HN user
I have an M2 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM that I bought three and half years ago. For browsing the web, listening to music, watching TV and movies, using Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc., it's still perfectly fine.
OTOH, for my development Mac, I have 64GB of RAM. (Though 32GB would probably be fine.)
it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room.
Wow, that's dedication!
I wrote my own adventure game for my Commodore PET, which had 8K of RAM. It worked well, but after three rooms of content, I ran out of RAM, so then I gave up.
At which point the computer dutifully saved as much as it could, before running out of disk space, informed via a text response of my poor choice in the real world, and left me with nothing.
Wow, that sucks!
When I was a kid, I had an 8k Commodore PET. I wrote a text adventure game for it, but I ran out of RAM after implementing the parser, inventory, and three rooms.
Well, it worked, but there wasn't much to do, other than follow the Wumpus around....
Bohm's Interpretation is experimentally indistinguishable from MWI.
On the other hand, Bohm's interpretation seems pretty ad hoc. And it also includes all of the other worlds that MWI has in it via the pilot waves that continue to exist and propagate forever. (The pilot waves never collapse.) It's just that only one of those many worlds ends up being "real".
When I was a kid, I once brought a stethoscope with me on the airplane so that I could watch the movie for free. (Or rather listen to it.) I pulled off the heart-listening cup part of the stethoscope and inserted beverage straws into the rubber tubing. Then I put one straw into each of the two little holes in the armrest.
It worked perfectly! Until a stewardess caught me and made me stop.
A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the all-time great science fiction novels.
It's likely he did, since he read just about anything reputable related to gambling. But he was doing this before Dr. Z's was published.
My uncle was a professional gambler and did well at it. At first he counted cards playing Blackjack, but eventually was banned from most casinos where it was actually possible to win at Blackjack. (Casinos in Atlantic City aren't allowed to ban card counters, so they use huge decks and shuffle frequently to make winning via card counting infeasible.)
He mostly switched at some point to betting on sports. He arbitraged the odds that the bookies used compared to odds that were apparently more accurate, probabilistically.
I asked him how he could possibly have a better sense of the probabilities than the bookies, whose job it is to get this right. He replied that the bookies don't set the odds based on probabilities, but rather just so that they have an equal amount of money on both possible outcomes, and therefore they would always make money no matter what.
So the odds that the bookies used were often not good measures of the actually probabilities, but rather often more a measure of public sentiment. And he could take advantage of this difference.
I detailed how I tracked down the problem in reply to another query in this subthread.
That particular section of ethernet, which served about half of a floor of an entire building was intermittent. It would work the vast majority of the time, but would have mysterious periodic outages, depending on the phase of the moon, or other mysterious cosmic events.
Working at a university, no one would pay for me to have a time domain reflectometer (aka TDR), which would have helped determine if there was a bad spot in the Ethernet cable somewhere.
One of the assistant directors of the lab told me that I didn't need a TDR, because I could just diagnose the problem with a signal generator and an oscilloscope. (Which is what a TDR basically is, but just bundled up to be convenient to use.) I ended up doing just that, and was able to determine that there was a reflection happening on that section of Ethernet cable, but IIRC, narrowing down the location relied on me having more knowledge than I had about the speed of light in an RG-58 cable. And also, wheeling around a working with the oscilloscope was a PITA.
Eventually I found someone to loan me a real TDR, and was able to determine how far down the cable the problem was occurring. Of course, even with that knowledge, determining where the problem was occurring was a challenge, since the cable snaked in a out of everyone's offices.
I followed the cable, applying the TDR at various points, until I got close to where the reflection was occurring, and it seemed to be occurring where the cable ran through the ceiling for a while.
I should note that all while I'm doing this, people are griping heavily, since it required disconnecting that section of Ethernet, meaning that people couldn't get their work done.
In any case, I got a ladder, pried up some ceiling tiles, looked up into the ceiling, and found a section of the Ethernet cable that had been spliced. At first I figured that one of the splices was bad, but eventually I noticed that the cable that had been spliced in was RG-59.
In case you don't already know, RG-58 and RG-59 look almost identical to each other. IIRC, the only real way to tell the difference was by reading the print on the cable.
Whoever spliced in that piece of cable should be drawn and quartered, but once I replaced that bit of cable with RG-58, everything then worked fine from then on, with no more intermittent outages.
Don't even get me started about the short section of RG-59 cable spliced into the middle of our RG-58 Ethernet. Hidden in the ceiling.
Why is the sword worth $150k? Did it appear in something famous? Or is it just because other Weta Workshop items have appeared in famous films?
The Diamond Age is my favorite novel of all time.
It's pretty fast. On an 8GB M2 MacBook Air, it produces more than 2 images per minute using the default settings.
E.g., it's about 20x as fast as InvokeAI, which doesn't have an FP16 option that works on a Mac.
I shudder at the thought of all the three-armed people with seven fingers on each hand that I will end up shaking hands with.
There's nothing in the release notes that says whether 2.0 can do hands without a 99% chance of producing deformed results.
"Prey". Well that's a pretty generic term. Perhaps much of this "prey" are the mice that are a danger to bumblebees.
So, I wait for her to return, sometimes until pretty late at night, because I don't want her to have to be outside for the night.
I've bell-trained cats that I've owned. I.e., I ring a bell every time before I give them a treat. When I've wanted them to come indoors, I ring the bell, and they've always come running.
