balefrost

MacOS also employs memory compression, so it's not necessarily swapping to disk.

My experience is, for businesses who pay attention to open-source licenses, they will avoid GPL libraries like the plague (GPL applications are usually fine, though there's sometimes some skepticism).

But not all businesses pay close attention to open-source licenses.

I have to assume that scale has something to do with it. Huge companies usually take that pretty seriously. Tiny companies... eh, they might not even be aware.

Nor any other non-FAANG company I've ever worked for. In my experience, 401k matches are immediate.

If you just need "switch using keyboard", not necessarily "switch using shell", some KVM switches allow input switching using keypresses. For mine, it's <SROLLLOCK> <SCROLLOCK> <1-4> <ENTER>, though I think that can be customized.

I dunno, even in C codebases, it's not uncommon to have data structures containing function pointers. Polymorphism isn't inherently bad and trying to achieve it using, say, enums and big switch statements isn't particularly maintainable.

It depends on who is buying the Steam Deck. If it's people who don't already have a PC, then sure, Valve is broadening their market. But if it's people who already have a gaming PC, then it probably won't lead to a lot of additional software sales.

The Atari 2600 had a digital joystick. The Atari 5200 was completely analog. If you tear the controller down, there's a complex mechanism that links the stick to two rotational potentiometers. It's similar in outcome to modern analog thumbsticks, but the mechanism is completely different (and is MUCH bigger).

The 5200 joystick didn't self-center, though. The only centering force was from the rubber boot. This ended up being advantageous in a game like missile command, but is widely seen as the Achilles heel of the controller.

Yes, I should have been clearer. I meant that their Linux investment started out as a hedge, but over time they were able to pivot it to something else.

I'm not sure what the impetus was for the Steam Deck. I could see it as a hedge against anticipated future, dwindling laptop sales. I could also see it as an attempt to expand into the same space that the Switch occupies. After all, with the exodus of Sony from portable gaming, Nintendo's only competition is cell phones.

I might have overstated that. Looking at eBay "sold" prices, they seem to go for anywhere from 30 USD (controller only, no accessories) to over 100 USD (used, but in box with accessories) or 200 USD (sealed in box). But even then, there's a lot of price variation - there are sealed controllers for as low as 130 USD.

And Atari released theirs back in 1982.

It's unclear whether Valve is playing the long game or simply hedging their bets. My recollection is that their investment in Linux was expressly stated to be a hedge against a future where Microsoft put Windows in a walled garden, like iOS.

On the other hand, I know that a bunch of people are unhappy that the Steam Controller has been discontinued. Secondhand prices are through the roof.

I can't speak about Haskell, but Clojure's lazy sequences also generate a lot of intermediate allocs.

For example, here's Clojure's implementation of `map`[1]. It internally uses `cons` to build a cell[2] and `map` to recursively walk the collection (but all wrapped up in `lazy-seq` to delay evaluation).

Transducers[3] do help with this if you are applying a stack of collection transformations. But, and this is just my opinion as a very occasional Clojure user, transducers are harder for me to grok and so I generally avoid using them. If I was doing performance critical work, I might try to build up a better mental model.

My biggest complaint about the Java streams API is that it makes it hard to write your own stream transformation functions. Or rather, you can, but then calling them is awkward. You generally transform a Stream by calling instance methods - e.g. `myStream.map(::f)`. But since Java doesn't have extension functions, there's no way for you to make a custom function callable in the same way as the built-in functions. I ended up writing a small shim to build a stream pipeline without using member functions. You would use it something like this:

    newPipeline(stream)
        .then(map(::mapFn))
        .then(filter(::filterFn))
        .then(customTransform())
        .collect(Collectors.toList());

Contrast that to Clojure, where everything's a function:

    (into []
      (customTransform
        (filter filterFn
          (map mapFn collection))))

Or (using the threading macro, I think this is right)

    (->> collection
      (map mapFn)
      (filter filterFn)
      (customTransform)
      (into []))

Or (using transducers, I'm really not sure if this is right)

    (into []
      (comp
        (map mapFn)
        (filter filterFn)
        (customTransducer))
      collection)
        
                      

[1] https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/2b3ba822815981e7f769...

[2] https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/2b3ba822815981e7f769...

[3] https://clojure.org/reference/transducers

> God forbid you try to change the audio device from speakers to headphones in the middle of a call.

I've been using it for a couple of years, and I have never had this issue. I can switch between my built-in soundcard and my USB headset without any problems. On Windows FWIW.

The EULA is giving you permission to e.g. copy and modify the font with certain restrictions (e.g. include the license text if you distribute it). In that regard, it's not terribly dissimilar in spirit from an open source software license.

It's probably not as impressive as Miniaturwunderland, but if you're in the US, and specifically near northern New Jersey, there's a neat place called Northlandz [1]. It's much older than Miniaturwunderland and I'm sure it doesn't have the level of computer control. But it's huge. Even going as an adult, I was still surprised at how large the display room was. It's been maybe 6 years since I last visited.

There was another, much smaller one that was closer to home - Roadside America [2] - but it sadly closed permanently during the pandemic. I remember going there several times as a child and really enjoying every trip.

[1] https://northlandz.com/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_America

Are you not doing the same thing that the author is doing? The author has a bias against blockchain, sees blockchain proponents making a poor argument, and that reinforces their bias against blockchains.

You have a bias seemingly in favor of blockchains, you see a blockchain critic making a poor argument, and that reinforces your belief in blockchains.

