HN user
If you use new parts, you might save 80$
Valve very obviously isn't enjoying a fat margin on Steam Machines, but they're not a public company so profit is profit. And people who buy Steam Machines are more encouraged to buy games on Steam and pay that nice juicy 30%.
The point of a canary is that it's cryptographically signed, and it's possible to set up a duress passphrase that will delete the key when entered, so if everything works correctly an unauthorized party can't keep posting signed canaries.
Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.
I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able to be done by super special people, and intimidating or making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions.
"Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing learn a skill in order to join a community of people with that skill.
And in fact, saying "you are too stupid to learn that on your own, use an AI instead" is kind of gatekeeping on its own, because it implicitly creates a shrinking elite who actually have the knowledge (that is fed to the AI so it can be regurgitated for everyone else), shutting out the majority who are stuck in the "LLM slum".
I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns everything into a blur where events can't be described linearly. In other words, the math sometimes requires that effect precedes cause. As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is only preserved on a macroscopic scale. (IANAQP, but I'm going off my recollections of books by people who are.)
Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!
Thanks for sharing. Just curious, is there any way to perform globbing over a list of path-like strings instead of only directly on the filesystem?
As I understand it, compiling each source file separately and linking together the result was historically kind of a hack too, or at least a compromise, because early unix machines didn't have enough memory to compile the whole program at once (or even just hold multiple source files in memory at a time). Although later on, doing it this way did allow for faster recompilation because you didn't need to re-ingest source files that hadn't been changed (although this stopped being true for template-heavy C++ code).
The chips themselves add a bunch of new failure states to consider beyond software bugs, too. Maybe a bad wire or component puts too much load on the microcontroller's wee internal pin drivers and they melt into a permanent "on" state. Or a voltage fluctuation browns out the chip on boot, partially randomizing its RAM or registers. Or the chip manufacturer fixes some errata or discontinues a particular part number and now a pin you've left floating has become a hardware heisenbug. Or the wrong bit flips in your EEPROM after being in a hot machine for a few years. Suddenly a boring 555 looks pretty good. (Keep in mind, we're talking about "turn off heater after pulses stop", not "abort launch sequence if tank 3 pressure low". The latter is way above my pay grade.)
quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky
Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)
I absolutely do not understand moving "report spam" under "report misleading". The UX for this is terrible. There are lots of bots posting SEO junk, at a rate and scale that definitely wastes resources, and now bsky has interfered with one of the signals it should be using to combat the problem.
Yes, a simple purpose-made chip designed to be used in safety-critical situations, with high tolerances for voltage etc, would probably be better. Although one thing the 555 design has going for it is that a seasoned EE could take one look at the physical circuit and know exactly what it does.
But I would never trust anything that ran software for something like this.
I would absolutely not want to use a microcontroller or a complicated chip for something like that. Simplicity is the point.
I designed the electronics for a heavy-duty industrial 3D printer and used a 555 in the failsafe circuit (alongside the manual e-stop). If it didn't get reset by a heartbeat from the embedded computer/software, it would unpower the heaters and actuators.
My memory that far back is hazy but I seem to recall being able to do full-page zoom in Opera circa 2003.
If I download the image, Fedora KDE shows it properly in Dolphin and Gwenview.
Leaving aside the externalities of constantly breaking everyone's workflow and potentially introducing disastrous bugs, there's an opportunity cost to innovating where there isn’t a clear need. Google and others are wasting massive resources endlessly tweaking browsers and the Web because that's all they know how to do, their users are locked in and without recourse, and they don't feel threatened by any competitors or upstarts. I would argue the web and smartphones and similar tech are boring now but because the market is controlled by only a few huge companies, the tech hasn't been allowed to become low-margin, standardized cookie-cutter commodities. Instead these attempts to make this old boring tech seem exciting is getting to the point where it's sad and comical.
I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work (or how you should navigate the Web) was uncertain, but eventually everyone settled on something that worked well enough that it was no longer worthwhile to mess with it.
Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).
Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their capabilities in ungainly leaps and bounds. Every new piece of popular hardware wasn't just the marketing number going up, it was Christmas for software. You didn't need 100+ devs to compete in the big leagues. And yeah there were a lot of moody FPS games, but I can't describe the delight of first seeing a Katamari Damacy or a Portal. It was a time of untilled earth and unplucked fruit.
e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand
IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily on photo-reference textures (instead of hand drawing or computer generating them). Keep in mind that in 2001 digital cameras were rare, expensive, and low-res, so people often just used film cameras and scanned in the physical photo with a flatbed scanner. Max Payne was far from the first, though; even 1998's Half-Life used some photo-ref textures.
