Posts by vtcodger 2029 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
Methane isn't considered to be toxic although there might be times when one would wish it were. Methane-Oxygen mixtures from 5-14% are explosive though.
The rather infamous SpaceX toilet is, it would seem, still busted. Astronauts will be issued high tech "underwear" which is -- I suspect -- Newspeak for "diapers". No, I am not making that up. https://fuentitech.com/spacex-toilet-issues-make-astronauts-dependent-on-underwear-silicon-valley/328181/
"I lived in China from 2012 until 2017 ..."
Fine. Sounds interesting. But how do these Superapps differ from what Apple is peddling and Google would like to drag us into?
I don't even use a smart phone. Have one. Rather slow, confusing, poorly thought out UI. Worse in its way than emacs if that's possible. But from what I see at the supermarkets here in the US you know you're in trouble when someone in front of you in line hauls out a phone to pay for their groceries. Sometimes the transaction goes smoothly, but very often it descends into three or four store people clustering around the register and customer trying to get the damn thing to work. And very likely the customer ends up paying with cash or plastic.
Do the Chinese do something different? Or do something radical like testing their products before they ship them? Or what?
"because the majority of its users ... demand it"
Citation needed.
When was the last time anyone heard a typical web user exclaim. "What I really want is for my phone/PC to run slower ... and more erratically. And I **LOVE** ads. Please send me more of them. And I don't think I'm being spied upon anywhere near enough."?
"Semiconductors will be about 20 per cent of the bill-of-materials of a car by 2030"
OMG. Can nothing be done to save humanity from this calamity?
Oh well. I suppose it will cut miles driven by a lot. It'll probably be next to impossible to convince these digitized vehicles to go anywhere other than back to the dealer for "upgrades".
why all the complication?
Just guessing because I gave up on Windows a long time ago. But my GUESS would be that the problem(s) isn't/aren't drivers so much as print queue management. Queues for shared printers can contain files from multiple users with differing access privileges. Can't let just anyone tinker?
Last time I looked CUPS required some credentials in order to tinker with print queues -- restart jobs, clear problem jobs, etc. Windows is probably similar? I had to create an lpadmin user and add said user to my list of printer administrators when I set up printing on my personal linux machine many,many years ago. And I need to claim to be good old L P every now and then to persuade CUPS to do what I want. But maybe there is a better, simpler way. It's not like I'm a super qualified Unix system administrator.
Not like I haven't had issues with Windows not keeping the correct time between restarts ...
Two or three decades ago that used, most often, to be due to the battery powered motherboard aka "CMOS" or "BIOS" clock. Those things used to be, and probably still are, designed to be cheap, not accurate. It wasn't at all uncommon for them to drift seconds a day. Adds up. Plus, the batteries that provide them with a tiny trickle of power when they PC is off, like batteries (almost) everywhere and always, wear out even if they are rechargeable. I believe many (all?) PCs still use those clocks. Sometimes the batteries are easily replaced. And sometimes they aren't.
But there is bugger all that data sharing can do for type 2
Perhaps not. On the other hand, there is are researchers who contend that "Type 2" is very likely a heterogenous group of people with differing glucose handling characteristics who need different (and possibly in some cases no) treatments and that the way to sort THAT out is to assemble Continuous Glucose Monitoring data from "Type 2 diabetics" plus a reasonable number of purportedly "Normal" individuals. The contention is that once there is sufficient data. a spectrum of conditions and treatment approaches may well emerge. Possible result -- better (and cheaper) treatments. Insulin is expensive. And somewhat dangerous.
Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But how can one tell without data?
I'm a type 2 diabetic with (currently) well controlled blood glucose. Having gone through a number of years of trying to control blood glucose with insulin before discovering that I'm lucky enough to be able to control my blood glucose levels pretty well with Metformin and diet, I have nothing but sympathy for those of you that need supplementary insulin. I found controlling blood glucose with insulin and a blood glucose meter to be extraordinarily difficult.
