Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in the session). This is active learning with small group work and peer learning - which students tend to actually quite like. (Flipped classroom works better the more engaged the students are in the topic - for electives, fine, for mandatory courses, less good.)
Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)
Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in sidebars and the like.
I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to support them with Linux (or any other OS...) than it was a decade ago.
The problem is power users with some specific needs, who also tend to be the more vocal in tech circles. In that circumstance, the usability of Linux depends strongly on what kind of needs they are - programming is obviously not a problem, but it's a harder sell for, say, photography (I like Darktable, but I have found it v hard to sell Lightroom users on it).
I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves their sanity...
I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks (plus, I found them all being so small - especially the ones closest to the sun - made me constantly worried about falling off), and I couldn't finish it.
(I did watch a YouTube play through to get some of the experience without the terror later)
IIRC, that was Socrates' complaint to Phaedrus about writing: that reading (because it was "high tech" at the time?) led only to an illusion of understanding.
Elsewhere Phaedrus echoes with a very modern complaint (even though search engines wouldn't arrive for another 2'300 years): They would say in reply that he is a madman or a pedant who fancies that he is a physician because he has read something in a book, or has stumbled on a prescription or two, although he has no real understanding of the art of medicine.
Socrates wasn't wrong. Reading a lot gives you a partial understanding but it isn't complete without experiencing the thing for yourself. Arguably the Internet is the natural home of authoritatively stated but uninformed opinions - the exact result of reading a lot about a subject without having any experience of it.
I think the Phaedrus is all about the importance of practice. I've been reading a lot of math books lately, but I don't actually grok anything well until I sit down and try to reason through the material myself, write my own little proofs, try to deconstruct what's being said actively with pen and paper. Similarly, I understand a work of literature far more deeply if I take active notes, and/or write a small essay about my interpretation. I become a better writer by reading good writers and emulating them in my own writing practice. Writing was a threat to poets when the goal was still to recite a compelling live performance, which, to do this well, would require memorization and practice—today, still, we ask that actors do not have paper scripts in front of them when performing in a film.
This is kind of the threat that tools like LLM's pose. Their power to generate decent results means that far more people will eschew practice for "good enough" LLM produced results. Creation will become even more transactional, and (many) people will quickly fail to "see the point" in practicing until we have a culture that's degraded even further than it already has today.
N-body problems can't be analytically solved.
However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermediate states along the way
In the case of the solar system, yes, it helps that the Sun is much more massive than everything else (and then Jupiter is 4 times more massive than Saturn, the next biggest) - you can go a long way to a "reasonable" solution by starting with the 2-body solution if only the Sun affected each planet, and then adding in the perturbation caused by Jupiter and Saturn.
(In fact, that's how we predicted the existence of Neptune, by noticing that there were extra perturbations on Uranus beyond those, and hence another massive planet must exist, far enough away from the sun to only significantly affect Uranus).
It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same property.
The difference is uptake. Julia's good and it's out there, but relative to the users of Python... How many people care how portable the Julia code they aren't writing is? The existence of a tool to jit-compile Python is more useful to a lot more engineers than the existence of another language that is nicely jit-compileable.
Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited metric.
Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install.
Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to plot" is now only a couple of seconds thanks to this (and subsequent plots are, of course, much faster than that).
