In some cases technical subjects just require some pretty steep prerequisite knowledge, but where possible it's nice to try to make them as accessible as can be done practically within the space constraint of a few introductory paragraphs. Usually that means trying to aim at least part of any article at approximately "1 level below" the level where students are expected to first encounter the topic in their formal study. (This isn't always accomplished, and feel free to complain on specific pages that fall far short.)
Writing for a extremely diverse audience with diverse needs is a hard problem. And more generally, writing well as a pseudonymous volunteer collective is really hard, and a lot of the volunteers just aren't very good writers. Then some topics are politicized, ...
How much time have you personally spent trying to make technical articles whose subjects you do know about more accessible to newcomers? If anyone reading this discussion has the chance, please try to chip away at this problem, even if it's just contributing to articles about e.g. high school or early undergraduate level topics – many of these are not accessible at the appropriate level. But if you are an expert about some tricky technical topic in e.g. computing or biology or mechanical engineering, go get involved in fixing it up.
I’m sure it is totally impossible because figuring out where to start (what’s “obvious” to the reader), but a wiki that also has some sort of graph and could work out the dependencies for a given theorem, what you need to know to understand it, and then a couple applications (for examples) could be really useful. Automatic custom textbook on one specific topic.
It's more or less Wikipedia but the articles are created using natural language generation on a functional programming base. The main goal is to generate content in any language from a common underlying structure, but one could also try recursive explanations of a given topic in that framework as well.
Although this is partly inevitable because the content is really abstract, I know there are more approachable ways to define “monad” than https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad
Yes Wikipedia is really bad for maths articles. They're all written by people who just learnt about the topic and are showing off their pedantically detailed knowledge of it.
I think i misunderstand you or lack knowledge, because this sounds exactly like RAII.
I know that rust has major compile time checks, but saying that the difference is that it reason about life time as difference to c++ is misleading. I think the major point of c++ compared to c is that c++ "reason about object lifetime statically" with deconstructors and RAII. And saying that rust do this and implying c++ don't is misleading.
Rust and C++ work very similarly with respect to objects you own. In both languages they get cleaned up by a destructor when they go out of scope. However, Rust also has a lot of language features that deal with objects you borrow, i.e. have a pointer to. In C++ you might make a "use-after-free" mistake and hold a pointer to an object that's already been destructed, which can lead to all sorts of memory corruption. In Rust, the same mistake almost always results in a compile-time error. The part of the compiler that enforces all this is called the "borrow checker", and getting used to the borrow checker's rules is a big part of Rust's learning curve.
One thing C++ programmers might be interested to learn, is that this doesn't only apply to simple variables and references; it also applies to library data structures and their methods. The Rust compiler doesn't really "know" what the .clear() method on a Vec does, but it knows enough to prevent you from calling that method while you're holding references to the Vec's elements.
> getting used to the borrow checker's rules is a big part of Rust's learning curve.
It’s also a big part of C and C++’s learning curves, it’s just that the compiler doesn’t tell you about it; you’re being taught by segfaults and silent memory corruption instead.
Very true. My hot take on this is, if you want to learn C or C++ "properly" (not just well enough to get your homework done, but well enough to write medium-size programs that pass ASan/UBSan/TSan), the fastest way is to learn Rust first. This is emphatically not because Rust is quick to learn, but rather because ownership and borrowing discipline takes years of mentorship to absorb in C and C++, and plenty of career programmers never really get it.
> Rust and C++ work very similarly with respect to objects you own.
There is one major difference. In Rust you can memcpy objects you own to a different base address and they will still work, unless they're pointed at by a Pin<> type (as such, code that requires objects to stay put in memory must take a Pin<> reference. This arrangement may potentially be replaced by a special "?Move" trait in future editions of Rust). C++ pins all objects by default and allows objects to have custom "move" constructors, to sort of enable them to be moved elsewhere.
In C++, objects that get "moved" must leave behind something that can be destructed cleanly; Rust has no such limitation, at least wrt. ordinary moves. Arguably the closest thing it has to a C++ move is the .take() pattern, which leaves a default-constructed object behind. But this is rarely used.
The general tradeoff is that the Rust pattern memcpy's compound objects more often, but has less gratuitous use of the heap and less pointer chasing compared to idiomatic C/C++. This is a valid choice once one has the compiler support that Rust provides.
> However, Rust also has a lot of language features that deal with objects you borrow
An other major safety difference is that Rust uses destructive moves, once a binding is moved-from it becomes invalid / inaccessible (and it won't be destroyed).
In C++, a moved-from object is in a "valid but unspecified state", so it must be destructible (because destructors always run) but any interaction with the object other than destruction may be UB, and the compiler won't tell you (in the same way it won't tell you about borrowing issues whether it's UAF, invalidation, ...).
Yeah if you never use a pointer/reference/iterator, the guarantees are quite similar. The rust compiler however also checks for use after free and iterator invalidation bugs. In addition it makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot in concurrent code because you can’t have multiple mutable references to an object.
Haha! Infinitely far away (not on my horizon). Thought has crossed my mind, but there are so many other things I want to do first (e.g. audio, superscalar CPU, ...).
It's not the same if you generate the heat outside and bring it inside, though. I don't know enough about where the fan is located to know if that's what you mean, but that would be different.
air/air heat pumps have a fan on both the inside and the outside. In modern designs, both those fans will be brushless DC, which enables deliberate heating through software.
Note however that both fans will typically be ~150 watts - which means that when heating they can't produce orders of magnitude more heat than that. So heat produced by the fan motor, even when run to generate as much heat as possible, probably won't be a very significant contributor to overall system heat output.
Maybe if you expect the heat pump to mainly move heat in, the heat generating parts should be on the inside, and reverse if you’re mainly moving heat out (A/C).
Don’t know if this is considered during installation?
The compressor is the only component that generates a substantial amount of heat. That's really it's purpose: trading a pressure increase in the refigerant for a rise in temp.
The compressor is usually in the outdoor unit, because of noise, size, and proximity to the controls. It also is the item that consumes most of the power, so for minisplits, the outdoor unit is the part wired for high currents. It usually is wrapped in a nice insulating blanket (for sound as well), and vapor injection techniques used in cold climate pumps means the heat wasted is minimal.
I think wikibooks is a good initiativ to solve this, and could be powerful when combined with a normal wiki.