gnode

Something I've wondered is whether technology like this could eventually be self-defeating for hardware manufacturers. Rather than the evolution of graphics deriving from improved accuracy of the optical simulation fuelled by advances in computational power, it may instead derive from optimising subjective video quality, similarly to video codecs.

While accurately simulating optics is needfully computationally expensive and gives special-purpose graphics hardware an advantage, it's not clear that psychologically subjective high quality graphics (i.e. generating visuals which are inaccurate but convincing to humans) has such a need.

Parliament is sovereign over the executive and legislative branches of government. The prime minister is chosen by the monarch as the person deemed most likely to have majority support of parliament, granted powers with which to carry out the executive will of parliament.

The situation now is that the prime minister doesn't have majority support in parliament and is using powers like prorogation to act against the majority of parliament.

> I read a bit that claimed this was "normal" in the UK Parliament.

Short prorogations are normal in order to prepare for Queen's speeches. However, this one is unusually long, with a political context of preventing parliament from exercising their powers.

It's more nuanced than that. The debt/GDP number is talking about future dollars above the divider, and present dollars below the divider. FutureUS$ / (PresentUS$ / yr) is meaningless.

The government could choose to reduce the productivity value of the debt by reducing the value of the dollar (quantitative easing), or numerous other monetary policy levers it can pull. How many years of "productivity we owe" isn't a sensible metric when it's not to be paid now, and we can manipulate the number between now and maturity.

Something I wonder is whether productized software needs to exist as an industry in its own right. Maybe it is enough for software to be incidentally produced in the course of other industries. The Linux kernel is today developed mostly by those with a commercial interest in using and supporting it, such as Intel, Google, Samsung and IBM. LLVM is supported largely by Apple; Go by Google; React by Facebook.

Comparatively, science and mathematics, which software is arguably conceptually closer to, haven't ended as human endeavours for want of direct commercial exploitation.

Given that a major criticism of closed source software is that it can contain adverse behaviour which is practically un-auditable, running less code is the minimal implementation of don't run closed source software.

For some, open source software isn't just seen as a "nice to have", but the only way to avoid a society where freedoms are limited by dependence on software which works against us by design.

Consider supplying a fixed amount of power P to a load. If each stage loses 10% of the power transmitted, after one stage you need to supply 1.1P, after the second stage, you must supply that power plus ten percent, and so on, so you need to supply 1.1^N P after N stages.

Capacitance is a major reason; the capacitance of the very large line doesn't need to be charged and discharged at very high voltage 100 or 120 times a second (per half wave of 50 or 60Hz).

Also, an X volts RMS AC line is 2.8X volts peak-to-peak. The peak voltage is limiting with regards to breakdown voltages, and so DC can reach a higher equivalent voltage on a line with the same maximum voltage.

I should have elaborated on my exponential claim. Resistive losses are indeed linear, however in the context of a maximum transmission voltage, efficiency is bounded exponentially.

If you consider a voltage source of 1V, a line of 1ohm, with a load of 1ohm (0.25W), the transmission is 50% efficient. With a load of 0.5ohm (0.33W) the line is 33% efficient. with a load of 0ohm it is 0% efficient.

> Also with very high voltage AC we can actually transmit quite far.

We can't transmit efficiently at a quarter the circumference of the globe, which would be required for a continually directly solar powered grid.

Naively that's true, but if you consider a distribution grid with a series of transmission line segments at a given voltage, after each segment the voltage is increased to normalise it to the target transmission voltage. Each stage results in a proportional loss of power transmitted, resulting in an exponential loss as distance increases.

Achieving a linear transmission loss ignores bounds on the source voltage. In this case, you may as well choose a transmission voltage of infinity and say resistive losses are constant because current tends to zero.

It is inefficient to distribute electricity over very long distances currently, and that inefficiency increases exponentially. Perhaps in the future a global electrical grid backed primarily with solar may be practical with superconducting transmission lines, but for now, generation is relatively local.

While a fossil fuel or nuclear plant is not reliable, their unreliability is uncorrelated. Solar and wind have geographically correlated unreliability, which is a major problem. To make them practical, large scale energy storage is necessary.

As energy storage is expensive, fossil fuel and nuclear redundant generation is going to be necessary for some time. Scaling demand could also help ease the problem. Electric storage heaters, aluminium smelters, and air conditioning for example can respond dynamically to supply through a real time market, or demand-side response agreement.

So if I understand correctly, the business model is to be the only seller in this exchange, with a profit margin justified by the convenience of instantly available Bitcoin funds.

Would it not be possible for a competitor to undermine this business model by running an exchange (based on the same technology, perhaps the same implementation) where selling is more permissive?

You can just use features of C++ which improve the ergonomics of C; it's not necessary to buy into modern C++ wholesale. If you want to write a C program but with generic container types, just use the features of C++ which facilitate that.

> And the ergonomics of modern C++ look absolutely horrid compared to actual modern languages.

True, but if you want to write "C as it is, with some niceties", then you're not talking about modern languages.

Why would conservative use of C++ not meet this mark? It's highly compatible with C, has container types, ranged for-loops, operator overloading which makes use of container types more sugary.

