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HisGraceTheDuck

32 karma · joined August 22, 2016

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HisGraceTheDuck··on After Universal Basic Income, the Flood
Until I read this I was more or less pro-UBI but this article makes some excellent points.

UBI essentially assumes that everyone is a rational actor and that they will not succumb to spending the basic income on non-productive things (drugs, alcohol, gambling, excessively expensive consumables, etc). This is demonstrably false, especially if individuals don't have a day job. On an individual level it's easy to say that people should be responsible for their own wellbeing. But as a matter of public policy, it's just plain bad policy.

It's also hard to see how that money would /not/ be extracted in the form of higher prices across the board.

And the main point of the article is a very good one: what happens to all the now-unskilled labour?

HisGraceTheDuck··on 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
I do like my humour dry.
HisGraceTheDuck··on Show HN: Chaotic Life – deterministic behavior from unsynchronized threads
After a quick look at the code (I'm probably missing subtleties):

The "state" array stores the state of the cells in the life simulation in the lowest bit of each int in the array. The rest of the bits are used to store the count of the current generation for that cell.

Each thread can then examine cells independently and determine whether there's enough information in the cell's neighbours (taking generations into account) to update the cell's state (and increment the generation).

The trick is that even though the threads could be reading and writing the same cells at the same time, they will only ever write the same thing and so it doesn't matter.

HisGraceTheDuck··on Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
The holographic principle proposes a much more complex relationship between the 3 dimensional (plus 1 time dimension) universe we experience and a 2 dimensional (plus 1 time dimension) model that could provide insights into many interesting areas of physics including QFT, Cosmology, Black Holes, etc.

There is a very well developed model of how this relationship could work in a simpler case. I suggest you have a look at this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence

Hopefully this mathematical model will convince you that the holographic principle is, at the very least, more mature than a minion meme.

HisGraceTheDuck··on With Google's RAISR, images can be up to 75% smaller without losing detail
That used to be the case but recent updates do the processing on the device now. I don't know how they managed it but they did.
HisGraceTheDuck··on Libreboot – A free BIOS or UEFI replacement
Sometimes people have to do what they believe is right.
HisGraceTheDuck··on Libreboot – A free BIOS or UEFI replacement
Here's the list of compatible laptops:

https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/index.html#supported_laptops_...

Nothing recent but on the plus side, you should be able to pick one up without spending too much.

HisGraceTheDuck··on Gonorrhea Is Becoming Untreatable, U.N. Health Officials Warn
That's true and if it works for you that's great.

Getting preachy about it isn't going to win you friends or change anyone's mind.

HisGraceTheDuck··on Gonorrhea Is Becoming Untreatable, U.N. Health Officials Warn
These are all excellent points and we should definitely be pursuing all available avenues. I don't think this is and either/or proposition - we should look into anything that can help.

Things like genome therapy are unfortunately a long way off so we need to look for antibiotics in the meantime.

HisGraceTheDuck··on Tail call optimization for JavaScript in Babel
To answer my own question, it's in ES6: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813277
HisGraceTheDuck··on Tail call optimization for JavaScript in Babel
This is cool. It also raises the possibility of adding tail call optimisation to JavaScript interpreters.

Anyone know if that would be feasible?

HisGraceTheDuck··on Only Samsung Can Save Android from iPhone Domination
I think competition has been good for all smartphone consumers so keep up the good work Samsung!

(speaking as an iPhone user)

HisGraceTheDuck··on The Elegance of Deflate
"it could be argued to be less efficient for certain types of data" This is true of all lossless compression.