jdewerd

Not nearly as quickly. Where we had millenials -- the echo of the baby boom -- they had the One Child Policy. That difference is now entering prime earning/spending years.

> moving back towards an inefficient state controlled economy

Didn't the Soviets go from agrarian to superpower and give the US a merry chase before collapsing? This might be a long arc.

> slow down China's growth and make them much less of a threat.

If I was a dictator and the population was starting to get upset over stalled growth, starting a war would seem to be a great way to generate excuses for economic hardship and crackdowns. Oh, and it would give the factories something to do other than get undercut by Vietnam. War sounds like the answer to all of my problems. I think this situation makes me more of a threat, don't you?

> trick China into behaving stupidly

Remember, they just acquired the world's industrial base. With our encouragement, because we thought it would turn them into a liberal democracy. It, uhhh, didn't. So did we really trick them? Or did we sell them the rope with which they will hang us (to paraphrase the Lenin quote)?

What's sad is that processes are already virtual machines, they just need to have a better permissions system. What's really sad is that for the most part those better permissions systems have been built (namespaces/cgroups on linux, gatekeeper on Mac OS) but nobody figured out how to expose that to end users before the business people figured out that there were trillions of dollars available if you charged rent to centrally manage it.

We were so close. Sigh.

My prayers were answered when they removed the infernal virtual password keyboard.

> "bloat" despite being capable of running on a 486

The worst bloat is structural and involves network round-trips, usleep(10000) calls, etc that can't be removed due to expectations that have thoroughly baked themselves into an ecosystem. No amount of Moore's law can make usleep(10000) faster.

I don't know if that applies to X, but I have vivid memories of learning how to tunnel X sessions only to find that VLC was faster and more responsive while using less bandwidth on extremely simple UIs. Something in that protocol had become so shamefully suboptimal that it lost a box drawing contest to pixel pushing, and I tend to suspect there is more where that came from.

Speaking of nuts, have they cracked HDR yet? I remember hearing some optimism about a year ago and I really look forward to it.

Ooh, that's a killer feature and this is the first I'm hearing about it! Thanks!

When nuclear takes off in China but not the USA, we'll figure it out. But not until then.

Studying history. The cost of nuclear was low until we stopped building 50 years ago.

https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u...

It's a pity -- if we had kept up the pace, we'd already have completely decarbonized our grid, but instead we are barely starting. Ah well. At least solar and wind finally became economical. Any path forward is a good path, even if it's 50 years late.

Right, low income causes kids, so what we need are more poors! We don't enact regressive policies because we want money, we only do it because we love you!

It couldn't possibly be that the causal arrow points in the other direction, that kids are an economic burden, cause hardship in an already economically strained population, and those who escape do so in part because they choose not to have kids. Nah, couldn't be.

Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.

Yeah, well, after 50 years of policy choices between "make housing affordable" and "make housing a good investment" and always choosing the latter, they now have an enormous vested interest to look after. Even if it doesn't really make sense to blame the gays or tiktok, they're absolutely going to do it anyway because the alternative points to policy changes that could lose them their ill-gotten gains.

18 more than most!

Huh, thanks for the heads up. The situation has evolved since I last saw numbers. That's wild.

The problem is that in terms of revenue (2) and (3) are tiny compared to (1) because by tipping your hand that you value your time above a pittance, you reveal yourself to be much less cost sensitive, so they charge you a massive premium.

> Titan Black

Huh. Is that another price/perf knee?

      Name       Cost  VRAM  TFlops64
    Titan Black $  99   6      1.882
    Titan V     $ 500  12      7.450 
    4090        $2000  24      1.290

Looks like it! Man, I'm glad AMD is at least trying now, this has gotten sad.

There's always a more complicated model.

I've probably heard 1000 Bayesians rant about the alleged Frequentist consensus and 0 Frequentists complain about Bayesian analysis. I'd need some pretty steep priors to interpret this as anything other than the academic equivalent of "one WEIRD trick THEY don't want you to know" marketing.

Yeah, but this one won't be three priests standing on each others' shoulders in a trench coat.

The fact that physical theory has such good coverage of everyday circumstances is really tough news if you want to do physics, but it's excellent news if you want to do engineering :)

Right, in fact it's very much "a thing" for bored/retired engineers (or otherwise physics-adjacent) to guess a new physics principle and convince themselves that it must be correct without actually doing the boring and difficult work of checking it against existing known-good principles / data and coming up with experiments that prove it to be usefully differentiated. You know, the difficult parts of science.

