This reminds me of what the Lincoln character said in the same named movie about the 13th amendment: "what you will be to our nation after this I don't know." Well, now we know.
Eh.. this will cost me some reputation points on HN, but I have to say this.
Why "Spanish flu" and not H1N1-A-18? That flu is called "Spanish" only because Spain's newspapers openly talked about the epidemic. The actual origin, according to wikipedia, was "likely Kansas".
I believe that the debate around Section 230 is a sign of the growing consensus among the ruling class that Project Internet is complete, that it's successfully deployed a world wide surveillance framework, and that no further growth for the sake of the growth, which could destabilize the said framework, is needed, and thus it's time to close the gates and fortify the site from competitors. One fact supporting this stance is the rapidly growing popularity of the so called "end-to-end encryption" idea, that could crack the foundation of surveillance, unless hard measures are taken right now.
That's a rhetorical question, right? In any company, employees don't get to capture any value. In Cisco, even if he turned his unit into a $50 billion business, he would be lucky to get $50 million and a promo to SVP. Even Google's CEO gets "only" 200-400 mils and I suppose that a VP at Cisco is a much smaller role.
Troy citizens also believed that if something is called a horse and looks like a horse, then it's obviously a horse and can't be anything else, especially when it's given for free.
We'll have to run our own fork of Chromium, just to run uBO. And that makes sense: it's strange to call a browser supplied by an ad company a "user agent".
In fact, it's a really simple app: a height map on a sphere approximated with triangles. With a bit more extra complexity, the app could do raymarching on a interpolated height map: this would remove triangle artifacts around "cliffs" on the height map. It would still be real time 60 fps even on smartphones.
To do something like this, you need to know a bit of WebGL and a bit of JS. No frameworks really needed at this level. The best guide to WebGL I know of is this:
Complexity starts when the height map isn't enough and you want to make arcs or otherwise arbitrarily shaped structures. This is where you'd need a framework, unless you want to implement all the math and glsl yourself.
And as always, the idea is really the 1% of the work. Anyone can say "it's just a height map on a sphere". 99% of the work is materialising the idea, debugging glsl, fixing ugly bugs on smartphones and esotheric browsers, dealing with partial WebGL API and so on.
We can go even deeper and ask how we'd call sound-like gravity waves in spacetime? Some sort of oscillating system of heavy stars can produce a periodic gravity wave that we'd call sound probably.
Here's an experiment. One cubic mile of space in a gravity free region is filled with tennis balls that freely float around and bounce each other from time to time. If we produce a wave in this medium by oscillating one of the walls, would we call this wave "sound"? If not, what makes atoms "better" than tennis balls? What if we replace atoms with electromagnetic balls exhibiting similar bouncing properties, would it be good enough to count waves in this medium "sound"? Getting back to the original experiment. Now, the tennis balls float not in vacuum, but in a gas, e.g. argon. In this case, both gas atoms and tennis balls would transmit waves induced by the oscillating wall. What makes one wave more "sound" than the other? What if we don't know for sure that the gas atoms are real atoms and not some atom substitutes? At what point does sound become not really sound? My point is that if we can substitute the medium carrying the waves, than we may as well remove the medium from the definition of sound.
Isn't it the same as the speed of light? If sound is an abstract wave-like signal, then it can be transmitted equally well with radio waves or molecules in the air. The paper should probably mention that it's the upper limit of sound in a atomic based medium.
"management has been more receptive" - that's a corpspeak for "nothing has changed", i.e. a bunch of vague statements with no substance that lazily nudge the reader to attribute something (severance pay) to someone, without saying that explicitly because that would be a lie (with potential legal troubles). If there were meaningful changes, they would be attributed to the union explicitly: "thanks to our union representative, we've come up with a revised agreement that gives all employees 8 weeks of vacation, 40% higher pay and eliminates the non-compete clause."
So long as the software industry is expanding, the salaries are growing and software engineers have freedom to jump ships, I don't see unions coming. The recipe to make a union is to lock thousands of grumpy software engineers in a bureaucratic company with stagnant wages.
Politics can be Luddites too? They see the world is moving forward, and as it's escaping the reach of their small grabby hands, they enact the "Earn IT" act as an attempt to return the times where their little grabby minds were able to watch and control others.
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Those 80 billions are the micro investments I was talking about. EU needs a 100-trillion-dollar project for the next 50 years + change some laws to improve competition. With 80 billions EU can build a wooden airplane at best.
I believe Europe can create its own SV by following the USA's route: the Europe's equivalent of DoD (which has access to unlimited funds, tens of trillions of euros), needs to come up with a grand multi-decade project and invest into companies that are going to work on related sub-projects. For USA it was the worldwide surveillance system, but for Europe it may be something else, like ITER (but on a bigger scale) or micropayments system (I don't know if it would be big enough). That grand project needs to be useful and reachable, though. One thing I'm certain about is that VC-style micro investments into micro projects with micro objectives will bring only micro results.
The way I like to think about it is people are like molecules of oxygen: in their natural state they are "free" and perform random Brownian motion. Society is about restricting the number of freedoms to a few, so all molecules can move either forward or backward, and produce work as a result. Psychedelics let people realise once again how much freedom they naturally have.
I've seen somewhere a clever trick that derives some QM with a small tweak in GR. I can't judge whether the trick makes sense, though. So the trick was to modify the ds2=c2dt2-dx2-dy2-dz2 equation to exp(a cos(wt))ds2=... That extra exp(...) modulation, when combined with Lorentz transforms, produced some basic QM formula. With more wizardry, the author derived the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. Someone who knows GR well could probably tell if GR has "room" for the exp(...) modulation, i.e. that something in GR doesn't fall apart after this addition.
Here's a possible explanation that I'd seen somewhere. Up until very recently, humans had had weak ability to think, especially abstract thoughts, and the phrase common today "just think about it", would be meaningless just a few centuries ago. Perhaps the concept of depth in those times would be similar in complexity to 4-dimensional structures today.
IMHO, Google & Apple are safe for at least 4 more years: the current and next US administration has no interest in changing the status quo in the corporate world. Maaaybe something will happen in 2030.