SimonPStevens

They've got their statistics confused.

Lifetime odds (in US) of death due to vehicle accident is 1/102. (https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...)

But that's average lifetime odds, not mortality rate per journey. It's a statistic with a very different meaning. But I see how people get confused by all the different ways risk can be expressed.

Because if you select a random family from the set of familes with two children, the 4 permutations (BB,BG,GB,GG) are equally likely, at 25% each, so it's the simplest way to model it. If you model it in your way with 3 possible scenarios you'll find that the probabilities are BB: 25%, one of each: 50%, GG: 25%, and dealing with those differing probabilities is harder than just splitung the one of each scenario into two.

Try it with 2 coins flipped at the same time and you'll see it's the case. You'll get 2 unmatching coins about twice as often as you get either HH or TT.

@Mods: The link seems to have a time reference set to right at the end of the video. Makes it load straight to the end by default. Should probably be changed to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AviBGkm3Bpg

The most important thing is having your own domain. Then whatever provider you choose, the address is easily portable.

I've no idea what your requirements are, but I've used office 365 small business premimum plan for years (£9.40 per month). It comes with a hosted exchange server which gives you loads of flexibility for very little effort. And for my purposes, I really like outlook as a desktop client. Not everyone agrees though. And as I want the desktop office apps anyway, the extra money for the plan with exchange included is minimal.

There is also a cheaper 'essentials' plan which gives you the server stuff without the desktop office apps if you don't need/want/like them.

But like those rockstars, they do become role models for other's behavior.

I certainly support many of the goals Musk has, and would like to see him succeed in those. However, he seems to have made some pretty questionable decisions recently which he does need to answer for appropriately.

This was flagged and I've vouched for it as I really don't see why. I'm hopeing it wasn't because Musk fans are just flagging anti Musk content, I believe that his community is above that kind of behavior. Perhaps a mod has the ability to review,or a flagger can comment on their reasons. I think the topic of the article is something that should be discussed in the tech sector.

I actually origianlly came here to say it's interesting that the article picks Gates as a counter example as during his working career he was known for being ruthless, and found guilty of anti competitive behavior by several jurisdictions. I agree he's a role model now, but not sure he has always been.

This sounds like it would be a similar situation to that of maps.

The fact of what physical geography exists cannot be copyrighted. Anyone is free to produce their own map by measuring the physical world. In theory if everyone used accurate measurements, then all maps would be identical. However a map itself can be copyrighted, and producing your own map by copying another for which you don't have permission is illegal.

But how would anyone ever know whether you went out and measured the real world, or just copied someone's map because the underlying data is the same.

Historical horse racing data is the same. You could start gathering all the data by recording the outcome of races, and in 10 years you would have 10 years of historical data. Or you could just pretend you have already done that and actually just copy the data from the other company. The result would be indistinguishable.

'Trap steets' is one way the mapping industry deals with this problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street - So I would not be surprised to find some deliberate mistakes in the past performance data provided by this company, which should they be found in your data set, would be pretty conclusive evidence of the source of your data.

"What colour are your bits" is also relevant and interesting article - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 - Despite what techies would like to believe, the source of your data does matter, even if multiple different sources would actually result in an identical block of data.

Given that Carmack is CTO, I'd assume he has a fair amount of say in what he works on.

He is arguing that if BTC price went up 100x, it would be so much more profitable to attack it that it would require a comparable increase in the hash rate (and therefore electricity usage) to deter would be attackers. So either hash rate increases, or BTC loses it's security.

Or the same thing, but stated the other way round, as the profitability of mining increases (due to price rises), more participants are attracted to the market, raising the hash rate and bringing profitability of mining back down to the marginal equilibrium.

Essentially the argument is that cost of mining/attacking is always in rough equilibrium with price, because whenever it isn't someone will take advantage of that in a way which will have the feedback of narrowing the gap again.

Yup. Looks like it was me that misremembered. My mistake.

The character Kraiklyn in the Iain M Banks novel Consider Phlebas has had enhancements to his brain to be able to do this.

Don't know if it's just a typo or an actual malapropism, but it's called a Venn diagram.

Except Uber didn't start as a taxi replacement company. If you only remember it as a taxi company it was already after it had started to become successful.

It was initially a carpooling app. The original pitch was that regular drivers would just drive to their own intended location and have an ability to see people on route who wanted to go the same way. Much harder to pick that idea out as a future billion dollar company.

Whats the reason for this? What is it about a satellite that causes it to produce flares that the new ones don't have.

(I always thought flares were sunlight reflections off solar panels. Is it that the new ones have less panels? Or is it about positioning?)

