sharikone

Yes but not precisely. There is an uncertainty that is difficult to remove.

However, if you combine it with modern image recognition and you know your target it will be probably enough

My impression is that Harvard will be filled with amazing students nonetheless, there are a lot of them.

It may miss some of the extraordinary ones, though.

This field is like a minefield for critical thinkers given the sensitivity around the issue and the difficulty in finding rigorous answers.

In stuff like that I don't trust the mainstream, nor I do trust any publication that is not very thorough. Since just establishing if a publication is thorough takes too much time for me I am content with a lot of question marks.

I accept that I do not know anything about general trends - only some personal stuff about myself and some people around me which may be or may not be representative.

Surprisingly you can still live well after you accept you are not required to have an informed opinion of this issue. You can still spend your time having fun and writing code

Some elegant abstractions are created too. JS modules, for example. Or, in another field, the Language Server Protocol.

But yes, humans are humans and everything that is "simple" will get built upon and then become the backbone of something complex that will engulf and smother it as it evolves.

The church defended a scientific assertion based on theology and used their (absolute) political power to curb other worldviews.

Even assuming that Galileo could not prove beyond reasonable doubt heliocentrism as a physical model, and that the Church accepted that the Ptolemaic model wasn't valid - the Church took an active part in asserting that "heliocentrism is heresy". They could have said it's not their own matter to pontificate about and they instead went after Galileo asserting that he overstepped his boundaries.

It's very possible that Galileo (and the stories about him in later epochs) was not 100% in his assertions and his arguments. And it's important to look at the history from an objective point of view. However if you look at it as a battle for freedom to do experiment-based research, yes, the church was evil at that time.

In fact gluons have a QCD charge, they just don't have a QED (electric) charge. That QCD charge is basically one color and one anticolor, minus the trace. So there are 8 different basis vectors that define the space for what the charge of a gluon is.

In defense of the Remarkable its primary purpose is a very useful use-case. No iPad or Android tablet could get me to ditch paper and notebooks altogether. The Remarkable did it.

And since it is hackable the community made interesting strides in other use cases as well

Their SIMD vectorized instructions are very neat and clean up the horrible mess of x64 ISA (I am not familiar enough with Neon and SVE so I don't know if ARM is a mess too)

I am waiting for "React Native for the Web for Native" as a tool to port React Native for the Web pages to native apps.

To be followed by "React Native for the Web for Native for the Web" to port those apps back to the Web..

At some point they will just emulate a browser into a PC into a browser to make your code more portable

You'd be surprised by how much water has been saved in droughts by encouraging this kind of small scale efforts. E.g. the Cape Town water crisis

They are breaching a walled garden. And they are looking at a system with capabilities unseen before. And Apple has its prestige. I can totally understand the excitement that goes into this.

Of course it's like working in front of an armed cannon that can be fired at you at any moment. Apple can very easily perform a lock in the seriousness of which no desktop computer has ever seen before, given they control the hardware down to the transistor level.

That cross-compiling is still so thorny in 2021 is in my opinion a big failure of software engineering.

The creator of Zig is maintaining a very accessible and immediate cross compilation infrastructure for Zig and C alike (zig cc). It's a secondary thing to him, but I practically use it very often since it just works, in contrast to the other stuff. Unfortunately even zig cc has often issues with less tested platforms like 32 bit ARM

Probably I am lucky but I don't meet a lot of people who use Twitter outside Twitter.

I believe that Twitter is not a cultural influencer as much as a product used by people who already have a rather shallow philosophy. So I do not buy into the cultural decadence argument since they fail to convince me that Twitter-like media significantly influence people behavior.

I wouldn't look at the mouth of a gifted horse. Their closed source binary is not huge.

Also I don't worry about updates. Why would I connect my notebook to the Internet anyway? I just don't install them.

I guess it's a matter of time before fully open source display drivers are available and I can do my part too to make it happen.

When it happens I will have an ownable very nice, thin and responsible e-notebook. It will never be connected to the Internet and I will patch it myself if I will happen to want a new feature.

Maybe you are right and it could be more FOSS than it is, but in a world where you don't really own anything valuable anymore I am so elated about the hackability of this device that I'll take a bit of tinkering with binary files.

In the rM1 you just write to a framebuffer device in /dev/fb0 to write on the screen. It's so easy you could probably write an application that does that, compile it for ARM, load it via scp and run it. All in 15 minutes even if you know nothing about the Remarkable itself.

The rM2 is a lot trickier. A full reverse engineering of the drawing routines is still unfinished, as far as I know. So you either manipulate the memory of their closed source application or reuse big binary chunks of it. There are of course abstraction layers built over that by the community but as of today I believe it's much less refreshing than the rM1.

