marktangotango

What a great read, I really admire the perspective of Charles Stross, a smart dude who's seen a lot and has a long history in tech. We don't read many of these guys commenting anymore. It's refreshing.

> As AI applications are increasingly deployed in public spaces we're now beginning to see the exciting possibilities inherent in the leakage of human stupidity into the environment we live in.

Well, that's certainly provacative, can the title be updated to the title of the paper and year (2019)?

"Factoring Integers by CVP and SVP Algorithms"

Dude this is so true, in the US reliable transportation is so important. Particularly given the abysmal, non existent public transportation in the majority of the country. Having an unreliable car is a major source of stress for a lot of people.

There are two aspects. One is the hardware. Coin production is held nearly constant by adjusting the difficulty. Hardware evolves such that hardware from a few years ago is drastically less effective than current hardware, and the difficulty is similarly higher. This means it takes new hardware to mine effectively. With jumps in prices comes jumps in prices of the hardware. And difficulty acquiring it.

Also, the economics change with the price of btc (obviously). When btc is $50k, you can mine very profitably with $.12 kw/h domestic electricity (ie your house). When btc was $10k, you'd break even or lose money.

So if you can get the hardware, and get access to cheap power, yes you can print money. Neither of those are easy. That's the challenge and why it's so easily dismissed as you observe.

The really provocative question is imo, how high will the price of btc go? A lot of people speculate $100-300k. That kind of price justifies a lot of capital expenditure.

I'm curious if you've written about the decisions around licensing that essentially killed the bitkeeper business by inspiring Linus to create git? What are your thoughts around that today?

What I find odd is: when this thing is operational, passengers are supposed to ride through this "flip to land" maneuver?

I used to work at a large F500 corp and managed a legacy app that used raw js/jquery on the front end. Every two years like clockwork we'd get a mandate that "all apps will now use X" where X was [ext-js, ember, angular]. As the person in charge of the app I ignored all those directives and saved myself a boatload of work. App is still using jquery today last I heard.

Basically the numbers come down to a few things. How much energy does your home use in a day (kw/h). How much energy does your installed solar generate; this is genarally kw of solar times average hours of peak sun for your latitude. So if you want to entirely power your home with solar, and you average 1,000 kw/h a month that's about 33 kw/h a day, and your latitude averages 5 hours of direct sun a day, you need about 7 kw of panels to generate that 33 kw/h.

Then you need to store the excess power to use throughout the rest of the day. If you're off grid, this means a lot of battery. If you're on grid (grid tie) you can generally put your excess power on the grid, then draw it back out throughout the day and your utility company will "net meter" periodically so you only pay for the difference you used, or they pay you for the excess you didn't use.

What utility companies pay for excess residential has evolved and is evolving. A few years ago you could get the full domestic rate (~ $.12 per kw/h) and that is a fantastic rate. Now utilities are pushing for a lower rate to take into account for delivery costs solar does not require [1].

[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11062019/rooftop-solar-ne...

> These problems are common to many applications / libraries that are written in C and thus there are a number of libraries that attempt to provide a high level “standard library”. The GLib library is one such effort from the GNOME project developers that has long been appealing.

I've been a fan of glib for some time, other than glib and apache libapr, what other "high level standard libraries" for C should I know about?

I had this thought as well. "Sneak King" and the commercials back then were brilliant. Too bad the BK nearest me is nearly unedible.

People who say “yes that’s nice, but isn’t it still super expensive to lift all that material into orbit?” should consider that space based resources alter that equation drastically.

First in space based, low cost sources of raw materials are near earth asteroids and asteroids that cross our orbital plane. Second is the moon and it shallow gravity well, much lower energy required to reach orbit from the surface of the moon than from the surface of the earth. Similarly, Mars has a much lower gravity than earth. Then we have the asteroid belt and outer planets and their moons.

I believe it is evident that once a basic level of resource extraction AND production are available ON orbit, it will be game over and vast fortunes will be made.

