I remember, from the earliest days, the rationalist movement talking about how cults prey on people and how to recognize it and walk the other way. The Ziz cult checks so many of the boxes that they were warning against back then, years ago—
—And years later, once the Ziz cult started preying on vulnerable people, the response from the mainstream rationalist movement was… to post warnings about avoiding this messed-up cult, to explain exactly how it was manipulating its victims, and how the best thing to do (in the absence of legal remedy) was to stay the hell away from that diseased social scene.
I’m not sure how they could have done better. Any sufficiently large movement attracts crazy people. No matter how well or poorly they may deal with that fact, anybody can do guilt-by-association forever after.
You’re right, of course, but there was a minor miscommunication: the exponential space is exponentially proportional to the size of the regular expression, and the linear time is linearly proportional to the length of the string being searched through.
This depends on the implementation of the regex engine; most are potentially superlinear in time, since that’s the easiest way of doing it, and quite fast until suddenly it isn’t. I always check the algorithm being used before I use regular expressions in production. I was surprised how many use a recursive descent strategy!
(Also, BTW, you can deal with the exponential space issue by using an NFA instead of a DFA – it’s slower that way, but the memory space required is reliably linearly proportional to the size of the regex.)
Do you have actual knowledge of their motives? Or is this speculation, confidently stated as fact?
Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
The obvious patch for this is to have monetary penalties for failing inspection written into the contract, so that submitting shoddy work has a price measured in dollars. Money is the unit of caring, at least at a corporate scale, so there needs to be money involved if you want them to care systematically.
(I don’t know if NASA already does this. They might.)
Those de-orbit in just a few years because of how exceptionally low they fly. SpaceX’s business plan is to just be so efficient at launching things to orbit that it doesn’t matter if they lose a huge number of satellites each year to planned atmospheric drag. It’s a pretty bold way of combating space junk, but it seems to be working out for them, and the FAA has looked over the math and given their blessing.
Maybe it's just a Greece thing. I notice that other EU countries are doing a lot better than them economically; not sure why Greece in particular seems to be struggling.
I’m less worried about that with SpaceX than I am about most companies, because Elon has shown a willingness to just fire a large percentage of a company’s employees with the massive Twitter layoffs.
Objective C is a system for that; Objective C++ is at least three systems for dispatching calls in ways that don't involve linear search. Not sure why they'd try to make another one.
I'm not the OP, but I'm pretty sure there's a simple, uncontroversial answer here. They were an excellent idea at the time, allowing much more pipelining with the microarchitecture design techniques in use back then. In the time since, the complexity of the instruction set has stopped being such a big deal.
The US, and the allies to which it exports F-35s, are overwhelmingly a net force for peace in the world. There’s a reason why the phrase “Pax Americana” is so well-known. You can think of these as war machines, since they’re literally machines made for use in war — but you can also think of them as war prevention machines, causing would-be aggressors to think twice before, like, invading Singapore or some such unpleasantness.
This is why they don't launch over areas where people are living, and why rocket launches are occasionally scrubbed due to the presence of a wayward boat. They're actually being careful here.
I remember when people were saying that about the Falcon 9, which now handles a majority of the world’s space launches. SpaceX has some good, proven engineers; belittling their work because they’re using an aggressive testing schedule (involving, yes, the occasional dramatic explosion) is both unkind and unlikely to age well as commentary.
The article claims that the US has over 100,000 shipyard workers, while Japan has about 70,000 and yet produces 20x more tonnage. This suggests that there's a lot more to it than just US deindustrialization.
Not an incoming monopoly, except maybe in a temporary sense for some remote areas. Ground-based internet continues to exist, and is getting better. OneWeb has over 600 satellites in orbit right now, with paying customers. Amazon's Kuiper constellation is planned to have over 3000 satellites; they've got regulatory approval and launch contracts signed, and their pockets are deep. Once those come online properly, it'll be hard for Starlink to charge anything like proper monopoly rents.
I don’t know if there’s a formal method, but there is a method – given an English word, I can almost always figure out how to say it as an English-to-Japanese loanword. Somehow. I think it’s just something that comes naturally once you understand the phonetics?
Although it's true, that's a hazardous way of thinking. If they had put more of their focus on making steel, keeping up with the technological advances rather than being dragged along grudgingly, perhaps they'd be making more money these days.
How in-house does it need to be? The actual physical facilities aren't being shut down; they're just under new ownership and management. And Nippon Steel is located in Japan, which is such a dependable ally of the US that I'm politely trying not to use the phrase "vassal state."
Also in the US, we've got Steel Dynamics (producing 75% as much as US Steel), Cleveland-Cliffs (approximately tied with US Steel), and Nucor (about 157% as much). That's not the whole story, of course -- Nucor primarily recycles scrap steel, for example, as opposed to smelting ore -- but I'm not really seeing a crisis anywhere on the horizon here. (My opinion in this paragraph is less confident than the first, so I'm open to correction from someone who knows more about the steel industry.)
I can confirm that one big reason why Apple went with reference counting in Swift is because they like it when garbage is freed right away. This lets them get away with smaller heaps than they'd need to get comparable performance with tracing garbage collection. This does slow down execution somewhat; the overhead of updating all those reference counts isn't terrible, but it is significant. It's just a price they consider to be well worth paying.
That's what mandatory liability insurance is for: it takes the occasional risk of a huge liability payout and turns it into a regular line-item on the monthly budget. One that can be bigger or smaller depending on what the insurer's safety inspectors think of their workplace safety practices.
> This is unworkable. You can't penalize a company because their employees did not follow the safety guidelines they promised they would or are legally obliged to follow.
One of life's more specific amusements is describing a system that's been in widespread successful use since for over a century – and then having someone confidently say that it's unworkable. It's called "no-fault worker's compensation", and you can read more about it here:
Australia already has these laws on the books! They just, apparently, didn't set a high enough price on silicosis.
> Especially when a large number of workers are self employed. You can send them bankrupt with a penalty, but then have to support the disabled worker with social security and health care.
Rules vary by state and I haven't looked them all up, but New South Wales has a remedy for this: self-employed workers in fields like construction are also required to provide worker's comp for themselves – and to make sure the money is actually there when needed, they're required to carry insurance.
One standard remedy for situations like this is to mandate that, if an employee gets silicosis for any reason, their employer must pay them some large sum of money. Regardless of whose fault it was. If cutting corners saves money, then corners will inevitably be cut - but if it’s made to be more expensive than being careful, suddenly it makes good business sense to get serious about workplace safety.
Oh, I'm sure those sophisticated store chains, with extensive inventory tracking, have never thought about things like "inventory shrinkage" or "looting" and they're just putting a bunch of locks around for no particular reason.