Similar article, no paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/electronic-ar...
2,452 karma · joined April 11, 2013
It's about 2x faster. Your code uses 44 CPU cycles x 64
Edit: plus a branch instruction, maybe that adds 3 cycles x 64 I guess
The fictional R2-D2 had a big advantage of being in vacuum so it could work from the outside, without disturbing the airflow, and without having its work disturbed by the airflow.
Envisage what happens at 900km/h in atmosphere, if R2-D2 tries to lift up an exterior wing panel to troubleshoot a blocked line?
The research in the article does suggest a plausible alternative
Thanks, I didn't notice the date. So, I wasted my time commenting on it.... thanks a bunch, OP
Yes, I noticed the 'spaceman bad' vibe, but I don't mind trying to discuss it. I'm certainly not on the 'spaceman bad' team, but probably on the 'spaceman getting worse' side.
Edit: thanks for your comment anyway. It's informative
Then, they are working on it by working on Starship
Edit: 'two years' is unlikely, but Mars does have an atmosphere, so something like a Dragon capsule could land there with a parachute. That's not going to work so well on the moon
"This includes communications from Valve that “‘the price on Steam [must be] competitive with where it’s being sold elsewhere’” and that Valve “‘wouldn’t be OK with selling games on Steam if they are available at better prices on other stores, even if they didn’t use Steam keys.’” Dkt. No. 343 ¶ 158, 160 (quoting emails produced at VALVE_ANT_0598921, 0605087). "
(This is a new case, not the 2021 suit, which was rejected by the court, then amended and refiled, later with an additional plaintiff added)
[0]https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29...
But how many billion-dollar companies would do that? Just give the rights to the ex-employees? I think most other companies would have not. So, in that sense, Valve is unusual, even if it's not the oranizational utopia that was promised.
After she left Valve, she and partners did get at least $15 million funding from outside investors to develop the AR technology, but after several years of trying, it didn't work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CastAR
I don't know. On the base layer, payments are all just transactions on the Blockchain, like any other. So it's not easy to see whether a transaction is a payment or an "investor" speculating, or something else. Then there's also other layers, like Lightning.
My guess is the relative percentage of retail Bitcoin payments, compared to speculative transactions, is now lower than 2017, when Steam accepted Bitcoin. I don't know if absolute amount of payments has reduced. Maybe?
You could look at historical charts of average Bitcoin fees[0], which gives you an idea when retail Bitcoin payments are practical, and when the fees are too damn high. Fees often got above $4, sometimes much higher, in 2024 for example, which would unacceptable for something like buying a game from Steam. Though, still, that doesn't show what impact Lighting is having on retail payments.
[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
Valve knew that there would be price fluctuations. Everyone knew that, and knew how to deal with it. They just priced the games in dollars, with a conversion to the Bitcoin value at the moment of sale.
But what Valve did NOT expect was that the Bitcoin blockchain would suddenly grow so popular and congested (which was a result of massive publicity from events such as Steam accepting Bitcoin). So suddenly, to Valve's surprise, the average fees to be sure that a payment would soon be processed on the blockchain fluctuated wildly upwards during that period, up to tens of dollars. The Blockchain congestion and high fees were exacerbated by technical and ideological arguments about how the Bitcoin network should function. The "small block" faction won, but Bitcoin quickly became a laughing stock as a method of payment, because second layer solutions to the network congestion weren't ready.
The high fees were a huge problem in themselves for Steam customers, and there were other support issues caused by Steam customer difficulty understanding how to use Bitcoin (and who can blame them?). Customers were angry because they had paid for a game, but their payments were delayed for days unless they paid an indeterminate Blockchain transaction fee which might be more than cost of the game they were trying to buy.
After a few months of that chaos, Steam dropped Bitcoin. So did many other retailers.
Ironic, Bitcoin payments work much better now and fees are lower, but it lost of a lot of goodwill from retailers like Steam during that period, and most of them have not come back.
