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Underrated reasons to be thankful V (dynomight.net)
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> 21. That every expression graph built from differentiable elementary functions and producing a scalar output has a gradient that can itself be written as an expression graph, and furthermore that the latter expression graph is always the same size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it’s possible to fit very large expression graphs to data. > 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs. Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?
Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality. I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.
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> Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. I wonder if you've misunderstood the point. Offspring are expected to be less fit on average because -things can go wrong- (mutations, birth defects, etc). But selection is a counterweight to this.
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Seemed to me that the author was referring to regression to the mean, as another commenter noted. De novo mutations have a negative effect, to be sure, but it is extremely weak on an individual level. In parents who are extraordinary, the effect of regression to the mean is going to be 20x to 40x stronger than the effect of de novo mutations. For instance, if you have two parents who are both 195cm tall, the regression penalty might be 4cm, whereas the mutation penalty would be somewhere in the millimeters, so a statistically average child would be ~190.9cm. If both parents are statistically average, there'd be no regression penalty and only a vanishingly small mutation penalty.
This whole thing reads strange. I’m not thankful for any of the presented reasons to be thankful.
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Not even cardamom?
I found this to be a disturbing read. Do not recommend.
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Same. Not quite sure what it was going for.
Oh, that's just trivia about the contingent universe. You wouldn't say it was impossible for Carthage to have conquered Rome, would you? It just didn't, by chance, happen.
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I assume the contingent universe is where my existence happens and thus a potential thankfulness should be placed on. I'm for example not gonna be thankful we're not in a higher-dimension universe, because my experience would likely be unfathomably different and things might look very different from there. As history shows, Rome did win, so I wonder just how you imagine Carthage could have won? Should they just have "tried harder"? (i imagine they did what was possible) Was there another universe where the first apes that would later become Carthagians found more bananas, thus had higher population and resources and won this way? Honestly curious how you set the rules of this counterfactual history :D
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Although maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_collapse is real! I remember that Gödel may have thought so?
LinkedIn is loud, and corporate is hell (ramones.dev)
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I hadn't used linkedin for over a year, so I recently deleted it. It used to be useful as a kind of phone book/rolodex; but they pivoted somewhere, and I'm not sure why I hadn't deleted it sooner.
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The solution, as always, is doing more of what you want to see in the world. Maintain a personal blog and post more from the heart.
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> post more from the heart The linkedin cringe comes from this place.
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For me LinkedIn is the employee/colleague phone book. And like every phone book, it’s more ad filler each year.
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I really enjoy their daily games.
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> How do these people stay motivated to do anything. I have no idea.
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I only maintain a profile on LinkedIn because it is standard and expected. But I never open the website except when I get notification maybe on important message or to update significant part. I don't read posts or anything else. I even block the website on my AdGuard Home instance and added it to kagi seach blocked sites. I don't see any reason why would I try to engage with people there. And that's even before LLMs, they just made it much worse.
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LinkedIn needs to be burned to the ground.
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So delete your account. I just got hired. Can confirm LinkedIn is irrelevant if you have a reference.
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"Your LinkedIn profile URL (required):"
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HR is lazy. Do you want to work in a company where HR is lazy to even work?
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Don't have the luxury to pick.
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Just link to Reddit/r/LinkedinLunatics and lean back
Is there some legitimate thing people are doing on LinkedIn that the crap is getting in the way of? One can make a profile and (thought it’s terrible for this) search for jobs without ever scrolling the feed. If you don’t like it just don’t use it. It feels like complaining that the strip bar has alcohol and nudity everywhere, why are you there?
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I only use LinkedIn when im looking for a job or information from people I know. Or asking good people if they're looking. Unfortunately I tend to miss people reaching out to me because I dont check it otherwise.
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Haha, you're absolutely right. But the kind of thing he's complaining about is on HN too. "Why the Cloudflare outage should never have happened" and so on and so forth. Everyone has wisdom to share but somehow they're never equivalently successful. "As a third-year student in Computer Science at the University of Tzatziki, I would never use unwrap, I'd use expect, so then the error log that I skipped over would be accurate..." blahblahblah
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Small business it actually can be a meaningful way to refer people digitally and make business connections. I think big business it's also a way of keeping in contact with former colleagues so that when you're interested in jumping to another company you can do it easily in one place. Otherwise it's a place for sales people to pump out garbage posts.
