Posts by tyrfing 135 publicly visible posts • joined 25 May 2018
There's lots of modelling being done at SpaceX, but they are doing stuff in areas that no one else has done.
E.g. no one else had attempted to retrieve a booster. They tried using parachutes and gave up, so now they use boost back. No one else had done boost back either.
So they're the ones gathering the data which will go into the models.
In a different area, in biology there's lots more modelling done than before, but sooner or later you still have to go to human trials.
The idea fails a basic look at the premise.
When is the battery storage at a data centre going to be used? When it can't get electricity from the mains.
When would it make sense for a battery storage facility to feed power back to the grid? In exactly the same scenario.
So rather like with solar power, they feed energy back when it's not needed. When it's needed they can't feed it to the grid because they need it for themselves, which is the reason they built it in the first place.
Can it be done to a phone battery?
One of the reasons phones now have fixed batteries is because basically everything inside that's not electronics is battery. So removing them isn't really possible. This was supposedly to increase capacity.
Of course another reason was that if your battery dies you have to get a new phone instead of a new battery. The phone manufacturers were never enthusiastic about making replacement batteries so this market was quickly taken over by third parties. Which was another reason to make it impossible to switch them out.
I'm reminded of, I think it was David Bowie(?) who was selling shares in his portfolio at one point? It was commented on as being a new thing at the time, though it seems to have since been normalized.
I suppose it's not all that different from getting a loan based on any other intellectual property (as opposed to physical property). I assume the company has the right to use the addresses and hasn't borrowed them from some other entity.
Surface gravity 38% of Earth. But an atmosphere roughly 1% of the pressure. Atmospheric drag would make a large difference.
Most of the problem is that the plans tend to assume that the fuel and oxygen is shipped from Earth. Which makes it an enormous problem.
Landing empty and generating the fuel and oxygen on Mars would make things much simpler. There's a lot of talk about that.
This issue hasn't been explained properly in *any* of the articles I've read about it. I had to go to Amazon to find out what's actually happening.
If your account had a record of buying a Kindle e-ink reader, then there was the possibility that you didn't have wi-fi or cellular access. So how do you load books onto the device? They allowed you to download the encrypted book to a computer, so you could then load it onto the device via USB.
The encryption was designed for that specific device, so if you had multiple readers you had to download it multiple times.
IMPORTANT:
****
If You Didn't Have A Record Of Owning A Kindle Device, Amazon NEVER Let You Download The Books.
****
"No compatible device found"
How can you read them without a Kindle device? An app on another device, e.g. phone, tablet or computer. It's what I've always done.
Of course, once you download the file, cracking the encryption is a possibility, though of varying degrees of illegality depending on your specific jurisdiction.
I do wonder what the people shouting about this were actually doing with the files, which they won't be able to do now. I presume they all had a device but no other method to transfer books, which is now useless. This wasn't a campaign to drum up views and clicks via feigned outrage, oh no...
"It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is."
Well yes. That's what contributing code is - you're supposed to make it better. Faster, does more, less code or similar.
To be making changes just to see your code in there instead of whatever was there before is pandering to ego.
There was a recent meeting where someone asked our boss about return to work (2 out of 5) and office space. Since before everyone went home the office was jammed, this was a valid concern.
He waffled about the studies they had done, then said two things:
1. we could support more, e.g. 3 out of 5.
2. they based this on "less me and more we".
The second one parses out to everyone getting a small desk, sufficient to put your laptop down. Everything else is "collaboration space". I guess on the idea that the return to office is to enable greater amounts. Never mind that the ones who haven't yet returned are the ones who don't need to collaborate, or only rarely.
The first point seems to parse out to "don't complain, or we will make it worse for you".
The hype around 4th generation languages (counting them as "ones and zeros", "assembly language", "FORTRAN et al. compiled or interpreted", and 'whatever a 4GL is") was that they were supposed to be usable by 'ordinary people". I.e. managers and secretaries (instead of employing those weird "programmers").
And in some cases they sort of, kind of, were. For example, SQL can be used at a much higher level than previous means of storing and accessing large amounts of data.
