Negitivefrags

The rediculoussness of the energy use of transport is especially noticeable when you are driving a Tesla which by default shows you a dial of power consumption and generation in kW.

When rolling down a hill with regenerative breaking, the car is generating 50kW.

You can literally power many average homes with that.

So there is a difference between meat that was farmed in a manner that is no more carbon unfriendly than vegetables, and meat that is not.

We could have marketing campaigns for “green beef” and I’m suprised we don’t. It seems very strange.

My country doesn’t import beef, and all of the beef here is grass fed. Nor do we cut down any forests since they are all now protected.

Eating meat here is just fine then right?

And yet a significant number of people here are going vegetarian for climate change reasons.

So we could agree that the methane is irrelevant because it would be emitted anyway by the rotting grass.

And we could also agree that clearing forests is a different thing than farming meat, which we could separately campaign against and prevent.

After all, the great grasslands of America are not turning into forests, and cattle farmed there doesn’t result in further forests being cut down.

No, this isn’t always the problem.

People are not fungible resources. You can’t simply turn a programmer from Google into a Lithium miner by paying more.

Can someone explain to me how beef actually contributes to climate change more than any other food activity?

If you have a big open plain full of grass, does it change how much carbon is emitted if a cow eats it versus being left alone, dying, and rotting?

You have farm machinary involved I guess, but I would think actually more of it for plants than for beef especially when you consider fertiliser.

I understand that it’s possible to do worse than this though using feed lots because then you are effectively having to grow more crops (using more farm machinary and fertiliser) which basically increases the amount of carbon use versus just plants.

But then rather than saying “no meat” shouldn’t we just be saying “no feed lots”?

Shouldn’t there just be a push towards grass fed beef?

Improbable is basically a joke in the games industry.

I’m not exactly an expert in them or anything, but the last time I looked at them at all (admittedly many years ago) the whole concept of what they do seemed both very expensive and mostly useless for real games.

It probably would be possible to add a new instruction that causes the processor to flush all state in exchange for sacrificing task switching speed. Of course it might still have bugs, but you could imagine that it would be easier to get right.

Of course, it’s not doing much for the billions of devices that exist.

I would hope that we could find a software solution that web browsers can implement so that devices can be patched.

Either way, I would want such a solution to not compromise performance in the case where code is running in the same security context.

This is what I don’t like about existing mitigations. It’s making computers slower in many contexts where they don’t need to be.

Once again it seems clear that running code from two security domains on the same physical processor cores is just not possible to get right, and we should probably just stop doing it.

There are really only two common cases for this anyway. VMs and JavaScript.

For VMs we just need to give up on it. Dedicate specific cores to specific VMs or at least customers.

For JavaScript it’s a bit harder.

Either way, we need to not be giving up performance for the the normal case.

I am also an advocate for transparency of ownership of companies, but that Disney example seems like more of a case against transparency than for it?

Why should Disney be price gouged in that circumstance?

“No parking on Sundays” is an exception that proves the rule. The implied rule is that parking is allowed on Monday through Saturday.

I almost never see this phrase used correctly however.

For sure, but the difference there is that someone was actually severely wronged. The worst that happened here was some people had time wasted.

I think a punishment where the lawyer had to pay for all the time he wasted for the judges and various legal clerks (and his client) would be sufficient personally.

He is unlikely to make the same kind of mistake again I would think.

The range of climates that heat pumps work in has expanded a lot in recent years. Some modern heat pumps work efficiently down to -20C or lower.

There is a setting in photoshop for this.

It’s called something like “Blend in Gamma: 1.0”. The default is 2.2 of course.

The annoying thing is that it can’t be done per image, so if you chnage it, it breaks the blending of any image you load made by someone who doesn’t have that setting enabled.

I occassionally walk around our studio and audit this setting is set correctly for all our VFX artists because they are the ones who will see incorrect results compared to in-engine if they use the wrong setting here.

Maybe they should let you bypass the quota system if you pay in advance via bank transfer then?

This anecdote is the opposite of the ones I usually hear.

Economies of scale go in the other direction usually.

If Microsoft being angry shows that it was the right decision, what would it look like if an actually unjust decision was made?

It is my understanding that if you do not log the IPs that connect, then you are not collecting personal data.

If you don’t collect any identifiable data, then the EU has nothing to say about it.

This is a concept called a Narrow Bank.

Basically it’s a bank that puts all its deposits directly with the Fed. There have been attempts to start such a bank in the past and they have been denied a banking charter.

