scratcheee

When it comes to fluff/slop/etc, worse can be measured by word count, so there’s your answer.

That’s going a bit far. I’m in the games industry and have used opus regularly, it’s a great codec for games, often the hardware decoding is so restricted that we’re using software regardless so we might as well use something like opus.

The licensing restriction is unfortunate, but only restrictive for those with very specific goals, under normal conditions BSD is a wonderful license for game devs since you’re free to use the code and only have to add an acknowledgement somewhere.

I suppose a public domain game might hit the same limitation, though as a non-lawyer I would guess the chance of anyone with standing trying to sue anyone implementing from this spec is realistically zero (though I don’t fault stb for being unwilling to roll those dice!)

MRIs are fundamentally expensive. Yes we can bring the price down a bit, and we can set more money aside for them, but they’ll always be limited by their price.

Even if this technique is much worse (I can certainly believe it is) the price might allow uses that would never be practical with MRI even with the best financial support. For example, ultrasound might be viable for use in GPs or small medical facilities which could never dream of justifying an MRI machine.

You’re both imagining different scenarios.

Scenario 1: 20% of staff tested failed. Individual targeting is pointless because the issue is systemic. This has happened in aviation, it’s common for accident investigators to conclude that the entire company culture (or even the entire industry) has failed to handle a problem. They don’t waste time in cases like this pointing at individuals.

Scenario 2: you test very regularly and nobody fails the tests. Except Bob, he fails the tests. In this scenario, your threat analysis document will recommend retraining, firing, or restricting Bob specifically.

Scenario 2 almost never happens because nobody has data that good. If your sampling frequency or ability to conduct tests are limited, no specific sample is enough to cover the entire problem. If you focus on a punishing (or just re-educating) the 20% who failed then your next test will fail for (potentially) 20% of the 80% who weren’t retrained, and thus didn’t learn anything.

TLDR: you need to choose the approach based on the situation, but we collectively tend to treat security poorly enough that we’re almost never in the fortunate situation where scenario 2 fits.

Disagree, though you’re right it’s a little bit similar to the eu flag, but only a little, plenty of countries manage with more similar flags.

Flags don’t exist for the period where they’re gaining recognition. Compromising the significance of the iconography for the temporary gain of not being misidentified during the period it isn’t recognisable would just mean if it gains recognition it will forever be less than it could be.

In other words, with flags you need to play to win, not to survive. Better that the attempt have a higher risk of failure with a great flag than a lower risk with a mediocre flag.

The pale blue dot is an excellent way to represent a global outlook and “we’re all in it together”, not sure I can think of a better pedigree for this concept. I’d perhaps have been tempted to make it a smaller blue dot, but flags do need to be recognised at a distance, so it can’t be too much smaller.

This is true, but since you always need a bit of hope in all the bad news, worth noting that if you focus solely on electricity generation, the fossil fuels from generation decreased last year. That’s the first time it’s happened when demand increased as normal (ie if we disregard things like covid which decreased fossil fuel use by suppressing demand). Electricity use went up as normal, but renewables went up faster, cutting out the normal fossil fuel increases. Whilst this isn’t quite going to be a guaranteed every year thing yet, it’s going to happen more and more, and in a few years we can expect to see the last year where fossil fuel use for electricity goes up, followed by an inevitable decline.

Of course there’s a lot of other uses of fossil fuels than just electricity, so we’re still using more each year and probably will for a while yet, but it’s still a major milestone and a change in how the world works that can be celebrated, especially given so many things are switching towards electricity as a basis at the same time.

We are fixing the problem too slowly, but the ball is rolling faster and faster now, signs a promising that we will eventually fix it, now the question is how much damage will be done before we get there rather than whether we’ll get there.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-...

