unsigner

There might be a chicken-and-egg situation here - one often hears that there’s no point having wider SIMD vectors or more ALU units, as they would spend all their time waiting for the memory anyway.

checking whether coordinates fall inside a national park is an exercise in computational geometry, surveying (the earth is not flat, what are coordinates on a sphere), databases, access to government data.

detecting birds is an exercise in gathering properly labeled training sets, neural networks and their topologies, matrix multiplication performance and/or orchestration of rented GPUs.

both of which cover interesting tasks, worthy things to learn, and are by no means easy.

"easy" is the bird recognition where you do an API call to a totem pole of third party services.

"easier tasks" is arguable and arguably wrong

"task about which you will find more easy-looking tutorials hiding the complexity under a blanket of 3rd party code and services" is better

If you think something like German automotive engineering or iPhone production can be substitute by a “simpler and more convenientional process”, you probably don’t understand how it works. These things have evolved and have been optimized to within parts of a percentage; almost everything is there for a good, time tested reason. (Except for ultra-novel stuff that has been around for a year or two - there they may pay with process inefficiencies for novelty)

Something that was sustainable when heating few hundred million people won't necessarily be sustainable when heating a few billion.

semaglutide comes pretty close to "a few thousand dollars to make 3-4 kg of body fat magically disappear with no complications or effort"

or you can submit to Putin and Xi and see if they grant you your four-day work week

Let me offer an intentionally shocking counterpoint:

The 4-day workweek only appears possible due to the peace divident, and the peace is rapidly coming to an end. We'll need the fifth, and maybe the sixth day of the week to produce shells, missiles, trucks, tanks, ships, planes, and to make up for the lost productivity of those who are on the battlefield.

There’s brutal war two countries over, and if one falls, the war is coming here. I can’t stop taking care of my family, but not a day passes without me wondering if bread on the table today is more important than preparing to stop Russia tomorrow.

a Lenovo Yoga Slim with a Ryzen 7840u lasts for 8-10 hours with Wifi enabled, browsing, Slack, and a text editor, with the screen brightness at around 30-40% - good enough for indoors.

I’m not okay with the German and Japanese civilian casualties during WWII either, but I think the world is better off with Hitler defeated. Similarly, I think we would be in a better place if Stalin was defeated, and Russia rebuilt in a western image like Germany and Japan were.

Not all Russians, no. I think the suffering during the Cold War, and the current war in Europe (which has so far only reached Georgia. Moldova, and Ukraine, with a satellite conflict simmering in Bosnia) is due to only one of the evils being defeated in WWII, and the other left to grow and pretend to be an esteemed citizen of the world.)

I suspect this thread is a honeypot to gather all Bulgarians on HN

The Eastern Mediterranean might be the (significant, underreported, under-remembered) Russian military presence in Syria. They have airbases, a naval base, they rotate and train their officers there, they constantly ship military equipment back and forth from the Black Sea ports via the Bosphorus to Syria, they train the Syrian army, they build human shield observation posts overlooking Israel.

What's unfathomable to me is how Israel (or Netanyahu?) keeps treating them as a frenemy.

X3D chips usually arrive later.

Thousands of tanks will be attacked by millions of human-piloted drones before we get to fully autonomous drones, if ever. The existence of 1.5 mln dollar Tomahawk missiles hasn’t made the unguided 155 mm shell (costing a few hundred dollars) unnecessary

This feels incredibly detached from my reality. In my reality, there’s a brutal land war two countries over, and I’m agonizing whether I’m dooming my children by not teaching them battlefield first aid, trench digging and FPV drone piloting.

Don't think of them as "computer-generated" any more than your phone's heavily processed pictures are "computer-generated", or JWST's false color, IR-to-visible pictures are "computer-generated".

This article makes a convincing argument: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/a-camera-not-an-engine

From reading about this reading wars, one would think reading itself was invented around 30 years ago, and people are still not sure how to teach it.

Shouldn't that be a solved problem? How were English children taught to read 100 years ago? 150 years ago?

something scholarly-looking claims there was 90% literacy rate in England in 1870: https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/education-in-victorian-en....

I've learned English as a second (actually fourth) language, and it was definitely weird (the previous ones, including my mother tongue are almost fully phonetic, i.e. much easier to read) - I guess it must be different when learned as a first?

I understand the reference to Ptolemy, Newton (Copernicus?), Darwin, but how did Einstein teach us that we're "part of nature instead of a privileged special case"?

That's amazing!

What does the API look like? I see you're calling it FuryGL so it must have some roots in OpenGL? What did you have to change because of the underlying hardware? compared to OpenGL? Compared to what a software rasterizer API would look like? You probably are familiar with Glide?

The brand should be called Horseshoe Cosmetics

These comments mention spam a lot as a reason to stick with iMessage.

What kind of spam are people (presumably in the US) getting outside of iMessage? I’m in the EU, I get very little SMS spam (mostly for telecom’s clumsy attempts to find more ways to monetize me).

I also have Viber, Telegram, and FB messenger, and the spam is virtually zero on Viber (less than an “offer” a month, and it’s from the likes of Coca Cola, not herbal viagra) and literally zero on the others.

Is spam significantly worse elsewhere?

Eastern Europe. slowly transition to digital payments, with two trends working against that: - it seems payment fees for small merchants are such as they lose money on small purchases (e.g. 2-5 EUR). So some of them require or prefer cash. - the anti-vax / anti-5G / chemtrails / anti-Western conspiracy swamp which is slowly rising around us, part of Putin's hybrid war, has chosen cash as one of their banners (along with resisting adoption of the Euro)

From the creators of "find your mother's maiden name in the number pi"

You can fold this and bring it into an office that doesn’t provide bicycle parking. Also some people detest any form of physical strain, fearing they might get sweaty or ruffle their clothing.

There's no "their side" here, both sides of the Dnipro are Ukrainian territory; one of them is temporarily occupied.

Unity was a dream, or a lie, the lie that you can make games without a somewhat competent software team.

Now TFA gives hope to another dream, or a lie, the dream that magical open source fairies can let you keep getting away without a competent software team. It won't.

Find those programmers, build a team, build a company where this team has a place, adjust your business model (i.e. raise your prices) to where you can afford to pay them.

Hard disagree on that, at least in the educational system I'm familiar with. The meagre time allocated in school schedules allows the teachers to barely introduce the students to concepts and techniques, and actual skill needs to be developed on your own.

(I can agree with a weaker version of that statement: homework that can be done by ChatGPT doesn't have any value and should be done away with.)

Teachers around me are freaked out about the end of homeworks, they can't stop talking about it. And their students anywhere between 8 and 18 are generating all assignments they can using ChatGPT (and then manually or DeepL-translating into our native language, which is not English and for which ChatGPT is still ridiculously funny). So it's not just tech.