I do not how that happened (perhaps it was changed?), I am almost certain I got this right as I remember double checking the post after I submitted. I do not agree entirely with the post linked to, the post above is what I intended to submit.
Purchasing a business or parts thereof is not “gambling” any more than purchasing a house is “gambling”. People purchase them (or are supposed to) for the value they provide either through income or asset appreciation in the case of businesses or shelter in the case of the house and not for the singular promise of some winning outcome unlike games of chance. The only expectation is that the asset purchased will continue to provide value throughout the period of ownership which is no more or less than what you would expect of many other assets or goods you might purchase and none of this is contingent on mere chance alone. Just because somebody quotes a ridiculously high or low price does not necessarily mean the intrinsic value of the asset has changed. Overpaying for an asset is not the same as losing money to a slot machine. Have I “lost money gambling” if I buy something in a store the day before it gets discounted? These are just risks that exist in any market. Do not confuse this issue just because some have decided to use them as mere vehicles for price speculation. People speculate on the price of eggs, oil and gold as well but that does not mean buying eggs for breakfast, fuel for your car or a gold necklace for your wife is “gambling”.
Do not assume that the rest of the world follows the US view of ethnic identity. Groups that would all be classified under “Asian” in the US would be considered different races in China. Regardless it is true that the PRC, even despite political differences, would be more in tune with the ROK culturally due to the long history of Korea falling under the influence of the Sinosphere which is something the United States should be more wary of as a competitive disadvantage when trying to maintain influence over the region.
It is almost always blocking first party JavaScript and XHRs that causes breakages. I have rarely had to enable Google anything in uMatrix to get a site to work (more often it is Cloudflare), and it is only if the site insists on reCAPTCHA.
Paradoxically (or not) this is precisely what makes their scholarship better than that of a “distant” observer. The problem is that truly neutral authors are also often indifferent ones. Since the Ottomans had such a large influence on the history of Hungary, the scholars of that nation are far more interested in that topic and therefore will study and research it to a much greater level of detail than a scholar working in English from the Anglo cultural sphere where that history is less relevant to them. Also “distant” observers will lack a lot of the context necessary to interpret the events and topics in question. The best books on the American Civil War will be written by American scholars working in English, their biases notwithstanding. To make matters worse there is a natural human bias rooted in in-group vs out-group psychology where information provided by an out-group (information in a foreign language) is viewed with more scepticism than that provided by an in-group, even when the topic at hand concerns the out-group.
I feel like this a problem in general for topics outside “the West” or even just the Anglosphere. There is a tantalising amount of information that is siloed away in other languages. I was reading a Wikipedia article on one of the campaigns waged by the Ottomans in Europe and the English version was threadbare (and poorly written) in comparison to the Hungarian Wikipedia equivalent which was three times longer and had more images, maps and diagrams. It also cited a wealth of sources that were, again, not in English. This is a natural result of the fact that the ones “closest” to the event in question will generally be the ones most qualified and ready to report upon it.
I had known that 3.6 was released when Firefox was at its absolute peak in terms of market share but I am somewhat surprised (not really) that this seems to also correspond with its peak in overall quality for some people. This is not the case with Internet Explorer.
> I don't remember the last time I watched a Chinese movie or listened to a Chinese band…
I have seen quite a few films from Hong Kong and a few have achieved some level of popularity and recognition in the West but perhaps you do not consider a HK movie to be a Chinese movie.
> ...I've also lived in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, and American movies, music and literature were much more popular there, too.
I can believe that for movies and maybe music but certainly not literature.
> I understand that unassociated alpha gives you more precision in 8bit and since people wanted to e.g. store color ramps (with alpga) in PNG at the time…
They do not mention precision at all in their rationale for that: “We standardized on non-premultiplied alpha as being the lossless and more general case.”
> And when 16bit PNG got introduced...
PNG has supported 16-bits per component since it was first introduced (see version 1.0 of the spec or RFC 2083).
The author has a completely distorted view of computing history. 64K was not a “luxury” in 1982/1983. Average memory prices then were about $2000 per MB, 64K would have cost ~$100. The C64 launched with that amount of memory in 1982 and that was considered a cheap, budget microcomputer. As for other things which were supposedly typical of computing then: Expensive CPU cycles (wrong). No floating point (completely wrong and just shows the level of ignorance), Direct hardware access (not a constraint). Characterising the past this way certainly adds to the drama of their story but it is not accurate.
