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CountSessineon Lua, a Misunderstood Language

That makes a lot sense. History is a path-dependent function, I guess. Interesting that it was a data description language - in that context, 1-based indexing really would be called for, although maybe flexible indexing like Pascal’s would be even better.

CountSessineon Lua, a Misunderstood Language

Djikstra argued in favour of 0-based indexing and against 1-based indexing. Let’s just agree that if you’re arguing for 1-based indexing, you’d better have a pretty fantastic argument.

I think for FORTRAN or Julia, using 1-based indexing is a good idea, because most mathematical algorithms are written in notation using 1-based indices. As someone who spent a semester debugging subtle off-by-one errors and small differences in results in his scientific computing classes because I foolishly opted for C rather than FORTRAN, understand that converting algorithms with nested summations and integrators from one convention to another is painful.

Lua should never have used 1-based indexing because it was meant to interface with C code which itself will have data structures that use 0-based indexing. Writing lua extensions for wireshark, for example, is incredibly painful just because of this.

CountSessineon U.S. jobless numbers surge as worsening Covid-19 pandemic hurts businesses

The economy as measured by GDP and unemployment was doing really well up until 2020 and Covid. And stock prices represent the present value of future earnings - if you believe that we'll see a reversion to the mean after Covid (and we will), why would you expect SPX to tank?

CountSessineon Intel is dying and we can’t save it

Intel is not just about CPU's.

Intel is ABSOLUTELY just about CPUs. I can’t think of a single thing that they produce that I would ever pay them money for other than CPUs, especially if they aren’t relevant in the CPU world anymore. Intel has tried to get into so many other markets over the years, but the company’s culture and the nature of their high margin, high R&D business made it impossible to compete in those other markets.

Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it.

That’s a very different market with very different margins. If they shrank so much that they became like Maxim or something, then that’s really not much different than going out of business altogether.

CountSessineon Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga is less than half an inch thick

Just thinking about this for a minute, maybe 16:9 panels are cheaper because they're more efficient to cut from the mother-glass? If the mother-glass is some compatible multiple of 16:9 in order to cut full-size (40" and above) TV's from, maybe cutting 16:10 14" laptop displays from it wastes more glass than cutting 16:9 14" displays from it?

At any rate, it seems like we all agree that 16:9 is a rubbish aspect ratio for a laptop screen. I can't wait for Lenovo to release a 16:10 version of my X1 extreme.

CountSessineon Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga is less than half an inch thick

I thought the 16:10 plague was because TV's were typically made in that aspect ratio and therefore it was cheaper to use the same panels in a laptop.

I've been told this too, but just how many 14" TVs does the consumer electronics industry sell in a year? And compared to laptops? It's hard to believe that laptop sales don't completely dwarf this weird niche 14" TV market.

CountSessineon My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions

That’s a bit strange though, don’t you think? TCP state only lives in the endpoints, unless you have something awful like NAT in between. Without NAT, why are keepalives a basic requirement for persistent connections?

CountSessineon Intel Talks with TSMC, Samsung to Outsource Some Chip Production

Stink or otherwise, they are actually very desperate!

CountSessineon Electric cars make up 54% of cars sold in Norway in 2020

I'm not even sure that it was an attempt to limit their appeal. There's a whole generation of old car executives who still think that anyone who would want an electric car is some sort of hippie-moonbat and you need to make the car look like a plastic sex-toy space capsule to appeal to that moonbat market.

And then Tesla comes along with great engineering and a more conservative body design and eats their lunches.

CountSessineon EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

Enhancing China’s CPU tech even a single generation is in the EU’s interest in exactly 0 alternate universes, along with this one.

As long as the US has the world’s only reserve currency and as long as the EU economy - especially the productive bit in the North - is built on exporting to the all-powerful US consumer, the EU has very little leverage in its affairs with the US.

CountSessineon Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

Except that the spooks failed even when it came to unseating Noriega because they had to call in the military to stage an invasion.

The only two cases that I’m aware of where the US clandestinely toppled a foreign government were Chile and Iran - and apparently even the Iranian operation was mostly driven by the British secret service. And by all accounts, Chile was more of a nudge than a push.

CountSessineon How Apple’s rivals plan to catch up with the M1 chip

Honestly how hard is it to port software to ARM? Electron apps just work, .NET just works and Java does too. So does every language that isn't C/C++. And even on the C/C++ side, unless you are doing some funky things I doubt it's more effort than adding a release configuration that targets ARM in the build pipeline.

In my C/C++ experience - it’s a big push that a software company would just rather not make. Even if you already have an ARM SKU for a different OS, all sorts of things can cause trouble. If you’re coding in C/C++, you’re probably pretty interested in performance and you’ll have a lot of hand tuned assembly and/or SIMD operations, and that can be a big pain to port, especially with different compilers and intrinsics.

I can only imagine the conversations that go on at Adobe or Autodesk or others when debating new platforms and SKUs. Given that even Microsoft wasn’t committed enough to ARM Windows to make a x64 emulator for it probably worked against this.

CountSessineon How Apple’s rivals plan to catch up with the M1 chip

Exactly. Microsoft and the Windows world is sitting at the top of a very nice, comfortable local maximum, and they’re not willing to make the investment and the commitment to climb down off of that for a while to find a higher maximum.

CountSessineon iPhone factory workers say they haven’t been paid, cause millions in damages

Ah - but that’s funny isn’t it? Some countries actually require local manufacturing as a condition for market access. So they don’t exactly have a free hand here. And Wistron is a fairly well known name and should have been a reliable partner in this enterprise with Apple.

