86 karma · joined December 7, 2017
I doubt Biden would last as President until Inauguration Day.
Thankfully, all signs are pointing to a DJT victory tomorrow! ;-)
This isn't an obstacle, given electric cars and clean electricity generation. As I said elsewhere, nuclear is the only viable answer. Sadly, it has been demonized, and that needs to be reversed.
ThorCon's efforts in Indonesia will be interesting to watch. I'm not sure I like its current plan of siting the reactors like oil platforms in coastal waters though...
The best approach is underground siting, with no or very little water cooling requirement.
That isn't true. With desire and enough money, we could be churning out small modular reactors (SMRs) by the thousands. ThorCon, Nuscale, Terrapower and many others have designs.
In fact, that's my recommendation for the conservatives/populists. Take climate change away as an issue by promoting the only workable plan - a massive shift to nuclear power generation along with "renewables".
Even if global warming isn't an emergency, clean air is a good thing, and so is cheap, plentiful power.
Recent studies show increased snowfall in central Antarctica for instance.
It's entirely possible that global warming has lessened the severity of these droughts. One fallacy of climate alarmists is to never admit that global warming has some positive effects, no matter how few.
If in fact global warming has in effect cancelled the next ice age, that is a giant win!
Never mind that the average wait time to see a doctor in Canada is almost 20 weeks, and that tens of thousands of Canadians cross the border to the US every year to avoid that wait...
There are tradeoffs with everything. Personally I think people should proactively try to live healthier lives - the medical establishment is about making money, not making you healthier.
The other major side benefit of that is our society might be able to afford the overall cost of healthcare - it's not looking too good at the moment!
What offsets that is that ice flows under pressure, so the entire sheet has a tendency to head for the ocean. Things are a bit complicated in Antarctica since some of the landscape where the sheet is grounded is below sea level. There are concerns that the seawater is getting warm enough to cause melting there, increasing the flow rate.
If, in fact, ice sheet mass is increasing, that's great in terms of sea level rise. There's no other way to spin it.
Now it's grown far beyond that, and is acknowledged by its creators as a true, general-purpose language.
One example is its use in real-time robotics:
True, but it's still very far from optimal. For something MUCH closer to optimal, see Rust.
All that said, from a practical standpoint I think Julia is near perfect as both a prototyping and implementation language, with the ability to drop to Rust/C/assembly easily as needed.
High productivity, and C-like performance. That's a sweet spot.
Ha, well the current estimate is that things should be roughly OK for about another billion years, give or take.
It is interesting to reflect that the run of life on Earth is 3/4 (or so) done, though...
> What will it matter to if we all voluntarily go extinct and add another millennia or two or three to the Earth? It will either overheat in a global warming or face eternal freezing when the sun burns out. Why not enjoy the ride while it lasts and allow others to as well.
We'll be in other star systems long before the Earth is uninhabitable...
LOL! I certainly can 'compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues"'.
In the "don't exist" case, there is no possibility of anything good happening.
In the "exist" case, there is a possibility of something good happening.
Easy choice, and that's entirely outside my belief that the human race should continue, thrive, and expand across the stars. Climate change is likely not as severe as the alarmists portray, and is very likely to be solved by market forces. The future is bright!
That reminds me, I want to experiment some with AOT compilation and also the new GC plugins.
Well...my particular interest in these types of languages is primarily in the realm of soft real-time simulation, specifically various kinematic simulations.
Of the three, only Julia is garbage collected, and (unlike some other GC languages) it's fairly easy to not exercise the collector. I'm encouraged that will continue to be the case, since there's an organization using it for robotics, which is implicitly a hard real time use case.
Julia, Swift and Rust are all clearly general purpose languages. Swift is unabashedly general purpose, while Julia and Rust each have a primary niche - math/science and systems, respectively. All three use the excellent LLVM infrastructure.
Aside from determinism (which mainly requires pre-allocating nearly everything), my primary requirements are expressiveness/productivity, readability, and efficient runtime performance.
All three languages produce highly optimized code, and Rust probably has the edge as far as efficiency goes - but it clearly loses on the first two criteria, at least to Julia. If one needs access to machine level functionality in Julia, there's an extremely efficient C FFI, so mixing Rust and Julia (for instance) would be painless if needed.
https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead
It's a great time to be a software developer, and things will only get better as languages and tooling continue to improve!
Up until now I've been focusing on Julia and Swift for projects that can use a new language, as the Rust pain/productivity ratio has looked too high.
Perhaps things are changing...correctness is certainly a worthy goal!
Well, one point of the article is that these days 62% of CEO income is equity, so in most cases the CEO is also an "investor".
