C++ and C are exactly as close to the metal, unless you use runtime polymorphism. But that's not really the point: they're not Java, nor Javascript. You have ideas like "this memory address is really the readout from a sensor".
Yes, the Pi is way higher level than the Commodore 64, but relative to the decade it's fine. It as least gives people the feeling that resources aren't infinite, and that optimization is a thing.
Sure, and that's the point of markets: scarcity drive up prices, which in turn causes reduced demand and greater incentives for technology. "The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices."
At some point, and we have arrived at this point, there is no potential for increased efficiency anymore. We're hitting physical limits.
Big companies often say that, then end up buying start-ups that prove them wrong.
If you want to increase your own profits, you now have to reduce those of someone else.
That's pretty much the core assertion of "the left", in defiance of all history. From simple Copernican principles, what are the odds that of all human generations, you'd be living in the first generation it was true?
I would hope any self-respecting Slashdotter would understand the "Vimes Boot Theory of Value". However, while there are people forced into that trap by circumstance, there are many more people who simply lack he judgement, ability to plan, or ability to defer gratification. I can't really blame companies for selling to them.
It really pisses me off, however, when there are no middle tier products for some need, just "the cheapest shit possible" and "custom made, massive margin" if you want any quality. Seems like there would be a market for goods in between, the decent quality, moderate margin goods. Perhaps companies get trapped by focusing on growth of sales, rather than profits.
I think as developers one thing we can all do to help reverse this trend is to simply be very, very careful about inclusion of third party libraries. That's where a lot of the bloat comes in, you add a few libraries and maybe it has a few dependencies and after a short time you are building in 20-30 subprojetts. Madness.
The fight gets harder every year. New grads know how to cobble libraries together, but don't know how to write things from scratch. If they don't get set on the right path early, they become mid-career devs who have "knowing a lot of third-party libraries" as their core skill set.
My only hope for the field is the rise of the Pi and maker projects and IoT devices and the like - there's a new awakening of how fun it can be when you get close to the metal. I blame the current bloat on the decades between the Commodore 64 and the Raspberry Pi.
Perpetual exponential growth is also know as "technology". And TFA is right on the nose here: technology does not mean "more bling", it means "more efficiency". That's how we sustain perpetual exponential growth. New technologies let us make the same stuff for less labor or energy, a few percent every year.
When the focus changes to all bling, no efficiency, it's a non-sustainable path.
There is a big chunk of consumers, probably 20%, that always buy the cheapest possible thing without regard to quality. It's the market Walmart caters to, and I have no problem with businesses that explicitly target "cheap". But that should be a niche, dammit!
Much simpler way to explain this: they make a profit vs the costs that scale per car made. They take a bath on fixed and one-time costs. What happens when volume increases?
You get a bit wordy, and I think people get lost in it.
The real argument is "where will sales plateau, vs what's the running cost of servicing debt". I remain skeptical there: sedans just aren't that popular in the US. 5k per week is impressive, if Tesla can sustain that, but I'm not sure it's enough (and it's never going to be 10k - Tesla will need a pickup truck for real volume in the US).
At some point arguments are just silly, and it's better just to trade the stock. I remember all the same arguments about Amazon, then it turned out AWS was actually profitable.
Google is a mega-corporation, but they are explicitly anti-Trump, or haven't you seen the internal videos? Management exhorting the engineers to make sure Google does its part to influence the election. You think Facebook or Twitter is any different?
For whatever dumb reason, "get woke; go broke" is very real, and companies don't even blink at throwing profits overboard to go 110% for progressive causes.
I'd say the modern way of looking at it is that all electrons are "a single object": the electron field. That's really the only useful interpretation any more. Thinking of an entangled pair of electrons as one object or two are just choices of ways to dumb down the problem to think about it easier, but you can't reason too far from such simplifications.
. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results.
That's... not even wrong? The entirety of modern QM is around the wave equation, which is the state of the universe (or some smaller system in isolation). Bell's theorem shows that classical explanations don't work, but QFT works fine.
You don't set them by measuring them FFS, you discover them. No information is transmitted by "collapse", just by perfectly normal ways. Nothing FTL happens or non-local happens, Bell's theorem isn't directly relevant. The only part that's different from classical mechanics is that a man-in-the-middle can't generate a duplicate of the signal.
Neural networks are "really AI" in the same sense that chickens are really dinosaurs: the experts in the field get to define the terms. Except for Pluto, which remains a planet regardless.
