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> Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.

I don't agree: using a bird and an Apollo space mission in speed comparison is a completely invalid support for that proposition: the rocket which launched Apollo 10 had to burn 770 tons of kerosene and 1300 tons of liquid oxygen in 150 seconds to achieve these speeds which are possible to be kept then only once outside of atmosphere and outside of the earth "gravity well". It didn't depend on anything of unknown physics or chemistry: Tsiolkovsky published his rocket equation in 1903.

Contrary to that, your "maybe 100 times" would depend on something different from what we know the physics and chemistry say for the last hundred years.

Yes. The emissions numbers everybody should know:

https://www.iea.org/reports/key-world-energy-statistics-2021

IEA Key World Energy Statistics 2021, pg 54:

    World CO2 emissions per year:

    1973:  15 Gt of CO2
    2019:  34 Gt of CO2

(Rounded and expressed in Gt to make it easier to think about them, the actual source numbers: 15461 Mt, 33622 Mt).

The sources exist:

The book, $13:

https://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Cinema-Government-H...

The article about the book:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/27/nsec-f27.html

"Using the Freedom of Information Act, the authors gained access to files that exposed the extent of government censorship in films between 1911 and 2017. The DOD (Department of Defense, or Pentagon) provided military equipment and “advice,” and even allowed members of the military to make appearances, in exchange for some degree of control over the content of 814 films.

The authors continue, “If we include the 1,133 TV titles in our count, the number of screen entertainment products supported by the DOD leaps to 1,947. If we are to include the individual episodes for each title on long-running shows like 24, Homeland, and NCIS, as well as the influence of other major organisations like the FBI, CIA and White House then it becomes clear that the national security state has supported thousands of products.”"

The movie discussed in the title article, streaming $4.75:

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar

At least I am an actual computer engineer with a degree in computer science. I’m certainly not unique.

What others do I care less.

Book (PDF)

Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet

2021 Murphy, Thomas W, Jr

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m

https://doi.org/10.21221/S2978-0-578-86717-5

Title: "Maryland stories: Inventor introduces self-charging generator"

"Inventor Donald Ghogomu of Lexington Park gives a presentation on his Omni Electric Generator"

That's it. And three pictures.

> since it promotes the idea that the whole thing is just impossible and we should just live it up before we hit the Malthusian die-off.

I haven't seen the author you criticize ever promoted either that or that he suggests that humanity as the whole should revert to "hunter-gatherer primitivism."

I see now you are summarizing his writing just as "just lots of pessimism". But the numbers don't lie. Unless you directly depend some specific miracle (and you should state which that is supposed to be) the numbers, if extrapolated assuming continuous growth, result in resource exhaustion. Continuous growth is provably impossible without some miracle involved.

And I guess the above observation you translate to "the whole thing is just impossible"? Would you define your "whole thing" as the "infinite growth and scientists will give us a miracle allowing that"? If not, what are you talking about then?

In the words of Tom Murphy, from the article:

"The physical reality is that we are living in an ecologically, evolutionarily untested paradigm that is very recent (on relevant timescales) and powered by patently unsustainable practices and resource use. The cost is rapid ecological degradation and global disruption to the biosphere. It seems quite clear that the track we are on does not lead to the stars, but to ignominious self-termination of this whacky mode called modernity."

> This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization tendencies.

Calling him that name is IMO an attempt of a "character assassination" and not a valid critique. His blog is "Do the Math" and his arguments are based on the math. If you can contribute a single example where his math is wrong, I'd be more inclined to believe you. Otherwise, I'll do my best to ignore your future comments.

> Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now."

I'm quite sure you can't cite an actual text where he wrote anything like that.

And checking the actual sources(1) the original authors correctly talk about the electric potential difference (voltage) over over the ~5 nm membrane, which is "equal to" the one "discharged by a bolt of lightning." It's clearly wrong to use that for the false claim in the article of "adding up" "the stored charge in one person".

