queuebert

It should be. Everything in the world runs on Linux except people who write Word documents and emails for a living. All that's missing is a simple UI that provides LibreOffice and a browser and doesn't nag you or leave you vulnerable to malware and then educating purchasing agents to know about it and trust it.

Thanks for reminding me of the hundreds of dollars of games on Steam I bought to play on Mac and now can't because I didn't realize that giving into to their Apple's incessant update nagging would completely remove support for those games.

Are you sure about that? Their average markup is around 10%, so that would mean that the average member would be spending $600 or less in the store per year.

Software companies should do the same thing material goods producers do: make the product smaller, faster, and cheaper. Instead they rent seek with half-assed updates and added bloat that 95% of users never need. Adobe is not alone in this.

If microchip producers had done what Adobe has done, computers would be developed by adding a few vacuum tubes each year and bumping the cost by 5%.

What's missing in Gimp? How far away is it from being a viable competitor?

> Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling wares cheaper than what they could have gone for, ...

Explain Costco then.

Having actually taught economics undergrads at Harvard, albeit in a science elective, I can the standards are not quite so high as you might think.

I'm not trying to be anything. He's demonstrably incorrect. It's just talking points, and I'm calling it out.

Microsoft has only ever forced standardization of aggressively mediocre software. In every case, be it OS, spreadsheets, or word processing, there has been a much better competitor who lost out due to market forces, not quality.

> Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Excel “the best consumer product we ever created.” He doesn’t just see it as an enterprise tool. It’s for everything. Nadella said he simply can’t imagine a world without Excel. “People couldn’t make sense of numbers before, and now everyone can.”

So the best thing they ever did was make a clone of Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc? Sounds about right.

What is the purpose of the annual spikes?

It's amazing how much security policy relies on the bad guys being dumb.

Knowing your rights is not the same thing as asserting your rights against a gun-toting, uniformed agent of the state who threatens you with detention, confiscation, and violence if you don't self incriminate.

I disagree. There are a lot of idiosyncrasies about monsters in NetHack such that getting good at NetHack is 99.9% about learning the NetHack world, not the real world. The werecreature game mechanic is no different than the POI or HALLU effect, so I don't think the AI needs any special knowledge. I

bet it comes down to how much memory the algorithm has, since the transformation might occur way later than being bitten, while most poison kills are fairly quick. The problem is NetHack requires you to have at minimum 1000 turns of memory to know when to pray. Even more if you want to keep track of where stuff was.

Second best documentary ever made, after Idiocracy.

Read the article.

But something is wrong in the learning, because as a human NetHack player who has ascended, I can say that we don't play radically different on full moons. Yes, the random numbers go your way slightly more, but that's about it.

This tells me the algo is trying to hard to predict the game or learn a decent static strategy, rather than make situational decisions.

Serious question -- can you clarify what evidence would need to be released?

The calorie counts clearly add up, because a single non-super-sized McDonald's meal is over half of a grown man's BMR. All that remains is to add up the resulting weight gain from the excess daily calories over a month.

I don't find any of the OpenAI voices sexy or deferential. They sound fake happy to me, like a customer service phone menu or an elementary school teacher, and reek of Bay area vocal fry [1] and lilt. I wish there was a greater diversity of accents and speaking patterns available, such as can be seen on the Speech Accent Archive [2].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU

2. https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=find&lan...

They didn't miss on social media from a social perspective -- Google+ was a great user experience. But it did make it harder to harvest people's attention for ad revenue.

Having some array syntactical sugar alone would be invaluable for us casual Bash programmers.

Fittingly the now-defunct Amber Rapid was a blindfolded chess tournament.

You could also do the extremely readable `| cut -f1 -d.` which will do nothing for an integer.

They're a manager and send out daily emails reminding the coders of arbitrary deadlines.

An amazing game that is secretly propaganda to make people respect and appreciate bureaucracy.

Glory to Arstotzka!

Thank you. That website was an abomination. Scrolling to do anything but move the content up should be highly discouraged.

Same here. Loudest noise is one of my servers, but after that is birds and cicadas. I wish I could make the birds shut the hell up, but that sounds like the start of a horror movie.

In fact the books use that rapid discharge property to power weapons.

The Rho Agenda sci-fi books rely on capacitors with absurdly high energy densities to power the tech. Is there any thing in the physics that would prevent a capacitor from having a higher energy density than a battery?

If the ointer points to a very large block of memory, is it an oinker?

Coming soon to an HFT firm near you ...