That's largely true. There is at least one, wonderful, reward from all the rule-fiddling, though it might be orthogonal to the issues you've highlighted, but driver deaths and severe injuries are much less common than they used to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Formula_One_fatalities
A cynic would say that, if the arena no longer offers us the ever-present possibility of death, then the drama needs to be enhanced in other ways, even if they are artificial.
Yes, Bitcoin does not have sufficient trade volume, and it was a joke anyway. Bitcoin would probably not have survived even one more month in 2010, if there were 184 billion new "fake" bitcoins added in the mix.
Even ignoring all the problems about the Bitcoin software being proven to be seriously broken, those 184 billion extra bitcoins meant that every other Bitcoin was suddenly worth about $0.0000000000000001
So, it's good that the transaction was undone, or 15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker.
(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)
Most commonly, this is comparable to people who realize that they have been having problems, for years, because they are "on the spectrum" or have Asperger's or autism-adjacent conditions or, perhaps, some ADHD/ADD challenges. I'm sure that there are many people in the HN community who have been surprised to discover this about themselves.
For example, this man, who has been successful in very many ways: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57045770
For people who discover challenges related to gender identity and dysphoria though, the great difference is that they're not only realizing that they have the "wrong" mind, but they even have the "wrong" physical body, too! [In that sentence, my opinion is that the definition of "wrong" is based more on the traditional viewpoints of conventional culture, and not so much on reality].
But there were in total six murder-for-hire allegations against Ross Ulbricht. That Maryland case in your link [0] was only one of them.
That Maryland one was also a case in which Carl Force, a corrupt federal agent, was deeply involved. The New York trial which incarcerated Ulbricht avoided considering that single allegation, specifically because of the corrupt agent's involvement. [1]
(Confusingly, there were also six allegations of drug-related deaths. These were completely unrelated with the six murder allegations.)
It's notable that, in that Maryland document you linked, the US Attorney could have moved to dismiss the charge without prejudice, meaning that it could be retried, but he chose not to do that.
But he then continues, to say, without explaining why, that Ulbricht was already serving a life sentence which had been affirmed on appeal in New York. The implication is that the US Attorney is hinting that there's no point ever pursuing the 'attempted murder' angle, because Ulbricht is already locked up for life (Narrator: he was wrong).
Here's a summary
* One murder-for-hire allegation (Maryland): Indicted, but dismissed with prejudice by US Attorney
* Five murder-for-hire allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
* Six drug-related death allegations (New York): Not indicted/charged, not decided by jury, but included in sentencing decision
*
What I understand is that the New York jury was allowed to know about the attempted murder-for-hire and the drug-related death claims, but not about the corrupt federal agents.
The murder-for-hire allegations, meanwhile, were allowed to influence his sentencing (and the rejection of his appeal) due to "a preponderance of evidence" as decided by the judge, which would not be sufficient grounds for criminal convictions such as murder, which require evidence "beyond reasonable doubt".
This was not justice's finest hour.
*
[0] Maryland dismissal: https://freeross.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Doc_14_Dismi...
[1] New York's appeal rejection decision: https://web.archive.org/web/20221213001237/https://pdfserver...
JW: That was probably Jerry Wolper. He was a coder and designer at Infocom in the later 1980s
I don't think that works. The keyboard can't buffer your input while it waits for a match on its autocorrect dictionary.
Imagine how that would seem if you're typing slowly? You will expect each keypress to have an instant output on screen. But nothing would appear.
That's similar to how the human visual system 'paints' a coherent scene from a quite narrow field of high-resolution view, with educated guesses and assumptions
Ross, L., Lepper, M.R. and Hubbard, M. (1975) Perseverance in Self-Perception and Social Perception: Biased Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880-892.
https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.5.88...
Anderson, C.A., Lepper, M.R., & Ross, L. (1980). The perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037-1049.
Seven children. Filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020. Died of ALS aged 64, which is probably not a nice way to die. I wouldn't celebrate his life, but I wouldn't celebrate his death either.