api

459 ms·

16261.
The Energy Trap(theoildrum.com)
1 points by api 15y ago|0 comments
16262.
by api 15y ago
This is known to anyone who's ever monkeyed with any type of machine learning: genetic algorithms, Bayesian filters, anything. I agree with many of the commenters in this article. This should be common knowledge. I also, like many commenter
16263.
by api 15y ago
IMHO, the future cannot be predicted. Period. I'm not talking impossible-as-in-hard. I am talking impossible-as-in-perpetual-motion. Nice well-behaved linear Newtonian systems can be modeled and predicted. There are systems that are chaotic
16264.
by api 15y ago
But how much did that 20 seconds delay cost you? It would have been nice to have the answer faster, but how much would you have been willing to shell out for it? I'm talking about economics. I'm talking about what people are willing to pa
16265.
by api 15y ago
I am in neither the doomer nor the pollyanna camp on this, as I said. Keep in mind that EROEI includes not only the energy cost of operating technology but also the energy cost of developing it. Every engineer who worked on that fracking te
16266.
by api 15y ago
But how much do they want all this, and does this require major improvements in computing power? It looks to me that almost everything you listed could be done on the computers of five years ago. It's all nothing but software improvements.
16267.
by api 15y ago
I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc. The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested.
16268.
by api 15y ago
What passenger jet speed and skyscrapers really hit is economics: demand limits to growth. Most super-tall skyscrapers are economic disasters. There seems to be a maximum economically rational height to a skyscraper, and it's already been
16269.
by api 15y ago
Another response: Kurzweil also ignores economics. The advance of technology is driven in part by economic forces. Computing power may stagnate not because we have reached physical limits but because present-day computers are good enough fo
16270.
by api 15y ago
What about energy? It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s. I'm on the fence on this issue, but there are many very intelligent and knowledgeable
16271.
by api 15y ago
And yet, the market has spoken, and here's why: Only technology monarchism has been able to deliver a good user experience. The organized chaos of OSS has delivered excellent technology but a piss-poor user experience by comparison. I can
16272.
by api 15y ago
Classless.
16273.
by api 15y ago
It's a loss leader for media.
16274.
SpaceX introduces fully reusable Falcon 9 concept(spacex.com)
9 points by api 15y ago|1 comments
16275.
by api 15y ago
My experience with Scrum is that it has a tendency, especially if implemented "textbook" with absolutely no flexibility, to completely de-emphasize any kind of architecture, forward thought, elegance, or big-picture thinking about the code.
16276.
by api 15y ago
It is. It's upward wealth redistribution.
16277.
by api 15y ago
"In a normal economy, the population is constantly expanding." Exponential growth can never continue forever. We are probably at or near the practical limits to growth on this planet. I think inflationary currency is an ugly hack to cope wi
16278.
by api 15y ago
Low-to-no-value-added reselling is in general a tough business, and thus encourages scammy/spammy behavior.
16279.
by api 15y ago
YMMV on this because different models of chips differ, but I found years ago just playing around that many of the more obscure x86 opcodes are actually very slow to execute. My hypothesis is that because they are obscure and rarely used by
16280.
by api 15y ago
Linode's weak spot is storage. Their offerings are pretty pathetic.
16281.
by api 15y ago
I don't experience these issues, but some of the Lion eye candy is downright wall-bangingly stupid. I want a vegan option for iCal.
16282.
by api 15y ago
This underscores how ridiculously overspecced modern servers are due to the bloat of a lot of modern software.
16283.
by api 15y ago
It's similar to Facebook: name recognition, everyone's on it so everyone's on it, etc. And their stuff just works really well. They're also slowly cultivating a third party integrated apps ecosystem.
16284.
by api 15y ago
"Until an asteroid," By far the best byline I have ever read.
16285.
by api 15y ago
Now throw untenable amounts of debt, peak oil, declining demographics, etc. into the mix. It's really chaotic. On one hand you have fossil fuel depletion and upwards demand pressure on other natural resources having this massively inflation
16286.
by api 15y ago
Yeah. In general, nobody knows how to write network code. I have seen tons of network apps that perform horribly and use utterly absurd amounts of resources for trivial tasks.
16287.
by api 15y ago
IMHO, I think they really fired me because I one of the co-founders didn't like me because graduated from the University of Cincinnati instead of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. I figured this out later when I checked their blog and he had pro
16288.
by api 15y ago
The only time I was ever fired from a job, it was for doing this. I rewrote an entire web crawler stack using parallel event driven programming, yielding a crawler that could crawl the same number of sites they currently needed 10+ EC2 inst
16289.
by api 15y ago
The first solution that fits isn't necessarily kept, unless it can be refined to a high enough level of development to compete with other emerging solutions. The eye, for example, evolved separately many times. BTW, in human engineering the
16290.
by api 15y ago
We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code

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