inkyoto

For the very same reason why the wisest of the ancient and medieval rulers were patrons of science, even if the value of scientific discoveries was not immediately apparent at the time.

It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.

Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.

Since categories have been invoked, we are discussing semantics.

«As a whole» leaves unclear whether your example means the kind itself, its members generally or every member without exception as they are three distinct interpretations. This is what I have remarked on.

«Cats meow» attributes characteristic behaviour to cats generally.

«Dinosaurs are extinct» attributes a property to a kind, making it a better example supporting kind reference.

The latter also establishes that English bare plurals can denote kinds. Their grammatical form does not guarantee that interpretation: «cats entered the dumpster» concerns individual cats on a particular occasion.

> “Cats meow” is “about” the whole of what makes up the category as opposed to parts of it.

No. That is, at best, a highly informal proposition and, at worst, a frivolous disposition masquerading as a definition of «category».

Bare plurals can have generic or kind-related interpretations (the one you refer to as «category»); they do not entail reference to every individual member of the class: a mute cat can't meow, and a rotten apple is unlikely to be liked.

The Obama analogy illustrates reference vs mention, but that distinction is orthogonal to the actual semantic disagreement.

I can't answer the why question, but out of all Germanic languages, only Faroese has retained the plural indefinite article, although its use is restricted to nouns that 1) only occur in the plural and 2) indicate «a pair/set of», e.g.:

  einar buksur (feminine plural) – a pair of pants

  einir skógvar (masculine plural) – a pair of shoes

Other than that, Germanic languages typically do not have a plural form of the indefinite article.

«cats» in «cats meow» and «apples» in «I like apples» are not categories, they are bare plural noun phrases with generic reference. They refer generically to members of the relevant class, rather than naming the class itself.

Both are count nouns, and, in English, a plural count noun takes the null article when it is used with generic or non-specific indefinite reference rather than to denote a contextually identifiable set.

However, in

  Cat is divided into numerous breeds.

  Cat excludes animals such as dogs and foxes.

  Apple excludes such fruits as pears and peaches.

  Apple contains numerous cultivated varieties.

«cat» and «apple» are categories.

That is a relatively recent change.

In the 80-90's, the most popular destination for Australians was the UK: Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance fame) and many others moved up there.

It is a conspiracy – one of the many for which history has been inconsiderate enough to preserve evidence of.

For rural areas, lower frequencies are better because they mean longer distances ↝ fewer cell towers but also less density.

Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.

There are historical and cultural reasons for that.

Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.

Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.

Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.

Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.

The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.

Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:

  明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō)

  明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler».

Even the pronunciation alone partly tells the reader which historical layer is being invoked.

明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.

Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.

> Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.

Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.

Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).

They can be rendered as:

  Kanō: 狩野 and 加納

  Gotō: 後藤 and 五島

Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan).

The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.

加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.

後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.

五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.

None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.

Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.

[0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209

[1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984

[2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8...

[3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019

Not numerous but specifically Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – all four countries speak Turkic languages, and they chose to do so to align themselves with Turkey. The adoption has been rather slow, and previous Cyrillic based scripts remain in wide use, though.

Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.

That is a total of five countries.

The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».

The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:

«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].

For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.

Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia

Australia (2018), New Zealand (2018), US (2017), Iceland (2025), Switzerland have shut down 2G networks.

In Norway, Telia shut down 2G in 2025, but Telenor is holding out until the end of 2027.

In Sweden, Telia is holding until 2027, and all other telcos have already switched it off.

France is shutting down 2G this year.

So the 2G shutdown is a real thing.

There is no need for two penny sarcasm.

I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.

My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.

In the current legal framework, AI can't be held accountable, a human being is required.

That is what the CEO is for – to be on the receiving end of beatings and flogging if the business they are at the masthead of effs something up.

The GCC assembly syntax is not a monstrosity, it was a necessity given how GCC represented the intermediate representation of the code. Historical GCC docs actually explain the rationale of the design pretty well.