But that's sort of beside the point. The issue is should my medical data be available to drug companies and medical researchers? Of course it should. I'd strongly prefer it be anonymized Insurance companies? For population studies and other meta-analyses? Of course. For setting my personal policy rates. Probably not. But there would seem to be some room for discussion there. Should it be available to scumbag marketers (is there any other kind of marketer?) Hell no. And speaking only for myself, I'm in favor of jail time -- lots of it -- for those marketing types who will inevitably try to pierce the veil of anonymity.
Now they just have to make it work
Not exactly. They just have to recover their investment plus an obscene profit before folks discover that it doesn't work. If quantum computing should, unlikely as it may seem, actually have useful applications, that's a (quite likely) unexpected bonus. For reference, see penny mining stocks, and/or cryptocurrency.
Aside:
History of Blue Sky Laws
The term "blue sky law" is said to have originated in the early 1900s, gaining widespread use when a Kansas Supreme Court justice declared his desire to protect investors from speculative ventures that had "no more basis than so many feet of 'blue sky.'" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blueskylaws.asp
On top of that, if you want to make me download a terabyte of blockchain data ...
Ahem ... Possibly (one hopes -- Probably) not. Cryptocurrency is digital. But not all digital currency is crypto. A huge fraction of the world's "wealth" is already digital in that it consists mostly or entirely of bits stored in computers. Is it real? Yeah. In some sense at least. You can accumulate it, buy and sell it, use it to buy stuff, or borrow against it. And in many (most?) cases, it has at least some tangible value that will remain even if the trading value goes (temporarily?) to zero.
A digital currency in the sense the HCB is talking about is digital assets that are backed somehow by a credible institution like a government or (a) major financial institution(s) that guarantees to try maintain some short term stability and to take the stuff off your hands and pay you something for it even if the ordinary markets are somehow paralyzed. It's also somewhat anonymous in that you can spend its tokens without proving ownership. Mostly, having the tokens makes them yours.
Cryptocurrency has most of the trappings of a currency. But it lacks a credible guaranteer. Its "value" can and very likely will go to zero during the next major crash of the world's financial markets. A crash which, incidentally, seems to me more and more imminent as the volume of financial excess worldwide builds. I, for one, won't miss crypto. It's a significant waste of resource and a vehicle for way too much questionable activity.
Blockchain is an interesting technology that genuinely seems to have no known useful application other than making counterfitting of cryptocurrency so difficult that it's easier to just follow the rules and create it "legitimately".
What's at issue here, I think is what problems would have to be addressed should governments/central banks decide to go into an activity that looks to me like government backed debit/prepaid-credit cards. Why would they want to do that? Well, it might make some forms of nefarious/unpopular activity more difficult. But mostly, I doubt they will. I sure could be wrong.
But getting back to the original issue. I doubt, they would need or want blockchain to lock down their credit/debit tokens.
This is an issue for economists. I am not (and would not want to be) an economist. Economists are very clever people. And, unlike most "soft scientists" they are not afraid of math and sometimes manage not to make too much of a hash of its application. Nonetheless, it is clear that they are a VERY long way from actually understanding economics.
but I sometimes lose patience with it (firefox)
Indeed, it appears that many useful websites have security certificates that expired on Sept 30. That includes Wikipedia and Stack Overflow amongst many others. Did they remember to renew the certificates? Of course not. Apparently failure to update your security certificates is a sign that you are human. (Maybe we could somehow use that characteristic of humanity to replace captchas?) Firefox won't let me see those sites. Chrome -- which I normally avoid -- warns me, but lets me see the site if I really want to -- which I do. So I am using Chrome this week even though I'd rather not.
Last Saturday my esteemed spouse said unto me. "I have couple of promotional coupons from a new deli. I'm going to pick up dinner there after work. Let me know if you'd like me to pick up something for you." "Fine", said I. "Their menu will be on their website. I will visit the website and see if anything appeals." As it turns out, no I won't, three different browsers show me a blank page. So I applied wget or curl (I forget which) to the home page. 1,8Mb of utterly incomprehensible Javascript. That's 1,800,000 characters. None of which have any readable content. ... and it doesn't work.
Seems to sum up Internet-2021 pretty well.
BTW, I think I can code a blank page in about 13 bytes of html. (Haven't tried it. Might need a bit more) What do the other 1,799,987 bytes do?