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37145232

> Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating

I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured fast, as the article notes:

"While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as a model for reproducibility in science, others say that it’s an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""

The actual sentence from the https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09486

(Mitochondria) "The electron and proton transfers of chemiosmotic energy coupling generate a transmembrane potential of 150–200 mV over the membrane (~5 nm across), giving a field strength of about 30 million volt per metre, equal to that discharged by a bolt of lightning."

Nick Lane and William Martin obviously don't talk about any directly obtainable energy. That number just can't be compared to the

"Available energy reserves (Ea)" "measured by quantifying the total lipid, protein, and carbohydrate content" from the

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6689315/

Also note: worms have mitochondria in their cells too.

Conclusion: "metabolism of a person and a worm" article is a good example of false claims which could be found on the internet, and the author, if he wants to help, should delete all the claims from it and put a note that what was on the page was false.

Maybe that comparison is wrong, i.e. different kinds of energy compared for humans and earthworms? For the later, if I understand correctly, the linked paper measures an equivalent of "how much energy one gets by burning the stuff from which an earthworm is made". For the former, it's something else: "total stored charge in all mitochondria membranes".

I'd expect that comparing the same kinds of energy the ratio would be more similar to a ratio of weights of the two organisms.

I have an impression that is "avoided" in many companies by demanding from the newly hired programmers to have "cloud experience". My problem is that that usually ends up being "programmers have taken courses about the way cloud vendor Y does the job" which then actually means "the programmers had drunk the propaganda of the cloud vendor Y" which is not a directly reusable knowledge for anything than "here's how we adjust our work to be charged by the cloud vendor Y". Which I think is guaranteed to have a company which can't even imagine doing it any other way.

Do you know, do all their drivers do this or only some? And how can this be seen?

I never had a goal to reduce Intel to a single role in today's world. Instead:

For a company Y, where Y produces GPU driver, I can't believe there's a plausible explanation for Y to globally collect information about the web sites visited by all users in order to improve the GPU driver code.

The reason behind must be something else.

IMO the "score" obtained this way would be completely useless as the "sites visited" don't correspond to the money one actually spends online.

Somebody interested in money transactions can get much more information by actually observing money transactions.

This is definitely not what I'd be ready to approve:

"Intel provides a long list of the types of data it collects" ... "Those include the types of websites you visit, which Intel says are dumped into 30 categories and logged without URLs or information that identifies you, including how long and how often you visit certain types of sites."

Emphasis mine. I surely don't expect that from a GPU driver company. Damn.

Exactly. And here is an example of that inability in the much clearer case:

"How many years after 1945 ... would it take for the Soviet Union to get the bomb? Framed this way, it was a much easier question than forecasting the advent of AGI: The Americans were concerned with only one adversary and the development of a single technology which they already knew all the details of. American predictions of Soviet proliferation offer a highly constrained case study for those who would undertake technological forecasting today."

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/03/how-long-until-armageddon

I like to use these interactive pages:

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...

I don't know what that is intended with that, but for simple line splits I'd use awk, which is typically everywhere, and its parameter -F (F there stands for field separator) that is, given the file L with the lines

   hello,world,one
   maybe,baby,you

awk -F, '{ print $2 }' L

should give

   world
   baby

(tested on https://busybox.net/live_bbox/live_bbox.html )

The texts like this say sometimes more about the author than the object of the text: IMO the author completely missed the deeper levels about the individual living soaked in lies, but recognizing them and, in his case, literally sailing "to the end of the world" to escape. The author wrote from the spectator perspective, not from the person's escaping.

"The experts wrote in their letter to Mr. Rush that they had “unanimous concern” about the way the Titan had been developed,"

"Mr. Kohnen said that Mr. Rush called him after reading the letter and told him that industry standards were stifling innovation."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/20/us/oceangate-titanic-miss...

3:54

Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate: "so the pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all because that's where we work with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail: your thrusters can go, your lights can go, you're still going to be safe"

https://youtu.be/29co_Hksk6o?t=219

This is a transcribed version of the original, then saved as A4 PDF. The original was, for me, more readable, being formatted for the smaller pages but using them effectively.