It's funny becasue I feel exactly the same about the LLM denegrators.

It feels like you will only be happy if we are able to prove that the LLM has a soul.

I like to implement an iterator that returns string_view when dereferenced. You can make the ergonomics quite nice with a helper class.

for( auto value : from_csv( str ) ) { … }

Clearly it's possible for depression to be affected by discussion with people around you.

If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?

As a manager, I actually find people doing "big picture" thinking quite annoying to deal with. What I want you to do is concentrate on the tasks in front of you and do those well. You shouldn't be caring about the total amount of tasks to do, or if we are going to finish the project on time. That is my problem, not yours.

At some point I realised that it's better to have all the issues in the tracker assigned to project managers and never have more than half a dozen on someone at a time because some people just can't seem to handle it.

People with a lot of work assigned to them will report how stressed they are and how they are working too hard. When I ask them if they are working more than 40 hours a week they tell me "no". (We don't allow people to work unapproved overtime)

And then if you unassign all the work off them and just parcel out the issues they work the same amount of time and produce about the same amount of work and yet are not "overworked" to hear them tell it.

C&C Generals had a thing where if you had multiple clients with the same CD key in a multiplayer game everything would be fine for a while, but 10 minutes into the game all the buildings of the people who duplciate keys would explode.

This happened a few times at LAN parties to my friends, some of whome gave each other the game by copying the install directory across. Took us a while to work out what the hell was happening.

One really has to wonder about the mindset of people who would enforce such a rule.

Do they really think they are a force for positive change?

Isn’t every other fictional story some parable about how the means don’t justify the ends? It feels weird to me that people don’t absorb that idea at some point.

Recently I’ve been experiencing the flip side of this. You don’t know how bad someone was until you get rid of them.

There are people who I feel are annoying and toxic, but I don’t get rid of them because I am afraid of the reactions of those who are left. They are talking shit about the company to others and spreading discontent and it’s easy to feel like firing the person will somehow prove them right to everyone else.

Then after actually getting rid of them, suddenly a bunch of people come out the woodwork and talk to me about how the person has been terrible for years and the how they are so relived that they are gone. I get told so many stories which make me understand that things were much worse than I even realised.

Why was nobody saying anything before! That would have given me so much confidence to get rid of them sooner!

In reality, I do understand why. Talking shit about others is exactly the behaviour that the toxic people who need to be removed are doing. Well adjusted people don’t want to do it.

But still, it proves the point. Trust your gut. Don’t let a bad situation persist based on what others will think.

I always hate this “If it doesn’t work we have much more serious problems” attitude.

If the world did go into a multi-decade recession, what “more serious” problems would you have then your investments doing poorly?

You might answer things like “ buying food due to shortages” or something, but surely whatever problem you name, being more rich is going to solve it?

Now you can invest on the thesis that this isn’t going to happen, but to argue that the whole concept of investment is useless if it does seems very suspect to me.

There seems to be a general lack of political will for big projects in the west.

Looking at Asia now is like what the west used to be like.

I am unsure about the cause but I suspect that a lot of it is that people seem a lot more worried about consultation with locals and such.

In the past the government might just decide “we are building a highway here” or “we are building all this infrastructure for houses there” and there seemed to be a lot less consideration for how people affected would feel about it.

Media has gotten more pervasive, so we might imagine that politicians are more concerned about things flaring up there, but Asia has plenty of media access too, so that doesn’t really explain it.

If you are a leader and your staff do not have the same values as you, then in the long run it’s probably better that you part ways.

They didn’t, but it was one hell of a pain in the ass. We only ever saw it on the production databases and the crash, which was the main thing we were debugging, would only happen every week or so.

Core dumps didn’t show anything useful because the crashes were just that a pointer was mysteriously pointing into a bad place. But how did it get corrupted?

We were doing increasingly insane things to reproduce the problem locally.

An interesting idea I had to reproduce it was using a database replica, which did crash sometimes.

We used TCPDump to capture the replication stream, then waited a week for the replica to crash. We could start up a copy of the replica in the state it was at the beginning and replay the week of replication data into the socket to reproduce the problem.

My theory was that since a DB replica doesn’t do anything other than the sequence of operations that come to it via the replication stream, that this should deterministicly reproduce the problem.

Turns out that it didn’t.

Anyway, if my memory is correct, the issue was that memcpy was copying an extra 1-3 bytes at the end of the range, if the start of the range was unaligned. If there happened to be a pointer there then that would lead to a crash down the line. My memory could be off though.