cletus

13 ms·

61.
by cletus 2y ago
I really hate this argument because you can use it for quite literally anything to the point it mans nothing. It doesn't mean anything. Criticisms of FTL don't come from being a naysayer. We now have more than a century of testing
62.
by cletus 2y ago
Forgive me if I get this wrong as I'm exceeding the limits of my physics knowledge here but what you're talking about sounds like what I would call a special relativity model of thinking. The general relativity model is where ever
63.
by cletus 2y ago
Jews were historically associated with practices like moneylending largely due to the religious quirks I mentioned. Go forward a few centuries and you have things like Shakespeare's moneylender from the Merchant of Venice, Shylock. Thi
64.
by cletus 2y ago
I find the City of London (formerly the Corporation for London) to be fascinating for many reasons. For one, the exact origins are unknown. the earliest record we have is from 1067 CE with the William Charter [1]. William granted the City r
65.
by cletus 2y ago
The first gravitational wave detected (GW150914 in 2015) was from a collision 1.3 billion years away. IIRC ~5 Solar masses was converted into energy in a matter of seconds. This is a mind-bogglingly large energy event. Yet to detect is LIGO
66.
by cletus 2y ago
This is really the limits of statistical inference. A prime example is a cancer detection AI was really just detecting rulers in the photos [1]. There are lots of subtle indicators that will allow bias to creep in, particularly if that bias
67.
by cletus 2y ago
Related [1] (framed in the context of the Fermi Paradox). I love these topics. While we might be nowhere near Kesssler Syndrome, the risks of space debris impacts are very real [2]. Some of the debris we've put up there intentionally a
68.
by cletus 2y ago
> At the same time though, it’s starting to feel to me, to some extent, like we have kind of solved solar? There are many metrics that affect power generation (or anything really). A few are: - Power generation per unit area - Power gene
69.
by cletus 2y ago
I've said for years you're always better off settling with regulators on negotiated terms than having that regulator taking you to court. And Apple have been holding on too tightly to their App Store monopoly. It simply creates to
70.
by cletus 2y ago
Story time: Chrome is a Frankenstein of C and C++ code (both directly and through called libraries, static or dynamic). Now C++ has `std::string` obviously. C of course has `const char *`. To facilitate interoperability C++ has various meth
71.
by cletus 2y ago
What you're talking about here is disabling runtime assertions, which is a common practice in C/C++ (using #define macros). Runtime assertions are strictly inferior to Rust's compile-time assertions because Rust allows you to
72.
by cletus 2y ago
Let me preface this by saying I like Go. I do. But as much respect as I have for Rob Pike (which, again, I do), he doesn't understand the systems programming space. Go was originally pitched as a systems programming language, a better
73.
by cletus 2y ago
I have no issue with the author's points but I just don't see these two as solving the same problem. Zig, to me, is a better C (as the author notes). It seems like it's designed so you can combine easily with a C code base an
74.
by cletus 2y ago
Unauthorized access by Chinese state actors is not a hypothetical [1]. [1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/1600064/hackers-used-i...
75.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm a huge Neal Stephenson fan. Cryptonomicon is to this day one of my all-time favorite books. Years ago now I read Anathem. It wasn't as good but it had some really interesting ideas. One such idea was how the Internet was fille
76.
by cletus 2y ago
Story time: when I worked at Google we had a specific policy for traveling to and from China. IIRC it went something like this: 1. You absolutely aren't allowed to take your regular phone and laptop; 2. You will be given loaner devices
77.
by cletus 2y ago
In the same way I don't trust Google not to cancel whatever it is they just announced, I don't trust apple to keep supporting software on platforms that aren't theirs. They just don't have a good track record and no real
78.
by cletus 2y ago
I would be happy if more people adopted password managers. We'd all be a lot better off if they did. And personally I don't care which tool they use to get there. But there's still too much friction in using a password manage
79.
by cletus 2y ago
This is one of those things that seems like a good idea but is really an existential threat to OpenAI. Having a single extremely large customer gives that customer a disproportionate amount of power over your business. Apple can decide one
80.
by cletus 2y ago
Here's Apple's big problem: it's not a replacement for so many alternatives because it isn't supported on all platforms. Safari? Not on Windows. Apple Music? This actually has a Windows client. I'm not sure how good
81.
by cletus 2y ago
> IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense The Space Race made perfect sense. It was a political exercise. a proxy for war between nuclear powers. As long as civilizations have existed they've built monuments and u
82.
by cletus 2y ago
Colonizing Mars makes absolutely no sense and it's fascinating to watch otherwise rational people with decent science educations contort themselves into believing otherwise just for the sci-fi trope of living on Mars. Mars's atmos
83.
by cletus 2y ago
Processing data is already a liability. The compute power isn't free. The storage isn't free. The engineering time isn't free. It's just that it produces more value than what it costs or people wouldn't do it. I bel
84.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm not sure this is true. if it were, there wouldn't be launch windows because any correction within a given orbit would be, as you call it, "a fine adjustment" yet we clearly do have launch windows. Also if you're
85.
by cletus 2y ago
IMHO an opt-out system is never going to work for this. Story time: while I still worked at Facebook, there was a company wide project for data attribution to comply with opting out of personalization (I believe to comply with an EU directi
86.
by cletus 2y ago
So JWST has (IIRC) a 6.5 meter mirror once deployed and yes, it was a challenge to develop that tech. Plus it added risk of failure. The Starship Super-heavy seems to have a max payload dimension of 9 meters. I imagine some buffer is requir
87.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm skeptical because satellites, like pretty much any technology, tend to get smaller over time. I remember reading about how it was profitable for someone to buy up 4 geostationary slots and replace 4 satellites with 1 that was proba
88.
by cletus 2y ago
If you think about this, it doesn't make a lot of sense because different satellites are going to sit in very different orbits. Geosynchronous satellites are an obvious case where satellites will collect into a limited number of orbits
89.
by cletus 2y ago
So I'm excited to see this tech develop but I wonder how much of a market there really is for super-heavy lifters. I can't wait to see a future version where they land the various stages rather than just dumping them into the sea.
90.
by cletus 2y ago
First, this is what happens when moderation is removed from Twitter [1]. So Dom Lucre was in possession of CSAM that would literally land anyone else in jail for the mere possession of it (fuelling the rumors he is an FBI informant), water

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