Kythyria

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• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  Quantum theory and relativity were at least invented by humans (well, the descriptions of them were, not so much the underlying phenomena), so are inevitably something that humans even can understand; it's more a matter of education. The AI also...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  I've noticed the trend of compilers and runtimes doing all the optimisation instead of troubling the programmer with it too. It leads to the perversely amusing phenomenon where most of the purported advantages of dynamic languages are ones that you...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  Alas, Google's new "Fuschia" project is apparently targeting "modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAM with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation.", which doesn't sound like someone concerned with compactness. So I wouldn't be surprised...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  And an addendum to my previous comment: if you want a spectacular electricity sink that may well be wank, I recently saw an article claiming that Bitcoin uses a ludicrous amount of power. I sometimes wonder what would happen if...
• Commented on The World of Tomorrow
  Posting on Charlie's blog now involves more processing power on the client than the 1987 version had on the server, and the 1987 client was a BBC Micro and a 1200 baud modem; it worked just as well. I wouldn't...
• Commented on Rejection Letter
  Trying to decompose a browser into pieces that could be tackled securely is a task in itself and might be a "we're currently stuck with an awful design that needs a very painful replacement" thing. But agreed, improvements in languages...
• Commented on Rejection Letter
  The tricky bit about bitcoin for this purpose is that it's got a weird half-anonymous model where the entire transaction log is public but who each wallet belongs to (and AIUI you can create multiple addresses that aren't obviously connected...
• Commented on Rejection Letter
  Formal verification merely checks that the code matches the specification, not that the latter isn't solid with fundamentally unblockable holes. That's pretty much the fridge logic I had in high school when encountering the concept. Not to mention that a...
• Commented on Rejection Letter
  Basically, they didn't care about running a crappy and unreliable system as long as there was some obvious target with pots of money to sue if it went wrong. And you can be sure said obvious target were very careful...
• Commented on The internet of decay
  And some of them will refuse to work unless you let them. What's the betting that the ones that are most stubborn about "needing" internet access are also the ones that least require it. Like mouse software that refuses to...
• Commented on The internet of decay
  Things that can detect some types of bad, or at least dubious, code do exist, though they aren't perfect (and can't be). However, this requires willingness to spend the time and money setting one up, learning to use it, and...
• Commented on Eleven Tweets
  Congratulations: you just drove teachers, doctors, lawyers, and everyone else who maintains a work/personal separation for professional reasons right off the internet for good. You also fucked over women trying to get away from abusive exes stalking their online identity,...
• Commented on Rise Of The Trollbot
  Hee, 182 comments and nobody's noticed one further use for bots that can pass as human: Giving your otherwise unused facebook account to an easily-herded bot that fills it with bland, inoffensive posts, with just enough data gleaned from the...
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  I think the "seventy percent of communication is non-verbal" people may be right. The ones that think that most of that seventy percent is body language, tones of voice, and the other things that neither of us parse very well...