strangetortoise

It is likely that most of the teslas you saw around Amsterdam were part of the Schiphol airport taxi fleet. They went all in on tesla about a decade ago.

To make meaningful statements about P and NP problems, you probably need to be able to model your problem as a computational one.

If for example, you model it as a graph, with a peg represented by a node, and a bounce direction to another peg with a directed edge. Assign probabilities to all the edges. Then you cqn simply flood search outwards to the end of the graph, accumulating probabilities by multiplication. Any node on the boundary with probability higher than zero can be reached, given enough balls. This job is clearly in P.

I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about "P" for physical problems without a computational model, but I'm not a complexity theorist

They haven't made slotted ram or storage on their macbooks since 2012 (retina macbooks removed the slotted ram afaik). It might save on thickness, but I'm not buying the slim chasses argument being the only reason, since they happily made their devices thicker for the M series cpus.

>- A megacorp that pays 0% in income taxes still pays a ton of sales tax on things it buys

Not familiar with the US, is this actually true? In europe, as a company, you're allowed to subtract VAT on products bought from VAT owed from sales. That would contradict most of what you're saying.

Theres a lot of value in the ecosystem through the asset store, that allows yoi to get up and running much more quickly than if you had to built subsystems from scratch (i.e. You can buy a good water package for <100 usd, whereas implementing state of the art would probably take you at least two months of dev time).

Additionally, from theres lots of educational resources, that might be harder to find for smaller engines

On the other hand, unity has a habit of shooting itself in the foot with incredibly messy and poor documentation, fragmented and duplicated functionality across multiple implementations (theres a common refrain in the unity community that every system in unity is either in beta or deprecated), so an engine that can provide an easier onboarding / dev experience could definitely compete there.

> More languages should have a single, mandatory way to format code, without any ways to opt out.

Strongly disagree. Maybe if you're in a very domain constrained environment, i vould see this being valuable. But i write graphics and simulation code all day, which involves a lot of translating math expressions. A compiler insisting on me using PascalCase (like for example .net uses) leads to very unreadable translations of formulas. And I'm not of the opinion that a system making me rewrite variable names to "meaningful names" helps understanding of the underlying math much, if you need to do symbol manipulation, or read backgrounds papers anyway.

Trust your users. Give them the tools to enforce safety barriers for themselves. Give them sensible defaults, sure. But give them ways to opt-out if they know that they need to break the conventions.

Non-USA here (which might affect things): Isn't the point of paying with e.g. a Netflix gift card that they auto-cancel/pause your subscription to Netflix after the gift card runs out of funds? How would that incur a debt?

Currently have to use sqlalchemy on an existing project, and while I am not necessarily disagreeing with you on ORMs or performance, just wanted to add that chatgpt has been able to reduce my time fighting with their documentation by what I estimate of 90+%. To be fair, if I would have written pure sql, I might not have needed chatgpt at all, but i also would have to learn pythons database connector calls for the umpteenth time.

Forgive my ignorance: I thought it was the other way around, and you needed some relatively high amount of compression on a vinyl master, since otherwise the grooves would swing too wildly, and the needle would have a higher chance of "skipping". Is this an incorrect understanding of mine?

I have heard this type of reply to this remark (from my side) a few times now. It has made me curious: Are you a type of person that often checks the sources on Wikipedia?

Anecdotally: I know that Wikipedia is not always correct. But I feel like I can build an intuition and reason on what pages I can reasonably trust on Wikipedia, since in my experience, the inaccurate bits I have encountered tend to be in certain categories. However it's much harder to feel confident about my intuition about ChatGPTs' correctness, since my exposure has led me to believe that the hallucinations are fairly random, and not concentrated in particular topics. This makes the tool much less attractive for me, as I feel like I need to double check every written word.

Perhaps I should be less trustful of Wikipedia...

Does this form a problem for digital mixing consoles? As far as I know, these already have fairly beefy fans for heat exhaust, so I don't know if they couldn't just add more airflow?

If a dealer repeatedly puts a needle in front of an addict, and encourages them to take it, and they end up giving in, who's responsible?

The addict is of course not without blame, but at the very least I hope we can find a consensus that the dealer is behaving extremely immoral. This is essentially how I view facebook. It's abusing the human condition for profit with destructive effects.

I might misinterpret the parent, but I think the parents idea is more that it helps when deriving the math used in a lot of video game programming. (e.g. simplifying expressions in shader code, or deriving closed forms for intersection tests).

Where this might help is if you don't have a strong background in algrabra, and don't know all the properties of e.g. quaternions by heart. You'd implement essentially the answer that you get after playing with a computer algebra system

> My understanding is that most compilers can out-optimise the average developer

Do you happen to know where (what source) you got that from? I'm genuinely curious, as to my knowledge, compilers are generally still easily fooled by things that causes them unable to vectorize code or factor out conditional jumps.