I don't know whether I hate smartphones or not. I bought one on sale. And I managed to set up wi-fi. Then I tried a few things. And the more things I tried, the less I liked it. So I never activated service. If I need to make a phone call, and I'm not at home, I use my 15 or 20 year old Nokia which doesn't aggravate me at all and costs about a third of what the cheapest smartphone service would cost.
Yep. That was my thought. And it's not just Washington. Indeed, the largest glacial floods were apparently further East draining into -- at various times -- the Mississippi, St Lawrence or Arctic drainages. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood. Similar floods occurred in Asia during the last deglaciation.
What I'm not sure of is whether the geological (areological?) signatures of glacial floods would be easily recognized from orbit or whether perhaps they require boots/wheels on the ground observations.
Dead on. I suppose they can upgrade/break the vehicle entertainment or climate control systems and such over the air without serious consequences, but if they try that with safety related features, the results are likely going to be a field day for morticians, and ambulance chasing lawyers. Elon Musk doesn't understand that. Yet. But the rest of the automotive industry likely does. I think we're likely looking at the fantasies of marketeers here, not the future.
The one hope "they" might have of pulling this nefarious scam off would seem to be maps. If future cars are dependent on maps for routine tasks, maybe they can sell the notion that having the very latest map is essential to safety and vehicle operators must pay generously for regular updates. But they better be damn sure that they can deliver valid maps reliably and never end up with cars with no usable maps at all or vectoring tens of thousands of commuting vehicles onto some dead end street instead of the bridge or tunnel entrance four streets over.
Upvoted because you clarified some things I wondered about.
I agree that it's seemingly not really what is claimed. But it sounds like an interesting project none the less. Probably things will be learned. How do they plan to "train" the thing? It's not like humans pop out of the womb equipped to discuss philosophy or quantum mechanics. We need a few years of preparation.
My one quibble is your first paragraph. Animals may not "have language" whatever the heck that means. But many are quite effective communicators. Dogs, for example, manage to convey their desires and opinions far better than many humans. And most understand the limited components of human speech that are of interest to them. That portion involving food, walks, etc. They do not seem to give a damn about climate change, Brexit, or whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Makes them pretty bright in my book.
The concern about collisions between satellites is understandable, but very likely largely unwarranted. Even if humanity ends up with 100,000 communication satellites zipping around in Low Earth orbit, that is only a small fraction of the amount of junk already up there. It is estimated that there are in excess of 500,000 sand to small pebble (1-10 mm) objects "flying" around up there. Since closing velocities between orbiting stuff are potentially very high -- if things want to stay in orbit, they have to move very fast -- roughly 8km/s -- even small objects are potentially capable of punching right through anything they hit. Since that does not seem to happen very often, I expect that satellite collisions will be quite rare. If collisions do turn out to be an issue, that can presumably be handled as it is with aircraft, by small, mandated, vertical separation.
(However, it possibly is important that only the satellite makes it to LEO and that any associated junk -- fittings discarded during deployment, etc -- returns toward Earth and burns up promptly in the atmophere.)
Why on Earth would anyone want to do this? (Not a rhetorical question).
I've never been entirely clear on all the reasons for ActiveX, but when it was invented in the mid-1990s, it was a way to temporarily download capability from a website to do some job or other. It's still in use because some people/businesses see no reason to change something that is integrated into their processes, works just fine, and is either paid for, or is a known cost that is budgeted for.
We don't actually need it nowadays because we have have Javascript which is even more capable/dangerous and has the advantage from the malware author POV of being likely to run under any OS, not just Windows.
Now, how much did you agree to pay me to say that?
The Good News:
You will be paid
The Bad News:
The payment will be in a cryptocurrency called Badcoin which is currently trading at $0.02 asked, nothing bid.
The fee to convert your 100 Badcoin payment to US dollars will likely be around $35.
Thank you folks. All of you. I'd always assumed that my inability to grok git was due to my stupidity and perhaps a bit to a loss of mental accuity as I slog through my eighth decade on this planet. But you make it appear that perhaps part of the problem that git really is as obtuse and confusing as it seems to me. Thanks ever so much.
