hasmanean

Default signed/unsigned is not a platform convention but a compiler one. You can change it with a compiler switch, in the makefile.

Well 3rd party libraries that are sloppy may be fixed by a psychological method…if you had an autotest environment that fuzzed the inputs and checked for correctness, you could label each library as “robust” or “weak” and leave it at that.

Then people could decide which ones to use based on the label alone. This would be an incentive for people to fix their libraries.

Then the process of normal attrition would take care of all the sloppy libraries.

Evolution at its finest.

Well using analog effects in digital logic has its risks…at relativistic speeds the capacitor dimensions will change, altering capacitance. Depending on the direction of travel, it could go up or down. ;)

Or maybe they’re the least sarcastic. Every other country in the world has people who just say “yeah life sucks” while enjoying themselves fully.

“Ecosystem” means advertisers.

So with the co2 forcing function, is it possible that Canada be glaciated again And that the Sahara be green?

That would fly in the face of conventional thinking which is that Canada will be temperate and the Sahara will be more arid.

Humans have this ability to obfuscate any issue. When there is a simple pattern for things some people always take edge cases and argue that the pattern is really not true. They don’t understand how models of the world work. Of course it’s not ideal but it’s a useful framework for understanding things.

I imagine the reason Newton’s laws never developed before was because of all the influential know-it-alls who took empirical data (moving objects stop! Gaseous balloons rise!) and drew the wrong conclusions from it (gases want to rise up to be with all the other gases…solids want to be at rest.)

It took Newton to do a thought experiment of a projectile moving in outer space to deduce his laws of motion.

The fact is that newtons laws aren’t really observable on earth, unless you have the imagination to see it and do the mental bookkeeping of accounting for friction as a separate force.

I’ve heard monoculture forests are worse for forest fires too.

Having dead decaying logs on the forest floor probably helps because fungi are naturally fire resistant.

I have been thinking about Norse and Native American myths lately, and it seems to me that their purpose was not to be a scientifically accurate description of the world…but they were meant to be memorable inside an oral culture.

If the migration path passed by a mountain that looked like a sleeping man, then it was natural to conjure up a myth about a giant (perhaps while you camped nearby) and tell it to the kids. If it helped them remember the place then so much the better.

These myths were more like an error correcting code. It meant that it would be transmitted and not forgotten for hundreds of generations. The details didn’t have to be true, they just had to be memorable.

Myths about the planets would have been a great way to make sure future generations took this hard won knowledge seriously.

The ancient Greeks knew about epicycles…if you look at some Greek dances the entire family makes a large circle and steps to the right but occasionally takes a step left. Just like an epicycle. I think this was a cultural expression of some piece of knowledge they valued.

If you’re shifting right, the behaviour ought to be

Unsigned: should produce a zero

Signed: should sign extend the leftmost bit, so it will either be 0 or -1

Shifting left should result in a 0.

Where are the concrete ones? I want to build a Lego house I can live in. (Non sarcasm)

if you didn’t hate it enough, styrofoam is part of a hydrogen bomb…it absorbs gamma rays from the uranium nuke, heats up, and becomes a hot plasma. Then it causes fusion in the lithium deuteride, which is the fusion fuel.

How hard is it to use AI to generate fonts on demand?

Yes, 20m and 40m are packed. Activity peaks in the evening and follows the ionospheric conditions. The other bands are mostly empty but may perk up during this solar cycle. VHF and UHF are less popular than HF.

Digital modes are active, as is 6m (50MHz) in the mornings.

I’d rather comment here. ;)

I hope they don’t plan to use the ham bands. They are jammed with traffic while the much bigger commercial shortwave bands next door are empty!

If they do allocate spectrum for fixed commercial use, I hope they allocate equally spaced bands (like hams use) so that you can send digital signals and not have to filter out the harmonics.

A lot of people look at sorting algorithms with the mental model of a 1970s era PDP-8. They analyze scalar instructions as if they are being executed sequentially.

Once you admit superscalar execution (multiple loadstore pipes), out of order execution and caches into the picture ( as well as the possibility of almost sorted arrays as input) the picture is never as simple.

That said, I’m curious whether insertion sort is categorically better than bubble sort. I thought they might have been equivalent for the almost sorted case. I’ve heard both sides argued on this thread.

Usually the hardware makers are the first to profit after a revolution, but then the next biggest thing in the stack (software) makes 10x the money.

In the 1990s Cisco and the ISPs were the biggest internet companies, then it quickly moved to yahoo and google, then mere websites (Facebook, Twitter etc).

Methinks apple and Microsoft just bullied Adobe and kept them down.

In a different universe we would have been happy with the limitations of html and published everything with a minimal of markup.

Hard for a human.

As the hype around AI shows, humans can barely reason either.

“AI will destroy humanity!”

“AI is a blathering idiot!”

No proper reasons.

Back then memory latency was faster than a cpu clock cycle so it was not needed.

So load it with an electrical generator and use power electronics to present a constant load. Problem solved.

Many old high efficiency engine designs were discarded because they had poor torque characteristics at the bottom end of their speed range. This is because they were coupled directly to the load through gears. That does not have to be a requirement any more.

Where does polonium come from in tobacco fields? If it’s in the topsoil then why wouldn’t it be depleted after 3 or 4 crops?

Was it released into some Appalachian watershed by Oak Ridge and is therefore in the rivers/groundwater?

It’s stuck.

Imagine if they put the transmitter right at the base of the antenna. Then you would not need all that coax. You might need impedance matching to make the antenna resonant but that’s all and it could be done continuously.

Imagine the headlines when humans try to immigrate to other inhabited planets:

“They’re bringing pollution, they’re bringing Extinction, and some of the I assume might actually enhance the ecosystems they inhabit.”

It’s not such a hard skill. When we see a complex ecosystem is our first instinct to make it better or to exploit and degrade it? Do we even have a metric for what making it better actually means?

Do we even have a way to debate it? Because the whole debate oscillates between destroy(“jobs”) and the minimum (“we need it to survive.”) nobody has the heart actually suggest it might be worth sacrificing anything for just to make it better.

We need more than a utilitarian reason, we should feel pleasure in making nature better the same way we feel pleasure at seeing a well designed race cad like a Ferrari.

Not over-population. Over consumption.

Actually over-production since a lot of food is wasted before consumption.

Isn’t that a dead giveaway? The universe expanded outwards at the speed of light from a central point…the radius is 21.5 billion lightyears and the diameter is 43B.

Of all the cubes in the world, there will always be one, his mothers gift, that is forbidden for him to solve. This is a great mystery. It’s a Rubik’s complex.

That’s probably what the antediluvian civilization said before they tried it in North Africa! ;)

Pre drill your screw holes.