4,144 karma · joined February 18, 2013
But when you're dealing with a pandemic, you can do without. Do you really think that your typical doctor spent all that much time in med school or residency learning how to operate a particular kind of machinery? If we have the ventilators, we'll be able to find people to operate them.
Anyway, risk tolerance isn’t the right lens to look at this. It’s about knowing whether that’s the way the government would actually issue demands and take payments. That requires some savvy and insight about the world. Some people have it and some people don’t. And relatedly, it’s about being skeptical vs. trusting in general.
Also, we do spend an enormous amount of money on safety in the US. Why do you think the absolute cheapest new cars in the US are two to four times as expensive as new cars in countries that don’t have the same kind of safety standards (e.g. Mexico or India)? And because of the tort system, businesses spend untold amounts of money making their facilities and products safer in general.
But anything is possible. Maybe some big customer used this pattern and now Java detects it and does something fancy like what I suggested. But really, this is an unusual scenario for an application.
I also wonder, for typical workloads, what percent of CPU time is spent zeroing pages.
At first, I thought you might just want to get fresh pages from the kernel (which are always zeroed), but this answer convinced me that might not actually be faster because of the overhead from syscalls and fiddling with virtual memory https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49896578/fastest-way-to-... . And Linux doesn't idle-zero or pre-zero pages (though I believe there's a switch to enable pre-zeroing for purposes of security hardening), so you're probably gonna end up with the OS doing a synchronous[1] zeroing anyway.
[1] Synchronous from when you actually first write to each page. My understanding is that when your process gets new pages, they're all mapped to a special zero-page and set to copy-on-write. So there is still some efficiency here in theory: you don't have a long wait for the entire range to be zeroed all at once and you never have to zero pages that you don't modify.
That's not to take away from any criticisms of Amazon and Bezos. I don’t care one bit for the man’s politics or his newspaper. But it's really ridiculous to say him and Amazon were "simply first." Most people would never even have the audacity to try what he and his partners have done, let alone the perseverance and skill. There are truly remarkable people on this world.
Consider, the global economy produces $80 trillion A YEAR, and all the billionaires combined accumulated, total, over the course of MANY YEARS AND DECADES a current trove of $8.7 trillion.
These kinds of statistics are so bogus because they make it sound like accumulated wealth is what makes the world go around, and that is just simply untrue. All of this accumulated wealth by the ultra rich, $8.7 trillion held by billionaires, is NOTHING when you compare it to the world GDP PER YEAR, which is $80 trillion. Remember, you're comparing the total accumulated wealth, built up over many years and decades, of the ultra rich with what the global economy produces in income IN A SINGLE YEAR.
For the majority of people, and especially young people, their most important asset is not how much wealth they have accumulated but their ability to produce income year after year through their productivity. And you can't be pushing government pension and welfare programs on the one hand, which incentivize spending all of your income instead of saving it, and then touting stored-wealth as the important statistic.
Through the worldview of this ridiculous methodology, graduates of elite American universities, with their high paying jobs but substantial student loans, are among the poorest in the world. Ditto for the highly-paid San Francisco software engineer who spends most all of his income to live a very comfortable life in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Better start transferring wealth to them from the bank accounts of middle class third-worlders!
There is code in Windows that was written yesterday and code in Windows that was written over three decades ago.
I buy my own speakers and plug them into it. It also supports some Denon wireless speaker standard that lets it hook up to other Denon receivers and/or any speakers with the special adapters attached. But the crucial thing is that at the end of the day, all that fancy pants crap can stop working and you still have a bunch of bog standard speakers and receivers that can be hooked up any other way.
Now I’ll concede that maybe I’m ignorant or misinformed or a grumpy stubborn old man, but I’m not sure why anyone technically competent would buy a Sonos or Bose system with their crazy lock-in. It wasn’t so long ago that Sonos made you use Spotify through their awful reimplemented UI. It seems they have relented on that front and now allow use of Spotify Connect, but why would you want to be at someone else’s whim like that? Bose uses non-standard wiring and electrical specs to make sure that you can’t use their speakers with standard receivers. You either have to trash the speakers or keep buying Bose receivers when you want new features (4K, 8k, Atmos, HDR, etc.) Even when money is no object, I feel like a sucker when I buy artificially locked-in products like that. Maybe others don’t feel the same way?
For the not-so-tech-savvy, I concede that home audio gear is still a little difficult to set up. The common practice of making your own banana plugs is ridiculous and pre-made audio cables should be the norm instead. The receiver UIs leave a lot to be desired, even when they are ultimately good enough once configured. Shopping for speakers is like choosing fad diets: you have to sift through outrageous amounts of bullshit to find any useful advice.
I’d like to understand some more of the sociology and economics of why Denon and Yamaha and such can’t get their act together to produce something as user friendly as Sonos but that degrades nicely into standard A/V equipment when desired. If anyone with industry insight sees this comment, please fill me in.
We have a sample size of one and what must be, in the grand scheme, a primitive understanding of physics and chemistry and biology. Throwing around numbers and probabilities for the existence of other life is frankly ridiculous. The best we can intelligently talk about is what the number is given some guess about other numbers. But remember, we have no good numbers for the emergence of life, the survival of life, the likelihood of evolution into intelligent life, etc. Any number multiplied by a totally unknown factor can be literally anything.
And before someone throws the infinite universe argument at me, of course. Any probability above zero times infinity is infinity. (Though it’s also possible that there is still no extraterrestrial life even in that case, that outcome always has a non-zero probability!) If we accept a probabilistic emergence of life, then we need to talk about useful things like “in our solar system”, “in our galaxy”, “in the visible universe”, and such. Though it is theoretically possible that the conditions for the emergence of intelligent life are so narrow that only planets exactly like ours, so exactly like it that someone else on that planet has or will typed out this exact comment, have it. In a truly infinite, random (hmm, another bad assumption perhaps?) universe, there would be infinitely many such exact replicas of Earth and its entire visible universe. This isn’t a very useful concept.