First the alcoholic needs to sober up, and only then can he or she look for an actual job. Cutting outrageous over-consumption by 99% is a starting point, not a finish line.
Person 1: You're useless and unreliable.
Person 2: Oh yeah? Well, I used to be shitfaced all day long.
Person 1: My bad. I misjudged you. Next drink's on me.
If everyone blocks ads, all of the high-quality Internet services we use will go away, or become subscription services. Those who long for the pre-ad Internet do not remember the pre-ad Internet.
You're not much into round-trip thinking, are you?
Without the captains of industry expending all this money on advertising, the products we buy would be a lot cheaper, and the money we all save on our merchandise could be spent directly supporting the channels we most prefer, which—once adequately supported—would probably have a liberal shoulder for free riders in any case.
System A: a lot of money spent on advertising production and distribution, with no direct benefits (except for the small number of people with narrow and unusual interests who actually enjoy the ads for their own sake).
System B: no money wasted on advertising production or distribution. All of the money invested in content creation and product manufacture.
Yet, somehow, in System B, with less overhead, there's not possibly enough to go around.
It might not play out this way, but any coherent economic theory needs to explain how eliminating a dead weight cost (advertising) might leave things worse (in aggregate).
Hint: it probably starts with the observation that the peer community is too effective at getting the word out about which products suck and which products don't, and Big Cheese is not going to simply sit around and stand for that.
And so we get these clusterfuck revenue models, where subjecting yourself to caustic brain-rot tens of thousands of times over the course of your life is portrayed as a marginal, collective good.
Well, I, for one, am not buying into this tube-steak sizzlegasm.
In 2018, album sales fell 18.2 percent from the previous year and song sales fell 28.8 percent, according to U.S. year-end report figures from data company BuzzAngle, which tracks music consumption. Meanwhile, total on-demand music streams, including both audio and video, shot up 35.4 percent. Audio on-demand streams set a new record high in 2018 of 534.6 billion streams, which is up 42 percent from 2017's 376.9 billion streams.
Four significant digits? Clearly the surveillance state is further along—and far better managed by the inerrant, wage-slave minions of the Deep State—than anyone heretofore suspected.
No it doesn't, as eating plant based food rarely means destroying/killing the plant.
A fruit is basically just a green or red/orange/yellow fetus that you can pluck and peel with a pairing knife.
You think the plants don't care because they don't reflexively cover their nads whenever anyone shows up with a baseball and a baseball bat? That they exist in pure vegetative bliss, like a steer happily chewing his cud, wondering what all the fuss is about?
You need to think a little bit harder about vegetative value systems. Try to work your way past the death fixation of Judeo-Christian ethics. Mostly we didn't kill slaves, either. And if they're happily alive, what's the problem?
Also, prairie agriculture makes extensive use of power equipment, and has for some time now (it's on the internet, you can look it up).
Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, threshing! Destroyers and usurpers, CURSE THEM!
That's the daily breakfast prayer of the little-known prairie Ent, Skullgluten.
$1k is a significant wanker barrier, and you released a model that darn near identical to the one released last year.
FTFY.
Hot tip: if three fat zeroes takes the edge off your erection, you're thinking with your wanker and not your brain. ROI functions are linear. Only wankernomics includes step functions that don't survive a currency exchange.
All progressive dogma always falls away when it hits home.
Unlike most military engagements, you at least know who the bastard is and what the bastard's done before you rip him a new one in cold blood, so I'd say that's still pretty far to the progressive end of the spectrum.
That's a typical MBA attitude, and it's devastating to the long-term prospects of a company.
But it's even worse than that, because it's also penny wise and pound foolish.
Once upon a time, five clever guys in Taiwan could design a beige box. Now we're worried about Apple lacking the engineering resources to update a minor platform that's easily their most minimal commitment out of their common laptop, iMac, and iMac Pro lineup?
It costs Apple far more to maintain the retail presence for this product line than to maintain the minor engineering tweaks (which, at a four-year cadence, is hardly blistering). Easily their largest engineering expense is validating the thermal management environment (the vast majority of the guts are pure Intel). But it's not like their laptops or the iMac don't also require the same investment. And then there's the Apple T2 security processor. Apple will abandon that project when hell freezes over. And once you've sunk those resources, you can hardly go around whining that it's painfully expensive to integrate into your own product line.
Besides, Apple has already applied MBA logic by ditching the Mac mini with an acceptable, internal GPU (external GPUs are expensive, and hindered by the thin Thunderbolt channel—do not be fooled by the Thunderbolt's 40 Gb/s bandwidth rating, for most serious GPU applications, that's pathetic; and latency is not improved by this dodge, either).
Physicists demand to know why there are 36 fundamental particles (or 37 if you include the Higgs boson) rather than 35. If there was 35, they would ask about 34. If there was two, they would ask about one. And some physicists wouldn't even stop there.
In the desktop space (excluding laptops), Apple—almost a trillion dollar company these days—has three whole crummy options: the insanely integrated iMac (throw away your display in each upgrade cycle), the insanely expensive iMac Pro (strictly for the 1%), and the insanely niche Mac mini.
That a weird approach to modularity, if you aren't purely in the dollar extraction business.
Instead, they could make an integrated display (with all of the connectivity of an iMac) and provide a mount on the back for the "brains" (which would look a lot like the current Mac mini), with a single TB3 connection point (and some provision for shared power).
Then the Mini could come in three versions: minimalist, minimalist plus decent internal GPU (maybe 0.5" thicker), and maximalist (probably a cube with the same desktop footprint as the Mini, that's now sadly too cumbersome to hang off the back of your integrated monitor, though it might hang comfortably off a special monitor stand). Large displays could have two mount points, the second to hang an additional GPU off of a second TB3 channel to the brain module, so even if you started with the base model, you aren't screwed.
