snek_case

It's also become very trendy to be "polyamorous" over there. I think part of it sort of fits with the culture where there are a lot of people constantly arriving in and leaving the city, and even people making a lot of money have to have roommates because housing is so expensive. It means there aren't a lot of people looking for anything long-term.

> rust demands that I cross every last t before I can run it at all.

It's worse than that IMO. Rust makes it very awkward/impractical to have cyclic data structures, which are necessary to write a lot of useful programs. The Rust fans will quickly jump in and tell you that if you need cycles, your program is wrong and you're just not a good enough programmer, but Maybe it's just that the Rust borrow checker is too limited and primitive, and it really just gets in the way sometimes.

Some of the restrictions of the Rust borrow checker and type system are arbitrary. They're there because Rust currently can't do better. They're not the gospel, they aren't necessarily inherent property that must always be satisfied for a program to be bug free. The Rust notion of safety is not an absolute. It's a compromise, and a really annoying, tiresome drain on motivation and productivity sometimes.

I'm looking at this and wondering why anyone would risk their life for an extremely dangerous trip in a cramped underwater vessel with no toilet when you could just... send a drone.

Probably doesn't matter that much because it's just hardware. Presumably not that hard to run your software on another intel box with nvidia GPUs. There's also plenty of demand for nvidia GPUs right now, still no guarantee given it's Google, but it would be hard not to make money with this.

The concept of watching cable TV with premade programming and ads seems extremely dated to me, and to most people of my generation, I imagine.

I have a 65" 4K TV, but I don't have cable or a TV antenna. I watch all of my content from Netflix, YouTube and other sources. I wouldn't put up with ads.

Also worth pointing out that much of EVs and grid storage are shifting to cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate batteries. Many people aren't aware of that.

> Your only remaining option is to use a totally IEEE-754 compliant algorithm that is guaranteed to work the same on every CPU that implements IEEE-754 floats

OK but, doesn't intel internally use 80 bits of precision for float64 computations? If that's the case, you can't even guarantee that float64 multiplication and addition would behave the same on say x86 vs arm.

Firstly, an arena-based allocator is a custom allocator, which is something most programmers never need to touch and probably don't know even know about. It is a "low-level memory trick".

Secondly, we were talking about how Zig makes allocation first-class. This is a prime use case: specifying your own custom arena-based allocator.

JIT compilers, games, database server. Anything where you need high performance and do a lot of allocations.

China is a huge country with a much bigger hardware industry than the US. Seems to me it's normal not everyone there is working with the same technology. It's just a massive number of different companies doing different things.

That being said, RISC-V is gaining a lot of traction. I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to become a real challenge to ARM in the next five years. You just need mature tooling and better cores. Probably also need a wider variety of smaller cores for embedded applications available at the right price points.

The thing is, Relativity Space doesn't really disclose much about how the rocket is made. They say it's some percentage 3D printed by weight, but that doesn't really tell you if, for example, they use carbon fiber COPVs for the fuel tanks inside.

We don't really know that 3D printing saves them much time. Rockets are large cylinders, which there are other efficient ways to manufacture. Other companies will 3D print parts of rocket engines. I'm sure Relativity Space does as well, but they probbaly do that separately from the main body of the rocket with some hand assembly after.

On Tinder and other dating apps, I see lots of women using very obvious filters that just make them look sort of blurry and pale and I always swipe left. I just question why they would go for filters that are so obviously filters. Everyone knows that's not what you look like, and it doesn't even look good. But now TikTok has these new video filters that can add makeup and look very realistic [0]. Can make women go from ordinary looking to supermodel. Follows the person's movement flawlessly.

Unfortunately, when technology like that becomes more common, people are definitely going to be tricked, and feel tricked. It's going to be awkward going on a date and the person looks nothing like what you expected... Awkward on both ends.

At some point... The online reality might become so fake, with disinformation generated by bots, generated images and videos, fake dating profiles (that are actually also just bots)... I wonder if it's going to spur some kind of reactionary movement. A movement to disconnect from the internet completely, or at least so socialize more in real life. Maybe some bars and pubs where you have to check in your cellphone at the door. Offline cafes.

[0] The new TikTok makeup filters in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2euJzOk60

The concept of microcode is fairly old. It was present at least as far back as the IBM 360 (1964), so it predates microprocessors.

One big motivating factor for microcode is that it insulates the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) from its actual implementation in hardware. That makes it a lot easier to be forward/backwards compatible.

Without microcode, you have a situation where every generation of processor, and even different implementations of a microprocessor will have different internal resources and circuits. You need to be able to control things inside the processor like the flow of data between registers, ALU(s) and the memory bus... But for each processor implementation, the available connections and execution units are going to be different. Microcode allows you not to expose all those underlying details to the outside. It's also more compact than having to directly control all of the connections inside of a CPU manually.

An alternative would be to have circuits that implement boolean logic and go directly from instructions bits to the internal control logic, but microcode also makes it easier to execute an instruction in multiple steps instead of being tied down to the constraint that each instruction must execute in exactly one cycle.

It would just take too long. Modern space capsules travel at kilometers per second, and it would still take months to reach Mars. If were to travel there a 30km/h it would take centuries to get there.

... This is all ignoring the fact that orbital mechanics just wouldn't work if there was air resistance. The planets would quickly slow down and crash into the sun.

What seems unclear to me is, does this use the onboard GPU or neural accelerator at all, or is it all CPU-based?

Cool if it's able to run 100% CPU-based because that makes portability and deployment a lot easier. Makes this code a lot more accessible.

