manholio

I think the point is that 60 fps is not a representable value in the gif binary format, just like (int pi) can be either 3 or perhaps 4, but never a transcendental number.

You can have a magical decoder that circumvents this, but that's no longer a gif.

Aside form neatness factor and hacker street cred, I don't exactly get the practical point for the vast majority of software. What am I to do with such a binary? Do I put it live on my website and allow my clients to download it? If I leave it with an .exe extension so that it runs in the Windows shell, wouldn't that confuse users of other platforms? What if I need a directory structure as 99% of programs do? Do I use a zip or a tgz? In the first case, how do I preserve permissions on Unix targets? Do I need to instruct my clients into how to use tgz on the command line and/or create permissions?

Software distribution is by its nature a very platform specific problem; even if we accept the premise of an x64 world, an universal binary solves just a very small portion of the practical problems of portable deployment.

Ironically, the best use case I can imagine is creating an universal binary installer that can run on any Unix system and then proceed to make platform-specific decisions and extract files contained in itself, sort of like Windows binary installers work. But that's an utterly broken distribution model compared to modern package managers.

> an architecturally guaranteed 16MB of room to play in would have changed the face of the software industry in the 1980s

I don't think it would have, because such amounts of RAM were prohibitively expensive into the late 80s. It would have changed the way software accessed the available RAM, made life easier for developers and improved compatibility be removing various kludges, but largely computers would have looked and behaved similarly, having largely similar specs.

But then again, why would anyone connect their computer to the completely censored national LAN, only to be spied upon by the state?

But are we hitting that power density ceiling yet? It doesn't seem so, we're not even in the "big enough to have ignited" range, only scraping at the door of "big enough for scientific break-even", but have already blown any reasonable chance for such designs to be cost effective even if they were to be mass produced.

Massive superconducting magnets generating megatons of force, building-sized vacuum chambers that are almost guaranteed to leak some amount tritium, which only adds to the unavoidable regulatory burden imposed by the fast neutron environment, activated structure and every day production of weapon-grade material etc. etc., even if the current technology magically works tomorrow, it's still an economic dead-end.

The present fusion crop is megascience at its worst, draining public funds for something that can't possibly ever work and producing very little substantial science in the way. We need to take a step back and reassess. At least Helion is trying a new path, even if they are likely to end up in a similar dead-end.

It's a limited revival, enjoy it while stocks lasts. Or, perhaps, build inventory. But do they have the Max sugar free version in Crystal?

You could say the same thing about Bitcoin. Fusion is in the VC hype cycle but there are no new developments that suggest it can become cheaper and more predictable than fission, which itself is dying, primarily because of financial uncertainties and risks.

On the contrary, physics suggest that performance scales with size, so even the extraordinary expensive ITER project is way too small to achieve engineering break even, let alone financial break-even. You will only hear about scientific break-even, which is a useless milestone because, yes, you get more energy than you put it, but you put electric energy and get fast neutron energy, only you need an order of magnitude more of that to get back the electricity you put in.

Understanding different types of break-even would be an obligatory primer to anyone navigating hyped fusion claims: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-a...

So essentially, the best investment one can make is to be rich, so they can afford having hired help to solve basic day to day problems that regular people must deal with on their own.

That's because if you are a statistically average person paying half their income on housing, another quarter on basic necessities, and saving another 10%, you can't really afford to spend almost your entire disposable income paying 3 hours of wages + taxes for another average employee, every week.

Sort-of like the stereotypical upper-middle-rich-white lamentations that "these days you can no longer find any good babysitter/cook/help/valet", as if living a life of privilege is a birth right.

The tone and content of this thread is quite a trip into the the entitlement culture of contemporary techies.

It should be noted that this solution completely fails when the data is anything like real world location data which tends to be clustered in cities, stadiums etc. The strength of quad trees is precisely the fact that the "Alaska" quadrant can have a single child for that crazy outdoors-man using your gadget, while New York can have a million children trees down to every house on the street.

The most compelling climate engineering mega-project has to be the Qattara Depression project, which would create a super-saline inland sea, generate a few GW of electricity and dramatically increase water fall over large parts of the Sahara desert:

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

The amount of market power Apple has left even after such extensive regulation still far surpasses what a small company can hope to get by building even the most restricted walled garden.

So, if there were any medium companies just below the regulation threshold, the discontinuity argument would make sense. But there isn't, and there won't be, precisely because of anti-competitive behavior of the giants, they can sustain walled gardens precisely because they are giants.