Corruption is one issue, but as I understand it there are also technical issues. The synthesis of derivative investments like collateralized debt obligations involves modelling the probabilities of default. If the models are wrong, such as assuming probabilistic events are not correlated (e.g. that mortgage default is a microeconomic phenomenon of individual hardship, rather than macroeconomic recession), then the ratings will not be sensible. Robust ratings require economic science to be robust.

The legal principle is simple: it make a person legally dead and so the intentional act is murder. Unfortunately the law doesn't recognise the concept that cryogenic preservation may not in effect kill a person in the long run.

On the other hand, if it were not regarded as killing, you may find healthy people being preserved based on oversold promises of revival from cryonics practitioners.

Perhaps the best compromise for the time being is to regard it as euthanasia, and legalise that with some sensible safeguards. I wonder whether in any countries where euthanasia is legal, opting for direct cryopreservation would be permissible.

DoH servers are not open proxies, they're just DNS resolvers with support for a security layer; they are comparable to HTTPS, SMTPS, SSH, etc. servers, not to a VPN.

VPNs are not a substitute for, nor a better solution than DoH in the same way as they are not for HTTPS or SSH.

I don't think this is at odds with "should do one thing well". Safety is not an application in itself, it is a design principle.

"rm"'s purpose is only to delete, yet it still tries to ensure safety and sanity with its flags: -r, -f, --no-preserve-root, etc. Even simple tools should be safe by default.

The Rust page also compares the performance of the Rust implementation using prefetching, which slightly outperforms C for some batch sizes. https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy.rs#performance

It would be a bit of a cheat, as it isn't portable, but it would be nice to see prefetching in the C implementation for the sake of comparison.

> the only thing [browsers] should do is fetch exactly the page URL that was entered and display it.

I strongly disagree. Browsers deal with a hostile environment that poses countless threats to their users, and need to be safe. Arguing that browsers should be minimal and not protect privacy is like arguing that cars should be minimal and not have seat belts.

There is an argument that ensuring privacy in DNS could be done outside the browser. I think HTTPS is a good precedent for putting privacy in the scope of the browser; the browser should attempt to ensure that privacy expected by the user is established or it should refuse to operate.

I disagree with the solution of trusting Cloudflare, but privacy should be considered crucial to user safety in modern browser design decisions.

> You think giving birth is free?

This is a straw man argument. Nobody is suggesting public healthcare is without cost. Civilised societies provide services like policing, fire and rescue, criminal legal defence, and education, because these are deemed rights. The United States is an outlier in not regarding healthcare a right to be supplied as a public service.

> why is this interesting?

Many people here participate in open source development. The evolution of social trends of such development communities is important to members.

There has been discussion here about codes of conduct and what is acceptable behaviour. This case is significant in that the subject is being banned for the intensity of their academic argument and debate, rather than intolerant or plainly offensive behaviour.

It is not a well known term, confirmed by your need to define it. Obscure slang should not be used in sincere formal criticism of an individual's behaviour.

Additionally, the post is attempting to minimally justify the banning while assuming good-faith. It is not trying to denounce and condemn John De Goes.

> This inflation also seems like the direct result of the overt policy to erase the natural deflation of manufacturing and technology to keep everyone working "full time", when human labor is needed less and less.

A low minimum wage combined with in-work welfare benefits essentially subsidises labour for employers, and is deflationary. Inflation would be naturally higher if not for such government policy.

> rising prices disproportionately affects the poor who must spend a greater percentage of their income on needed goods.

Inflation has a cause, and often that cause is beneficial to the working class. For instance, a rise in the minimum wage or increased workers' union power would increase prices, and disproportionately benefit the poor. If assets don't increase in value, inflation erodes the wealth of the investor class.

Reminds me of the achievement for carrying a gnome through Half Life 2 Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_qF3onDNCo

That's unfortunately often how it is, but it doesn't need to be that way. As an example, Ubuntu's donation page allows you to select how you wish your contribution to be allocated: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you

FOSS foundations should (and typically do) accept code contributions that aren't restricted to their leadership's agenda, so why should they not accept financial contributions beyond their agenda?

Could you elaborate? Without delving too deeply, that article seems to suggest the opposite:

> The KD can more effectively reduce glucose and elevate blood ketone bodies than can CR alone making the KD potentially more therapeutic against tumors than CR

The article explains that fasting is often prohibited by malnutrition and low body weight. Obviously fasting cannot be undertaken long-term, as it results in starvation. I wonder whether there is any benefit to caloric restriction / fasting, versus maintenance calorie intake with a ketogenic diet. The crucial thing seems to be the elimination of insulin promoting carbohydrate, and depletion of glycogen which forces metabolism into ketogenesis, reduces growth factors, and promotes catabolism and autophagy.

This breaks down with negative temperature, where adding temperature to the system decreases its entropy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

Additionally, the Big Bang is theorised to have passed through "absolute hot" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot

I don't think it's fair to say Rust is still a research language any more than it's fair to see the ongoing evolution of C++ makes it a research language. Rust is being used to engineer production software (parts of Firefox, Tor and Microsoft Azure), and its development is aimed mostly at practical and ergonomic issues, rather than experimental or esoteric features.

I agree that there's a cost to introducing a new language to a codebase. On the other hand, there's a cost to being stuck with only C, which manifests as security vulnerabilities and high cognitive overhead for want of better abstractions. I believe the Linux maintainers are taking a sensible and conservative stance here in allowing use of Rust, but not allowing Linux to depend on it.