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I think it's more just a bizarre platform for us to gawk at. I'm not really certain why LinkedIn even has social features available if it's purporting to be a professional space and especially a professional space that is going to be your first impression for a new job prospect. Maybe having a loud profile is a positive to some sorts of recruiters but posting anything beside resume information on that site just seems like a guaranteed malus on future prospects. Even if you'd like to run a live blog on some project you're working on as a sort of portfolio - do it on a platform you have full control of in case you want to rescind it or modify it later.
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> gawk at Exactly this, it’s just another outgrowth of the attention economy, and I assume there is a payoff for many people or they would not be engaged with the platform. I assume part of that is purely for the attention, but part of it must be remunerative from a professional standpoint as well. The lines get blurry fast in influencer spaces. What is work, what is personal, what is even real, and how much does any of that matter as long as you are getting attention?
LinkedIn has always been as if HR and PR agreed on a post.
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I wish LinkedIn was that good. In my eyes LinkedIn has become "Facebook but with resumes" - I accept that I should have a profile on there for resume visibility but there are so many features built into that site that just should not exist and so many genuinely valuable things around job seeking they could do that they're simply not. It's an excellent example of a product that could be massively improved by just removing things - look back to early linkedIn days where their email notifications actually meant there was likely something relevant that you care about there. Now they've created a platform where the valuable is buried in piles of irrelevant slop.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Physicists drive antihydrogen breakthrough at CERN (phys.org)
If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, which skips the whole inefficient part of making antimatter.
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> a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, What form of power and through what principle?
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Miniature black holes would just evaporate. Antimatter wouldn't.
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Depends. Do we know how to obtain a miniature black hole?
AI CEO – Replace your boss before they replace you (replaceyourboss.ai)
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The free version of Gemini says it could not replace the CEO of JP Morgan Chase but that it would make an excellent Chief Risk Officer or Chief Strategist. That would still save a ton of money!
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lol fun satire and totally true true for the bigger companies the incentive for the board is to replace the excess too.
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Ah fun enough I wrote a post just about that https://open.substack.com/pub/defragzone/p/ceo-is-obsolete?r=7n2a9&utm_medium=ios
Easier in what way? I’d say this wouldn’t fare better than other recent AI implementations. I.e. I’d guess doing this in practice with current state of the AI and without expert supervision would lead to some catastrophic error relatively soon.
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managerial roles are information-based , while we are far from automating a multi-faceted physical-world-facing role such as a plumber or a cook
Thank you brand new account, your contributions so far have clearly been more valuable!
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1. This account was created months ago. 2. This doesn’t seem like a very polite or valuable contribution either.
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...and you haven't contributed anything in those months. You went from one one-sentence-long comment months ago straight into criticising what other people contribute in this thread. Do you think that's fair of you?
There is an amount of people who own, well, in the past we could say "means of production" but let's not. So, they own the physical capital and AI worker-robots, and this combination produces various goods for human use. So they (the people who own that stuff) trade those goods between each other since nobody owns the full range of production chains. The people who used to be hired workers? Eh, they still own their ability to work (which is now completely useless in the market economy) and nothing much more so... well, they can go and sleep under the bridge or go extinct or do whatever else peacefully, as long as they don't try to trespass on the private property, sanctity and inviolability of which is obviously crucial for the societal harmony. So yeah, the global population would probably shrink down to something in the hundreds millions or so in the end, and ironically, the economy may very well end up being self-sustainable and environmentally green and all that nice stuff since it won't have to support the life standards of ~10 billions, although the process of getting there could be quite tumultous.
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That is more or less what I fear. If the top 10 percent already account for half of all consumer spending, and I equality keeps getting worse and worse, that's probably where it will end.
Probably why Elon etc want to replace militaries with drones. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2024/11/25/elon-musk-criticized-the-f-35-called-for-armed-drones-instead/
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Not a lot of difference between an F-35 and a fleet of drones when it comes to it tbh. If F-35s are not enough then I don't see how drones will fare better. IMO drones are just a way for Elon to get his foot in the door.
Cherry gives up German production and wants to sell core division (heise.de)
Deindustrialization isn't fun. Don't worry, some of us have been down that road. Sincerely, the American Rust Belt
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Birmingham moved to China
> There are bunch of things that are only manufactured in Germany. You don’t hear those companies that much because they are not public but they are well known by the people who work in specific industries. There is small town of 35,000 inhabitants around the corner from where I live. It produces 50% of the world's surgical equipment, from a base of around 600 companies. There are good reasons why "made in Germany" is not as dead as some people want us to believe.