I think the linked post makes good points (e.g. git and blockchains are related but not broadly comparable) wrapped up in a lot of unnecessary opinion.

Surely the rational approach is to just discount bad arguments, not to treat them as evidence to reinforce the opposite position.

The Raspberry Pi foundation recently (about a 18 months ago) released their own dual-core ARM chip - the RP2040 - and a corresponding dev board - the Pi Pico. The Pico dev board runs about $4 plus shipping from authorized resellers.

Within the past few weeks, they introduced a wireless version - the Pi Pico W. It's about $6 from authorized resellers, though stock is hard to find at the moment.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-w-your-6-...

In the worst case, you would get 2 leap seconds per year. So in the worst case, 1800 years.

However, in the past 50 years, we've only had 27. So at the current rate, probably more like 6667 years to be off by an hour.

Of course, if the earth's rotation changed speed by so much that 2 leap seconds per year wasn't enough, we'd find a way to cram more in. In fact, in that case, the case for leap seconds would probably get stronger.

The RP2040 has a programmable IO subsystem. This lets you define a simple state machine that manages the IO pins and can transfer data to/from memory.

Here's what the project's README says:

So, how the heck the pico is able to achieve this? Well, the key are the PIO units, these units are a wonder, they are coprocessors explicitly dessigned to handle IO, it uses a very restricted and deterministic assembler (only nine instructions that each take a single cycle to execuet) but extremely efficient, so efficient that with only two instructions is possible to create a loop that captures GPIO data up to 30 bits and redirects the program flow based in the status of one of these GPIOs.

North America got both variants. This iteration is the model 2, but the model 1 was also sold here.

Münecat made a pretty good video on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGfW5U7d8sc

One strategy is to go to community college for your gen ed requirements, transfer those credits to a more prestigious university, then finish your degree there. The piece of paper will have the university's name on it, but you will have saved money in the process.

You have to do some due diligence to figure out what credits you can transfer. You don't want to waste your time and money on a class that doesn't count. But I know of some people who did this.

They did disclose it; it was in the press release:

In the case of Tether, the company represented that each of its stablecoins were backed one-to-one by U.S. dollars in reserve. However, an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that iFinex — the operator of Bitfinex — and Tether made false statements about the backing of the “tether” stablecoin, and about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars between the two companies to cover up the truth about massive losses by Bitfinex.

also

Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie.

The settlement also bars Tether from trading with New Yorkers, and the must submit regular reports about their compliance with this prohibition.

I suspect the AG got what they wanted, they just managed to do so without taking time in the court system. I would assume that Tether realized that it wasn't worth trying to defend themselves and so agreed to settle. My use of "successfully prosecuted" might not have been the right way to phrase it.

The NY Attorney General successfully prosecuted the parent company of Tether and Bitfinex. They found that the two were sharing funds, transferring them back and forth to make it appear that Tether was fully backed while using the same funds to prop up Bitfinex (after they lost coins, maybe in a hack?)

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...

That doesn't necessarily mean that Tether's assets are less than its debts. I don't know the details. I just know that the NY Attorney General finds their activities to be shady.

I think it's fair to assume, in the discussion of an article, that all the discussion is related to said article.

FWIW, your definition of "real money" doesn't comport with the generally accepted notion of "money", at least as I understand it. Gold probably couldn't be used as money in modern society because most vendors probably won't accept gold as payment. Bitcoin might not count as money because its value isn't stable enough. (As far as I know, people have generally given up on the idea of Bitcoin as a currency and instead treat it as a long-term investment.)

AS for the creation of money, it's not just the central bank that creates money. You should read up on fractional reserve banking. It turns out that retail banks do not need to back 100% of their loans with reserves. In the interplay between deposits and loans, this ends up creating money out of "thin air". This is also partly why FDIC insurance exists in the US. In the case of a bank run, the bank literally doesn't have enough reserves to immediately pay out to all the depositors. So the federal government promises to make up the difference.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/money.asp

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fractionalreservebankin...

If you read the article, it specifically points to remote learning as the thing that put students behind. I think the commenter believes that the negative effect of remote learning is overstated relative to other factors.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I think a lot of people's introduction to OKRs is John Doerr's book "Measure What Matters". That's where I learned about them.

The book explains how Andy Grove introduced the practice at Intel and it was very effective. The book seems to attribute the success to the practice itself and seems to say "if you adopt OKRs, you will succeed like Intel did".

I suspect that this success is misattributed. I suspect that Andy Grove was probably an excellent manager and I think he could have succeeded with something other than OKRs. I think he understood that what was really important was to get everybody across the organization to focus on essentially one big goal. He needed to make sure that everybody was pulling in the same direction and together, and OKRs provided a tool to do that.

When my organization decided to implement OKRs, my question to my peers was "who is our Andy Grove?"

If the people implementing OKRs focus too much on the practice and not enough on the motivation, I think you just end up with cargo-culting. The setting and tracking of KRs becomes the objective. So people treat it like busywork because OKRs don't really seem to matter - they just gets in the way of the "important" stuff.

As one of my coworkers says, the title of the book is "Measure What Matters", but it's too easy to slide into "What Is Measured Is What Matters".

Topre has the same fundamental issue. The rubber dome buckles at some point, but the switch is activated by the spring deforming enough to change the capacitance above the pads.

Then again, in my experience, it's not an issue. The resistance curve of the rubber domes makes it hard to feel the buckle yet not activate the switch. Once it buckles, it's hard to avoid the "thock".

I too like my Topre boards. But I also haven't gotten a chance to try any of the newer Cherry-style third-party switches.