But Apple learned long ago that modularity and design don't go together (and certainly not at the profit margins to which they've become accustomed). That's what most incredible about the Mac mini: it has the expansion potential to do anything via the burly four-barrel USB-C ports, but only at the expense of turning the back of your desk into a rat's nest of short, horrid wires connected to tubby little devices (unless you plan to pay $100 per cable, you're looking at 18" maximum for most TB3 peripherals).
So they sliced things up in this weird way because design (and because ixnay right to repair) and it barely covers 80% of the standard-usage RGB colour-space already, and blue is pretty niche, so surely Apple could simplify this decomposition to merely RG.
Which begs the question, why does the MBA include both management and administration? Surely one of those could be discarded, and you'd still cover 80% of the solution space, with an education at half the cost, at an ROI instantaneous, so far as you education allows you to see, regardless of whether you went in for the MB or the MA.
"Can I stop safely before I reach the intersection", if the answer is "yes", he should stop, if "no" he should go.
You can't stop safely if you peg the brakes and the person behind you is just finishing a lane change, or typing a text message.
I tend to apply the principle of least surprise. The safest action is usually the one that least surprises all the cars around you vying to trade paint.
The bright-line yellow light rule is a stupid rule to fetish over, in any case.
A good rule to fetish over is not entering an intersection until all the arrows are pointing in the right direction that you'll be able to exit the intersection promptly. If I enter an intersection before the car in front of me has itself exited the intersection (with less than a full car length behind to tuck myself into) it's usually after reading the traffic ahead. I'm probably right in my prediction 19 times out of 20. Maybe once a year I leave my rear tires dangling in the exit-side crosswalk by the time the pedestrians have started to rumble (forcing them to funnel around my metallic backside).
I can't even recall the last time I actually blocked cross traffic by the time the light changed.
Nothing screams life of the party like entering an intersection on the green, and still being trapped inside the intersection after the red. Is that even a ticket? Well, if you need to know (I don't), ask a grammar Nazi near you.
I think they gave up way too easily not beating Android at their own game, because "everyone else" who offered any service competing with a g-service would be on their side.
Not as obvious as it looks. Personally, signing onto the slate of an omnibus Google competitor would make me think twice about future repercussions.
Google wields powers great and small. They've never been as cutthroat with their great powers as Microsoft was with theirs back in the day (a high-water mark rarely replicated), but at this point, even Google's small powers wielded in small ways can really pluck your nads bald if you're caught off guard on the wrong foot.
They have gone to the extreme lengths that they put a giant ad on your app, that you MUST dismiss, at least once a month asking people to go review their privacy settings.
Because everybody wants to repeat a tedious task on a monthly basis, without any forewarning or focus on what diabolical changes have been recently enacted.
If you can quickly size up and imagine what all those cryptic tick boxes imply, you probably don't use Facebook in a serious way.
If you can't quickly imagine what all those cryptic tick boxes imply, you probably don't see much point in the monthly visit to the Swahili proctologist's office.
Just imagine if Facebook instead had a page "see all the places we shared your data over the last 30 days" and each item had a handy tick box beside it "never do this again". Then, after you press submit, Facebook AI reviews all your ticks and puts up a screen: you seem kind of tetchy about us sharing your speedy cross-town junkets after those short calls to your wife that you're working late. Is this what you wish us to filter?
Yes, people would visit that page, all the damn time.
At some point you have to accept that lots of naturally-occurring substances can kill you.
Dihydrogen monoxide is a notorious killer.
Only when Big Broccoli invents a green floret as addictive as tobacco or bacon-flavoured ice cream, will "can kill you" matriculate into freshman Epidemiology 101.
If you have doubts on this, the internet is available to clear your doubts.
Good thing there's only one internet, otherwise there might possibly be two opinions which don't fundamentally agree, shattering the awesome power of the internet to cast doubt asunder. Food for thought: an internet fork might well be worse for civilization than a Bitcoin fork.
The chapter on the cans is among my favorites. It contains not just a biography of the can and its extreme usefulness but also a description of the quest by a small number of people to stop them from imploding, self-Âdestructing and interfering with the food and drink they encapsulate.
Waldman is concerned about the chemical ingredients of epoxy can coatings, especially bisphenol-A, which may leak into the drink or food contents.
Its impact on health is controversial — some authorities maintain that it can disrupt human hormones and increase the risk of cancer and other disease, others insist that it is harmless in the concentrations likely to be absorbed even by a dedicated drinker of canned beverages.
Unsurprisingly, Waldman's suspicious questions about BPA did not make him popular at Can School.
I'll give you a hint: whatever the coatings contain (much is shrouded in secrecy) they contain plenty of BPA.
The most common epoxy coatings are synthesized from bisphenol A and epichlorohydrin forming bisphenol A-diglycidyl ether epoxy resins.
There's an insane amount of these epoxy resins manufactured in America, and then spread very, very, very thin, them maintained in constant contact with food or drink, for days or weeks or months (during highly variable storage conditions, too).
The results, published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, showed a 52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm count among North American, European, Australian and New Zealand men.
Not exactly a smoking gun.
BPA is well known as a potent source of smokeless powder.
I'd love to see a graphic of epoxy can liners over the past 40 years denominated in m^2 hour per capita (average duration of food contact times total coated area of container in constant contact with food until food consumed). It just might tell a sad tale of sad tails.
Are you one of those Luddites who hated CDs because of the sampling, or born too late?
