I probably average a book a week. Some weeks I don't finish a book, but other weeks I finish two (since I read multiple books concurrently noting the finish date is easiest).
I greatly dislike breaking changes but sometimes it is necessary. Backward compatibility do the dawn of platform time gets increasingly expensive in every way. Technical debt exists here to, languages are not immune.
I was reluctant to move to Python 3, but now I see that this had to happen. Substituting iterators for lists in the APIs was essential to make it scalable to big data. Its not just for parsing little log files anymore.
That binaries break on every release of Scala is a defect in that platform. Yeah, I know, reasons, but it is still a significant defect.
I use Java a lot, so I know that there are debt issues. So I am willing to give them a pass on this. I'll buy the argument it was necessary. This is not the first breaking change in Java by the way, though previous ones have been small issues.
Main purpose of sleep is simply saving energy. It's hard to safely find food in the dark, so it's better to go into a power down mode instead, and expend the energy during the day. Not mysterious at all.
This is not an actual fact. It is a simplistic speculation as to the possible "main purpose of sleep" purporting to be an incontrovertible truth. But the ubiquity of sleep to all essentially all vertebrates (at least) suggests this cannot be "the answer". Yes, you can find lots of places claiming that animal X "does not sleep" but if you dig just a little into the claim, you find that really they just have a very different sleep pattern.
There is a pretty obvious demonstration that "it mainly conserves energy" cannot be true. If you are in a normal state of health and are deprived either of food, or sleep, which will kill you quicker? It is the lack of sleep. If it was entirely (or mostly) a matter of "saving energy" then being deprived of all energy (in the form of food) would seem to be more lethal, but it isn't. If it is just a matter of "saving energy" why would sleep deprivation kill you at all?
The ubiquity of sleep, and evolutionary considerations, suggest that there is no "main purpose" of sleep but instead it is a process that has broad based benefits, that likely vary in importance from species to species. Of all the many metabolic processes an animal's body conducts some of them will be done more efficiently when the organism is quiescent. If there is a quiescent period as part of a diurnal cycle, those processes will migrate to being normally conducted during this period. For example (to pick one that is easy to relate to) muscle growth normally occurs during sleep. It is easy to see how cellular changes would be more efficiently conducted while the muscle is resting and more than you would (car analogy) repair a motor while it is running. Lack of sleep is lethal because there are metabolic maintenance processes that require sleep, and cannot be put off indefinitely.
Read the crummy UPI story, and the original paper, and there is nothing in the paper or the scientist's quotes that is either about, or pertains to, deflection of asteroids, except for three sentences of the reporter bloviating about it. The reporter apparently believes, based on nothing, that asteroid deflection means "destroying the asteroid".
This paper is about how asteroids fracture and reassemble in collisions with other asteroids and thus the typical structure to be expected. It is an advance in the state of asteroid analysis, but we already expected most of them would be "rubble piles" from several lines of evidence.
Deflection is not "blowing up asteroids", and no one thinks the way to deal with an asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to "blow it up". Shattering an asteroid leaves it on the same collision course, but in many pieces which is worse since many large pieces can be expected to hit over a wide area -- turning it into an asteroid "cluster bomb:". It is the same reason that many small nuclear bombs do more damage than the same energy in one large bomb.
Deflection depends on changing the asteroid's trajectory, while leaving it in one piece. So as far as it goes, this paper says that should be easier (less chance of permanent fragmentation).
CDs get lost, burn up in fires, get scratch, lots of things happen. streaming services generally are a much better way to preserve the files.
This claim - that it is silly to cache stuff locally in media that you control, that the "net will provide" - is something I've heard ever since before the Internet went public.
As the half-life of digital services is a few years at most, over the course of a decade or two, access to lots of things disappear. Any sort of service providing access to copyrighted material at a reasonable cost is one lobbyist-written piece of legislation, or lawsuit under existing law, away from being taken away. That is if the service itself does not suddenly shut down for its own reasons.
There is a reason that Archive.org exists, and is very important, and it does not successfully save everything. If there is something on the Internet this is of value to you, you should cache it locally.
So if I spend 12 hours a day in a Ketamine-induced stupor, I can lower my risk of Alzheimer's disease? Of course, when you do that, you greatly increase your risk of a bathtub-induced drowning.
This whole thing is bullshit. I hate to use the correlation is not causation meme, but the whole thing is like "Sitting increases your likelihood of death. I mean, it's not like people who are already dying can't often do much more than sit.
