tachyonbeam

I guess my point was, Windows should have just as much of a reputation, given Microsoft has shipped release builds with absolutely horrible and blatant bugs (does anyone remember windows millennium?).

I did do some research before I bought my printer and found a brother that connects to wifi and works flawlessly with both Mac and Linux. I find you can also make your life much easier as a Linux user by choosing popular distributions. It's always easy to Google specific fixes for Ubuntu.

I switched to Linux around the same time as you. Before that I was a Windows user from 1997 until ~2008. In the late 1990s and early 2000s people just accepted that Windows crashing everyday was a normal feature of that software, and they blamed every crash on user error, eg: "your drivers are bad", "you're running buggy software", etc. My Windows 98 install couldn't run for more than ~4 hours without crashing, it was infuriating. Windows 2000 did better, but it would still crash once every couple of days.

Linux was a million times more stable and much more pleasant to use as a programmer (no SDKs to download with complex installation instructions). It also had a package manager which made installs/reinstalls a breeze. You could actually write a bash script to redo your setup automatically, wow! Never looked back.

I recently installed Windows 8 on an older computer I was setting up for my mom (she didn't want Linux, understandably). It was my first time using Windows in two years or so. Windows Update was broken out of the box. It wouldn't run. You had to manually download a patch to get it to work. I don't really understand why desktop Linux gets so much hate when commercial software is this bad.

The difficulty in banning it is very much political. You would get massive backlash from Jewish groups, you'd probably get accused of being anti-semitic. Also, not to get too cynical, but my perception is that issues affecting men/males are given less importance.

Should also be pointed out that there are probably two or three orders of magnitude more men at the bottom than there are men at the top. It's asymmetric. Your odds of failure are much higher than your odds of incredible success.

When it comes to nature vs nurture, the answer seems to always be that it's a combination of both. Unfortunately, this is a heavily politicized topic.

One aspect that maybe deserves to be more explicitly outlined because people tend to assume that talking about gender differences means that we're pointing to one as being better than the other, is that "more extreme" doesn't just mean "closer to the top" or "better". There's more variance between men, success wise. There are more men at the top, but there are also 7X more homeless men than homeless women IIRC. There's also a higher rate of drug addiction amongst men, there are way more men in prison, way more men getting killed because of reckless driving, etc.

It's a bit like investing. Nature takes a more high risk approach with men. High risk can yield high reward, but it also means a higher rate of failure. This is why, when investing, the advice people generally give you is to make conservative/safe investment decisions.

Memory protection isn't just used to protect processes against one another, you can also use it to implement write barriers for a garbage collector, or to map files to memory, for example. I think you'd be hard pressed, with any kind of compiler, to prove that an object you're writing to isn't part of an old GC generation, seems like an intractable problem, unless you're in a pure functional programming language.

I don't know of any platform that offers that in my country.

> You can't expect women to work on having more of a penis.

That's a bit simplistic, isn't it? Not to mention, maybe it's not just the penis. Maybe you can teach women how to copy the kinds of attitudes (eg: assertiveness) that help men succeed. Maybe you can get more women in engineering by giving them positive role models from an early age.

We can help prevent there being so many incels by supporting young men emotionally from an early age. Right now we have a very punitive approach IMO. The education given to young men is a lot of "don't do this", "that's toxic", "women hate it when men do that", but there isn't enough positive messaging and encouragement.

I think this is the right way to look at it. This is why I gave myself as an example. I was raised by a mentally ill single parent in poverty. I wasn't taught how to socialize with others in a healthy way. As a result, I wasn't equipped to form healthy relationships.

I think there are a lot of young men who are in a similar position and if they are given proper guidance and healthy role models when they are young, they can be in a better position to succeed in friendships, work and relationships.

That's one bitter truth about life: (almost) everyone needs some amount of physical intimacy to be happy, but it's not something anyone is entitled to. Those of us who have access to that are privileged.

I agree with the author though. IMO the existence of so many "incels" is some expression of a real societal problem. Many young men are suffering, and we don't acknowledge their suffering as genuine. We just tell them that they suck, call them names and walk away. This can cause them to become more radicalized.