I once owned a first generation CD player. The audiophiles were not wrong. The analog recording process had evolved over decades to use microphones that were intrinsically too bright, to compensate for the LP recording process, which was intrinsically low-pass.
All the original CD transfers from the early 1980s are ludicrously shrill. On the other hand, every audio CD I've ever bought going all the way back to 1983 is still playable, but I have to manually equalize everything from the 1980s differently than what came later. The original CDs also ruined stereo staging, as perceived by a listener with sufficiently good speakers. The vast majority used a single DAC, which was multiplexed between the two channels (rendering the two channels permanently half a sample out of phase). In addition, the earlier recordings (especially when played on the earlier players) had a lot of structural quantization noise. Both of these last two problems disappeared with the advent of the 1-bit DAC, interpolated to 20-bit precision, combined with changes to recording technology which computationally dithered out the quantization error term.
Yes, there were plenty of idiots who blamed all these very real problems on the digital process itself. The digital process itself was a broken panacea before an additional decade of secret sauce was quietly supplied behind the scenes. And there is still a group of people out there who think that digital signals travel best over uni-directional, oxygen-free copper wire. But I wouldn't call these people Luddites. I'd call them nearly anything else—but not Luddites.
Some of these people now have hermetically-sealed listening rooms equipped with HEPA filters and helium recirculation pumps—because not even regular indoor air is pristine enough until fully ensconced in a Goldfinger money pit.
Another effect worth mentioned is the analogy to the transition from incandescent bulbs to modern LED lighting. If you've been used to the yellowish incandescent colour-temperature for decades and decades, the new whiter-whites seem peculiar. Then when you get used to the new whiter-whites and you go back to the yellow incandescents, it's now the incandescents that seem weird.
Some of the early CD problems was simply a change of customary colour temperature.
All of this was hotly contested back in 1983 and 1984. Some of the loudest voices in the room were the audiophiles with $30,000 of analog gear in their listening rooms, many of whom claimed to hear nuance that mere mortals couldn't detect.
There was one voice of reason in the wild-west wilderness of the early digital era, and this was the NRC psycho-acoustic research center in Ottawa, Canada.
Over the course of more than 20 years, the validity of these measurements has been confirmed by double-blind listening tests conducted in a nearby NRC listening room that approximates the size and furnishings of a typical living room. The program was guided by Dr. Floyd Toole, a Canadian physicist and psycho-acoustician who received his PhD in England in stereo localization, and continued his experiments at the National Research Council beginning in the 1970s. In his search for an accurate speaker with which to conduct his experiments, he discovered wild inconsistencies in speaker design and measurement, and an absence of controlled scientific research. Since he was already an audiophile, Toole invited several young Canadian speaker designers, including Axiom's Ian Colquhoun, to work with him in evolving new speaker measurements and listening tests (part of the NRC's mandate was to assist Canadian firms in product development).
The facility also tested audiophiles, and they gradually identified a group of people they called "golden ears", who really could hear more a
Many people, through no fault of their own, have become locked into the Apple ecosystem, and Apple killed their last phone with 3.5mm socket a few months ago.
Although Betamax initially owned 100% of the market in 1975 (as VHS did not launch until the following year) the perceived value of longer recording times eventually tipped the balance in favor of VHS.
By 1980, VHS had proven favorable among consumers and was successful in controlling 60 percent of the North American market.
By 1981, sales of Beta machines in the United States had sunk to 25% of the VCR market.
As movie studios, video studios, and video rental stores turned away from Betamax, the combination of lower market share and a lack of available titles further strengthened VHS's position.
In the United Kingdom Beta held a 25% market share, but by 1986 it was down to 7.5%, and continued to decline further.
By the mid-1980s every sentient consumer on the planet (with less than a PhD in navel lint) knew that consumer gadgets—like marriage—are a package deal. And like marriage, "caveat emptor" is the word of the day, as every now-unplayable Betamax fairly tale soundly advises.
Typically, the ingenue is beautiful, kind, gentle, sweet, virginal, and often naive, in mental or emotional danger, or even physical danger, usually a target of the cad; whom she may have mistaken for the hero.
That pretty much sums up the iPhone right there: reeked of true love (at first sight), but ultimately just another chiselled, gracile cad right from the splendid skirt-lift of the inaugural staged event.
You see, the earth really is flat (and disc-like), and all the early settlements started out at the rim—strictly established in alphabetic order—and gradually we progressed toward the proximal center.
So if even Zimbabwe is still too far away for most people to visit, then we really are screwed, and Discworld is, indeed—as legend records—Too Big to Not Fail.
Not some random cunt with a Wordpress moaning. We were just wrong at the qubit-counts required to outpace classical computing, which we thought were considerably smaller.
Is that the Royal We? Must be, because I sure don't think anyone else with a qubit chub is voluntarily sharing your misogynist tub.
In the spring of 2017 Tang took a class on quantum information taught by Scott Aaronson, a prominent researcher in quantum computing. Aaronson recognized Tang as an unusually talented student and offered himself as adviser on an independent research project. Aaronson gave Tang a handful of problems to choose from, including the recommendation problem. Tang chose it somewhat reluctantly.
Good lord. Aaronson is one of the few people in this field I actually respect, and even his best efforts to put some robust daylight in between QC and classical algorithms are not exactly stumping Terence Tao.
What the beginner soon learns: * "(" and "{" symbols are found in different places on the keyboard, and look different, too—if you're not too vain to be caught dead in your corrective eyewear * "#" leads a furtive double life: inscrutable on your touch-tone phone, and just as inscrutable here, as well * manual indentation is a thing (but do you properly use tabs or spaces?) * there are several types of symbols which travel mainly in pairs * you can muck around freely with what you type in between the double quotation marks, and your program will still compile (no matter how rude you make it—and because of this, you grok for the first time in your life why some people are drawn to this arcane form)
Note that if you're clever enough to improv something in between the double quotes that causes your program not to compile, you're probably already on your way to becoming a real programmer.
