derstander

I wonder if smoking serves as a proxy for social interaction. I remember seeing someone else comment on another story about not liking smoking but liking smoking culture. And along those lines, maybe the following quote from the linked open access paper re: marital status might also suggest having a community of support might be helpful? Seems plausible to me, anyway.

> Participants who were female; never married or were divorced, widowed, or separated; had poverty index ratio less than 1.30; had less than 12 years of education, or had no health insurance were more likely to have self-reported depression.

> people are dying, so maybe that policy should change

I have a harder time drawing a straight line between the universal service obligation and postal workers dying than you seem to.

I think there are tons of other issues about the USPS that can be fixed and will be more effective than just introducing regional rates for postage (and thus putting a larger burden on poorer people in those regions who need to mail things).

One example of a thing (that was recently maybe fixed) was the USPS’s need to pre-fund retiree health and pension benefits on a scale that I’m not aware applied to any other business or federal entity in the US.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billi...

> by charging much more for postage in these areas

This would seem to fundamentally be at odds with interpretations of the USPS’s universal service obligation (USO). Though it seems there’s some ambiguity about exactly what the USO requires.

https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/usps-uso-exe...

https://www.oversight.gov/report/usps/reevaluating-universal...

> The basic issue is that life longevity goes down with the vaccine, by many years.

Do you have a source for this handy? I couldn’t find anything with a cursory search.

I have a dog that’s getting on in years and would like to keep them around as long as possible. I do live in a very rural area so the possibility of infected animals is certainly not nil, though.

> I'd like to point out that this depends heavily on your institution. My CS program had a class literally called "Formal methods", and every student was required to learn formal proofs before their first programming-heavy class (namely, "Data Structures I").

But compare usage of formal methods and practices in software engineers in a startup (or even well-established company) with engineers designing a bridge, for example.

> Much of theoretical computer science is math, like much of modern theoretical physics is also math.

Math is not science - regardless of whether it’s masquerading as computer science or certain branches of theoretical physics.

This makes me sound down on mathematics which I’m certainly not. It’s both useful and can be profoundly beautiful. And it can be an integral tool in science — or studied on its own merits. But it’s not science.

> Also, wasps are horrid. Are Hornets better or worse?

All hornets are wasps. But not every wasp is a hornet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornet

> A domestic cat can easily survive in the wild. A domestic dog cannot.

This is not a measure of smarts. A juvenile human is also unlikely to survive unaided in the wild. Though, I guess some may actually truly believe that cats are smarter than children.

> Did you adjust for company size? I bet the average s&p 500 company is much larger than they were in the 60s.

If you adjust for company size then you should adjust for inflation as well. I’d be interested in knowing for sure, but if I had to, I’d guess they’re 5-10x, not 1000x, bigger.

> Comparing the President of a Japanese video game company to the CEO of major American healthcare organization with ~6-7x the revenue isn't really an apt comparison, is it?

Why wouldn’t it be? And if it’s not, how about a comparison between Sony and KP? Sony’s revenue in 2022 was $88B (though with a much larger net of $6.7B instead of KP’s $0.9B). Sony’s CEO was paid $4.4M.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/FY2022_20F_PDF.p...

I also think spinning Nintendo as simply a Japanese video game company undersells their global presence as well as the fact that they build hardware in addition to software. My guess is that Nintendo or Sony have a much greater global presence than KP though I certainly could be wrong.

> That seems like a reasonable amount for the CEO of a massive health care system. Not an easy business to manage and someone who can manage a business that large could do lots of other things.

As far as US CEO salaries go, I agree that it doesn’t sound particularly egregious.

Compare that with, say, Nintendo’s President, who makes the equivalent of $2.4 million.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2023/annual2303e.pdf

Executive pay in the US seems to be high compared to at least Japan. Are US executives really that much better than Japanese executives scored against objective metrics?

My assumption when I clicked the link was that I’d see the color-coding by age instead of by political party. That would have been interesting in that it would be easier to see regional clusters. Not necessarily a creative way, but just what I kind of expected.

> It's starting to turn out, and I fear the perception is getting set, that almost all of that creativity is garbage, or at least perceived as such by a growing percentage of people.

I think this might be an accurate perception of creativity that we need to accept instead of fear.

Yes, the majority of creative works are not going to be like Beethoven’s 9th, for example. The majority of them are going to be much closer to my attempt at writing a symphony (not very good, to be clear).

But if just one work out of a million that wouldn’t otherwise exist is great, isn’t that enough? I mean, we’re not forcing people, Clockwork Orange-style, to consume all this bad media!

And that is leaving aside the subjectivity of value in media. Some people even enjoy “bad” media (“so bad it’s good”).

One of the reasons I was thinking this way is that there is a lot of media (certainly video games, but even movies and books) that are already lost. I think being able to share them freely earlier in their lifecycle will prevent some of that.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1189450157/the-classic-video-...

> The appeal is in spoiling childhood innocence and not getting sued for it.

Unfortunately this happens under the current system. See E.g., Star Wars. I’m not super invested in the franchise but entries after the original trilogy have been polarizing, as probably the vast majority of us here have been made aware.

If the changes aren’t that minor, then people would certainly gain extra value from buying the 4th edition instead of freely getting the 1st.

If the changes were minor, then maybe it would stop, say, a textbook company from releasing a zillion versions of the same book with minor changes or the question ordering switched in order to extract money out of the next class of students instead of simply allowing them to buy the previous edition used. ;)

> but I can't get to why it should become freely shareable.

A side effect of this would be to encourage the creator or company to continue making it available.

> Secondly, that puts an unfair burden on creators. If I do a run of of my book, and it sells out, I don't think it becomes open season on duplicating it digitally, and I shouldn't have to always carry excess inventory just in case it's a hit.

