cycomanic

> > Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics.

> This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.

I think you should look up the definition and history of fascism. You're correct about totalitarism, but fascism is by definition capitalist.

People have done these sort of "optical computing" based demonstrations for decades, despite David Miller showing that fundamentally digital computing with optical photons will be immensely power hungry (I say digital here, because there are some applications where analog computing can make sense, but it almost never relies memory for bits).

Specifically this paper is based on simulations, and I've only skimmed the paper, but the power efficiency numbers sound great because they say 40 GHz read/write speeds, but these consume comparatively large powers even if not reading or writing (the lasers have to be running constantly). I also think they did not include the contributions of the modulation and the required drivers (typically you need quite large voltages)? Somebody already pointed out that the size of these is massive, and that's again fundamental.

As someone working in the broad field, I really wish people would stop these type of publications. While these numbers might sound impressive at a first glance, they really are completely unrealistic. There are lots of legitimate applications of optics and photonics, we don't need to resort to this sort of stuff.

Funny, but I (and I believe many who support this law) would say that's a good thing. The problem is not (and never was) social interaction online, it is large corporations designing their algorithms to be as addictive as possible to tie kids as early as possible to their services.

I have had to recently get back to using Facebook (after creating the account ~15 years ago and leaving it dormant for >10 years), due to several sports clubs using it as their only means of communication. It's scary how good these algorithms have become, I often only want to look up something related to the club and end up being roped into 1h of doomscrolling. And I'm an adult with significant better impulse control than most teenagers.

Sure, but how does that relate to environmentalists? The people lying were the car industry, but somehow the OP questions environmentalism. Why are they not questioning the car industry?

What is your evidence? A quick search on google (and the git commits) would show you that many wayland developers are significant former xorg developers.

1. Kristian Høgsberg the founder of wayland, did all the DRI2 work on xorg before becomming frustrated 2. Peter Hutterer was a main xorg developer and has been behind the wayland input system 3. Adam Jackson, long time xorg maintainer essentially called for moving on to wayland https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server... (I found that he was involved in wayland discussions, but not sure if he contributed code) 4. you already mentioned Daniel Stone

The only main xorg developer not involved in wayland arguably could be Keith Packard, although he made a lot of the changes for xwayland so I'm not sure if it is correct to say he did not have wayland involvement.

So who are the "vast majority of X.org developers"? I think people always read about the couple of names above and then think, "well there must have been hundreds of others", because they thought xorg was like the linux kernel. AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers.

MDs are just another example of Sony screwing it up by making things proprietary and keeping it to themselves instead of creating an ecosystem (memory sticks were another example, although they didn't offer quite the same advantages). It's really a shame, I think if Sony would have gone about this differently they likely would have put off the emergence of MP3 players for a long time.

> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.

I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.

Some correction here. FMCW lidar does not need fiber lasers. In fact most fiber lasers are actually very difficult to frequency sweep internally. Typical lasers used in swept wavelength interferometry (which is really the same thing) are so-called external cavity lasers, which rely on photodiodes + external cavity e.g. through a wavelength selective feedback (still comparably expensive though).

Baraja selling point was AFAIK that they used a integrated swept laser source (they typically have lower coherence but you can work around that in DSP).

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but it seems you had a subscription missed one payment some time ago, but now expect that your subscription works because the missed month was in the past and "you paid for this month"?

This sounds like the you expect your subscription to work as an on-demand service? It seems quite obvious that to be able to use a service you would need to be up to date on your payments, that would be no different in any other subscription/lease/rental agreement? Now Mistral might certainly look back at their records and see that you actually didn't use their service at all for the last few month and waive the missed payment. And that could be good customer service, but they might not even have record that you didn't use it, or at least those records would not be available to the billing department?

That's such a silly argument. X, OpenAI and others have large Saudi investments. In the grant scheme of things the US is largely indebted to China and Japan.

