What I’m gathering is that “wave” can refer to a behavioral pattern that is substrate independent — it refers to a logical function more than it does an ontological presence

I think that’s a good way of putting it.

As for what counts as a “substrate”, I have no idea! In the old days, the idea of a substance that permeated seemingly-empty space was common. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

Nowadays, the idea of aether has been discarded for the most part. But that said, there’s still plenty we don’t understand, like dark matter. There’s no consensus on what dark matter is exactly; there are many competing theories. What we know is that there are observable phenomena that can’t be explained without something that acts (roughly, at least) like matter in terms of its effect on gravity, but doesn’t interact with electromagnetism like normal matter. That “something” is called dark matter, but its fundamental nature is an open question.

Now we’re getting into linguistics with the question of “what is a wave?”

In quantum physics, basically everything is waves, in the sense that the same mathematical formulae used to describe waves are used to describe quantum phenomena. The intuitive human-scale dynamics of waves don’t necessarily apply though.

For example, sound waves can’t propagate through a vacuum, but light waves can. Aside from that, they follow mostly the same rules. You can use the same math the describe interference of sound waves and light waves, for example.

People talk about the “particle/wave duality” of photons because in some ways they behave like waves and in some ways they behave like particles. But both of those words are stretched a little from their everyday plain-english usage, and the precise reality would require years of study to understand.

Plain English wasn’t made to be that precise or objective. That’s why we use math. :)

I’m no expert in quantum physics so take this all with a grain of salt.

With a million tokens you can get it to rewrite the script to remove this guardrail. OMG we’ve reached the singularity!!

The coolest, and often most confusing thing about computer science, information theory, and perhaps reality in general, is how everything becomes more or less equivalent if you boil it down and twist it around a little.

Everything is sorting. Everything is compression. Everything is geometry. Everything is language. Everything is music. Everything is, like, waves, man. *puff*

Or more accurately, everything can be expressed in any of those other things’ terms.

These are not new ideas, but computers have made them provably and demonstrably true in many contexts, and I think that’s super cool.

MediaTek Helio G81 SoC, with 4GB/64GB

Uhhh. For $500? Sorry, no.

Kind of the opposite. It takes more effort to make a filesystem case-insensitive. Binary comparison is the laziest approach. (Note that laziness is a virtue.)

I’m on the fence as to which is better. Putting backwards compatibility aside, there’s a perfectly good case to be made for case-insensitivity being more intuitive to the human user.

Apple got into a strange position when marrying Mac OS (case-insensitive) and NeXTSTEP (case-sensitive). It used to be possible to install OS X on case-sensitive HFS+ but it was never very well supported and I think they axed it somewhere down the road.

Geany is a nice GUI option. It’s a bit more capable but still lean.

It’s probably time for me to re-evaluate the host of coding editors out there. For the most part I just use good text editors. Though I do love Spyder, I only use it for a certain subset of tasks.

IPFS content IDs (CID) are a hash of the tree of chunks. Changes to chunk size can also change the hash!

I don’t understand why this is a deal-breaker. It seems like you could accomplish what you describe within IPFS simply by committing to a fixed chunk size. That’s valid within IPFS, right?

Is it important to use any specific hashing algorithm(s)? If not, then isn’t an IPFS CID (with a fixed, predetermined chunk size) a stable hash algorithm in and of itself?

Oh nice! I did a quick search for forks but didn’t find that, so thanks for linking. I’ll check it out!

Looks like the open source version was axed, and the cheapest subscription plan is $36.67 per month per user. Yikes.

I’d kill for a modern HyperCard.

DBAs think everything is a database.

My guess is that this is a teenager, and this is probably their first experience with git and version control in general. Just a hunch.

Anyway, it is reasonable to expect a mainstream GUI app from one of the largest companies in the world to be approachable for people who do not know all the inner workings of the command line tools that are used behind the scenes. And it is reasonable to expect any destructive action to have clear and bold warnings. “Changes will be discarded” is not clear. What changes? From the user’s perspective, the only changes were regarding version control, so “discarding” that should leave them where they started — with their files intact but not in version control.

Have mercy on the poor noobs. We were all there once.

I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it’s going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that’s good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically “This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn’t then get fucked.” Just adding insult to injury.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

All temperature scales are arbitrary, but since our environment is full of water, one tied to the phase changes of water around the atmospheric pressure the vast majority of people experience just makes more sense.

But when it comes to weather, the boiling point of water is not a meaningful point of reference.

I suppose I’m biased since I grew up in an area where 0-100°F was roughly the actual temperature range over the course of a year. It was newsworthy when we dropped below zero or rose above 100. It was a scale everybody understood intuitively because it aligned with our lived experience.

Give it time. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Look at GitHub or Skype.

Monocultures are bad. Popularity very rarely tracks quality. And once something is overwhelmingly popular, it usually goes to shit, because the momentum is enough to keep it successful.

See: Windows. Outlook. Reddit. CrowdStrike.

everyone and their mother uses VS Code

This is usually a good reason to avoid something. Especially if that something comes from Microsoft.

The solution to the whitespace gripe is strictly enforced formatting standards with a git hook running a manually invokable script.

Throwing a linter into the pipeline just hardcodes the formatting at that point in the pipeline. That doesn’t really solve the issue, which is that style is not a one-size-fits-all concept, and displaying text appropriately is really the job of a text editor. To quote PEP 8, “default wrapping in most tools disrupts the visual structure of the code”. In other words, “most tools” suck at displaying code, because they are not language-aware. That’s the real problem. Hardcoding style is a workaround, not a solution.

That said, I wouldn’t consider intelligent editors to be a replacement for formatting standards, either. Ideally my text editor would display my Python code the way I like it, and then save to disk in accordance to PEP 8.