• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Because usually if you end up at the API reference in that situation it’s a code / project smell that other stuff is going wrong.

    If I want to use a library to do something, you should be able to search for what you want to do + language / framework, find the library’s docs, follow the install instructions and then look through the highest level API / instructions and then just go from there.

    If you find yourself confused at unhelpful API references that just means that they have badly written top level API docs, badly written intros, or quite probably just badly written APIs.



  • It goes against the simplified idea of evolution, in that, having a huge amount of off-spring die for no reason should generally be selected against since it’s wasteful.

    But evolution isn’t a straight march to a finish line, it can only use what it has to work with and it’s entirely possible for a branch of it to get stuck in weird specific ways that aren’t helpful.



  • I mean, research funding is a huge problem, but half the problem is that journalists and reporters are largely people who went into English or Communications and stopped taking or learning any science past the high school level and thus don’t actually know how to read papers or report on them. Not to mention that critically reading a scientific paper and evaluating in the context of other research takes a significant amount of time, more time than is given to write a normal newspaper article.

    And they’re reporting that science to people who on average know the same or less than them, so their mistakes and misreporting is never caught or corrected.









  • For software to run on a computer, it needs to tell the computer what to do, “display this picture of a flower”, “move my character to the left”, “save this poem to a file”.

    And for a bunch of different software to all run on the same machine, they all need to use the same basic set of instructions, this is called the machine’s Instruction Set.

    Because the instruction set has to work for any software, these instructions don’t look that readable to us, instead of “show this flower” they might be “move this bit of memory into the processor”, but software builds up millions of those instructions to eventually display a flower.

    Intel processors used a set of instructions that were called x86, and then when AMD made a rival processor, they made theirs use the same instruction set so that their processors would be compatible with all the software written for Intel processors (and when they needed to move from 32bit instructions to 64bit instructions, they made a new set called x64).

    Meanwhile Apple computers for a long time used processors built by IBM that used IBMs PowerPC instruction set.

    Now many companies are using the ARM instruction set, but ARM is still a private company you have to pay licensing fees to, so RISC-V is rising as a new, truly open source and free to use instruction set.