> I wonder the same thing. The essence of a collusion scheme is a commitment between counterparties not to defect.

Do you have any citation that supports that? That seems an awfully narrow definition.

Here is an idea: Fix your homelessness problem and don't let other policies be guided by the best way to keep homeless people out of sight.

Somewhat meta question, do you believe that down voting opinions we don't like is a good way of engaging with one another on HN?

I wish we could discuss the issue here, and instead would have liked to hear from you why you think it is a pitically unrealistic proposal, and what your criteria is for seeming something politically unrealistic.

That doesn't significantly change the argument. Most solar plants have capacity factors of around 20% (5% might apply to home systems, but not commerical), compared to nuclear which has around 80%. So a factor of 4. So numbers change a bit on the previous poster, China just installed 3x more solar in 1 year than all the nuclear under construction, or they essentially installed the same amout of solar in one year as all existing and under construction nuclear combined. And if we look at projections, next year they likely will install twice as much solar...

While China is often put up as the poster child for nuclear power, they are actually a great example of how nuclear is being overtaken by renewables. China's 2019 plan was that by 2035 nuclear would account for ~8% of generated electricity (up from ~5%). Since then percentage dropped to 4.5% (and the drop seems to be accelerating). Unless something dramatically changes nuclear will account for less than 4% (not the planned 8%) of generated electricity by 2035. All that is due to the raise of renewables (largely solar). I suspect we will not see China build close to those projected 200 GW and the percentage to be even lower, just due to the exponential growth in solar.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

Sometimes these posts feel like the old man yelling at the clouds kind of disconnected from reality. They don't seem to even be realising that what they are asking for is contradictory. "Only spend money on the browser/javascript engine", "become independent of google", "give me the best search results when I type into the address bar", but "don't give me AI recommendation".

On top of that, the whole premise that AI is just being a nothing burger. Pull your head out of your arse.

Is there an AI bubble? I tend to agree, likely yes. And yes it is very much overhyped etc. Does that mean that AI is useless and will disappear? No way! Just observe how Joe Doe's are interacting with the web. AI engines have taken over from where people used to use search. It's ironic how they say they just want search results when typing in their address bar, at a time when everyone is complaining that search has become increasingly useless (and yes we can blame AI tools at least partly, doesn't change the fact). Moreover, there are definitely use cases where an AI gives a much better answer than search (just try searching for how to do something a little niche with e.g. ffmpeg, you can either read 10s of block/stackoverflow posts try to understand the manual or ask an AI and typically immediately get a decent answer).

I tend to agree with Mozilla org here, AI does pose an existential thread to the web as we know it and if we don't get non-profit organisations to develop "open" (and I acknowledge the discussion what that entails is important) tools we will end up with a web that is much less free than it is today.

When I read posts like this I despair. I mean I can sort of understand that ML an AI have become largely synonymous, but that even on a technical website for nerds like HN, people now think that AI and LLMs are synonymous and that translation engines are not AI?!

> > The overwhelming majority of people who worked on Xorg are now developing Wayland.

> I've never seen this documented.

What do you mean you can look at the history of wayland on Wikipedia (it was started by Kristian Høgsberg) the person who wrote the DRI2 implementation for xorg. Other major xorg contributors like Hutterer have also been major wayland contributors.

I think the misconception is that people thought there are lots of xorg developers. That's just false, around the time when wayland was started there were maybe 10. And now there are even less.

> > It is a 400K LOC behemoth of a project and it has a ridiculous amount of technical debt.

> So we have people who want to create features but do not want to pay for technical debt. So.. they create more technical debt? Is there some indication that the wisdom of the crowd is particularly valuable here?

But that's not what they did?

> > I would have to imagine that if the Xorg developers thought they could fix Xorg, they would do that instead of making a new thing.

> It seems like all the paid developers are working on Wayland while many of the volunteers are working hard to continue Xorg despite all the sponsored efforts to artificially shutter the project.

