ajnin

The problem would be that everyone would have a different time depending on where they are on the globe, not only different hour but also minute. That would make things like meetings between people living in slightly different places very difficult. Timezones are needed by the modern organization of society, and I guess that organization is not necessarily very friendly with human needs.

You can't conflate games that try to create a fun experience, and engage people through feelings of discovery, fun, achievement, and games that use manipulative techniques to create frustration and exploit psychological feedback loops to extract a steady stream of money from people. Its just not the same thing at all. Like comparing a novel to a lottery ticket. Both are written on paper but the comparison stops here.

You're forgetting the various fluids : oil, coolant and associated tubing, filtering and pumps, the radiator and fan, the starter/alternator, the gearbox, the transmission, the air filter, various belts ... Quite a bit more complex than the electrical alternative.

I see that as just another hardware manufacturer limiting what people can do with their hardware. And "creating tailored products for customers with specific needs" ? Just regular old market segmentation as they've always done, to extract more profit. Don't be mistaken, thus is about money, Nvidia does not act in the interests of the end user but their own. "think of the gamers" is just a way to put their foot in the door.

I think there is a bit of circular reasoning here. If by "physics" we mean the way the universe works, then of course we are "within physics", and we determine our actions in exactly the same way as the rock falls to the ground : because this is the laws of physics that those things happen. The actual distinction is what people attribute to the term "physics" itself. For some it is exhaustive and it encompasses everything that exists, but for others it is not and they allow "something else" to intervene. At which point we're well within the realm of theological arguments.

The fact that the video is sped up is not new information. It is immediately known when you watch it, it says that the video shows a week in the life of a whale yet the video lasts only 45s. You can only pretend in bad faith that it is not immediately obvious that whales and boats don't travel at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour across the ocean.

It does have something to do with it in the sense that it locks code in a proprietary format that does not allow code traceability and source co trol, and does not favor best practices like code comments and commit comments. That does make maintenance harder.

I witnessed an interesting phenomenon : invariably when information is presented from some article that hints at either animal intelligence or harmful influence of humans on animals, some armchair commentator will come forward with an alternate explanations that reduces the observed behaviour to a basic mechanistic instinct related to feeding or reproduction or survival. That comment will also be the most upvoted one. The commentator does not present additional information, but for some reason his opinion is given more value than that of the experts who wrote the original study. That phenomenon is particularly prevalent on Reddit.

I don't get why this maxim is constantly touted as if it were a fundamental truth. Corporations exist in a social and legal framework that we agreed to create, and that we could change so that money would not be the sole measure of value.

You might say that's the way things are right now, but if you stop there it sounds like fatalism. I'd rather say something like "let's find ways to regulate corporations so that they have to care about our basic rights". Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your comment.

I wouldn't use an ultrasonic humidifier with non-distilled water in a living area. Those minerals will end up in your lungs and I'm not confident it won't accumulate and cause long term problems. The body can't eliminate at least some of them like silica. I don't know if you can actually end up with silicosis from that but that does not seem worth the risk.

Musk has stated that since humans manage to get all info from the road using only 2 cameras, then Tesla cars can do the same and don't need lidar. Which makes sense, but also humans cause thousands of deadly accidents per year using those 2 cameras. So there is no certainty Tesla will be able to do better, it is a gamble.

This tendency to close "stale" issues is a symptom of Goodhart's law [0]. Once the number of open issues is used as a proxy for software quality, then lowering that number becomes a goal in itself. And thus it ceases to be a pertinent metric, and it might even become counter-productive by discouraging contributors.

Another reason I think is that it's also a nice excuse to avoid working on old boring stuff and focus on new exciting stuff.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Without free oxygen, animal life could hardly develop at all, let alone intelligent life, since it would not have access to the large amounts of energy it needs to exist.

Very nice. A few nitpicks :

- You need to wait a bit for a drop target to become active, so when you try to move items quickly it's not registered and snaps back to the start location, is it something that is intended ?

- The animation is smooth with Edge but a bit janky with Firefox, as if it was animated at 10fps or so. It's probably Firefox's fault honestly. Also the border on dragged items is not shown with Firefox.

I think the points you make are very important. Not only the "Terminator" scenario but also the "hyper-capitalism" scenario. But the solution is not to stop working on such research, it is political.

Before Maven, there was Ant. Ant is a fancy Makefile written in XML that makes it very very easy to write build scripts that are not reproducible and rely on a particular structure and set of tools on the computer of the person that wrote the build file. At some point people realized the madness and wrote a new build tool that would only use declarative syntax, and would provide reproducible, contained build bliss. And lo and behold Maven came to be.

Later XML came into disfavor, as things do, and thus by association Maven as it uses XML. So they created Gradle, a tool deemed superior by the mere virtue of using a Groovy DSL instead of XML.

