papaver-somnamb

> What is the problem?

> There are two main problems with digital piracy. First, it robs the creator of their income. It’s not just big companies who suffer – the people working behind the scenes lose out too.

How risible! Over the decades we have come to learn that those who pirate are those who are willing to expend their time and use their technical competence to consume media that they otherwise wouldn't pay for or cannot afford to begin with. Like younger folk. And the economically disadvantaged (George Carlin vocetto). A small % of the media corps' "attention base."

It's just a rhetorical talking point in the service of effecting leverage for the incumbents, but does the average Joe know that? And what would change if they did?

Now I'm falling into cynicism, albeit well founded ... Oh, let's go devil's advocate:

And what of the societal consequences of the copyrighting of what is effectively a very large number (encoded media file IP). As though ideas can be owned.

Seeing some talk about "built in Japan": This is a huge psychological factor in the hearts and minds of Japanese people. AFAICT, pride is a main constituent. There is a strong desire for Japanese to have accomplishments to be proud of to the world, to stand out on a crowded world stage.

Another is this phrase particularly signals to other Japanese: Hey, choose this software, because it was made by our kind (pride), and its operation might mesh better with your cognitive patterns. oh, and the Japanese localization is bound to be 1st class (a small rarity).

One more: Japanese like to judge things after getting the thing into their hands and evaluating it (物で判断する), and word-of-mouth is mighty powerful in Japan. So "built in Japan" means it's pre-vetted by Japanese, and that is in turn a powerful seal of quality. Oh, and if there are some flaws, we can overlook them knowing that someone will eventually get round to dealing with them. It's a civil and respectful community-minded approach that mirrors Japanese culture in the large.

If you are so inclined, there is a whole multi-faceted Made in Japan movement.

Outside of the context of Japan or being of a Japanese mind, the value of this statement depends greatly on the context. For medicine, semiconductors, industrial equipment? Made in Japan is often a solid choice. For software? Japan is an advanced nation, plenty of highly-skilled knowledge workers, and has a very long history with software development; this software is probably competently done. On the other hand, it might mean the software is designed a little .. mysterious .. to non-Japanese eyes due to those aforementioned cognitive patterns but also a differing cultural context. For example using the color blue to signify "build successful" in Jenkins instead of green.

How did you get into conversation with DENSO? Channels through YCombinator or investors?

I appreciate that this product is geared towards a narrowly-defined type of user. But I'm genuinely curious why would it be more appealing than a Studio with a Thunderbolt enclosure?

PCIe configuration of the 2023 Mac Pro: 1 Two double-wide full length x16 gen4 slots Two double-wide full length x8 gen4 slots Two single-wide full length x8 gen4 slots One single-wide half length x4 gen3 slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card and up to 192GB RAM.

Meanwhile, a typical real-world workstation mobo like the Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE offers: 2 7 x PCIe 4.0/3.0 x16 slot(s) Up to 2TB RAM

In my use case, I require 512GB RAM (next stop 1TB) and plenty of cores for heavy parallel build action, a Blue-team graphics card, 3 cards of fully-populated Asus Hyper M.2 X16 and a high-speed NIC, plus some life-improvements like a 4-port USB-C card. Requirements that seem to outstrip the capabilities of this new machine.

Hey, I love the appearance and feel, and I'm used-to and productive with MacOS on desktop. Up until iOS and newer cousins took over Apple's revenue sheet in the early 2010s, the x86 Mac Pro was a permanent fixture under my desk and a reliable partner. That plus a well-specced Linux box and I never had to worry about being out of action. But since that time, my impression is that it and Mac on the desktop in general feels like it's in decline, neglected, it's software increasingly abandonware, Apple's conception of the target market is every-more narrowly defined and on a just-enough basis, and perhaps most important of all the system's first allegiance no longer to me.

Maybe I need to accept or re-conceptualize that Mac Pro today is just for a narrow group of content creators, at least for the meantime...

1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213661 2 https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/wo...

I went through Linear Algebra I & II where eigenvalues & eigenvectors played a central role many a time and I was left with no elucidation regarding their practical applications.

Now I know that eigen*s (at risk of egregious oversimplification) can characterize systems and transformations, they are fundamentally widely applicable. Think of stretching narrow an arbitrary 2D image on a non-cardinal axis; an eigenvector can be a key factor that describes that transformation.

Yes, the footprint per capita. My post was already becoming uncomfortably long..

Ex: A religious person goes to a developing country, promotes birth control, and comes back to be rewarded for preventing excess births to the degree of 100 children. They then proceed to have 2 children of their own. Given that the developing country has a footprint per capita two orders of magnitude less than that of the proselytizer (i.e. 5 versus 800, to use circa 2000 numbers), that person has in effect only slightly mitigated the cascading impact of their own actions.

It's more about raising everyone alive not just to our collective higher standards of living but also in reducing footprint.

I'm going to make some predictions, bold, dystopian predictions yet ones I feel at least rather confident in coming to be.

1) Political action will stay under the threshold necessary for real change on human behaviors to realize limits on human-caused warming. We're gonna heat the planet and politicians will remain anti-aligned and selfishly focused on partisan/regional /short-term gains with the support of their votership.

