20 Oct 2008 chalst   » (Master)

Recentlog
  • slef, in writing “your country continues to turn into Big Brother”, talks about Labour's apparently hostility to civil liberties. I commented there this topics reminded me of Chris Lightfoot (born 1978, died 2007); I have to say thinking of Chris now makes me feel quite sad. I've never had such a connection to someone I haven't met face-to-face: I had an email exchange with him —following some issues I found in the construction his excellent Political Compass— on the whole idea of using the internet to conduct lightweight opinion polls, and on what kind of statistical methodology they required. Chris was a very substantial person, both very politically engaged and deeply committed to getting to the truth. The world is a poorer place for his death.
  • wingo, in dynamic dispatch: a followup, writes that
    The salient point is that in latent-typed languages, all of the static type analysis techniques that we know are insufficient. Only runtime analysis and runtime recompilation can capture the necessary information for efficient compilation.
    I'd like to return to this claim in a future post; suffice it for now to say that, for a sufficiently knowledgeable group contained in "we", I doubt that this is true.
  • kgb wrote a diary entry, which was a perfectly decent diary entry. It wasn't on my recentlog because, for some reason, his account appears to mine with rating 2.1. I'll add his diary separately to my RSS feeder; I'd like to find why he's rated so low, since this seems to be a concrete case where Advogato's diary rating machinery has failed.
This edition of Recentlog introduces a new format for linking to old advogato diary entries. Hope you like it.

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