However, they still need training to use. Or you end up with cr*p systems. See pretty much every set of SQL queries designed by a manager.
Which people eventually learned. So the hype died down, and they're on to the next thing.
Which now seems to be AI.
"Now headcount is coming into focus."
Well that would be because headcount increased drastically a few years ago due to everyone been required to stay home. So internet usage increased and there was increased money flowing in.
But people are not required to be at home anymore, so the money river has dried up. And much of that increased headcount has not increased productivity, so it's just increased cost.
Overall, I think AI is more of an excuse than anything else. It's replacing people that didn't need to be hired in the first place, but it saves face for the boss.
And this tech likely won't work as planned.
It's a numbers game. Bruce Schneier said it a couple of decades ago when they first got enthusiastic about it. If you scan a lot of people trying to match against a small target list, any given match is far more likely to be a false one.
Facial recognition works better if you're e.g. using it for entrance to a secure facility. Then your target list is a much larger percentage of the people you're scanning.
But police like sitting at a desk and only stirring when there's an alert. Glorified security guards. And a lot of them are likely not much good for anything else these days.
Whether a law is passed has nothing to do with whether it's practical or even possible to comply with it.
See the law almost passed to dictate the value of pi. Or any other attempt to require a back door decryption ability in an encryption technology.
Legislatures tend not to be experts in any given field, so they rely on expert testimony. We currently have a crisis, more or less worldwide, where we're discovering that many of the experts called to testify on things, are either corrupted or cranks.
Unless they have Facebook branding or something they won't be identifiable as such.
Even if these guys make them as branded (it sounds like they won't, since they did it as a proof of concept), it's possible now.
Cue knockoffs from other people fairly quickly.
It does depend on whether wearing glasses in general will be fashionable. It might be, but we might have a Red Guard movement.
A successful break-in involves *whatever gets you in*. Often there is no code-writing involved at all.
It's like when you're changing a business process. Sometimes it involves code, but that's the easy part.
Getting people to actually change what they're doing to a different, better way is much more difficult.
Some of the other commenters are saying things like "I bet their security is much better now." I'm not so optimistic.
After the break-in the people who directly allowed it due to bad practice may actually change that practice. At least for a short time.
Go back five years later and there will probably be someone else doing the same thing though. Among other things because likely very few people are still around in the same role from that long ago.
Since he's clued in, he's already lasted much longer than average.
I suppose he'll last until he gets a directive that conflicts with the BOFH and he chooses...poorly.
After all, that training has a large dropout rate as well.
Why are we still using terrestrial instruments for astronomy?
There's no reason to put them at the bottom of a well full of stuff to distort the picture.
Learn how to put your instrument on a satellite and launch it. I hear there's a fairly cheap launcher out there...
More seriously, this "clogging up the night sky" is like the people who don't want a moon base because humans might cause pollution.
This has an exact analogue in kidnapping for ransom.
The practice exists today in a number of countries.
To the extent it has been stamped out in some areas, it's because of a resolution that kidnappers get no rest, and *will* be caught, and *will* be punished.
I don't know how to do this for kidnapped data.
A train only has possible savings per passenger-mile due to greater theoretical capacity.
A train that is only used during rush hour and is empty the rest of the time will have much higher cost per passenger-mile than a bus route. You can put on or take off buses; trains come in much larger sizes. Yes you can put on a "half-train", but unless each car is powered (making them much more expensive) you still have a large engine for each one.
- If payment is declining, then either there's less demand, or more supply. Maybe there's more companies in the market. Or Uber is holding back more since now apparently they're employees. Are they now doing payroll and income tax withholding? I bet that's a chunk of the "lower wages" involved.
- Waymo is new, with new cars. Uber has been around; the cars are likely older too. I think there's a lot of turnover in Uber divers, rather like with restaurants. Everyone thinks they can do the job, not many will keep doing it past the first setback or dry spell.
- Waymo will not be able to maintain those electric Jags, or purchase new ones every year to maintain that "new car" smell. The first time a drunk or drugged passenger vomits (or does something else) during the ride, you'll never get that smell out. Why do you think taxi cabs are generally somewhat run down?