Who? Looking at xorgs git there is essentially 1 developer making changes that are not related to xwayland?

> The article authors main complaint seems to be that distributions forced users to choose between one or the other when, at this point in history, there are zero good reasons to have done that.

> Open source used to be about choice. Now it's about paid interests bullying you out of that choice. And Hacker News readily defends this in the name of modernity for it's own sake. It's truly a bizarre outcome to me.

You mean the choice not to work on xorg? You're welcome to use X, but you can't bully others into keeping it going for you.

The reoccurring theme in these comments is that the people complaining have little knowledge of X internals, have usually not done any work programming a WM, a compositor or X or wayland libraries. Listening to the people who have done that (e.g. Rasterman, deVault...) are widely positive about wayland over xorg. It's also an indication that most recent interesting desktop experiments/projects (niri, sway, hyprland...) have been happening under wayland. And AFAIK none were corporate sponsored.

I don't understand a lot of the complains. It asks for a remote connection? That's because of xwayland (which is x11 inside) not wayland AFAIK. Also all the comments about how that is weird on a single system, mmh the whole X server/client architecture always sounded like one was running like on a remote system.

I actually like the approach that compositors are much more different from each other than WMs used to be, that allows people to experiment much more. Also let's not forget that X was a plethora of different plugins and incompatabilities. The reason many didn't encounter that was that the almost everyone was running xorg with all plugins, that said I still remember the hoops one had to jump through to get transparency etc. You needed a compositor and not all compositors were compatible with all WMs (and all had different capabilities).

That said I do also wish that the protocol would evolve faster. It is my impression that if it wasn't for the wlroots people not much would have happened, especially because the gnome guys seem to rather just implement something for themselves and don't try to use or push the standard.

There have always been different standards for a person of public interest compared to the general public. So what is your point?

> I'm curious what you think the solution is? > > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. > > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. > Collecting and selling PII without a person's consent is certainly not legal in many places.

The problem with that argument is that nowhere did environmentalists in the 70s or 80s prevent nuclear power plants from being build. Nuclear has received much more subsidies than solar or wind ever did (even if we ignore the indirect military->civil subsidies) and it still never became economical. Back in the 70s and 80s coal was much cheaper, and now solar and wind are so much cheaper it doesn't make any sense to invest in nuclear. The nuclear power plants that were build, got built largely for political reasons (energy independence, and military), and the reason why not more got build was not those pesky environmentalists, but that it was expensive.

The way I understand it from people working in the field, is that the issue isn't really that lakes/rivers are running dry, but more that most hydropower is produced on the South Island while most consumption is on the North Island and the connection is woefully inadequate (typical NZ problem, never invest in infrastructure just keep bandaiding it). That said installing wind and solar (both of which are plentiful) would do a lot towards alleviating the problems, but there are the issues of the existing generators lobbying and the political climate, where the conservative party still has a significant number of politicians who think climate change isn't real.

Here's a bigger one at ASDEX (a fusion experiment):

https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4244138/generatoren

Just seeing your reply now and wanted to say that I really appreciate your humorous self-reflection. Too often we just argue aggressively against the others standpoint without any self-reflection of our own (I've certainly been guilty of it).

Also the idea of smaller units for creating a closer feeling of belonging is something I've been thinking about quite a few times. I think countries/nations etc. try to use patriotism and a us vs them (because there is often not enough real connection otherwise) mentality to artificially create this.

But all those "it's AI posts" are about the prose and "style", not the actual content. So even if (and that is a big if) the text was written using the help of AI (and there are many valid reasons to use it, e.g. if you're not a native speaker) that does not mean the content was written from AI and thus contains AI mistakes.

If it was so obviously written by AI then finding those mistakes should be easy?

These posts are getting old.

I had a discussion on some other submission a couple of weeks back, where several people were arguing "it's obviously AI generated" (the style btw was completely different to this, quite a few explicitives...). When I put the the text in 5 random AI detectors the argument who except for one (which said mixed, 10% AI or so) all said 100% human I was being down voted and the argument became "AI detection tools can detect AI" but somehow the people claim there are 100% clear telltale signs which says it's AI (why those detection tools can detect them is baffling to me).

