917 karma · joined February 15, 2025
It goes further than that, it is the exact argument made by wealthy people as to why we shouldn't tax them more aggressively. Parroting that argument is ludicrous unless you're considerably wealthy yourself.
An organization like Mozilla should take a stance and do the opposite by making their policy as narrow as possible.
This costs more in legal costs, but for an organization that defines itself as a champion of user privacy and control this should be the natural choice.
When rights holders use a pirated version of their work it may be embarrassing, but it certainly doesn't violate copyright law. (Assuming the pirates didn't transform the work in a substantive way)
Basically unlike the U.S. Switzerland doesn't view background checks and permits as a slippery slope to a dictatorship and implements them effectively.
Those are fair questions that I don't have the answers to. I share your suspicion that a larger number of people have received a high school education and that in absolute terms more people are educated than ever. That is why I do not think it is the reason why there's been a decline in critical thinking.
> You bring up "the replacement of newspapers that invite critical thinking by yellow journalism" as if the term Yellow Journalism wasn't literally used to critique one of the major US newspapers over a century ago.
Correct, and it seems we have regressed back to those days. I do believe the post-war period was an enlightened era in journalism where the press went from a vehicle for propaganda to an independent institution.
We eventually traced it down to a small for loop that added 0.5 to double members in an anonymous struct. For some reason these three factors: an anonymous struct, double datatypes and a for loop caused those member variables to become uninitialized.
We extracted this code into a small code sample to make it easily reproducible and reported it to Microsoft. Their compiler team called it one of the most helpful reports they'd gotten and confirmed it was a bug in their for-loop vectorization code. The compiler appeared to have messed up the SIMD instructions to write the results of the addition back to memory.
On top of that social media has put people in echo chambers and force fed them outrage content. People who are outraged and surrounded by peers who are also outraged are less likely to think critically.
I personally think that the replacement of newspapers that invite critical thinking by yellow journalism and social media has had a more significant effect on critical thinking than the drop in education quality.
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/propos...
The gist of it is that graphics APIs like DX11 were designed around the pipelines being compiled in pieces, each piece representing a different stage of the pipeline. These pieces are then linked together at runtime just before the draw call. However the pieces are rarely a perfect fit requiring the driver to patch them or do further compilation, which can introduce stuttering.
In an attempt to further reduce stuttering and to reduce complexity for the driver Vulkan did away with these piece-meal pipelines and opted for monolithic pipeline objects. This allowed the application to pre-compile the full pipeline ahead of time alleviating the driver from having to piece the pipeline together at the last moment.
If implemented correctly you can make a game with virtually no stuttering. DOOM (2016) is a good example where the number of pipeline variants was kept low so it could all be pre-compiled and its gameplay greatly benefits from the stutter-free experience.
This works great for a highly specialized engine with a manageable number of pipeline variants, but for more versatile game engines and for most emulators pre-compiling all pipelines is untenable, the number of permutations between the different variations of each pipeline stage is simply too great. For these applications there was no other option than to compile the full pipeline on-demand and cache the result, making the stutter worse than before since there is no ability to do piece-meal compilation of the pipeline ahead of time.
This gets even worse for emulators that attempt to emulate systems where the pipeline is implemented in fixed-function hardware rather than programmable shaders. On those systems the games don't compile any piece of the pipeline, the game simply writes to a few registers to set the pipeline state right before the draw call. Even piece-meal compilation won't help much here, thus ubershaders were used instead to emulate a great number of hardware states in a single pipeline.
If you're a business or a professional then certainly HDDs provide you with more recovery opportunities.
However for a business like blackblaze that specializes in data storage, recovering data from an HDD is probably more reliable. After all, in the case of a complete failure recovering data from the platters inside the HDD is more likely to succeed than recovering data from the memory chips inside the SSD.