The ABC theorum is a bit hard to explain. The best I can do is taken from Wikipedia: If: * A, B, and C are co-prime * A + B = C * D = the product of the unique prime factors of A, B, and C Then D is usually not much smaller than C.
Or, put a different way, if A and B are high powers of primes, C probably isn't. For example: * A = 64 = 2^6 * B = 81 = 3^4 * C = 145 = 5*29 * D = 870 = 2 * 3 * 5 * 29
In that example, the prime factors of C were to the first power, so D was a multiple of C. That's pretty normal.
This apparently has much broader consequences when generalized broadly to number fields, but I've never gotten my head around "primes" in fields other than integers.
The smart plug actually sounds kind of interesting
So:
The $25 Amazon Smart Plug (shipping next month) doesn't have nearly as many bells and whistles as the Sub, but lets you switch off or on whatever's plugged into it with a voice command. You can schedule quiet hours, too, and it works independently of a hub
Just makes me think "clap on, clap off, the clapper". So I can only conclude that IoT will give you the clap.
When all this shit works with no data flowing to Amazon, I'll be interested.
A bit of pedantry that I think is very important: two entangled objects have no classical hidden variables. The wave equation is nothing if not hidden variables - they're just not linearly related to any classical observables.
The wave equation describes state that is always there, and deterministic forward and backwards in time, and evolves linearly. It can only describe that state statistically, because we can't observe it directly. Bell's theorem shows a mismatch between classical hidden variables and reality precisely because the relationship between the state modeled by the wave equation and what we observe isn't linear.
For spin/polarization, the "deeply weird" cos^2 comes from how the "quantum hidden variables" transform to observations.
When I lived in Houston, there was 1 hospital that, in practice, accepted everyone (LBJ). It was also the only Class-1 trauma center (a fortunate coincidence). The non-profits were posh, and would aggressively get rid of you if you didn't seem likely to afford them - they actually ship people from their ER to LBJ once they were stabilized.
Even if it somehow did, there are measurable state changes on both ends of the longest-ever-chewing-gum-thread that cause information to be transferred at infinite speeds between the ends. So even if you do such ridiculous mental gymnastics, the fundamental problems still wont go away, i.e. information travelling way faster than C.
We live in a universe where such non-local events occur. Pretending otherwise is pointless. The challenge is to explain how causality is preserved (without classical hidden variables). QFT does this, but it's hard to put in English - certainly it would take someone more expert than I at QM to do so.
Hospital which is a not-for-profit cannot refuse to treat patients based on their ability to pay for services.
That's not true. While a non-profit hospital must, like any hospital, accept emergency patients, they may transfer them as soon as they are stable, and there's no obligation to treat anyone otherwise.
In the Houston medical system, the non-profit hospitals are generally the most expensive an cater wealthier patients. Never been sure why it worked out that way, but I'd guess it's because they use gross profits to make the hospital more posh, rather than returning them to owners.
India has long has a strategy of not being dependent on manufacturing outsourcing for their economy, It's a very different economy than China, attempting to be more self-sufficient. They might be pretty boned if tech immigration is ended, though.
They're going to have massive surplus populations
You are using the language of genocide. Please stop. People are a resource, not a problem. Education can be a problem. Totalitarian regimes can be a problem. People per se are not a problem.
But they're also going to be straddled with a "if you don't work you don't eat" culture. They'll end up with dictators and massive wars.
China is communist, India socialist. China already has a dictator. Hopefully we won't see another massive war - of all the people killed in war in human history, most were killed in Chinese civil wars.
Both of these nations are still trying to get the majority of their people out of rural poverty. AI is not going to make people's lives worse in any direct way, nor will it replace humans in building all of the infrastructure these nations need to "emerge". There's plenty of work needed, and if AI means less people need to work in factories, that just means more people can work building factories (and roads, and plumbing, etc, etc).
Frankly, China has deeper issues - all the economic waste in building an amazing amount of housing that no one lives in, for one.
Or life just became too drab to bear, and he ran out of Middleton dreams.
The office door closed early The hidden bottle came out The salesman turned to close the blinds A little slow now, a little stout But he's still heading down those tracks Any day now for sure Another day as drab as today Is more than a man can endure
Slashdot Mirror
C++ and C are exactly as close to the metal, unless you use runtime polymorphism. But that's not really the point: they're not Java, nor Javascript. You have ideas like "this memory address is really the readout from a sensor".