They already tried pushing back against c-sections, turns out giving overly opinionated options to women that discourages things that are medically beneficial in a large portion of cases is not helpful and caused a lot of unnecessary suffering and some deaths, now that policy is thankfully long gone, though the opinionated attitude it generated in some continues on sadly. my wife had a particularly large first baby, natural birth might have worked, but would have been risky, rather than being given unbiased options, she was pressured towards induction over c-section since it was “more natural” (I suspect mostly because it would have looked better in the hospitals stats to keep the c-sections down). The early induction failed after days of suffering (as early inductions usually do, turns out), and then she had a c-section anyway (which having reviewed the options was her original preference, but was pressured out by the doctor), the c-section was vastly more successful, as you’d expect from the statistics (and a lot less suffering, which doesn’t show up in the stats but is obvious once you concider the process). Im willing to agree neither should be recommended in most cases, natural births are safer in most births, but the best thing anyone can do is give the facts as they apply to the person giving birth (and keep their opinions well out of it).

I fully admit that personal experience has biased me strongly in favour of c-sections, but only when the stats support them, which they often do.

That’s pretty flawed argument on the face of it, very few things win a cost benefit analysis if you disregard the benefit and thus require exactly zero cost.

The real question is whether detransitioning or other negative outcomes are greater than the number of suicides prevented by allowing early transitioning, and that’s a rather more complicated hurdle to jump.

Yes, and I think that’s actually intentional, they’re rewarding renewables way over the odds without needing to give politically controversial benefits. The rewards are just an inherent result of the existing system. This is why renewables are growing rapidly in the uk.

Of course we’ll need a way to resolve fluctuations both rapid and slower. Rapid fluctuations are handled by pumped hydro and increasingly by batteries.

The slow fluctuations (day/night all the way to summer/winter and good/bad weather patterns) are much trickier, I think it’s still unclear how well handle them, but it will certainly be partly handled by having an excess of renewables, though we’ll likely need some other solutions too, nuclear is probably one of them.

The implied part is “within common conditions” it’s a law limited to a specific regime, much like Newtonian physics. We know it’s not universally true but we can see it’s often true in common scenarios.

In the extreme case, as road coverage approaches 100%, the city stops containing buildings so the traffic will drop towards zero, so there’s actually a balance point somewhere, but roads are quite inefficient for high density cities, so probably the balance point would be less about fulfilling traffic demand and more about reducing the demand by demolishing most of the city.

I know the thread is about tvs, but since gaming has come up, worth noting that at computer viewing distances the differences between 1080p/1440p and 4k really are very visible (though in my case I have a 4k monitor for media and a 1440p monitor for gaming since there’s 0 chance I can run at 4k anyway)

The obvious use-case for unsafe is to implement alternative memory regimes that don’t exist in rust already, so you can write safe abstractions over them.

Rust doesn’t have the kind of high performance garbage collection you’d want for this, so starting with unsafe makes perfect sense to me. Hopefully they keep the unsafe layer small to minimise mistakes, but it seems reasonable to me.

You make a strong case for voice, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate their argument, they never said voice should be replaced.

Here’s some ideas: 1. A data side channel 2. Use it to send originator for each message, have unique note on other end per sender so they don’t need to check visually, but also show on their display so corrupted or suspicious sender can be verified, in desperate circumstances (rather than the current case of “that cannot be done at all”). 3. Digital audio, allowing actual high quality audio, which we know does improve comprehension, which should not be optional in this context. 4. Take some lessons from modern coms systems on how to handle overlapping coms, plus the extra bandwidth from digital, so overlapping coms is handled gracefully (I realise the realtime nature prevents being too clever, but perhaps blocking all but the first to speak and playing a tone if you’re being blocked), perhaps with some sensible overrides like atc and anyone declaring an emergency getting priority. Currently overlap obliterates both messages and it’s possible for senders to not even know their message was lost. This has contributed to accidents, whilst basic direct radio transmissions cannot avoid this, smart algorithms with some networking could definitely reduce the failure cases to very rare and extreme scenarios 5. Let atc interact with flight planners on aircraft, show the aircraft’s actual locally programmed flight plan to atc, with clear icons if it differs from the filed plan atc has, and perhaps as an emergency only measure, allow atc to submit a flight plan to the aircraft (not replacing the active plan of course, just as a suggestion/support for struggling pilots, “since you have not understood my instructions 3 times, please review the submitted plan on your flight computer, note how it differs from what you programmed”) 6. Aircraft usually know where they are, and which atc they’re meant to be communicating with, have the data channels talk even when the audio channel is not set correctly. If incompetent pilots forget to switch channel, you can force an alarm instead of launching a fighter jet, or just have a button for “connect to correct atc” and a red light when you’re not on the correct one.