The question for anyone with an entrepreneurial bent well be; how to contribute?

> Many minimalist purists claim that modern compilers are evil

Do you have a reference for this statement?

A lot of garbage systems make a lot of people a lot of money.

This is true in a very real sense, plus Boston dynamics has been bought and sold with some regularity, indicating there seems to some obstacles monetizing the tech.

I was glad to hear McConnel and Pence finally (FINALLY) do the right thing.

How are you investing in sports betting? Publicly traded books like fan duel?

I worked at bike shops for several years in college. We'd sometimes get the customers who would ask, how is this bike worth $X more than a bike I can get at Walmart? All you'd have to do is get them on the bike for a test ride. The difference is night and day. Given that, I feel like the goal of the Coast project wasn't necessarily to increase ridership, but to increase profits margins with a clever doo-dad.

There's always been a lot of hand wringing by cycling enthusiasts in the US about increasing ridership, and being more approachable, better group rides may be one way to do it. There are a lot of obstacles here; road conditions (potholes), hilly in a lot of areas (it does not take a steep or long grade to flummux a introductory or casual rider!), but at the end of the day, cycling is just dangerous. American car culture is not friendly to anything else being on the road (talk to motorcyclists for example!). When I think back on some of the close calls I had, and accidents my friends had simply riding around, I'm kind of amazed I was ever that fearless.

Dev-cpp, mingw, and allegro where my gateway drug back in 2000 or so, nice to hear it’s still around.

What is "cheating" exactly though? Isn't that also culturally specific? Like why shouldn't the collective benefit from the work of a few, if the few are willing? That was certainly the attitude of students of many different cultures when I was in college. Many called sharing work "cheating" I'm certain they saw it as "stupid not too" and "helping their countrymen".

Does anyone know where one can get historic wind data (avg direction and speed per hour for example) for a well known location like LAX? I was looking a few months ago and couldn’t find anything. I thought surely NOAA or NWS would have this?

It's a money grab, pure and simple. They've (Redhat, let alone IBM) done it before (see below).

What happens in practice with this sort of "rolling release" is users end up patching endlessly in production, which no sane person or organization would ever want to do. This was the exact situation for another Redhat acquisition for years now. JBoss EAP and community editions (wildfly now I suppose), everyone who could moved off of JBoss long ago.

This “x implemented in y” is a curious thing we are seeing with growing frequency nowadays (imo). On the one hand, good for these folks, to be rewriting something old in a new way (be it language, library, or framework). On the other hand, could this be an indicator that we’ve reached a certain level where it is easier to rehash the ideas of the past than create new work or invent new ideas or applications? Maybe someone with a more classical education can comment on how this manifests in the arts?

How much do these bales cost usually? How would an individual buy them? I've visited one of the "ropa" stores in south Texas, the ones where they have massive piles of clothes you literally climb over to dig through, it was a real surprise those exist!

A lot of bitcoin miners would love that rate!

I think I read somewhere that the water molecules are thought form semi crystalline structures from protein surface charges that contribute to their function; you could imagine these forming channels or some other mechanism to orchestrate the liquid around the protein to aid it's function (so it's not all random molecules bumping into the spots it needs to go). I have no references for this though.

Concretely, it’s because an int is generally defined as 4 bytes and with a sign bit the remaining 31 can have values 2^31.

Well to be fair, this author was only 2 years old when this disaster happened, posting it here for anyone not familiar:

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-...

This and they have a large number of tickets to examine for patterns along with locations to look for patterns in physical ticket distribution.

> NEVER tell that a particular task is "easy" of "fast" to do

This is sooo true, I cringe whenever I hear developers (or anyone) say this. Especially when it's clearly to curry favor with others. It's a disservice to themselves and our entire profession.

That’s a rosy picture, but I’d point out that atrocities such as Eclipse Rich Client platform and associated OSGi specs are where this plugin concept can lead and it has its own problems! Complexity and discoverability are two!