ansible

> Can you perhaps devote a few seconds to my security concerns for a change?

Nope, sorry. It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, or what your concerns are. Russia and Putin insist that you must support Mother Russia, and be willing to die for the cause (of ensuring Putin gains power and wealth). /s

It is sad how things turned out regarding the West's relationship with Russia.

Back around the year 2000, it really seemed things in eastern Europe were all moving in the right direction. The entire region was becoming more and more democratic, relations were warming up. Prosperity in Russia was increasing, things in general were looking positive.

It wasn't seriously discussed, and no concrete steps were taken, but there was speculation that Russia might join NATO eventually. There was concern about China (concern which has proved well founded) and having another strong partner in Russia would strengthen the bulwark against them.

But, well, should we really have expected so much from a former KGB officer like Putin? No, he turned into another Russian strongman, seeking only to enrich himself, and determined to only leave power feet-first. He illegally coerced the Russian oligarchs into giving him billions of dollars.

The story of democracy isn't over in the rest of eastern Europe (heck, it isn't over in the USA!), and there have been various partial successes and partial failures (esp. Hungary and Turkey). And the threat and actions of Russia has in turn strengthened the need for NATO.

Edit: I stand corrected - Concrete steps were taken for Russia to join NATO.

> This is idiotic, it is not up to the Ukrainians to decide to join NATO...

Yes, we know.

I definitely did not miss all those news stories about Turkey blocking the final approval for Sweden.

> I personally think that a Ukrainian NATO membership is not worth hundred thousands of dead and wounded, millions of refuges and a destroyed country, but others obviously disagree.

Well, it has been for the Ukrainians to decide. They have fought like hell to avoid being conquered by a foreign dictator that would destroy their country, their culture and the rape, torture and murder their own people.

> Which threats? Putin already decided that Ukrainian NATO membership is so important that he is willing to go to war over the issue if there is no political solution, he certainly expected sanctions and support from the West.

Which threats? I assure you that in the run-up to February 2022, there were some very serious phone calls and meetings between the USA State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry. Just because that wasn't reported on the news doesn't mean it didn't happen. Often we try to find solutions to problems without it being a public announcement.

> If anything, a strong America just lends a false sense of security to countries like Ukraine, which might be better off understating that they must see to their own safety and security.

Name a full member of NATO who has been invaded. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Even without NATO membership, China currently isn't occupying Taiwan. Guess why.

> Historically speaking, few of America’s international adventures have had a beneficial outcome. Pretending that the world ‘needs’ our meddling is a stretch. We need to be able to defend ourselves and to ramp for war quickly. The rest is pork for the military industrial complex.

Did you even read the first part of my comment? Do I sound like an apologist for the USA's recent foreign policy?

There is a lot of pork spent for the USA's military. Cost overruns and unnecessary systems abound. That doesn't obviate the need for a strong military to keep the peace for ourselves and our allies.

The world is different now than it was 100 years ago. Many counties have at least a few nuclear weapons. We can't afford to let things spin out of control. We need stability, and NATO provides a lot of that.

Name the last time a NATO country invaded another NATO member. Oh, wait, that never happened, and never will happen. That's called stability.

> But none of that even addresses my argument, Russia opposed NATO expansion, Russia threatened severe consequences, NATO gave no signs that Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO or entered any kind of negotiations, Russia delivered on its promise. The outcome was rather predictable, at least ignoring that Russia did not react as strongly to previous NATO expansions.

Oh, so we're supposed to just listen and obey every dictator out there now? We are supposed to listen and obey when North Korea threatens our (or our ally's) destruction? Are we supposed to just sit back and let China dredge up new islands out of nothing in the South China Sea, and then claim the entire thing is now their territorial waters? Are we supposed to just let them have Taiwan too? How many times has China threatened something when we sold Taiwan some more F-16s or some other military hardware?

And what about our threats? Do you think the Kremlin wasn't warned about what the consequences to Russia would be if they invaded in 2022? Why shouldn't Putin have listened to us?

> My point is just that there was a relatively simple situation, Russia warns NATO, one step closer and there will be war, and NATO decides that it will make that step.

What's funny with all this is that Finland and Sweden resisted joining NATO for decades, despite being very closely aligned with the rest of Europe. Russia made angry noises about that for years and years, and they listened. Wow! Exactly what you thought should happen! Fantastic!

And then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Then those two countries decided they could no longer listen to the threats coming from Russia, and had to choose what was best for their own security and prosperity. And so they joined NATO to protect themselves.

