thinkski

There’s a continuous tension between capacity and load. We’ve been fortunate that technology (and untapped resources) have largely placed capacity above load for much of our lifetimes. Spare capacity tends to be followed by an increase in load. Remains to be seen if technology advances can keep capacity above load. If not, load will decrease, either gradually or drastically, one way or another.

It’s really a restatement of supply and demand. Prices that are free to respond to an imbalance between the two keep the two in balance. Prices have been low for a long time because capacity has been high / load has been low. As load increases faster than capacity, expect prices to increase,

In embedded systems, space can be a premium (e.g. a recent project has 75MB for a rootfs). With C++, need to link to libstdc++ and libc, with C only need libc.

I find a number of developers reach for C++ because they aren’t comfortable with C or low-level development. For instance, will copy memory into a std::vector or std::string just to use the STLs search functions where a simple finite state machine would be more appropriate. I also find a correlation between C developers having a better understanding of things like file descriptors, poll/select/epoll for an event loop, while a C++ developer is more likely to use std::thread and then have to deal with proper locking.

Working in a constrained environment, I like C exactly because it “does less”. It’s more explicit, simpler, hides less behind abstractions in practice.

What is the origin of genuine choice?

Unfortunate that the truck was at an angle — much of radar likely bounced off to the right rather than returning back. The color of the truck provided little contrast, probably wasn’t resolved by the sensor, which has a dynamic range of 115dB, low compared to ~160dB of human eye, and 1MP (before debayering), again low compared to human eye at the center of vision.

Does make me wonder what we’re building today that will last. I suppose the engineers who worked on Voyager or Pathfinder have the best shot of having built something enduring.

It’s also an inconvenient idea. For instance, how can one be guilty of a crime if one had no choice in committing it? Why try at anything if you have no choice — everything that will happen was decided at the universe’s origin and is merely playing out. It’s nihilism to the extreme.

Then again, the quantum idea of true randomness isn’t much better — if human choice stems from a coin flip, can you really call it a conscious choice?

The scientific method and human free will rely on a possible fiction of choice that is neither 100% deterministic, nor 100% random.

Feature idea: bundle a webring, so when viewing one paper website can get connected to others.

Software updates have also been longer and more frequent. Wonder how many people have died because their phone was updating when they needed to call 911.

Post it in a Hacker News comment.

Perhaps look at it another way: each of your actions and thoughts influences people today, who influence people tomorrow, and so on — your legacy lives on within the state space of humanity (same as you are a vessel for the legacy of those before you).

We live in a chaotic system — each action echos through the rest of time (and quite possibly is a deterministic echo of the past).

Thomas Jefferson had similar thoughts, a “tyranny of the majority”. Say 1 in 100 people are doctors. People are tired of paying doctors and want care for free. They put it to a vote. 99 vote to force doctors to work for free. Democracy triumphs, but at what cost? This is partly why America was founded as a republic, not a pure democracy.

From the Hacker News guidelines, this appears Off-Topic.

When they say motions of three bodies are random and unpredictable, I assume they mean not able to be modeled with a closed form equation? Seems like the motions would still be entirely deterministic — could still predict the locations of the bodies computationally, given your computer computes faster than reality (at least for a reality with only 3 bodies), no?

I think it comes down to measuring the wrong things. Reminds me of the story where a flight was 30 minutes delayed. Instead of delaying all downstream flights affected by this by 30 minutes, the airline repurposed the plane for a flight that would qualify as on-time. So they had a few customers that were irate rather than a lot that were slightly annoyed. But it was because the metric the airline was evaluated on was percentage of on-time departures — once a flight was late, it didn’t matter how late.

Out of curiosity, how often do violations of open source software licenses result in enforcement (e.g. court case)? Even then, it seems the worse case is a requirement retroactively adhere to the license — monetary penalties seem like they wouldn’t apply to something being given away at no charge anyway, right?

As a independent open source author, if big corp doesn’t abide by my license, am I really going to pay lawyers from my modest savings to sue them so that they abide by my license? Seems there’s a practical asymmetry that makes open source licensing largely theoretical for all but a handful of the biggest projects out there. Of course, I’d very much like to be proven wrong.

Much of Eastern Europe tried this between the 1940s through the late 1980s. The result was blocks upon blocks of cramped, drab apartments with long waiting periods to get one. If you were married, you could get one sooner, which resulted in unhappy marriages. It sounds good in theory, in practice it didn’t work.

Has anyone tried to implement this as a gstreamer plugin?

The same happened with home prices.

Fabrice Bellard is indeed a super-programmer. Amazing how one guy can write ffmpeg, qemu, linmodem, amongst a slew of other useful thing.

Good point! Yes, had assumed storing .tar.gz, but makes sense to then have the code for tar and gzip. What about gcc?

Electronic payment mechanisms reduce friction, making it easy to spend money you wouldn’t otherwise, and lack adequate protections against inadvertent spending. This is why many vendors are happy to eat the 3-5% credit cards and online payment systems take — they make more overall. Guess where that’s coming from.

Easy to blame the parent. Could have give their child cash instead of a debit card. But that’s like the transportation industry building a highway with a massive hole in the middle of it and blaming drivers for driving into it.