Recurecur

Linux should be on it shortly, running in a VM environment.

That won't satisfy the purists, but it should satisfy the practical in most cases.

You might try reading the article. One example was a large software build taking ~25% less time on a 13" MBP than on a 12-core Mac Pro.

I'm curious about FP/vector performance, but I'm pretty sure it's fine. I'm definitely eyeing a MBP myself! 20 hours of video playback? Crazy...

The only known exoplanets are in the Milky Way - we can't yet detect them around the vastly more distant stars of other galaxies, except perhaps in the rarest of circumtances.

As someone who’s actually used the language (sigh) the “hype” around Julia is more excitement about a modern language that’s hitting a broad sweet spot in a unique way.

Julia is a delightful combination of ease of use, clarity, and performance. It lets one concentrate much more on the problem at hand than language related boilerplate (I’m looking at you, Rust).

I’m hopeful that Julia will become one of the most used general purpose programming languages in the long run. It’s certainly got what it takes!

Not enough time. Life on Earth, as we know it, has less than a billion years left.

Now, cockroaches might evolve impressively!

More seriously, humans will soon escape this particular rock, and things will look a LOT different. Smart people are optimistic.

There is a workable, brute-force solution to climate change if needed - orbital sunshades. We'll also have enough energy to supply the galaxy with diamond semiconductor substrates, carbon fiber, nanotubes, buckyballs, and the myriad other useful substances and items made from carbon extracted from the atmosphere. Again, if needed.

Market forces, with a nudge from government, are moving things in the right direction (electric cars, renewables, nuclear power, natural gas). China and India are the main worries at this point, as they have a lot invested in coal at the moment.

We'll have a better idea about negative feedback from existing natural systems over the next few years, there's some reason for optimism there. This is a highly nonlinear system.

This is a very narrow view. I've probably practiced software development longer than almost anyone on this thread - right at 40 years. I'm still a practicing software engineer, doing "enterprisey" software development in Java. Still interesting, lots of challenges, and yes, lots of complexity.

That said, I've done a lot of other things over my career, and one reason it's stayed interesting is the variety. If I wanted a change right now I'd probably look at small embedded systems work.

With all the AI, IOT, scientific, real time control, and robotics software being developed these days, I think there are a lot of interesting directions available!

I'll add a shameless plug for Julia, which I think could become a major general purpose programming language, and which makes for some enjoyable development!

(On the "best use of one's body", I have some sympathy there, but "balance in all things". Or just up your rates and work 32 hour weeks. heh)

Redox looks very interesting. It seems one good approach might be to force new apps and drivers for Redox itself, but provide a VM environment that would run sandboxed Linux and other OS's securely. (Similar to the Qube OS idea.)

That way Redox could offer a considerably improved API and app development environment without worrying about backward compatibility, while being useful as a daily driver in the meantime.

It is pretty much unthinkable from a pride perspective.

Processor IP is Intel's bread and butter.

I think if they do it it's the beginning of irrelevance, really.

What might be more interesting is if Intel became champion of Risc-V...that would be like Microsoft and Linux.

So, I just calculated the orbital speed at 50 km. It came out to 282,378 km/s. The speed of light is 299,792.5 km/s, so we're way into relativistic territory.

Good luck having enough energy to build a structure around it! ha

BTW, regarding "standing" in this gravity field...

If there were a structure to stand on, rather than you being in orbit, the force of gravity would be about 160 billion times the force of gravity on Earth (~1,594,000,000,000 m/s^2).

That's for a 10,000,000 Earth mass black hole at 50 km.

Maybe ships will need laser power . It remains to be seen if near-C travel is at all feasible, due to radiation/erosion from impacting interstellar material. If not, a ship can easily carry its own fuel, it will just be a generation/hibernation ship.

Or, perhaps our extropian descendants won't care about travel time. ;-)

OR, maybe the black hole could power a hyperspace portal or something equally exotic...

Regardless, having a compact object nearby to play with would be fun!

It's not that, it's the difference in the gravity field between two points. On Earth, the gravity field is very close to uniform.

Near a small black hole, the field changes rapidly and is very strong.

It's a "pull" effect, meaning that if you were oriented with your feet towards the object as described by the GP, and 2m tall, your feet would experience 1.6 G more "gravity" than your head. It's a tidal force, literally working to pull you apart (same effect causes tides on Earth).

If you were to fall into the black hole, at some point you'd be "stringified" as that force stretched you into spaghetti shape.

That is how Intel is hanging on...

The problem for Intel is AMD is putting out a clearly better value proposition in the high-margin server space, with single socket systems beating Intel dual socket systems, and other advantages like more PCI lanes and lower power consumption.

That will drive Intel prices, and margins, down. That means a lower Intel stock price as probable future earnings shrink.

Right. It's all about perceived future growth.

AMD has a ton of room to grow. Intel does too, but not in the processor business where it's had a near-monopoly in some spaces. Intel also has challenges in other areas, and ARM is looking strong too.

It also doesn't help Intel that the long-running data leakage issues hurt it a lot more than AMD.

Right, it is directly the "argument by precedent" fallacy.

It has happened that way before, therefore it always will! (Waking up in the morning, for instance...)