The rM1 used the chip electrophoretic display controller directly , while the rM2 has a software controller which is closed source. Hence much of the complications

Interesting. As an aside the Remarkable runs Linux too and it's somewhat hackable, but its main application is closed source, as is the drawing of the screen (accomplished with temperature dependent waveforms via software).

Its hardware specs are much worse but it's thinner at 4.7 mm.

I appreciate this new product but if it were dependent on me I would have invested in color eInk instead of powerful CPU with an NPU. I guess the build on the community providing a nice environment and handwriting recognition (otherwise I cannot explain the NPU)

> Is that really so much to ask?...

Yes. You cited requirements that to be satisfied together require a huge effort. You want something that can "just work" and is also cross-platform, power user friendly (LaTeX), and should be snappy to be able to gain traction. Not to mention that you have to compete with the ecosystem lockin of Office-Teams-Onedrive-Sharepoint-Azure.

I frankly see no way a competitive alternative could appear without a billion dollar budget backing it.

I disagree. Such tooling would probably be annoying for pro users and beginners alike.

The reasoning involved is deeper than what an automatic tool can accomplish. It requires knowledge of computers (disk access speed) and of the input (mostly not unicode). We can imagine inputs for which this optimization does not work and also architectures where it will be less effective. This is the kind of reasoning experienced humans are (still) better than machines.

The article is from 2012 and today in 2021 Iran still has no nuclear weapons. So it did, after all, slow them down.

This tactic has been successful for the Israelis against the Egyptian missile program in the '50s, after significant setbacks.

So I understand why it appears to be a last sort extreme measure. Risky, difficult to get right but sometimes successful.

I personally think that next batches of new weapons - killer drones, biological warfare, etc... could easily get more "effective" than nuclear weapons. So it's not like it's a static world where the atomic bomb is the ultimate one. It's nations fighting to keep an edge over others in a dynamic setting where older weapons will eventually lose their relevance.

I don't know why but for a moment I read this comment in horror imagining language developers implementing telemetry in the compilers and tooling themselves, then relying on them to "improve the experience" by changing the spec every six months.

Linux as a system is very ill-defined. I'd argue that GNU/Linux by definition contains glibc even if they are not in the same tree and musl based distributions are a variation which you could call "musl/Linux".

HPC courses can be pretty good for that.

Stuff like OpenMP is great for doing quick things like a parallel for cycle

Perhaps it's me but I like to be able to edit articles and see discussions, and I haven't figured out how to do that from the mobile version.

So I find myself constantly fighting the website to access the Desktop version

It seems Microsoft and Intel are threatened by the M1 and had to do this hastily. Hence the rush for Windows support in spite of Linux.

Let's be real. There are more physicists than fitting research problems. That's why your average physics PhD graduate is typically employed outside of the field they learned and earns less than an average React programmer.

That said, theoretical physics has the goal of understanding reality from a reductionist point of view. At the scales that goes from the nucleus to the Solar system there are few questions left. We know the Standard Model and GR and they fit the data perfectly. Of course some questions remain for how things interact when there are many of them (e.g. warm superconductivity) but there are few questions about fundamental laws

You can think about it like bootstrapping an open source system (it was in the homepage today). There are still many technical hurdles downstream but we are interested in reducing the binary blob from which all starts to its perfect minimal form. And the only places we still have not figured out well are things at the limit of our instrument capacity. Black holes (GR and relativity, we still cannot figure out that and proving black hole seems experimentally challenging), exotic particles (what are quarks composed of?), dark matter (why far away galaxies seem to rotate so quickly?), dark energy, inflation, that stuff.

I think physics should be smaller, it has too many graduates. But actually these problems should be researched. They are the fundamental questions that remain and there is a reason that the layman considers this stuff to be "real physics" and not origami folding

TIL, thanks! So Europe does have some big players in the chip production facility infrastructure, after all!

What European company? Do you mean ST microelectronics, ARM, or something else?

That's something that changed for the worse in the last decades. In the 2000's Apple documentation was terrific.

It puzzles me how things like that go. Google and Microsoft improved their developer documentation in the last years

In my experience the ideology of the left has a lot of appeal among the rich who want to just feel they are good.

And the right has some unhinged aggressive component of "see, being good is hypocrisy, so it's better to be bad".

I agree perfectly. It seems there are zillions of apps (just look at this thread), but the moment I look for my requirements (markdown, good math rendering, no format lockdown, decent GUI, basic backup options) it seems that no matter how I look the only options are Obsidian and Joplin. Joplin being open source, albeit not perfect, it is my choice.

It always surprises me how many apps there and how I don't get a feeling with 95% of them.