Great point. I like YAML as a format, but when it's the only exposed interface for a black box that doesn't even give you control of order of operations, it's a curse. I'm specifically thinking of a case involving buildpacks for cloud architectures, and boy is that a circus of things Unix/Linux have long had right being reinvented badly.
It's true. I want that open source quality even if I'm not going to personally audit most of the code that I download on the system. I'm happy trusting a source that has a good track record for that practice. I *do* still care about the standards being open and being set by developer mindshare, what engineers are excited to build, because you can get pretty burnt when the health of the platform you run depends on suits and marketing divisions that don't really care about it. Every Amiga fan knows what I'm talking about. After I had to jump ship from that platform, I ran Linux almost entirely to this day, because no CEO has the option to sink that ship.
Quite frankly, no. Borders shift here and there, that's one thing. Wiping out a whole continent-full of people, even driving the buffalo to near extinction for the simple purpose of eliminating those they depend on, that's something Hitler literally thought was inspiring. The USA is a state founded on the largest scale of genocide in history. If you can't read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and deal with what that looks like, that's just cowardice.
First, having lots of stuff isn't necessarily healthy. I've had the family members that could have probably beaten any two exhibits on Hoarders combined with a large farmhouse, barn, and multiple sheds reduced to tiny crawlspaces and all sorts of safety and health hazards. They don't just hurt themselves doing that.
Second, we shouldn't glamorize minimalism which relies on having great families, great jobs, trust funds, and social networks to work. Pretentious yoga types, don't preach. It's not minimalism if you're just externalizing privilege.
Third, we need to challenge assumptions that participation in public life, and that one's value as a citizen, is based on the amount of property owed. Every time I see someone acting like Voter ID needs to be tightened and that somehow, it's racist to think that minorities are less able to navigate this has failed to reckon with how much of our documentation has to do with property owned and services used, and they're already penalized there even before you deal with places like Alabama that selectively shut down DMV's in majority-black counties. There's a rank classism and racism intersecting here.
Finally: we need to differentiate between private and personal property. We are taught to think of private property as a personal effect, whereas, there's a difference. Do you make direct personal use of it? Do you need it to live with dignity? Or is it leverage to boss others around? Absentee private property is a sort of dictatorship. Privatizing a county or state's water supply is not the same thing as making sure the government doesn't come and take away your toothbrush. When people talk about private property in the USA, it's not going to mean the same thing for the people lining up to reprise the role of the feudal lords as it does for those sinking to the level of peasants, and unfortunately, there's a lot done to deliberately confuse listeners on this issue.
That's how, in the name of keeping private property safe for alleged persons, we've actually been giving corporations to gouge actual people of almost every real necessity and dispossess them. The 1%, in the meantime, trades in gold-plated sports cars. They are *not* hurting.
How can you chop down half of a world's forests and lose more than half of its topsoils, and dig under it and burn hundreds of millions of year's worth of sequestered hydrocarbons and expel its CO2 into the atmosphere, and *not* dramatically change it in an unnatural way?...I say this without the supposition that nature is necessarily kind, or that this is without precedent in Earth's natural history. The fact that the closest analogue to the CO2 spike we've seen due to burning hydrocarbons was lava flowing through coal seams in Siberia - which triggered the biggest natural extinction of all, the Permian-Triassic. Over 95% of all living species died. That was over a much larger time-frame than anything we're talking about in the present, and the rate of acceleration and deceleration in matters like this is the difference between a ride and a deadly wreck.
Assuming that the increase in greenhouse gasses is not primarily anthropogenic in nature - which has all sorts of isotopic evidence against it, assuming that the climate is doing something natural, it's still a very sudden shift in ecological, especially geological terms. How do you expect the outcome to be okay, when every mass extinction before was a challenge to a yet-uninhibited, unpillaged globe of ecosystems, not the paltry wildlife preserves? Fact: we're set to see more plastic than fish in the ocean in our lifetimes. Fact: we're losing rainforests. Fact: we're releasing refrigerants, even banned ozone-depleting CFCs into the atmosphere that are many times more potent than CO2 still, and that impact should be obvious...
