Comments by "Martin Maat" (@MartinMaat) on "Computerphile" channel.

  1. People were talking about 4th generation languages when I was in school, some 35 years ago. Then it stopped, for good reason. There is little added value to a new domain specific language compared to a good library in a 3rd generation language, which gives you the best of both worlds.
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  2. It looks to me this should have been a mathematics prize and all would have been well.
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  3. Some thoughts: In order to answer the question "is it sentient" one would need to define sentience which is impossible because "feeling" is inherently undefined. It is a state other similar entities can relate to because they experience it too and recognize it but it is not data. For us animals it is very much tied to biology which an electronic device does not have. As long as this will be the case there is no comparison.
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  4. Uncalled methods fade away in my editor. The moment I call them they light up. Sentience for you right there!
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  5. Hey, if it was hard to write it should be hard to maintain (and preferably impossible to use).
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  6. Basically the same. We want the least haramful outcome at all times.
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  7. + does not mean "OR" in regex, that would be the pipe character (|). Plus means "the preceding must occur and may be followed by". So quite confusing to anyobe vaguely familiar with regex.
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  8. We would all be in big trouble if compilers decided to reduce different algorithms to the same output. Possibly clarifying: while loops and for loops are not different algorithms.
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  9. A stack holds multiple items, this is just one item of which the value is incremented or decremented with each operation. And that is indeed counting (up or down).
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  10.  @mattdurcan5633  That is an implementation detail, irrelevant to the model.
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  11. I don't see why. I would say with any scrambling step it might just as well come out looking more like English. Even with a simple offset of each letter it will immediately be nothing like English. If you do 5 steps, how would doing 4 leave you with more patterns found in plain English?
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  12.  @avidrucker  I never heard of Clojure so I looked it up. Wikipedia classifies it as a functional language. Scala supports both OO and functional programming. Neither are domain specific or 4th generation, both are "general purpose" languages. The point of 4th generation is that you model rather than code, you state what you want as an end result rather than dictating steps to a result.
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  13. No one knows but everyone has an opinion.
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  14. SemanticMerge is really helpful.
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  15. The takeaway for me (apart from short is useless) is that any "system" applied to your password is wrong and vulnerable. Writing down and locking up a random and long password is still better than being "smart" about it. But then again, we're all lazy.
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  16. If you ever wondered about the expression "high brow", here's your example.
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  17. I am an experienced and fairly accomplished computer programmer. I know my languages and type systems. So when I saw the video I got interested. I watched it start to finish, trying to map what is told to programming languages, trying to imagine a practical application. I failed to do so. Now I am wondering: is that because there is not enough substance to what was told, was it not explained well enough or am I just not smart enough?
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  18.  @JivanPal  Ah, so it has nothing to do with data types or class types, co-variance or contra-variance. I assumed it did considering the name of the channel and the term "type". Different domains, that explains why I could not relate the two. That and not being a mathematician.
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  19. I imagine that university they work has a sub-optimal purchasing process and they ended up with piles of boxes of the stuff at a time no one was using it anymore. Now every employee is using it as scribbling paper for centuries to come. The editor even used an image of it as a surface for an animation which was funny.
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  20. 2:46 "Again it sounds complicated"... No, it it doesn't, really. It sounds nonsensical and utterly useless. And this does not change in the 16 minutes to come.
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  21.  @_garicas  Alright. I know about the nuances, this radical deviation from the norm is new to me though.
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  22. I don't understand how this compares to the situation back then. I imagine the British intercepted encoded messages but did not have a clue about the way these were produced. This guy starts with in-depth knowledge about the machine used to encode the messages.
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  23. It seems to me the human brain does not store memories comparable to the way a computer does it, nor in a redundant way. If you assume redundancy, you are still assuming the same storage model. It looks like memories are reproduced from a more fundamental source every time they are needed. This makes sense when you consider the quality of memories DOES deteriorate over time, as the brain gets older and damaged.
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  24. That would not be too hard for a bot but I was thinking something similar, that sentience really is the ability of becoming tired or irritated, the behavior itself being impeded rather than enhanced. The ultimate sentience is that the thing can be broken by input it was not programmed to process. Which is rather counter logical for a machine.
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  25. Something occurred to me: hashes are not unique. A passwords found to match a hash is not necessarily the password the user uses. But it does not matter, you will get in with whatever word matches the hash being checked against.
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  26. Looks like an exercise pad.
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  27.  @TheDarkOne629  That is not true. Recursion implies a call which includes putting a return address and possibly some arguments on a stack. Loops are just conditional jumps.
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  28. The only thing missing in the video shown in the 5th minute are the Oompa Loompa's gathering the individual molecules.
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  29. So, he wrote a unit test?
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