That’s why I explicitly included a short time period to account for such hiccups. And, for example, if you’re talking about books then print on demand is certainly a way to satisfy the for sale criteria.

> You'd have to have special categories whereby quantities could be intentionally limited.

This is artificial scarcity, especially when applied to things that can be distributed digitally. I don’t particularly see a reason to encourage it. It’s not like 1s and 0s are in short supply compared to, say, precious metals.

And omitting that carve out will explicitly prevent Nintendo and other companies from making that argument.

It’ll never happen, but I think codifying a concept similar to “abandonware” in law would be a huge step forward. If a person can’t buy or rent a piece of media, then it should be able to be freely shared.

Maybe add a short time-out period in case there are momentary hiccups with a creator.

Make it apply not just to videogames, but books, movies, music, etc.

After all, if you can’t buy it, you’re not depriving the creator of revenue.

Actually, looking back at what I wrote, I think maybe I’m just describing the Copyright system as it was originally envisioned before times were extended to such ridiculous lengths. Whoops.

> +1 - I actively avoid games using the unity engine in favor of ones using unreal. It’s a noticeably worse experience for end users of the product (not just the devs, but also the players).

I often wonder how common this view point is. From a player perspective, I don’t think about game engines. If there’s a game that I’d like to play, I play it regardless of the engine.

If you were to see a video for a video game — say Hollow Knight or Cuphead, for example — and think that it might be fun to play but then see that they use Unity, what do you do instead? Do you search for a close analogue made in Unreal engine? Or do you just play something completely different?

From a hobbyist game dev perspective, I definitely think about engine — of course. But usually when I work with other people they want to use Unity. I’m guessing that might change now, though.

He was in fact an old male with a gray beard and actually referred to himself as such.

To respond to your descendant response to a sibling comment, he was not, however, a programmer: he was an engineer.

> Lichess, legally, is now a charitable organization

I’m not saying Lichess will do something like this, but have you heard the saga of the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM)?

It grew out of the University of Michigan — as a non-profit. Its president and board spun off a for-profit subsidiary owning the majority of its work, people, and assets and leaving a small fraction for the non-profit.

Then, the for-profit entity was bought by a succession of other entities: Veridian, General Dynamics, and now MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates.

I only learned of this while working with a graybeard from the original ERIM during their General Dynamics days — he was still sore about it.

So never doubt a president/ceo and board if they’re really determined in going for-profit!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Research_Insti...

All of what you said is true.

Yes: compensation is needed to account for non rectangular sampling (see the Polar reformat or the Stolt interpolator). Yes: non-straight and level flight paths result in degraded or even useless imagery unless the deviation is small or the FFT-based algorithm is specifically tweaked for it. Yes: various algorithms make assumptions that may be violated (e.g., planar wavefronts).

But again, I think it’s just the computational efficiency of the FFT-based algorithms for real-time use.

As a random thought, a lot of radar engineers that don’t start with SAR are perfectly comfortable reasoning about Doppler. Particularly with regard to detection of moving targets. Maybe that’s a factor, too.

> I always wondered why most explainations of SAR take the frequency-domain approach of describing it in term of Doppler resolution instead of explaining the process of aperture synthesis in the spatial domain in terms of a sum of phase delayed signals.

A time-domain backprojection based approach as opposed to one of the Fourier Transform based approaches? My guess is that because you don’t see the backprojection based approaches much in real-time systems (at least I haven’t seen any). That might change as they’re easily parallelizable in comparison. So any conceptual understanding between a time based approach and a real-time (FFT based) implementation is a little harder to transfer.

Like you, I also find the time-based backprojection approach more conceptually straightforward and satisfying, though.

I feel like there ought to be a software analogue to that aphorism about models (if it doesn’t exist already) — maybe something like:

All code is wrong, but some is useful.

Sorry: I'm confused. Are you saying this is why an organization like MITRE cannot build contextual knowledge and expert judgement into itself? Or are you saying this is how computer security differs from radar and/or communications systems engineering?

> Distinguishing between a simple bug and a vulnerability requires contextual knowledge and expert judgement that simply cannot be built into bureaucratic organisations like MITRE.

Why can’t it? MITRE runs FFRDCs. Having worked for an FFRDC (although in electrical engineering, not computer security), if you were to tell me that engineers in FFRDCs or UARCs in my domain simply cannot utilize contextual knowledge or expert judgment (or that their knowledge and judgment would be completely overridden by management such that it appears they can’t) then I would wonder if you ever interacted with that kind of organization.

Is computer security somehow different to e.g. radar or comms systems engineering?

That definitely meshes with what I’ve seen with respect to gaming performance.

Any experience with Arc for GP-GPU using e.g. Intel’s DPC++?

Though certainly nVidia’s CUDA is by and far the major player in that domain.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/dpcpp-cpp-compi...

> I'm not entirely sure that intel is in the best position to make consumer grade specialty "AI" PC because they make CPUs not GPUs.

Intel makes (albeit recently) the Arc series of dedicated GPUs.

I’m not a graphics programmer so it’s not quite clear how the logic units compare between nVidia, AMD, and Intel, but this link suggests thousands of shading units/cores.

https://wccftech.com/intel-arc-a770-a750-a580-graphics-cards...

> Through a flurry of leaked documents involved in the court case between the FTC and Microsoft, it has been revealed that the software giant has been looking to acquire Nintendo since the year 2020.

The leaked document link doesn’t resolve for me. It sounds like this is a separate incident from the very early 2000’s one? (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-06/xbox-the-...)

“BACHUS Steve made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired. They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”