That’s just the ideas I’ve come up with just now. 4. Is probably quite hard to get right, and 5 could add load, so should be done carefully. But hard to believe the current system is technically optimal, or even vaguely close to optimal.

Admittedly, I know the real reason is that having 1 working system for everyone is better than a theoretically great system that is barely implemented and a complicated mess of handoffs between the 2. But with care they can absolutely improve things, but feels like things are moving a few decades slower than they should be.

The article explains the weaknesses of the password-centric approach:

whether by phishing or exploiting the fact the passwords are weak or have been reused

1. Phishing is harder when you only ever enter your password into 1 place, and that one place is designed to be secure and consistent.

2. Much easier to have exactly 1 strong password than unique strong passwords for every website.

Is it better than a vault full of random passwords? Probably not, beyond pressuring the user into using the more secure method

Not disputing the obvious advantages, but since you asked:

Being forced to maintain compatibility for all previously written apis (and quite a large array of private details or undocumented features that applications ended up depending on) means windows is quite restricted in how it can develop.

As a random example, any developers who have written significant cross platform software will be able to attest that the file system on windows is painfully slow compared to other platforms (MS actually had to add a virtual file system to git at one point after they transitioned to it because they have a massive repo that would struggle on any OS, but choked especially badly on Windows). The main cause (at least according to one windows dev blog post I remember reading) is that windows added apis to make it easy to react to filesystem changes. That’s an obviously useful feature, but in retrospect was a major error, so much depends on the filesystem that giving anything the ability to delay fs interaction really hurts everything. But now lots of software is built on that feature, so they’re stuck with it.

On the other hand, I believe the Linux kernel has very strict compatibility requirements, they just don’t extend to the rest of the OS, so it’s not like there’s a strict rule on how it’s all handled.

Linux has the obvious advantage that almost all the software will have source code available, meaning the cost of recompiling most of your apps for each update with adjusted apis is much smaller.

And for old software that you need, there’s always VMs.

There’s a classic yes minister skit on how dubious polls can be: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks&t=45s

Easy: provide high quality output when being tested for a new task, The moment you are done outperforming the competition in the tests and have hit production you slowly ramp down quality, perhaps with exceptions when the queries look like more testing.

Same problem as ai safety, but the actual problem is now the corporate greed of humans behind the ai rather than an actual agi trying to manipulate you.

I assume they’re referring to ag-gag laws, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag Gives a reasonable background by the looks.

And yet their statement makes perfect sense to me.

Caching and lower level calls are generic solutions that work everywhere, but are also generally the last and worst way to optimise (thus why they need such careful analysis since they so often have the opposite effect).

Better is to optimise the algorithms, where actual profiling is a lesser factor. Not a zero factor of course, as a rule of thumb it’s probably still wise to test your improvements, but if you manage to delete an n^2 loop then you really don’t need a profiler to tell you that you’ve made things better.

Given the web’s much wider remit than pdf, it has support for accessibility tools and much better non-visual handling than pdf, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair I think. If a website doesn’t handle lynx well, there’s a good chance it doesn’t handle accessibility well either.

“Newfound”? People have been fighting this debate for decades. I remember having this exact debate at school 20 years ago, except the price arguments back then were bullshit, but people didn’t care enough about the environment so there wasn’t any pressure to change.

Nowadays the price arguments are… complex. But for the first time people actually care enough about the environment that nuclear is no longer competing poorly with coal (except for in Germany).

The exact maths on comparing pricing is complicated, given that energy storage costs vary so much depending on the inputs (try looking up storage costs for a 100% solar/wind grid during a once in a decade lull, it’d make nuclear look great, but obviously for a slightly mixed grid and more typical conditions, storage might be reasonably priced vs nuclear).

