nsguy

What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either. Puerto Ricans are administered by the US but don't have voting rights.

There is nothing undemocratic about this at all. This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.

You can ask why these territories are in this status for this length of time. Part of the reason is that the country it was occupied from, Jordan, does not want it back. Another part is that the Palestinians that live there don't really want this resolved either (at least some really large portion of them). Another part are other external interests that don't want to see this resolved.

They're also expelling Syrian refugees right now which is not getting a lot of coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-69059929

Freedom house, which I think is a credible source here, says Israel is free and democratic, and Lebanon and Iraq are not. How does that not contradict your point? The claim was that Israel is the only free and democratic country in the middle east, do you have any credible source that disproves that?

Iraq and Lebanon are far from free and democratic countries.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/iraq/freedom-world/2024 https://freedomhouse.org/country/lebanon/freedom-world/2024 https://freedomhouse.org/country/israel/freedom-world/2024

This might be a useful reference here: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitio...

"Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic." ...

"Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation."

Because Israel is a Jewish collective then some criticism of it can be and is antisemitic.

One test of whether specific criticism of Israel is anti-semitic or not is to s/Israel/OtherCountry/ and ask yourself whether similar criticism would be made. E.g. comparing criticism of Israel on its war in Gaza contrasted with the US war on Afghanistan or Iraq or the war on ISIS. For example, when the US bombs a hospital in Afghanistan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike ) do we see the ICC issuing warrant for the arrest of the US president and secretary of defense?

I'm not American so I can't comment on US politics but I feel like there's a small difference between "daring to say anything negative" and asking for arrest warrants (without jurisdiction as well). The Arab lobby seems to have plenty of power, e.g. it looks like they managed to make the US stop (or at least pause) shipping weapons to a long time ally that's being attacked and is at war.

There's list of different PACs here: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...

AIPAC is a lobbying group of Americans that think the US should have pro-Israeli policies. It's operating within the framework that many other lobbying groups are operating in. It's a large and influential group reflecting the large number of Americans that believe in pro-Israeli policies. I guess it's "normal" in any sense that US politics are "normal". Ofcourse Americans are more than welcome to pass laws to limit the influence lobbyists can have, like many other countries do.

How do you propose we determine the fine line between the antisemitic "The Jews run the World" and "being critical of their actions"? What would e.g. be the piece of evidence that convinces you that we're dealing with antisemitism and not legitimate criticism?

We shouldn't shut down conversations about Israel with antisemitism but we also shouldn't shut down conversations about antisemitism with "being critical of their actions".

There are many other groups lobbying for various causes in the US, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_lobby_in_the_United_State...

"According to ProPublica, 4 of the top 10 governments lobbying in Washington are Arab, in terms of spending. The United Arab Emirates places first, having spent $10,914,002 in 2007 and 2008. Iraq, Morocco and Saudi Arabia also each spent over $3 million, and the non-Arab, Middle Eastern nation of Turkey also spent over $3 million."

Why the focus on Israel here?

TIL from another comment that the Shannon limit assumes Gaussian noise so it's not actually always the theoretical limit.

You can't work around the Shannon limit by using encoding. It's the theoretical information content limit. But you can keep reducing the bandwidth and one way of doing that is adding error correction. So intuitively I'd say yes to your question, the distance can go to infinity as long as you're willing to accept an increasingly low receive bit rate. What's less clear to me is whether error correction on its own can be used to approach the Shannon limit for a given S/N ratio - I think the answer is no because you're not able to use the entire underlying bandwidth. But you can still extract a digital signal from noise given enough of a signal...

EDIT: There is a generalization of the Shannon limit to non-white Gaussian noise here: https://dsp.stackexchange.com/a/82840

There is, by pressing a button on the left stalk. But that only wipes once and is also not intuitive when you first drive a Tesla.

When I picked up my new Model 3, about 5 years ago, I headed home and it started raining. I had no idea how to turn the windshield wipers on and was barely able to find a place to stop on the side of the road as I tried to figure it out. I do love the car overall but this certainly wasn't thought through and the auto mode is pretty bad. It's one of those quirks you get used to...

Here's that segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74RdET79q40

I wasn't aware this was discussed, thanks for the pointer! I'm curious now what he says he was talking about ;)

That's not my interpretation. If you're profiling and benchmarking you're already engaging in (premature) optimization. This process you're describing of finding out whether `i++` is taking a lot of CPU time and then changing it is exactly what Knuth is saying not to worry about for 97% of your code. Knuth is saying it doesn't matter if `i++` is slow if it's in a non-performance critical part of your code. Any large piece of software has many parts where it doesn't matter for any practical purpose how fast they run and certainly one loop in that piece of software doesn't matter. For example, the software I'm working on these days has some fast C code and then a pile of slow Python code. In your analogy all the Python code is known to be much slower than the C code, we don't need a profiler or benchmarks to tell that, but it also doesn't matter because the core performant functionality is in that C code.