My 5 hours a night should have killed me 20 years ago to hear the "get more sleep" crowd. Yet I feel good with 5...
Good for you. As with absolutely everything in human physiology there is a statistical distribution of requirements, and for some people it is higher than the mean, and for some it is lower. Maybe you are just on the low end.
I am sure this does not apply to you, that your sleep-time estimates over time are absolutely accurate, but it is well known by sleep researchers that people in general are very bad about estimating how much they sleep. If, in the culture or subculture, needing little sleep is seen as a sign of merit of some sort reason, then people will tend to falsely report needing little sleep. Thus I do commonly see claims of people saying they need only a small number of sleep-hours, and must assume that most of them at least are mistaken.
But none of this in any way discounts the report. You need how much you need. If its less, then its less, but you still need it and cannot shortchange without consequences. It does not matter whether this is number is (really) 5 hours or 10.
There is a natural evolutionary process that makes it so. Of all the many metabolic processes your body conducts some of them will be done more efficiently when the organism is quiescent. If there is a quiescent period as part of a diurnal cycle, those processes will migrate to being normally conducted during this period. For example (to pick one that is easy to relate to) muscle growth normally occurs during sleep. It is easy to see how cellular changes would be more efficiently conducted while the muscle is resting and more than you would (car analogy) repair a motor while it is running.
There are a whole lot of AC's this morning who didn't even read the TFS. Yes, even the summary clearly explains that this is not the common oil interference effect. Not all things that look sort of similar are exactly the same thing.
It was possible to design and build LIGO, and detect extremely distant gravitational wave generating events, and figure out the masses of the two objects, and the amount of gravitational energy produced as the merged, and produce charts of the emission history, because we do know a lot about gravity. We don't know everything about gravity, but saying that we have "barely begun to grasp" it seems way off base.
The world's oceans contain about 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium. The world consumes 65,000 tonnes of uranium a year. There are thus 70,000 years worth of uranium at current consumption rates in the ocean. The world land reserves of uranium are estimated at 7.6 million tonnes at a recover cost of $260/kg, this is 115 years worth.
The lowest current estimated cost of recovering uranium from seawater is something like $300/kg, a price point at which the cost of the uranium still has little influence on fission power economics, and not much higher than that cost of recovery cited above for the 115 year reserve on land. The current market price of uranium right now is about $80/kg (element, not oxide), but it fluctuates a lot. The recent trendline is something like $100/kg, though in the past it has spiked as high as $400/kg (current dollars).
There no need for uranium-for-seawater in the foreseeable future (i.e. this century), and as long as mined uranium can be had for $100/kg or so there will be no steps taken to commercialize seawater extraction. Research on the topic, like this one, continues with refinements in extraction chemistry and efficiency as the focus, but not looking at the most cost-efficient extraction method, since that is the realm of commercialization. When land uranium resources start to run out, and prices rise, that is when all of the research on seawater extraction will be put to use, with a new focus on industrial operation cost and efficiency.
We are never going to run out of uranium. Even with no breeder reactors, or any thorium reactors.
Pointing out that Google does not need to monetize everything given its enormous revenue stream and wealth is hardly an "ad hominem" attack.
Decent companies do pro bono work all the time (I am working on such a project for my employer right now) using some part of their revenue to subsidize it. Making the vast body of literature available to the public would be a pro bono project that is literally in keeping with the goal Google set for itself (making the world's knowledge accessible).
Due to the complexities U.S. Congress has thrown into the copyright legislation, with retroactive term extension, etc., many of these works are, as I said, orphaned, with no way to clearly resell them. That is what the term means.
Like most of its projects, Google has lost interest in Google Books and has not bothered to maintain it, much less continue developing it. This has been going for more than a decade now. NGram search for example stopped adding new texts to the index in 2008.
Google fought and won a court case to put 25 million more orphan books which it had already scanned, out of print and largely unavailable, into Google Books. But decided it wouldn't bother. Because out of print books cannot be monetized, it would seem and thus are of no interest to Alphabet, which has over $100 billion in cash on hand. Spending a few million to support Books would shave a small fraction of a percentage off the growth of its investment wealth which is unacceptable to the company that has officially retired the "Don't be evil" slogan.
At least they haven't pulled the plug on it entirely. I guess there is still some monetization to be had from in-print books.
So I strongly suspect that such price collusion is already happening and algorithms make it no worse.
The first half of your statement is reasonable.
