Jupe

My guess is that, by the end of this year, we will see this pattern over-and-over. The economics are just too compelling, especially in the attention-driven business like News.

Apologies if this is actually a human-written post - I understand not everyone's first language is English.

But, is this a markov chain generated response? It has a glimmer of actual content, but the wording / point / theme is completely lost on my reading.

If this was generated by an AI chat bot, then I must have a much better AI chat bot at my disposal (ChatGPT).

No idea if this any good... Every 3 seconds of video spawns a 10 second video advertisement. I gave up.

Very nice write-up on the various techniques and styles of generative art.

I like the artificial life simulator. I did something similar here https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MftSRf

The article goes out of its way to characterize such ancient sites through the lens of our current culture. This kind of archeo-sociology is nothing more than a massive guess as to what was actually going on. There are simply too many possible reasons for different house sizes. The most obvious, to me, is household (family) size. There may, or may not, be a relationship between household size and social level, but I do not see how this would ever be understood from these sites.

Jumping to "household income" seems too much for me, given nothing more than house size.

Example (from the article): "In addition, poorer households are prone to lose members to richer households, have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates..."

This is certainly a more modern perspective and not something I'd associate with a pastoral community like this.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I view such articles with a huge amount of skepticism.

And burn down their own homes as well?

Mass burning of homes, on a recurring 60 to 80 year cycle, then to rebuild the same structures, seems odd. Not mentioning it in the posted article seems like an substantial omission.

Concerning when an article like this makes assertions but doesn't mention key social concerns associated with the culture such as the periodic burning down of the houses. [1]

Given the "social strata" ideas presented in the article, I have bias concern alarms going off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned_house_horizon

(edited: grammar)

Which probably means:

1. You will not be able to watch any of these networks on any device other than your cable-connected television.

2. Every movie will be PPV.

3. To get the "deal" you'll first need to subscribe to the CBN, WWF, Nickelodeon, Bowling Network and HSN 1/2/3 bundle along with land line service for the low cost of $79/mo.

4. Your bill will now include a new "negotiation fee" for paying the lawyers who put this deal together, whether you subscribe to this set of services or not.

5. Then, Disney+ will also include CBN, WWF and Nickelodeon, and HULU will include Peacock and then Disney+ will include HULU, and Apple TV+ will buy Peacock and subsume all their content... and then Max will include Apple TV+... and you'll end up getting these services from 4 different providers, each at a "vastly reduced price", but the overall cost will exceed the original service subscription fee.

I'm worried -- and perhaps over-reacting here. To me, this leads to a question: "Why should a company go public at all?"

The growing number and net worth of so many equity firms, as well as very, very wealthy individuals, seem to indicate that the value stream of public investment isn't _really_ needed at all. At least for the right product / market.

I mean, the hassles of public stock (of which there are many: filing constraints, very "impressionable" public opinion, entanglements with Wokeism vs. Conservatism, etc.)

Basically, my thought here is that "Billionaires breed billionaires." They do not, in any way, breed richer "masses" investing their 401Ks.

> Does this decouple progress from our current understanding of the scientific process - moving to better and better models of the world without human-interpretable theories and mathematical models / explanations?

Replace "human-interpretable theories" with "every man interpretable theories", and you'll have a pretty good idea of how > 90% of the world feels about modern science. It is indistinguishable from magic, by the common measure.

Obtuse example: My parents were alive when the first nuclear weapon was detonated. They didn't know that they didn't know this weapon was being built, let alone that it might have ignited the atmosphere.

With sophisticated enough ML, that 90% will become 99.9% - save the few who have access to (and can trust) ML tools that can decipher the "logic" from the original ML tools.

Yes, interesting times ahead... indeed.

Nick Beato (bee'-ah-tow) is great. He has some awesome interviews with old-school rockers. Really fun. And he certainly has an engaging way of teaching music theory.

I'm no pro musician, as he is, though I do dabble. I can detect the out-of-tune chords, but he can tell which string is out of tune on the guitar. To me, that's just amazing.

But, here, I'm not sure what he's saying in this video. On the one hand, everyone he talks to about his son's "A" string being out of tune is saying: How would I know, I've never heard the song before. Then, he ends with all of us being inundated with precisely tuned (and precisely timed) music these days. Given that, I would guess people are more sensitive to slight out-of-tune with itself instruments?

That's all a little beyond me at this point. But very compelling!

As the original simulation shows, the idea is to calculate the difference and proximity of the pixels. So the drawing part is just a projection...

The ease of getting a memory buffer pointer, setting pixels within my calculation loop with simple offsets was very simple and compelling. I think I should look deeper into OpenCL/CUDA for this use-case, as I mentioned in the other response to my comment.

Thanks!

Interesting. While I've played with ShaderToy a bit, I've not gotten such a thing to run locally. Maybe I should revisit this..

I guess all that I'd need would be in-memory buffer of my field, then a single function to copy the buffer (or section of the buffer if I want larger than screen fields) to the video buffer.

This is pretty neat...

Having an interest in the space for many years (on-and-off; life gets busy sometimes) - I've often lamented the lack of good pixel-level performance optimizations in graphics cards. Everything seems hell-bent on polygons.

Some years ago, DirectDraw on Windows was an excellent way to optimize the graphics portion of these types of things, but that all went away as "3D Is The Way" mentality took over.

My explorations of Processing.* were neat, but lacked the IDE and library support I like as a developer.

No, no, no! Tell me something useful about the code, or why it is there in the first place...

Tell me where it's called from, how often it's called, if the caller can ever send null args, expected execution time, who wrote it, and when, and what else changed when it was first created, whether it is executed under a unit test or functional test.

But please do not tell me what it is doing... That's the one piece of information I don't need since I'm already looking at the code.

(Sorry for posting this here - I'm just overwhelmed and don't know how to digest this).

This stuff makes me queasy. The destruction to come from this kind of stuff is just blood curdling.

I would have said "more than 90%", but from ChatGPT:

Prompt: "What does vast majority mean?" Answer: "The term "vast majority" refers to a very large portion or segment of a given group or quantity, often implying much more than a simple majority or over half. It suggests an overwhelming or significantly large percentage, typically used to emphasize that the subject in question constitutes the bulk or main part of the whole. For instance, if one says "the vast majority of people support a certain policy," it means that significantly more than half of the people, possibly upwards of 70%, 80%, or even more, favor that policy."

Agreed. I'm no macro-economist; I was trying to relate the dependency tree aspect back to my are of work.

But, you appear correct, the decoupling does appear to be an illusion.

Awesome - good to know. Thanks!

I'll read this later: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/multi-cloud-deployment/

> This will take time. Decoupling is not an instantaneous process. China spent two decades becoming the workshop of the world; the rest of the developing world isn’t going to mirror that accomplishment in one or two years.

It is all about dependency trees. The US decides to divert imports from China to other countries, which in turn may import from China.

This reminds me of my day-to-day work so much; especially w.r.t. transitive dependency management. So:

If service A is 100% dependent upon service B which is 100% dependent upon service C, then service A is 100% dependent on service C.

At some point you need redundancy to protect against disruptions, outages, supply chain issues, policy changes, wars (either physical or economic), etc.

My (probably silly) question is: Does anyone know of "building block" or "core" services (such as authentication, authorization, BLOB storage, data storage, queuing) which are multi-cloud by design? Meaning service X offers SLAs for service endpoints hosted in AWS, GCP and Azure? If/when any of these "go down", consumers can (automatically?) flip a switch to route to another cloud service implementation?

I recall, back when Windows 95 was released, a joke going around that went something like this: "Yes, Windows 95 is awesome and popular. So awesome and popular there are ~450 books written about how to use it!"

Since the post said "cluster", I assumed it was a set of instances with replicas and the like.

I've never experienced AWS killing nodes forever; at least not DB instances.

Restoring from backup doesn't mean you actually have to use it - just prepare it in case you need it. Since this can take time, starting such a restore early would be an insurance policy, if needed. If there are snapshots to apply after the last-known-good backup, all the better.

Ouch?

The bad news is that I'd be out of a job if I chose your service in this instance. 47 hours is two full days. For an entire cluster to be down for that long is just unacceptable. Rebuilding a cluster from the last-known-good backup should not take that long, unless there are PBs of data involved; dividing such large data stores into separate clusters/instances seems warranted. Solution archs should steer customers to multiple, smaller clusters (sharding) whenever possible. It is far better to have some customers impacted (or just some of your customer's customers) than have all impacted, in my not so humble opinion.

And, if the data size is smaller, you may want to trigger a full rebuild earlier in your DR workflows just as an insurance policy.

The good news is that only a single cluster was impacted. When the "big boys" go down, everything is impacted... but customers don't really care about that.

Not sure if this impacted customer had other instances that were working for them?

Agreed, but the same can be said for any creative output by another human, can it not? Watching movies, reading books, listening to music... even reading articles and comments on Hacker News would be "worthless luxuries" if one is "chased by heat and thirst".

Agreed. (And thanks; never came across this before... ever. in 20 years)

I guess some projects need to randomly select a few rows from a table? I was thinking of the wikipedia random topic, but that's only one-at-a-time, not a set of records.

Wait, what?

  order by random()

Does that even make sense? Why would anyone ever need this? Better to order by a stored value and randomize the presentation order, IMO.

Seems completely dependent on when random() gets evaluated. If it gets evaluated at every inspection of the row during the sort, I'm little amazed that it hangs some times.

Thanks for sharing. This deserves a submission of it's own.

Very much reminds me of Deluxe Paint on the Amiga from 25+ years ago. Set the number of animation frames, press the Alt key (?) and start drawing with the mouse. Every 1/2 second or so the page would flip automatically, but your drawing would continue. You could easily create animated squiggles very similar to this.