ACM Queue - kodevicious

ACM Queue - kodevicious http://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?sort=publication_date&order=desc&item_topic=all&qc_type=kodevicious&filter=all&page_title=kodevicious The Process http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3762986 While the Scientific Method gives us a way to evaluate a hypothesis, a Scientific Process allows us to organize our minds to form these hypotheses, lay out a piece of code, organize a project, or debug a program. It's how we get to the point of focusing enough to solve the incredibly challenging problems we've set for ourselves. 2025年9月05日 13:04:51 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3762986 In Search of Quietude http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3744234 KV is old enough to remember a time before ubiquitous cell phones, a world in which email was the predominant form of intra- and interoffice communication, and it was perfectly normal not to read your email for hours in order to concentrate on a task. Of course, back then we also worked in offices where co-workers would readily walk in unannounced to interrupt us. That too, was annoying but could easily be deterred through the clever use of headphones. 2025年7月10日 18:44:54 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3744234 Can't We Have Nice Things? http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3733697 We build apparatus in order to show some effect we're trying to discover or measure. A good example is Faraday's motor experiment, which showed the interaction between electricity and magnetism. The apparatus has several components, but the main feature is that it makes visible an invisible force: electromagnetism. Faraday clearly had a hypothesis about the interaction between electricity and magnetism, and all science starts from a hypothesis. The next step was to show, through experiment, an effect that proved or disproved the hypothesis. This is how empiricists operate. They have a hunch, build an apparatus, run an experiment, refine the hunch, and then wash, rinse, and repeat. 2025年5月19日 11:06:32 GMT George Neville-Neil 3733697 Can't We Have Nice Things? http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3733697 We build apparatus in order to show some effect we're trying to discover or measure. A good example is Faraday's motor experiment, which showed the interaction between electricity and magnetism. The apparatus has several components, but the main feature is that it makes visible an invisible force: electromagnetism. Faraday clearly had a hypothesis about the interaction between electricity and magnetism, and all science starts from a hypothesis. The next step was to show, through experiment, an effect that proved or disproved the hypothesis. This is how empiricists operate. They have a hunch, build an apparatus, run an experiment, refine the hunch, and then wash, rinse, and repeat. 2025年5月19日 11:06:32 GMT George Neville-Neil 3733697 Analyzing Krazy Kode http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3722545 There actually are about six or seven emotions, or so I'm told. But the one state you should really try to avoid is confusion, which isn't actually an emotion but instead a state of mind. Code created by a confused mind shows itself in the randomness of naming, which is not handled by modern, fascist, programming languages like Go. Sure, you may have your names in the proper case and your spaces in the proper place, but you can still name a function PublicThingTwo() if you want to, and this is a sure sign of trouble. 2025年3月30日 11:50:51 GMT George Neville-Neil 3722545 The Drunken Plagiarists http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3711675 Before trying to use these tools, you need to understand what they do, at least on the surface, since even their creators freely admit they do not understand how they work deep down in the bowels of all the statistics and text that have been scraped from the current Internet. The trick of an LLM is to use a little randomness and a lot of text to Gauss the next word in a sentence. Seems kind of trivial, really, and certainly not a measure of intelligence that anyone who understands the term might use. But it's a clever trick and does have some applications. 2025年1月23日 17:36:06 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3711675 Building on Shaky Ground http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3703127 The CrowdStrike catastrophe happened because of architectural issues in hardware and in systems software. We should be building systems that make writing a virus difficult, not child's play. But that's an expensive proposition now. 2024年12月02日 15:18:26 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3703127 Unwanted Surprises http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3688154 There is the higher-order question of whether loosely typed languages with coercion are really a good idea in the first place. If you don't know what you're operating on, or what the expected output range might be, then maybe you ought not to be operating on that data in the first place. But now these languages have gotten into the wild and we'll never be able to hunt them down and kill them soon enough for my liking, or for the greater good. 2024年9月23日 15:08:01 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3688154 Repeat, Reproduce, Replicate http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3674499 Unless a result relies on a specific hardware trick, such as a proprietary accelerator or modified instruction set, it is possible to reproduce the results of one group by a different one. Unlike the physicists we don't have to build a second Hadron Collider to verify the result of the first. We have millions of similar, and sometimes identical, devices, on which to reproduce our results. All that is required is the will to do so. 2024年6月30日 13:05:56 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3674499 Structuring Success http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3664276 The problem with software structure is people don't really learn it until they really need it, and your homework assignments will have to force them to look closely at how they are solving problems, not only through algorithms but through structure. 2024年5月29日 15:09:15 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3664276