pjscott

21 ms·

211.
by pjscott 4y ago
There's an argument that aliens are more likely near us than far away: if life on our planet got started via panspermia, then closer planets are more likely to have been seeded with our distant ancestors as well.
212.
by pjscott 4y ago
Any company that could refine oil faster would be able to make a ton of money by doing so. Do you have evidence for this grand conspiracy? How do you suppose it avoids the usual free-rider problem?
213.
by pjscott 4y ago
A large market cap and significant profits don't imply large profit margins. Look at Walmart for example: their market cap is over $300B but their net profit margins are in the 2-3% range.
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by pjscott 4y ago
Yep. The accurate version of that statement would say that fewer than 100 ocean-going Jones Act vessels are in operation today. The others are much more numerous -- but also much less relevant to the military rationale behind the Jones Ac
215.
by pjscott 4y ago
One possible alternate way to get a lot of shipbuilding capacity on demand is to pay major overseas shipbuilders in allied countries to (a) build ships for within-US shipping and (b) devote some dedicated percentage of their production to t
216.
by pjscott 4y ago
The oil companies are price-takers, not price-makers. That is: the market for oil is competitive enough that no oil seller can unilaterally have much effect on the market price, and collusion between multiple sellers (most notably OPEC) has
217.
by pjscott 4y ago
Considering how worried the orcs were about informants reporting them for sedition, it sounds less like a modern military and more like one of the militaries where commissars shoot anybody who retreats. Add on to that the fact that Mordor&#
218.
by pjscott 4y ago
It doesn't have a magical bubble. What it does have are some excellent natural defenses. The eastern border of the Shire is marked by the Brandywine river, which is wide and hard to cross, with only one bridge in the area. (The Shire
219.
by pjscott 4y ago
Most of those can be avoided with a bit of foresight. Take Balrogs, for example: by the Third Age there weren't all that many of them left, and on the off-chance that you do run into one, you can lure it into a trap made from one of
220.
by pjscott 4y ago
That was fascinating. Does anyone have recommendations for something that goes into more detail? Finland seems to have had different enough circumstances that it can be a useful test case for grand theories of economic development based on
221.
by pjscott 4y ago
Can you think of any country, rich or poor, that doesn’t have something like that in its history?
222.
by pjscott 4y ago
Take heart! The majority ruling explicitly says that its reasoning does not apply to those, and goes into detail about why those rulings are different.
223.
by pjscott 4y ago
And if you go to Taiwan and look around, empirically you can see that people try to avoid being immediately downwind of a stinky tofu cart. (It’s pretty tasty, mind you, but IMO not worth the hassle.)
224.
by pjscott 4y ago
“Lots of tiny tasks” workloads, mostly. For more coarse-grained parallelism the cache thing matters a lot less. I still favor work-stealing schedulers as the default, since robustness across different types of workload is a very good thing,
225.
by pjscott 4y ago
Static inline functions can often do the same thing with more type safety. (Not always, of course! But it’s worth thinking about when optimizing.)
226.
by pjscott 4y ago
Once you see this pattern once, you see it almost everywhere. This is one of the most important essays of the past decade.
227.
by pjscott 4y ago
Yes. Suppose that both numbers are positive, that x>num, and that x+num is bigger than INT_MAX. In that case we hit signed integer overflow, which is undefined behavior. If signed integer overflow happens to wrap around, which it might,
228.
by pjscott 4y ago
It's weird how there's a whole thriving genre of studies that look at things with incredibly complicated causal graphs, maybe control for a random smattering of confounding variables, find a correlation between some variables X an
229.
by pjscott 4y ago
Imagine that you had come up with a delightfully clever way to break pointer authentication using wacky speculative execution side-channel shenanigans. Wouldn't you be proud? Wouldn't you want to give it a cute name and an explana
230.
by pjscott 4y ago
> The number of channels is exponential, that's just Metcalfe's law. Metcalfe's law is quadratic rather than exponential -- O(n^2), not O(2^n). And if n people all need to be aware of communication happening between every
231.
by pjscott 4y ago
> As teams get bigger, communication sales factorially, That sounds a bit drastic. Surely at worst the scaling is quadratic?
232.
by pjscott 4y ago
They're less concerned with getting top talent among the enlisted men -- that's what officers are for -- and instead want to avoid really dumb soldiers. That's what the minimum cut-off scores are for. There was an experiment
233.
by pjscott 4y ago
I did a bit of googling around. As best I can tell, the person you're talking about wants the US to have more high-skilled immigration and is, himself, an immigrant.
234.
by pjscott 4y ago
I'm not sure how this explanation fits with California: it's a very blue state, about 77% of the senators are Democrats, it has one of the highest per-capita tax revenues in the country -- and it's famous for being an adminis
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by pjscott 4y ago
Ah, of course. Thank you, kind emissary from Twelve-Fingered Alternate Earth.
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by pjscott 4y ago
No, what you said in your first sentence is a pretty good description of EA as it's typically practiced. The article's emphasis on non-core stuff can give a misleading impression.
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by pjscott 4y ago
> You might just end up sending a million malaria nets to Africa which might contaminate the wildlife. EAs have long since internalized this idea, and do actually look at the reality on the ground. For example, here's a citation-lad
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by pjscott 4y ago
That is legitimately awesome, and the good cheer it brings you is richly deserved.
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by pjscott 4y ago
The reason for 10% is because (a) tithing isn't that hard on most people's finances and (b) it's a nice round number, memetically strong and aesthetically satisfying. Sure, it's arbitrary -- but it's arbitrary in a
240.
by pjscott 4y ago
In case anybody was wondering "Why is the frame rate so lousy?" the answer is that the probe only has about 325 bits per second of downlink on average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)

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