#compsci

yudkowsky:

bunjywunjy:

yesterday for April Fool’s my workplace had a short training article on recognizing computer-generated faces from real ones and one of the tricks mentioned was “count the teeth” and I just wanted to say that it’s both ironic and kind of horrifying how society has unwittingly cycled right back to IF YE MEET A MAN ON THE ROAD, COUNT HIS FINGERS LEST YE DEAL UNKNOWING WITH A FAE 

Furthermore,the Fae are bad at counting so you can detect their glamours by numbering their teeth.  It’s a perfectly sensible fantasy trope - and yet, I can’t recall reading any stories where that happened in fiction before, you know, it happened in real life.

normal-horoscopes:

peel-a-potato-with-a-potato:

You’re talking about the small amounts of silver in solder, right? Would that completely get rid of their image or just make it look weird? And what about film cameras? Was there silver in film?

YES FILM IS DEVELOPED USING SILVER HALIDE

TIME FOR AN OBJECT LESSON IN ARCANE MATERIAL SCIENCE, MORE COMMONLY KNOWN AS ALCHEMY

SIMPLY PUT SILVER HAS NATURAL PROPERTIES THAT FUCK WITH CURSES

IMAGINE A CURSE AS A CAREFUL PATTERN MADE OF IRON OBJECTS AND IMAGINE SILVER AS A MAGNET

THE CURSE COULD BE MADE OUT OF BALL BEARINGS AND BE TOTALLY DESTROYED BY CONTACT WITH SILVER

OR IT COULD BE A HEAVY METAL CHAIN THAT UPON INTRODUCTION OF A MAGNET IS ONLY SLIGHTLY TUGGED OUT OF PLACE BUT NEVER BROKEN

VAMPIRES ARE THE RESULT OF AN ANCIENT BLOODLINE CURSE SO TAKING A PICTURE OF ONE IS SORT OF LIKE TRYING TO PAINT A PICTURE OF A VAMPIRE BY THROWING METAL DARTS AT A DARTBOARD BUT YOUR DARTBOARD IS A POWERFUL ELECTROMAGNET MEANT TO DEFLECT DARTS

MODERN ELECTRONICS ARE MUCH MORE ACCURATE AND SO THE EFFECTS OF THE CURSE/SILVER REACTION CAUSE DISTORTED IMAGES OFTEN ATTRIBUTED TO MALFUNCTION

mostlysignssomeportents:

Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak’s Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to create relays (“similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors”) that can do computational work according to simple programs; it’s installed at the Angewandte Innovation Lab in Vienna.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/13/irene-posch.html

lark-in-ink:

phantomrose96:

PSA to anyone who’s thinking about adopting devs. I’ve noticed a huge rise in popularity of devs lately and there are some tips yall NEED to know:

For starters, if you notice your devs start making a lot of random, unnecessary, aggravating UX changes to your website: such as palette changes, button rearrangement, sometimes just deleting entire features. This is a sign your dev does not have enough enrichment in their enclosure. Theywillresort to these self-destructive behaviors if they are not properly cared for!! This is a serious problem that not many website owners seem to acknowledge. Your devs are living beings, and though you think it might be cute to have them program your website, you need to be responsible for them. Without proper stimulation and enrichment and guidance in their environment they willstart ordering posts by popularity, instead of in chronological order.

Devsneedreliable project management in their lives, I cannot stress this enough. Engineers cannotreason out good aesthetic design like most people can! Their brains are logic-driven and they wear the same three outfits in rotation every day, they do not understand UI design. “Well my family had a dev growing up and they designed our wesbite just fine.” I’m tired of hearing excuses like this. It just gives other people a pass to mistreat their devs. Don’t do this.

Furthermore, devs needat least two full-sized monitors, a well-maintained team git repo, and a fully stocked snack bowl. Devs are grazers who eat chips and pretzels while actively doing their work. You can’t expect devs to abide by certain meal times. (Their natural habitat is in soggy basements with mothers providing doritos and snacks, so they need similar care in your home). Also, the old wives’ tale about devs needing rubber ducks in their environment is actually just a myth –  any inanimate object to yell at will do just fine. 

