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This morning, I got up with the sun. I really missed this over the winter — there's something lovely about having the sun pouring into your bedroom as you wake up.
We'll see how I feel about it when the sun is getting up an hour or more before I want to 😁.
Good Friday was the warmest day in recent memory. It was fortunate then that we had chosen to go on a little adventure that day, an adventure to Rouge Park.
It was lots of fun, here's a few pictures.
Just about a year ago I linked to a study out of the University of Arizona on reproducibility in CS. I had some complaints, and later linked to a crowd-sourced effort to check the results.
It appears that the authors of this study paid some attention to the criticism, and reexamined their study. It's worth looking at the updated technical report and results, which are located at the original project homepage.
Whelp. I may have found the worst search result on the internet.
There is so much wrong here.
Alright. Let's break this down.
They also think I'm in Vancouver. Which is about as wrong as they can be. Except, when I try to change it, it says "null" in the top left, and then thinks I searched for an empty string.
edit: Now that I've calmed down a bit, it turns out that 13 results is actually accurate: There's also the "Know how" tab that I missed. So 13 results, 12 products, 1 pieces of 'know how'.
“Many people have tried that problem,” Iwaniec said. “He’s a private guy. Nothing is rushed. If it takes him another ten years, that’s fine with him. Unless you tackle a problem that’s already solved, which is boring, or one whose solution is clear from the beginning, mostly you are stuck. But Zhang is willing to be stuck much longer.”
From The Pursuit of Beauty (via Knowing and Doing)
Leaving for work in the sun! Woo!
After a long wait in the preprint queue, our journal paper on Blue Gene/Q's transactional memory system is finally available.
At the present time I think we are on the verge of discovering at last what programming languages should really be like. I look forward to seeing many responsible experiments with language design during the next few years; and my dream is that by 1984 we will see a consensus developing for a really good programming language (or, more likely, a coherent family of languages). Furthermore, I'm guessing that people will become so disenchanted with the languages they are now using -- even COBOL and FORTRAN -- that this new language, UTOPIA 84, will have a chance to take over. At present we are far from that goal, yet there are indications that such a language is very slowly taking shape.
— Structured Programming with go to Statements, Donald E. Knuth, Computing Surveys Vol 6, No. 4, December 1974.
I haven't finished this paper, but I had to share the quote. It's interesting to see how optimistic Knuth was. My reading of history is that what happened instead is that we know many good ideas, but have never solidly landed on a definitive best.
Black Lives Matter