"International laws currently do not allow the use of nuclear weapons in space, though one imagines that weighed against the extinction of humanity an exception could be made."
- a body that would cause human extinction is unlikely to be taken care of by any reasonable number of nuclear weapons we could send up in time.
- what about a body that doesn't cause extinction, but is just really bad? I can certainly see lots of people arguing over the precedent it would set, and who actually suffers more harm and whether it's worth it to mitigate that. Meanwhile of course, the cost to send the weapons goes up as it gets closer...
Yes.
To the extent AI produced text is useful, it shows just how much text on the web is not actually all that informative.
In information theory, the information contained in a string of bits is determined by just how predictable the next bit is. If you can predict the next bit with 100% accuracy, seeing that next bit adds *no* new information.
Or you know, don't have a bunch of people who think that taking stuff is easier than working for a living.
The reason there's lots of bicycles in England now is that supposedly they're used a lot in Europe, and "they're so sophisticated".
Why isn't there a problem in Europe? Or are they so poor they have to use a bicycle, but so rich they can just write off a bicycle being stolen every month?
Or is it just not done to talk about it?
On another note: thievery works like many other things in nature on a power law. There's a few thieves who steal most of the stuff. Lock those few up for a long time, and your thievery problem will become much less of a problem.
I would suggest a more permanent solution, but that's probably beyond the Overton window. For now.
A thing that happened to me around 2000. I worked for a municipal government. At the time, departments had been purchasing their own PCs, but it was decided to consolidate them.
At the same time, we would move from (a bunch of Windows versions) to Windows NT on the client machines, Token Ring to Ethernet, and Banyan Vines servers to Windows NT.
Lots of work to get the images together and test versus all the software.
Rolled it out.
Turns out the audio driver would corrupt a Microsoft Access file if sounds were produced while it was open. Much work ensued to remove the audio drivers until a fix could be found. Months later.
Considering all the changes involved, it's amazing that it went as smoothly as it did. That was the only major problem after all.
No. In this case the driver is attempting to avoid consequences for *his* decision.
It's illegal to engage that mode in the state of Washington. Regardless, the driver engaged it. He's responsible for the death.
The marketing from Tesla says what it does because it's available in a number of jurisdictions. No doubt some jurisdictions have different laws on this.
Which is why there's also the legalese saying you still have to follow the law wherever you are, and it's *your* job to find out what the law is.
I suspect a lot of this is setting up for the "wrongful death" civil lawsuit from the heirs of the motorcyclist. With "joint and several liability", as long as Tesla is found even 1% liable, Tesla would have to pay out on whatever enormous sum the suit is for while the Tesla driver skates.
Not sure how well that works for actually transferring the money.
Those salaries get taxed as income; if they're "fat" then likely at the highest bracket.
Admittedly the resume gets a tick, but that's only useful if the kid is planning to work in someone else's company. Investors look at your track record, i.e. was your company actually successful and what part did you have in that? They don't need to follow laws against asking questions on employment, since they're not employing you.
Maybe if their life's ambition is heading up an NGO it's good.
Making a movie in 3D uses special cameras, which are very expensive. The shots also have to be set up differently to show the 3d.
Most film makers didn't bother. Many of them can't think of framing in 3d anyway.
So most "3d" movies were filmed in 2d with the usual cameras, then post-processed to add the 3d in, which is why you could see them in 2d.
This did save them the money for the cameras, but it meant camera shots were set up with 2d in mind.
Also, since 3d effectively cuts the light in half, they also ended up much dimmer in the theater than they were intended to be. You can crank up the light coming from the screen, but then the film looks washed out because of lack of contrast.
This article is useless.
As far as I can tell, they did a post-course survey of 34 students on their attitudes after taking the course. And this is what powers the study that resulted in a paper.
How many of you have answered a survey after finishing a course for work? How honest were you about answering the questions?
The article mentions nothing about measuring actual recidivism rates for course takers vs. general rates. In other words, did the course actually help them stay out of prison?
Maybe the actual study mentions this (though with only 34 subjects this is unlikely). But the article has a misleading headline as a result.
I see that most commenters got distracted by ragging on the incarceration rates in the US instead. Good job. Squirrel!
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