To give an example here, see Mike Actons' talk below (from about 43:10 onwards) in which he describes the compiler failures.

https://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc?t=2590

I clearly haven't, can you elaborate? I thought the steam deck was near universally lauded for it's open and hackable software, repairable hardware and competitive pricepoint. Is there some privacy news or other scandal I've missed?

Not sure if you're familiar with Mike Acton (as mentioned in the article). One of his key points of focus is data-oriented design, and that when designing software, ignoring the architectural realities of the hardware is ignoring one of your responsibilities as an engineer to deliver performant software.

Now, it's possible to argue that writing performant software is not important. The prevailing modern sentiment definitely seems to be "The compiler / interpreter takes care of that". But given his track record of delivering high performant running software, and the trend in computing towards sluggishness, I'm trending more and more towards his camp, than the "don't micro-manage the runtime" camp (which is starting to feel more and more like a thinly-veiled "I don't want to have to think about it").

Edit: A summary post he wrote as a source https://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2008/03/three-...

Why couldn't this be solved by Apple simply adding a feature that allows you to lock the installation sources behind a PIN? We've had these type of restrictions for other subsystems, so I don't see why it wouldn't be possible here? (Modulo security vulnerabilities, but those exist for the current iOS ecosystem as well).

Example. I could set my parents' device up so they can only install from curated stores (Let's say App Store & Epic Games store, if they were inclined to play games). Now I don't have to worry about them being scammed into sideloading shady apps, they don't have the PIN; and I get all my freedom to install whatever I want.

I'd be honestly happy to hear an argument for why this wouldn't work, cause I haven't been able to work it out.

edit: In a world where apple is mandated to provide sideloading access, it's even in their interest to provide such a feature. It allows them to hold up their "we're security focused" claim, while at the same time potentially increasing revenue (in my example, my parents are still vendor-locked, just by me, their "digital guardian").

While the 20ms latency on the Remarkable 2 is very impressive, let's please not say that users "cannot perceive the difference". At best the latency "does not bother" users. There are whole swaths of professions for which 20ms is a huge amount (professional gamers, musicians, etc), and even personally (And I generally view my lag perception as quite poor) the 20ms on the remarkable was noticeable enough that it did not feel as nice as having a good pen on paper.

At the risk of being pedantic; it's just a feature, it does not have anything to do with LSP. Plenty of non-LSP IDE's have these features as well (XCode, Visual Studio Classic, etc).

> But I will say this, I've long been thinking that there should at least be a programming language and OS that does its best to not change. A sort of whole environment where every single piece that's out of beta commits to minimal interface changes over time

At the risk of this being interpreted as trolling; don't we have this, for crucial OS interfaces at least? Linux is famous for "we do not break user space" (yes, I know it's not 100% true, but it's closer than anything else I've seen), and afaik the posix standards are pretty stable too.

The C language also has a stable ABI, which is basically the ffi for most languages, and most static libraries that were developed decades ago can link just fine.

In my mind, the problem is caused by at least two things:

- Languages that are not compiled to machine code have no incentive to have a stable API or ABI. This has the effect that code reuse now necessitates replicating the state of the machine it was developed on (Which might be using a different language version, runtime, etc).

- Programming culture has progressed to a "get it done quickly, just grab a library" culture. This is not to say you should develop everything in-house, but on a spectrum, I have the hunch that this easy accumulation of dependencies induces a culture that does not vet the stability of the dependencies. Once one of your dependencies is unstable, the project on which it depends cannot be stable.

Just to be clear, you're talking about freelance consulting in NL, correct? I can believe that. Based on my conversations with peers, the big consulting firms seem to be the exact opposite however:

- Spending endless time on useless reports.

- Technically ancient development practices.

- Delivering "courses" or workshops to clients on topics they only themselves learned about 2 weeks earlier.

- Extremely low starting salaries, with long working hours, and a ladder culture that's been described to me as very corps-like (dutch name for fraternities).

As a relatively fresh FTE, the "big consulting shops" have given me the strong impression that it is where technical prowess goes to die.

afaik none of Apples other "proprietary software" is designed to pass my personal images to a human for visual inspection if it mistakenly outputs 2 high-enough numbers after a handful of convolution operations and matrix multiplications.

> ... but the question of whether there are more or less police staff generally probably not that important here.

What are you talking about? A quick google shows extensive reporting on the lack of police staffing and working pressure. This has been pretty well-reported in NL over the last few years.

[0] 2018: https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2245189-personeelstekort-bi...

[1] 2019: https://eenvandaag.avrotros.nl/item/politievakbond-er-is-een...

[2] 2019: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/12/16/politie-heeft-te-weinig...

[3] 2019: https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/4936156/po...

I think one of the problems here is that people wanna share code snippets on social media, where generally, the other approaches mean linking to an external github gist or similar, which isn't as visible. I'm not sure if I see a good solution, other than suggesting that the "link previews" for social media sites display the code snippet inline, if it's a link to a pastebin/github gists page.

Edit: Perhaps something can be done by somehow embedding the content into the image (EXIF?) Metadata?