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I don't think I'm understanding the properties of a viewshed tile.

Each tile is sized so that the viewshed size (in square metres) of every point within the tile can be found just from elevation data within the tile itself?

But that doesn't seem right from the example you gave, because along the edge at the mouth of the river, the viewshed presumably includes the rest of the river outside of the tile as well?

I think the takeaway should be you really don't want Alzheimer's regardless of what people think of you.

Think about what is happening from his point of view. The condition has fundamentally changed his perception of reality. You are trying to tell him that this perfectly cooked chicken is pink all-over when it clearly isn't. Everyone else has gone mad and he doesn't know why.

It's been a while since I did abstract algebra, but I'm pretty sure that once you have the additive and multiplicative identities, the rest of the reals can be generated. Which is still a constructive process.

Regardless, the existence of the real numbers is not a matter of need. Their existence is a consequence of how mathematics is defined. Over-simplified, it's a case of if addition and multiplication work, then the real numbers must exist.

Usually, maths doesn't require us to overthink about anything metaphysical. Things either are or they aren't, the problem-solving approach taken to demonstrate a result one way or the other is the fascinating part.

Not sure about the LLM community, but it's not uncommon in other computer-science communities to assign common names to models and implementations.

Common names will always be influenced by the authors culture, so it seems unfair to exclude a name based on any individual opinion that it is or isn't a mundane choice.

Unless you would also exclude names based on their relationship to old, but culturally relevant texts in the western tradition to, e.g., the bible.

There is a bigger issue with any argument around competition as to whether market participants are really competing head-to-head or if they're finding subtle ways to collude.

The universe, being a physical entity not bound by the rules of human logic doesn't have to be either.

Our logical approximation of the universe might need to be, assuming that we don't add more axioms to our system of logical reasoning.

You can construct a real number by using an infinite series so it's no less constructive than a rational function on the naturals.

Non-constructive arguments are things like proof by contradiction i.e., the absence of the negative implies the existence of the positive.

The natural numbers are 'natural' because they are definite quantities that can be used for counting.

Taylor expansions about a point of a function requires that the function has a derivative defined at that point.

The derivative itself is the point at which an infinite sequence (say, of incrementally closer approximations) converges.

So derivatives and Taylor series are really more of an arbitrary precision approximation of a value rather than a concrete exact quantity.

Arbitrary precision approximation just happens to be a very elegant way to model the physical world around us.

For truly exact solutions, you still have to work with the naturals (and rationals, etc.)

Mathematics is a philosophy that focuses on the study of logic. It's a bit of an exaggeration to conflate mathematics with 'truth' in an absolute, universal sense.

Mathematical 'truths' are themselves only true in the sense that they can be derived from axioms.

The fact that mathematics can be used to understand the world around us is nothing short of a mystery (or a miracle).

My first thought here is that an open market for translations would just create lots of really bad, free translations and make discovering good translations impossible.

Ultimately, there will be a concern that it devalues the translation process, leading to translators getting paid less, not more.

Presumably the company translating and subtitling anime is licensing the show, not producing it. So subtitling and translation costs for a business like Crunchyroll would be most of their production budget (assuming licensing fees are not egregious).

This is true not just in AI but in tech in general. Data centers could be cheaper and more energy efficient. Phones could last longer, etc.

Ultimately, companies don't like participating in markets that are races to the bottom (better outcomes at lower prices).

Technologies that make LLM training cheaper will only see widespread adoption after its no longer feasible to keep expanding data centers to handle the data processing loads.

> it can’t wait on the database. In that case autoscaling cpus on the requester side makes sense but this is rare.

You might be billed for a new CPU for each request, but in practice this may not be how it's implemented by your provider. It may not be any more computationally expensive than Async callbacks you would implement yourself anyway.

> Highly disagree. Imagine one of those command line utilities is “ls”. This overreliance on lambdas is akin to adding new Computers to the cluster in order to call ls.

If your application needs to walk the files in a directory by name, you don't need to use 'ls' either. You can use standard library routines instead. However, by shipping 'ls' as a separate binary it is now significantly easier to reuse.

There isn't a universal best solution. But serverless does have technical merits.

Having worked with it only a little on occasion. I found that the problem lies in its atrocious documentation.

I get it, there are lots of knobs and dials I can adjust to tune the cluster. A one-line description for each item is often insufficient to figure out what the item is doing. You can get a sense for the problem eventually if you spin up a local environment and one-by-one go through each item to see what it does, but that's super time consuming.

Synadia was clearly open to being supported by community contributions. But since no-one who used NATS wanted to maintain NATS, a decision has to be made about how to support the project in the long-term.

The thing is, Synadia has made 97% of the contributions. So they essentially own the copyright to the entire project and the CNCF hasn't helped them to build a community of developers and software support.

There's a balance to be struck here, but, given that there are not really any users of NATS that are contributing back to the community. It seems very reasonable to me that NATS should be able to relicense their software, and it won't affect any of their commercial users. Free users can be transitioned to a trial license, and the impact from the transition will be minimal.

I have always had the impression that the CNCF was founded as a kind of demilitarized zone for large companies to collaborate on big projects.

Having governance and contributions all recorded in the public domain, and the software licensed so that it is free means that the big firms limit the risk of IP infringement and they can control the size of their financial investment to be proportional to their financial benefit.