2) As we heat and resources exhaust, some populations are going to wither, some will adapt, and some will attempt to migrate towards cooler regions (the poles). This will cause political strife. As one particular example, draw a line from China's western extent straight north to the pole, and see how what is present-day Russia defends against "the iron will of 1.4B people" who are struggling to live where they are (China already views itself as an Arctic power). Another: USA pushing north beyond the 49th parallel.

3) Population control is topically political suicide in democracies; no one in power will dare broach it in seriousness at a national or multilateral level. Few such people will even give voice to relating resource levels with population levels. Instead, the mitigation strategy will find its loci in migration control and containment (keeping-their-problems-in-their-own-Stans) like we do today with Bangladesh.

I truly hope I'm wrong, but I have a hunch I'm not ..

IMHO speedy Internet should be regarded as critical national infrastructure, and be prioritized for accordingly by national governments in coordination with their lesser jurisdictions (provincial, municipal). Let free market solutions co-exist, sure. Contemporary government can be shown to be highly inefficient, possibly unable, to realize it, sure. But do bring an end to barriers to the deployment and operation of nationalized Internet such as regulatory capture, incumbents free to hinder others in sharing cabling infrastructure, etc., and dismantle a barrier to your country-folk flourishing in this modern world.

Have rising sea levels and storm surges been taken into account for the planning of the entrances? Watching the video, wondering if it is an accurate depiction of size and placement, I couldn't help the bolt of consternation that shot through me, because those entrances look awfully close in elevation to sea level.

And regarding air management, in Japan and HK at least, driving through lengthy tunnels can already be a stinky affair, especially in summer, so ensure your vehicle's air conditioning system is set to cycle the air inside the car. The Tokyo Bay Aqua Line tunnel that connects Yokohama to Chiba is quite long and it uses large fans that vent at mid-way points, one doubling as a tourist stop. The Fehmarnbelt tunnel being the longest in the world is therefore longer, and I didn't see such venting points. Yes I noted the air movers in the video. But hey, I'm hopeful that such problems will attenuate with electrification.

I concur; the original Japanese article is uncolored, and the English language article is not a faithful translation. Although the people responsible for authoring and editing TFA seem to go unmentioned, shame on them.

This is one reason why at the time of group formation I ask that one person be responsible for delivering the desired outcome of the group. By election, by appointment, whatever the circumstances may call for. And, as I learned the hard way, that responsibility needs to be coupled with and balanced by a suitable degree of authority.

Two keys to readable C declarations:

1. Just read the clumps in a given decl backwards.

2. Keep the decls of individual concepts in code small enough to grok without breaking your brain. While decls can be mechanically complex, ability to reason about and maintain code is a paramount factor. For C, typedef, struct, nomenclature are friends.

You know, returning an array of triplets of function pointers each of which accept more gloop can be made to be understandable with judicious application of the above. I'm given to understand that this overall approach is all the rage in the Go community ...

Alright, narrower spreads in economic inequality appears to connote greater overall happiness in the measured society. Perhaps attributable to the averaging and not representative of the outliers, or demonstrable of modality, but that might be a separate argument. Northern European countries are famed for ranking near the top. The degree to which a society is advanced can be measured in part by how it treats its most disadvantaged members. And in the long run, we help ourselves by helping each other.

But (playing the devil's advocate here) I'm interested in equalizing opportunity, not in equal outcome and artificial fairness.

If this notion is ridiculous, would somebody care to enlighten / disillusion?

That's the luxury of time thing.

If I was a recipient of universal basic income, it's the first item on my list. A series starting from grass roots leading to code-level manifestation and verification of landmark chips like MOS 6502, Zilog Z80 and onwards up to MIPS R4000, SuperSPARC, Intel 80486, Motorola 68040. And a deep dive to implementing a lisp-based OS and tooling to both run & compile itself, completing the circle. There is so much interesting about CPUs, from large architectural design considerations like machine type (Von-Neuman or Harvard) and MMUs through to minutiae like choice of instructions and the encoding of the instruction set, balancing the conflicting demands of instruction timing optimizations versus silicon space and power budget, math intrinsics, ... this rabbit hole runs deep. I'm starting to wonder if any one person is able to master all of the requisite topics, similar to the pseudo-fact that there is no one person who is able to manufacture a can of Coke from scratch. But, we can try, and that is where the fun is :)

Can anyone layout a path to becoming as skilled in chip design as these people like John Bruno? As though I would be able to do a competent Verilog implementation of RISC-V or 68040 in my own workshop.

As a hobby (back when I had the luxury of time) I designed several ALUs, and two CPUs featuring datapaths and register transfer control. I did them as digital circuit diagrams on paper, on breadboards (which teaches the valuable lessons of signal fanout, wire layout, debugging), and in squirrel (which teaches the value of good tooling, one way or another). I've toyed with VHDL, Verilog, and FPGAs, and am competent in assembly and C. I'm interested, but I don't know what the path forward looks like to gaining the chops that these famed designers have.