Moreover, since GCC was one of the very few C compilers that targeted a large number of very diverse ISA's at the time, they wanted to have a uniform way of injecting the assembly code across wildly varying ISA's.

The correct assembly syntax is a matter of convention and personal preference – not a category error.

Historically, some ISA's have adopted the «src, dst» convention, whilst others have preferred «dst, src». We should be grateful that no engineer, in a moment of excessive creativity, attempted boustrophedon – a conceptual device solely appropriate to the likes of INTERCAL. Then we have 3 operand RISC instructions.

As with so many technical orthodoxies, the first convention one encounters tends thereafter to acquire the status of natural law.

The consistent application of the same convention is useful nevertheless. It reduces the unnecessary cognitive overload once one starts jumping across multiple hardware architectures.

Firefox has also adopted and supports Manifest v3, but Mozilla did not adopt all of Chrome/Chromium’s Manifest v3 restrictions.

In Chrome/Chromium, Manifest v3 largely replaces extension-controlled network blocking with a more restrictive «declarativeNetRequest», whereas Firefox, by contrast, has deliberately kept support for blocking «webRequest» functionality.

Importantly, the full uBlock Origin is a Manifest V2 extension. The Manifest v3-compatible version is uBlock Origin Lite, which has fewer capabilities.

Registers are very much real, and their number being available at the ISA level will continue to matter regardless of the actual number of shadow registers.

Being able to store, e.g. 10 vs 5, local variables in a larger register file has performance implications[0] strong enough to consider larger register files an advantage.

[0] The reduced number of memory-to-CPU and vice versa data transfers for transient computation results.

Competing RISC designs tanked for a number of reasons, but not just because Intel and AMD started pumping money into their products.

RISC vendors were in the business of selling hi-end workstations and servers that required their own respective RISC CPU's, which meant that each vendor had its own, in-house CPU design arm and either their own fab or they outsourced the CPU manufacturing to someone else. In a way, the RISC CPU was a by-product of what they sold but never the product they sold alone. Two problems followed.

The CPU design is an expensive process, and keeping one's own fabs up to date with the latest and greatest manufacturing process is even more expensive, especially as the designs and processes advanced. It eventually became prohibitively expensive to maintain one's own fab, and RISC vendors started falling behind the bleeding edge (DEC, Motorola, etc.). IBM managed to get away with it for a time, but eventually, they also divested.

The second problem concerned the outsourcing of the CPU manufacturing. Those RISC vendors (e.g. SGI with their MIPS) who did not have their own fabs had to contract a fab (e.g. NEC). Such a fab would produce a diverse range of microchip products, and a CPU would be just one of them. Which typically meant not the latest and greatest process, but at least a generation behind.

Whereas both Intel and AMD were dedicated CPU design and manufacturing houses (although AMD also divested their fabs later), so they could specifically focus on what mattered for CPU's and for CPU's only.

That said, for Intel and AMD, the CPU was the product, whereas for the RISC vendors, it was not, however important, the CPU was for them.

To recover the past working context, not necessarily looking up a specific command (but that, too, – on certain occasions).

I also hold over a decade worth of zsh history and revisit it from time to time to reconstruct the full memory of what I was working on N years ago.

> […] then the CPU vendors can optimize on one side […]

I find the statement ironic and somewhat amusing (or bemusing – depending on the perspective) for reasons entirely unrelated to CPU's and/or RISC-V.

I keep hearing the phrase «we shall leave that to the vendors» every now and then. Only a few days ago, whilst attending a working-group session on an emerging data exchange standard, precisely the very much same argument was bluntly stated: «We do not particularly care how complex the specification becomes because the vendors will implement it. We shall leave it to them».

The issue is that «the vendors» are not a single mythical intelligence or force possessed of infinite technical wisdom, unlimited, cosmic scale engineering resources and an relentless desire to right the wrongs.