Yes, the Pi is way higher level than the Commodore 64, but relative to the decade it's fine. It as least gives people the feeling that resources aren't infinite, and that optimization is a thing.
Sure, and that's the point of markets: scarcity drive up prices, which in turn causes reduced demand and greater incentives for technology. "The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices."
At some point, and we have arrived at this point, there is no potential for increased efficiency anymore. We're hitting physical limits.
Big companies often say that, then end up buying start-ups that prove them wrong.
If you want to increase your own profits, you now have to reduce those of someone else.
That's pretty much the core assertion of "the left", in defiance of all history. From simple Copernican principles, what are the odds that of all human generations, you'd be living in the first generation it was true?
I would hope any self-respecting Slashdotter would understand the "Vimes Boot Theory of Value". However, while there are people forced into that trap by circumstance, there are many more people who simply lack he judgement, ability to plan, or ability to defer gratification. I can't really blame companies for selling to them.
It really pisses me off, however, when there are no middle tier products for some need, just "the cheapest shit possible" and "custom made, massive margin" if you want any quality. Seems like there would be a market for goods in between, the decent quality, moderate margin goods. Perhaps companies get trapped by focusing on growth of sales, rather than profits.
I think as developers one thing we can all do to help reverse this trend is to simply be very, very careful about inclusion of third party libraries. That's where a lot of the bloat comes in, you add a few libraries and maybe it has a few dependencies and after a short time you are building in 20-30 subprojetts. Madness.
The fight gets harder every year. New grads know how to cobble libraries together, but don't know how to write things from scratch. If they don't get set on the right path early, they become mid-career devs who have "knowing a lot of third-party libraries" as their core skill set.
My only hope for the field is the rise of the Pi and maker projects and IoT devices and the like - there's a new awakening of how fun it can be when you get close to the metal. I blame the current bloat on the decades between the Commodore 64 and the Raspberry Pi.
Perpetual exponential growth is also know as "technology". And TFA is right on the nose here: technology does not mean "more bling", it means "more efficiency". That's how we sustain perpetual exponential growth. New technologies let us make the same stuff for less labor or energy, a few percent every year.
When the focus changes to all bling, no efficiency, it's a non-sustainable path.
There is a big chunk of consumers, probably 20%, that always buy the cheapest possible thing without regard to quality. It's the market Walmart caters to, and I have no problem with businesses that explicitly target "cheap". But that should be a niche, dammit!
Much simpler way to explain this: they make a profit vs the costs that scale per car made. They take a bath on fixed and one-time costs. What happens when volume increases?
You get a bit wordy, and I think people get lost in it.
The real argument is "where will sales plateau, vs what's the running cost of servicing debt". I remain skeptical there: sedans just aren't that popular in the US. 5k per week is impressive, if Tesla can sustain that, but I'm not sure it's enough (and it's never going to be 10k - Tesla will need a pickup truck for real volume in the US).
At some point arguments are just silly, and it's better just to trade the stock. I remember all the same arguments about Amazon, then it turned out AWS was actually profitable.
You can volunteer to pay extra taxes, fluffer. Did you volunteer to pay an extra $5k? Or are you only generous with other people's money? Thought so.
Google is a mega-corporation, but they are explicitly anti-Trump, or haven't you seen the internal videos? Management exhorting the engineers to make sure Google does its part to influence the election. You think Facebook or Twitter is any different?
For whatever dumb reason, "get woke; go broke" is very real, and companies don't even blink at throwing profits overboard to go 110% for progressive causes.
Thank you captain pedantic. Does "primes other than integers" make you feel better?
Who is "you"? A genocidal dictator? Each person needs himself.
I'd say the modern way of looking at it is that all electrons are "a single object": the electron field. That's really the only useful interpretation any more. Thinking of an entangled pair of electrons as one object or two are just choices of ways to dumb down the problem to think about it easier, but you can't reason too far from such simplifications.
. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results.
That's ... not even wrong? The entirety of modern QM is around the wave equation, which is the state of the universe (or some smaller system in isolation). Bell's theorem shows that classical explanations don't work, but QFT works fine.
You don't set them by measuring them FFS, you discover them. No information is transmitted by "collapse", just by perfectly normal ways. Nothing FTL happens or non-local happens, Bell's theorem isn't directly relevant. The only part that's different from classical mechanics is that a man-in-the-middle can't generate a duplicate of the signal.