Gist of the story: Bell Labs taught EQN to typists in under an hour, to a level where they were able to reproduce most of the mathematics that needed to be typeset. Obviously, these typists were way more mature/professional than the majority of my freshman classmates way back when.
———
About that nice, pedagogical exercise: main doesn't declare it's return value (or its argument list), the function doesn't supply an explicit return value (there's an implicit return 0; inserted by invisible elves), and printf itself—your first friend—is a notorious hole in the C type system.
And it only gets worse when you visit the other side.
From The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike: int scanner(const char *data, char *buffer, size_t buflen) {
char format[32];
if (buflen == 0)
return 0;
snprintf(format, sizeof(format), "%%%ds", (int)(buflen-1));
return sscanf(data, format, buffer); }
When you've typed that little ditty out, not entirely from memory, but from mastery of all the various arcane necessities—and without consulting a cheat sheet—and it compiles the first time, T&OT (then and only then) you've demonstrated something to self/instructor about your competence to freely improvise in the C language.
But still -1 for that coyote-ugly NSFW manifest constant 32.
If you can type that snippet out, without the manifest constant 32, using precisely the smallest automatic array which is guaranteed not to fail on any platform where the code reasonably compiles—and the comment block at the top explains the reasoning process with full reference to all pertinent passages of the C standard—hand the person their technical diploma already; this is one Navy Seal–caliber code monkey. (Remember to make sure that your locale does not screw this up, and to provide the precise reference to the C standard which justifies your conclusion.) I'm not sure what kind of dire hoops you'll need to jump through to introduce this precise buffer size as a compile-time constant (in C, not C++), but have no fear: it turns out that the C preprocessor is Turing complete.
Moving everyone to a 32-hour week with only 10% reduction in salary would be an optimal benefit to society,...
Some people complain about all the gun–foot problems associated with C++ not having a garbage collector, but then they blithely introduce the word "everyone" after a gerund or the word "if", as if that's not far more dangerous than dereferencing an unchecked pointer (many of these seem to regard the class of algorithms known as "collision detection" as having originated in the arcade era of the 1980s and 1990s—thus neglecting the au courant car–life problems associated with a badly timed, asynchronous GC gag).
That innocuous-seeming word, "everyone", has a lining, and it's not a silver Audi.
When something is made to be foolproof, nature invents a better fool.
I'm sure for many people out there, their productivity is incompressible. The most productivity they can squeeze out of themselves on any given day is 4–6 hours. There are people who can't go four days without sex (not without a short leash, stretched taut), and there are people who can't go four work days without screwing the pooch (downhill in both directions).
So then you get into a scenario of a four-day week only for those who can. The division of the workforce into "cans" and "can nots" surely won't cause any mushroom clouds to erupt at the water cooler, no, not one little bit.
Safe, GC languages don't implement self as a pointer, and they don't implement the keyword everyone either: neither by pointer, nor reference, nor value shall a bent-kneed barrel of monkeys be invoked through a uniform interface of vapid polymorphism.
So it would make evolutionary sense to have a mild seasonal depression: you should just want to hole up somewhere and not do much until conditions improve.
That was before the invention of razor blades, gelatin capsules, and handguns.
Turns out humans don't have an incredible fear of heights merely because it's dangerous to fall. Our fear of heights was multiplied by having to offset this sluggish, seasonal brick, gratuitously loaded on top of other oppressive psychological burdens by a corner-cutting mother nature.
It does not make sense to drag affect down into the mud to cope with the seasonal management of stored energy in any primate which advances much past hurtling rocks, nor in any small, songless songbird who can manage to convince his or her delicate sense of self-preservation that some shiny, spotless wall of glass simply isn't there.
Perhaps it looked like a good evolutionary idea at the time, but it sure hasn't held up to the test of time.
I was suspicious that too many edges had been sanded off the narrative: no data on how long it sat on the porch, no data on its final recovery after the last segment (what happened to the fart spray?), no data on anyone facing charges from police (there was way too much identifying data in these clips to prevent friends and relatives from recognizing the locations), and after the first segment, no data on who went out to collect the device.
Additionally, his tone leans slightly to the smug and away from the geeky.
I discounted my suspicions, because the risks of getting caught if it were fake were too high to countenance—for such a smart guy (now known as previously such a smart guy).
What half the Trump supporters believe about Trump's tariffs: that the foreign company simply pays the tax, and then offers their product in the American market at the same price as before, for Americans to continue to enjoy at their accustomed cost. Easiest win-win of all time. (That was the first clue.)
Supply curves only work this way in the extreme short term, as changes to the supply-side production level don't happen overnight (they might have to eat something in the short term so as not to wind up with unsold merchandise).
In reality, there's an extremely complex dance of supply and demand curves, which might involve many thing, including suppliers exiting some products or markets (shrinking supply), continuing to sell into the same markets with the entire tariff expressed in their new price point (at the same unit profitability, but with less sales volume, also shrinking supply), or continuing to sell into the same markets with only a fraction of the tariff expressed in their new price point (at less unit profitability, but similar sales volumes, in only this case not shrinking supply).
However, with less profit, the corporation will likely move to trim cost somewhere in the pipeline: excellent support becomes mediocre support, metal parts get changed to plastic parts, Q/A testing is reduced, warranties are shortened, etc. (All this directly from the unchallenged economic theorem of "no free lunch"—the other side of this theorem is a socialist's pipe dream).
