rnk

Vernor Vinge introduces many fantastic ideas in his really excellent scifi book A Fire Upon the Deep. He has many fascinating concepts like what if somehow there are parts of the universe where you can go faster than the speed of light, and you would be smarter there, that's where the super intelligent beings go. Guess what, we humans live in the slow zone, you morons. Also there it's a ftl communication method that is like good old Usenet. There is (what looked credible to me) a fascinating set of multiple brain beings, thing like dogs where together 5 of them form one "intelligence" where the different personalities combine in interesting ways.

And I was sad to notice he died this year, aged 79. A real cs prof who wrote sci fi.

But we keep seeing these devices after multiple generations and they keep using more and more silicone so they're not shrinking that much.

But if someone calls you on the phone, they are just sending their voice to you, there's no Avatar from them, except for one your software invented. The one that you're looking at is disconnected from the actual person.

I'm skeptical of this argument. I don't want to be on the same road with people who self identity as expert drivers going at the limit.

The credit card company could access subcategories of your purchase. It would make sense for them to do that to track you

Can you explain what project is unwinding? It looks to me like Europe is still coming together to resist the danger of Russian invasion. For Nuland, it looks like she had a long career, she had many good roles, she championed protecting Ukraine and there was only one other position for to be promoted to and they promoted someone else. So that seems like a perfect time to leave after a successful career.

Software jobs still seem to be available for over $200k remote.

rpn for for the win I guess ;-). I actually didn't get to try my first linux stuff until grad school in the 80s. I wish I had saved off all my init files from then to see what they look like now.

I got tired of typing bc -l years ago, I have a function so I can do it on the command line: calc 2^27 + 3^15. I wish somehow the shell would let me add parens here, instead of having to escape them with a quote.

function calc2 { if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then echo 'pass commands for math evaluation, like calc l(2^32/17) + 3'; fi; echo $* | bc -l; }

who does not use bc? people who aren't old unix people ;-) I use bc

How do we get China to stop? It's impossible. It's completely to their advantage to have drones get better. They can mass produce them way better than us. The CPUs don't seem to be that advanced up to now, so they can probably make them. If not they can steal/buy them illegally.

Russia is a slightly different case because they can't make many of the parts but they can cobble them together using other CPUs. So they are hurt, but possibly helped.

We just have to work on defensive measures.

What if they are careful to make a fake kid who looks nothing like the original (other than kind of looking like a kid of that age and kind of looking like the same race)? There are dramatic re-enactments. I don't want to see this, but should it be banned? Is it okay if it was done with live actors? What about if they were on "to catch a thief"? What if it was a real drama or a play. What if you wanted to block a shakespeare play that had kids killed in it that was a historical event? Is it only for ai actors?

This is a hard thing to figure out. I'm against true crime repros that are disgusting and pandering, but that's completely personal and ambiguous.

Yeah, the ideas expressed by the person above seem to lead to a lazy and incorrect argument that there's aren't any things to argue anti-trust. Google doesn't have one android store, they have 57, across 57 countries with different arguments. And in the they even have two, one focused on English and one on Spanish or something. Divide their total revenue by 100, see it is not so much!

The "Satellite" could be a rich person's enclave. I can see an extension where someone in a wealthy powerful country has a good standard of living, but it depends on the toil and environmental destruction which affects those people "outside".

I think the idea is that it used to be Boeing didn't have these kinds of problems, they managed themselves and made safer airplanes. At least they appeared safer.

Yeah that was a great anecdote, I was going to post the same story! Parent pays you to install spyware , rich kid pays you not to install spyware, double payment for nothing.

And they called him Hiro Protagonist.

How is this different than the argument to sell NFTs that are jpegs that somehow have some value, or token's having value from all these random crypto sites. And they take your 'hard crypto' eth or btc and somehow manipulate trading to make the ftx tokens worth billions.

I interviewed at a company that was making tools for analyzing this world and they had similar arguments about the world changing impact of their analysis tools.

This is a surprising and interesting. This is an actual supply of hydrogen that wasn't based on using fossil fuels or cracking water. Since they are reused fuel cells, they don't have that incredible expensive fuel cell bill of materials. Apparently the fuel cells in the toyota mirai are really expensive because of materials needed. Thanks for posting that.

Up to now all the h car projects just seemed like an attempt to keep the industrial complex useful, transferring the ideas of ICE. There's a kind of structural challenge to the ICE industrial complex with EVs because their expertise in design, building, service gas engines will not be needed with EVs. But this, this is promising to even me.

