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New degree: B.Goo.


Law exams are open book; Engineering exams are not.

I'm not sure exactly what the distinction is - apart from law being "soft" and requiring argument - but it's deeper than inability to reuse past papers.


Lots of engineering exams are open book. The only closed book ones are the freshman & some sophomore weeder classes.


I'm glad they were actually, it allowed us to focus on learning the material instead of copying all the formulas from the textbook onto a notes sheet.


Thanks - looks like this has already changed in line with GGP since my time. https://peer.asee.org/open-book-problem-solving-in-engineeri... [pdf]


He's making a more general statement, with "root of all evil", that improving some aspect of something without understanding its effects on the whole outcome, is literally the root cause of evil in the world, in general. Winning the battle but losing the war. Not seeing the forest for the trees. Getting lost in the weeds. Unenlightened self-interest. Not hyperbole, but a particular instance of a general concept.

But on code optimization, k deeply nested loops are not a bad guide to O(n^k), and a candidate for optimization.

That said, I once cached something that obviously needed to be cached - so obvious in fact that a deeper level in the system already cached it.


A problem with semantic markup is when it doesn't do what you want, and you need to wig-wam it. Does this mean you actually wanted presentation markup? Or, since you are trying to convey meaning, does it mean that the semantics aren't rich enough to describe what you mean?

In this D2 example (https://d2-lang.com/assets/images/intro-example-a917149ff3b7...), the diagram is nicely designed to be centered on the nexus node crawler. But the choices of which side the tributary nodes are on is not. You might want cron below and ps->express below - or to the sides.

The grammar can be extended to accommodate this (maybe already has been), but what is the semantic meaning of above, below, left or right?

One semantic choice is made: the "persists" arc is unidirectional, and is presented left-to-right - a natural order for many languages.

(Technically, "declarative" needn't be "semantic", but arguably is the most useful one)


If there is semantic meaning in where your options are (or you want to assign it anyway) then an automatically generated diagram is probably a bad fit.


before introducing anything, I'd like to see more instances where something needs to be on one side of something else, which I haven't found to be the case in software architecture diagrams.


It's more a research question.

I think it'll be more like ordered keys in JSON - not ordered, according to the spec, but very useful in practice, because easier to compare, locate keys by eye etc. This order might not merely be "the same" as the input happened to be, but an order customarily used - and there might be a semantic reason for that order in the first place, used in some original, non-JSON, representation.

Tenuous.


Having a diagram drawing tool that automatically lays things out in an elegant fashion by default is really wonderful -- especially when I am just getting started on any given project.

But if that diagram drawing tool does not graduate to allowing me full control over every detail of the output (albeit that might be verbose or awkward) then it cannot grow with me as my requirements become more complex and it is good only for toy-sized or throw-away projects.


It's bidirectional if that helps. That's the outstanding feature to me.


It does seem wrong that nature would use irrational numbers - the fault is more likely in our concepts. Our mathematics may be more parochial than we realize - than we can realize. Alien mathematics may have taken a different route.

pi is not irrational in base pi



FYNI jq was originally implemented in Haskell.


jq uses bison (gnu's yacc), which is a nightmare for error diagnosis. Additionally, the founder (though brilliant - or maybe because brilliant) wouldn't accept improvements in error reporting.


jq used to do this, but changed to preserve key order.


Android tablet + termux + bluetooth keyboard is cheaper, and better performance in some ways...

The only problem is Google slowly locking down and squeezing the life out of termux.


I carry a folding bluetooth keyboard when I'm on call and just use my phone to SSH to another system. It's a great setup in a pinch. Decent battery life, built in 4G and close to a full sized keyboard which is much easier for typing than these micro PCs.

I've also used my phone connected to a screen/keyboard/mouse through Samsung Dex and it was a very desktop like experience for my use case. Although it's rare that I'd have the required equipment and not be carrying a full sized laptop.


I have tried that with tablets. Its decent when you have a table to set it on, but sitting somewhere where you have to place it on your lap (train, bus, bench) the laptop formfactor works much much better.


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