How will you pay for what you need to live without a job, exactly? Or do you think we'll be living in some idealistic world where everything, including housing, is free?
If robots are doing all the work, what other alternative could there be?
Accountants always go for arbitrary precision with accuracy settings twice as far out as precision and decimals only ever actually evaluated when they are to be presented to a human.
There's the whole problem with your smug position.
Accountants typically represent intermediate results to humans at many points in their algorithms. At each of these steps they make gross roundoff errors, but they make sure that all of the rounded off numbers add up neatly at the end. All of your vaunted precision and lazy evaluation has just been made irrelevant.
Accountants shrug it off and declare it to be the correct answer, when in many cases appropriately designed algorithms using plain floating point would have come out closer to the actual truth.
My point is that many programmers of financial applications build gross errors into every single step of their algorithms, rounding off each intermediate result to an even decimal to make the results look pretty.
Then they pat themselves on the back and say how the decimal types helped them represent the results "exactly", when in fact it was a case of "garbage in, garbage out".
It's true that most so-called developers know the principles behind neither numerical algorithms nor data types. That doesn't excuse smugness on the part of people who only know the latter, and who think that big decimal data types are somehow inherently superior to any other numerical representation.
To avoid getting errors in the magnitude of 1e-15 on these inputs (which they could often entirely avoid anyway by working in cents), they instead happily round intermediate results to quantized values with errors typically in the range of 1e-2 to 1e-9 over and over again.
As the saying goes: "Accountants know the cost of everything and the value of nothing".
You'd like to split $10 exactly by 3. You think that you can't because you're using a decimal representation. You could if you were using duodecimal or any other base containing a factor of three. (It would be exactly $3.4 in duodecimal.)
Accountants would inaccurately divide the quantity into unequal amounts of $3.33, $3.33 and $3.34 decimal, and then call that "correct". Scientists would divide it into three payments of $3.333333333333333, and disregard the insignificant error. Which is closer to the ideal? I would argue the latter.
Accountants are used to adding gross errors at every step of their algorithms just so the results look neater. (Government accountants even encourage you to round every intermediate value of your tax returns to a whole dollar. Such sloppiness would be laughed at in scientific computing.) You're just so used to these errors that you've come to expect them.
Flashback to the 80s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they took away copies of "PC Week" tabloids and stopped people from running "Tetris". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Flashback to the 90s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they didn't let people access the World Wide Web and stopped people from running "Doom". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Flashback to the 00s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they didn't let people access Napster and stopped people from running "Quake III". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Over the last couple of months, when I cut through one of the local parks on its bike trail, it's looked like the Night of the Living Dead: A bunch of zombies obliviously wandering around, staring down into their phones and cluelessly blocking the path.
Lately, the zombie outbreak seems to have abated somewhat, and the bike path isn't so much of an obstacle course.
Because 'backspace to go back' is default behavior in a lot of programs, not just web browsers. Try it in File Explorer, for example.
Just like F1 being a nearly universal shortcut for 'help', F2 for 'rename', F3 or CTRL+F for 'search', and so on. I shouldn't have to relearn shortcuts for common behaviors in every program I want to use.
I thought that Alt+Left and Alt+Right *are* the standard shortcuts for going backward and forward in program histories. It's worked that way in every web browser I can remember using back to the 1990s, and it works that way in Windows Explorer. The backspace key doesn't even have an obvious corresponding "forward" key.
I wasn't aware that backspace was used to go back in history in any program. I always expect it to erase one character, or do nothing.
True, but sometimes the result is hilarious. I started using base64(random(32 bytes)) as password for some sites, and it seems 256 bits of entropy give me only a 'medium' level of security.
The JavaScript probably figured out that your RNG wasn't properly seeded.
By the time either a blimp or this thing deflates enough to make the engines flop around, there isn't going to be nearly enough lift of lift of any kind to keep it in the air.
But let's ignore that: You want to do this to a rigid airship.
Look at their history. Excluding the ones that burst into flames, many if not most of the major airships ever built ended up lost due to failure of their internal structures. They got shredded like pretzels with the slightest adverse aerodynamic forces. (Even the Hindenburg disaster probably initially involved the snapping of an internal bracing wire due to overzealous steering.)
If I had to ride in one of these white elephants, I'd still go with the inflatable version.
You'd better contact the Goodyear company ASAP. It looks like they've been putting people in incredible peril for over 90 years now with their fleet of deflatable blimps. You've got to stop them!
It's about as hot as it's been since humans arrived right now, and it's going to get much hotter. Not in evolutionary timescales, but within a couple of generations.
Evolution would probably work in the long run, but don't forget that sometimes evolution works by wiping out almost every member of a given species leaving only a tiny handful of "fit" survivors. That hardly seems like a better choice than just switching our primary energy sources ASAP.
