qubex

42 ms·

601.
by qubex 6y ago
Just because it might be self-interested on one party’s behalf (Apple) doesn’t automatically invalidate the positive externalities.
602.
by qubex 6y ago
They don’t.
603.
by qubex 6y ago
For anybody interested in what working at Bletchley Park must’ve been like during the wartime years, beyond the endless dramas and the dramatically inaccurate Imitation Game , I very much recommend Ian Harris’ Enigma (1995) which trigger
604.
by qubex 6y ago
Upvote for the distinction, but a :-| for the implication of “playing dirty”.
605.
by qubex 6y ago
When I visited the Pacific North-West in 2015 (I herald from Italy), I made a point of visiting Powell’s Bookstore in Portland (OR) and even chose my hotel (which turned out to be the very hip Ace Hotel ) based on proximity to it. I poin
606.
by qubex 6y ago
I know Revolut don’t have the best reputation et al , but one handy feature is generating one-time ‘virtual’ credit cards for use online. Use it once and it deducts from your balance and is ‘burnt’.
607.
by qubex 6y ago
If Moore’s Law keeps on going, it’s only a short matter of time before not only can we upload a single consciousness to a probe, but a fully functioning copy of all our society’s members’ consciousnesses. They will either be able to interac
608.
by qubex 6y ago
I think it’s time to pull out the ‘splitting’ distinction between “industrial capitalism” and “financial capitalism”. I’m an economist, but in no way enamoured with free markets and laissez-faire attitudes as the default for solving every
609.
by qubex 6y ago
It’s pretty clear why we’re all fascinated with faster than light travel (it makes the Universe feel accessible on our comparatively tiny timescales), but it’s also a sheer display of narrative obstinacy on our part that we continue to try
610.
by qubex 6y ago
My reference to relativity was to indicate that I thought it would lead to different conclusions than the Newtonian case. As for the two images, it’s well covered on PBS Spacetime ’s overview of the Alcubierre Drive from several years back
611.
by qubex 6y ago
Yup, I think you’re right, and that I’m wrong.
612.
by qubex 6y ago
You start from Earth and go two light years in one year using an FTL drive of some kind. A day before departing you look and you see your spacecraft in spacedock and, peering through a telescope, your two-year-old spacecraft in orbit around
613.
by qubex 6y ago
The Alcubierre Drive does not change topology (number of shortest paths), only geometry (lengths of the shortest path).
614.
by qubex 6y ago
A highly nontrivial issue connected with the change of topology associated with wormholes is whether passing through a wormhole reverses chirality or not.
615.
by qubex 6y ago
I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that... wow, what a ‘blast’! Wouldn’t it cause the core to collapse inwards though, as it would basically provide a “safety valve”-type release (though I presume if you were to place it on the edge of t
616.
by qubex 6y ago
Isn’t ‘photosensitive’ what all eyes are? ;) Anyway, +1 for astigmatism and extreme sensitivity to glare. The rise of dark themes is something of a curse for my ability to interact with interfaces these days.
617.
by qubex 6y ago
> but “Open” isn’t everything I never claimed it was, and this is starting to reek of a straw-man argument where you’re opposing a statement I haven’t actually made. (1) Yes, I am aware of situations where this architecture has been ch
618.
by qubex 6y ago
I don’t even attempt to reconcile it because they’re totally different things... ‘Open’ means that you’re allowed to understand exactly how it works and that there’s no mysteries. It means having the blueprints of the machine, not a free ma
619.
by qubex 6y ago
Open Architecture with no black boxes. Total control over your system of the kind we used to take for granted before the Intel Management Architecture days. Very focussed on throughput and centralised operation (for example homomorphic encr
620.
by qubex 6y ago
Raptor Systems’s POWER9-based Talos system immediately came to mind when I was reading this. I definitely hope they’ll be bringing out a POWER10-supporting successor. The experience is now pretty perfect, even for the supposedly dicey deskt
621.
by qubex 6y ago
Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, springs to mind. The 1930s World Fairs held in New York and San Francisco. I’ll probably have a facepalm-why-didn’t-that-other-one-occur-to-me moment after I hit ‘submit’, but that’s what’s come to mind so f
622.
by qubex 6y ago
I came here to say this: the artist’s renderings of the housing and monorail look exactly like the Contemporary resort at EPCOT.
623.
by qubex 6y ago
It’s so unfunny it caused me to start pondering issues regarding the breakfast I’ve just sat down to eat.
624.
by qubex 6y ago
That viewpoint is nicely argued by Gary Marcus in Kluge (2008): that we’re basically a collection of hacks (and not the the Marvin Minsky Society of Mind sense) but that this makes our cognition fascinating in (yet another) it’s own way
625.
by qubex 6y ago
I’ve heard this joke in another guise: An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are sitting in a train compartment and travelling through some countryside. Presently they come upon a field, which contains a white sheep. “Oh look, in th
626.
by qubex 6y ago
I’m (half-)British and I consider “ could care less ” a hideous American corruption. Recently I successfully argued my case with an American friend, not coincidentally a physicist, by analogy to zero-point energy.
627.
by qubex 6y ago
Not that I disagree with you, but ARM doesn’t sell hardware—they sell licenses to designs of the aforesaid. Nonetheless, don’t forget that nVidia, insofar as it sells hardware in the EU, would definitely be within the scope of local anti-tr
628.
by qubex 6y ago
At 8% of c time dilation & length contraction are about 0.3%. That’s definitely measurable, but whoever wrote this article clearly calculated values for 80% of c rather than 8%.
629.
by qubex 6y ago
Except I’m making considerations about fellow humans, not non-human entities. Anthropomorphism doesn’t apply here (unless you subscribe to Jaynes’ surprisingly compelling hypothesis set forth in The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown
630.
by qubex 6y ago
I wholly agree. Sorry if my initial post gave the opposite impression. I’m very much in favour of supporting hypotheses with evidence and discarding those which are incompatible with facts as observed.

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