Why do you think Poland, one of the poorest countries in Europe, has been giving proportionately so much aid to Ukraine? Because they fear for the war spreading, and want to stop Russia now. Why do you think Poland wanted to join NATO back in 1999? Even though one of the member countries of NATO (Germany) that had invaded them 50 years earlier? Did they fear that Poland was going to be invaded by NATO, that this was some coercion? No, because NATO doesn't invade other countries.

Poland joined NATO because they were worried about the other country that had also invaded them 50 years previously, Russia.

Are you starting to see that it is Russia that is the problem here?

> This is what got us the Ukraine war in the first place, an uncompromising hard line against a weak Russia because the USA was in the position to do so. Russia opposed each NATO expansion but did nothing in the end and it was the same gamble with Ukraine, hoping that Russia will once more do nothing.

Ah, the classic "The West forced Russia to invade Ukraine. Like the government in Ukraine didn't have any legitimate reason to align itself with the West after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Have you heard the rhetoric coming from Putin and the Kremlin? About how Ukraine doesn't have a legitimate national or ethnic identity of their own, and how the territory of Ukraine should just be a part of Russia. And how the Ukrainians (who are really just Russians, really) don't deserve to self-govern?

Going on right now in occupied Ukraine, the Russians are actively purging all Ukrainian language and culture. Only the Russian language will be taught in schools.

Yes, the West is totally to blame here. Totally.

Impressive design.

I've watched more than a few videos of jet-powered RC aircraft, and they are scary fast. So it shouldn't be a surprise for the performance of a craft like this.

Computer generated video is getting better, but it isn't that good yet.

Especially when it comes to smuggling drugs across the border.

Of course, we could fix the drug smuggling by decriminalizing drug addiction and treating it like other public health issues. But the "War on Drugs" still rages on, after decades of failure.

I get where you are coming from. In the last two decades, the USA and allies have spent trillions of dollars increasing the suffering and death in Iraq and Afghanistan, and didn't even gain much geopolitical advantage in return. A giant waste of time, money, and human life. Had we not invaded them, there might be a million more Iraqis alive today. Afghanistan would still be a failed state though.

The 2014 invasion of Ukraine was not a significant news event for me. Ukraine was weak, and the tepid response to the invasion from Ukraine and the rest of the West meant that Russia just rolled in without opposition or much drama.

Fast forward 8 years, and Ukraine has further developed its national identity and is starting to become a real democracy. The 2022 invasion was a big wake-up call for the West. We had thought that we had won the Cold War in 1992, and that our geopolitical rivals, while still warranting concern, were not a direct threat to us and our allies anymore. Nope! It turns out there is still a need for the USA to be an unrivaled global superpower, and for the rest of NATO to get its ass in gear and modernize.

If more celebs get sued when they do stuff related to NFTs (scams) or crypto in general (probably a scam), then maybe we'll see less celebrity endorsements, and less of this crap overall. Good luck plaintiffs! Though only the lawyers (on all sides) will really profit from this...

The fix is that AMD needs to develop, test and deploy a microcode update for their affected CPUs, and then the problem is truly fixed for everyone, not just the people who have detected the issue and tried to mitigate it.

Formal knowledge representation and any sort of formal reasoning is not the way the industry is going right now with LLMs though.

It occurs to me that if we want LLMs to be able to reason better, we may need to write texts that explicitly embody the reasoning we desire, and not just use a bunch of books or whatever scraped from the Internet.

So I've thought about the problem some more, and have my own idea.

You would still have a rod mounted a short distance from the wall, like the clothes hinger design, but a little further out. The rod for the clothes hinger has grooves that are perpendicular to the long axis of the rod.

But what if you cut the grooves at an angle instead, maybe 60 degrees. This would take up about the same distance out from the wall as the clothes hinger design, but slightly more wall space. This would be a factor for very constrained walls, but for the longer rods, the "overhead" would be insignificant. And it would only project out from the wall the same as the clothes hinger design (that's trigonometry!).

You would use a smaller diameter rod, so that with the grooves cut at an angle, the diameter is still sufficiently small enough to use a regular clothes hanger.

I'm glad to see the design of the knowledge base language is aware of context (here called a domain). This is better than other systems, like what is used to parse / dump data from Wikipedia, where the context is basically "the real world right now". However, it doesn't seem like they wanted systems to be able to use and switch between domains easily, nor be able to backtrack (where you have inferred some knowledge, and you are trying to figure out what domain(s) you should be operating inside).

Contextual reasoning is very important for many situations, because time is one of the most important contexts. You can have a fact like "the iPhone is the best selling phone". This fact is true or false based on the context. It is definitely false in the real world year 2006 and before, because the first iPhone was not released yet. While the fact may be true right now in a global context, if we are talking about a specific country or region, it may be false. For example, I would expect that satellite-capable phones may be more popular in a highly remote (non-urban) country or region.