Here's my opinion about Gradle :

1 - the syntax is poor. Merely not using XML does not imply that it is fun to write Gradle build files. XML is verbose but very well specified so when you need to write some configuration it is a bit tedious but all in all very easy. On the other end Gradle uses a custom DSL that is poorly documented. Usually the best documentation there is are example files, so it can be very hard to figure out what to do in uncommon cases.

2 - plugins can extend the DSL. That means there is no single document to learn to know how to write Gradle build files, you also need to learn the DSL for the plugins you use. Maven developers went as far as specifying a standard plugin documentation format so that when you need to look for the syntax for a particular plugin you can do so fairly easily. Not so with Gradle, documentation quality is inconsistent and hard to find. The Android plugin seems especially bad in that regard.

3 - it killed the dream of declarative builds. Gradle allows to run Ant files directly and is simply Groovy under the hood so build scripts can quickly become ad hoc messes. Not what I call progress.

> in the tens of megawatts

But for how long? 1 second, 1 hour, 1 month? The energy matters more than the power.

Your comment reminds me of Gödel's proof of his incompleteness theorem. Basically, he said that if you treat a mathematical statement as a sequence of tokens, and then assign a number to each token, then you can transform the statement into a big number. Then, going one step further, if a mathematical proof is a sequence of statements then it can be too transformed into a really long number. Then you can come up with rules to manipulate these numbers to create new valid statements and proofs.

I don't know if there was much work done on this idea beyond Gödel's proof, but I think it's a really neat idea that gives a way to manipulate mathematical proofs as objects and create new ones from a very high level view.

How much do you value your online life ? Put all your eggs in one basket and you allow yourself to be locked away from it at the whim of some unknown algorithm, with practically no recourse. A strike on your account (maybe a Play Store upload or some vague TOS violation) and you may be locked out of your mail and the auth that you use for everything. You'll end up adapting your behavior, consciously or not, to avoid angering the giant. Spreading the risks, and taking back control, seems the level-headed thing to do.

And the concept that there is only a single company in the world that knows a thing about security seems deluded to me.

> I've got nearly 30 years of experience and not once has non ECC memory lead to corruption

How do you know?

> 15 km/h

The tape stores 580TB for a length of 1255m, does that mean the read speed is 580TB/1255m*15km/h = 1.9TB/s ? Seems too high.

That works because the RGB receptors in the eye have different transient responses, so by precisely timing flashes of light you can create a color illusion. This is called the Fechner color effect : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fechner_color

Why is the polar angle constrained so much?

Something smells fishy, if they don't want the stress why would they want to do all the work alone? And there would still be investors bringing some pressure. They also didn't ask you if you agreed to run the business like a "lifestyle business", they directly ask you to leave. That sounds like a made up excuse.

You probably can't work together anymore now, but you both seem to think the business can be profitable, so if you decide to leave you should be compensated for what you built.

Don't rush the decision. You've worked for 11 months, you can take 2 weeks to talk about it and think things over.

1. Where would this military police force take its legitimacy from ? The only legitimacy there is is when people get together and agree to institute a force to police them. That means democracy. Since the UN is currently very far removed from the will of the individual citizen of the World, I think your proposal would require a deep change of governance of the UN to include more democratic processes.

2. This proposal assumes that there is a single set of values and rules that can be applied to everyone. I don't think this is actually true. The world currently allows several value systems to exist simultaneously, which can all be valid. Your proposal would raise a single value system above all others. How do we chose which one ?

3. The further the government is removed from the citizens, the less it cares about their actual needs. Special measures would need to be taken to make sure that police force actually serves the interests of the people. I don't think the current forms of democracy actually work in that case, when so many people and cultures are involved, you can't be satisfied with a majority rule.

It fails for my trying to post something to http://localhost:5001/piiq-1/us-central1/create (tried with Firefox and Edge)

I'm using the following User Script to remove specific domains from Google search results. It does the job well enough for me.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...

We've reached a pretty sad point when whether a multi-billion dollar corporation gets to spy on millions (billions?) of people is decided by another multi-billion dollar corporation. It feels like we're moving closer every day to the cyberpunk trope of privatized everything, no government, and corporations running the show. Our governments are not doing their jobs.

I think there is a certain discrepancy between how progressive Musk is in technological terms, and how he behaves like any other billionaire in social terms. Look for example how he pushed for the reopening of the Tesla factories despite covid lockdowns, potentially putting the workers lives at risk. Or how he recently tweeted against the US stimulus package while Tesla is receiving billions in corporate aid.

This discrepancy is preventing me from fully cheering for the man, and I guess it causes a certain cognitive dissonance and an irrational defense of everything the man does by his fans.

> MDRS

Is it Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station ? Space nerds tend to abuse acronyms almost as much as developers.