The original can also be found on the internet, but it's a "classic" pdf of scanned images.

Does anybody know if transcribed version, but either as a source document or as saved for the original, smaller format, exists? Or if somebody merged the transcribed text with the original images and made an ultimate pdf of the book?

And another:

https://smmax.sourceforge.net/

Written in C:

"The current "shrinking level" of this version is around 670 bytes." ...

"Later on this version has been extended to allow playing with full FIDE rules, meaning including the management of en-passant, castling and under promotion. This new version is around 750 characters (35 lines of codes when pretty printed)."

+

full FIDE version assembly 583 bytes .COM

+

ZX81 1K version

> implements a turing machine

Just searched for some details, it's amazing, all this inside of a JBIG2 image:

"Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations."

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

I've tried to see __defaults__ and __kwdefaults__ here:

    i = 7

    lambda_list = [lambda: i for i in range(3)]
    results = [x() for x in lambda_list]

    print( i )
    for k in range( 3 ):
        print( lambda_list[k] )
        print( lambda_list[k].__defaults__ )
        print( lambda_list[k].__kwdefaults__ )

    lambda_list = [lambda j=i: j for i in range(3)]
    results = [x() for x in lambda_list]

    print( i )
    for k in range( 3 ):
        print( lambda_list[k] )
        print( lambda_list[k].__defaults__ )
        print( lambda_list[k].__kwdefaults__ )
    print( i )

The output is:

    7
    <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xB2>
    None
    None
    <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xBC>
    None
    None
    <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xC6>
    None
    None
    7
    <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xD0>
    (0,)
    None
    <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xDA>
    (1,)
    None
    <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xE4>
    (2,)
    None
    7

If I understand it, __kwdefaults__ are always None and the __defaults__ used only in the second case. I've also tried to see the "i" as not being inside of the closure, but it remains 7, not like (as noted by 'remram here):

    i = 9
    y = 1
    for y in range( 1,-1,-1 ):
        try:
            x = 4 / y
        except Exception as i:
            pass
        print( i )

Which gives, for me, fascinating:

    9
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "p.py", line 10, in <module>
        print( i )
               ^
    NameError: name 'i' is not defined. Did you mean: 'id'?

I'm learning a lot here.

I like your explanation, it has more missing information and also demonstrates the use of "import inspect", it's definitely not to be ignored!

Did I understand correctly, the fact that the variable is not belonging to the closure is the non-intuitive part, not knowing "how it was decided to do in Python" I'd expect the variable to belong to the closure, but instead just the reference to the variable outside of the closure belongs to the closure? Which AFAIK doesn't save any memory (the reference still has to be there), it was simply a design decision?

So in Python the closure just doesn't "enclose" the variables at all? So any use of any variable in it can destroy something used "outside"? How do those using these construct cope with that in practice? Just ignore? Invent some naming schemes? Something else?

Reminds me on an old Fortran which allowed changing the global constants passed to the functions via an assignment to the function parameter inside of the function. :)

So can somebody explain to me, step by step with the "elements behind the curtain", what is actually going on in these two cases:

   >>> [ x() for x in [lambda: i for i in range(5)] ]
   [4, 4, 4, 4, 4]

Why?

   >>> [ x() for x in [lambda i=i: i for i in range(5)] ]
   [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]

And why?

Starting from the fact that the following give:

    >>> [lambda: i for i in range(5)]
    [<function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xC22>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xCAE>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xC9A>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xCD6>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xCC2>]

    >>> [lambda i=i: i for i in range(5)]
    [<function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xCF4>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xCFE>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xD08>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xD12>, 
     <function <listcomp>.<lambda> at 0xCCC>]

Speaking for myself, I don't share the beliefs of the author about which he wrote elsewhere, and reading that "Ship" story separated from these beliefs, and assuming a different context, I see the story "functioning" better than his other published writings.