Posts by Filippo 830 posts • joined 24 Nov 2007
"A well written program is easy to follow - not written like a contender for the obscured C contest."
I sometimes find myself having to argue with people who believe that being able to express a complex recursive algorithm in a single line is a mark of distinction and elegance, and also why call a variable instance_counter a function createUniqueKey when "ic" and "cruk" will do? Screw them.
"But I presume you expect publishers to keep printing every book ever made, just in case you may want a copy."
Nope, but anything that cannot be legally purchased ought to automatically be out-of-copyright.
The whole point of copyright is to reward authors, while at the same time allowing other people to access and build on shared culture. An out-of-print book does neither.
I think AC has the correct detailed answer. But, speaking in general terms, I think that any time you do anything for the first time in space, no matter how certain you are that it's going to work, you do it as slowly and as accurately as you possibly can, and pause frequently to document everything. If it's mind-numbingly boring, you know you're doing it right.
Yup, that's typical. If you can fix it, then it was your fault. It happened to me a couple times. Nowadays, any time I find myself in a similar situation, I won't admit I can implement a workaround until there's an extensive paper trail that proves where the problem originates.
You don't. The problem isn't who is more trustworthy; that's near-zero for both anyway. The problem is who is more powerful.
I would *prefer* not to give my personal information to anyone, but if I *have* to, I'd rather give it to a big corporation than to my government. Both are fundamentally amoral entities, and both could (and probably will) misuse that information, but the amount of damage that a government can potentially do to an individual is orders of magnitude worse than anything any corporation could do.
At home, my laptop appears to connect to my wifi, but it doesn't actually work. I've tried using a repeater, but that makes my phone jump randomly between networks (even when one is sitting right next to it).
Even in a best-case scenario, there's a wide area that's close enough to the AP to make a phone try to use wifi and not use the cellular network, but far enough that the wifi doesn't actually work. If you happen to be standing there, you'll just be disconnected, and drain the phone battery.
A friend used to connect his first-floor desktop to the DSL router on the ground floor, but after changing the router it's no longer working. None of these issues ever produce any useful error messages; most of the time it just declares to be working, except that everything times out.
By comparison, my cellphone's 4G always works, if it's in a place that's covered.
https://xkcd.com/1865/
So, does this new AX standard actually, y'know, work?
"Unions might be a good idea if they worked as they are ideally needed, but unfortunately human nature takes over."
Uh, yeah, it's true that some unions are inefficient and/or corrupt, but if you replace "unions" with "capitalism" there, you get an equally valid reasoning.
I mean, over-rewarding top execs for maximizing the short-term at the expense of tanking the company long-term is definitely a bug and not a feature, and so is the inability to handle externalities - and yet I don't think you'd say "I wouldn't go anywhere near a corporation".
"I'm not sure how continuously powering 50+ network devices around the globe is cheaper than temporarily powering 1... your own (mathematically I don't see how it's possible, do you have sources?)."
I think the numbers change substantially once you factor in the energy that goes into manufacturing the disc and moving it around. That said, I don't actually have any of those numbers, and I could be persuaded either way.
I suspect it's easier to improve our knowledge and technicque in biology to the point where time-to-market for vaccines is 10x shorter, than to reverse urbanization. Not that I think achieving the former is easy, but I think that achieving the latter is as close to impossible as it makes no difference.
5k-10k deaths is what you'll get *if drastic mitigation measures are taken*. At which point, when the thing is over, it will look like the government overreacted.
Exponential growth is annoying like that: you need to stop it hard and early, but if you're successful, you can't help looking like you overreacted.
There are many different types of pollutants in the air. Some of them do go away very quickly, and are only present in high amounts because human activity also produces them very quickly. If you stop human activity, they'll drop sharply. When activity resumes, they'll go back to the original levels.
Others last for a long time, and the epidemic won't impact them much.
Italy has a whole lot more physical touch in its culture.
Italy has good hygiene, but I think the Japanese top almost everyone on that front (although I may just going by stereotypes there).
The Japanese seem not to mind wearing masks in general, and I bet they used them a whole lot more very quickly once news of the virus popped up.
The virus in Italy seems to have gotten into a couple of hospitals before being detected, and hospitals are clusters of elderly population activity.
I think it's a mix of the above factors.
Also, the numbers of infected people are unreliable, because you can't test everyone and a lot of victims have actually very mild symptoms and probably won't get tested.
The proportion of infected that actually get discovered probably varies wildly between countries, depending on which detection and containment strategies are employed. That will in turn make mortality rate comparisons sketchy.
I'm not sure what they're trying to prove. So, there are lots of projects where 20% of the staff does 80% of the work. So, there's a core team, and there's a bunch of contributors who toss in an hour or two when they can. It's open source; we're not all doing 8 hours/day 5 days/week on it. How is this weird?
Even if everyone had exactly the same level of skill, you'll still see a lopsided distribution, simply because not everyone is devoting the same amount of time to the project. On top of that, even at exactly the same level of skill, the people who spend more time on the project are going to be more efficient, simply because they know the internals much better, which is going to amplify the effect.
All of this is perfectly normal and reasonable. Why does this situation deserve odd, loaded terminology like "hero" or "rockstar"?
"Also, make sure you never program any SCADA interfaces with that, because God knows Russian hackers would just love to hijack that."
Some of my clients have started asking for exactly that. Start factory engines from the browser. I've flat out refused so far. Not sure how long I'll be able to keep doing it, though.
Umm, no. I have a .NET 2.0 application from 2004 that's still in use, will happily run on any Windows box from XP to 10, and I have no reason to believe that it's going to stop working any time soon.