Also keep in mind a good deal of the software businesses depend on is Windows only. Yes Open Office (or whatever we're calling it this month) works fine and even (I'm told) runs some Excel macros nowadays. And yes MS support for it's products is at times a bit wobbly. And their QA is rather ...ahem... problematic. But a lot of stuff -- likely including mission critical software isn't available for Unix and probably won't run under Wine without a daunting amount of tinkering. Unix is probably a non-starter for most businesses.
BTW, the finance folks who would probably need to approve the funding for the switchover often understand Excel macros and use a lot of them. All the time. They will surely be less than enthusiastic about a world without MS Office. And their managers won't be wild about a world without Power Point.
Now a new operation with no dependence on some sort of special software that everyone in their sector uses? THEY probably ought to seriously consider Linux for a lot of reasons -- including security.
Rather than inventing something -- which might be a lot of work -- how about an NFT covering something of undeniable value -- the Gold purported to be stashed in Fort Knox? Or the Night Watch painting by Rembrandt (which, unlike the Fort Knox gold has actually been seen recently by reliable observers)?
But isn't the lack of ownership a problem? Of course not. This is the 21st Century. The digital age. We are no longer shacked by quaint, old-fashioned concepts such as ownership. Just conjure up that NFT and get out there and peddle it before our culture moves on to the next fad.
"It's like the Sharecropper Economy of Uber, Airbnb & Lyft. Having your sharecroppers shoulder all of the Capitalization and Operational burdens & risk while you just skim the cash flow is just great. For you."
Well, Yes. But the last I looked, Uber and Lyft have somehow been losing money hand over fist for years. One wonders how they accomplish that. Seems to me to be something that most folks would find difficult or impossible to do.
Dishonesty in the cryptocurrency sector? Who could possibly have anticipated that?
And while we're here. Isn't anyone the slightest bit interested in where the investor's money went? Personally, I think it will eventually be found in a hollow tree trunk on or near a property owned by one of the principals.
I guess I've been doing things with computer programs too long. I wrote my first computer program in 1961. But in my world view, kernels aren't supposed to crash -- ever.
To me 99.8% (99.8% of what pray tell?) sounds like an atrocious success rate. Assuming that it's a meaningful number, it should probably be orders of magnitude better before a product is allowed to ship. It seems to me a sad reflection on the state of the art of computing that a 0.2% (of what?) failure rate is postulated to be not only acceptable, but admirable.
No, I don't use Windows. I gave up on it two decades ago because it kind of sucked and I was tired of trying to deal with the lack of adequate technical documentation and the #$@^! Registry. Also, it seemed likely to me that competitive forces would cause MS to become far more user hostile than it was prior to 2000 -- which it has.
I've read the article several times and I have not the slightest idea what Splice Machine does/did other than generate buzzword laden press releases and lose their investor's money -- perhaps as much as $56.5M of it. Would anyone care to enlighten me as to what an innovative "machine learning data pipeline" might be and what, if anything, it might possibly be good for?
Far more logical would be to use LPG
Liquid Propane will work -- on paper at least. And it should generate substantially fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline and diesel. I do wonder if modern computer driven ignitions are entirely compatible with LPG. I doubt anyone is likely to develop and certify new LPG capable hardware for older cars. Too small a customer base? And where is all the necessary Propane (and, in warmer climates Butane) going to come from? At what cost?
The other alternative is Compressed Natural Gas. It's apparently widely used in cars in Iran and Pakistan as well as a few specialized applications in other countries. I remember that the service manual for our 1998 Toyota Camry had an extensive section on the CNG version tucked away in the back.
Problems I'm aware of: Propane is heavier than air. Some tunnel and underground parking operations ban Propane because of its potential for pooling at the lowest levels of the structure. Oh yes, and Propane and CNG are probably more of a fire hazard in an accident than gasoline or diesel. And in really cold weather (-15C) Propane probably needs to be thawed -- at least I have had to throw Propane cylinders into a sink full of water a couple of times to get them to work.