So second: if somehow, going from 190ppm to 400+ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere in less than 200 years is not a human doing, how is the natural world to cope with such a disruptive process simultaneous to all the pressures we are incontrovertibly responsible for?
This is academic until we have solid open-source operating systems based on a microkernel fit for general use - and we're almost there.
Genode (https://www.genode.org) is a really interesting project, a microkernel OS wherein the subsystems and policies are set up for resiliency and security. It actually can run on Linux, but it also works in conjunction with a variety of the L4 microkernels which go a long way towards solving the overhead problem characteristic of microkernels. It does seem to blur the line between hypervisor and host OS, but it seems awfully promising as a pragmatic response to the microkernel vs. monolithic debate.
In fact, I don't know why we even mention HURD when Genode is so far along.
We're installing all of this insecure technology around a vital process of our governance, whereas paper ballots and paper trails work elsewhere. Florida failed to provide a clearly understandable paper ballot in 2000, but when has this electronic voting been a fix?
It's a gravy train for government-connected firms, that's what it is.
The only electronic voting I want is something that can give me a QR code to print a paper ballot I can sign off on, giving me time to research the entirety of the options and speeding time at the booth.
I believe this and approval voting would go a long way towards actually fixing things.
Over the last several years, I've opted for a refurbished Samsung S4, then S5, and put LineageOS on them. The results on these have been outstanding, and I paid less than $150 in either case.
What gets me excited about the Amiga hardware scene are the neat FPGA kits that drive them. It's particularly interesting when this leads to things superior to any officially produced Amiga hardware out there, like a 68080 processor core: http://www.apollo-core.com/
It's nice to simulate an ECS or AGA chipset for old times' sake, but it's also nice that the hardware doing that is also easily used for other creative things. I'd love to see RISC-V and FPGAs become a new creative playground for programmable hardware.
Let's ban citizens from preparing meals in their households as well. What better to ensure the success of local eateries?
Sure, why not take another unfounded leap that has nothing to do with the article. Have you ever spent any time there?? Do you understand what makes a dense city like San Francisco different? It's no suburb. It's tied with New York City for density of population, a city on a mountain peninsula that can't just sprawl out. These corporations have an extra footprint that's already been accommodated on the basis of an understanding.
That density means it's an easier walk than almost anywhere in the country to have lots of top-notch options.
San Francisco already made the stupid mistake of giving an inch and letting Silicon Valley roll all over it, turning itself into the bed and breakfast for gentrifying careerists who work in a whole another county. They're taking steps to stand up for people who have somewhat normal means and aren't so loaded with trust funds to work and get by. It's actually really overdue.
But I only lived there for some years, so what do I know, compared to a flippant know-all comment on Slashdot.
Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.
That's the sort of thing where trying to give Mars a core like Earth's is probably way more work than, say, building habitats in the asteroid belt. I like NASA's proposal to put a magnetic shield in the L1 Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun better.
You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.
Oh, this sounds fun. You should probably get a copy of Universe Sandbox and try it out. I did. Seems Venus' temperature only falls to around 170F, its atmosphere is so thick, or maybe it's because the tidal heating of putting actual planets close together is no joke.
It took a long time to even try to get anything livable started, though. I just got impatient and smashed Europa into Mars - for the water, you know.
Your mileage may vary, but nobody should put me in charge of any solar system, ever.
Hearing every speakerphone conversation, chatty intern, clap-out at meetings, every youtube video for within thirty feet and feeling like I was in a fish-bowl with people whose qualifications differed from mine made it impossible to do focused coding at work in the few hours between meetings. Eventually, bringing the work home wasn't enough.
I like universal basic income to start with, especially since it's clear that worker's wages are not rising with worker productivity. However, part of the problem is that major industries - payday loans, health care, landlords/rentals, banks - have made price-gouging their standard practice. They've already mastered the art of scamming desperate people via means that would be illegal in many other developed countries, and they've been buying off the lawmakers too. Fix that too - fix that first, even. I don't think an uptick in income is going to last very long without some way to enforce decency in the trade of living essentials.
