DowsingSpoon

Or, alternatively, the NSA could be tasked with constantly pen testing US companies' computer security. If they find a problem then they would mandate fixes and assess a hefty fine. The fine would be used to cover the NSA's costs and to pay a bounty to the individual who discovered the weakness.

I used to smoke. I started smoking while drinking and the reason is that it feels fucking amazing. People don't smoke for no reason. They smoke because it feels good. Really good.

The long-term health consequences don't feel real when you're young. It's easy to dismiss, even if you logically understand the risks.

The expense is not a problem. Utterly unimportant.

The addictive aspect is a subtle beast. It creeps up on you slowly. At first, smoking is a great, fun thing to do every once in a while. It's a great, fun thing to do with friends. Slowly, every once in a while turns into every day. Then, a few times a day. Now you need a cigarette to start the day right. You try to cut back and only then realize you're addicted.

What an excellent analogy! You can’t put chocolate sauce on the rice you bought because outside food and drink are always prohibited. You’ll be politely, but firmly, asked to leave. So, in a word, yes, because the owner of the restaurant says no.

Disagree. If there is a filter at all then it could easily be that we’ve already passed it. Maybe the filter is the formation of multicellular life, for example. Also, Earth and Mars have exchanged a lot of material. If we find Mars life, it would not at all be surprising to learn it is related to Earth life.

>(Very) bad developer API (actually ABI). Having being in N64 emulation, you truly see they have no idea how 3D rendering was supposed to be exposed.

I'd be very interested in learning about the N64's 3D API and ABI and the issues with it, if you'd like to expand on that. Or maybe you know of a blog post or article already covering the topic?

The term “third world” does not mean something like “third rate.” The first world is the Western bloc, under the influence of the USA. The second world is the Eastern bloc, under the influence of the USSR. The third world is everyone else.

I think we should stop using these terms.

Thank you! I did not know.

Why?

This is a nothing article.

The article provides no meaningful analysis. Here’s what might have made it worth reading:

* How does the hardware, and software like the kernel, manage heat in the machine?

* Some information about CPU power states, &c, and how the kernel interacts with the hardware regarding them.

* Some analysis of how Activity Monitor works and why it ascribes a certain amount of CPU activity to kernel_task, or to any other task.

A while back, I was working on a fun little video game side project which used BMI2 instructions to compute Morton codes on the critical path.

Voxels were stored in a buffer sorted in Morton order. The idea was to balance performance improvements realized by increased spatial locality against the cost of computing the Morton codes. The trade-off was only worthwhile on Intel because of the use of pdep/pext in optimized encode/decode functions.

I imagine something similar would probably apply to texture lookups in a software 3D renderer.

>Using C++ for kernel development means you first have to drop most of the useful parts of C++ and take usability hits with almost all the other features.

This is commonly accepted wisdom, but it's not entirely true. (It's only a little bit true.)

The kernel is a freestanding environment where big chunks of the standard library are missing. However, the most useful parts, like unique_ptr<T>, can be reimplemented as needed.

The kernel absolutely can support RTTI and exceptions. Porting libcxxrt is relatively simple, for example, even if implementing the entire Itanium C++ ABI is a big task. Though, the kernel should still avoid throwing and catching exceptions in sensitive code like interrupt handlers. This is not radically different from other C++ projects. The use of exceptions is typically discouraged, for example, in tight inner loops.

It is true that enabling RTTI and exceptions causes code size to explode. This is a valid concern. While memory is cheap, cache misses are not cheap. Mark functions and methods with "noexcept" as needed where this becomes a problem.

Finally, it's absolutely true that exceptions make it impossible for the kernel to make solid real-time guarantees. Fortunately, most operating systems only have soft real-time constraints, if that.

Bikes are parked on bike racks, which is to say, in a place designed to store bikes. Scooters are parked — rather, strewn — across the side walk chaotically with no regard for those of us actually trying to walk there.

Sometimes scooters are parked on the side of the road. Sometimes scooters are parked in a ditch beside the road. Bikes rarely are.

The radio spectrum is limited, and belongs to the people. Careful regulation ensures it remains usable. Likewise, regulating orbits is important. For example, to limit potential damage from space debris.

Without some sort of pressure to maintain a standard like 40 hrs/wk, employee work hours become a race to the bottom. This pressure could take the form of a formal collective bargaining agreement. It could also take the form of a strong social norm. In either case, it doesn’t work unless a lot of people buy into the idea.

