Posts by Alex Stuart 89 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jan 2021
> Now were at a time where even many governments don't have the required funds any more to make it happen.
I don't think that's the main issue as they can essentially just print the money. The main issue is we appear institutionally unable to build things at scale anymore. Some combination of lack of knowledge, structural government/council issues, corruption, legal issues/NIMBYism or simply the inability to take any long-term actions from a governing system that works in 5-year blocks, and it's crippling for something like nuclear power. It's bad enough for much more simple projects like train lines, or even houses - we cannot even get that right.
> The write up seems to suggest that this vulnerability affects just the vector registers, and I wondered how the vector registers were actually used.
> I'm no expert, but the way that I thought these units were used was mainly for mathematical operations, like array processing.
Me too. But, from the github page for the exploit - "The AVX registers are often used for high performance string processing by system libraries. This means that very high volumes of sensitive data pass through them."
> All the "motorheads" I know who say they love the speed and the acceleration and the wind in their hair, etc. won't touch electric cars or bikes. Despite the fact that they are the fastest moving things around. What they mean is "they want to make a nuisance and let everyone know they drive a flash, expensive car".
It doesn't mean that, that's a non-sequitur. I suspect you simply don't get the appeal. I'd bet the majority of sports car/bike owners are neither nuisances nor care for how expensive the vehicle is. See - popularity and reverence of classic cars like old M3s, R34 GT-R etc.
It's OK - most people see cars as simply A to B transport, don't enjoy driving, and don't appreciate any of the design or engineering of a performance vehicle. Which is why the roads are full of bloated crossovers on stilts with zero steering feel or liveliness to them. No problem, not everyone shares the same interests and hobbies.
> * my kids do not understand the difference between "WiFi" and "the internet
From what I've seen, this seems to apply to most people under 30. Initially I thought they were stupid, then realised they have likely never used an Ethernet cable - to not even speak of an RJ11 - in their life, and that actually I'm just old.
> Is it possible that, taking only biological factors and not social factors, men and women tend to like different things?
It's not just possible, it is absolutely the case, yet inevitably ignored in every single report/article of this type. Specifically, men are more likely to be interested in things, and women more likely to be interested in people.
Even without studies supporting it, this is just self-evident stuff for anyone talking to a bunch of men and women about their interests over the course of their life.
A relatively recent study on this issue - https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261438 - found that not only do these differences exist, but that in countries with higher levels of female empowerment, the ratios in career choice are in fact *bigger*. It's a total repudation of the idea that if careers aren't 50/50, there's some bias or other negative effect at play.
Every time I've read a CEO's bleating about getting back into the office for productivity etc, there never seems to be any evidence to support it.
Example - number of tickets closed per day, cadence of successful releases, etc.
Surely, especially at the same time as an org being *data-driven* being so trendy, there should be...data?
Meanwhile, my personal productivity from not having the commute and associated faff is strongly supported by many KPIs. Number of parcels not missed, average percent full of washing basket, number of trips to refuel, kilometres ran per week, videogames completed per year....
> because Islam teaches that nationalism and other fake religions are alienation
Ah yes, the other fake religions.
It's remarkable that everyone who thinks this way is so lucky to have been born at the right time and place (in the last circa 200,000 years), to the right parents, that they grew up indoctrinated into the *true* religion - while everyone else has the misfortune of being born into one of innumerable fake religions, 'idolatry' or atheism nonsense.
It's really quite an astonishing stroke of luck, don't you think?
The "plateau" (area under the tail end of the bell-curve more accurately, it's not like we're programmed to self-destruct after X years) on lifespan won't be moving significantly until we fix a few very hard problems - brain degeneration (so dementia etc), cancer and heart/artery disease to name three. Risk of all of them go up with age.
Even then, 'healthspan' won't quite improve in the same way, as a 100 year old free of major disease is, well, still 100 years old and inevitably quite clapped out.
The real, root-cause fix will be to treat the *disease* known as 'aging'. So, looking at gene therapy. Research into super-centenarians has found some gene variants in common, and of course genes are also responsible for the extraordinary longevity/cancer resistance of some species e.g. Greenland shark, naked mole rat. We need to find the right genetic software to give all cells youthful vitality/immortality, but at the same time prevent uncontrolled division AKA cancer. Very difficult task, but no reason to believe impossible. Question is only will we be able to reach that point without destroying the planet in one form or other first? And if we make it that far, the ethical questions of who gets to have their firmware patched to human 2.0...
> My experience is that the better the 3D device, the worse the nausea is. What I think is going on there is that you are successfully fooling the bodies visual inputs, but these are being cross referenced against your bodies Vestibular system in the inner ear.
This is true. But some people, at least, can get used to it to a significant degree.
My first session with Playstation VR, major vestibular disruption and I tapped out after 30 mins or so.
A few sessions later, I was doing hours at a time with no problems at all.
To this day, pulling extreme maneuvres in a fighter jet in VR induces a wave of unpleasant sensations - but then so would doing it for real!
For those who can never find their 'VR legs'...yes, value very much limited to no-lateral-movement experiences.
of the lengths that Facebook et al go to monitor every minute detail of your interaction with their app to make sure you, dear product - oops - customer, don't have a single wasted second of potential 'engagement' or 'value'* kept from you. After all, merely using psychological tricks, sorry, methods, as part of UI design and behaviour to maximise 'engagement'** of dopamine systems might leave some spare 'engagement' on the table.
* definitely not compulsion, addiction, etc.
** definitely not abuse
> Just ban all children from social media.
