Slotos
@Slotos@feddit.nl
- Comment on At what point when learning a new language do someone become bilingual? 1 month ago:
Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.
Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.
Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.
Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.
- Comment on Climate change 1 month ago:
There’s Black Sea too. I swear it exists, I saw it!
- Comment on Is there a difference in meaning between the words *people* and *persons*? 2 months ago:
It’s not “people vs persons” but “those people vs they”.
Conversationally, “those/these” distances you from the group you are talking about, which is humorously weird when it’s your family you’re talking about.
It’s not the meaning of the words, but habitual (and often fleeting) attribution around them that tripped you up.
PS: “People” are uncountable, “persons” are countable. That’s basically the whole difference between the two plurals. Although it’s rapidly disappearing, as “ten people” won’t raise a single eyebrow in a conversation.
- Comment on Breast Cancer 3 months ago:
“90% accurate” is a non-statement. It’s like you haven’t even watched the video you respond to. Also, where the hell did you pull that number from?
How specific is it and how sensitive is it is what matters. And if Mirai in www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.aba4373 is the same model that the tweet mentions, then neither its specificity nor sensitivity reach 90%. And considering that the image in the tweet is trackable to a publication in the same year (news.mit.edu/…/robust-artificial-intelligence-too…), I’m fairly sure that it’s the same Mirai.
- Comment on Breast Cancer 3 months ago:
youtube.com/shorts/xIMlJUwB1m8?si=zH6eF5xZ5Xoz_zs…
Detecting is not enough to be useful.
- Comment on How to test without mocking 5 months ago:
Ah, I didn’t get that impression myself, but looking at the article again I can see it.
- Comment on How to test without mocking 5 months ago:
The author clearly doesn’t realize that they still mock in their examples. I understand the annoyance with mocking away the complexity, however.
To address your second claim - doing IO in tests does not mean testing IO.
I test my file interactions by creating a set of temporary directories and files, invoking my code, and checking for outcomes. That way I can write my expectation before my implementation. This doesn’t test IO, merely utilizes it. The structure in temp that I create is still a mock of an expected work target.
Very similarly I recently used a web server running in another thread to define expectations of API client’s behavior when dealing with a very ban-happy API. That web server is a mock that allowed me to clearly define expectations of rate limiting, ssl enforcement (it is a responsibility of an API client to initialize network client correctly), concurrency control during OAuth refreshes etc., without mocking away complexities of a network. Even better, due to mocking like that I was able to tinker with my network library choice without changing a single test.
Mocks in the general sense that author defined them are inevitable if we write software in good faith - they express our understanding and expectation of a contract. Good mocks make as few claims as possible, however. A networking mock should sit in the network, for example, lest it makes implied claims about the network transport itself.
- Comment on Why do teeth don't regenerate? 5 months ago:
Teeth cannot produce enamel. Enamel is not a living tissue and it was produced by cells outside of the tooth in a coral-like manner. In order to grow a new tooth, you need it to be fully surrounded by specialized living tissue for the whole growth cycle.
PS: I honestly expected something like this to come out of bioelectric computation research, but progress seems slower there. Or rather knowledge and techniques in other fields is reaching critical mass, giving us these advances.
- Comment on Somehow metal with zip zap moves rocks without touching and this isn't fiction? 5 months ago:
A direct quote, I dare say.
- Comment on Somehow metal with zip zap moves rocks without touching and this isn't fiction? 5 months ago:
You know how they call traditional medicine that works? Medicine.
You know how they call magic that works? Technology.
And by “them” I mean “us”.
- Comment on sweet dreams 6 months ago:
I mean, Schwarzschild radius shows that for a medium of constant density (and on a large scale, Universe is fairly uniform) there is an upper limit of a radius of a ball comprised of said medium above which it will form an event horizon.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius#Calcul…
Which means that an infinite universe of non-zero density is either a bloody paradox (spend a minute deciding where exactly event horizons should form), or our understanding of gravity and spacetime breaks on ginormous scales just as it does on micro ones.
- Comment on Anon can’t have a factual argument 6 months ago:
- USA is not the most diverse country (its ethnic fractionalization index is below that of Moldova - worldpopulationreview.com/…/most-racially-diverse… or …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethn…)
- Out of listed countries, the only one that exhibits clear signs of ethnonationalism is Russia (although I have to admit to be fairly ignorant on state of things in Argentina)
- Lumping Russia with its former colonies screams “ignorance”
- Grabbing a bunch of countries from the oldest trade route and thinking they are gonna be ethnically homogenous echoes the previous scream
- Me spending time on this post is a clear evidence of procrastination
- Poland has universal healthcare, walkable cities, affordable intra- and intercity public transportation, and provides free higher education to its citizens
- Moldova provides free education to its citizens and has universal healthcare
- Even Russia has a still working universal healthcare (terrible by many standards, but still beats US) and provides higher education to its citizens
- Argentina has universal healthcare and offers free higher education to it’s citizens
- Why am I still procrastinating? Send help!
USA is a dominant superpower though.
- Comment on Explain yourselves, comp sci. 6 months ago:
Modern CPUs are also extremely efficient at dealing with contiguous data structures. Branch prediction and caching get to shine on them.
Avoiding memory access or helping CPU access it all upfront switches physical domain of computation.
- Comment on Form over function, eh? 7 months ago:
In the dark, with the other side obscured (or just broken), you don’t want the blinker to actively prompt you to come to a wrong conclusion.
It’s better to see a blinking light and think “I don’t see enough, gotta slow down” than see a blinking arrow and potentially not even realize it’s a turn signal.
- Comment on Amsterdam testing system that can remotely slow e-bikes down 8 months ago:
actual infrastructure for micromobility
Right, because Amsterdam, as we all know, is such a shithole in that regard.
You’re the obsessed one in this case.
- Comment on What do mean things so small we can't see them with the human eye? Are you crazy? 11 months ago:
That’s the scientific part. Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, is often neither.
- Comment on 1.1 History 11 months ago:
Entropy is a measure of a number of distinct possible configurations that result in an equivalent outcome.
It’s pure statistics. Given time symmetric laws of nature and a state that can be achieved by a relatively small number of configurations, in the absence of potential barriers, the system inevitably approaches a state that’s achievable by a larger number of configurations. Simply because an elementary change is more likely to fall into the latter mode. Thus, arrow of time emerges.
- Comment on [OC] My feeling as European reading news on Lemmy/Reddit 1 year ago:
Because living felt better in the past.
That’s the root of conservatism. And yeah, it does devolve to “my dick wasn’t limp, my tits didn’t sag, my knees didn’t hurt, and I was ignorant enough to not see the problems I see clearly now”.