In a world where electric second hand cars exist, the second-hand price of most ICE cars will be negative, sellers will have to give you money to accept the high fueling and maintenance costs.

While I agree with the sentiment, I think this text is pushing it a bit to far. There exist mathematic, cultural, psychological and anthropological truths that can help one navigate towards success in the world of humans, it's not all random noise.

For example:

1. Getting yourself organized and goal oriented, focused on what you can control, your behavior and decisions, instead of wasting time fantasizing about the lives of great men and the myriad ways your environment differs from Silicon Valley in the 70s. For example, a simple tool like the "Getting things done" methodology helped me to increase my productivity significantly. Some other tool might work for you, as long as you can stay on goal and deliver.

2. Understanding the exponential curve and the power of compound interest. Wealth is built by capital accumulation via compound interest, you start with just your two hands, reinvest the proceeds in growth and watch you empire grow. Once you accumulate seed capital, everything becomes easier, money is like a superpower and you can direct people around you to work towards your vision.

Cultural norms are strongly favoring linear career goals, ex. becoming a doctor, so it's very hard, risky and counterintuitive to go against your peer group and position yourself on an exponential growth path.

3. Understanding people are political animals, always competing for power and resources. This is true for any organization, team, project, people will obey power and getting and wielding power is a complementary goal to money, one leads to the another. A strong way to accrue political capital is to build networks, meet and keep good relations with many powerful people that can be useful and for which you are useful.

These examples are some very general and powerful concepts that are likely to remain true for a long time and that most successful people use at least instinctively. They are necessary to greatly increase the odds of success, but of course, vastly insuficient to guarantee it.

It seems absurd to try to find a "standardized" ISO country name, especially to enforce local names in English. Country names are both endonyms (for the inhabitants) and exonyms, the way certain cultures / linguistic areas refer to another country. How exactly do you transliterate Türkiye in Cyrillic or Mongolian script, where does the umlaut go? Why would you want that, instead of leaving Mongolians to use whatever traditional name they use for Turkey?

And if Turkey can demand it, why not 日本, Deutschland or الإمارات العربية المتحدة ?

I'm very skeptical it will ever take off: the wear and tear of your high performance, high density, mobility optimized battery that has a unique vendor that tightly controls the spare parts market for maximum profit would be much more expensive then intra-day price differentials of the energy market.

On the long run you are effectively competing against industrial scale storage operations that use exceptionally large infrastructure, optimized for low cost, lower density chemistries (Sodium instead of Lithium), with charge profiles optimized for very high number of daily cycles, or even multiples per day etc.

So even if grid battery storage becomes the main thing stabilizing the renewable grid, it still makes little sense to use your car for that, except in emergencies, a "virtual energy supplier", you are paid for the availability, not the actual delivery.

EVs are (much) cheaper to run, for commuters that need a steady, predictable mileage within range, they are already less expensive in TCO terms for comparable quality/comfort.

In Europe, where gas is insanely taxed, the operational costs of EVs are 4-5 times lower than ICE, you can save about 10,000€ per 100,000 km (62,000 miles) .

There is no "far left drift" of the mainstream. Outside the gender craze which is real, the "far left drift" is an entirely made up talking point in the conservative war against basic institutions and freedoms.

For example, never in its history was the SCOTUS so conservative compared to the views of the general population. It used to be one of the most progressive actors in society, forcing race and gender equality judgments to a country where working wives and interracial couples were still a faux pass.

The solution to these problems is not to tax the person, but the company itself: every year a certain faction of stock is nationalized and distributed to the population of the county without which the company would not be possible.

It's the only realistic option to provide a UBI: in a world where human capital is quickly depreciating, provide people with financial capital so that they can still be a part of the resource distribution and consumption game.

I have a floppy disk and it's a perfectly fine piece of computing peripheral, I've even recovered some old university projects from 20 years ago. No need to bastardize it into a mockup SD card reader, the same goes for the CD-ROM.

I'm shocked and aghast to hear you found a bug in my code - I assure you it compiled and ran flawlessly in my brain.