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Mannheim?
I did not even mention energy prices in my post. But it is a basic truth that high energy prices reduce the competitiveness of industry. >and they just announced dirt cheap industry prices Any person who thinks that this is any more than a figleaf lacks basic economic understanding. Where does the German government get money? From German industry . The industry price is a tax break. But you are also right, just continuously talking about the price of energy is another way to avoid talking about the structural issues. Lack of cost competitiveness does not just come from differences in the price of electricity. The hard truth is that the Chinese are very good at manufacturing. Even for high quality products. For decades they have only gotten better and have taken over more and more industries, they did this by being cheaper and better, while also innovating. The future of the German industry depends on rising to that challenge and actually being able to stay better than the Chinese. If you work somewhere in German industry, a phrase you are going to hear is "so haben wir das immer schon gemacht" (this is the way we have always done this) and you will find an institutional unwillingness, from the management down to the staff, to engage in radical change, to try new things and to embrace new technologies. This protects German industry from fads, which quickly fade, but it also means that it is always at risk of drastically falling behind when it comes to genuinely superior ways of working.
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You didn't mention it, but it was mentioned somewhere else and is a typical response. My main point is that these things are complex and can't really be reduced to a simple sentence. As for the electricity itself, most countries have cheap electricity because of subsidies. The issue with German "high" electricity price was never that it was truly high, it was that the actual cost was on the actual bill. This is typically not true. I don't work in the industry, but I agree with this assessment. I don't want to reduce all Germans to a stereotype, but I agree there is just a lot of inertia and being successful because it used to be successful. Like e.g. Intel, and it will eventually run out. The whole Europe reminds of the tired part in that wired vs tired meme. People live a good life, which is good, but it makes them want to strive to preserve that. So no wonder they trust their fortunes to someone like Friedrich Merz, a bean counter, whose biggest accomplishment in life was that he submitted a tax report on a "Bierdeckel". That's not the way to go forward. One of the last worldwide relevant things coming out of Germany was the Energiewende, yet many people outright reject it because it interferes with their comfort and the way it used to be done. But in reality either by luck or genius, completely nailed it and was the first in creating a completely new world. But then nothing.
>Their people are still transitioning from agrarian hardship to urban factory life, and there seems to be a zeal that comes with this transition, a willingness to work hard for what here today would be considered little. You don't find hordes of Chinese peasants in their dark factories. Do you think that JLCPCB offer such prices because they have 2000000 lowly paid machinists drilling the pcb holes manually? China invests in all kinds of automation like crazy
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Yes! China invests heavily in the future. Automation, technology, better processes, you name it. This is exactly what Cherry did NOT do. Now we see the end results.
Well, there's Gateron and Keychron.. But from what I gather Cherry still are considered the choice if you want longevity.
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Cherry are more expensive than the rest but honestly I didn’t love the feeling of their keys. To be fair I was after a particular feel of very clicky keys. For longevity I don’t feel the need to really differentiate between 100,000 actuations and like 500,000. Both are long enough and I don’t mind replacing the switches in a few years because let’s face it, it can be fun to try some of the new stuff and switching things up.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Why Strong Consistency? (brooker.co.za)
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The argument seems to rely on the point that the replicas are only valuable if you can send reads to them, which I don't think is true. Eventually-consistent replicated databases are valuable on their own terms even if you can only send traffic to the leader.
I don't understand this article and It's like the author doesn't really know what they're talking about. They don't want eventual consistency, they want read-your-writes, a consistency level that's stronger than EC yet still not strong. https://jepsen.io/consistency/models/read-your-writes Read-your-writes is indeed useful because it makes code easier to write: every process can behave as if it was the only one in the world, devs can write synchronous code, that's great ! But you don't need strong consistency. I hope developers learn a little bit more about the domain before going to strong consistency.
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I am not an expert, but from the examples in the article I think the author is looking for a bit more than read-your-writes. E.g. They mention reading a list of attachements and want to ensure they get all currently created attachements, which includes the ones created by other processes. So they want to have "read-all-writes" or something like that.
Again - the viewer rarely cares when that happens Minor annoyance, maybe, rage quit the application? Not a chance.