This is the source of a steady stream of crackpots that regularly pester the physics community. Don't be one of them. If your trajectory doesn't include a bunch of graduate level physics classes, a literature review, and a big math slog, you are at risk. Existing techniques are very powerful and you need to know them well before you know what counts as a genuine addition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11lPhMSulSU

What details do you think they needed to know, lol? Pence was going to take all of the official actions. The rioters just had to storm the capitol and delay the response long enough for team Trump to consolidate power, and maybe serve as a prop if Pence was asked to rationalize his decision. Trump's speech to rile up the mob and send them to the capitol building at the correct time was quite sufficient. That's how stay-in-power coups work. That's how they've always worked. The mobs never needed telepathic training before, why would they now?

These aren't numbers, but a quick intuition reminder: nuclear-powered ablation drives are really good and we are really good at building them.

That's how you turn a fission bomb into a fusion bomb. If you just put LiD in a fission bomb, it doesn't squeeze hard enough. If you focus the x-rays from a fission bomb onto an ablation drive, it does squeeze hard enough and you 1000x+ the yield with fusion. Which is why fusion bombs look like metal peanuts.

Conveniently, this means we are also really good at designing x-ray reflectors and lenses that focus the primary output of a nuclear bomb for the purposes of building ablation drives. Depending on just how good, we could probably persuade an asteroid pusher to be far more unidirectional than one typically pictures from a "bomb," if we set it off some distance away and focused the x-rays in the direction of the asteroid.

Yes, and for the most cynical of reasons: the fireball and dirt-digging go with r^3, but the people killed and infrastructure destroyed go with r^2, and the purpose of a nuclear weapon isn't to light a fireball and dig dirt.

Agreed, a big device doesn't really alter the balance of power, which is why both the Americans and Soviets abandoned the path of bigger and bigger devices by 1962, leaving lots of engineering possibilities on the table to instead focus on miniaturization.

Yes, but he also figured out how to use ablation drive in his fusion bombs because otherwise a fission bomb doesn't squeeze nearly hard enough.

If you had to design a really big ablation drive to push a really big asteroid, who would you call? Prof. Ablation Drive? Or some other guy? (Yeah, he's not with us anymore, but you know what I mean.)

What's more, the technique is in one sense very well explored: ablation drive is how fusion bombs work.

Putting Deuterium and Tritium (well, LiD which becomes D+T) in the middle of a fission bomb doesn't squeeze it hard/long enough to boost the yield of the fission bomb 1000x. Focusing the x-rays from a fission bomb onto a uranium "pusher" and driving it forward with the reaction force of vaporizing uranium does squeeze hard enough to generate fusion yield far in excess of the fission primary.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, you might be thinking of the Hohlraum at the NIF that recently made the press for getting more energy out than was deposited in. That strategy doesn't scale into a power plant but it does a brilliant job of simulating fusion bombs, which is why the DOE / NNSA can pursue it with so much money.

> God forbid a flash mob storms the Capital again and writes a slur on the wall without killing anybody

They took a calculated and premeditated swipe at the seat of power. Even a liberal democracy built on loftier principles than Machiavelli's cannot afford to let this slide.

The mob's purpose in the the plan devised by Eastman and enacted by Trump [1] was to serve as a distraction / excuse for Mike Pence to launch a contingent election with fake electors who would certify Trump as the victor, thereby terminating our democracy and ending the American experiment. Pence refused to do this and that's why the peaceful mob started chanting "Hang Mike Pence, Hang Mike Pence."

I have to admit, before that point in time I saw Pence as the diametric opposite of every political belief I ever held -- because I did not realize that a basic belief in American democracy was up for question. I thought it went without saying that we all shared that value. We did not. But Pence did, and he set an example of "Love Thy Neighbor" that I will not soon forget.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

> I'm not saying AMD made a bad decision

No, just a cool trillion dollars of market cap are saying that, nbd :)

About damn time.

No, because contract law is built for centuries past and lets Adobe screw you for trying this. Not sure if they do, but they definitely could.

Back when communication latency was days or weeks, allowing sticky auto-renew that ignored payment failure and asked for a lot of heads up time on a cancellation made sense. It was exploitable, but it was worth it to buffer the latency. Now we don't have the latency, so it's just exploitable, the law hasn't caught up yet, and Adobe is happy to exercise this advantage against you.