xorxornop

I may be totally off-base here, but can't the SHA256 CPU instructions be used for this? Then it'd just be 1 (? Or is it more) instruction to perform?

Yup, I run IoT Core in my Raspberry Pi 2, and run a C# UWP app on it to dynamically update my DNS settings. The UI is lovely, and the UWP API in general, too.

Both JIT and native modes of operation work. Hell, I can also build it for my desktop PC, and it's literally only changing the build target. It's phenomenally easy, so easy that I was actually a little in disbelief at first. .

Maw, the emulation is for binary-only apps.

.NET can already be built to ARM CLR bytecode, or to ARM native/machine code.

This is for apps where you don't, and quite possibly never did, have the source.

And it is also why it will continue to be marginalised, and have generally shit, inconsistent UI.

It probably doesn't require the chip... I'm thinking they are using some form of hardware accelerated binary translation.

Re: Windows on ARM, I run Windows IoT on a Raspberry Pi. Shows they have a good lot of it running, eg the full UWP UI system, kernel etc. Imagine it's the translation part that's deleted things.

It has been, I'm running one such example on my Raspberry Pi 2 right now. It's just a DynDNS updater. Written in UWP.

I have tried it in CLR and native (machine code via .NET Native) modes. Both work great.

I'm pretty sure my Pi runs on an ARM chip, anyway

How the hell does this happen. Seriously, I've ran Windows for like over 10 years now. It's happened a grand total of 3 times, ever, and 2 of those were back in the Windows 9x days, and the last one was between W8 and 8.1 (a major service pack).

Never since then. Oh, I'm even in the fast update pool. What do you people _do_?

Maybe, though their partnering with Qualcomm is suggestive: perhaps they're doing hardware-accelerated binary translation? That _might_ be fast and power efficient, who knows...

In any case, many users may just be wanting to run older enterprise apps, and so even then, with the translation penalty, they'll probably be quite snappy.

And this is exactly how it works with Windows Store apps. You upload .NET bytecode, and the Store delivers the correct compiled-to-native code for the user's architecture.

You can also make fat packages, if you don't wanna distribute through the store.

Yes, for precisely the reason that he did not want to be the arbiter of what is released. That's probably why he's still alive. It was a good decision

Yup, it all depends on which level of abstraction you choose to operate in.

I could describe throwing a ball to you into terms of how the quantum wavefunction evolves over time to produce the end state from the start state, and it would be a perfectly fine description, but for the sorts of things we do, usually a Newtonian physics level of description will do because we're generally concerned with coarse level details, not the momenta of each individual atom involved.

This strikes me as an entirely superfluous distinction. "just" random noise? What other kind of life is there..?

Why can't life be that? Why the "just"? Needless romanticism

I don't know for sure, of course, since I don't know him - but, from all the interviews I've seen of him where the conversations were variable and unscripted, he has a very broad but also deep knowledge. I'm convinced that he's a voracious reader.

On a tangential note: Over the years, many people have asked me how I know so many things... and I always give them the same answer: because I wanted to, so I put time into making it be that way. That's it.

While I feel that I should recognise that being reasonably gifted has likely benefited me here, there are _many_ people considerably cleverer than me! I take pains to attempt to drive home the central point, which is that I believe it's the _attitude_ that matters the most of the two. Just because I might have had a easier time than many when learning _doesn't_ mean it was easy, or didn't consume a lot of time and effort! No.

I just thought it was important, so I did it. It requires effort. It was an investment.

It greatly irritates me that many jump to the conclusion that some talent negates all the hard work that it required - and still requires. Learning never ends - or, it shouldn't!

I think most people are considerably more capable than they think - they often just don't try.

Naw, at least with me I seem to be able to by treating the tab ordering as a conceptual discovery ordering. That is, I remember what things I learned / researched prior to and following each tab. It's lossy, but because each has a unique relationship with its surrounding concepts there's plenty of opportunities for parity-like behaviour; redundancy.

When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it / them.

So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well, I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno.

There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!

It's almost always motherboard hex spacers. Source: have had multiple computers with such problem. All were due to surplus spacers having been put in which subsequently contacted solder pads on the board underside.

The worse version is broken in-board signal paths.

Both ultimately result from mechanical distortion.

Yeah, and integer division behaves approximately to real division, too.

Well, yeah, but then you'd basically - eventually - end up with Rust... not C!

C and Rust compile to native code. Python doesn't. It's either interpreted, or run in an abstract machine (VM). Python was never really intended to interact with the actual hardware directly.

I mean, you could, there's no real technical blocker, but it'd be horribly slow. Plus many failure modes of touching hardware are very likely to break the VM process and make debugging very challenging

Stellarator designs already use superconducting electromagnets.

