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vmchale

902 karma · joined June 14, 2017

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vmchale··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
The industrial resource utilization is being done to serve the consumer.

Pinning carbon emissions on a steel mill (which sells to airplane manufacturers who take people on vacation flights) is logically incoherent and motivated reasoning.

vmchale··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem.

If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...

vmchale··on Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers
> A data center costs my community

No one was objecting when pornhub was building out data centers. Anything they like to consume, no matter how frivolous, is accepted as morally better on a metaphysical level.

> further enriches a few already rich people.

Meat eaters damaging the Earth is okay because it's "equal"? 300 million people deciding they're entitled to consume anything they want in ever-increasing quantities is a problem because... there's 300 million of them!

vmchale··on Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say
It's not American evangelicals. It's been a long campaign and the evangelicals are still being targeted by Israel because no one else is left, but there aren't enough American evangelicals to swing things.

Not to mention, it often comes down to primary voters, to say nothing of Hollywood/media blacklists

> the Democrats are necessarily adversarial, but they clearly aren't as agreeable as a whole).

Democrats only changed recently. For some decades before that, the Israel lobby had significant sway over them (including allowing dems to publicly admit certain things).

vmchale··on 2SLGBTQQIA+ Sub-Working Group MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ National Action Plan Final Report
Might be ridiculous but at least they're not parading kidnapping victims on Instagram to advertise as one sees in Israel. https://x.com/trackingisrael/status/2039724748309930448?s=20

Humanity is always beset by annoying people but at least Canada is blessed to be dealing with frivolities.

vmchale··on What game engines know about data that databases forgot
kdb does two of those by default—columnar and it uses memory mapping (no serialization/deserialization)

Not entirely forgotten in the database world!

vmchale··on Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?
"long term storage" for CO2 is to spew it into the air where it remains forever... free for Germany, not so much Australia, California, Florida, etc.
vmchale··on BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech
Cool, we can be like Cuba except we did it to ourselves
vmchale··on BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech
> The US car manufacturers are cooked.

Biden put a 100% tariff on Chinese cars and then Trump added tariffs on inputs.

Americans are getting screwed!

vmchale··on Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023
> When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

Ford's profit margin was 1.7%. Lots of innovative/productive American companies since 1970 for workers to aspire to = the enterprise can't continue.

vmchale··on The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)
> no social democrats in sight

The US already has social security, medicare, medicaid. It is often just plain worse/more brutal than Western European countries but the difference isn't a radical reimagination of the social order.

> barring the occasional Bernie

Western Europe has likewise not imagined any new government welfare since the 1970s.

vmchale··on The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)
> only have use as propaganda

Propaganda helps you ascend to power and then constrains what you do with that power.

Ultimately if you want to look objectively, you have to look at the concrete, at history. But propaganda matters: history would unfold differently without it!

vmchale··on The Obsolescence of Political Definitions (1991)
> These words have more conventional meanings.

Kondylis disputes the typical interpretation of "conservatism." Historically it was a backwards justification of feudalism. Easy to see why someone would talk up "history," "tradition" when they're at the top of the social order and an upstart comes on to stage.

vmchale··on Use Your Type System
ATS does this. Works quite well since multiplication by known factors and addition of type variables + inequalities is decidable (and in fact quadratic).
vmchale··on Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Xerox was when the US was on the up-trend, not committing economic suicide at the whim of a mad king.
vmchale··on Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Given the changes to R&D taxation and cuckoo tariffs I don't think private research will want to start a lab in the US like Bell did.
vmchale··on Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
France is explicitly trying to poach researchers. UK is committing higher-ed suicide though it has a better reputation than the US in many ways.
vmchale··on Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
For engineers, maybe. But with immigration restrictions, employers can no longer create a workplace where "work with the best in the world" is an attraction.
vmchale··on Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
Before Trump/Vance nuked US reputation the interest on US bonds was low and provided a safe asset to investors. Spending on scientific research was a no-brainer.
vmchale··on Why the Poor Vote for the Right (and Stop Demanding More Equality)
>The heart of the model is simple and radical: people choose the identity they feel is most relevant to the social conflicts of the moment.

A lot of this is in Kondylis (30+ years old)

vmchale··on Python Is Dynamically Typed
the negative and positive use of types (gating inputs vs. witnessing implementations) get confused when talking about programming languages. It seems to me the positive aspect is overwhelmingly where programmers find frustration.
vmchale··on Analytic Combinatorics – A Worked Example
in Haskell you can read off the generating function's coefficients directly from the functional equation T(z) = z + zT + zT² + zT²

ghci> ts=0:(1+ts+ts^2+ts^3) ghci> take 12 ts [0,1,1,2,5,13,36,104,309,939,2905,9118]

Using the Num instance for power series (very cute application of laziness expounded by Karczmarczuk and then McIlroy https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1017/s0956796899003299)

vmchale··on The Prehistoric Psychopath
Brian Hayden has a book right at the heart of this topic, how secret societies (terrorist proto-religions, think scientology+murder) anticipate civilization. You don't find such societies in precarious places, perhaps because extorting wealth isn't tolerated, though you do find them in hunter-gatherer societies as well as civilizations.

Unlike many paleontologists, he is willing to bring in psychology and unlike many anthropologists he is willing to doubt sincerity/motives.

vmchale··on Ask HN: A retrofitted C dialect?
Have a look at ATS, it is memory-safe and designed for kernel development. There's a kernel and arduino examples. Fluent C interop.

No tactics metaprogramming but it'll give you a start.

vmchale··on Some Programming Language Ideas
> Refinement on memory addresses

This is precisely ATS!

vmchale··on Compiling Array Languages for SIMD [pdf]
Aaron Hsu has an APL compiler targeting GPU that gets tantalizing performance in machine learning: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589246.3595371
vmchale··on Compiling Array Languages for SIMD [pdf]
>it's unfortunately pretty obscure

NumPy is partly inspired by APL and descendants. One of the few places that programmers commonly get performance afforded by hardware!

vmchale··on Ask HN: Which functional language for full stack web development?
I've been impressed but what I've seen of the Phoenix web framework. https://youtu.be/MZvmYaFkNJI

On the F# side:

"Where are the F# jobs? I've checked the various FP-centric job-sites - they're as barren as everywhere else. It almost seems as if Haskell jobs are more plentiful! Haskell!"

https://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/comments/24layv/where_are_th...

vmchale··on Compiling Array Languages for SIMD [pdf]
One of my blog posts was posted and got some comments. This is a more refined take in the vein of "C is Not Suited to SIMD"
vmchale··on C is not suited to SIMD (2019)
> perhaps a C compiler only needs to represent that function as an intrinsic instead, to give itself a chance to later replace it either with the function call or some SIMD instruction

I gesture to this in the blog post:

> In C, one writes a function, and it is exported in an object file. To appreciate why this is special, consider sum :: Num a => [a] -> a in Haskell. This function exists only in the context of GHC. > ... > perhaps there are more fluent methods for compilation (and better data structures for export à la object files).

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