Thus tariffs are always a contraction on the supply side to a first order, which almost always leads to higher prices on the demand side, which almost always leads to lower aggregate sales within the product sector. Viewed from a larger perspective, entire economic sectors can shrink in relevance as tariffs make the sector less appealing to the end consumer (substitution effects respect no preordained boundaries).
Meanwhile, if the tariffed imports continue to sell at all—it doesn't take much to completely kill a trade relationship, because in a competitive global economy, profits usually hang by a knife-edge—the U.S. government sees an increase in tariff-related general revenue. Note that it's always the best first approximation to view this tax as having been paid by the end consumer, because any other equilibrium point takes work to explain.
With this specific revenue in hand, some partisan dunderheads view this as the ideal time to haul out their magic earmark calculator.
My favourite example of this was the Canadian government announcing that 100% of Canadian tritium exports to the U.S. were not going into the U.S. nuclear arsenal. No, but because Canadian tritium satisfied almost the whole of U.S. non-military domestic demand, it freed up 100% of the sparse U.S. production to go into military applications: a distinction without a difference if I've ever seen one—though you can make this narrative work if you believe that Canadian tritium was baptised, and American tritium is heathen, that this metaphysical paint shall nevermore wash off, and that the whole point of the clever arrangement was to keep conscientious, baptised tritium out of heathen nuclear warheads.
In American politics, all general revenue is contested on the same terms. Earmarks are an extremely narrow mechanism (which the Republicans recently voted to eliminate entirely, but that's another story).
Finally, it's all ridiculous anyway, because you've deliberately substituted domestic goods with higher price tags for imported goods with lower price tags (quality distinctions are already fully factored in). Almost always the magic coefficient of "buy local" does not cover the spread (this verges on being a central theorem of modern economics). In many cases, it's easy to show some group of people who benefited—or think they did—by slicing off the sides of the big picture. But do they count all the times that entrepreneurs decided to not start a new business, because the
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First the alcoholic needs to sober up, and only then can he or she look for an actual job. Cutting outrageous over-consumption by 99% is a starting point, not a finish line.
Person 1: You're useless and unreliable.
Person 2: Oh yeah? Well, I used to be shitfaced all day long.
Person 1: My bad. I misjudged you. Next drink's on me.
You're not much into round-trip thinking, are you?
Without the captains of industry expending all this money on advertising, the products we buy would be a lot cheaper, and the money we all save on our merchandise could be spent directly supporting the channels we most prefer, which—once adequately supported—would probably have a liberal shoulder for free riders in any case.
System A: a lot of money spent on advertising production and distribution, with no direct benefits (except for the small number of people with narrow and unusual interests who actually enjoy the ads for their own sake).
System B: no money wasted on advertising production or distribution. All of the money invested in content creation and product manufacture.
Yet, somehow, in System B, with less overhead, there's not possibly enough to go around.
It might not play out this way, but any coherent economic theory needs to explain how eliminating a dead weight cost (advertising) might leave things worse (in aggregate).
Hint: it probably starts with the observation that the peer community is too effective at getting the word out about which products suck and which products don't, and Big Cheese is not going to simply sit around and stand for that.
And so we get these clusterfuck revenue models, where subjecting yourself to caustic brain-rot tens of thousands of times over the course of your life is portrayed as a marginal, collective good.
Well, I, for one, am not buying into this tube-steak sizzlegasm.
Four significant digits? Clearly the surveillance state is further along—and far better managed by the inerrant, wage-slave minions of the Deep State—than anyone heretofore suspected.
A fruit is basically just a green or red/orange/yellow fetus that you can pluck and peel with a pairing knife.
You think the plants don't care because they don't reflexively cover their nads whenever anyone shows up with a baseball and a baseball bat? That they exist in pure vegetative bliss, like a steer happily chewing his cud, wondering what all the fuss is about?
You need to think a little bit harder about vegetative value systems. Try to work your way past the death fixation of Judeo-Christian ethics. Mostly we didn't kill slaves, either. And if they're happily alive, what's the problem?
Also, prairie agriculture makes extensive use of power equipment, and has for some time now (it's on the internet, you can look it up).
That's the daily breakfast prayer of the little-known prairie Ent, Skullgluten.
So regularly harvesting your testicles would be okay, so long as they grow back within a year or two, almost to their former size and glory?
FTFY.
Hot tip: if three fat zeroes takes the edge off your erection, you're thinking with your wanker and not your brain. ROI functions are linear. Only wankernomics includes step functions that don't survive a currency exchange.
Unlike most military engagements, you at least know who the bastard is and what the bastard's done before you rip him a new one in cold blood, so I'd say that's still pretty far to the progressive end of the spectrum.
But it's even worse than that, because it's also penny wise and pound foolish.
Once upon a time, five clever guys in Taiwan could design a beige box. Now we're worried about Apple lacking the engineering resources to update a minor platform that's easily their most minimal commitment out of their common laptop, iMac, and iMac Pro lineup?
It costs Apple far more to maintain the retail presence for this product line than to maintain the minor engineering tweaks (which, at a four-year cadence, is hardly blistering). Easily their largest engineering expense is validating the thermal management environment (the vast majority of the guts are pure Intel). But it's not like their laptops or the iMac don't also require the same investment. And then there's the Apple T2 security processor. Apple will abandon that project when hell freezes over. And once you've sunk those resources, you can hardly go around whining that it's painfully expensive to integrate into your own product line.
Besides, Apple has already applied MBA logic by ditching the Mac mini with an acceptable, internal GPU (external GPUs are expensive, and hindered by the thin Thunderbolt channel—do not be fooled by the Thunderbolt's 40 Gb/s bandwidth rating, for most serious GPU applications, that's pathetic; and latency is not improved by this dodge, either).
