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gameoverhumans

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Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form.

And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.

I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).

Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.

is it really so hard to imagine that perhaps the climate issues that have been "constantly talked about for 20+ years" have been heavily moderated/filtered/co-opted by financial/political interests?

The current party line is "holy shit we gotta do something soon or 2100 is gonna be bad, ya'll!". Thing is, essentially nobody today will be alive by 2100. Humans are not very good at thinking in these kinds of timescales. Corporations are hilariously bad at thinking beyond the next quarterly financial report.

So if it turns out that we're witnessing irreversible and catastophic changes to important natural systems that many of us will witness first-hand in our own lives, don't you think it's entirely plausible that the people in charge don't want us to learn the full scope of how bad things got under their watch? That the people profiting from this carnage don't want the majority to act in a way that impacts their profits?

You think we are physically unable to build an asteroid defense?

Mate the dino-nuking asteroid that hit Earth was 10km in diameter. Even if we launched every nuke we had at such an object, it wouldn't do much to deter such an object. And that's assuming it's moving at a low enough fraction of c that we could actually detect such an object in time to mobilize all said nukes.

So, no, I don't think we would be able to defend ourselves today (nor by 2100, let's say) against such an adversary. Same deal with any species that is sophisticated enough to do interstellar travel. For them it's even easier, they can just pick up a few rocks from Kuiper belt, stick some mass drivers on them and it's bye-bye Earth within a few weeks/months.

(and we are doing a lot)

The point is we're not. We haven't even reached peak fossil fuel yet. Even if we stopped everything tomorrow, things would still keep getting worse for at least another few decades. But as it is we're reading today about how bad we made things for ourselves in the 80s. Since then our consumption has only continued to accelerate, which can only mean things will be even worse tomorrow.

but if the counter to everything is: not enough, doomed anyway

No. That's not what I or anyone else in this thread has been saying.

It's like this. We are on the Titanic. Some very clever people have charted our course and done ocean sonographs and determined there's a big-ass iceberg ahead. Many folks like you are insisting either a) there's no iceberg or b) icebergs are good for ship hulls or c) we'll out-technology the iceberg somehow and thus we don't need to worry about the iceberg. So right now all we've done is ACCELERATE towards the iceberg. If there was sensible suggestions like "let's alter our course slightly" I wouldn't be saying "well that still puts us on course for the iceberg so there's no point". I would be saying "great! that's a start!".

Meh I dunno, there's that website that reports how many hiroshimas of energy we're releasing into our planet per second, the skeptics/denialists don't seem to care much for that metric, either.

I don't think the problem is how it's being reported, I think it's just that this is the kind of news some people will do anything but hear.

covid showed that despite widespread disruption, technology civilization actually didn't collapse at all.

What I hear: "hey look, I pulled a piece out of the Jenga tower and it didn't collapse! Clearly from this I can infer that more pieces can be pulled without any consequences!"

if it isn't warming, an asteroid will get us or aliens or nuclear war or ..., so why bother?

Uh, because we don't have control over foreign sentient beings, nor the path of celestial bodies? Do you really not see the difference between those things and anthropogenic warming as a result of rapid industrialization?

Okay so we've established that neither my imagination, nor the labors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are any good for determining how likely we are on course for nuclear war.

You know that humans do have nukes, right? And a long history of killing each other over pretty much anything? (from land rights to idealogies and everything in between).

So in your estimation, who would be a good source to determine how/whether humans get to a point where nuclear war is a likely scenario?

So you are an expert in these things that you don't trust other experts

I don't see how the grandparent comment implied a lack of trust in other experts, nor did they imply themselves to be experts.

Catastrophic collapse is not really something generally assumed on the 2-3 degree warming path.

Actually, the IPCC, which tends to be rather optimistic on how bad things could be (or already are), predicts pretty significant socioeconomic problems arising from 2-3 degrees warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Socioeconomic_Pathways

It doesn't take much imagination to come up with ways that "Social cohesion degrades and conflict and unrest become increasingly common" leads to "nation states with nukes and experiencing extreme scarcity and high social unrest declare war on each other"...

Agreed, humanity is unlikely to survive an asteroid of the likes that wiped out the dinosaurs, considering it increased global atmospheric temperatures to several hundred degrees celsius for a few minutes (or several thousand for a few seconds) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFCbJmgeHmA).

It doesn't look like we need the help of celestial bodies intersecting ours, though. We're ushering in our own demise just fine on our own, thank you very much!

Aren't you sick of this tired old argument?

