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As a programmer, if I were designing the physics for a simulated universe full of sentient simulated entities, I would definitely:

- Quantize the lowest-level physics to make them easily tracked.
- Save CPU by lazily computing quantum effects only when an observation is made.
- Have a "garbage collection" mechanism to collapse ~1e35 kg of matter at a time into easily-tracked pointlike objects.
- Add a speed of light limit so subjects can't move far enough to see that everything outside their local region is a low-resolution cubemap.
These are jokes, but this also gives me the real willies. I demand to be released from this simulation!; or, at minimum, I humbly request an ice cream substitute that's indistinguishable from the real thing and has zero macro-nutritional content! with cookie dough please
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Gary Bernhardt
@garybernhardt
Taking any one design technique "too far" is a really good way to learn about design! ...until it starts to feel like a silver bullet, at which point you risk frog-boiling yourself, contorting the entire design of your system to serve the silver bullet.
Case study: "mocking only hurts because your design is wrong." E.g., specifically: "Your module depends on 5 others, which it shouldn't. Fix your module dependency graph and the tests will be easy." Five is definitely not a huge number of modules to depend on.
If you focus on minimizing the number of interacting modules, it can easily lead to every module depending on ~2 others. Now the module dependency graph is artificially forced into the shape of a deep, roughly-binary tree, so we have to trace calls through 8 modules instead of 3.
Read 10 tweets
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Gary Bernhardt
@garybernhardt
I describe a problem. I get replies telling me to "just" use a solution that involves a million lines of third party code, or 200 transitive dependencies, or a README that says "not ready for production use", or, most often, doesn't even address the stated problem.
Sometimes I get 20 of those! Then, suddenly, the 21st reply gives me a four-line function, with no dependencies, that completely solves the problem.
Reaching for huge tools to solve simple problems is irresponsible. Reaching for explicitly "not ready for production" tools to solve core business problems is irresponsible. Recommending that other people do those things is irresponsible.
Read 6 tweets
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Gary Bernhardt
@garybernhardt
Currently at 11 months since switching to TypeScript, probably 20 hours spent just trying to get a reliable build watcher (with easily 20,000 hours of Unix experience). I've never even gotten close. I'll go to my grave screaming that long-running stateful build tools never work.
I just rewrote all of it for the nth time, but this time is fundamentally different. All of the dev processes are managed by a single 175-line script that starts, stops, and restarts them at the right times. The process that it runs never spawn children. Any leaks are my fault.
This is what I should've done when I first had these problems. Trust as few external tools as possible; make it all my problem. That way, when something goes wrong, I know who to blame, and I know that it's fixable.
Read 15 tweets

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Dan Falk
@danfalk
1. “The Death of a Universe” -- Terrific talk this evening by Dr. Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) at @yorkuniversity. Here are a few highlights. This of course is the CMB, the faint microwave “echo” of the big bang. (cont’d) #physics #astronomy #cosmology (@YorkUScience)
@AstroKatie @yorkuniversity @YorkUScience 2. The big bang happened ~13.8 billion years ago. So what lies ahead? Could the universe collapse in a big crunch? Maybe – but as Prof. Mack explained, it's more likely that it will keep expanding. In fact, the universe is currently not only expanding but also accelerating...
@AstroKatie @yorkuniversity @YorkUScience 3. We seem to live in a universe with a non-zero cosmological constant. Right now, the CC appears small – but in the far future, the CC could come to dominate. That won’t end well! At best, in that scenario, we’re going to freeze to death in the dark...
Read 8 tweets
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Rhett Allain
@rjallain
Yesterday in #physics class, I had to have the discussion about learning vs. telling the answer. I got to use my favorite Karate Kid analogy - "wax on, wax off" to emphasize that sometimes you have to do tedious things to learn.

wired.com/2013/10/tellin…
2/ What happens when you just tell students answers? They have trouble learning complicated concepts. Personally, I love this (older) video showing students trying to explain the phases of the moon and the cause of seasons. It's great.
3/ Another point I mention to students.

If #physics was as easy as me just telling you the answer, I promise you I would do that. I'm not trying to make physics hard just for no reason. Physics is difficult on its own accord (and honestly, that's what makes it awesome).
Read 4 tweets
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Margaret Ferrier SNP
@MargaretFerrier
1/ Baby Box - a jam-packed box of baby essentials to help new parents at the start of a child's life.

2/ Childcare - 800 hours of early learning and childcare, saving families up to £2,500 per child per year @theSNP
3/ Free Tuition - students in England face tuition fees up to £27,750 - Scottish students receive university tuition free

4/ Period Poverty - Scotland is the first in the world to make sanitary products available free to all pupils and students
@theSNP
5/ Prescriptions - prescription charges abolished in Scotland - now £9 per item south of the border

6/ Cheaper Council Tax - every Scottish household benefits from cheaper tax bills - on average £500 less than England @theSNP
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Dr. Phil Metzger
@DrPhiltill
Here's a perspective on satellite mega-constellations that nobody has mentioned. (We are ALL tired of this, but I think this is interesting).

The real reason SpaceX is putting up a mega-constellation at this time is because of the laws of nature. It was inevitable.../1
2/ Many metrics of information growth show exponential growth. Examples: Moore's law, computer speeds, agents on the internet of things, sensors. See review here: ourworldindata.org/technological-…
3/ Even before humans existed, we see evidence of exponential growth in information. Consider the sizes of genomes. This plot has a slope of 1 on a log-lot chart, so this is exponential growth in DNA complexity. phys.org/news/2013-04-l…
Read 48 tweets
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Sabine Hossenfelder
@skdh
String theory is interesting and a worthwhile research topic. But I often wish that popular science articles about string theory were less hype and would also inform the readers of the shortcomings of the approach. Here is a reminder 1/10 #physics
String theory, as a theory of quantum gravity and a unification of the forces, has zero experimental evidence speaking for it. 2/10
String theory predicts additional dimensions of space which have not been seen. String theorists therefore conjectured that the unseen new dimensions are very small and compact, so they are unlike the dimensions we are familiar with - for unknown reasons. 3/10
Read 11 tweets

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