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Your users must be very different from the ones I'm familiar with.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Memories of .us (computer.rip)
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I had a us local domain back in the early 90s, back when uucp still ruled!
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It did always make me really annoyed they didn’t deprecate .gov, .edu and .mil and transition to moving those under .us (as .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us). Having them as basically US-only just reeks of American exceptionalism which most of the world finds very distasteful.
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I wonder if some anti-“west” military alliances are eligible to get their own .int just like nato.int
My school didn't have a domain name or even an email address, or even an internet connection. I think it had 1 or 2 BBC Micros though. I remember playing a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Funny how memory works - I assumed I'd remember nothing as so long ago, but remember sitting in the room playing that game now, can't remember why I could though (why I had free access).
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> a game where you had to fire a cannon (choose angle and power) and hit something. Scortched Earth?
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Or one of its predecessors, Tanx.
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Based on the age of the bbc micro, no way it was scorched earth, tanx seems likely (I think it was 3d tanx? I have a vague memory of seeing this in a vintage collection)
> Technically speaking, the top of the DNS tree, the DNS root, is a null label referenced by a trailing dot. It's analogous to the '/' at the beginning of POSIX file paths. "gatech.edu" really should be written as "gatech.edu." to make it absolute rather than relative I have never seen this, but I just tried it and it seems like browsers, even today will happily handle such URLs. Neat!
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Some browsers (and web servers, proxies, and other things) treat "example.com" and "example.com." differently for various things, like the default limit of per-domain parallel connections. See for instance https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-dot/
Subdivided geographic TLDs are still common in Ontario govts, such as gov.on.ca [1] and tdsb.on.ca for Toronto schools.[2] Both are still in common use. [1] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3Agov.on.ca&r=ca&sh=lUDz_I8Uq7eG53rKLL9ssg [2] https://kagi.com/search?q=site%3ATDSB.on.ca&r=ca&sh=jysEnEgZsxcTI_o6qK-_uQ
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Freenet.Hamilton.on.ca got me online in the early days! I recall a rather tech-savvy teacher struggling to write his school-board provided email address for students to submit some assignments to. Was something reasonable until the @firstclass.schoolname.xyzdsb.city.on.ca or some related silliness
Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year (reuters.com)
In spain he pays more than that on average, and only gets €0.04 for sold KWH. If it was one-to-one credit offset, as you have in Canada, it would certainly be very profitable.
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So then just use most of your power during the day and you’re better off than Canada. It’s not hard to use heavy power appliances only during the day.
pvXchange, but they're €23 because you fucked up the math: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preisindex/ €12 would be 44× cheaper (7000/6000/(12/450) ≈ 44). Maybe in a couple of years.
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I assumed 7k installed, so roughly half for the panels. So how many do you need to buy to get that €23 price?
We got roof top solar 1.5 years ago in Canada. Payoff will be 6-7 years, but we got an interest free loan to cover it. So we’ll just pay what we would have for power for those years ~$1000 a year, then we’ll have free power for 20 more, saving something like $20,000 for $0 investment.
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Where in Canada?
> averaging power over 15 minute chunks, and taking the worst one of a year. What an interesting metric. Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) provide enough smoothing to, like, halve this peak number? You could rig it to not even output energy until you are beyond the current year's peak usage... How much money would you save this way? I just feel this number is so prone to small mistakes (grandma plugs in the wrong things at the wrong times) and hacks (like the above) that the relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate. > market rate price of the energy in each 15 minute chunk separately I am currently on a plan with 5 minute market rates, can buy and sell in (sell prices can go negative - as can buy, actually), all automated. At least I feel we am working with the grid, not against it, and we make a small net profit (before depreciation).
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It's legacy tactics; against the hacking the comparable thing for internet connections has historically been iirc 5 minute chunks and then taking the 95th percentile (like, charging not the highest, but the one 5% away from the highest). Not sure about the 5 min aggregation tbh. The 15 minute chunks are due to the German and much of the European grid market being in that chunk size.
> relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate. It's still much closer to the real costs for the grid operator than $/kWh. The fundamental problem that rooftop solar has revealed is that people think they are paying for the electricity, but they are not. Electricity is dirt cheap. Most of what they are paying for is the maintenance of the grid, and simple usage based billing crushes the system because of freeloader problem once rooftop solar is added. Long term, the likely thing you pay for will be the size of the main fuse that connects you to the grid. Because that's the thing that scales with the costs you impose on the operator.