Wind power in Texas is often some of the cheapest electricity you can get. It's picking up momentum, and the incentive to keep it going is pretty high. I smell a slant in this article, likely from someone with money to lose from this trend. Say, coal industries.
This platform is not a presence in a debate as we think of it. It has no inherent values, no physical experience, and it doesn't have anything at stake other than the demo itself. It is not free of bias, rather, it sorts through the information and biases humans supply it with.
That last part is why it's still super-valuable, in my opinion. In my time as a politically engaged citizen of the USA, there have been times when the big media across the political spectrum has lagged for almost a year in reporting information that could be found with very good corroborating evidence in major media across the globe. Regarding the Iraq war, major stories seemed to break in the Summer or Fall after the invasion, but they were only breaking stories in the USA. They'd been reported on extensively before the invasion in Europe in Lebanon. I'd been reading that media and cross-comparing and detecting US corporate bias, noticing what was either left out or buried in the footnotes, and becoming aware of the biases and motives they implied.
One really stunning example: word came out that the BBC and CNN were both carrying "full" transcripts of Hans Blix's testimony to the UN about the efficacy of UN inspectors to verify Iraqi compliance with denuclearization, but that CNN had omitted major parts of a "full" transcript. I did the homework. I downloaded both transcripts and broke out my tools as a Linux guy and analyst, and did the diff. What amounted to two large paragraphs on my screen right in the middle of the testimony were the omitted parts. They were the most detailed and convincing parts of Hans Blix's testimony, and the most relevant to a public that had a right to informed participation about whether the nation should start a pre-emptive war. That a "liberal" institution doctored verified and significant news in favor of a pro-war stance was really, really damning.
That wasn't the end, that story goes on.
Point is, as a human, cross-comparing many diverse pieces of information and journalism has definitely brought not just the story, but how some actors are trying to manipulate the story to light. We need an equitable, fairly administered system to make this sort of analysis available to the public. It needs to detect discrepancies and focus the public on where it can validate and verify something into being closer to fully true. It needs to be broad-based enough to not be itself a prop for those looking to use it for propaganda.
I'm all for using this AI in ways that might help critical thought prevail.
Pluto won't be the first thing in the cosmos to break definitions and it won't be the last. The current definition of planet isn't a good one.
"A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
But if these bodies at some point have a molten core, complex geological features, and long-term orbital stability, I find the cleared neighborhood requirement to be unfounded.
If the Earth was a bit less massive and the Moon a bit more, the center of gravity for the system would be outside of Earth. Why wouldn't it be a binary of two planets then? Isn't it a matter of time until we discover these even in the data on exoplanets we've already got? Pluto is such a system.
When we find Planet IX out there, and it's likely to be 10x the mass of earth, it'll likely have an orbit that is crossed by a great many bodies, some of which may be larger than Pluto and Eris. Is its status as a planet going to be in doubt every time we find another large object in the Kuiper belt?
There are planemos we've detected that may well have not formed in a star's proto-planetary disk but are larger than Jupiter. How are they not planets of a sort?
If we're just trying to keep the planet count in our solar system low, what for exactly?
I find that definitions with excessively sharp and arbitrary boundaries where physics shows us a gradual spectrum are a product of humans trying to impose their thinking, instead of adapt it to the world.
One of the houses I've helped to build in Central Texas features large amounts of rammed earth and white, reflective domes, and they only run the AC in that house for three months out of the year. They haven't even used all the tricks a passive thermal architect knows in the classical or cutting edge senses, and it's already a success.
Slashdot Mirror
Great point. I like YAML as a format, but when it's the only exposed interface for a black box that doesn't even give you control of order of operations, it's a curse. I'm specifically thinking of a case involving buildpacks for cloud architectures, and boy is that a circus of things Unix/Linux have long had right being reinvented badly.
It's true. I want that open source quality even if I'm not going to personally audit most of the code that I download on the system. I'm happy trusting a source that has a good track record for that practice. I *do* still care about the standards being open and being set by developer mindshare, what engineers are excited to build, because you can get pretty burnt when the health of the platform you run depends on suits and marketing divisions that don't really care about it. Every Amiga fan knows what I'm talking about. After I had to jump ship from that platform, I ran Linux almost entirely to this day, because no CEO has the option to sink that ship.