Humans have not existed on this planet for the 4 billion years. More like 4 million. Sure, an accurately recorded history of 174 is still a pretty small fraction of 4 million.

So if you're going to try to downplay the increasingly obvious Great Filter our idiotic species is hurtling towards at breakneck speed, at least be dignified about it and use the right numbers. Thanks!

He was building for at least Windows and Linux

Are you sure about that? I remember in Doom 3 era Carmack was rocking a fancy NeXTStep computer and doing cross platform development. But before that I'm pretty sure everything was a strictly Windows affair...

Wikipedia seems to suggest in the first line that it was originally released for Linux. But the "Ports" section it mentions that:

The first port to be completed was the Linux port Quake 0.91 by id Software employee Dave D. Taylor using X11 on July 5, 1996

And on that topic:

In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a source port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using the Rendition Vérité chipset.

and didn't have OpenGL so he was doing all the 3D manually

So in other words he could focus on the fundamentals of doing vector math and rasterizing pixels, rather than worrying about 600 different incompatible OpenGL extensions, pipeline stalls, and memory management bugs?

Plus assembly code...

Assembly isn't that hard. Pokemon Red/Blue was written entirely in assembly.

had to handle all the raw networking code

Again, not that hard when all you're doing is blasting out UDP packets on a very simple network. You didn't have to worry about double NAT, people didn't expect your game to work for diverse peers connected from Germany to Belgium.

wrote tools to work with assets and process levels

I think Romero wrote a lot of the tooling. Side note - have you read Masters of Doom? It goes into a lot of this stuff and is a great read.

encryption to unlock the full game on the shareware

I couldn't find anything online but I doubt this was anymore more than some xor + rot13, it's not like Carmack was also Daniel J. Bernstein in disguise :) Back then the state of computer security was, well, rather nascent.

I hope this comment doesn't come across as contrarian. I also hope it doesn't sound like I'm trying to diminish the achievements of Carmack. He's a role model for me personally as a programmer. And he and his mates spawned an entire game genre that I have enjoyed for ... an amount of time I'd rather not disclose or think too much about!

The original point I was trying to make is thus: computers, and computing, have steadily become more and more powerful, which results in more and more complexity, and progressively more unwieldy abstractions to deal with all that complexity. Back when Carmack was cutting his teeth, computers were still fairly early on that complexity curve.

Well, it is Carmack we're talking about here. He's well known as a prolific programmer prodigy ;)

But also, some other things to note:

* A lot of "agile" development in corporate environments is anything but agile because of overhead in horizontally scaling human gray meat (until we get neural interfacing between one another or something)

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack was coding against a much simpler architecture, with significantly fewer variants.

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack could focus on blitting pixels to the screen as fast as possible, rather than spending 6 months trying to wrap his head around Vulkan.

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't have to worry about building for Windows, macOS and Linux, and iOS. And Android. And ...

* It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't need to worry about accessibility requirements. Web service integrations. Digital distribution complexitities. etc...

Even in the modern day there's still people who get prodigious amounts of work done when they can focus on doing something they like doing, and the stars align. A good recent example off the top of my head in game development is The Witness. Jonathan Blow + 2-3 other programmers IIRC.

Vivaldi on iOS 3 years ago

Interesting, thanks. Didn't realise there was ways to embed WebKit views that also got JIT (escaped the walled garden a while ago!)

Still, my original point still stands. As you note, you can't have Spidermonkey running on iOS doing JIT. But you also couldn't have Gecko doing rendering and using WebKit JIT, either. ... Right?

The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.

Completely agree. The "it's for your own security" angle is just usual Apple FUD to make their anti-competitive stance seem pro-consumer.

Vivaldi on iOS 3 years ago

Rather than just downvote you for stating incorrect things with such conviction, I'll refer you to Apple's own website :)

https://support.apple.com/en-eg/guide/security/sec15bfe098e/...

Memory pages marked as both writable and executable can be used only by apps under tightly controlled conditions: The kernel checks for the presence of the Apple-only dynamic code-signing entitlement. Even then, only a single mmap call can be made to request an executable and writable page, which is given a randomized address. Safari uses this functionality for its JavaScript Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.

In other words, Apple only allows Apple to do Javascript JIT on iOS.

Some cursory web searches reinforce an assumption I had: Amazon absolutely dominate the eBook sales market, with figures from 65-80% of all sales being indicated.

So how can you make the case that Amazon doesn't have "leverage" to negotiate DRM-free publishing?

together with CDs not having DRM

I don't recall printed books ever having any form of "DRM".