> Here’s an idea. Instead of the rod being parallel with the wall, have multiple small rods perpendicular to the wall. They can easily accommodate full size coat hangers. Problem solved

That takes up more wall space, and makes it harder to see what everything is.

I get that this is not the product for you (or me either), but don't compare the 3 years of on again, off again mulling over the design with your 20 seconds of thought on the problem space.

I've also never used punch cards, but I had seen the equipment in the computer lab at university.

One more trick for the young ones here that I've heard is: With your completed stack of punch cards, take a marker and make a diagonal slash across the edge of the stack from top to bottom. That way, if you accidentally dropped the deck of cards, you could put them back in at least the approximately correct order very quickly. You would still want to look through the cards one at a time to ensure the order, but the process goes much quicker if the deck is nearly sorted.

I mostly used serial terminals connected to minicomputers like various PDP-11s and Dual VAX 11/780s. I did get to experience the joy of trying to complete an introductory CS assignment near the deadline. The machine slowed to a crawl, but didn't crash. You would type in one character, and wait for it to appear. We were warned to submit our assignments early!

I had a graphic EQ from DAK in the early 1990's. It was so neat to watch. Too bad it died after a couple years, it wouldn't save the EQ settings anymore after a power cycle.

> Smartphones have taken over much of classic gadget functionality, and perhaps dimmed its magic.

Almost all gadget functionally, really. I was looking through a mid-1980's Radio Shack catalog. Just about everything in there can now be done by a phone instead. It is crazy and awesome when you think about it.

Camcorders, tape recorders, stereo systems, shortwave radios (now Internet streaming), TVs, VCRs, electronic weather gauges (just look up the current humidity now), computers, etc.

Linus Torvalds famously does not like and will not allow the use of C++ in the Linux kernel.

Also, Rust explicitly puts safety first, and C++ cannot give the same guarantees for normal code. The uses of `unsafe` in Rust should be relatively uncommon and deserve extra scrutiny.

Spending money like water to make a big splash with advertising, sponsorships and such.

But really, anything to do with crypto or NFTs should be a red flag at this point.

A trillion dollars? Heck no.

They may be worth more than Arm, Ltd. in a decade or so. That also depends upon Arm making some more bone-headed decisions too.

I don't have a simulation software recommendation, though /u/type0 might.

I would recommend just using an "expensive" prototype board, that costs maybe $20 USD, instead of over that costs $4. There are different levels of quality with regard to the little clips that grip the wires and components.

The wires are really the least problem in experimenting with electronics.

This is a super-neat design, and I'm glad someone has made it. But I would never buy it, in part because of the cost.

It is really neat though.

I haven't found an exact comparison, but here is what I found in a quick search.

M1, Unigine Heaven, 1080p, Medium settings, 56 fps average:

https://youtu.be/DzIrmSFqzYk&t=271

Ryzen 5, RX 6400, Unigine Heaven, 1080, Ultra settings, 46 fps average:

https://www.alktech.co/articles/asus-dual-radeon-rx-6400-4gb...

At least for the RX 6400 test, the bottleneck is the GPU itself.

> The M1 is quite capable and can keep or or even outperform many current gaming value builds.

At the same price? I would be surprised if that is the case. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $300 on eBay. For that money, you can get a used i5 business desktop and a new low-profile RX 6400 for about that. At that price point, you'll see much better visuals and framerate for most games on the Windows PC (or you could run Linux). The PC owner can then later buy a better desktop system and put the same GPU in it. And later still the PC user can upgrade the GPU.

With the M1 Mini, that's basically it, and if you want to upgrade anything, you are buying a completely different system.

Would a small BH have enough of an accretion disc to emit sufficient X-rays to be detectable? While the density of matter in the Oort cloud is low, it is not as low as interstellar space.

I think we would be able to detect it. We can navigate spacecraft with high accuracy.

If you can get a spacecraft somewhere in the vicinity of a black hole of decent mass (like a 10km asteroid equivalent) we could probably detect changes in trajectory of the spacecraft from the gravitational attraction.

Or, here's an idea, blow out a tonne of radar chaff in the vicinity of the black hole and watch for how it disperses via radar.

We could also try detecting Hawking radiation that a BH should generate, though that might be pretty faint (I have not done the math).

> ... and it’s faster than it has any right to be

The main Lua interpreter by PUC-Rio is among the fastest bytecode interpreters for a popular scripting language. Very efficient C code.

Wizard programmer Mike Pall then came along and wrote an even faster Lua bytecode interpreter in assembly language. And added JIT for even faster performance of hot functions.