Seems like you can have the cake and eat it too, by manually parallelizing the code to something like this:

    double A4 = A+A+A+A;
    double Z = 3A+B;
    double Y1 = C;
    double Y2 = A+B+C;

    int i;
    // ... setup unroll when LEN is odd...

    for(i=0; i<LEN; i++) {
        data[i] = Y1;
        data[++i] = Y2;
        Y1 += Z;
        Y2 += Z;
        Z += A4;
    }

Probably not entirely functional as written, but you get the idea: unroll the loop so that the data dependent paths can each be done in parallel. For the machine being considered, a 4 step unroll should achieve maximum performance, but of course, you get all the fun things that come with hard-coding the architecture in your software.

> mankind could never deploy them at scale because we simply don't have the resources.

I don't understand what your objection exactly is. That's just a way to rephrase my statement: magnetic confinement, as it stands, is too capital intensive to ever break even financially, regardless of the experimental success ITER/DEMO might have.

I never said it was. But a device that needs multiple square feet of high tensile steel to hold together will have immense costs because it also includes gigantic superconducting magnets, vats of cryo-coolant and myriad of custom, unique parts made of exotic materials for exorbitant money.

The billion price tags of tokamak experiments is not a scientific oddity, it's a fundamental economic issue with the approach that will carry on to any production plant, that as far as we can conjuncture will need to be even larger and more expensive.

> two of them could have held down the Space Shuttle when it was trying to launch. To keep the reactor from flying apart, they needed 38

And all that for a reactor that was unable to break even in energy terms, let alone ignite and break even economically.

It perfectly illustrates the folly of magnetic confinement: to hold the plasma you need fields so strong and equipment so massive and expensive that the capital expenses get out of control, fully negating any advantage fusion might have over fission. We already know how to make capital intensive energy - the fueling costs are negligible for a fission reactor, yet those largely failed in the market. An even more expensive and capital intensive solution is dead in the water for economic reasons regardless of any theoretical merits.

It would seem he got it exactly in reverse: the vacancies are up because wages are too low compared to the demands of the labor force which is still available, those people prefer to retire/have a baby/a sabbatical etc. etc. instead of working, because the price point being offered for their time is not attractive. Reducing wages will not solve this problem, but exacerbate it.

What he's actually doing by increasing interest rates is reducing agregate demand, price action goes down, labor demand and vacancies drop and consequently businesses can pay lower wages without fear of losing employees.

So the interest hike is a direct action against inflation while the wage drop is a side effect, not the intended mechanism of action. Inflation can be controlled via interest rates even if, say for contractual or legal reasons, wages stay up. Unlike the case of a recession - that is prolonged by inflexible wages on the way down.

Just like in the fiat case, the attacker of a currency peg has enormous upside if the attack succeeds and essentially zero risk if it fails: the peg can only go down, not up. So shorters pile on to the diseased currency like lions biting a dying antelope, it's not a question of IF it will go down, it's a question of WHEN and what is the most profitable and likely to fail peg you can pit your capital against. These days, there's a whole herd of them.

Sounds like you are an overachiever. The big implicit assumption of GTD is that, while it makes you more productive, there is still a limit on how much you can take on. Workload is not specifically addressed, but implicitly the overflow will go to the Someday folder.

I think the answer to this problem is not any productivity trick, but to aim for exponential growth of your business, career, etc. so that Delegate becomes the primary workhorse instead of Next Actions. Prioritize actions you perform and projects you start so that they are conducive to a long term self-sustaining increase in your productivity. And accept that you may have limited success/luck in unleashing the exponential and that some projects will forever stay out of your linear reach.

> It is not known whether proportional representation can compete with the best single winner voting methods.

I don't know the metric you are using here, but it is surely purely academic, as the rest of your comment. The idea that a single candidate can better represent a smaller (and usually gerrymandered) district than a larger number of diverse candidates in a larger district flies in the face of everything we know about real democracies and party systems.

> Your scenario is unrealistic because real humans aren't that tightly clustered, so you get defectors.

Again, theoretical claims against real world experience. I've experienced polarization in AV to the point where center becomes a wasted vote, and people are incentivized to support one of the two dominant slates.

The point is to have fair representation. If a 30% fanatical minority can get a 100% clean slate for its candidates by voting strategically, AV fails.

In a single winner election AV makes coordination among moderates somewhat easier, so it's an improvement, but still inferior to Ranked Choice/STV with multi-member districts.

I can't be bothered to search for academic papers, but I've seen it use in real elections to designate party candidates. Voters were absolutely rabid, marking exclusively for candidates from their group. The largest group gets a clean slate and the unaligned voters, instead of acting like swings, are simply ignored.