The REAL challenge is not where to place the chargers, it's where on Earth to get all the extra electricity generation needed, and baseload rather than fickle wind and solar.
That's a correct albeit unpopular assessment.
So here's what you do ...
Put the effort to site and build charge points out for public bid. If you require the successful bidder to have actual experience in siting and provisioning charge points, very likely the only acceptable bid will be from Tesla. Will Elon bid? Almost for sure. The man has never seen a subsidy he didn't like. Can he do the job? Almost for sure he can. And since this is something his company has done reasonably well before, he'll probably do a good job.
But Musk is going to point out (as you have) that the chargers require adequate power. And I imagine he will suggest huge banks of solar panels and humongous backup batteries. All of which he can sell you.
But England is way too far North to power its transportation grid with solar energy especially in Winter? Of course it is. Any teenager who has mastered basic arithmetic and trigonometry can work that out in a few hours. But that's not Elon's problem. It's yours. It just means that you need a LOT of solar panels and an enormous number of batteries. And it'll cost a bloody fortune? You bet. Maybe you should have looked at the invoice for zero emissions before you signed on.
I'm not an Elon Musk fan BTW, but as I see it, he's the about only guy with any realistic chance of bailing you out of the mess your folks are creating. Like they say, "Any port in a storm."
What's the alternative? Nuclear power I suppose. But humanity has managed to dink around for half a century without coming up with an inexpensive, easily replicated, safe, nuclear reactor design that does not easily support nuclear proliferation. Perhaps you folks should consider holding off on saving the planet until you have a proper toolset?
If everyday language is precise, why are there 1.3 million lawyers in the US who spend a significant part of their time arguing about its meaning?
If you ask me (which no one will) automatic generation of useful code from everyday language is probably harder than autonomous driving on any road in any weather. And we all know how well THAT effort is going.
Well, a humaniform robot might be suitable for search and rescue, firefighting, stocking/fetching goods in a store with a diverse inventory with widely varying packaging, etc. But I have to think that in each case, a purpose built device with suitable attachments would likely be cheaper and more reliable.
And while robots aren't totally immune to radiation damage, they are decidedly less fragile in many ways than real humans. Moreover, if things go badly, they are very unlikely to file a lawsuit re damages caused by their employer's callous disregard for worker safety.
However, that's probably a moot point as it is unlikely that Musk or anyone else will come up with a useful humaniform robot anytime soon. Consider that Tesla has been working on vehicle autonomy for a decade or so and so far all they have to show for the effort is an overhyped and none too reliable collision avoidance system, considerable bent metal, and a few dead bodies. Useful humaniform robots look to be a much more difficult problem. A problem for our great, great, ever so great grandkids most likely.
"Muck is a con man out of the Donald J Trump Univeristy of grift."
There are some similarities, but I think the Trumper probably knows he's lying whereas Musk very likely actually believes that he's only one modest breakthrough away from success. But that doesn't make Musk's advertising for "Autopilot" any less irresponsible. Long past time to shut this nonsense down.
... And while they are at it, ban Over The Air software updates to safety related systems for ALL car manufacturers BEFORE one tiny mistake kills or maims a bunch of folk.
"The surprising outcome is that the 'green' fusion reactors will be burying radioactive waste for generations."
Fusion reactors will generate radioactive waste. But purportedly few or none of the fairly long half-life heavy element fragments like Cs134, Cs137 and Sr90 that make nuclear waste from fission power such a nuisance. If you believe the glossy brochures, the principle radioactive in the fusion mix is Tritium which is a weak beta emitter with a half-life of 12 years. My impression is that the electrons (beta radiation) from Tritium decay are no more energetic than the the occasional electron that escapes from the tube of an old-fashioned CRT monitor or TV. But I could easily be wrong about that. Tritium does appear to be about the least harmful radioactive material one is likely to encounter in daily life which is why it has replaced Radium in glow-in-the-dark instruments.
And even if that's true, "they" could be misrepresenting the situation a bit since the premise here is that the reactor itself will likely be exposed continuously to lots of energetic neutrons. Of course those will be pacifist neutrons that work only for good and socially beneficial purposes ... Or so we're told.
