The past two days I have been attending a presentation training.

Presenting is not a weakness of mine, and especially when I am into the subject and had sufficient time to prepare, I like to think I am already quite good at it!

The reason for registering for a training like this is two-fold: Firstly, I believe it is always a good idea to test your theories, especially if they are about yourself. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, I registered for this training because I had become inspired by what I saw during my PIT-Stop training.

The trainers over there were able to tell a story so naturally and so inspiring. Something that made me realize there is still a ton to learn!

The training itself was quite nice. The setting was relatively intimate (understandably, as many people also take this training in order to get over a fear of presenting) which made that there was plenty of time for feedback and practice.

Even though I did not have a concrete goal of what to improve during my training, I did leave with some quite useful tips I will continue to practice on.

The Consequences of a Conscious Deterministic Simulation

With the recent progress in computing, and more specifically artificial intelligence (mainly neural networks), it is not strange that we see more and more sources say that it is only a question of time before such a computer program will eventually surpass the capabilities and intelligence of the human brain. A scary thought for one, an interesting thought for another. But if this is indeed a possibility, what will this mean for (human) consciousness and our understanding of it?

This article will explore the consequences for the existence of consciousness in a very specific type of computer simulation: a deterministic simulation.

Enjoy!

(Also published on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/consequences-conscious-deterministic-simulation-jasper-lammers)

Recently I have been asked whether or not I would be prepared to visit other countries for work. As this sounds very interesting to me, I said yes, and I am looking forward to the opportunity to do so.

As part of preparation, I also signed up for the training about cultural awareness that Vanderlande provides.

At first, I was going there to learn more about countries like China and India. Countries with an obvious and very large culture difference with the Netherlands. I was surprised to learn however, that the culture differences between countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Great Britain is also very large!

This was one of those trainings where you think you are going to learn one thing, but you learn another. It was very interesting, and it really helped me understand on how to work together with people from other countries. Not only will I be using this for working in other continents, but also when working with my colleagues from Germany.

I’m proud to say that my latest article is currently on number 3 of the Top Articles section on CodeProject!

Edit – Jan 25 2019

Even made it to number 2!

After discussing the subject of my previous CodeProject publication with others, I got curious how other languages handle the mid point values. I was happily surprised that almost every language did have this subject covered. However, there are a lot of differences between languages.

To hopefully help someone in the future, I have mapped the rounding methods in a table. X’s in bold are default implementations, other X’s are optional parameters or separate methods.

The language names in the table link to the documentation I used.

Without further ado, the big “programming language/rounding method table”:

	Java	C	Python*	C++	VB .NET	JavaScript	C#	PHP	Objective C	MATLAB	R	Perl	Swift	Go	Delphi	Ruby**
Round half up	X	X				X		X
Round half down		X						X
Round half towards zero		X														X
Round half away from zero		X		X	X		X		X	X		X	X	X		X
Round half to even		X	X		X		X	X			X	X		X	X	X
Round half to odd								X				X
Random tie-breaking												X

* The table references Python 3.7 but Python 2 actually has a different round implementation. It will round half away form zero.
** The mode keywords in Ruby are :up for “round half away from zero” and :down for “round half towards zero”, making them quite confusing in my opinion.

Of course, I’ve added this table to the article as well. Check it out here:

https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1272542/How-NETs-Math-Round-has-Nothing-to-do-with-Maths-A