One last essay that I have enjoyed, also too old to be a blog post, is W.M. Turski's "I was a computer". It's here on Elsevier but fortunately it looks to be open access.
Unfortunately this contribution is inhibited from being significant in value by the fact that TypeScript doesn't support full gradual typing [0] and has an intentionally unsound type system [1].
Accidentally unsound is a problem, but intentionally unsound just means that they balanced soundness against other design criteria such as completeness, complexity, and tooling capability, then decided that they were willing to trade soundness for other things.
You refer to perfect pitch and absolute pitch like they're different things -- do you realize that they're the same thing?
My brother and I are both musicians with perfect pitch, and we've found it useful in a variety of circumstances. To name a couple, it really helps if you're jamming and want to pick up a progression quickly, or if you're DJing and want to key match. I will concede that Traktor recently got key detection, which is nice, but especially when playing live I find that key segues will pop into my head without having to search for the next song in the right key.
Even the best relative pitch cannot help you exactly memorize a melody -- if you are unable to remember what note it actually starts on, you haven't remembered it fully.
I think they are different things. Knowing the sound of a perfect fifth is not perfect pitch, but relative pitch. One could transcribe a piece of music from memory with just very good relative pitch, with the caveat they probably will transcribe it in the incorrect key.
If you're saying that perfect pitch and relative pitch are different things in that it isn't as if perfect pitch is better than relative pitch, then yeah, I absolutely agree. The hacks that I mentioned involve perfect pitch specifically, but transcription ability like you mention is probably tied most to one's sense of relative pitch, even if one has perfect pitch.
Does it seem like cultural commentary has also improved in the last 50 years? I am young enough to not remember what it may have been like when Asimov wrote originally, but it strikes me that Vice is a relatively contemporary sort of a thing.
I would be interested in similar pieces from 50 years ago, looking back on 1914's view of 1964. So much has changed since then, though, and it seems like more has changed since 1964 than changed from 1914 to 1964. In particular, the 60s happened, but even after that, the Internet seems to have effected a fairly massive and seemingly permanent cultural shift. It might be too early to tell, but even the fact that someone posted this commentary, we all read it instantly, and then now we're discussing it here only hours later seems worlds away from the climate of 1964.
>Does it seem like cultural commentary has also improved in the last 50 years? I am young enough to not remember what it may have been like when Asimov wrote originally, but it strikes me that Vice is a relatively contemporary sort of a thing.
Cultural commentary? If anything, it declined a lot. Once you had people like Normal Mailer, Tom Wolf and Hunter Thompson doing cultural commentary, and many more besides.
Now it's mostly puff pieces, and 90% of it is about who said what on some bs tv show (and twerking).
90% of it was then as well, we just don't reread or remember those. You don't think that there are five cultural critics(whatever that includes) on par with Thompson or mailer? There might be more noise, but there's a lot more signal as well.
> Think of me as an MSR guy publishing a paper, it’s just on my blog instead appearing in PLDI proceedings. I’m simply not talented enough to get such papers accepted.
I wonder if someone at MSR would be interested in taking up the cause and publishing with Joe. It does seem like this work might contain the makings of a great PLDI paper.
We got into Feed The Beast, a curated collection of modpacks for Minecraft, this year. Played a whole lot of that.
I've been playing the Hearthstone beta with a few friends for a couple months now and it is absurdly fun. Also played a bunch of StarCraft II and Diablo III as usual.
Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas have held up well. Papers, Please was just fantastic. I had fun playing CounterStrike: GO with friends.
I played SimCity and liked it, though in the midst of the fallout and server issues, I found Tropico 4 and Anno 2070 to be fantastic alternatives.
On Black Friday I picked up a PS3 and have finally been getting into The Last of Us, which is stunning, and Red Dead Redemption, which I think will take longer to get into.
I want to lastly point out that we've had a lot of fun doing LANs with some classics that we've been playing for years now: CS: Source, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires II.
Not only that, but seL4 [0] is a cool NICTA effort that's been ongoing for almost a decade now to produce a secure, machine-verified microkernel based on L4. It seems like there's lots of room for L4 and its children to occupy interesting spaces in OS design.
I wonder what the really ancient Mac he links to was. The link is broken since Apple has since drastically redesigned their support site at least once.
One of the horribly compromised x2xx series Macs, which did 64-bit operations through 32-bit, 16-bit and 8-bit buses to save 10c on a chip. Quite possibly the most compromised Macs ever built. I used to have one, we called it the "iTurd". It could just about crawl Mozilla 1.3. We eventually just used it as an oversized desk clock.
Ah, yes. Somehow I was fortunate enough to skip over that. My first couple of Macs that I remember getting second- or third-hand as a kid were a Performa 640CD DOS Compatible which was actually not bad at all, and had the interesting property of containing within it a 486 on a daughtercard, and then later a Power Mac 7200, which wasn't great, though at least had PCI and managed to avoid the Road Apple designation from LowEndMac.
I found this article really interesting. I started using Facebook in high school, back when high schoolers were to use hs.facebook.com to access Facebook and networks were heavily emphasized. I left Facebook about one year ago today.
One particular observation that the article makes that I want to flesh out a bit is the following: Facebook has grown and grown in terms of the size of the application itself, and it is clear that they have pushed very heavily for the 'platform' model. It seems like this is getting replaced by a series of more specialized, more mobile-centric social applications, like Snapchat and Tumblr. Of course FB owns Instagram so they have that going for them, but this does seem to hint at a bit of a growing trend in social networking.
It's not quite a blog post, but it's as close as one might have come in 1908.
I also like a whole host of articles from Matt Might's blog. I think my favorites are
12 resolutions for grad students
http://matt.might.net/articles/grad-student-resolutions/
and Responding to peer review
http://matt.might.net/articles/peer-review-rebuttals/
One last essay that I have enjoyed, also too old to be a blog post, is W.M. Turski's "I was a computer". It's here on Elsevier but fortunately it looks to be open access.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0167642395...