I was raised by a mentally ill single mom, on welfare. In many ways, my emotional maturity really lagged behind that of other guys. I didn't know how to make friends, let alone how to approach women or form a healthy relationship. I did eventually manage, but it took me years of learning during my 20s. When I was a young man, I struggled with some pretty bitter feelings myself, and I feel like society didn't make it easy to overcome them. Even today, the not so ambiguous message that society sends to young men is: if you can't get women, it's entirely your fault, because you are not enough. It just adds insult to injury, particularly when you're really missing closeness and understanding, when you feel alone and wounded.

IMO, the modern discourse around gender only really goes one way. We hear about women's issues everyday, but even in 2021, it's no more okay for men to talk about the challenges they face than it was in the 1950s. Men are told to just suck it up, and that's a huge part of the problem. If feminism is really about gender equality, then it needs to allow some room for men to talk about their issues and concerns as well, without fear of judgment. I would also like to see words other than "toxic" being used to describe masculinity.

Are they already pulling out the rug? Seems like the investment they made so far in terms of time, money, hiring must have been massive.

If they are killing stadia, that does maybe show that Google lacks "grit". The way they killed Google Plus was kind of stupid. They could have adjusted the formula and made it better, but instead they just gave up on it, it seems. It's like Google doesn't understand that it's normal not to have instant success? Maybe they should make a more active decision that here is a market segment they want to enter, and keep working at it, instead of just trying random things and giving up.

If you work for a competitor, you are clearly biased. Show us some evidence, some uncut videos of GM's Cruise or whoever besides Waymo you believe is ahead of Tesla.

Are TPUs designed for low-power applications? You don't want to burn lots of power in an electric car.

The pandemic is a bit different from what was before because we're not really given a choice. That being said, I agree, and I think it's not just hobbies. If you think about music, Spotify exposes people to much wider array of choices than what was there before. It used to be that people had a common cultural thread through the radio and television. Now, you can find your own niche community online, and listen to very niche music customized to your very specific preferences on Spotify. Even porn is getting increasingly niche. I find that often, even friends who like similar music genres to mine don't really appreciate tunes I share with them, because everyone has diverged so much. Politics are getting super divisive too, with no tolerance for different viewpoints.

I'm not sure what's the antidote to that. I do think that in many ways, technology is driving people apart, and I'm afraid we're headed the way of Japan (hikikomori). I think some people will choose to remain socially active and others will withdraw. At some level, interacting with other human beings is challenging, it takes effort, you have to want to do it.

This is also a silicon valley problem. Lots of people move there to get the big job and make money. It attracts a certain kind of people. People who prioritize their career and income above other things. You also have the challenge that a lot of the people moving to SF might only stay a few years, so you have lot of turnaround. People are not focused on building long-term friendships and relationships because know that they or others might leave. You also see this on the dating scene. I found silicon valley to be an unhealthy living environment on multiple levels.

That's not the only goal though, the more immediate goal is to restore mobility/communication/freedom for disabled people. Neuralink can be a huge success even if it doesn't bring about a cyberpunk future (which, honestly, do we even want that?)

I think Karpathy at Tesla has basically unlimited funding, Tesla is developing custom hardware. They've already deployed said hardware in the wild, and they're probably about as close to Waymo to true full self driving. We also don't know what his pay situation is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had multimillion dollar bonuses tied to various milestones. I know if I were Elon Musk, I wouldn't want to lose the guy.

So sure, he could leave, but to do what? To start building something similar from scratch somewhere else? He could go to Waymo to find that he went from being the project leader to an underling, and that Waymo is not using the approach he wants to use (he designed the Tesla project, and it's close to pure deep learning). IMO, unless something goes really wrong at Tesla, he will stay, because they're so close to success, surely he wants to see what happens, because the payout will be huge.

