jl6

Can I get this, but for geology?

Passionate hobbyists are often a great source of technical information, and usually more objective than industry sources. The thing to watch out for is people who have become so absorbed by their hobby, they start to put great subjective weight on distinctions that would be without difference to a "normal" person. Audio gear, gourmet food, fine wine, running shoes... It's XKCD 915 all the way down. I also recommend Penn & Teller: Bullshit! S03E12 ("The Best") on this subject.

Good for the hobbyists, if it enhances their enjoyment, but if you're a casual, microscopic variations are going to be dwarfed by other factors.

Infantino’s justification has been to “grow the game”, but I cannot imagine how football could possibly get any bigger, except maybe in the US.

> the loss of the Amazon (it's pretty much lost already, isn't it?)

No, it’s not lost already. We should attempt to preserve what remains, not assume failure is inevitable.

Good question, with a couple of possible answers:

1) maybe those species aren’t as unchanged as we think, because our evidence of the past is limited to things like skeletons, and maybe the skeletal structure of the shark didn’t change much, but other aspects did.

But more likely…

2) maybe unchanging requires a stable environment with stable selection pressures - but humans have had a rollercoaster of change in selection pressures, possibly more than any other species.

We must prepare for the possibility of a malicious secession of Exeter City, likely with Chris Martin as president.

Is that from the San Francisco Examiner? Do you have sources for the family information you mention?

Yeah. Nobody is innocent here.

Someone linked to The Market for Lemons below. This is exactly right. We now live in the World of Lemons. Everything is lemons, because we can only properly judge quality for the tiny number of things we truly care about. For everything else, we just buy the cheapest thing, because by definition we don’t care enough to do otherwise.

The only possible solution is to buy less stuff, to the point where you have the capacity to care more about each thing, and enough money to pay for these things, which will inevitably cost more.

But then that means making peace with the idea that not having a thing can be better than having a crappy thing. It’s a tough sell to the consumption mindset.

Wikipedia sources the claim to an article by Jerry Pournelle in BYTE magazine, from 1985.

I don’t think anyone can lay claim to a plot of land in perpetuity. Reverence should and does fade over time. Maybe when you are initially buried, that plot of earth belongs to you for a while, but after hundreds of years, it’s the other way round: you belong to the earth.

By the way, I don’t think you deserve downvotes for expressing your opinion.

Here’s one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode...

-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.

If you have a billion year long civilization, it would probably be easier to genetically/medically engineer humans to live forever, so that a 75,000 year space voyage doesn’t seem so long. Easier than near-lightspeed space travel at any rate.

A definition that is debatable at the edges doesn’t have to be debatable at the center, so I don’t think it follows that we need to completely throw out the concept. Nature doesn’t provide neat categories, but speciation is nonetheless a real natural phenomenon that isn’t perturbed by having fuzzy boundaries.

All forms of entertainment are entering crisis, because there is so much of it competing for attention, and so many years of back catalog that are still entertaining and available for free-or-nearly-free. Premium gaming and premium content of any kind seems unsustainable.

"Is 50% faster than Postgres on transaction workloads" - That is a very big claim! 50% faster on everything? Is it a strict improvement across the board or are there tradeoffs that make some workloads slower?

Yeah, money ruins everything. I’ve recently enjoyed blogs on Gemini (the protocol, not the AI), which is massively unpopular even by its own low peak in ~2021. In other words, it’s a perfect haven. I hesitate to tell anyone.

It certainly wasn’t going to happen while compute kept getting cheaper. A sustained period of rising compute costs is unprecedented, so who knows what might be possible.

Welcome to the era of thinking more carefully about computer resource usage!

Have the WMF done something bad that needs counterbalancing or are they just forming a union out of some sort of principle?

Surely you call a recovery truck to come pull you out and do an emergency charge on your battery, similar to how they’d provide you with emergency gas if your tank ran dry? Or tow you if they don’t have a charger?

Small land area, mountainous, northerly latitude… it’s not that wind and solar won’t work, but I don’t think you can automatically compare costs to giga-scale solar farms in spacious and sparsely populated equatorial countries. Even if more expensive, nuclear will have a niche, and it’s madness to rule it out.

> Speaking of memory, the new Outlook uses between 490 MB and 636 MB of RAM while idle, with individual sessions varying based on mailbox size. Outlook Classic, doing the same job, uses around 117 MB to 148 MB at idle. A roughly fourfold difference.

They really picked the wrong timeline in which to 4x RAM usage for no benefit.

Yeah, so don’t do that.

There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.

Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.

There is still solid and interesting content, it’s just that the material is so diverse that attention is spread thinly. Meanwhile, blogging is the one thing bloggers definitely have in common, so the attention is more concentrated.

It’s a failing of aggregators that they optimize for attention concentration rather than interestingness. But is there even such a thing, objectively?

Is blogging always like that? Always has been.

> But there might not be a better word for the latter scenario.

How about age-gating?

Sounds more midgame.

The endgame is to generate a binary image for an entire single-purpose OS/unikernel that does exactly and only what you require of it. No source to open or close.

It would be saner to set a cap that is in some way tied to ecological footprint, food production, energy generation capacity, and other factors that make a country sustainable and sovereign. Trouble is, I expect that would put nearly every country way over.