In Kubernetes related projects for instance, I've seen sensible bug reports asking for features that have been rejected not because of a lack of sponsors, or lack of resources, or lack of expertise, but because it doesn't fit into the projects goals or roadmap. Responses like that never made me feel that these projects were particularly ”open".

> Furthermore, the architecture will fundamentally require a sorted index, meaning that any such a queuing / streaming system will process n messages in O (n log n).

Would using a sorted index have an impact on the measured servicing time of each message? (Not worst-case, something more like average-cass). It's made extremely clear in the Kafka docs that Kafka's relies heavily on the operating systems filesystem cache for performance, and that seeking through events on disk turns out to be very slow compared to just processing events in-order.

There are technical benefits to using serverless functions. As mentioned, there is autoscaling and the delegation of infrastructure management to a vendor. But you also create clearer language/runtime independent code encapsulation. This means that you can reuse this code for other purposes in the future, even projects that use different programming languages.

It's a little bit like the difference between writing a monolithic piece of software and writing a bunch of command-line utilities and scripting them together using the shell.

There was a time when "engineer" was a respected term reserved for a profession. Engineers were highly paid because they're brought onto projects that are high-complexity and high-value. Companies are hoping not to pay for engineering work more than once.

Some countries still treat the title "Engineer" as a protected title. Though I often now see it prefixed with professional or accredited or something so that people know they aren't an "engineer" they're an "Engineer".

I think most people who write software who think of the work they're doing as "real engineering" are like the draftsmen who draw up floor plans for local government approvals in civil engineering offices. If you're doing it over and over again, it's probably not engineering, it's probably just regular skilled Labor.

My professional career has mostly been in IT ops. I've worked for companies that do requirements analysis and design in-house, write up a huge spec, send the spec to an offshore development house, then simply acceptance test the software that is sent back.

Companies know that the quality of the software they get back might be lower than if they hired the bestest, smartest developers in the world. But it doesn't matter because keeping the production cost of the asset low means that they can maximize long term profits.

Writing good software is not the same as writing profitable software.

The problem with FOSSland is that it is increasingly driven by commercial interests, not by volunteers.

I don't know the last time I encountered a used (not random hobby projects) FOSS project that wasn't funded and supported by a company (with exceptions maybe only in the GNU software suite, but even then lots of authors there are making submissions using company email addresses).

I think it's totally acceptable to not make open-source contributions to those projects unless someone is paying you to.

I've just finished a PhD in (specialised) topics around computer performance. And I have a similar feeling about the stagnant state of innovation in computer and software engineering over the last 15 years or so.

The vast majority of research is funded or incentivized in some way by the big internet companies. The big internet companies have a very narrow scope of problems that they are commercially interested in. They also have so much power and money that getting people to listen to diverse ideas and opinions is incredibly difficult, both commercially and academically because everyone somehow has to cater what they do to be in line with internet company practices.

And of course, the internet companies have found ways to industrialize their core competencies of data warehousing and analytics so that every year, fewer inputs (staff, hardware, software, data) are needed to achieve the same outputs.

I think that people are experiencing a loss of independence, and creative thinking. Not a loss of passion for the craft.

Would you still feel the same joy if this project was one of thousands of React/Next.js apps you have worked on?

While this definitely helps consumers. I don't see how it doesn't displace workers.

If the work those workers were doing before software was truly valuable. Companies would find other ways to scale, and simply pass the higher costs onwards to consumers.

Oh? What's an example of a common way for unit files to be subtlely broken?

Most residential power is dirty to some extent, and AC/DC converters are supposed to be able to cope with a wide range of input distortions. For the problem to have worked its way through all of the safety components in both the laptops power brick and its internal electronics means that the distortions must have been particularly high amplitude, and at frequencies that couldn't be easily filtered out (very high, very low, or both).

Electricians that aren't particularly well trained, or particularly experienced are probably not going to be able to diagnose this kind of problem.

This is really a problem for an electrical engineer.

Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions, engineers aren't allowed to perform these kinds of repairs because they don't necessarily have the certifications to perform work on live wires.

Most electricians can only trace wires and identify visible faults, and replace things that aren't up to building codes.

Hasn't radiation from black holes been observed? It's called Hawking radiation I think.

This is not because the publishers can't afford to spend a bit more. But because they would rather capture every last dollar of profit.

There's an argument to be made that getting some of these details right would improve their profitability. For sure people will be talking about the strange pigs wandering around outside the villages.

'Middle Management' is also not a well defined term.

For some, managers like you have described could be thought of as front line managers. Or supervisors.

And middle management are the layers, usually many, that separate the front line managers from the senior executives.

The role of middle management is often to oversee budgets, and be accountable for financial performance in certain geographic regions or business areas.

Middle managers don't employ workers. They employ other managers. Lots of these kinds of jobs will probably be made so simple that entire layers of management will just be removed.

Some examples from chain retail might be:

The franchisee of say, a McDonald's, is in some sense a middle manager. They hire store managers to run the stores in the area that they're responsible for. And they're accountable for the financial performance of all the McDonald's that they own.

The 'Regional Manager' of some large company. They won't be involved in the day to day activity of the business, but they're often an important cog in the wheel because they have local visibility on the financial performance of the business in the region, and are best positioned to allocate the budget in ways that maximize financial performance. Again, they don't hire workers, they hire other managers.