fhood

What a strange article. I think that a company like Nvidia could probably provide a great deal of additional value to the world of scientific computer modeling. And I think that simulations can work really well to assist in training models, I don't really understand why that would be up for debate, they already do. What I don't understand is talking about "simulating the entire world down to atomic interactions" or teleporting to Mars via data collected from..."sensors".

Little sections of this, particularly wrt pushing towards more standardized systems for building computer models make sense and seem like a worthwhile goal, but most of this reads like nonsense to me.

That requires that you did something that you are very sure the country you end up in won't just prosecute you for themselves. If your crime is massively embarrassing to the US govt you go to Russia, or heinous sexual assault of a 13yo, France. But I think most of the usual culprits in this case would just prosecute you.

Me neither, my first encounter with it was 3 or 4 years ago at a backpacking shelter in Iceland.

I'm really not sure what you are getting at. Psychology is pretty definitively a science. So is a massive chunk of medicine. Science holds extra weight because it involves at least attempting a verification step following an idea.

Treating science as gospel is stupid. But without personal experience (and frequently even with) stating something as true is largely meaningless. Stating something is true, while providing data to back it up, as well as evidence that other subject experts have checked that data may not be perfect, but that doesn't put it on equal footing with a gut check.

I think we can maybe inject a little bit of extra nuance here.

Not every field is the same, they vary massively in size, level of external influence, and complexity in subject matter. Psychology suffers more than most. It's a large field, so competition to get noticed is likely high. There is money to be made, as discussed in the article, so it struggles with influences outside of pure scientific inquiry, and they have no chance of describing their theories in terms of pure component mathematics.

Contrast that with ocean and atmospheric sciences. It is a tiny and very insular field, so the rat race works very differently. This also protects them from outside influences, and a lot of the major underlying physical and biological processes involved can be modeled with mathematics that have been demonstrated to be predictive.

It's just easier for some fields to reliably produce higher quality work. I think this is a case where blanket skepticism is just lazy. Every field suffers some level of a reproducibility issue, but some fields are better able to self select for a variety of reasons.

Hahaha, it is a bit of a catch-22 though isn't it. In debunking a paper like this you have to understand that your are cutting away the foundation that people built their careers on, and you may be fundamentally damaging their academic trajectory. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, just that being a bit of an asshole probably helps.

Seconded. Blindly implying that economists of all groups are blatantly appropriating math from other fields without understanding it seems a step too far to me. I'm sure it happens, but I've worked in conjunction with people writing computer models to study certain economic subsystems and virtually everybody involved had a serious academic background in mathematics.

Large portions of AWS are widely regarded as waking nightmares. Elsewhere largely seems to be fine.

Assuming the author is primarily directing this sentiment at people attempting to make a living in indie dev, then I agree with them. Or at least with the larger purpose of dissuading people from "following their dreams d'art" as a primary rather than secondary occupation. They should be discouraged. They should live in a world where it is common knowledge that pursuing acting, or film making, or writing, or gamedev as a focal point of their life is really stupid. Because actually accomplishing that is ridiculously bullshit hard, while sinking crippling amounts of time and money into the training is relatively very easy. If you want to spend your life making indie games more than anything else in the whole world and are driven towards it with single-minded intensity then you are unlikely to be dissuaded by everybody telling you it is a bad idea, and thus might also have the drive required to weather the punches.

Oh wow, everybody else is debating the specific intricacies of the design decisions, and I'm here wondering why you would complain about not enough instructions in an architecture with "RISC" in the name.

I can't think of too many downsides to making bot scalping illegal, making it illegal to misunderstand demand seems more fraught......unless this is sarcasm.

What do you mean? Nintendo could sell the NES Classic for 13k if they wanted to, but nobody would buy it. Companies choose their pricing very carefully, and there are a whole lot more factors than max value on secondary market that go into it. Nvidia is well aware they aren't going to be able to keep up with demand, but if they raise their prices too much people will consider the cards poor value and won't purchase them. Think mac pro wheels. Scalpers operate on a different playing field, and are really just parasitic.

It might not work well for digital goods, but physical ones are much easier to control.

Edit: and even for digital goods, it would force people away from the most convenient storefronts.

I guess I don't disagree, but not sure I understand the point if all you need is one guy with a copy of illustrator/photoshop/whatever?