Quite frankly, no. Borders shift here and there, that's one thing. Wiping out a whole continent-full of people, even driving the buffalo to near extinction for the simple purpose of eliminating those they depend on, that's something Hitler literally thought was inspiring. The USA is a state founded on the largest scale of genocide in history. If you can't read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and deal with what that looks like, that's just cowardice.
But the majority of people are renting, so they'll just get pushed out by gentrification into ever crappier neighborhoods.
If you're born here, you are native.
Note: in the USA, this only applies if you're white and sitting pretty on top of stolen land.
You wrote an expert-sounding essay on a topic like this without doing your homework on pthalates? Really??
https://www.theguardian.com/li...
First, having lots of stuff isn't necessarily healthy. I've had the family members that could have probably beaten any two exhibits on Hoarders combined with a large farmhouse, barn, and multiple sheds reduced to tiny crawlspaces and all sorts of safety and health hazards. They don't just hurt themselves doing that.
Second, we shouldn't glamorize minimalism which relies on having great families, great jobs, trust funds, and social networks to work. Pretentious yoga types, don't preach. It's not minimalism if you're just externalizing privilege.
Third, we need to challenge assumptions that participation in public life, and that one's value as a citizen, is based on the amount of property owed. Every time I see someone acting like Voter ID needs to be tightened and that somehow, it's racist to think that minorities are less able to navigate this has failed to reckon with how much of our documentation has to do with property owned and services used, and they're already penalized there even before you deal with places like Alabama that selectively shut down DMV's in majority-black counties. There's a rank classism and racism intersecting here.
Finally: we need to differentiate between private and personal property. We are taught to think of private property as a personal effect, whereas, there's a difference. Do you make direct personal use of it? Do you need it to live with dignity? Or is it leverage to boss others around? Absentee private property is a sort of dictatorship. Privatizing a county or state's water supply is not the same thing as making sure the government doesn't come and take away your toothbrush. When people talk about private property in the USA, it's not going to mean the same thing for the people lining up to reprise the role of the feudal lords as it does for those sinking to the level of peasants, and unfortunately, there's a lot done to deliberately confuse listeners on this issue.
That's how, in the name of keeping private property safe for alleged persons, we've actually been giving corporations to gouge actual people of almost every real necessity and dispossess them. The 1%, in the meantime, trades in gold-plated sports cars. They are *not* hurting.
I have two questions for you.
How can you chop down half of a world's forests and lose more than half of its topsoils, and dig under it and burn hundreds of millions of year's worth of sequestered hydrocarbons and expel its CO2 into the atmosphere, and *not* dramatically change it in an unnatural way? ...I say this without the supposition that nature is necessarily kind, or that this is without precedent in Earth's natural history. The fact that the closest analogue to the CO2 spike we've seen due to burning hydrocarbons was lava flowing through coal seams in Siberia - which triggered the biggest natural extinction of all, the Permian-Triassic. Over 95% of all living species died. That was over a much larger time-frame than anything we're talking about in the present, and the rate of acceleration and deceleration in matters like this is the difference between a ride and a deadly wreck.
Assuming that the increase in greenhouse gasses is not primarily anthropogenic in nature - which has all sorts of isotopic evidence against it, assuming that the climate is doing something natural, it's still a very sudden shift in ecological, especially geological terms. How do you expect the outcome to be okay, when every mass extinction before was a challenge to a yet-uninhibited, unpillaged globe of ecosystems, not the paltry wildlife preserves? Fact: we're set to see more plastic than fish in the ocean in our lifetimes. Fact: we're losing rainforests. Fact: we're releasing refrigerants, even banned ozone-depleting CFCs into the atmosphere that are many times more potent than CO2 still, and that impact should be obvious...
So second: if somehow, going from 190ppm to 400+ppm of CO2 in our atmosphere in less than 200 years is not a human doing, how is the natural world to cope with such a disruptive process simultaneous to all the pressures we are incontrovertibly responsible for?
