white-flame

Sure, just look at the positive pressure I mentioned in the end of my post. If we took all the money spent in the police, courts, & prisons for non-violent drug use offenses, and funded totally free to use, no questions asked, walk-in rehab programs, I think that would be both a massive financial and massive cultural benefit. Throw in awareness programs, counseling, poverty-area involvement, etc, and you'd still be way in the black.

Regulating substances for purchase by minors is something that's well understood and much more agreeable. Getting it into stores and away from pushers (which can still be criminalized, just not the users) makes it much more manageable for the problem cases, and much more available for any beneficial cases (self-medication, etc).

Characterizing that everybody's going to start using hard drugs if they're decriminalized is really kind of jumping off the handle, too. People have few barriers to hard drug access as it is, where this problem affects us the most. Many value their mental & financial state and have seen too many negative examples already and abstain, even if they're a classified high-risk sort of person. Others use whatever they can get a hold of, and legislation is irrelevant to their use. Yet others dabble or use sparingly, like your bad trip example. It's a personal choice, not a legal one, that's already been made millions of times over.

Besides, consuming junk food, watching TV, internet use, etc, have none of these usage laws while having addictive and society-wide negative effects, too. The question remains why other behaviors "must" be regulated while these aren't.

They've always been bumping up against this back in the Apple II days, and systems would overheat then, too. All in the name of Steve Jobs emphasizing case aesthetics & not wanting fan noise.

The headline's question should really be reframed to question the validity of these restrictions in the first place.

I'm not a user of any of these sorts of substances, nor condone them, but there's zero reason for a free country to police personal use of such things. Sure, driving under the influence should be policed as a safety hazard, showing up to work out of your gourd should still get you fired, etc.

But there's little mandate that the government should be policing and prosecuting adults for potentially self-destructive private behaviors. Especially in light of all the other addictive and potentially self-destructive legal activities people are heavily involved in, any pretense of that mandate crumbles. Only when it threatens the safety, or disrupts the public civility, of other non-involved people should there even be a thought of government intervention. Any other conception to reduce individual drug use should be positive pressure like awareness programs and rehab centers.

Sure, replace "C" with whatever OS language is appropriate. The situation is still the same: wasm doesn't talk directly to the host interfaces, regardless of it being low-level. You'd still need another FFI layer somewhere to talk to those.

While this would supplant "C for speed" libraries, it wouldn't supplant "C for OS access" libraries. At some point, system code needs to call the OS.

It's not really a standalone platform, though. It's a sandbox utility to contain high-speed or highly customized computation, that can be plugged into any other platform. By design, it doesn't seem intended to be limited to a single higher-level (well, higher than assembly language) ABI.

Yes, that's what a CPU-level model with byte-level access means, and is how all code running on your computer has its basis. Whatever high level constructs you want are built on top of your asm-level runtime. This is as-designed, as is the only reasonable way to allow different language paradigms to run on top of it. It's also heavily implied by the name.

It does have a notion of function imports & exports, so in the same way it allows you to do what you want, without specifying what you're going to do. For untrusted code, like in a browser, the environment can choose only to extend limited access. For trusted code, the environment can give access to more OS-level functionality. By webasm not specifying what functions to bind, but giving the ability to bind functions, it remains flexible and appropriate for wildly varying deployments.

Java's intent was "write Java code once, run anywhere". The JVM exposes a strict Java-centric view of what it can run, and it can be difficult to run other language environments on top of the JVM reasonably.

Webasm is basically "write any code once, run anywhere". It models a very low-level CPU-like environment that the code fully controls at the byte level, so even runtime language VMs can run in such a model without harsh slowdowns. While this literally offers fewer features than the JVM, it doesn't restrict which features the final runtime can implement.

This of course is all based on the assumption that you have a CPU-level environment that already bootstraps what you need (like C-based garbage collectors running underneath your dynamic language); or that you're running low-level, assembly-style code for speed reasons.

Your latent passions are very likely non-specific, an affinity for particular facets of your lifestyle that resonate with you; not some specific regiment of what your business (as employee or otherwise) actually does.

So no, it doesn't predestine you down a particular career path where any deviation will leave you miserable. Your passions can apply very broadly.

Working a "whatever" job also isn't finding a passion, yet it's a perfectly serviceable way of funding your life as you pursue things outside of your employment hours. As long as it isn't destructively draining you, and isn't assaulting your psyche, it can just be plain work.

As this appears to be about measuring statistical association, and not just singling out individual failure cases, are you implying that the entire industry is generally filled with unskilled and dishonest people?

Edit: It was an honest question, and it does appear to be considered an untrustworthy profession as a whole here. I was just asking clarification if that was the intention of the parent poster.

> The sudden commodification of facial recognition means most of the companies racing to fill business needs are startups.

I know it's a common phrase, but to be rhetorical, when is facial recognition actually a "business need"?

Certainly part of this is a cultural problem, which is part complacency and part ignorance as to what's actually going on. Laws aren't going to necessarily change that, but they can step in as a last resort when culture doesn't end up addressing fundamental problems of social health or rights issues.