Physicists demand to know why there are 36 fundamental particles (or 37 if you include the Higgs boson) rather than 35. If there was 35, they would ask about 34. If there was two, they would ask about one. And some physicists wouldn't even stop there.
In the desktop space (excluding laptops), Apple—almost a trillion dollar company these days—has three whole crummy options: the insanely integrated iMac (throw away your display in each upgrade cycle), the insanely expensive iMac Pro (strictly for the 1%), and the insanely niche Mac mini.
That a weird approach to modularity, if you aren't purely in the dollar extraction business.
Instead, they could make an integrated display (with all of the connectivity of an iMac) and provide a mount on the back for the "brains" (which would look a lot like the current Mac mini), with a single TB3 connection point (and some provision for shared power).
Then the Mini could come in three versions: minimalist, minimalist plus decent internal GPU (maybe 0.5" thicker), and maximalist (probably a cube with the same desktop footprint as the Mini, that's now sadly too cumbersome to hang off the back of your integrated monitor, though it might hang comfortably off a special monitor stand). Large displays could have two mount points, the second to hang an additional GPU off of a second TB3 channel to the brain module, so even if you started with the base model, you aren't screwed.
But Apple learned long ago that modularity and design don't go together (and certainly not at the profit margins to which they've become accustomed). That's what most incredible about the Mac mini: it has the expansion potential to do anything via the burly four-barrel USB-C ports, but only at the expense of turning the back of your desk into a rat's nest of short, horrid wires connected to tubby little devices (unless you plan to pay $100 per cable, you're looking at 18" maximum for most TB3 peripherals).
So they sliced things up in this weird way because design (and because ixnay right to repair) and it barely covers 80% of the standard-usage RGB colour-space already, and blue is pretty niche, so surely Apple could simplify this decomposition to merely RG.
Which begs the question, why does the MBA include both management and administration? Surely one of those could be discarded, and you'd still cover 80% of the solution space, with an education at half the cost, at an ROI instantaneous, so far as you education allows you to see, regardless of whether you went in for the MB or the MA.
You can't stop safely if you peg the brakes and the person behind you is just finishing a lane change, or typing a text message.
I tend to apply the principle of least surprise. The safest action is usually the one that least surprises all the cars around you vying to trade paint.
The bright-line yellow light rule is a stupid rule to fetish over, in any case.
A good rule to fetish over is not entering an intersection until all the arrows are pointing in the right direction that you'll be able to exit the intersection promptly. If I enter an intersection before the car in front of me has itself exited the intersection (with less than a full car length behind to tuck myself into) it's usually after reading the traffic ahead. I'm probably right in my prediction 19 times out of 20. Maybe once a year I leave my rear tires dangling in the exit-side crosswalk by the time the pedestrians have started to rumble (forcing them to funnel around my metallic backside).
I can't even recall the last time I actually blocked cross traffic by the time the light changed.
Nothing screams life of the party like entering an intersection on the green, and still being trapped inside the intersection after the red. Is that even a ticket? Well, if you need to know (I don't), ask a grammar Nazi near you.
Great post.
Not as obvious as it looks. Personally, signing onto the slate of an omnibus Google competitor would make me think twice about future repercussions.
Google wields powers great and small. They've never been as cutthroat with their great powers as Microsoft was with theirs back in the day (a high-water mark rarely replicated), but at this point, even Google's small powers wielded in small ways can really pluck your nads bald if you're caught off guard on the wrong foot.
Because everybody wants to repeat a tedious task on a monthly basis, without any forewarning or focus on what diabolical changes have been recently enacted.
If you can quickly size up and imagine what all those cryptic tick boxes imply, you probably don't use Facebook in a serious way.
If you can't quickly imagine what all those cryptic tick boxes imply, you probably don't see much point in the monthly visit to the Swahili proctologist's office.
Just imagine if Facebook instead had a page "see all the places we shared your data over the last 30 days" and each item had a handy tick box beside it "never do this again". Then, after you press submit, Facebook AI reviews all your ticks and puts up a screen: you seem kind of tetchy about us sharing your speedy cross-town junkets after those short calls to your wife that you're working late. Is this what you wish us to filter?
Yes, people would visit that page, all the damn time.
Dihydrogen monoxide is a notorious killer.
Only when Big Broccoli invents a green floret as addictive as tobacco or bacon-flavoured ice cream, will "can kill you" matriculate into freshman Epidemiology 101.
Good thing there's only one internet, otherwise there might possibly be two opinions which don't fundamentally agree, shattering the awesome power of the internet to cast doubt asunder. Food for thought: an internet fork might well be worse for civilization than a Bitcoin fork.
Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman — 19 April 2015
Rust by Jonathan Waldman — 3 April 2015
I'll give you a hint: whatever the coatings contain (much is shrouded in secrecy) they contain plenty of BPA.
Dossier: Can coatings — December 2016
There's an insane amount of these epoxy resins manufactured in America, and then spread very, very, very thin, them maintained in constant contact with food or drink, for days or weeks or months (during highly variable storage conditions, too).
Sperm Count Dropping in Western World — 26 July 2017
Not exactly a smoking gun.
BPA is well known as a potent source of smokeless powder.
I'd love to see a graphic of epoxy can liners over the past 40 years denominated in m^2 hour per capita (average duration of food contact times total coated area of container in constant contact with food until food consumed). It just might tell a sad tale of sad tails.
I once owned a first generation CD player. The audiophiles were not wrong. The analog recording process had evolved over decades to use microphones that were intrinsically too bright, to compensate for the LP recording process, which was intrinsically low-pass.