Probably because the textures were just too low resolution. You add bilinear filtering to low-res textures, you get something that looks blurry.

The majority of Teslas being sold right now use lithium iron phosphate batteries already. This isn't just some future plan, it's already largely implemented.

Part of the problem is the idea that people must have X years experience in Y.

I once applied to a game development company. I have something like 20 years experience in systems programming. The problem is that my CV doesn't have any game development experience on it... But when I was about 20, I programmed my own 3D engine, and my own raytracer with soft shadows. A few years ago, I've worked with GLSL as well. I'm familiar with concepts like perspective projection, backface culling, scene graphs, shaders, 3D models, etc. and I'm sure that I could figure out how to work on a 3D game and produce useful work fairly quickly, but these people quickly tossed my CV into the "no" pile because I've never worked at a game development company before.

At the end of the day, I'm doing very well at a different company doing systems programming, but my point is, people look for boxes to check on your CV. This is especially bad if you have to go through non-technical recruiters. Your best bet if you want to get into a programming job IMO is to try to speak directly to developers who work at the company. If you can show them you know your stuff, they might just give you a chance.

I wish that there was some kind of a lifetime connectivity plan. You buy a modem with a one-time fee, it has a unique ID, and you get to send/receive data at a low bit rate for the life of the modem (or until the satellite service is discontinued).

IMO that would make IoT devices a lot more attractive. The device works for years and you never even have to worry about setting up an account to pay a bill.

There are conversion kits and electric crate motors [0] that are available to enthusiasts.

The problem is that EVs and traditional ICE vehicles are built very differently. In order to fit enough batteries, the batteries are usually built under the vehicle in what's called a "skateboard". You can't do that easily when retrofitting an ICE vehicle, so you end up sacrificing trunk space. Modern EVs are also much more lightweight and aerodynamic than ICE vehicles, and they can do regen braking. Without all of the modern EV innovations, you just don't get nearly the same range.

So yeah. You should probably get a modern EV and just crack the firmware to jailbreak it instead, which is likely to happen in short order. A challenge there though is that when it comes to autonomous vehicles, you're likely going to need updates to the map data on a semi-regular basis. You could also become liable if someone gets hurt and it's found that you tinkered around with your autonomous car's software.

[0] https://www.thedrive.com/news/42974/fords-281-hp-electric-cr...

Sure, but there's also a question of bootstrapping. Can you build electronics that work underwater? Sure. But it's a lot harder than building electronics that work on land. The barrier is a lot higher.

Also, simple things like... Primitive humans used tree branches to build lances and things to fight predators. They also used them to dig and to build homes. There are no trees underwater. Octopuses have soft bodies and are not equipped for digging in the ways that humans were, especially without tree branches to help them.

Another obvious difference: one of the key technological discoveries that made humanity happen is the discovery of fire. It would be somewhat difficult to make fire underwater.

Maybe it really is just easier on land. That being said, many species have gone from sea to land or land to sea during their evolution. Not impossible that some octopus descendant could become a land species in the far future... But I have a feeling that evolving bones or a hard shell would he helpful there.

cue movie scene where an octopus, drawn by strange unheard noises, surfaces and witnesses nuclear bombs exploding just above the New York skyline from far away, and the dawn of a new era begins

> In general, the article is a total case of "uncharitable interpreation".

Literally everything musk does has 100 news articles published with the most uncharitable interpretation possible. Hating on him has become a sport.

But, is Kombucha Turing-complete?

I don't think it's necessarily as hard as you think. Can't do math? Teach the model to use an external mathematical expression evaluator to do math. Makes up inaccurate information? Teach it to query an external knowledge base. How hard to implement do you think that is? They're already working on it.

I think Google just had an "oh shit" moment as it dawned onto everyone that we now (almost) have the technology to build personal assistants that actually work, and this could be the new tech that disrupts Google's business.

But now that the dust is settling, people are realizing that this technology is not flawless. We haven't fully 100% mastered it, there are unsolved problems, and maybe it's not quite ready for a broad deployment just yet.

That's normal. It's just the way the hype cycle works. People (and the media) quickly get really excited and build unrealistic expectations, then they become aware of the flaws and limitations. That doesn't mean these kinds of systems can't be better and even more useful in 1-2 years. There's a lot of really smart people working on them with many possible paths to address the current limitations.

Hang in tight brother, and if you have a public CV you can share, maybe you could join one of those startups.

I could see it for a semi truck. Another advantage there is that you don't need it to look pretty, you don't need to try to hide the battery under the truck.

The problem with swap stations, in addition to the large infrastructure cost, is that you need to keep your vehicles and battery packs compatible for years to come. If you have 4 different car models, you either need all 4 vehicles to use the same battery pack format, or you need to have multiple battery packs available. It might seem trivial, but it's a significant design constraint.

IMO if technology progresses and we can get rapid charging times close to 10 minutes or less, battery swapping technology will become entirely moot.

My prediction is that NIO will have to sink a lot of cost into this technology to build all the swapping stations and have all the spare packs available, and that will likely be its downfall. If you think I'm being silly, then please consider that NIO is the same company that invested in having yoga lessons at its dealerships[0], which seems like WeWorks-level stupidity to me. This company does not know how to deploy capital in a lean and effective manner IMO.

[0] https://cnevpost.com/2022/12/17/nio-opens-first-nio-house-in...

I support the right of people to choose to end their life with dignity and it seems sad that people would have to resort to starving themselves to death. If this was legally sanctioned, an injection of opiates could be much quicker and less painful.