linuxhansl

Why bring this us up now? This formula was changed in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president and the interest rate was 9.09% (down from 12.24% in 1982).

I'll note that Steve Forbes supported Trump in 2016, and claimed last year that Joe Biden is "not up to the job anymore" - although this is not necessarily relevant.

We can't change how we look at inflation based on the perception we want to achieve. This is what we have measured since 1983. And what if the change the formula back? Then we have a new number. And now what?

The article claims that the previous formula correlates better with sentiment. Maybe so. Sure, ever increasing money supply might make you feel rich, when in fact you are not. Did we think we will never have to be pay the bill for over a decade of near-zero interest rates?

The current sentiment seems to be as much influenced by what people want to believe or what their peer group on social media believes.

Hah. I worked in one of Michael's startups in 2000 (I think the only one that failed).

I doubt he remembers me. In any case even back then he would say that the database should just do everything in our staff meetings.

Many of us were smirking back then each time it came up, but it looks like now, 20 years later, he is finally having a go at it!

He is one of the smartest people I have ever met - as far as I can tell :) So if there's someone who can do it, it is him and the team he assembles.

I'm an old fart too. First computer what the ZX81 with 1K of RAM :) That's how it all started, and made a carrier out of it.

What always excited me about software was that I always had renew myself, learn a new thing, change the way I think about something, reflect on what is now possible that wasn't before, etc. I.e. it was never stagnant.

In addition I could try out everything myself, and (more of less) understand what it is doing and why. When I wanted to understand RSA, I read the paper and implemented a PoC myself, or a BTree, or an LSM tree, same for Paxos and Raft.

I worked a lot on databases and "BigData" and on the re-convergence of the two. Much of this is open source, so I could play with it, change it, etc.

In that AI is indeed different. I can install (say) Ollama on my machine and play with it, look at the source code (llama.cpp), etc. And, yet, when I get a response to a prompt, even locally on my machine, I feel blind.

And I used to work on neural networks in the late 90s, when their use was limited, so I understand what they do and how they work.

How exactly was that model trained? On what data? What did it actually learn?

(Aside: Here I am reminded of early usage of neural networks to detect enemy tanks. It worked perfectly in the lab, would correctly classify enemy vs friendly tanks, and in a field test it failed terribly - worse than random. What happened? Well it turned out that the set of photos with enemy tanks mostly showed a particular weather pattern, whereas the friendly photos predominantly showed another. So what the neural network had actually learned was to classify the weather. You might laugh about this now... But that's what I mean.)

So, yeah, I can related to OP, even though I am excited about what AI might bring.

> S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton responded to the news of the collision on social media, saying, “So much for safety.”

Somehow I would have expected more from a supervisor.

Maybe she could have awaited the investigation? Does she have stats on miles driver per accident - for human drivers and autonomous vehicles? Does she have stats on how many cyclist are hit by car with human drivers? Is this an interesting intersection? ...

She probably did not ask herself any of this.

Seems to me the range of what a credit card charges would seem sensible. I.e. 3-7%.

Alternatively charge 30% but be forced to allow side-installing Apps. That way developers can decide if they want the convenience and reach of the AppStore or not.

I think this is problem with nuclear power... You can never get a new project started without a public outcry.

So instead of new, safe, carbon neutral nuclear power (like thorium reactors, passive cooling, etc), we're are continuing to running literal old-timer nuclear plants (Diablo Canyon was built in 1981).

Most folks would not drive a car from 80s, but somehow we're cool with running powerplants that old.

IMHO The best for our carbon footprint with safety would be new nuclear plants.

Yep. stringstreams make copies of passed strings too. I had to hack around that once like this:

  struct ZeroCopyBuf : public std::streambuf
  {
   ZeroCopyBuf(const std::string &s) : ZeroCopyBuf(s.c_str(), s.length()) {}
   ZeroCopyBuf(const char *c, std::size_t l) : ZeroCopyBuf(const_cast<char*>(c), l) {}
   ZeroCopyBuf(char *c, std::size_t l) { setg(c, c, c + l); }
  };
  ...
  std::string s ...;
  ZeroCopyBuf buf(s);
  std::istream is(&buf);

Terrible. C++-20 makes it better by adding move semantics to most methods... Still.

