falcrist

You've probably seen it, but you'd definitely love the movie "Hidden Figures".

They do seem to get the adding machines more or less correct.

One of the interesting things about the movie was how well they conveyed the mood and atmosphere on subs.

I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.

Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.

Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.

I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.

It reads a bit like a verse from the song Time by Pink Floyd, which perfectly encapsulates the sense of existential dread that so many of us feel more and more often as we get older.

I don't think it's overly philosophical to point out that these are large language models, not truth engines or AGI or knowledge directories. They're not using logic to reason their way to an answer. They're just predicting the next word that would sound like part of a human answer.

If you define being a kid as "the ability to express emotions and enjoy playing", then yes.

I feel like that's a terrible definition, though.

There aren't many Microsoft products that seem to be genuinely good without many complications or drawbacks.

Most of those products have the words "Visual" and "Studio" in the name.

Atmel Studio can come too.

Being intelligent might correlate with a more liberal outlook, but I know a few highly intelligent people who are big fans of trump.

My father was a nuclear reactor operator and electrician for a big chunk of his 22 years in the Navy (EM-N, E-8, worked mostly on fast attack subs). He was a manager at multiple nuclear powerplants on the East Coast before leaving that industry. He's honestly highly intelligent and curious.

He's definitely a trump fan. He thinks Biden is going to destroy the US. Dude's politics are unhinged.

One of my siblings is disabled, bi, and trans, yet both of my parents supported trump openly in 2016.

C'est la vie. It goes to show you never can tell.

It can't stop him from running because prison doesn't disqualify a presidential candidate.

IIRC, Eugene V. Debs ran from prison in 1920, and he got something like 5% of the vote... As a third party candidate. He was with the socialists.

It also may be worth simply providing an outlet for people to make a comment so it doesn't intrude on usual business.

But not DRM content. The system will recognize and avoid screenshotting that.

Banking details? Fine.

Passwords? A-OK!

Copyrighted content? STOP, YOU FOOLS, BEFORE YOU ANGER THE MOUSE!

This whole thing is dystopian, but making it a priority to avoid DRM controlled content is wild to me. The screenshots are ostensibly a cache, which is part of how video is displayed anyway. Is avoiding caching a 6 frame per minute cache really a higher priority than all of the privacy this undermines?

I could see the US pulling back on Israel if it starts to cost them soft power elsewhere, but you're fundamentally correct. Israel is the primary instrument of US hegemony in the middle east, and they aren't going to risk losing that.

There may be a potential for more localized grids that are interconnected by HVDC transmission lines. I'm not sure what the impetus for that would be, however. I agree that it would be unlikely.

Interestingly, HVDC actually becomes a more efficient method of transmission over longer distances. Perhaps it's feasible to generate electricity half a continent away. Maybe tile the Sahara with solar panels and power all of Africa with it.

I specifically said that because I DON'T want to discuss whether it's a good company or not.

I'll have to take your word on recent Lenovo laptops. It's been well over a decade since I got my Yoga 11. The hinge on that laptop was quite good. The keyboard sucked though.

Perhaps they retained enough of the original employees that workflow and procedures remained similar, which resulted in similar products for a long time.

Certainly the tooling wouldn't have changed immediately.

IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo in 2005, so your timeframe correlates with the laptop division no longer being part of IBM.

Not that Lenovo is a bad company persay, but IBM was historically a company that focused on corporate sales and Lenovo is a company that seems to target the consumer market. As far as I can see, individual consumers are much more price sensitive than corporations. That would explain the steady decline in quality.

I'm certainly not an expert, so there are probably other valid explanations. Unicomp bought IBM's keyboard manufacturing division (or at least the equipment used to build model M keyboards), and experienced a decline in quality simply due to (allegedly) not updating the old tooling until fairly recently.

Aside from hardware prototyping, this seems to be the primary benefit of FPGAs. Much like if you assembled a system from glue logic, all of the operations in the pipeline and across the entire subsystem can happen simultaneously and often asynchronously with the only limitations being on clocked devices like flipflops and gated latches... and obviously whatever propagation delays the logic gates have (along with any protection from race conditions)

Admittedly, I haven't had the opportunity to play with FPGAs very often in my professional career, but the limited experience I've had with them showed me you need an entirely different mindset when programming in a hardware description language. With assembly everything is global, and similarly with FPGAs almost everything is asynchronous and parallel.

Among other things, critical current in bulk ceramic superconductors depends on cross-sectional area, so while it seems reasonable to make a ribbon-like structure, the 3rd dimension does matter. You can't make it effectively 2D.

I feel like we're just describing a narrow bus bar.

Here I was thinking "zombie star" was another term for ANY stellar remnant like a white dwarf or neutron star.

Reader view on firefox also works.

This content is paywalled. Web archives don't seem to bypass it. You have to delete the popup and move the content out of the scroll-locked body.

Between the industry astroturfing and the splinterd advocacy, "net neutrality" is almost as meaningless as "fake news".

I have to disagree with this. There's a very clear meaning, and the 2015 FCC rules for wired connections put it succinctly.

No blocking or throttling of legal content, and no paid prioritization.

The wikipedia article has more information, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

some kind of internet dystopia where data for each service is treated and billed differently

I feel like this particular topic (while important) distracts from a much more disturbing possibility: blocking or throttling legal content for political purposes.

It has been pretty rare, but it's not unheard of. Given the number of companies that can block your access to a given site (DNS, ISP, backbone, webhost, etc), I think having some regulatory or statutory protections for online speech is in order. Net Neutrality (in it's 2015 FCC formulation among others) is basically that.

Youtube is the worst with this behavior.

Have you done a search on that website recently? There will be around 2-3 actual results, followed by shorts, followed by 2 more real results, then a "People also watched" sections, then a couple more results, then another section, then a couple of results, then a "For you" section, then a couple results, then a "the latest from X" section, then a "From related searches" section.

I'm sorry, did I ASK for all of this nonsense? I was looking for a specific video.

If “low level” means “runs on the CPU almost literally as written.” then no it’s not.

But doesn't this still depend on what CPU you're talking about? Your C code will map much more closely to the instructions of the machine code of an 8051 or even an M4 than it will to an x86.

Thus any general-purpose language is more or less "low level" depending on the CPU it's running on. This seems like a poor definition.

To make an article about how C maps to the processor and fail to make any distinction between application programming and embedded programming seems strange to me. After all, C is by far the most common language for programs running on micro-controllers, and it actually does map well to many micro-controller architectures in use today.

I'm clearly not the target audience for this article, but I still feel like the author would be well advised to put a little note at the top that says "we're talking about CISC and high-end microprocessors rather than microcontrollers."

I'm also not seeing suggestions for languages that do map well to modern microprocessors.

I hear there are concerns about plug-in hybrid's that don't use their engines often developing issues because those engines never get used. Does the CX-90 have any features to help with that?

AFAIK, Gravitational waves are out first method of "seeing" the universe that isn't just capturing incoming photons from the object under observation. The only exception is neutrino detectors, which have hilariously bad resolution.

It seems reasonable to expect new phenomena to be uncovered this way.

This seems like a good example of that.

Turns out it's less.

Cooler bulbs seem to generate a larger fraction of their energy in the infrared. Hotter bulbs generate not only more light, but a greater fraction of that light is visible.

That's not unsolicited advice from GPT so much as it's a mandated CYA disclaimer from OpenAI.