They are businesses. They have narrow commercial objectives, conflicting priorities, disparities in the engineering talent and resourcing and, quite properly, incentives to advance their own products – you are right, to compete with other vendors. Where an opportunity appears to increase market share, lock customers in, differentiate their platforms and products or shift implementation burden elsewhere, one should expect them to notice it. It is not an accusation, it is merely an acknowledgement that vendors tend to behave like vendors.

So with «the vendors will do X», at best, we may hope that vendors will deliver an interpretation of the specification – to a degree, provided that doing so aligns sufficiently well with their commercial interests. An equally plausible outcome is that they will not – or that they will each implement mutually incompatible interpretations whilst proclaiming full compliance.

> […] we're at a bit of an inflection point where mooore's law has proved itself to be an scurve […]

Well. May's law[0], which states that:

  Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law.

effectively counterbalances Moore's Law and, with continued technological process improvements and optimisations, the proverbial arm's race is likely to continue for a very, very long time – just a few days I was reading a wonderful article from 1998 on the state-of-the-art DEC Alpha 21264 CPU which mentioned the 21264 and POWER3 as the world's most complex CPU's each boasting 15+ million transistors and also mentioned the equally state-of-the-art 0.18 micron processes. The 3 old year M3 Max design, in comparison, supplies over 90 billion transistors to the mainstream consumer.

Humans are resourceful, after all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...

Functionally, Bitcode delivers – a .bc file can be compiled into any architecture LLVM supports. I have tested a few supported architecture, and it worked like a charm.

Stability of the Bitcode format across releases is orthogonal to the functionality it provides. Given that OS/400's TIMI has been a long-running success, it is possible to put extra effort into stabilising the Bitcode format as well. Benefits would be numerous and significant, ranging from CI/CD to apps taking advantage of new or enhanced ISA extensions.

It does exist in LLVM and is called Bitcode, a binary format for the LLVM IR - https://llvm.org/docs/BitCodeFormat.html

Apple used to require apps submitted to its iOS App Store to be in the Bitcode format, and they would «recompile» the Bitcode into the exact user's iPhone CPU architecture at the download time – pretty much what OS/400 does. For reasons unknown, they have discontinued Bitcode.

> […] why the building does not have high quality NBN connections?

Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.

Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.

By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.

«Mates rates» is a big problem in Australia, indeed. At best, it is collusion, but typically it is corruption.

I have recently gone through the entire chain of complaints, the ombudsman including, and I have gained plenty of insight into how insidious the current scheme is.

NSW has set out to do something about it, with price caps being introduced in 2027. If you live in NSW, make your submission to the regulator (IPART) ASAP – submissions are closing at the end of July.

No, technically it can't. An individual writing to an MP is rarely sufficient by itself.

Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers.

Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments.

Embedded networks are private distribution systems sitting behind a single connection to the public grid (shopping malls, apartment blocks, retirement villages, camp and caravan sites etc). They all have, effectively, a single wire going into the site.

Originally, they were designed for incidental on-selling by site managers, and they are a regulatory exception allowing the operator to on-sell electricity and other services without becoming a fully authorised energy retailer or licenced distributor. The embedded networks typically bundle: 1) electricity, 2) centralised hot water, 3) cold water, 4) gas, 5) heating / cooling (air-conditioning) and 6) fibre to the premises (sometimes, not always). All those things are governed by separate statutes.

In theory as well as occasionally in practice, they should be cheaper for consumers because they are able to negotiate lower wholesale rates from the upstream supplier and because the customer churn is non-existent (the customer is locked into the network and has nowhere to go). In some cases, that is indeed true, but because the current legislation explicitly excludes the embedded networks from the government reporting, many embedded network operators have resorted to the insidious exploitation of their customers, and the government is clueless because the operators' imposed pricing is opaque.

Natiaonally, Australia does not have a single federal embedded-network statute. The principal framework is a cooperative national scheme comprising 7 government bodies (Australian Energy Market Commission, AER, Australian Energy Market Operator, National Electricity Law and Rules, National Energy Retail Law and Rules, Australian Consumer Law and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).