Neural networks are "really AI" in the same sense that chickens are really dinosaurs: the experts in the field get to define the terms. Except for Pluto, which remains a planet regardless.
The ABC theorum is a bit hard to explain. The best I can do is taken from Wikipedia: If:
* A, B, and C are co-prime
* A + B = C
* D = the product of the unique prime factors of A, B, and C
Then D is usually not much smaller than C.
Or, put a different way, if A and B are high powers of primes, C probably isn't. For example:
* A = 64 = 2^6
* B = 81 = 3^4
* C = 145 = 5*29
* D = 870 = 2 * 3 * 5 * 29
In that example, the prime factors of C were to the first power, so D was a multiple of C. That's pretty normal.
This apparently has much broader consequences when generalized broadly to number fields, but I've never gotten my head around "primes" in fields other than integers.
The smart plug actually sounds kind of interesting
So:
The $25 Amazon Smart Plug (shipping next month) doesn't have nearly as many bells and whistles as the Sub, but lets you switch off or on whatever's plugged into it with a voice command. You can schedule quiet hours, too, and it works independently of a hub
Just makes me think "clap on, clap off, the clapper". So I can only conclude that IoT will give you the clap.
When all this shit works with no data flowing to Amazon, I'll be interested.
A bit of pedantry that I think is very important: two entangled objects have no classical hidden variables. The wave equation is nothing if not hidden variables - they're just not linearly related to any classical observables.
The wave equation describes state that is always there, and deterministic forward and backwards in time, and evolves linearly. It can only describe that state statistically, because we can't observe it directly. Bell's theorem shows a mismatch between classical hidden variables and reality precisely because the relationship between the state modeled by the wave equation and what we observe isn't linear.
For spin/polarization, the "deeply weird" cos^2 comes from how the "quantum hidden variables" transform to observations.
When I lived in Houston, there was 1 hospital that, in practice, accepted everyone (LBJ). It was also the only Class-1 trauma center (a fortunate coincidence). The non-profits were posh, and would aggressively get rid of you if you didn't seem likely to afford them - they actually ship people from their ER to LBJ once they were stabilized.
Even if it somehow did, there are measurable state changes on both ends of the longest-ever-chewing-gum-thread that cause information to be transferred at infinite speeds between the ends. So even if you do such ridiculous mental gymnastics, the fundamental problems still wont go away, i.e. information travelling way faster than C.
We live in a universe where such non-local events occur. Pretending otherwise is pointless. The challenge is to explain how causality is preserved (without classical hidden variables). QFT does this, but it's hard to put in English - certainly it would take someone more expert than I at QM to do so.
Hospital which is a not-for-profit cannot refuse to treat patients based on their ability to pay for services.
That's not true. While a non-profit hospital must, like any hospital, accept emergency patients, they may transfer them as soon as they are stable, and there's no obligation to treat anyone otherwise.
In the Houston medical system, the non-profit hospitals are generally the most expensive an cater wealthier patients. Never been sure why it worked out that way, but I'd guess it's because they use gross profits to make the hospital more posh, rather than returning them to owners.
China & India are pretty boned.
India has long has a strategy of not being dependent on manufacturing outsourcing for their economy, It's a very different economy than China, attempting to be more self-sufficient. They might be pretty boned if tech immigration is ended, though.
They're going to have massive surplus populations
You are using the language of genocide. Please stop. People are a resource, not a problem. Education can be a problem. Totalitarian regimes can be a problem. People per se are not a problem.
But they're also going to be straddled with a "if you don't work you don't eat" culture. They'll end up with dictators and massive wars.
China is communist, India socialist. China already has a dictator. Hopefully we won't see another massive war - of all the people killed in war in human history, most were killed in Chinese civil wars.
Both of these nations are still trying to get the majority of their people out of rural poverty. AI is not going to make people's lives worse in any direct way, nor will it replace humans in building all of the infrastructure these nations need to "emerge". There's plenty of work needed, and if AI means less people need to work in factories, that just means more people can work building factories (and roads, and plumbing, etc, etc).
Frankly, China has deeper issues - all the economic waste in building an amazing amount of housing that no one lives in, for one.
Or life just became too drab to bear, and he ran out of Middleton dreams.
The office door closed early
The hidden bottle came out
The salesman turned to close the blinds
A little slow now, a little stout
But he's still heading down those tracks
Any day now for sure
Another day as drab as today
Is more than a man can endure