All the original CD transfers from the early 1980s are ludicrously shrill. On the other hand, every audio CD I've ever bought going all the way back to 1983 is still playable, but I have to manually equalize everything from the 1980s differently than what came later. The original CDs also ruined stereo staging, as perceived by a listener with sufficiently good speakers. The vast majority used a single DAC, which was multiplexed between the two channels (rendering the two channels permanently half a sample out of phase). In addition, the earlier recordings (especially when played on the earlier players) had a lot of structural quantization noise. Both of these last two problems disappeared with the advent of the 1-bit DAC, interpolated to 20-bit precision, combined with changes to recording technology which computationally dithered out the quantization error term.
Yes, there were plenty of idiots who blamed all these very real problems on the digital process itself. The digital process itself was a broken panacea before an additional decade of secret sauce was quietly supplied behind the scenes. And there is still a group of people out there who think that digital signals travel best over uni-directional, oxygen-free copper wire. But I wouldn't call these people Luddites. I'd call them nearly anything else—but not Luddites.
Some of these people now have hermetically-sealed listening rooms equipped with HEPA filters and helium recirculation pumps—because not even regular indoor air is pristine enough until fully ensconced in a Goldfinger money pit.
Another effect worth mentioned is the analogy to the transition from incandescent bulbs to modern LED lighting. If you've been used to the yellowish incandescent colour-temperature for decades and decades, the new whiter-whites seem peculiar. Then when you get used to the new whiter-whites and you go back to the yellow incandescents, it's now the incandescents that seem weird.
Some of the early CD problems was simply a change of customary colour temperature.
All of this was hotly contested back in 1983 and 1984. Some of the loudest voices in the room were the audiophiles with $30,000 of analog gear in their listening rooms, many of whom claimed to hear nuance that mere mortals couldn't detect.
There was one voice of reason in the wild-west wilderness of the early digital era, and this was the NRC psycho-acoustic research center in Ottawa, Canada.
National Research Council
The facility also tested audiophiles, and they gradually identified a group of people they called "golden ears", who really could hear more a
Are you on drugs?
From videotape format war:
By the mid-1980s every sentient consumer on the planet (with less than a PhD in navel lint) knew that consumer gadgets—like marriage—are a package deal. And like marriage, "caveat emptor" is the word of the day, as every now-unplayable Betamax fairly tale soundly advises.
That pretty much sums up the iPhone right there: reeked of true love (at first sight), but ultimately just another chiselled, gracile cad right from the splendid skirt-lift of the inaugural staged event.
Your definition of the word "all" is 80% FOMO bling.
You see, the earth really is flat (and disc-like), and all the early settlements started out at the rim—strictly established in alphabetic order—and gradually we progressed toward the proximal center.
So if even Zimbabwe is still too far away for most people to visit, then we really are screwed, and Discworld is, indeed—as legend records—Too Big to Not Fail.
Is that the Royal We? Must be, because I sure don't think anyone else with a qubit chub is voluntarily sharing your misogynist tub.
Major Quantum Computing Advance Made Obsolete by Teenager — 31 July 2018
Good lord. Aaronson is one of the few people in this field I actually respect, and even his best efforts to put some robust daylight in between QC and classical algorithms are not exactly stumping Terence Tao.
Original K&R program: boiler plate, missing boiler plate, boiler plate, "hello, world\n", boiler plate.
The original version:
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("hello, world\n");
}
What the beginner soon learns:
* "(" and "{" symbols are found in different places on the keyboard, and look different, too—if you're not too vain to be caught dead in your corrective eyewear
* "#" leads a furtive double life: inscrutable on your touch-tone phone, and just as inscrutable here, as well
* manual indentation is a thing (but do you properly use tabs or spaces?)
* there are several types of symbols which travel mainly in pairs
* you can muck around freely with what you type in between the double quotation marks, and your program will still compile (no matter how rude you make it—and because of this, you grok for the first time in your life why some people are drawn to this arcane form)
Note that if you're clever enough to improv something in between the double quotes that causes your program not to compile, you're probably already on your way to becoming a real programmer.
———
Brian Kernighan on successful language design: on teaching notation — uploaded 17 November 2015
Gist of the story: Bell Labs taught EQN to typists in under an hour, to a level where they were able to reproduce most of the mathematics that needed to be typeset. Obviously, these typists were way more mature/professional than the majority of my freshman classmates way back when.
———
About that nice, pedagogical exercise: main doesn't declare it's return value (or its argument list), the function doesn't supply an explicit return value (there's an implicit return 0; inserted by invisible elves), and printf itself—your first friend—is a notorious hole in the C type system.
And it only gets worse when you visit the other side.
From The Practice of Programming by Kernighan and Pike:
int scanner(const char *data, char *buffer, size_t buflen)
{
char format[32];
if (buflen == 0)
return 0;
snprintf(format, sizeof(format), "%%%ds", (int)(buflen-1));
return sscanf(data, format, buffer);
}
When you've typed that little ditty out, not entirely from memory, but from mastery of all the various arcane necessities—and without consulting a cheat sheet—and it compiles the first time, T&OT (then and only then) you've demonstrated something to self/instructor about your competence to freely improvise in the C language.
But still -1 for that coyote-ugly NSFW manifest constant 32.
If you can type that snippet out, without the manifest constant 32, using precisely the smallest automatic array which is guaranteed not to fail on any platform where the code reasonably compiles—and the comment block at the top explains the reasoning process with full reference to all pertinent passages of the C standard—hand the person their technical diploma already; this is one Navy Seal–caliber code monkey. (Remember to make sure that your locale does not screw this up, and to provide the precise reference to the C standard which justifies your conclusion.) I'm not sure what kind of dire hoops you'll need to jump through to introduce this precise buffer size as a compile-time constant (in C, not C++), but have no fear: it turns out that the C preprocessor is Turing complete.