Many of the advanced battery technologies will have toxic chemicals. With huge production volumes, there's going to be a lot of poisonous waste materials. I suspect the environmental damage of new batteries is going to make the claimed damage of carbon seem like happy-fun-day.
No, the current buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is a slow-motion apocalypse because it leverages the sun's vast energy output to push the entire planet away from the conditions that humans evolved to live within. No amount of run-of-the-mill poisonous chemicals could touch it. (Not that these chemicals would be released into the environment anyway. Utility storage batteries are very easy to track and regulate.)
In the worst case, they could just unscrew the wires from the thermostat and clip the bare ends together with a clothespin to turn on the furnace. That would at least keep the pipes from freezing and cost $0.
You convert CO2 in CO. Then you oxidize it to get CO2 back. No CO2 sequestration at all! So, how would this be better than photovoltaic cells?
It's better because every time there's a story on photvoltaic cells, a bunch of self-appointed geniuses yell: "I'm the first person to realize that the sun doesn't shine all day! It won't do any good without energy storage!!1!"
Well, here's a solar technology with built-in energy storage.
The "bad guys" will still find that classic abandoned warehouse across the train tracks and plot their evil in the veil of darkness. Perhaps we should require spotlights and mandatory cameras over every square inch of the planet too?
The problem has never been all that hard for the authorities: They have always known that to snag all the bad guys, they only have to monitor the small subset of warehouses that are built on a slanted "Dutch angle".
I'm sure that a makeshift homebrew directional antenna could sniff these signals out in a suburban or office park area just fine.
Even in your high-rise case, the signal could be narrowed down to a small subset of all devices. Processing the sum of a few signals to pick out "words" shouldn't be too hard, either.
Not to mention, I said three times the distance to frigging PLUTO. Presumably, attackers could get within 100m of most targets. I don't think you realize how much easier that is.
With the right antennas, NASA routinely deciphers transmissions sent with a power comparable to a CB radio coming from three times the distance to Pluto.
Slashdot Mirror
How will you pay for what you need to live without a job, exactly? Or do you think we'll be living in some idealistic world where everything, including housing, is free?
If robots are doing all the work, what other alternative could there be?
They purchase my framework for the express purpose of not doing what you just said.
Every account statement and tax return in my filing cabinet says otherwise.
Accountants always go for arbitrary precision with accuracy settings twice as far out as precision and decimals only ever actually evaluated when they are to be presented to a human.
There's the whole problem with your smug position.
Accountants typically represent intermediate results to humans at many points in their algorithms. At each of these steps they make gross roundoff errors, but they make sure that all of the rounded off numbers add up neatly at the end. All of your vaunted precision and lazy evaluation has just been made irrelevant.
Accountants shrug it off and declare it to be the correct answer, when in many cases appropriately designed algorithms using plain floating point would have come out closer to the actual truth.
My point is that many programmers of financial applications build gross errors into every single step of their algorithms, rounding off each intermediate result to an even decimal to make the results look pretty.
Then they pat themselves on the back and say how the decimal types helped them represent the results "exactly", when in fact it was a case of "garbage in, garbage out".
It's true that most so-called developers know the principles behind neither numerical algorithms nor data types. That doesn't excuse smugness on the part of people who only know the latter, and who think that big decimal data types are somehow inherently superior to any other numerical representation.
To avoid getting errors in the magnitude of 1e-15 on these inputs (which they could often entirely avoid anyway by working in cents), they instead happily round intermediate results to quantized values with errors typically in the range of 1e-2 to 1e-9 over and over again.
As the saying goes: "Accountants know the cost of everything and the value of nothing".
You'd like to split $10 exactly by 3. You think that you can't because you're using a decimal representation. You could if you were using duodecimal or any other base containing a factor of three. (It would be exactly $3.4 in duodecimal.)
Accountants would inaccurately divide the quantity into unequal amounts of $3.33, $3.33 and $3.34 decimal, and then call that "correct". Scientists would divide it into three payments of $3.333333333333333, and disregard the insignificant error. Which is closer to the ideal? I would argue the latter.
Accountants are used to adding gross errors at every step of their algorithms just so the results look neater. (Government accountants even encourage you to round every intermediate value of your tax returns to a whole dollar. Such sloppiness would be laughed at in scientific computing.) You're just so used to these errors that you've come to expect them.
When people claim that they need big decimal number types, they're not counting whole eggs in refrigerators.
Single precision floating point or even 16-bit integers would do a completely equivalent job at that.
That statement is false. While decimal number types may have limited precision, they are, in fact, accurate.
That statement is self-contradictory.
What happens if you need to evenly split $10 into three payments?
No they don't. I store the number of eggs in my fridge as [integer] four. Are you saying it's really 3.9 recurring?
Now try using compound interest to grow your egg investment.
BigDecimal is not a work-around. It is the exact solution to the problem.
All mechanical representations of numbers lead to inaccuracies.