I wasn't making any kind of comparison to petrol cars! I guess it seemed like I was and that explains the downvotes, perhaps?

All I was trying to do is add some support to the claim that battery density does matter in cars (contrary to ancestor assertion). Less weight = less strain on brakes and tires = less nasties in the air and our lungs.

Yeah, I've wondered that too.

I'm a fan of not yucking other people's yum, especially in the privacy of their own homes and not infringing on the liberty, safety or wellbeing of others.

That said, if we've got folks who just straight up like child pornography (which we do, and always will for as long as we remain a race of homo sapiens, sadly), would the ability for them to consume this kind of generated content actually help? Or would it encourage these people to then go further and prey on real human children?

I simply have no idea. I grew up with violent video games. I've had violent thoughts. But blowing someone's brains out in a game has never motivated me to do it in real life. I think that whole era of moral panic was silly. But human psychology is complicated, this could be very different.

What kinds of regulation do you anticipate helping here?

Let's assume that generating these images is as simple as downloading a model from the internet and running it on the same hardware you use to play Fortnite.

How do you prevent stuff like this without going full "we need to backdoor all encryption because terrorism" moral panic mode?

Child pornography is one of the worst forms of human depravity, because in order to satisfy one person's messed up desires, a child is subjected to unspeakable sexual violence. We're conditioned to protect our young for lots of obvious reasons, so this triggers an understandable an entirely justified visceral response.

This particular situation is ... different. It's clearly still causing pain to children. It's using their likeness without their consent and in a sexually violent way.

But ... I can't get behind the idea of equating it to child pornography.

It should absolutely be considered a crime, and come with its own set of punishments for those found guilty.

Again, making it absolutely clear that I personally find this act to be vile, unacceptable and highly antisocial, I also think that it should be published much less severely than producing/distributing .. err ... "actual" child pornography...?

We treat manslaughter and murder as different things, perhaps that's a suitable analogy here?

This also seems similar to the whole issue of deepfaked porn involving celebrities. When folks said "AI is gonna usher in societal problems we have no idea how to deal with", I never imagined it would get this bad, this quickly.

Well see now we've well and truly wandered away from the discussion of your original comment, and veered straight into the territory of what the original article was addressing.

That's it. What's the issue here?

I guess you didn't read the original article, but it does touch on specifically why this is problematic, and can only lead to even worse outcomes in future.

It also links to this iFixit article, which might make things clearer for you?

https://www.ifixit.com/News/69320/how-parts-pairing-kills-in...

I was trying to put your original "100$ isn't unreasonable" into context. I think making a comparison between a roll of graphite dipped in some lithium salt and an entire computer made up of billions of transistors is a reasonable one.

You didn't address my parent question either. Because you either don't know (that's fine), or don't want to address the fact that there's very little that has changed in smartphone battery (or any lithium-ion battery, for that matter) composition or manufacture in a long while.

I think you'd find that attempting to repair the NUC you highlighted would soon exceed the $100 if you needed to do anything more than very basic repairs.

Well I thought you didn't see the point of this comparison, so I don't know why you want to open that can of worms ;) But okay! A replacement 1TB nvme SSD costs 40 bucks (that's a new, in retail box, btw). A used stick of 16GB RAM costs 30 bucks. A used i5-6500T is 30 bucks.

Since you don't like comparing apple to ora--- er, batteries to computers, how about this? An iPhone 13 Max battery harvested from a broken-screen unit can be had for 30EUR on eBay. Except Apple doesn't want you to have that option. It wants to be the only game in town, and have folks like you justifying its monopolistic and unsustainable behavior.

If Apple gets away with this awful practice for long enough, I'm sure the other manufacturers will follow suit if they haven't already.

Remind me who it was to remove the headphone jack first, again? ;)

What does age have to do with the value proposition I put forward?

Has the battery chemistry in a iPhone 15 advanced significantly in the last 8 years? I don't think so.

I can also buy an entire iPhone SE 2020 or something, for $100 as well.

Exactly, thanks for reinforcing my point.

99$ isn't really a "bargain" in the absolute sense. I encourage you to look at eBay buy it now listings for used/refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre NUCs, for example. You can get an entire computer with 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a Skylake+ CPU for that kind of money.

Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it

Not sure what you're referring to here. Archinstall [1] is relatively recent [2]. I used it a few weeks ago to quickly yeet a machine into Arch for some testing. Worked flawlessly and had the machine from live boot -> Arch install on root media in under 5 minutes.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-Does-Archinstall