The micro-op cache is very small, on the order of ~1.5K uops AFAIK. It can also be repopulated quite fast. So yes, the performance hit should be quite small. You should presumably also be able to reduce the performance hit if you reduce the frequency of context switches, which should get easier the more cores you have, if I'm not mistaken. That is, the OS can have its own dedicated core, and some programs can be more or less pinned to other cores where they are rarely interrupted.

Good for you. You don't have to install Linux on your phone, but it would be better for the planet (eg: recycling) if we all could.

I don't think Apple or Google have to open source every part of their software. They just have to make it possible for us to install alternative operating systems on their computing platforms. That would allow giving older devices new life by putting Linux on them, for example. A fully unlocked iPhone 6 with Linux on it could be very useful.

I mean there were vacuum tubes and relay machines before that :)

IMO relays are a bit easier to understand than transistors because it's a bit easier to understand how to implement various logic gates with them with only very basic knowledge of electronics.

Also, very satisfying clicking sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZyFSrNyhy8&t

27" monitor on Chrome here. Looks pretty far to the right.

Noise, maintenance, added cost and complexity. Then you also have the issue that you need an inverter and some kind of scheme to communicate with the mini wind turbines so they don't drive the voltage too high or some other kind of scheme for regulating that.

Why do you say that WASI misses the point? (genuinely curious)

I'm not sure where this is going. Doesn't the computational cost to mine ether bitcoin or ether change over time?

And also, we already have units for quantifying computation. We can talk about millions/trillions of floating-point operations and also millions/trillions of instructions executed. The problem is that it's very hard to reach the peak theoretical capacity of a system, and also, when you're talking about trillions of instructions, the time taken depends on your instruction makeup.

You'd get a similar problem if you talked about ether as a computational unit, because a machine can be designed to mine ether really fast, but not be suitable/optimized for other types of computation, meaning that the compute power it takes your system to compute an ether might not be a good way to quantify the time it would take said system to compute something else.

There's no way you can run all these companies, be an international celebrity, and not be busy.

People with amphetamine habits typically look very skinny and unhealthy because amphetamines suppress appetite. Same for cocaine, ritalin and all other dopaminergic stimulants. They can also have facial scabs because of obsessive picking/scratching, and tend to be very twitchy and hyper. He doesn't come off that way at all during interviews.

My personal experience leads me to believe that there is no way Elon Musk could have been dosing stimulants for the last 10-20 years and look as good and as relatively calm as he does. You build a tolerance very quickly, and any edge that you thought the stimulants were giving you will fade away fast. Then, if you increase the dose, your life will spiral off the rails as you become more manic, impulsive and irrational (eg: gambling, sex, spending sprees, irritability, violence, paranoia). Just Google John McAfee if you want to see what this can look like.

IMO Elon Musk just has lucky genetics and doesn't need much sleep, always has high energy. There are people who are fortunate to be born like that.

Well, this is supposed to be a professional desktop machine. I don't want to run my work machine off of wifi that could randomly disconnect in the middle of meetings though. I know I'm not the only one. They could have spent the 3 dollars per machine it would cost them to add an ethernet jack, but instead they're going to have you spend $20 on some adapter dongle.

As for USB-A, there are tons of peripherals still in existence out there. Maybe you're fucking loaded and you don't care about just buying everything USB-C, but that's definitely not the case for everyone. Suppose I have a nice USB-A optical mouse and mechanical keyboard that I like for example, or a really nice $200 audio interface. I guess I need to buy yet more dongles, or throw them away and replace everything with USB-C peripherals because some 20yo on HN says that USB-A is legacy. Thanks Apple. You definitely value user experience above all else.

What's losing my interest more and more is that their music recommendations are terrible, rarely match my taste... And, uh, I wish there was an easier way for me to just browse music by category. I just want to see all the new releases under electronic music and browse through them quickly. I don't need to be spoon-fed things as part of "discover weekly".

Also, the Spotify Chromecast integration is utter shit. It has been utter shit for a while, but it seems it's just getting worse? It's laggy, it randomly pauses during my playlist for no reason. I ended up buying a bluetooth receiver to hook to my AV system so I could get reliable playback. What the fuck? Why isn't this getting fixed?