The lighting in Max Payne's textures was probably mostly just the lighting from the original photo. Every texture had to be hand-manipulated to make it usable on 3D models, so changing the lighting would have added even more work and would have looked less realistic.
I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate simulations, but most of these tricks were industry standard for 3D games in the early 2000's. Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown; developers just did the best they could with the basic tech that was available. Back then, just the fact that we could put thousands of hardware accelerated textured polygons on the screen was a miracle to us.
While Max Payne was cutting-edge, a lot of what made the visuals appear impressive was due to hand-tweaking by a team of highly skilled artists and designers, who were probably using ridiculously primitive tooling. Pretty much every realistic 3D game of this era had to make do with low-res diffuse textures, prebaked lighting, mostly fixed-function rendering, pre-scripted interactions, and particle dynamics that were basically just a few lines of C++. Other early-2000's games like Serious Sam, Halo, and Metroid Prime also managed to create immersive visuals with very limited tech, using the same techniques as Max Payne.
Both questions could fill many books. But having grown up in Canada and having visited Europe, they both seem to have a fundamental disinterest in technology and futuristic-ness, and curiosity in and ambitions about it (relative to the US). There are still techies and nerds, but they are fewer and further between, and more consumerist and casual about it. From personal experience, in the 90's and 2000's, far fewer businesses were interested in websites or using the Internet for commerce, and were slow to adopt it. In Canada, broadband and cellular access lagged far behind the US, and continues to be sub-par and overpriced to this day.
If you did happen to end up with computer-related skills or education, not only was the pay vastly higher in the US, that's where the culture was a lot more enthusiastic about technology (hence why most of the world's major tech companies were founded there). And if your interest in tech extended beyond making money, you probably felt like you would meet more like-minded people in the US.
"Killing the golden goose" is the phrase that has come to mind repeatedly in the past few years. As someone living in a country that has been brain-draining into the US for decades, I'm quite perplexed at all this. It looks like the next Andrej Karpathy (born in Czechoslovakia, educated in Canada) will be taking their talents somewhere besides the US in the future.
Maybe they think they can just cherry-pick the geniuses and leave "the rest" but that's not how it works; skilled experts don't just suddenly appear out of the vacuum, you need a pipeline with a wide mouth. It wasn't perfect but the US had the world's best genius pipeline, and it has already been largely torn down.
Yes, I know mmap already sort of allows this (and has for well over a decade). To elaborate: when I want to, say, parse a megabytes-sized file, I don't muck about with mmap(), I just read() into a buffer; it's simple and it's fast enough even though I'm just wasting microseconds waiting for bytes on one fast chip to get copied into another slightly faster chip (and then copied into CPU cache). If I'm dealing with a larger amount of data, I'd be tempted to use database middleware to figure out all the platform-specific shuffling between RAM and disk (designed on the assumption that the disk is spinning rust, cough), but that pulls in yet another chunk of complexity.
Instead, imagine if I could just state in one line of system-agnostic code "give me a pointer to /home/user/abc" and it does the right thing--assuming there was some way around mmap's current set of caveats. Imagine if I could turn a memory buffer into a file in one line of code and it Just Worked. Imagine if the OS treated my M.2 SSD as just another chip on the bus instead of still having a good amount of code on the hot path that assumes I'm manually sending bytes to a mechanical drive.
Not a new idea, but it's intriguing to think about an architecture that's just: CPU <-> caches <-> nonvolatile storage
What if you could take it for granted that mmap()ing a file has the exact same performance characteristics as malloc(), aside from the data not going away when you free the address space? What if arbitrary program memory could be given a filename and casually handed off to the OS to make persistent? A lot of basic software design assumptions are still based on the constraints of the spinning rust era...
A more intuitive and natural phrasing, even though it's invalid in a technical sense. I've noticed this happens when people talk about computers/software as well ("it thinks the variable is set", "it freaks out if it doesn't get a response", etc). Outside of formal writing/presentations, using only technical terminology seems to take a suboptimal amount of effort for both speaker and listener compared to anthropomorphizing (unless, as you mention, the listener is a layman who gets the wrong idea).
The explicit support for Linux is the main reason I bought a Framework (which looked slightly more attractive to me than System76).
Douglas Adams was bang on about how comedically unhelpful advanced technology was going to be. Every ridiculously convoluted user interface and neurotic computer he thought up (or worse) is imminently going to be our daily life.
I wonder if this move has anything to do with SATA SSDs being a common upgrade for older PCs, but those will just go in the trash now that Windows 10 is EOL and Windows 11 will refuse to run on most of them? (I assume only a small percentage will be switched to Linux instead.)