Not really. Knuth was talking about putting effort to make a non-critical portion of the software more optimized. He's saying put effort into the smaller parts where performance is critical and don't worry about the rest. It's not about `++i` vs. `i++` (which is semantically different but otherwise in modern compilers not an optimization anyways but I digress).

This quote is often taken out of context, here's the full quote: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%."

If you want a specific example look at something that needs to be performant, i.e. in those 3%, let's say OpenSSL's AES implementation for x86, or some optimized LLM code, you'll see the critical performance sections include things that could be reused, but they're not.

Also the point Knuth is making is don't waste time on things that don't matter. Overuse of DRY falls squarely into that camp as well. It takes more work and doesn't really help. I like Go's proverb there of "A little copying is better than a little dependency."

That sounds a lot fluffier than writing code ;)

In Hebrew there is a saying that goes roughly like "He who steals from a thief is exempt". This is commonly interpreted as you're not liable but goes to a Mishna (circa 100AD) that says you're exempt from the normal fines that apply to stolen property.

https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%94%D7%92%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%91...

Wouldn't surprise me if there was some sort of link to the Spanish but if there is I can't find it...

Our local library has a Radon detector you can borrow. We did. No Radon...

AFAIK the scientific consensus is no amount of radiation exposure is beneficial. There have been some theories going around about how a small amount of radiation can be beneficial but I think that's been proven not to be true.

IIRC they also come down from their tree to poop once per week.

I used a Kodak digital camera in the late 90's. I don't remember the model name. These cameras were not "one offs". They were not quite consumer products either. They were more "Pro-sumer".

Even later they had some pretty good models but were just a touch too late into the consumer market vs. others like Sony, Fuji and Canon when the market exploded. I'm not really sure anyone made a lot of money in this market.

I think you're referring to a later period. They had earlier digital cameras that were not cheap and were ahead of the competition. IIRC Kodak invented the digital camera pretty much.

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

I still have my Newton and my HP-48SX. Yeah, the Newton was clearly ahead of its time. Maybe the main thing that "made" the iPhone was connectivity (and ofcourse having the "Internet" to connect to) - neither were really there for the Newton (or other PDAs for that matter). It's those intersections in technology Internet/Celluar network/Hardware/Software where things take off. An expensive cool PDA without the rest of it is just that. The iPhone was a little bit cheaper (again driven by hardware technologies maturing).

Your garage project also doesn't need to support 100's of random features some product manager thought are critical but nobody uses. Quality issues are exponential to the complexity of the software. Out of those 1000's of engineers there will also lot of variability in terms of productivity and quality. Some engineers are likely doing most of the heavy lifting. Some spend all their time in meetings. Some engineers might be working on their novel or startup while sitting in the office. Extremely unlikely they're all operating at the same level. With 1000's of engineers there's a lot of effort synchronizing those engineers, communication overhead, people stepping over each other's work etc. The mythical tower of babel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

Lots of reliable/production software was built by teams much smaller than 1000's. Things like operating systems (e.g. the Linux kernel), compilers, tools or libraries, come to mind. Some even by single people.

That's not to say that all weekend garage projects are better than what 1000+ developer teams produce but don't knock the ability of small teams to do amazing things. Twitter isn't exactly the pinnacle of engineering accomplishment either. I'm pretty sure Twitter suffered from bloat similar to many other large tech companies. Elon taking a sledgehammer to that is probably not the best approach though. That said some people were saying the whole thing will fall apart in days, and it didn't.

[EDITed for typo]

I got to use CP/M briefly on a DEC Rainbow machine in the 80's. It was very similar to DOS but IIRC there were quite a few differences at the detail level. I remember seeing some ads for Kaypro's but I don't think I ever saw one in real life... What sort of issues are you having with the serial port? You might need to jumper the flow control pins if you can't disable flow control. I'm sure the pinout is documented? I had to deal with lots of oddball serial ports way back when, I might even have some breakout/jumper RS232 adapters lying around.

Well. BBC. Their title contradicts their article which says: "And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change." which is more believable.

I think it's an interesting topic. You probably want to read the original research if you want to get better insight. Naturally with all things human it's not an exact science. Also should we look at the population of China or the population of Hong Kong? Presumably if 10% of the population of China was protesting there's some chance of a political change.

90% of people think they're above average drivers. And no, the flat earthers e.g. think we're stupid. I'm not sure stupid vs. smart is the right axis here though. Plenty of people with apparently high I.Q. believe in nonsense.

You've just realized that a lot of people can be stupid? I saw some statistics that 7% of people in Brazil believe in flat earth. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131128/flat-earth-brazi...

As Einstein said(?) only two things are infinite and he's only sure about one of them.

Maybe stupid isn't the right word. Gullible, subject to being influenced, herd mentality- donno. Intelligent, rational, people with critical thinking skills seems like a very rare phenomena indeed.

Sliced bread is a step in the wrong direction though ;)

The logic is really for things like Telnet sessions. IIRC that was the whole motivation.

Myself (and a few others) fought to get rid of bottled water from our office. A location with great tap water quality. Filtered water dispensers. But still people wanted to have their (worse quality) bottled water. Eventually we won...