The newer kind are just a lot more powerful and versatile.

Yes, exactly. If we're going to talk proportions, then both "sides" need surfacing. If you're on lower income, otherwise "minor" fines, fees, surcharges etc can become life threatening or at least highly disruptive. The cost of failure is so high that it becomes very difficult to take the sort of risks that are sometimes needed to get ahead.

Yup - it's hard to imagine a more out of touch viewpoint. Straight out of "talking heads present one type of franchise blockbuster reality fiction that manipulates you into betraying your fellow humans and yourself" land.

Oh boy, I couldn't agree more... I, too, feel rage at this state of things. What makes it particularly awful is I just don't see any way out of it.

People are pathetically easy to manipulate for the most part. The poor are the demographic that most frequently votes against their interests. The fascinating part is, it would be easy to conclude that perhaps these people are simply not very clever. Well, that's certainly true for some fraction of them, to some extent... but I really don't think that this is the main factor (or even in the top 3), no - rather, I just think that it's a combination of their being credulous, and not particularly predisposed toward a special type of socially-strategic thinking. Like, the sort of thinking that manipulating psychopaths use to bend people to their will. Like you said, the poor are often plenty clever and useful, they often just get manipulated and used.

What I don't know is whether this is just a matter of education (and so long-term improvement is viable) or whether it's more of a societal-cultural values thing... or even, I guess, a biological thing (there is probably at least _some_ component of this but probably very minor relative to the others).

I'd want education to include a kind of mental self-defence component, so people can protect themselves against mental infiltration by virulent memes (eg, religions and other ideas which abhor and resist attempts of inspection and eradication) and demagoguery... as well as a heavy focus on critical thinking in general. Learning _how_ to think - not_what_ to think.

As an alternative to ear plugs, perhaps also consider noise _replacement_ instead (eg. vs. noise _elimination).

I use an app that plays various rain sounds. I have it linked to speakers via Bluetooth (and I have a 3.5mm headphone-jack-type extension audio cable that I've run to my bedside table as an option, if I'm feeling picky about the sound quality of my rain ).

It's very relaxing, and blocks most outdoor sounds. I live in NZ, and the houses here are usually pretty thin-walled and consequently offer almost no sound deadening. This mostly-fixes/avoids that.

Perhaps you don't like rain, and so different sounds might be appropriate... I don't like anything else really apart from maybe low volume white noise, but that's me... but yeah, regardless of which sounds you pick, the general approach is worth trying!

Huh? But you can use C# on a Mac... I should know, I just came home from doing that all day at work. .NET Core works great on Mac, and imports many dlls just fine.

That being said if it was quite an old dll, and never compiled under PCL or netstandard, maybe not. There's still Mono, but, well, I can definitely understand reluctance in this case, and indeed would choose a different way in a different language myself, if that was my only option left that way.

Yup, it's so superior that it seems ludicrous that others are considered comparable. The taste of it isn't quite like sugar, but it's close, and it's WAY better than any of the non-polyalcohol-sugar artificial sweeteners... and, IMO, is better tasting than isomalt, which comes second in tastiness to me, sorbitol 3rd place... I don't much like xylitol.

Yep. Adding another lower/zero-calorific sugar but with a positive heat of dissolution (to counter the negative one of isomalt) can really help here.

Similarly, you can choose sugar pairs to promote or suppress crystallisation, as the recipe style requires. This is done by selecting sugars with similar or dissimilar molecular geometry and charge distribution.

Why not erythritol? Isomalt can cause some pretty severe gut issues (to which I can personally attest, unfortunately!). It's also still quite calorific (that is, it is metabolised) - erythritol isn't. I can eat it in high quantities to seemingly zero consequence. It's also got an entertaining mouthfeel, where it cools the mouth; so does isomalt, incidentally, but it's not nearly as noticeable.

I have done quite a bit of cooking with erythritol, simply swapping sugar out for it, and it usually works great. Erythritol is only about 70% as sweet, so it can sometimes be necessary to adjust for that, but really, most things are already overly sugary, so it's usually unnecessary.

Except that most people have repeatedly shown they're not capable of making sensible choices. Although that's possibly a secondary/tertiary effect, seeing as how it's so hugely variable over different regions of the world

Well, what if it's done randomly? (like, by software that controls the machine that grows it)

Or, modify the growing process so that it has a greater element of chance to it? (this is likely multi-dimensional)

Is it? I suspect the thinking is along these lines: "this shit is already really bad! And that's with a kinda - or at least, publicly - sympathetic government..... and the new guy has openly said he'd like to massively expand this program! welp"