This is the way. Social media is not only a gateway into all sorts of toxic content and an attention-destroying dopamine pumping device, but it's a global psychological experiment on homo sapiens that we didn't realise we were signing up for, with the consequences on society and our brains still unravelling.
But it can't be done by parents. Has to be baked into the apps - need verifiable ID to register and occasionally re-authenticate.
Won't happen though. We'll just get the token hand-waving and virtue signalling whenever something bad happens and the occasional unenforcable/impractical bill going through.
Sure, but you're missing the point. Labelling a population of millions of people, of whose motivations one cannot know in entirety and will certainly include many non-racist reasons, as racists (or in this case, racist scum), is an act of group-based discrimination in exactly the same manner as racism or other biases.
To amend your analogy, in the same way a Pole doesn't choose to be Polish, a non-racist Brexit voter *didn't choose that other Brexit voters may be racist*
I don't think it's a scam either, but I'm also yet to see a convincing argument for the use case of it vs a centralised relational database.
Your Starbucks coin example, current loyalty apps/accounts will store their users' points on a database, what is the problem with this that needs the solution of defi? Especially PoW vs PoS based which wastes massive amounts of energy vs a database.
> So, by implication, you think it's easier to provide 400 MB/s via 5G for the whole country than it is via fixed lines? If so I have a bridge you might be interested.
I didn't imply anything about how easy it would be. Though I'd assume that erecting a radio mast or two is significantly easier, cheaper and faster than digging up hundreds of streets, of course.
Cable is of course better, but not all of us have that luxury. Nor can we realistically do anything about it other than 'register interest' in Virgin Media while watching the years go by.
My point was merely that, in such areas, 5G would be quite useful indeed.
> Other than the bandwidth monitor, what Apps do you have on your 'phone that can use 400 Mb/s? Can anyone sling ads at you at that rate?
Nothing. My point is not that I need a 5G *phone* connection, but that a 5G mast in my town would enable my home devices to have much more bandwidth, for which I have multiple uses.
> Let's be honest, do we really NEED 5G?
In the UK, yes, we do.
At a relative's house with 5G coverage, I get over 400Mb/s on my phone. That's around thirteen times faster than my home "broadband" connection, which is unlikely to improve in the forseeable future given our glacial pace of fibre rollout.
Sounds about right. Whenever I've ran the numbers in the past for cost-savings from more efficient CPU/GPU, it's always the same story - extremely long break-even times for realistic usage scenarios. Specifically regarding idle draw - CPU/GPU in general have had very good idle power draw for years now.
> "Working remotely, we've lost that deep connection we only get from being together – with each other or with our customers – more often."
Instead of harping on about WFH, why don't you "get together" in my mid-sized town and give us a "deep connection" providing remotely modern broadband speeds?
> SQL Server is a mature product. SSMS is a pretty good tool. So serious question, what does it need that would require a new release?
Barring a few nice-to-haves - some of which will be in 2022 - I'd agree with this.
I work with SQL Server by trade so I'm biased, but I've also used Oracle, Postgres and MySQL.
What you get with SQL Server is a very mature product with excellent tooling, documentation and support, nothing else ticks all those boxes at once. It's also excellent at doing what it's designed for - crunching *relational data*.
If you want to do non-relational stuff or some massive custom scaling solution then yeah, look elsewhere.
> highlights that BT boss Philip Jansen received a 32 percent pay hike this year to £3.5 million ($4 million) while the corporation made £1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) in net profit and distributed £761 million ($887 million) to shareholders
£761m in dividend payouts yet I'm still stuck with 30Mb internet within spitting distance of one of the biggest cities in the UK. Not quite got rid of the 'British' in 'British Telecom' I suppose.
> I'd group VR, AI and Quantum Computing as unproven technologies that might have great promise or might be nothing more than huge resource sinks.
I wouldn't call VR unproven - gaming in VR can be genuinely brilliant and immersive on a level not possible with TVs. It will become even more immersive with increased processing power and screen technology, and less unwieldy as the headsets get smaller.
The only drawback that will not be easily resolved, if it's even possible at all without some sort of multi-directional treadmill, is the motion sickness associated with lateral movement. I got used to it so it's not so much of an issue, but the disjoint is always there to an extent, and I imagine there are people who simply don't get used to it.
> Thirty years ago, a Sega or a Nintendo knew its place - you turn it on, it works, no quibble, no updates, no IRQ clashes, no advertisements.
Consoles are still largely the same. Yes, they're now x86 PCs in a snazzy box, and they have updates, game patches and ads for their own services, but the games tend to just work. I haven't had a game crash on PS5 so far, and had *one* crash on PS4/PS4 Pro over the course of 8 years, and that's thousands of hours, probably into the tens of thousands of hours, gaming.
> However, the existing roads and Highway Code are set up for humans and they will need to be adapted to accommodate the self driving cars, rather than trying to make the self driving cars adapt to human environments.
I'd be up for this. England has some truly appalling road designs in places, and pisspoor paint replenishment levels. I find it far easier driving in America on the wrong side of the road than in an unknown English area.
More squares and less roundabouts, please. Even if I have no problem with roundabouts, enough other humans do that it's dangerous.
The writing was on the wall when they scrapped the stars system for 'like' - 'we don't have any bad content, just content you might not like as much as other content!'.
And the social-media style endless scrolling panels - 'keep scrolling, there's no end, just more great stuff!'
I won't cancel as they have enough good stuff (esp in 4K/HDR) that it'd be cutting my nose off to spite my face, but I'm not as happy about it as I used to be...
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