Sure, if I wanted it to run on Linux or Android or whatever, I'd have to do some work on it, but that would hold true for any application that was not originally designed to be multi-platform.
I have no idea, but that's not really the point. You don't have to move *the entirety* of heavy industry in order for this to make sense.
If there are some industries that just don't work in space, then keep them on Earth and/or only move to space the bare minimum you need to build and service machinery.
Ultimately, you just need to move enough to make the off-planet system economically workable. After that, there will be a very strong incentive to figure out how to make more stuff in a vacuum (because, barring sci-fi new tech, shipping stuff upwell is never going to be really cheap), so chances are that the system will grow by itself, and relieve pressure on Earth by doing so.
"Quite apart from which, moving like locusts to another place because we're wrecking Earth will likely result in us wrecking that as well, as it's the attitude that needs changing, not the place."
You say that as if anyone anywhere had any idea on how to actually accomplish that.
I 100% believe that colonizing the Solar System is going to be easier than changing humanity's attitude towards sustainable usage of resources.
Actually, I could easily be convinced that colonizing *other star systems* would be easier than that.
If anyone comes up with a non-dystopic way to reliably get people to start behaving responsibly, by all means implement it. In the mean time, though, exploiting space will at least buy us time.
Yeah, my support of space exploration is driven by pessimism, not by optimism.
The way to do this would be to start by lifting some small-scale multi-purpose manufacturing capability equivalent to a small workshop, as well as dragging a suitable small asteroid into orbit. Mine it and use the output to make larger machinery. Eventually, you'll have enough output to start making stuff for Earth; dropping it down the well is vastly cheaper than lifting, energetically speaking. Yes, the time-scale is in the order of decades; that's fine. We'd start on this now if we had the ability to make plans further in the future than one election cycle.
Directly lifting industrial-scale structures is nuts, nobody is proposing that.
Because money does not really work that way, not on this scale. Spending money on space exploration does not detract from fighting climate change (or cancer or whatever "phenomenal problem" you were thinking about). Problems on this scale are all about collective willpower; money is only a consequence of that.
Yes, this is typical EU. But, all things considered, the fact that "typical Europe" now means "coming up with awesome shared projects and then fucking them up due to political bickering" is a massive improvement. I mean, "typical Europe" before the EU used to mean "war". Had been since literally forever. If it takes another hundred years to get a EU that really works, the process will still look pretty good in a history book.
If capability and accountability are so much at odds that there is absolutely no way to have one without hurting the other, then a balance will have to be struck, and capability will just have to suffer a bit.
Unaccountable agencies are intrinsically harmful to democracy, and that harm cannot be ignored altogether.
Providing sufficient information to guarantee accountability might hurt capability a bit, but I really do not believe that it will cripple it.
From what I understand, it looks like each time an object gets re-classified, its tracking history is erased. Because of this, if an object's classification is ambiguous, there is a side effect of the system being unable to track its path. So it's always considered to be static.
I'm sure the real problem goes deeper than that, but my programmer's gut feeling is that re-classification should not erase tracking history.
That is, the problem isn't "the software wasn't designed to classify jaywalkers"; the fundamental problem is "the software should avoid ambiguously-classified objects".
The power of financial providers and regulators is intrinsic in the job they do. Replace them with someone else, that someone else will be monitoring and controlling you. The problem cannot be solved by finding someone who doesn't do monitoring and have them provide financial services, because the moment they do financial services, they'll start monitoring. It's not a technical problem and it can't be solved by technical means.
I've long ago understood and accepted that signatures never, ever get checked, unless and until somebody actively requires them to be checked. They are not an authentication device; they are an ass-covering device.
Incidentally, if you think of bureaucracy as "liability engineering", the world suddenly makes a whole lot more sense.
Guys, ID cards are not that bad, and they really do fix a lot of practical problems. It's just a bit of paper that's actually designed to solve this kind of issue, unlike an electricity bill. Make them and get rid of this nonsense. I promise you, they don't become evil spying devices when you don't look at them.
I am constantly bewildered by hostility towards space exploration in the public opinion. I really don't get it. Any time I hear "we should fix our problems on this planet first", I feel so utterly incapable of grasping the other guy's point of view that I can't think of any strategy to try and change his mind. The best I can come up with is prodding for how they feel about the amount of resources that humanity spend on consumer entertainment.
Most of the time they'll admit that spending billions (including tons of tax cuts) on movie remakes, overpaid athletes, and "AAA" videogames that nobody is going to remember in 20 years' time (let alone 200), is worse than spending them on making the things that let us have GPS and weather forecasts, or figuring out how to spot a dinosaur-buster in advance and do something about it.
But the next day, show them a trailer for Remake VIII: Return of the Revenge, and they'll just go "meh" at worst; show them a rocket launch and they'll actively bitch about the CO2 and how that money should go to starving orphans instead.
I just don't get it.
It does, but a lot of the potential yield is in pure research, and that's too hit-and-miss for the private sector; also, far too long-term. The public can afford to both diversify and wait for decades, though. Do that, and you're bound to hit a few gold mines that will more than make up for everything else. It's a shame that governments tend to think no further than the next eelction, but I honestly wouldn't know how to fix that.
Well, yeah. I mean, looking really hard at any UK collaboration is the sensible thing to do, given that there's a good chance they'll get tossed out of the window in less than two months. It's not being "evil", it's just common sense in the face of utter uncertainty.
If things were clear and settled, even if they were clear and settled on no deal, businesses and organizations would be able to plan accordingly. But as things stand now, entering any kind of long-term commitment to anything in the UK is really difficult.
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