The same exact thing happened with "The Limits of Growth", written during the 60's (MIT group). Bad assumptions, scenario didn't happen.

That's not to say there aren't problems, but the global war that's likely about to start will set population back a fair bit I think. That's a much more immediate and real concern than hypothetical future deforestation.

On a happier note, the wood producers replant a whole bunch of trees after harvest. It's not like the forests are actually "vanishing" in first-world countries.

Julia also has plenty of functional features, but is above all a practical, fast, and fast-compiling language.

The elegance is free.

I really enjoyed the artistic part. I wonder if the author was trying to evoke a Martian atmosphere with the color choices. The contrast of the spheres with the columns was very nice as well...the perfect, beautiful spheres ascending into the sky...

I'm not sure if the author is reading this thread, but thanks! :-)

This seems like a fair enough idea, except that there should be provision for "rich content boxes" that might contain images, forms, WebGL or other things that Gemini intentionally forgoes.

Having a "web browser" that can't do interactive content at all (no, server-side CGI doesn't count) is a non-starter in 2020. What if I need an interactive chart?

> Free to catch COVID-19 in a state where the governor has said that he will prohibit any city from passing laws that require masks?

Sure, except you should consider the death rate in Texas compared to some of the Dem run states (deaths per 100,000 attributed to COVID-19):

NJ: 167

NY: 161

CT: 121

MA: 116

RI: 87

DC: 77

LA: 68

MI: 61

IL: 54

DW: 52

Then, there's TX: 8

Time to question some of those assumptions...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

The funny part is that Austin is one of the most liberal areas in Texas... ;-)

As another poster said, no state income tax is a giant win.

It looks like Apple will be going it's own way with GPU, as tight integration between GPU and CPU enables much better performance. Think vias rather than buses.

The higher end Macs should see some large on-chip (or part of chiplet array) GPU implementations.

It'll largely be transparent at the Metal API level.

Interestingly, from a business perspective this is mainly bad for AMD.

The obvious interpretation of this is that in some places like Italy, the older population received much more exposure than it did in the US. In Italy, this was due to so many extended families living in the same home.

In fact, things would have skewed even younger in the US except for the nursing home debacle in NY and NJ.

It's worth pointing out that there's quite a disconnect between the US media coverage of the mortality rate here, versus the higher mortality rate in Britain, France, and other EU countries. There is also a good chance that COVID mortality in the US is being significantly overcounted.

Regardless, there's little choice at this point - we need to keep the economy open as we wrestle with minimizing hospital visits and fatalities. Let's hope improved treatments are developed at a high rate!

Something of a false dichotomy - perhaps. The fact is that allocating at all during realtime operation is frowned upon. Given that the best approach is pre-allocation and then turning off the GC, why carry the overhead of the GC at all?

For 99% of realtime work, the Rust or Scala Native approach is just fine. No GC required. Julia users can just use the pre-allocation approach.

The important thing is avoiding language patterns that encourage needless allocation.

Being a "better, stronger, faster" Python is fairly near Julia's sweet spot... :-)

I'm a very senior engineer. I've had a strong desire to find a better alternative to C++ since the 90s when I was first exposed to it (I worked with it for about a decade, after a few years with C). Now, decades later, enough bandaids have been applied that it's somewhat tolerable. Congratulations...?

The industry has needed good alternatives for a long time. Finally, they're coming, and not nearly soon enough to suit me! :-)

> But why does everyone want c++?

Few "want" C++, but for robotics a non garbage-collected language is necessary so latency is predictable. There are few mature languages besides C/C++ in that category.

Rust is an improvement, but I'm hopeful something like Julia (Julia Robotics, https://juliarobotics.org/) or Scala Native (https://scala-native.readthedocs.io/en/v0.3.9-docs/) becomes mainstream, the productivity gains would be substantial.

"I feel like I'm missing something when it still seems like huge number of Covid cases are from nursing homes."

There's been terrible mismanagement of this in nursing homes in a couple of states in particular. That was completely avoidable.

In most states, nursing homes have done well.

The military and prisons have accounted for some cases, but not all that many. There's been plenty of community spread in some places.

Since there's (apparently) no treatment and no vaccine, herd immunity is the only workable outcome. We've flattened the curve, let's continue to take reasonable, easy precautions and ride this thing out.

'"What if someone dies" is hard to come back to.'

Not really, my response would be "Do you drive on the freeway?".

People are generally terrible at assessing risk.

Given the science around the virus dying in sunlight and heat, and the lack of a single confirmed case contracted outdoors, I suggest that your circle is misinformed. :-)

I'm also in the South, and there's plenty of outdoor activity going on!

Here's the thing: a common sense approach to this could have avoided 90% of the economic misery.

The key would have been to allow everyone 60 and under to continue normally unless they have other risk factors. The consequences of a case for most in that age group aren't too bad, less than flu for most. Older folk and those at risk could isolate and take other precautions.

No economic shutdown, no 40 million unemployed, no $6 trillion spent, far fewer bankrupt businesses, and vastly fewer long-term consequences. I hope we learn from this, it was an EXPENSIVE lesson. 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing.