469 karma · joined May 3, 2023
If it contains less than 50,000 words, perhaps, but most standard print dictionaries contain ~500,000 entries. The size of /usr/share/dict/words on my system is 954 KiB and the small version of the cracklib dictionary is 481 KiB.
I presume this is hyperbole and that what you mean is almost or very near zero.
The original reasoning can be found in medical texts from the mid to late 19th century when it was first discussed. My recollection is not strong enough to repeat it with confidence but it was to the effect of: the removal of the foreskin should restrict the ease of movement* and therefore restrict the ease of “self-abuse” as it was termed then.
* the foreskin functions as a sleeve which eases movement and reduces friction during sexual acts.
I would not give too much credence to the various figures often given for the average height of men and women in x country without careful research, since they have highly variable degrees of support.
For years I had heard repeatedly that the average height of a man in Indonesia was 158 cm or 5ft and 2 inches. This seemed so absurd to me and provoked enough scepticism that I eventually attempted to track down the source of that figure. It turned out to be from Wikipedia and the citation was a study that measured the heights of the elderly yet all of those repeating that figure neglected to mention, or were in all likelihood entirely ignorant of, that detail. I am similarly sceptical of some of the claims made about the average height of the Dutch, the subject of which seems to be a particular favourite among height myth-mongers.
With respect to young adult men I have found that figures based on measurements obtained as part of fitness screenings for mandatory military service are the most reliable due to their large sample size (at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest academic studies) and overwhelming lack of selection and sampling bias. A minority of nations have such systems and fewer still publish the data obtained in public. Yet even this would not answer the question for the whole population.
In my personal experience that "scenario" is a wearisome but stable job with a good income that would afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Yet this unfortunate circumstance was so intolerable that they would rather risk, and have in fact realised, the complete financial ruin of themselves and the ruin of the prospects and happiness of their children than continue to suffer it. So I had little else other than contempt, for them and others like them, when they came to me asking for money.
Even with their proposed “improvements” to Windows Update it would remain inferior in principle to what it was in Windows 7 (or 8 which I never used) and prior when you could “pause” updates indefinitely or, in non-dystopian terms, refuse them. If a third party, even one that you trust, can mandate changes to the software on your computer, then it is not really your computer.
They should wait until some or all of the following things have happened:
1. Camp David is sacked, looted and burned to the ground by foreign troops. [1]
2. Foreign naval vessels patrol American rivers to protect foreign corporate interests in America. [2]
3. Foreign nations have unrestricted access to American ports and trade. [3]
4. America pays a large indemnity for attempting to resist. [4]
5. Foreign nationals become immune to US law. [5]
6. Multiple military defeats and territorial losses. [6]
7. This goes on unfettered for 100 years.
All in all perhaps it is a bit early to call it that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Summer_Palace#Destruction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_Treaties
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Indemnity#The_clauses
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterritoriality#China
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation#History
You say that ratings drift over time to such an extent that to use them in comparisons across long time spans is meaningless yet their analysis determined that chess ratings as a measure of intrinsic quality of move choice (which must be highly correlated with playing strength) is stable over several decades with only some indications that a small amount of deflation has occurred.
Your argument in comparison amounts to informal speculation. If I were to share my own I would say that those potentially error-inducting considerations, are statistically insignificant compared to the sheer number of games, that is to say corrective and informative exchanges of points, that occur. Further, I would add that the absolute values of ratings were defined by the playing strengths of the original players and that this definition has been well preserved even as the player pool has evolved.
I have heard many such arguments in my time yet not a single proponent cares to demonstrate them. What I find amusing is that those same proponents will often readily accept a comparison across time of a single player (often themselves) across similar time spans without controversy, as evidence of their progress as a player, for instance using Carlsen’s rating today and comparing it with one from early in his career, say from 2003 or 2004, which at this point was more than 20 years ago.
Gukesh is arguably stronger than either of Khalifman, Kasimdzhanov and Ponomariov, who won the FIDE title before it was re-unified. Also his current rating is higher than either Karpov’s or Kasparov’s were when they first won the title. His rating when he first won was about the same as Fischer’s when Fischer first won. Neither Kramnik or Anand were clearly the best player throughout the entirety of their reigns and both of their ranks fluctuated amongst the top ten positions.
If anyone reading this is interested in small and efficient chess programs that are still reasonably strong, there was a x86 assembly port of Stockfish called asmFish from a couple of years ago (the Win64 release binary was about 130KiB). Also see OliThink (~1000 LOC) and Xiphos which has some of the simplest C code for an engine of its strength that I have seen. I have not investigated the supposedly 4K sized engines that participated in TCEC too closely but from what I have seen so far it would seem that there are a few asterisks to be attached to those claims.
This claim is frequently made about that era yet ignores the fact it was almost certainly running proprietary software.
Exactly, which is why I thought this was a terrible and meaningless benchmark. It completely obfuscates the actual video playback performance of these machines. It is more a measure of how awful and inefficient YouTube is. I am surprised that the author did not remark on or seem to be aware of this at all.
I am also of the opinion that with an optimised program the CRAY-1 would have been on par with Karpov and Fischer. I also think that Stockfish or some other strong program running on an original Pentium could be on par with Carlsen. I am not sure if Crafty’s licence would count as FOSS.
I do not think it is surprising that there is a Jevons paradox-like phenomena with computer memory and like other instances of it, it does not necessarily follow that this must be a result of a corresponding decline in resource usage efficiency.
This is not an issue in my view. I like the fact that I can download 100 MiB ultra-high resolution TIFF files of scans of photographs from the original negative from the Library of Congress and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC files of captures of 78 RPM records from the Internet Archive. In addition to maintaining completeness and quality of information, one of the main goals of preservation is to guard against further degradation and information loss. You should try to preserve the highest quality copies available (because they contain more information) and re-encoding (deliberate degradation) should only be used to create convenient access copies.
Inferior copies, in addition to being less informative, have the potential to misinform. Only the archivist will enjoy space savings. All the readers who might consult your library in the infinite future will bear the cost.
> ...(e.g. lossless FLAC). This inflates the file size...
This is entirely the wrong view. The file size of a raw capture compressed to FLAC should be thought of as the “true” or “correct” size. It is roughly the most efficient (balancing various trade-offs) representation of sampled audio data that we can presently achieve. In preservation we seek to preserve the item or signal itself and not simply what we might perceive thereof. This human-centric perception view is just wrong. There is data in film photographs which cannot be perceived visually yet can be of interest to researchers and be revealed with digital image analysis tools.
As an example of how much information celluloid can contain see: https://vimeo.com/89784677 (context: he is comparing a Blu-ray and a scan of a 35mm print)
This is wrong, that is the current maintainer. Jorge Arellano Cid is the creator of Dillo.
I am really surprised to see something seemingly so simple in the changelog at this stage of development.
I cannot find an article about this wall even on the Chinese Wikipedia but Baidu Encyclopedia has one: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E8%A5%BF%E5%A4%8F%E9%95%BF%E5%...
Can they really not be bothered to hire human translators? You would expect as much from a high profile news source like CNBC.