This is really frustrating to hear!

It continues to boggle my mind how Chrome - partly closed source, questionable goals related to advertising - has almost 50% market share; while Firefox is declining.

Been using this one forever. It's pretty good. Every now and then Youtube changes something in their API, then Newpipe usually needs to a day or two to adjust.

Are there any reliable statistics of something like accident per mile driven that compare between autonomous vehicles and human drivers?

What I found so far is this:

- Waymo and Cruise have driven about 8 million miles driverless (mostly in San Francisco) and reported about 100 crashes (mostly minor like scraping shopping cart, etc) and many that were fault of another car. (as of September 2023)

- Apparently a human drives am average 100 million miles between fatal accidents. In that case we do not have enough data, yet.

I'm not sure what to think. Is the rate of accidents a cause of concern? Or is this blown out of proportion and driverless cars are actually safer? Or (most likely) we simply do not know, yet?

Honestly I never quite understood why most folks switched so easily and unquestioningly to Chrome.

Maybe I'm just an open source purist. However, I will say that in almost all tests with websites I am actually using Firefox is faster.

(Maybe not that much of a purist: I do use Chrome at work as we're using various Google products... docs, meet, etc, and those work better on Chrome. Go figure.)

I can get extra help, instead of everybody else being slowed down.

And come on please, not slowing everybody does not mean that the teacher moves "as fast as the best student".

What you call morally reprehensible is rooted in your own black and white thinking in this matter.

I'm reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

We are not, should not, and cannot all be the same.

I am bad at languages. Should I now demand that everybody please slow down so that I do not have to feel bad about myself? ... Nope.

RedHat is still doing a lot of work in upstream open source projects, I want them to stay around and continue to do so.

To do that they need to be commercially successful.

Now, you can argue whether the recent moves are helpful to their bottomline or not (I think this is short-sighted and in the end will hurt them), but we need to acknowledge they are not charity, and also that we all are already benefiting from their money and their work.

I am getting a lot of calls from a Mr. Likely. His first name is Scam. I don't know a Scam Likely, why does he keep calling me?!

Seriously though, my spam to legitimate phone call ratio is about 10 to 1 (10 calls spam/telemarketing for each call I actually want).

My phone does a good job identifying scam, and if not I simply ignore any call from a number I do not know. If it is important they'll leave a number!

The part that I do not understand is how it is possible to call 1000's of numbers for free. Just do not allow any flat plans with free calls anywhere; charge a few cents per call and lower the flat fee. Normal folks will save money, and scammer will need to pay.

Edit: Spelling

Can we now finally go back to the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter Internet, before we centralized everything within a few corporations?

Good. I got rid of my Twitter account years ago. Not missed anything whatsoever. Hopefully public institutions will now stop using it.

I mentioned this before... As a Linux user I am getting more and more afraid of being left behind.

In the end this spurring Intel to innovate, but will it be enough?

I realize there are some Linux' running on Apple H/W, but due to do the closed nature (H/W specs anyone?) it will already be inferior to MacOS.

I have a MacBook from work, and strongly dislike (hate?) MacOS.

I have a challenge out to all my friends: "Show me one, just one, software patent that is not obvious to someone skilled the field, and I will stop my annoying diatribes about how bad software patents are."

To this day I have yet to see to a useful software patent.

> Participation is entirely voluntary, according to Air New Zealand.

I doubt this will lead to reliable numbers then. Heavier folks will be more likely to feel ashamed (which is unfortunate, but probably true).

Sure. And it has the wants and needs now, instead of worrying about the wants and needs next week, or feeling regret over past wants and needs not being met.

As a Buddhist I find myself meditating on a related question: When is the personal self born? It clearly does not exist at birth, and then some point, after we learn language, that voice of the ego develops. The ego that constantly chatters and is everywhere in past, the future, somewhere else, and never here and now.