Anyway, I’m mildly disinterested in nuclear now that it’s only a side show to renewables, but I think it’s far from being a slam dunk either way. If some country or politian is more interested in nuclear, fair play to them, I say go for it. We’re not in a comfortable position right now so any movement away from fossils is a win regardless of where we end up (within reason of course)

No doubt the debate will only be resolved once and for all once fusion turns up and actually makes fission genuinely irrelevant (even then, fission might be cheaper for quite a while).

Only everyone who goes bankrupt, and their creditors.

Rather the opposite for their customers.

I’m sure there’s a few cases where this would excessively hurt a company’s prospects (perhaps where a company has an innovative software product with a thin hardware component), but in the majority of cases losing access to the software of a hardware product as an asset is a relatively small loss, and the benefit to consumers is pretty huge. I’d support the trade off.

I’ve met humans who do that too

That argument works pretty well for any bad api design (assuming sufficient documentation somewhere).

Yet I assume we can agree that regardless of how you can work around bad apis, good api design that prevents misuse is always better.

The safety measures have to stop somewhere of course (short of an api that is a single function which does exactly the thing you want without inputs or outputs, which seems unlikely), but extending type safety to interfaces does not seem like a step too far.

I agree with most of this, but I’m not sure about tracking the size metadata becoming a required task for the caller.

The cost of storing the size of every allocation is relatively high, at least some of the time, where it isn’t implied by the usage. Meanwhile the caching system for allocations can store it very efficiently, a block of 4KB of 8-byte allocations will contain over 500 allocations that can all share their metadata. Once they’re handed out by the allocator their shared origin is obscured, so they’d need individual tracking.

I do acknowledge that when size is inherent to the context (new or allocating for a specific struct) then maybe an allocator that doesn’t track size could allow for some clever optimisations, though I’m doubtful it could overcome the loss of shared metadata, which is so much more efficient.

One potential value of CC today is as a final and most flexible solution. Even with the limited and experimental technology of today, which is obviously economically insane, we have a way (with enough money) to make anything carbon neutral. The value is not that we actually do that (humanity cannot afford it, in general), but instead to give us the number to beat, the correct carbon tax, the absolute cost of failing to decarbonise.

It’s easier to justify improved efficiency when the cost of spilling carbon is a big number of dollars rather than a tiny slither of a global problem.

That said, I do agree investment should be limited, it’s obviously only going to be the “best” solution in the rare circumstance that there is no good solution.

I actually disagree, if it can be shown to be safer overall then I don’t think it should be required to be a strict superset of human abilities.

AI will always behave differently to human cognition, we should expect them to have different illusions and different failure cases. That doesn’t mean worse, if they perform better than a legal human driven car on average then I don’t think there’s a justification to exclude them.

That said, they will probably have to be _significantly_ better than human drivers in order to survive the media and public perception, so this might be irrelevant in the end.

I think the value in art like this is that it isn’t a matter of skill but of dedication. Should art be something that only the 1% most skilled and well trained artists can ever hope to be celebrated for?

giant tortoise was meant to be delicious, not considered ethical or practical these days

Whilst I won’t deny that incompetent leadership and planning are involved, I think there are structural reasons for the game industry being uniquely problematic.

Games have massive cost efficiencies from scaling. Studios are incentivised to always make the biggest games they can with their budget. Games team sizes vary strongly with the project period. They can’t handle more than a small team early and can absorb almost any number of people at any skill level before release.

End result is that game development is always boom and bust. Small core teams build a game up slowly, then more and more are added until just before release when a mad scramble for anyone and everyone they can be bought borrowed or stolen to get the game released on time. Then there’s no work except for the core team on the next game.

The obvious solution is to have many games running in one studio to even out the team sizes and absorb the crunch, but that implies either studio sizes beyond anything we see currently (and no increase in per project scope) or much smaller scope for games.

I’ve seen models like they work, and be much less painful to work with for everyone involved, but it did require different market conditions to justify the alternative model, I’m not sure the entire industry could switch.

That’s not to say fixing the problem is impossible, just that the bad incentives will always be there to push back against improvements..