Dictatorships don't care. Look at Russia, it's much worse than China, Russia still suffers from ww2 losses. You can distract the people with a "good war". China has so many more people than Taiwan, they can waste a lot. What do they care, many of the leaders believe it's their destiny to be the world leader. That's not a unique view, a certain group of americans believe the same about the US too.

We've got to make it 10 years from now for demographic change.

Great fictional book about a possible 2024 era war, "2034: A Novel of the Next World War", Novel by Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis. It's much more realistic than other novels. China sinks multiple aircraft carriers, they completely hack the us and turn off the power and telecommunications. Then the shit hits the fan. Maybe a limited nuclear exchange will scare the other side, the us and china start thinking.

There are more efficient ways to get our needed energy, wind, water, solar. In the US we are up to 20% using this (and 20% nuclear). In other countries they will be able to transition to solar, as it will only get cheaper and cheaper. Electric vehicles will also further reduce emissions. Electricity to head and cool your home from primarily green sources will mean your personal emissions will go down.

The hard thing to calculate is the net impact over time. But imagine someone in a poorer country that burns wood or coal, their electric sources are those too. They can increase their energy usage and actually improve their greenhouse gas impact.

There's no panacea but we can get there.

Okay, call them unnecessary status symbols for people to show their wealth. See also fancy cars, gaudy diamond rings. They are kind of in that category.

There are multiple reports of similar problems on related vehicles like lyriq, also see reddit for some. There's nothing good there. Behind it there's the mysterious lack of details about underlying anemic ultium production in general.

The embedded db is cool, but what's the security boundary around UDFs?

I figure running "standard" SQL is safe, because it's just some functions implemented in the database (SPJ). It's not malware (maybe only slow ;-)). But UDFs that could be python or worse risk a binary are more of an open ended danger.

Great info, I had not heard that, it was needed. You cost someone years of their lives by that. The "authorities" always try to burry the details of the actual improper behavior behind the scandal of the leak, usually successfully.

There's a 25% tariff on Chinese Autos right now. The volvo ex30 is actually made in China (Volvo was bought by Geely). But the ex30 is highly reviewed in previews, coming out for $35k after the tarriff in 2wd model. This compact suv apparently has great quickness and is a fine car. It's the harbinger of doom.

I'm sure the us will pass more protectionist legislation, in Europe they is at least early talk of blocking Chinese EVs because they can't compete too. Volvo has a plan for a Euro based factory for that reason.

There's a trend of these things happening. Reporters constantly miss what tracking tech does.

Reality Winner's situation, where they gave the actual printout she gave them to the feds and it had secret codes embedded in it to identify when/where printed (a long standing thing in printers, in case you didn't know) completely violated her trust with the reporters.

There was also the situation where the NYT reporter got docs from a leaker about Les Moonves' sexual harassement case. The reporter put in stupid info that outed the lawyer, that was on the line of "the docs has 57 pages" and a couple of other very specific things.

There needs to be some kind of education system for reporters that helps them stop outing sources. We are of course served by extreme misdeeds being exposed in the press, whether it gores your own ox or someone else's. But reporters have to stop doing this. Don't publish and actual photo, please re-encode it, remove metadata, do it twice, try to test it yourselves to find something. Don't put numbers. Don't use exact phrasing. When big companies like microsoft try to find leakers, they have software that slightly changes the phrasing in their big company missives, I was told this by a microsoft exec once.

That's a lemon. That's unacceptable of course. We do know from millions of teslas sold that they work fine over the mass of cars. They are made by people, they'll have problems, they will break. But the sum of experiences is good outcome. The opposite seems to be the case with the ultium cars.

The endless series of failures by legacy auto keeps convincing me that they are doomed to lose most of their market share. Because they are incompetent and not trying to build evs with all their might - they don't recognize them as the existential threat they are to ICE manufacturers.

First tesla is taking their market share, even tiny new startups like rivian are outselling many major automakers in the us. US EV sales are up 50% plus year over year. Max ICE auto sales were in 2017! No one seems to have noticed where the growth went. 1 million ev sales this year.

But the second wave is just starting, which is cheap and quite capable chinese EVs. They are starting to take the growth from Tesla in China, Tesla is having to work hard there. The 1-2 punch of first Tesla and then China will degrade us auto.