For most people that ego goes unnoticed, until they look or listen for it. Upon reflection the ego (and the self) is quite obviously an illusion, yet, this constant chatter, the constant fear, anxiety, anger, remorse, from living in the past or future is source of so much violence among human beings.

Maybe this is off-topic but I feel that the "take what I want" attitude has is source in the unnoticed ego illusion.

I bought the printed versions about 15 years ago, not to prepare for anything but to "leisurely" read about Physics.

Richard Feynman had the uncanny ability to explain something at a level where it makes sense, and then back it all up for math.

Hah. Used SLS (and then Slackware) back then. I think the first version of the kernel I used was 0.98pl13.

I worked at DEC back then and did not have Internet at home, so I would schedule jobs at night to download the 1.3" floppy images and then copy them to actual floppies to bring home.

Can't believe that is 30 years ago now.

That would indicate many high-quality news outlets.

Many European countries have state-funded but independent media. Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, France, et al, all have state-funded and independent media.

The idea is that state-funding makes them less dependent since they do not have to only report what people want to read for ad-revenue but can focus on honest reporting (including reporting critical of the government).

Whether you buy that argument or not is a different discussion. The point is that "state funded" has nothing to do with "state controlled" or even "state affiliated"; just another dumb move by Elon Musk.

I quit Twitter a long time ago. Good riddance, I have not missed anything!

That happened to us, and what followed was a 8 week nightmare.

1. My son's school MS account took over his private account, only because he linked the two accounts.

2. Suddenly my son's Windows said it was un-authorized.

3. We called Microsoft, they could not fix it.

4. We called the manufacturer of the machine (they shipped Windows as OEM). They could not fix it.

5. Called MS again. They gave us a new activation code. Did not fix it.

6. Called MS again, this time they said to reinstall Windows (This is not a joke).

7. Upon re-installing, Windows would not activate. No error message, no nothing it would just hang in the activation loop.

8. Called MS. They had no clue. Claimed H/W issues.

9. Called manufacturer again. Also claimed H/W issues. I said that I can access the internet from the machine while it was hanging in activation, so network was not the problem.

10. Manufacturer sent someone out (I had bought warranty). He switched the SSD with a new version of Windows... The did exactly what I did. Same problem, would not activate.

11. Some back and forth with MS and the manufacturer involving many reboot and (I kid you not) turning off all wireless routers... MS still would not activate. Manufacturer (and MS) did not believe me. So they sent someone again. Did the same thing, again. Did not work.

12. Manufacturer said I needed to send in the machine. So I did. I included a note about what the problem and to please not just re-install Windows, because the activation was the problem.

13. Got the machine back... They had just re-installed Windows. Would not activate.

14. Started to get upset. After some pressing manufacturer agreed to send a new machine.

15. First they sent someone out again. Did the same thing again. Forced me, again, to turn all wireless routers off, so that (he claimed) Windows would activate without network. Again... Did not work. Activation just hung.

16. Eight weeks into this we ended up getting a new machine (yes, not kidding) from the manufacturer and now the same version of Windows (from the same memory stick) on the same hardware, same drivers, all the same, would happily register.

I cannot even begin to express how annoying and useless this was. And MS and manufacturer were helpless and useless.

Personally I have stopped use Windows over 2 decades ago - only using Linux, but my son wanted a gaming machine, and so I relented. :)

Gattaca is hands down my favorite movie of all time.

From a dystopian future, where a determination ("not saving anything for the way back") can still make a difference against all odds. A love story, a friendship, and finally an unexpected act of goodwill and an ending that is both relieving and sad.

And all this on top of the great acting and cinematography!

Am I the only one who does not like episodes and prefers movies?

One the one hand there is time for development that a movie would not have, on the other hand it often feels drawn out.

KDE is great. I've been using the Fedora KDE spin for years now. Just works.

Everything just seems to make sense, and I have not experiences the crashes or wake-up failures the author describes. Probably Fedora pre-vets which packages and version work well together.

The last day of the year would not be complete without watching this! Together with "Ein Herz und eine Seele: Silvesterpunch". :)