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Actually the local cost is not the fuse size, but how much smaller the first transformer after you could be if you weren't there. Though it's often more fair to determine such for each user; then take those as a relative scale, then split the transformer's actual TCO by the determined share sizes between the users. Because the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size, which is lower as they won't use it peak at the same time.
> Wouldn't even a very cheap and small battery (definitely small enough to keep inside an appartment) Like namibj mentioned, this does not apply for residential contracts.
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I don't think it's necessarily impossible to get that billing model as a household; it's just not an interesting one to have as it's not competitive for the usage patterns of a household.
Most people aren’t interested in being responsible for their own electrical generation. Especially with payback still being on the order of decades
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Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar systems (for reference there are almost 11 million dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery installations exist so far according to these stats: https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-installation-postcode-data Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.
Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (qualcomm.com)
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While we are at Snapdragon processors ... Does anyone know what (not so technical-)user friendly distro runs without too many issues on a Snapdragon 850? I found Mobian listing Snapdragon 845, but I don't know at all, if that is almost the same or not compatible at all.
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How does it compare to Apple ARM M series and did they slap on a decent GPU? If not, they still got a long way to go...
The drivers, while impressively reverse-engineered, are basically alpha-quality by Linux standards. Even well-studied M1 machines will have spotty support in comparison to what an OEM can provide officially.
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Those that are implemented have been very reliable in my experience, I think that labeling them “alpha-quality by Linux standards” is a ridiculous claim
How does Fedora handle the graphics and audio when running under hypervisor? Or is it strictly a command-line thing?
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I'm using both fedora desktop and fedora kde and they look entirely normal, graphical desktops. i suspect (haven't verified) the UTM app wrapper is presenting access to the underlying Metal framework etc, so Fedora thinks its running on normal devices about which it already knew. I didn't have to do _anything_ weird: just grabbed the latest Fedora iso for aarch64 ( or arm64...i forget what it was named), and voila.
what's the battery life like? do you use macos at all, or do you do ~everything within a full-screened fedora instance?
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battery life seems totally fine. i believe the benefit over Asahi, for example, is that by using Apple Silicon hypervisor and the UTM macos app wrapping such, low level device drivers (including power management) are still Apple implementations.
Does Israel has access to this website ? Does the USA ?
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Are you stupid, or just pretending? Qualcomm is the USA, how do you imagine Qualcomm blocking access from the USA? Leaving aside the fact, that Israel is USA's ally, Palestine-Israel is quite different from Ukraine-russia. In his pre-SVO speech putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all. It's not even a nazi vibe, it's straight nazi ideology. russians burn Ukrainian books, destroy Ukrainian museums. All on purpose... Israel, OTOH, has >20% Arabic population, all free to speak their language, to celebrate their culture and even to practice their religion. We can discuss and condemn many terrible things Israel does, but it's not even in the same ballpark with russia... comrade.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Quake Engine Indicators (fabiensanglard.net)
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Always awesome content from Fabien Sanglard! +1 Quake 1/Quakeworld gladly live on! I'm a big fan for many years so I always encourage anybody to try it. [0] Still one of the best FPS ever built imho. The community [1] keeps on improving the game and infrastructure and we can now even spectate games straight through the browser without having to download anything. [2] [0] Download free (and legal) at https://nquake.com [1] EU Discord: http://discord.quake.world | US Discord: http://discord.usquake.world [2] Check out the "Web QTV" links at https://hub.quakeworld.nu
Are you sure it’s not meant to be an RJ45 plug? The cylindrical thing to the bottom left corner of the wall socket looks like it might be a BNC plug. Which would make sense for the era of quake when Ethernet wasn’t yet ubiquitous.
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RJ45 next to BNC implies a token ring network, not ethernet :)
The turtle/tortoise note is correct for UK English, but in the US (where Id software was headquartered during the development of Quake), tortoises are considered a subset of "turtles". Per Webster: > Turtle (noun): any of an order (Testudines synonym Chelonia) of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine reptiles that have a toothless horny beak and a shell of bony dermal plates usually covered with horny shields enclosing the trunk and into which the head, limbs, and tail usually may be withdrawn.
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> Trivia: The icon doesn't actually depict a turtle but a tortoise. A turtle swims in the water while a tortoise walks on land. Turtles walk on land, too. All turtles are tortises? /s
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