Computer scientists using binary-based representations realize this and design their algorithms to minimize the errors.
Accountants just define any inaccurate decimal-based results as "correct".
Flashback to the 80s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they took away copies of "PC Week" tabloids and stopped people from running "Tetris". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Flashback to the 90s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they didn't let people access the World Wide Web and stopped people from running "Doom". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Flashback to the 00s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they didn't let people access Napster and stopped people from running "Quake III". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Over the last couple of months, when I cut through one of the local parks on its bike trail, it's looked like the Night of the Living Dead: A bunch of zombies obliviously wandering around, staring down into their phones and cluelessly blocking the path.
Lately, the zombie outbreak seems to have abated somewhat, and the bike path isn't so much of an obstacle course.
Because 'backspace to go back' is default behavior in a lot of programs, not just web browsers. Try it in File Explorer, for example.
Just like F1 being a nearly universal shortcut for 'help', F2 for 'rename', F3 or CTRL+F for 'search', and so on. I shouldn't have to relearn shortcuts for common behaviors in every program I want to use.
I thought that Alt+Left and Alt+Right *are* the standard shortcuts for going backward and forward in program histories. It's worked that way in every web browser I can remember using back to the 1990s, and it works that way in Windows Explorer. The backspace key doesn't even have an obvious corresponding "forward" key.
I wasn't aware that backspace was used to go back in history in any program. I always expect it to erase one character, or do nothing.
True, but sometimes the result is hilarious. I started using base64(random(32 bytes)) as password for some sites, and it seems 256 bits of entropy give me only a 'medium' level of security.
The JavaScript probably figured out that your RNG wasn't properly seeded.
By the time either a blimp or this thing deflates enough to make the engines flop around, there isn't going to be nearly enough lift of lift of any kind to keep it in the air.
But let's ignore that: You want to do this to a rigid airship.
Look at their history. Excluding the ones that burst into flames, many if not most of the major airships ever built ended up lost due to failure of their internal structures. They got shredded like pretzels with the slightest adverse aerodynamic forces. (Even the Hindenburg disaster probably initially involved the snapping of an internal bracing wire due to overzealous steering.)
If I had to ride in one of these white elephants, I'd still go with the inflatable version.
So what? If the blimp deflates, it also becomes uncontrollable sinks.
That's a stunning revelation!
You'd better contact the Goodyear company ASAP. It looks like they've been putting people in incredible peril for over 90 years now with their fleet of deflatable blimps. You've got to stop them!
It's about as hot as it's been since humans arrived right now, and it's going to get much hotter. Not in evolutionary timescales, but within a couple of generations.
Evolution would probably work in the long run, but don't forget that sometimes evolution works by wiping out almost every member of a given species leaving only a tiny handful of "fit" survivors. That hardly seems like a better choice than just switching our primary energy sources ASAP.
Many of the advanced battery technologies will have toxic chemicals. With huge production volumes, there's going to be a lot of poisonous waste materials. I suspect the environmental damage of new batteries is going to make the claimed damage of carbon seem like happy-fun-day.
No, the current buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere is a slow-motion apocalypse because it leverages the sun's vast energy output to push the entire planet away from the conditions that humans evolved to live within. No amount of run-of-the-mill poisonous chemicals could touch it. (Not that these chemicals would be released into the environment anyway. Utility storage batteries are very easy to track and regulate.)
In the worst case, they could just unscrew the wires from the thermostat and clip the bare ends together with a clothespin to turn on the furnace. That would at least keep the pipes from freezing and cost $0.
We're going to build a wall along the entire border.
And the Mongolians are going to pay for it!
You convert CO2 in CO. Then you oxidize it to get CO2 back.
No CO2 sequestration at all!
So, how would this be better than photovoltaic cells?
It's better because every time there's a story on photvoltaic cells, a bunch of self-appointed geniuses yell: "I'm the first person to realize that the sun doesn't shine all day! It won't do any good without energy storage!!1!"
Well, here's a solar technology with built-in energy storage.
The "bad guys" will still find that classic abandoned warehouse across the train tracks and plot their evil in the veil of darkness. Perhaps we should require spotlights and mandatory cameras over every square inch of the planet too?
The problem has never been all that hard for the authorities: They have always known that to snag all the bad guys, they only have to monitor the small subset of warehouses that are built on a slanted "Dutch angle".
I'm sure that a makeshift homebrew directional antenna could sniff these signals out in a suburban or office park area just fine.
Even in your high-rise case, the signal could be narrowed down to a small subset of all devices. Processing the sum of a few signals to pick out "words" shouldn't be too hard, either.
Not to mention, I said three times the distance to frigging PLUTO. Presumably, attackers could get within 100m of most targets. I don't think you realize how much easier that is.
With the right antennas, NASA routinely deciphers transmissions sent with a power comparable to a CB radio coming from three times the distance to Pluto.