I think what the author meant is that film grain is part of the authentic visual aesthetic of cinema produced using celluloid materials. A de-noised image is therefore inauthentic as that is contrary to the appearance of the original projected image or source/master elements.
> But there is no grain in reality, so it does the opposite
The author did not do a particularly good job of selling the merits of film grain. I am not sure what he meant by that but I will say that it does increase the perceived sharpness of the image as well as perceived detail, even if it is just an illusion. The cinematographer Steve Yedlin describes it as giving the viewer’s eyes something to “latch” onto.
> Certificates are still a pain in the butt. One of the most cumbersome aspects of the web.
They will likely always be a pain and many aspects of Web security are cumbersome. It is simply a reflection of the fact that the Web, like e-mail, was not designed to be secure in the first place, being used in organisations where you can rely on trust. As a result the security stuff is just bolted on and often only in response to the previous solution failing. The previous layers stick around like zombie flesh until they are unceremoniously deprecated and cut away a decade later. A new system designed from scratch would be less cumbersome.
> The fact that PNG stores straight/unpremultiplied alpha says everything if you know anything about imaging in computer graphics.
> And the fact that the updated format spec just released didn't address this tells you everything you need to know about the group in charge of that, today.
> ...as it's a pretty bad look to upvote such a low-quality submission.
I had already just about dismissed HN as a place for any serious discussion of AI for a multitude of reasons. After seeing this I think I will be hammering in the final nail.
It has already been known for decades that arbitrarily precise approximations of mathematical formulations of AGI are computable. I was expecting nothing less than a refutation of that work from this based on the title. Unfortunately the first page alone makes it apparent that it is not, nor likely even a serious work of mathematics.
A Librebooted ThinkPad takes 10-15 seconds to reach a login prompt which I think is perfectly satisfactory considering that prior computers with roughly equivalent computing power (say a Cray machine) would have taken considerably longer to get fully up and running from deadstart. Think of all the tape drives, the cooling system, the frontend mini etc. that would have to spin-up, start up or initialise.
Therefore statements like “Remember when turning a computer on meant instantly jumping into code?” are confusing since I would guess that the vast majority of computer systems throughout history did not satisfy this requirement.
> Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made.
Flash was a proprietary extension to the Web. That important parts of the Web were implemented with it was a travesty and reason enough for it to be killed as it threatened and subverted the open nature of the Web. The useful functionality it provided has been incorporated into Web standards and current implementations are no more complex or less efficient than Flash was. The rest is fluff which can readily dispensed with, there is no need to re-implement it, although lately I have been wondering if it is possible to replicate its functionality with a combination of SMIL and SVG.
Before those came along I was perfectly content using a computer with 4 or 8 GB of RAM or less and thought that ought to be more enough for anything I wanted to do with computers for the rest of my life. Now I find myself wondering how much more RAM and what new GPU I am going to need to run a model with tens or hundreds of billions of parameters. A few years ago I might have agreed with those who say the personal computer revolution has long been over. Indeed there was a long period with few new milestones or innovation. But now I see that that sentiment was mostly a failure of my (and their) imagination.
I notice a pattern in the kinds of software that people are complaining about. They tend to be user-facing interactive software that is either corporate, proprietary, SaaS, “late-stage” or contains large amounts of telemetry. Since I tend to avoid such software, the vast majority of software I use I have no complaints about with respect to speed and responsiveness. The biggest piece of corporate bloatware I have is Chromium which (only) takes 1-2 seconds to launch and my system is not particularly powerful. In the corporate world bloat is a proxy for sophistication, for them it is a desirable feature so you should expect it. They would rather you use several JavaScript frameworks when the job could be done with plain HTML because it shows how rich/important/fashionable/relevant/high-tech they are.
Unfortunately there is a distinct lack of any scientific investigation or rigorous analysis into the phenomenon allegedly occurring that is called “Wirth’s Law” unlike, say, Moore’s Law despite many anecdotal examples. Reasoning as if it were literally true leads to absurd conclusions that do not correspond with any reality that I can observe so I am tempted to say that as a broad phenomenon it is obviously false and that anyone who suggests otherwise is being disingenuous. For it to be true there would have to have been no progress whatever in computing-enabled technologies, yet the real manifestations of the increase in computing resources and the exploitation thereof permeates, alters and invades almost every aspect of society and of our personal day to day lives at a constantly increasing rate.
> Image maps date all the way back to HTML 3.2, where, first, server-side maps and then client-side maps defined clickable regions over an image using map and area elements.
Server-side image maps were specified in HTML 2.0, in section 7.6 of RFC1866.