Pleasespread this. So so so many people are trying to run websites without the slightest idea how to keep a happy, healthy dev. It breaks my heart to see mishandled devs, who shouldbe great additions to any website, instead end up turning on high-contrast mode permanently, removing pictures of sand dunes and babies with a broken p0rn detecting AI, and sometimes just deleting entire users, features, and posts accidentally. This is not cute. Do not get a dev if you cannot care for them properly. This has been a PSA.

Also, please, please don’t house your devs with marketers!!  This stresses out the dev and will also exacerbate any existing behavioral problems, or even add new ones as the marketer attempts to gain dominance!  Even if they don’t share an enclosure, any sort of contact, even supervised, can cause issues if the marketer is particularly aggressive.  I know that this is promoted as the normal standard of care and even “cute” by major companies, but this is terrible husbandry.   Devs are often blamed for destructive behavior that they’re bullied into by the marketers they are sharing too-close quarters in. 

(To be frank, I think marketers as a breed were a mistake- the traditional salesperson breed they were developed from is a much healthier example of the species, though still not an appropriate cubiclemate for a dev. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t think marketers deserve good homes, with experienced owners who can set strong boundaries, but I do think breeding of them should end. Sorry not sorry if I’m stepping on anyone’s toes) 

Speaking of cubicles, I know they’re not ideal housing, but they are far superior for housing multiple devs than the trendy “open office” habitats. 

astrodidact:

The top photo is a little memento mori I found in the third floor women’s restroom in my dorm building.  It’s a dead moth anchored to the wall in spider’s silk.  Duke is covered in spiderwebs, but somehow I almost never see any spiders at work.  This makes operating in daily life easier, but also somehow, much more disquieting.  Where are all these spiders?  Anyway, it reminded me of the computer bug story, and since there’s still myths going around about this one, I thought I’d post the real, myth-busted account.  This article is from Computerworld, and the log it refers to is pictured above.

It’s an oft-repeated tale that the grand dame of military computing, computer scientist and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, coined the terms buganddebug after an incident involving Harvard University’s Mark II calculator.

The story goes like this:

On September 9, 1945, a Harvard technical team looked at Panel F and found something unusual between points in Relay 70. It was a moth, which they promptly removed and taped in the log book. Grace Hopper added the caption “First actual case of bug being found,” and that’s the first time anyone used the word bug to describe a computer glitch. Naturally, the term debugging followed.

Yes, it’s an oft-repeated tale, but it’s got more bugs in it than Relay 70 probably ever had.

For one thing, Harvard’s Mark II came online in summer of 1947, two years after the date attributed to this story. For another thing, you don’t use a line like “First actual case of bug being found” if the term bug isn’t already in common use. The comment doesn’t make sense in that context, except as an example of engineer humor. And although Grace Hopper often talked about the moth in the relay, she did not make the discovery or the log entry.

The core facts of the story are true – including the date of September 9 and time of 15:45 hours – but that’s not how this meaning of the word bug appeared in the dictionary. Inventors and engineers had been talking about bugs for more than a century before the moth in the relay incident. Even Thomas Edison used the word. Here’s an extract of a letter he wrote in 1878 to Theodore Puskas, as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006):

‘Bugs’ – as such little faults and difficulties are called – show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.

Word nerds trace the word bug to an old term for a monster – it’s a word that has survived in obscure terms like bugaboo and bugbear and in a mangled form in the word boogeyman. Like gremlins in machinery, system bugs are malicious. Anyone who spends time trying to get all the faults out of a system knows how it feels: After a few hours of debugging, any problems that remain are hellspawn, mocking attempts to get rid of them with a devilish glee.

And that’s the real origin of the term “bug.” But we think the tale of the moth in the relay is worth retelling anyway.

thatsogerman:

Since I’m not seeing her name nearly enough on the press, let’s give the attention Katie Boumandeserves. Thanks to her, we are now possible to see the first ever image of a black hole, something that people talked 200 years ago for the first time. It’s no longer a myth.
We are girls and we can be whatever we want to be. Einstein would be proud of you, Katie. Thank you!

Here you can see a huge stack of hard drives she used for Messier 87’s black hole image data.

youputitthere:

dex has an android phone and his pc runs on linux but he prefers to listen to dad rock on an iPod classic that he’s had since 8th grade and when nursey finds out and calls him “pretentious” dex has an existential crisis

Computer Science, Brunswick, Germany