It would be a lot easier if it were much, much easier to negotiate work-life balance while negotiating compensation. Unfortunately, I’ve never found this to be practical. Management has certain expectations set by company social norms. Any employee found violating those norms is punished in one way or another.

I don't believe there is an intention to slow down or stop.

>Aren't all ads lying?

Not at all. Please refer to the Wikipedia page on "False advertising" for an overview of what does and does not constitute false advertising.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising

The article puts forward the notion that "the universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion." However, conflict will most assuredly not be "extremely difficult to avoid" because space is large, and interstellar travel will always be extraordinarily difficult and slow. There will be no war between two groups when they have basically no interaction whatsoever.

You ask how? I accept that any search for meaning in life is founded on a categorical error. Life is not the sort of thing that can have meaning. Then, I just get on with the business of trying to find some modicum of happiness while I still breathe.

>nobody is spraying wheat right before harvest

Glyphosate is sometimes used as a desiccant to alter the timing of wheat harvests, ensure even ripening, and to make harvesting easier. While it's not a widespread practice, it does happen in the US.

Mechanics and Story are often orthogonal. Games that focus on one often do so at the expense of the other. Rare is the game that is able to effectively use gameplay mechanics to provide additional depth to the story.

Imagine an idiot-savant. He can tell you with complete accuracy the answer to complex mathematical problems, but has no understanding of how he arrives at the result. Now imagine a hyper intelligent alien who is like the savant. It can construct interstellar vessels, but has no self-awareness of how it came up with the designs. Though, it is clear that they do work. The alien can observe a human and know exactly how to best injure him or her, but it cannot understand how it came to know human anatomy, or even why the attacks work. For example, if it performed a Vulcan neck pinch, and you asked it how it figured out how to do that then it might tell you that "it just felt like the right thing to do." It has no conscious notion of the human mind or neurology.

The alien in Blindsight also apparently does not care to understand such things, and may lack the capacity for this kind of thought. It runs entirely on instinct, but these instincts bake in extremely complex behaviors that are beyond human capabilities.

I'm also reminded of two other aliens from other Sci Fi series: 1) the Orkz from Warhammer 40k. Dumb as a rock, but can build devastatingly effective vehicles and weapons from salvage and garbage. God knows how. They certainly have no idea. 2) The Motie engineers from "The Mote in God's Eye." They can instinctually build and improve on machines but cannot understand, or come close to explaining, How they did it.

Lots of random 'Æ' and 'ö' characters strewn throughout the article... Did anyone proof read this?

What about applications with soft or hard real time requirements? (So, for example, a video game or an audio player.) I am not aware of any GC language which is suitable for use in this space. Go certainly is not.

What about any application that cares in the slightest about performance? In this case, memory layout is incredibly important, and many (most?) of those higher level languages are immediately disqualified.

Mathematics is founded in logic. You cannot use logic to prove logic. Instead, we start with some axioms and build from there using rules that we think we reasonable and intuitive. I vaguely recall learning about a position in philosophy that holds that these axioms and rules come from the way the human mind is structured. If this is true then there is no reason to think that an alien mind would use the same axioms. For example, something that seems entirely fundamental to us might require a very complicated proof in the alien system. If the two systems are pragmatic and useful then they can produce conclusions that correspond to the physical world, and from there we can relate the two.

However, a major plot point in the movie is that time does not exist and that there is no such thing as causality. In the world of Arrival, there is not a lot of reason to believe that mathematics, logic, and science are capable of bringing us to a true understanding of the universe. It wouldn't work to teach human mathematics to the aliens because human mathematics is weird and wrong.

I thought that all sorts of skilled labor was done by slaves in Ancient Rome?

Can you comment a bit more on the limitations of Metal?

I've been spending the last few days reading through the docs and learning how to use Metal. So, I'm curious what you (and anyone else, I guess) perceive its shortcomings to be.

Many good monitors have a 144 Hz refresh rate these days.

The asr and ditto command line tools work very well and cost nothing.

The newer CPUs include fancy power management features. Operating system participation is needed to make the most of that.

Care to expand on that?

Why do you disagree? What specific points do you disagree with? Is that link meant to be a counter to the argument that "text formats suck?" If so then how does it demonstrate this?

If you're saying that your text protocol is good enough for your purposes then I have to wonder if maybe you aren't doing anything particularly latency sensitive.