This is academic until we have solid open-source operating systems based on a microkernel fit for general use - and we're almost there.
Genode (https://www.genode.org) is a really interesting project, a microkernel OS wherein the subsystems and policies are set up for resiliency and security. It actually can run on Linux, but it also works in conjunction with a variety of the L4 microkernels which go a long way towards solving the overhead problem characteristic of microkernels. It does seem to blur the line between hypervisor and host OS, but it seems awfully promising as a pragmatic response to the microkernel vs. monolithic debate.
In fact, I don't know why we even mention HURD when Genode is so far along.
We're installing all of this insecure technology around a vital process of our governance, whereas paper ballots and paper trails work elsewhere. Florida failed to provide a clearly understandable paper ballot in 2000, but when has this electronic voting been a fix?
It's a gravy train for government-connected firms, that's what it is.
The only electronic voting I want is something that can give me a QR code to print a paper ballot I can sign off on, giving me time to research the entirety of the options and speeding time at the booth.
I believe this and approval voting would go a long way towards actually fixing things.
By your logic, there's:
* The cooling stratosphere, worldwide,
* Nights are warming faster than days,
* Polar regions are warming much faster than the rest of the globe.
So, case in point. It's not a natural oscillation in solar input. It's due to heat trapping by greenhouse gasses.
Over the last several years, I've opted for a refurbished Samsung S4, then S5, and put LineageOS on them. The results on these have been outstanding, and I paid less than $150 in either case.
What gets me excited about the Amiga hardware scene are the neat FPGA kits that drive them. It's particularly interesting when this leads to things superior to any officially produced Amiga hardware out there, like a 68080 processor core: http://www.apollo-core.com/
It's nice to simulate an ECS or AGA chipset for old times' sake, but it's also nice that the hardware doing that is also easily used for other creative things. I'd love to see RISC-V and FPGAs become a new creative playground for programmable hardware.
Let's ban citizens from preparing meals in their households as well. What better to ensure the success of local eateries?
Sure, why not take another unfounded leap that has nothing to do with the article. Have you ever spent any time there?? Do you understand what makes a dense city like San Francisco different? It's no suburb. It's tied with New York City for density of population, a city on a mountain peninsula that can't just sprawl out. These corporations have an extra footprint that's already been accommodated on the basis of an understanding.
That density means it's an easier walk than almost anywhere in the country to have lots of top-notch options.
San Francisco already made the stupid mistake of giving an inch and letting Silicon Valley roll all over it, turning itself into the bed and breakfast for gentrifying careerists who work in a whole another county. They're taking steps to stand up for people who have somewhat normal means and aren't so loaded with trust funds to work and get by. It's actually really overdue.
But I only lived there for some years, so what do I know, compared to a flippant know-all comment on Slashdot.
Mars doesn't have enough mass and magnetic spin to maintain an atmosphere. That's kind of always going to have anything you generate torn away by solar winds.
That's the sort of thing where trying to give Mars a core like Earth's is probably way more work than, say, building habitats in the asteroid belt. I like NASA's proposal to put a magnetic shield in the L1 Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun better.
You probably need to merge Mars and Io or some other sizable planet/moon to get the right conditions. Maybe move Venus to the Mars orbit and create a bi-planetary system like Terra/Luna.
Oh, this sounds fun. You should probably get a copy of Universe Sandbox and try it out. I did. Seems Venus' temperature only falls to around 170F, its atmosphere is so thick, or maybe it's because the tidal heating of putting actual planets close together is no joke.
It took a long time to even try to get anything livable started, though. I just got impatient and smashed Europa into Mars - for the water, you know.
Your mileage may vary, but nobody should put me in charge of any solar system, ever.
Hearing every speakerphone conversation, chatty intern, clap-out at meetings, every youtube video for within thirty feet and feeling like I was in a fish-bowl with people whose qualifications differed from mine made it impossible to do focused coding at work in the few hours between meetings. Eventually, bringing the work home wasn't enough.