———
Some people complain about all the gun–foot problems associated with C++ not having a garbage collector, but then they blithely introduce the word "everyone" after a gerund or the word "if", as if that's not far more dangerous than dereferencing an unchecked pointer (many of these seem to regard the class of algorithms known as "collision detection" as having originated in the arcade era of the 1980s and 1990s—thus neglecting the au courant car–life problems associated with a badly timed, asynchronous GC gag).
That innocuous-seeming word, "everyone", has a lining, and it's not a silver Audi.
I'm sure for many people out there, their productivity is incompressible. The most productivity they can squeeze out of themselves on any given day is 4–6 hours. There are people who can't go four days without sex (not without a short leash, stretched taut), and there are people who can't go four work days without screwing the pooch (downhill in both directions).
So then you get into a scenario of a four-day week only for those who can. The division of the workforce into "cans" and "can nots" surely won't cause any mushroom clouds to erupt at the water cooler, no, not one little bit.
Safe, GC languages don't implement self as a pointer, and they don't implement the keyword everyone either: neither by pointer, nor reference, nor value shall a bent-kneed barrel of monkeys be invoked through a uniform interface of vapid polymorphism.
That was before the invention of razor blades, gelatin capsules, and handguns.
Turns out humans don't have an incredible fear of heights merely because it's dangerous to fall. Our fear of heights was multiplied by having to offset this sluggish, seasonal brick, gratuitously loaded on top of other oppressive psychological burdens by a corner-cutting mother nature.
It does not make sense to drag affect down into the mud to cope with the seasonal management of stored energy in any primate which advances much past hurtling rocks, nor in any small, songless songbird who can manage to convince his or her delicate sense of self-preservation that some shiny, spotless wall of glass simply isn't there.
Perhaps it looked like a good evolutionary idea at the time, but it sure hasn't held up to the test of time.
I was suspicious that too many edges had been sanded off the narrative: no data on how long it sat on the porch, no data on its final recovery after the last segment (what happened to the fart spray?), no data on anyone facing charges from police (there was way too much identifying data in these clips to prevent friends and relatives from recognizing the locations), and after the first segment, no data on who went out to collect the device.
Additionally, his tone leans slightly to the smug and away from the geeky.
I discounted my suspicions, because the risks of getting caught if it were fake were too high to countenance—for such a smart guy (now known as previously such a smart guy).
What half the Trump supporters believe about Trump's tariffs: that the foreign company simply pays the tax, and then offers their product in the American market at the same price as before, for Americans to continue to enjoy at their accustomed cost. Easiest win-win of all time. (That was the first clue.)
Supply curves only work this way in the extreme short term, as changes to the supply-side production level don't happen overnight (they might have to eat something in the short term so as not to wind up with unsold merchandise).
In reality, there's an extremely complex dance of supply and demand curves, which might involve many thing, including suppliers exiting some products or markets (shrinking supply), continuing to sell into the same markets with the entire tariff expressed in their new price point (at the same unit profitability, but with less sales volume, also shrinking supply), or continuing to sell into the same markets with only a fraction of the tariff expressed in their new price point (at less unit profitability, but similar sales volumes, in only this case not shrinking supply).
However, with less profit, the corporation will likely move to trim cost somewhere in the pipeline: excellent support becomes mediocre support, metal parts get changed to plastic parts, Q/A testing is reduced, warranties are shortened, etc. (All this directly from the unchallenged economic theorem of "no free lunch"—the other side of this theorem is a socialist's pipe dream).
Thus tariffs are always a contraction on the supply side to a first order, which almost always leads to higher prices on the demand side, which almost always leads to lower aggregate sales within the product sector. Viewed from a larger perspective, entire economic sectors can shrink in relevance as tariffs make the sector less appealing to the end consumer (substitution effects respect no preordained boundaries).
Meanwhile, if the tariffed imports continue to sell at all—it doesn't take much to completely kill a trade relationship, because in a competitive global economy, profits usually hang by a knife-edge—the U.S. government sees an increase in tariff-related general revenue. Note that it's always the best first approximation to view this tax as having been paid by the end consumer, because any other equilibrium point takes work to explain.
With this specific revenue in hand, some partisan dunderheads view this as the ideal time to haul out their magic earmark calculator.
My favourite example of this was the Canadian government announcing that 100% of Canadian tritium exports to the U.S. were not going into the U.S. nuclear arsenal. No, but because Canadian tritium satisfied almost the whole of U.S. non-military domestic demand, it freed up 100% of the sparse U.S. production to go into military applications: a distinction without a difference if I've ever seen one—though you can make this narrative work if you believe that Canadian tritium was baptised, and American tritium is heathen, that this metaphysical paint shall nevermore wash off, and that the whole point of the clever arrangement was to keep conscientious, baptised tritium out of heathen nuclear warheads.
In American politics, all general revenue is contested on the same terms. Earmarks are an extremely narrow mechanism (which the Republicans recently voted to eliminate entirely, but that's another story).
Finally, it's all ridiculous anyway, because you've deliberately substituted domestic goods with higher price tags for imported goods with lower price tags (quality distinctions are already fully factored in). Almost always the magic coefficient of "buy local" does not cover the spread (this verges on being a central theorem of modern economics). In many cases, it's easy to show some group of people who benefited—or think they did—by slicing off the sides of the big picture. But do they count all the times that entrepreneurs decided to not start a new business, because the