I have the feeling that the whole "it's AI" stick has become a synonym for I don't like this writing style.

It really does not add to the discussion. If people would post immediately "there's spelling mistakes this is rubbish", they would rightfully get down voted, but somehow saying "it's AI" is acceptable. Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it? So what is your point?

Completely agree the transition between continuous and discrete domains is often glossed over and people use DFT, FT, DTFT and FFT almost interchangeably (I certainly have been guilty of that myself, and you are correct the FFT and DFT are equivalent for this discussion).

An interesting fact (somewhat related to your mentioning of the DTFT) is that one can consider the DFT as a filter with a sinc transfer function. That's essentially how you can understand the spectrum of an OFDM signal. You perform a block based FFT on your input bit/symbol stream, so you have waves at different carriers. However, because the stream is timevarying you essentially get sinc shaped spectra spaced at the symbol rate (excluding cycling prefixes etc.). So your OFDM spectrum is composed of many sincs spaced at fb, which is very squarish which is one of the reasons why OFDM is so advantageous.

I really don't get the point the article is making. I think the whole point about curve fitting is really a distraction, they could have simply stated that the FFT has periodic boundary conditions, so if you take the FFT of something that only extends a finite time of your sampling window, you will see your delta functions in the frequency domain spaced by the inverse of the length of your sampling window, i.e. the FFT "sees" your finite window as a pulse train. That's well known and a fundamental aspect of Fourier transforms.

But then the statements about the discontinuous "vibrations". E.g. in the case of the 1 Hz cycle over half the window the author states that:

> Yet the FFT of this data is also very complex. Again, there are many harmonics with energy. They indicate that the signal contains vibrations at 0.5Hz, 1.0Hz, 1.5Hz, etc. But the time signal clearly shows that the 'vibration' was only at 1Hz, and only for the first second.

The implication that there is a vibration only at 1Hz is plain wrong. To have a vibration abruptly stop, you need many frequencies (in general the shorter a feature in the time domain the more frequency components you need in the frequency domain). If we compare for example a sine wave with a square wave at the same frequency, the square wave will have many more frequency components in the Fourier domain (it's a sinc envelope of delta functions spaced at the frequency of the wave in fact). That's essentially what is done in the example the sine wave is multiplied by a square wave with half the frequency (similar things apply to the other examples). Saying only the fundamental frequency matters is just wrong.

This is also not just a "feature of the fitting to sines", it's fundamental and has real world implications. The reason why we e.g. see ringing on an oscilloscope trace of a square wave input is because the underlying analog system has a finite bandwidth, so we "cut-off"/attenuate higher frequency components, so the square wave does not have enough of those higher frequencies (which are irrelevant according to the author) to represent the full square wave.

As bad as teams is, there is absolutely no comparison to the crap that is slack. Just a number of things I regularly encounter: 1. Slack selecting speakers instead of headphones for call, even though I've used the headphones just before. 2. Calls ringing on my mobile that has been quietly sitting on the desk, instead of on the desktop that I've been typing on. 3. Mobile and desktop client being completely out of sync, it sometimes takes several minutes for messages typed on the mobile to show up on the desktop or vice versa. 4. I always have to select which screen to share twice before it shares (non of the other programs have this issue) 5. Don't get me started on the worst search ever, it's almost always easier to scroll than to search if it wasn't for: 6. Whoever thought it was a good idea that we should everything older than 15 messages or so back from the server. So instead of just quickly scrolling up it becomes an excercise of wading through molasses.

7. The absolute brain dead formatting, which makes typing equations or e.g. python exponents super annoying (no I didn't want to have this text bold)

I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of teams either, but it's absolutely mind boggling how slack got to such a dominant position in this space

Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.

All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.