At the state level – so far – only Victoria has largely banned new embedded networks, with the remaining states either participating or not participating in the National Energy Customer Framework. Overall, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the national regulators are tightening the rules but they still have a way to go.

For a reform such as embedded-network regulation, the path looks closer to:

  Voters ↝ political parties ↝ MP's ↝ ministers ↝ departments ↝ intergovernmental bodies ↝ regulators ↝ consultation processes ↝ rule-making bodies ↝ implementation.

An MP may understand: «Residents in apartment towers are getting poor outcomes». They are highly unlikely to understand: a) market settlement arrangements, b) metering identifiers, c) distribution-loss factors, d) retailer-of-last-resort frameworks, e) exemption classes, f) embedded-network-manager functions, or g)interactions between state strata law and national electricity law.

Unsurprisingly and consequently, politicians become heavily dependent on: a) departmental advice, b) regulator advice, c) industry submissions, d) consultant reports, and e) lobby groups.

The people who understand the system – and especially those one who know how to work the system to their benefit – therefore acquire disproportionate influence over how the system evolves. That does not necessarily imply corruption, it is a structural feature of technical governance. Customers, however, refer to it as «rent seeking», even if they own an apartment.

Despite all that, elected representatives still do remain one of the few machineries capable of changing the underlying legal framework. The deeper issue is that modern regulatory states are neither pure democracies nor pure technocracies – they are hybrids. Formal authority remains democratic, but practical power is distributed among elected officials, bureaucracies, regulators, courts, industry participants, consultants, lobbyists and organised interest groups.

I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the embedded networks and learned a bewildering number of things hence the fulmination.

Performance gap is not closing in specimens commercially available today, and the promises of it «happening any moment from now» are now indistinguishable from monthly horoscopes.

For example, Zen 2 is a 2019 design, and the 64-core SG2044 C920v2, which was released in May 2025, a three-decode, four-dispatch core at about 2.6 GHz, with 128-bit vectors is still approximately[0]:

  – 9 times slower in the block tridiagonal solver at 64 cores;

  – 2.05 times slower in the lower-upper Gauss-Seidel solver;

  – 2.05 times slower in the scalar pentadiagonal solver.

Given a six year gap between two design (2019 vs 2025), the result is wholly underwhelming.

The reason why those three solvers are particularly interesting, especially in the HPC scenario, is because all three exercise substantial amounts of (unlike hobbyist and similar synthetic benchmarks):

  – Floating-point computation;

  – Memory hierarchy behaviour;

  – Cache utilisation;

  – Synchronisation;

  – Compiler optimisation;

  – Overall processor throughput.

Another, June 2026, study using production astrophysics codes found the SG2044 roughly 3–6 times slower[1] than an AMD EPYC 9554 system and 3–9 times slower than an Nvidia Grace system, workload depending.

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13840v1

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13840v1

> […] they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager […]

The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation of wiring, air-conditioning, gas, hot water, and sometimes the internet – usually for free – and that happens before the strata comes into the picture. The strata is left with no choice but to inherit a fixed-term contract (typically 3-5 years), after which it can switch to… another embedded network.

The builders accept offers from embedded networks because it reduces their overall costs.

The NSW government has enacted the first tranche of regulations for embedded networks from the 1st of July this year, with the embedded networks price caps being introduced in early 2027 (that is the promise, anyway). If you live in NSW, IPART is the government body in charge of the regulation, and it is accepting submissions until the end of this month. Prepare and make your own submission whilst you can, as I have done.

Moreover, apartment dwelling residential customers connected to embedded networks (many new apartment blocks in NSW, Victoria and Queensland) are not eligible for the Solar Share Offer because under section 6(3)(c), a consumer supplied through an embedded network is already excluded from the Commonwealth Electricity Retail Code’s definition of a «small customer».

The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.