If you are considering a Vive, you should probably avoid this. It's only 3dof, unlike the Vive's 6dof. In my opinion this isn't VR at all. It's a glorified 360 degree viewer. See my other comment in this thread.

(Disclaimer: Vive owner)

The key thing about Oculus Go that is entirely missing from their website is that it only allows 3dof in the movement tracking. It's just like cardboard/daydream/gear. Unlike all the tethered VR headsets that do full 6dof.

In my opinion this isn't VR at all. It's a glorified 360 degree viewer. Personally I think it's pretty deceptive of Oculus to market this like it's a full VR heatset when it's very much not. If you are interested in VR for the immersion or the experiences, avoid this. Get something with full positional 6dof tracking.

I haven't been active for a long time now so this may have changed.

Back then the reason behind locking rather than deleting was because the duplicate may be asked in a different way, using different keywords. So keeping it viewable allowed people searching for an answer to effectively have multiple entry points into finding the answer because perhaps they were googling the wrong combination of keywords to get the original to show up, but the duplicate would match.

This isn't really to do with raytracer perf. It's about how Miguel de Icaza (The creator of Mono) improved Mono's float handling. The difference in raytracer perf on different .net runtimes is just what brought the poor float handling to his attention. Better mono float handling is a good outcome for lots of non raytracer scenarios.

If you read the linked blog about the ray tracer, the C# ports are just blog 3 in a series of 8 that does actually conclude with two posts on SIMD - https://aras-p.info/blog/2018/03/28/Daily-Pathtracer-Part-0-...

I think what he is saying is that gaming is just a small part of what VR could be, so it shouldn't be the focus.

Imagine if the PC sector totally ignored all PC uses except gaming, it would still exist, but it would be a much smaller market.

Couldn't someone else then simultaneously register the hash of the same domain with a different seed? Neither of you would know of the duplicate until you revealed your seeds.

Interesting similarity with 'the light of other days'.

It's about a privacy invading technology and several sections deal with how different groups evolve that deal with the lack of privacy in different ways, both embracing and circumventing the technology.

Don't know about year of release, but these are sci-fi books I enjoyed reading this year...

The book of strange new things (Michel Faber). This isn't typical sci-fi, it's hard to describe. It's quite slow paced. I can't really talk about it without spoiling it. I really felt impacted by it though, I think the book has a deeper philosophy that isn't really mentioned but requires thinking about the meaning. I thoroughly recommended it if you are willing to be thoughtful about a book and not just after laser and space battles. Another book by the same author (under the skin) is also good, and has been turned into a very weird film with Scarlet Johansson.

Other good more conventional sci-fi stuff...

Extracted series (R.R. Haywood) Not alone (Craig a. Falconer) Themys files series (sylvain neuvel) We are legion series (Dennis E. Taylor)

It's probably related to this phenomenon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

I think it's also less statistically unlikely than you think. Thousands of security issues are discovered every year, it makes sense that some small number will be discovered in parallel. It looks like a big coincidence because you are focusing on the one parallel discovery, but if you consider it in the broad landscape of all discoveries then it's just statistically expected that there would be at least one parallel discovery.

Random conspiracy theory:

This whole episode of CPU bugs and fixes that cause performance problems (most notably on older hardware) is exactly what the tech industry needed to stimulate consumers into refreshing their old hardware that was previously running fine.

It's almost like planned obsolescence. Msybe it was orchestrated.

(I don't think this actually likely, but it's interesting that it could be rather beneficial in the end for some)

I think you should cut the guy some slack here. He is talking about working to keep his kids safe online. That sounds like responsible parenting to me.

The internet is full of crazy awful stuff, and yeah sure I get that at some point you have to let them be independent and trust them, but we don't know how old his kids are, at younger ages there is certainly some protection required. And as they grow up and learn you can gradually give then more trust and freedom.

So is this effectively "combat extremism for us and we'll give you a free pass on all that tax you've been dodging".

I'd rather they just paid the tax.

Yeah, without any criteria it's just a random list.

There's already a pull request by mashhoodr to add Mashhood Rastgar. (I don't know this person, I'm sure he is legitimately awesome, but if you can add yourself the list is worthless)

That kinda misses the point though (and it's only that price because of recent events, it was more expensive)

Apple themselves are describing batteries as consumable, and to me it doesn't work both ways, you can't describe something as consumable and seal it inside the device and still claim to be doing the best thing for the user. Either it's consumable and user replacement should be supported and within warrenty, or it's not consumable.

From the statement...

    "All rechargeable batteries are consumable components"

If they are "consumable", why aren't they user replaceable. As far as I'm concerned any company that seals consumable parts inside a device isn't acting the interest of their users.

Thanks for this. You've largely answered my question elsewhere in this thread.