It does seem to me that creates a conflict of interest, in that a short-term plan to increase share price may not be in the long-term interests of the company. Yet, the CEO will likely not be around for the long haul and benefits more from short-term thinking.
I'm generally not a fan of Warren, but a good bit of this makes sense to me.
I think the most questionable part is: "At least 75% of directors and shareholders would need to approve before a corporation could make any political expenditures". That is just thrown in there with no explanation, and is likely intended to cripple Republicans by not allowing campaign contributions in almost all cases. That is likely the poison pill that will doom this legislation.
Where do you think most companies get "professional programmers" from, exactly?
Julia's been designed and implemented by some very bright people, and it shows.
Python is rather a mess. Code written in Python can't be sped up without pain/cost, and apparently it will never support concurrency natively. It also suffers from the bane of weakly typed languages, errors at run time instead of compile time.
I think the sweet spot for a language with most of Python's benefits that fixes many of its glaring warts is enormous.
No. Julia is a general purpose language that has so far been mainly focused on scientific and mathematical programming.
It's design is probably least friendly to the real-time programming domain (GC based) but it can apparently be used there as well:
I see an extremely bright future ahead for Julia!
The F-15, F-16, and F-18 are all multi-role aircraft, and are fairly unarguably the world's best in their categories. There's no reason to think the F-35 won't be in the same class.
As to the A-10, I believe the F-35's primary ground support approach will be from pretty high altitude, using smart weapons. That kind of approach will even work against first-tier opponents.
If you need "low and slow" close air support while shooting up the enemy with cannon, the Apache seems a better fit. The AC-130 is somewhere in between...note recent AC-130 variants have been getting longer and longer range weapons to decrease vulnerability to MANPADS.
The F-16 isn't stealthy (terrible in fact), and the F-22 isn't well suited as a strike bomber - its weapon bays are too small.
In fact, the F-35's single engine design works well in providing enough space for weapon bays, while still keeping the aircraft fairly compact.
Consider that javac and the Java runtime have received plenty of resources and development time (since 1995 or so!).
The overhyped claim in the early days of Java was that it would be "faster than C" due to JIT optimizations. That has certainly turned out to not be the case. Further, Java and all the other managed languages (to include the CLR languages) remain unsuitable for real time applications due to GC pauses.
As this article points out, memory consumption for JVM based systems is also usually vastly higher than for C/C++/Rust/Ada.
C++ in particular has been a dumpster fire of a language, and IMO has set the industry back considerably. It's good to see Rust and a few other languages providing much better alternatives in the same space - languages suitable for lean, real time, high performance applications.
I think that's an objectively false statement.
There are many objective metrics by which a programming language may be evaluated. Conciseness, clarity, suitability for realtime applications, and efficiency come to mind.
"It is even possible to "use the best language for the problem"?"
It's certainly possible to use a suitable language for the problem. Some problems are more forgiving than others, of course...
I will say that the idea of a "general purpose" programming language, suitable for most tasks, is a good one. The current multitude of languages, while fun and good for exploring new ideas, is taking a lot of brainpower away from actually producing working systems. Also, I'll claim that there's no reason that most programs shouldn't be written in an efficient language, and in fact there may be a push for that in the name of datacenter efficiency.
It's sad that the most written programming language today is Javascript.
'Past performance doesn't guarantee future results...'
Trump has confounded observers quite a few times now, just sit back, relax, and enjoy... ;-)
"Yes, with the hilariously biased Rasmussen polls. Who the hell uses landlines in 2018? Not the average voter."
Rasmussen also polls those without landlines. One difference from other polls is that Rasmussen polls "likely voters" instead of "adults" like Gallup...
Indeed. President Trump's judicial appointments are also great compared to what we would have had with a HRC victory. Leftists are all about curtailing personal freedom and eroding the Bill of Rights.
I have mostly libertarian positions on things, but I'm pro-military and want border enforcement. I'm generally happy with Trump's policies (note: not so much his behavior).
If Republicans can gain seats in the midterms, and personally I think there's a high probability they will, there's a good chance some real reform will occur in Washington - which is of course the real reason for most of the hysteria regarding President Trump.
By the way, did you happen to see that his overall approval rating hit 50% today...? ;-)
I doubt that. Like it or not, military conflicts (and military confrontations such as the Cold War) have produced many of the technological advances that we enjoy today.
In point of fact the "hundreds of thousands" of useful idiots will eventually come to understand the real world - and in the meantime little will change. The millions of NRA members alone trump them, and NRA membership has just had a significant jump.
"When it's a matter of seconds, the police are only minutes away."
That's what I didn't understand - why the author didn't just use "unsafe". There's nothing intrinsically bad about using "unsafe", you just have to test that code thoroughly. There's plenty of robust C code out there.