CountSessineon Global chip shortage threatens production of laptops, smartphones and more

This is directly analogous to the buffer bloat problem. Smaller inventories and more responsive suppliers means better communication of intent and supply in the supply chain and therefore greater efficiency and prices. Why are advocates of big redundant inventories willfully ignorant of this?

If we optimize for efficiency, we get supply disruptions every 5 years or so. If we optimize for redundancy, we suffer from higher prices all the time, and delayed availability of all new tech. I don’t know which is worse.

CountSessineon Firefox Was Always Enough

if you care about details (most people don't).

Most people don't care about battery life?

CountSessineon Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

I think if someone really owns this credo - “I’m using the government to improve my life at the expense of someone else’s property rights” - I could maybe respect that? At least it’s consistent.

None of the people I’ve encountered who oppose housing construction seem to see things this way. Most of them seem to be economic conservatives who see themselves as having won a “fair game” and the fact that they’re using the government to strip others of their property rights - rights to build, rights to house - is lost to them. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance and post-hoc rationalization in this group.

CountSessineon Silicon Valley exodus: Bay Area tech companies leaving for Texas

Championing restrictive zoning policies. They got theirs, and screw everyone else.

CountSessineon Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?

I grew up in the 80's too. What you say is very very dependent on your service area. I have fantastic coverage where I live, but I live in a big city. I've never had a problem with initiating a call on my mobile. It's likely my operator has done a better job of pico-celling my area than yours has. You might consider switching.

I got fast busy tones several times a year back in the 80's, and it usually corresponded to whenever a concert was announced. Maybe my phone company back then was as bad as your mobile services company is now?

CountSessineon Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?

"Easily fix" is relative though. It was never a majority of car owners that fixed their own cars. I would never have maintained a thousand-dollar toolbox to fix and maintain my car - not then and not now. I'm just not mechanically inclined. For us, there's no difference - we need to take the car in to be serviced either way. The complexification of automobile engineering has disenfranchised a small minority of car owners. But for the rest of us, we just don't need to bring the car in for servicing as much. It's a huge win for the majority.

CountSessineon Why are new devices dependent on the Internet but made with little forethought?

I don't think I've ever heard a fast-busy signal from my cell phone, even once. But it happened lots with landlines when too many people were making local telephone calls. Circuit switched networks kind of suck in a lot of ways. I don't think I would say traditional phone systems were as reliable as modern telephone and data systems.

CountSessineon The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

Possibly - although if your suppliers have operating margins that are as wide as yours, or wider, it might actually make sense to just buy them and take those earnings for yourself. I wonder how many of Ford's suppliers have an operating margin as wide as Ford's 5%?

CountSessineon The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

Read some 10-Qs for some big companies sometime. You might be surprised. Like I said - S&P 500 average operating margin was 10.53% a couple of years ago. And that’s crazy high - probably because of pharma stocks and the US’ dysfunctional generic drug regulation.

CountSessineon The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

When someone is beating you, the least you can do is copy them. We could start by copying German worker councils (unions) - but no one in management or labour here wants that. Labour hates company unions and still dreams of building labour monopolies like they had in the 60’s and that’s exactly what worker councils were designed to prevent. And managers want to be able to bust unions which isn’t legally allowed with worker councils.

So I guess not?

CountSessineon The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system

The average operating margin for the S&P 500 is 10.53% (although that may have been 2018). And economists are worried that even that is high - traditional manufacturers like Ford typically manage operating margins of ~5%. Workers are already getting 95%. And then everything after that like R&D, marketing, and capital amortization has to come out of that 5%. And then finally a bit is left over for earnings for the owners. You’re mistaking wealth for income. Surely the workers could use more wealth, but what we’re discussing is the price of goods and this is operating revenue and income. And workers already get the lions share of this.

If you’re going to make US manufactured goods cost competitive with foreign goods, much of it has to come out of that 95% operating revenue that is operating expenses, most of which will be employee wages. There’s no way around this.

CountSessineon Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses

When they shut down GCP in a couple of years, I wonder what they’ll do with all the addresses?

CountSessineon Canada's 350-year-old department store Hudson's Bay locked out by landlords

I loved Target. As a single dad, I loved the variety of kids clothes they had. They still carried the brands that Zellers did but they had their own from the US too. I was so disappointed when I heard they were leaving. I didn’t believe it at first but sadly it turned out to be true.

CountSessineon Canada's 350-year-old department store Hudson's Bay locked out by landlords

It was a US military study for fighter plane cockpit ergonomics. They had accidentally designed cockpits to be suboptimal for all pilots.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/insight...

CountSessineon Canada's 350-year-old department store Hudson's Bay locked out by landlords

Wow. And, my order for the dumbbells was...cancelled! They sold my item to someone and cancelled my order.

Canadian retail is still such a cluster-f*ck.

CountSessineon Canada's 350-year-old department store Hudson's Bay locked out by landlords

Yeah - it's frustrating how bad Canadian retail is still. I had an experience a few years ago with Canadian Tire where I chose in-store pick-up for an online purchase. The people at the store looked at me like I was from Mars. They didn't have the item in stock, and the manager actually told me that

1. he couldn't refund me because it was two separate computer systems (a lawyer would have told him tough sh*t - you're still the same company), and

2. I should do a credit-card charge-back to get my money back!

It's been years since, and I'm trying them again now. I ordered a set of dumbbells yesterday and ... still no email to come pick up my in-stock dumbbells.

BTW - I have wide feet too. If you're looking for running shoes, ASICS is good (this is the brand I always wear), and I've heard New Balance is pretty wide too. I can't wear Nike or Reebok for this reason.