The social media companies effectively propagandize ordinary communication for whatever's most profitable, and the effects can be individually subtle, with large overall effect. While this tends to be accepted at the for-profit media creation level, it seems quite inappropriate and socially unhealthy to apply these to personal communication on social media, because the cultural buy-in to these sorts of things means individuals put themselves into monopolized systems.

Social media is very new in the grand scheme of things, and there are things to figure out. Certainly education on these topics and their effects is important, and possibly more declarations of rights (as opposed to specifically prescriptive regulations) of people's personal communications might be in order.

The "tech giants" are creating and controlling core forms of communication, both interpersonal and broadcast/public. That's too important and fundamental to the health of society to allow it to be arbitrarily engineered, filtered, and slanted for maximizing profit.

If they were acting like common carriers, it would be a completely different issue. But they're not; they have business models that necessitate the manipulation of communication.

No, what we need to curb is agreeably unethical behaviors, and to delineate basic rights that need to be expressed in light of new technologies (like data privacy rights). This is regardless of any other socioeconomic structures, and ends up being the fundamental basis of complaints like what you raise.

Or even just a manual bake() call, with an expensive unbake() to use during development (or maybe even deployed if it's that reconfigurable). But I do agree that a tool like this should affect the global environment and not try to be fine grained. Leave any fine-grained decisions up to the VM itself.

I say screw deoptimization checks, and put the burden in the redefinition processing.

When you redefine something, you stop the world at safepoints and update prior baked assumptions that are registered on the old definition. These redefinitions usually happen during development and initialization, not during performance-sensitive runtime. It would add more to the memory footprint, but that information is not accessed at all except during recompilation.

There's nothing wrong with making money within legal and ethical bounds. Getting as close as possible to the former, or bulldozing over the latter with no concern, will certainly draw public ire. That can lead to market changes, as well as the possibility of legal changes.

> There's certainly a case to be made that a strong US military is in the world's best interest.

The USA was formed on a basic distrust of the government, including checks & balances, and non-federal armament in the 2nd amendment. It is not allowed to be a single, trusted federal power, but rather one whose powers are defined by limited and explicit allowance, with default powers resting on the distributed states and people.

The notion that the USA should stand in a singular trusted and empowered situation over the rest of the world neither fits with fundamental American concepts, nor notions of robustness in general. Strength of militaries should be distributed among independent allies, not focused on any single point of failure or corruption.

The military strength of the USA certainly benefits the USA. But a singular point of above-and-beyond military strength is not a model of benefiting the world.

> Growing up hungry, with worn out second hand clothes, and dysfunctional families happens also in post-industrial societies.

Just pointing out that the parent didn't imply a dysfunctional family in their upbringing. Familial dysfunction is orthogonal to poor, hungry, and having old clothes; and in my opinion can be a far more life-constraining factor for the future.

The feeling of presence is so limited compared to realtime-rendered 3d spaces where you can move your head around from the central camera point even just a bit. Adding some artificial parallax shift to the movie frames might be enough to give it that extra oomph to feel truly immersive.

Technically, that was because of battery life, not thickness. The limits on that particular Intel chipset are 16GB LPDDR3 or 32GB non-low power DDR4, and Apple chose to use the LPDDR3.

I have a basic 32GB DDR4 laptop* which was contemporary to the touchbar MBP, and while I'm very happy with the running battery life, the suspended battery life isn't as long as I would prefer (usually doesn't last 24 hours). I suspect that's because of the RAM. However, the MBP has a larger battery than mine, so I don't think it would have been that big of a problem.

[* = Clevo N240BU, same as the newest System76 Lemur. i7-7500U, iGPU, opted for m.2 only, 4-cell removable battery, slim 14" 1080p, real HDMI/ethernet/USB-A&C/headphone/SD ports.]

BitTorrent The Company isn't focused around their p2p client. They've been trying to become some form of media publisher for a long time now, but haven't had any particular big hits there.

At this point, I think the name recognition is the fundamental asset they have as a company.

Random selection is literally equal opportunity.

Any time a HN discussion gets as big as this, it's because he content is controversial and people are arguing.

I don't think I've seen this many replies in unison. It's an amazing testament to how poorly these systems work at all levels.

If it comes with a massive cooling facility bundled, then sure, that's presented as manufacturer's spec.

Overprovision with cold failover.

A main quote from that link is "a small percentage of American consumers are limited in their ability to access" healthier food, seemingly mostly tied to lack of transportation to otherwise close-by stores in densely populated areas. I would posit that's a much smaller percentage than those eating unhealthily in low/poverty income situations.

Your post here coincides with mine. Somebody running between jobs does have means of transportation, but is in a highly stressed life situation. The main problem is not one of literal access to healthy food, yet that is always the first supposition made. Healthy food is cheap, and it is not far away. The problems are beyond that.

Seriously, who in western countries does not have availability to "healthy food"? Everybody has basic grocery stores with cheap simple stuff just as available to them as convenience junk shops.

It's education about how food affects you that makes all the difference. People literally don't know what they're putting in themselves. There's a lot of food purchasing decisions based on stressors related to your very reasonable 2nd point. Basic food education at a personal level brings people out of that particular negative health cycle.

Yes, but I'm talking about his assertion about that C example earlier in the talk, not about Zig. It's pretty fundamental to his arguments.