theaeolist

Recursion is natural and easy to understand when the argument of the function is a recursive data structure, and the cases are patterns on the constructors. These are natural and useful cases, much better than the alternative. Starting with misguided examples like factorial is demotivating.

Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.

"The consumption of electricity in everyday life was limited (it was forbidden to use a refrigerator during the winter, and the use of a vacuum cleaner was banned all year round), hot water was supplied to apartments twice a week,"

This is all false. Source: I was there.

Program Committee

A clear exposition of an obscure and hard to understand result is lack of 'respect for readers' time'? How so?

> 3. While the size of any one conference has to be fixed, tech has made it infinitely easier to create new conferences and journals with other focus areas. They may not start with the prestige of a larger journal, but if the papers published start to have an impact, it can catalyze an entire subfield of work.

Does it though? The largest conferences I go to as a CS academic have hundreds of people. There are academic areas where 10x people participate. The size limitation is a self-imposed excuse to keep acceptance low. I have been PC chair of two conferences and my attempts to expand the conference numbers were shot down by the steering committee precisely for this reason, not because we couldn't find a larger room.

Journals can still do curation of the stuff that's on preprint archives. Some already do. It's a lot less friction than the current model.

Maybe not so slow.

> For example, in Sri Lanka, there is no way for someone to accept payments or send money through PayPal or Stripe. However, people will be able to send money through the blockchain and bypass these restrictions if more people begin to trust crypto.

If Sri Lanka blocks PayPal and Stripe are you sure they will not block commercial entities from converting between rupees and crypto-assets? Individual and small scale operators might still do it, flying under the radar, but that is not a scalable proposition.

Maybe Google should start a new thing, a "search engine", which actually searches (rather then guess, anticipate, and interpret).

10 hrs waiting (i.e. catching up on email and social media, eating or shopping) for 4k? Does this seem reasonable to you?

At the airport I don't merely sit and wait. I catch up on email and paperwork, maybe start watching a movie. It's not wasted time so I don't mind being there 30 mins extra for safety.

If you need to flip your USB A connector three times before pushing it into the port you are not pushing hard enough.

> Smart contracts offer revolutionary new to transact gloablly.

They certainly do that.

You don't seem to understand what the previous poster said: all of this can be achieved with a database that allows some open access. You don't need a consensus protocol on a distributed system.

Much like mixing garbage into food. You get garbage, not food.

The article makes some specific points, which you fail to address. Your objection is a generic "never mind that, just give it more time". You can do better.

You can, however, greatly reduce it. That would be good enough.

This is so true, yet so totally besides the point.

Everything about fancy hotel bathrooms is a usability nightmare. Sometimes there are two showers (hand-held and ceiling-mounted) operated by a single lever which sets temperature, pressure, and which of the two showers is active. The risk of giving yourself a too hot or too cold burst is significant. I usually cower into a corner while sloooooowly messing with that lever.

For an extra bonus: You usually have three identical looking small bottles with 'shampoo', 'conditioner', and 'shower gel' only distinguished by a tiny label, something like black-on-brown or yellow-on-white. Good luck if you are wearing glasses.

Indeed. I hope posting jokey papers on the Arxiv does not become a thing.

Can you recreate all phenomena computationally? Could you replace the antenna of your radio or mobile phone with a special CPU? Could you bomb a country with CPUs? I don't think so.

We DO have PB-grade storage facilities and they lack full AI. Moving the memory inside a single box instead of having interconnected devices is not going to bring AI just like that.

I wonder if there isn't some fundamental misunderstanding here. What if it's not "just the neurons". If you found a Regency TR-1 radio you could wonder "how can this 4-transistor device produce a continuous stream of music, much like Spotify, which requires billions of transistor to run?". Of course, the radio also has an antenna, which is a completely different device than a transistor.

The device running Spotify may also have an antenna, but I hope you get the analogy. My analogy is not meant to be taken faithfully, so that we need to start looking for antennas now instead of neurons. I am just saying that maybe the neuron-counting game is not the only thing. Maybe there is something else -- not magical, not divine, but physical and as-of-yet unknown. Humanity didn't always know everything, and maybe still doesn't.

You also don't have to worry about owning anything that is, you know, useful in any way.

Agreed, if there were sleeper trains available. But finding a sleeper trains from A to B is much harder than finding a plane from A to B.

In this case the game is not building 'electric airplanes' but 'better batteries'. If you have the power plant at a reasonable power output / weight building the airplane is not such a challenge.

Additionally, I can find 6am flights, which means that I can be at 8am at the destination and have a full day ahead of me. By train the whole day will be dedicated to travel. Same on the return. Losing 2/3 days on a business trip is a big cost to pay.

There is one aspect where flying beats trains: checking luggage. If you have big suitcases it's a PITA to get them on and off the train. And changing trains means taking the bags with you, unlike flights where bags are (usually) transferred.

If only. There's a nice flat-earth documentary on Netflix. Some scientifically-minded flat-earthers designed and carried out not one but two experiments to "prove" the earth is flat. Both of them came conclusively on the side that the earth is not flat, but is quasi-spherical with a radius and rotation rate consistent with the scientific consensus. Remember, these experiments were on their own terms. They repeated them several times and they declared them "inconclusive". This is not someone you can convince by any means.