I like universal basic income to start with, especially since it's clear that worker's wages are not rising with worker productivity. However, part of the problem is that major industries - payday loans, health care, landlords/rentals, banks - have made price-gouging their standard practice. They've already mastered the art of scamming desperate people via means that would be illegal in many other developed countries, and they've been buying off the lawmakers too. Fix that too - fix that first, even. I don't think an uptick in income is going to last very long without some way to enforce decency in the trade of living essentials.
Wind power in Texas is often some of the cheapest electricity you can get. It's picking up momentum, and the incentive to keep it going is pretty high. I smell a slant in this article, likely from someone with money to lose from this trend. Say, coal industries.
https://www.chron.com/business...
I've got a question. Why did you build a life you'd have to bug out from in the first place?
Does trying to debate with ELIZA piss it off?
This platform is not a presence in a debate as we think of it. It has no inherent values, no physical experience, and it doesn't have anything at stake other than the demo itself. It is not free of bias, rather, it sorts through the information and biases humans supply it with.
That last part is why it's still super-valuable, in my opinion. In my time as a politically engaged citizen of the USA, there have been times when the big media across the political spectrum has lagged for almost a year in reporting information that could be found with very good corroborating evidence in major media across the globe. Regarding the Iraq war, major stories seemed to break in the Summer or Fall after the invasion, but they were only breaking stories in the USA. They'd been reported on extensively before the invasion in Europe in Lebanon. I'd been reading that media and cross-comparing and detecting US corporate bias, noticing what was either left out or buried in the footnotes, and becoming aware of the biases and motives they implied.
One really stunning example: word came out that the BBC and CNN were both carrying "full" transcripts of Hans Blix's testimony to the UN about the efficacy of UN inspectors to verify Iraqi compliance with denuclearization, but that CNN had omitted major parts of a "full" transcript. I did the homework. I downloaded both transcripts and broke out my tools as a Linux guy and analyst, and did the diff. What amounted to two large paragraphs on my screen right in the middle of the testimony were the omitted parts. They were the most detailed and convincing parts of Hans Blix's testimony, and the most relevant to a public that had a right to informed participation about whether the nation should start a pre-emptive war. That a "liberal" institution doctored verified and significant news in favor of a pro-war stance was really, really damning.
That wasn't the end, that story goes on.
Point is, as a human, cross-comparing many diverse pieces of information and journalism has definitely brought not just the story, but how some actors are trying to manipulate the story to light. We need an equitable, fairly administered system to make this sort of analysis available to the public. It needs to detect discrepancies and focus the public on where it can validate and verify something into being closer to fully true. It needs to be broad-based enough to not be itself a prop for those looking to use it for propaganda.
I'm all for using this AI in ways that might help critical thought prevail.
This Uber driver's really upstaged the recent headlines. Let's see Tesla's autopilot match *these* results!
Pluto won't be the first thing in the cosmos to break definitions and it won't be the last. The current definition of planet isn't a good one.
"A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
But if these bodies at some point have a molten core, complex geological features, and long-term orbital stability, I find the cleared neighborhood requirement to be unfounded.
If the Earth was a bit less massive and the Moon a bit more, the center of gravity for the system would be outside of Earth. Why wouldn't it be a binary of two planets then? Isn't it a matter of time until we discover these even in the data on exoplanets we've already got? Pluto is such a system.
When we find Planet IX out there, and it's likely to be 10x the mass of earth, it'll likely have an orbit that is crossed by a great many bodies, some of which may be larger than Pluto and Eris. Is its status as a planet going to be in doubt every time we find another large object in the Kuiper belt?
There are planemos we've detected that may well have not formed in a star's proto-planetary disk but are larger than Jupiter. How are they not planets of a sort?
If we're just trying to keep the planet count in our solar system low, what for exactly?
I find that definitions with excessively sharp and arbitrary boundaries where physics shows us a gradual spectrum are a product of humans trying to impose their thinking, instead of adapt it to the world.
People who've lived in "one of these places" for millenia before there was such a thing as air conditioning knew how to do exactly that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One of the houses I've helped to build in Central Texas features large amounts of rammed earth and white, reflective domes, and they only run the AC in that house for three months out of the year. They haven't even used all the tricks a passive thermal architect knows in the classical or cutting edge senses, and it's already a success.