A relational database can also be stateless and lawless if you try hard enough. But I think that the point that a lack of recourse is inherent to the technologies ideology does ring somewhat true.

So, not to play devil's advocate, and I'm sure they would push against a federal law just as hard, but I can understand a reluctance to allow state specific privacy laws. That sucks, and compliance would be very expensive and complicated.

Yes, 100%. Without question. I know it's trendy to hate modern languages and frameworks but they do reduce overall dev time even if they have more of an initial learning overhead.

We use additional compute power to enable frameworks and abstractions that allow code to be written faster. Sure it's bloated but at least there is a reason.

Don't want to put words in anyones mouth, but if it runs linux, it's probably not what the author was talking about. Hence Arduino rather than rpi

By size maybe. Way less disruptive than a highway though.

Pretty much every company would do something like this. No reason not to discourage people from buying.

I'm definitely not agreeing with the parent comment in fact it really rubs me the wrong way, and I'm probably not even entirely disagreeing with yours, but ffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... Sort per capita, and yes I know this is probably a flawed list whatever it's good enough. We are not talking about "America" we are primarily talking about SF or more broadly coastal California.

And they should be helped. Absolutely. Regardless of the reasons I think people who need it should be helped. I just think that the most difficult group to help is also the group that causes the most serious issues.

I will admit that my current tax rate is a little....irritating in a state that can't seem to provide reasonable roads or trains, especially trains, ffs why is the east coast so much better at this. But I think that the segment of the homelessness that has the greatest negative impact on life in SF is probably smaller than you would imagine, and maybe it is just flat out worth it.

haha, as it should. Taking the "hard line" here seems awfully stupid to me though. Isn't that what causes the problem? I would happily pay my share of taxes to provide the most problematic homeless with a lifetime supply of heroin and hookers if it meant my family could safely park their car when they visit.

I do wonder about number 2. Obviously it's a great solution, and even a less expensive one that you might think for a pretty good swathe of the homeless. But I've always had a pet theory that the real reason NYC and SF homeless seem so different is winter, and Vienna also gets really fucking cold. Ideally I am wrong in this, but I wonder if the most visible group in SF need something closer to assisted living than just housing.

Which honestly I am fine paying for, I just wonder if rehabilitation just isn't possible for many.

Let's get one thing out of the way first, I support tax money being used to support the homeless, regardless of the cause of said homelessness, so maybe I am not the correct audience for the article but...

I am incredibly confused as to why both this article and the Oliver piece are so proud of themselves for pointing out that not all, or not even the majority, of homeless suffer from serious mental health and addiction problems. Maybe these articles aren't targeted at me, BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW THAT.

Is there really ANYBODY who is referring to a single mother living out of a car because her rent got raised when they complain about the homeless?!?! In SF I would imagine most people aren't even referring to your garden variety homeless similar to what is most visible in cities like NY. The actual problem is not being able to park anywhere with anything in your car, and passing people lying on the street that look like they are barely even alive, as well as your traditional human waste and the smell that comes with.

I don't want to act as though I am disagreeing with the conclusions of these articles, for the most part I'm not. I'm also not judging people for ending up homeless. Just please stop pretending that addiction and mental health issues are some sort of unfair characterization, because it is clearly a very accurate description of the group that is responsible for the most unpleasant manifestations of the homelessness in SF. I'm also not saying we should stop trying to help and house that specific group either. I'm just baffled by how this is being framed. "A humanitarian crisis, not an unsightly inconvenience"?!?!?!?!?! Has it not crossed the author's mind that IT COULD BE BOTH.

Stabilized wood is essentially as hard as whatever it's stabilized with. But yeah, the interesting concept is the densification. I dunno about replacing steel, but if soft fast growing woods can be converted into something closer to a hardwood, and the volume lost and extra time still puts it out ahead, that is pretty exciting.

Not really "separately", pretty much as a rule hardwoods grow very slowly. Pretty much any fast growing wood is going to be soft.

Huh, I've actually had pretty good experiences with venison. My family weren't hunters, but our house was on an old farm that had been planted over with a pine forest, and we used to have guys come by and ask to hunt on our property (farmers doing population control), and they would give us the first deer they got. Anyways, those were always pretty good, not gamey at all. I think that may have something to do with all the local deer being fat lazy stupid nuisance animals with far too much available food.