Letting your cat roam free is a tacit acknowledgment that one doesn’t really care that much for the animal
This is untrue. I've owned both indoor cats and indoor/outdoor cats. Anyone who has seen the joy that a cat experiences while outdoors would never claim that a cat owner who wants their cat to experience this joy, "doesn't really care that much for the animal".
Maybe an outdoor cat will live a shorter life than an indoor cat, but that hasn't been my personal experience. In fact, I had an outdoor cat that lived for 22 years. In any case, a shorter but happier life is not without its merits.
The cat I currently have is an indoor-only cat, but she only rarely displays the kind of joy that my outdoor cats would routinely. As for walking her on a leash, I have tried, but she will not tolerate the harness, and will manage to escape from it if I persist.
Outdoor cats are an invasive species which are destroying the native bird populations
This is certainly true for feral cats, but I'm highly skeptical about this claim being true for owned indoor/outdoor cats.
I have one of these! It was my first computer. I got the 8k model, but it had the chiclet keyboard.
Eventually I got a full-sized keyboard for it, but it was made by a third party and connected to the motherboard via a flat ribbon cable.
I programmed my own text adventure for it from scratch, but I ran out of ram after the game had only three rooms in it. It may have been the smallest adventure game ever, but it worked!
To this day, I still see PET computers in old science fiction movies and in recent TV shows and movies that take place in the late 70s or early 80s. It was definitely the coolest looking personal computer of its time.
I haven't used Pythonista myself, and it is true that, as I understand it, Pythonista doesn't directly provide the capability to use "pip" or pull code from GitHub. But it seems that these issues have been addressed via plugins for Pythonista. E.g.,
You can't even compile and run code on a (mobile) Apple device. It's explicitly against the app store terms and conditions to allow users to do that.
You better inform Apple then, that the Python IDEs that are available in the App Store need to be banned!
Plan 9 was designed to work with Blit (or similar) terminals, which were basically thin-clients that would be backed by a Plan 9 server cloud.
On the other hand, maybe there's a good reason that Plan 9 never caught on.
In terms of mass-market success, goodness of recommendations is like, #12 on the list of must-have features
Well, maybe that's why they generally are not so great.
On the other hand, Pandora has traditionally existed with playing music that you'll like, but didn't explicitly select, as its reason for existence. Maybe that's why it seems to do a better job at this than other streaming services.
Fresh fruit can surely be expensive. I doubt that frozen fruit is that bad. Maybe more than frozen french fries, but if you can cook frozen french fries, I should think that you can also cook beans.
Regarding corn syrup being put into everything, this seems to be a much more general health issue than for the poor alone. Obesity in the US is an epidemic that is much more widespread than amongst just the poor.
I agree that this means that surely we are doing something very wrong in this country!
Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify.
That may be true, but Negroponte was proselytizing streaming media back in the early 90s, long before anything like Spotify or Netflix were actually practical. Did all this hot air have any effect? I have no idea. But from where I was sitting, he was definitely pushing hard for something that others were not at the time.
Also, the first music recommendation service I ever heard of was started at the Media Lab. It was called Ringo, and you'd email it a list of your favorite bands, and it would then email you back recommendations for other music you might like. Ringo was implemented using some sort of statistical correlation amongst other people's lists of favorite bands.
Ringo was eventually spun off into a company called Firefly which ran a music community website that used this technology. It didn't do so well, though, and was eventually bought by Microsoft, which shut down the website about a year later.
Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
Sure, but I don't think that doing it very well is. I mean they typically do an okay job, but I've yet to find one that just blows me away with its ability to find music for me that I will love.
Yes, I'm introduced to some good new music this way. But I also have to listen to a lot of dreck too.
I was responding to the claim that subsidies to grow the right kind of food, rather than corn, etc., might help.
I mentioned the issues of housing and community, etc., that are required to actually obtain and cook food. I don't see how subsidies to farmers to grow healthier foods are going to solve the problems that you mention.
I.e., I'm not denying that people living in poverty don't end up malnourished, but that would seem to stem from lack of good housing and community, not with healthy food itself being too expensive.
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I find it hard to believe that the cost of healthy food is a terrible problem these days with poverty. (In the US.) Housing, heating, clothing, education, living in a community that fosters wellbeing, etc., sure!
But food? Rice and beans is one of the healthiest things you can eat, and it's very cheap.
Okay, well rice and beans might bore you to death, but you won't starve. Add some frozen vegetables and fruit and I should think that most people would do just fine nutritionally.
Of course, a lot of people might not know this, and that could be a problem.
First, I would agree with @codingslave in that you SHOULD NOT quit your job
I agree with this. There was a period of several years when I was suffering from mysterious medical issues that made functioning at work very difficult. Fortunately, I had a therapist at the time. At times I told my therapist that maybe I should go on medical disability.
My therapist advised that I should under no circumstances go on long-term disability. That if I did, I would likely end up being on medical disability for the rest of my life, and likely sit around being depressed forever.
Eventually, the mysterious medical issues went away, and I had managed to keep my job and sanity in the meantime.
I'm sorry that that OP has been going through so much. I know how rough this type of thing is, and it's truly hell on earth. What's always worked for me is to just fake it til you make it. Take everything one day at a time. Work towards getting your life to where you want it to be when you have the wherewithal. Do things that you find to be fun when you can. Eventually, a day comes when things are not so shitty anymore, and when that day comes, you'll be happy that you persevered.