h3lp

5 ms·

31.
by h3lp 1y ago
It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurshi
32.
by h3lp 1y ago
That's a great insight---the problem with LLMs is that they write code and elegant prose for us, so we have more time to do chores. I want it the other way around!!!
33.
by h3lp 1y ago
Folk medicine that succeeded in rigorous clinical trials is called 'medicine'?
34.
by h3lp 1y ago
On Banana Pi F3, which is similar to VF2, you can boot off SDcard, and transfer the OS to eMMC or M2.
35.
by h3lp 1y ago
Well the railroads aren't the seat of power that they used to be---the progress ebbs and flows in mysterious ways. Even their arguable replacement, air travel, is not the paradigm of economic dominance. Everybody is now excited about t
36.
by h3lp 1y ago
It occurred to me that tariffs are really a backdoor way of introducing consumption tax (aka sales tax, VAT, etc). It has been a conservative policy goal for many years, as the conservatives believe that income tax penalizes entrepreneurshi
37.
by h3lp 1y ago
> There are a few regulations that have a high cost/benefit ratio (e.g. ban leaded gasoline), I think you mean to say that it had a very low cost/benefit. Otherwise, citation seriously needed.
38.
by h3lp 1y ago
35M of 1937 dollars is $784M$ today according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ . Also, 97M$ is quoted as a total budget for maintenance; painting apparently costs just 0.3M$ (I have no idea what else goes into main
39.
by h3lp 1y ago
Well, I don't really understand the detailed content of executables compiled by GCC/LLVM either, but I am not going to go back to writing assembly language. Having said that, I am old enough to remember worrying about compiler bug
40.
by h3lp 1y ago
Fracking was a brilliant invention, but may be reaching inherent limits---there are lawsuits between oil companies about fracking fluids from one well flooding and disabling other wells.
41.
by h3lp 1y ago
The AI discussion reminds me of the assembly vs high-level languages (HLL) debate of my youth. The claim was that expert assembly language programmers could write optimized code that was much faster than compiled code, and therefore HLLs wi
42.
by h3lp 1y ago
A common FP4 layout is 1 sign bit, 3 exponent bits, 0 mantissa bits. There's just not that much difference in complexity between that and a 4-bit integer---the ALU can just be a simple table lookup, for both FP and integer.
43.
by h3lp 1y ago
thanks for the benchmark tip. FWIW, firefox 140.0.4 on Fedora 42 runs pretty much all tests at 60 fps or therebouts.
44.
by h3lp 1y ago
One large but forgotten effect of the dotcom bubble was an excess fiber capacity, that allowed smooth growth of internet in the following 25 years---average internet speed in the US is 200 Mbps, and a significant number of households is on
45.
by h3lp 1y ago
I see an analogy to the discussions from my youth about compilers vs. assembly language programmers. It is still true that assembly is required to write high performance primitives, and that a competent assembly programmer will always beat
46.
by h3lp 1y ago
Well, historically, we used to have a robust industrial R&D that even did basic research: Bell Labs (astrophysics, semiconductor physics), IBM, Xerox, RCA, Kodak and many other; even Ford had an R&D lab with physicists. Their record