"there's no reason to think that we can't have a load of wind farms driving the process"
Sadly, there is reason to believe pretty much exactly that. To paraphrase a famous quote from John Maynard Keynes “The stock market can remain irrational longer than you and I can remain solvent.” == "Output from intermittent energy sources can remain inadequate longer than any reasonably sized storage can continue to deliver backup power."
But wait ... it gets worse. We can't currently even begin to guess the probability distribution function(s) (PDFs) that we would need to size the wind/solar generation or the storage facilities for zero emissions without nuclear power. (We do know that hydro, tidal and grid scale geothermal look to be inadequate although they can certainly help). We don't even know if it is actually possible to formulate those PDFs. For that matter, we don't know for sure that there are enough suitable sites and raw materials for wind to generate the average 40 to 80 Tw of electricity that would probably be required to support the 7 or 8 or 9 billion humans on the planet at a decent standard of living even most of the time.
Numerate people have actually looked at this and their analyses are not encouraging. Recommended reading -- https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/post-index/ Tom Murphy is a physicist from the University of California at San Diego. He's written a great many articles on various aspects of energy and sustainability. Moreover the guy actually runs his house (mostly) on solar power, drives a (mostly) electric car. While I don't agree with him on everything, all of what he has to say seems VERY well thought out. And the math looks to be entirely correct -- a welcome change from the wishful thinking that drives way too much thinking on energy
"Absolutely agree, nuclear is the only valid solution to our energy needs,"
I think you are likely correct. But if you think that the politicians have promised "zero-emissions by 20xx" without the slightest idea about how to achieve that or even whether it can be achieved are ready to build thousands of nuclear power plants, you are surely mistaken. They will very likely only embrace nuclear power after every other "solution" has failed. I'd not be surprised if it turns out that the construction of thousands of hastily planned and built nuclear plants is in humanity's future. I think the prospect of thousands of hastily planned and built nuclear plants should make all of us a bit nervous.
On top of which while it is unlikely that climate change is an existential threat to mankind, nuclear proliferation could be exactly that. The answer to that probably is adoption sort of fission plant that uses technologies that don't use and can't easily breed weapons grade U235 or Pu239. (U233 -- "Thorium" technologies -- is also fissionable, but it makes a rather mediocre bomb). The problem is that we don't really have an easily replicable off-the-shelf design for such power plants.
I long for ... I don't.
I have clear memories of a lot of reasonably adept American males trying to start engines on a collection of those computerless cars that had been sitting at a campground above 8000ft for a few days. The procedure was to try to start normally Then when that failed -- which it almost always did -- open the hood, remove the aircleaner, wedge the automatic choke open with a screwdriver (In the 1960s, you didn't go out into the wilds without a few basic tools). Then you trickled a small amount of gasoline into the carburator from the gallon can of gasoline you had stashed in your trunk next to your tent, sleeping bag and beer. Then you crossed your fingers, hit the starter and, if the battery held out, the engine would eventually catch and, if you were lucky, continue to run. If it didn't, you tried again until it did start or the battery died. A similar procedure sometimes worked in sub-freezing weather.
Today is better. It has taken a few decades, but the modern electronics have things right, and cars usually just start in any sane environmental conditions.
But you're right. Tomorrow may be worse if we don't somehow restrain corporate bad behavior.
"Mysterious breakage was so common and catastrophic that we'd codified an option for our bootstrap script: --nuke-from-orbit," he claimed. The move to Codespaces was "an opportunity to treat our dev environments much like we do infrastructure — a commodity we can churn." However, the early Codespaces experiments were frustrating since the code for GitHub itself is "almost 13GB"
It never crossed their mind that there might somehow be some connection between "mysterious breakage" and 13GB of code?
And while I'm here, what the hell is "churning" development environments or infrastructure about? Are they trying to convert code/infrastructure to butter? Should we wish them luck in that endeavor?
... would care to tell us how much it costs them to provide office space and support services to an office worker? IIRC the accountants call that "home burden". And also what it cost them to support a remote worker. Clearly if the cost of supporting a remote worker is higher, then paying them less is fully justified.
OTOH ....
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