Care to explain how you support the second half wherein you posit that automating a process so that it happens much faster, more ubiquitously, with far more data than a human can process causes you to conclude that it must be "no worse"?
But what actually makes this interesting is that it may also be an emergent behavior as opposed to either intentional programming or an untended artifact of some algorithm
This is quite common in machine learning task optimization. Algorithms often find out that the best ways to "win" is to game the system - for example discovering flaws in models of the world and exploiting those instead of solving the intended problem.
No, I don't mean Newsom's top line rhetoric. I mean what are the actual changes that are being made to the project?
Is funding being cut? No.
Are any of the construction and land acquisition activities being planned over the next several years being changed? No.
Is the current route under construction, and due to be built over the next decade going to be changed in any way? No.
Newsom announced that the $28 billion or so currently appropriated to build a line south from San Francisco as far as Bakersfield will continue as planned, and all of the environmental and land acquisition planning for the route south from Bakersfield to LA will continue unchanged.
So what did Newsom actually declare? That he is not, at the moment, willing to rhetorically support the eventual goal of reaching LA - although it will not require changing any decisions for at least his first full term of office, and probably his second, if he is re-elected. But everything is proceeding as before.
I can't wait for USB sticks to come in 12" thick lead-lined concrete cases with free shipping from Alibaba.
Let's see the delivery guy try throwing that package across the front yard.
Says someone that knows nothing of radiation. Uranium produces only alpha particles which would be easily stopped with a thin plastic case....
Says someone who know way less about radiation than they think. The amount of uranium that would used in a magnetic storage device would be a tiny, insignificant amount true, but uranium absolutely emits gamma rays (the most common is an energetic 2.5127 MeV). Not only that, but the two immediate daughter products of U-238 decay (Th-234, Pa-234) have very short half-lives and also emit gamma rays (along with their beta emissions).
Uranium is very toxic, even if it’s not a radioactive isotope. Not sure I’d like to have that in my house.
It is not as toxic as lead. The OSHA permissible exposure limit for insoluble uranium compounds is five times higher than lead. Lead is still commonly used in solder, where it is exposed, and in fishing weights, and so forth (some people use lead glass for fancy goblets and drink out of it). Any uranium antimonide used in a magnetic platter is going to be a tiny amount in thin film (about 40 nanometers thick) in a sealed unit. The total amount a magnetic material in a 3.5 inch disk is just a few milligrams. The radioactivity of this would be thousands of time less than the radioactivity in an ionization smoke detector.
Don't let the occurrence of the word "uranium" throw you into a tizzy. If you own anything made of granite weighing more than a few ounces, you have more uranium in that than would be in a hard disk.
Given that someone made the device this AC comment is idiotic. Of course it has been touched by human hands, it did not materialize out of thin air. The people who touched it before knew what the heck they were doing, wore gloves, if that was necessary, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I probably average a book a week. Some weeks I don't finish a book, but other weeks I finish two (since I read multiple books concurrently noting the finish date is easiest).
I greatly dislike breaking changes but sometimes it is necessary. Backward compatibility do the dawn of platform time gets increasingly expensive in every way. Technical debt exists here to, languages are not immune.
I was reluctant to move to Python 3, but now I see that this had to happen. Substituting iterators for lists in the APIs was essential to make it scalable to big data. Its not just for parsing little log files anymore.
That binaries break on every release of Scala is a defect in that platform. Yeah, I know, reasons, but it is still a significant defect.
I use Java a lot, so I know that there are debt issues. So I am willing to give them a pass on this. I'll buy the argument it was necessary. This is not the first breaking change in Java by the way, though previous ones have been small issues.
"For many urban and transit planners, it was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned."
You must be one dumb ass urban planner to not know towns, cities, and neighborhoods needed to be "planned."
When they were children oh dumb ass AC.
That could use some help in learning Hindi. Heck, I hardly know a word of it!
Main purpose of sleep is simply saving energy. It's hard to safely find food in the dark, so it's better to go into a power down mode instead, and expend the energy during the day. Not mysterious at all.
This is not an actual fact. It is a simplistic speculation as to the possible "main purpose of sleep" purporting to be an incontrovertible truth. But the ubiquity of sleep to all essentially all vertebrates (at least) suggests this cannot be "the answer". Yes, you can find lots of places claiming that animal X "does not sleep" but if you dig just a little into the claim, you find that really they just have a very different sleep pattern.
There is a pretty obvious demonstration that "it mainly conserves energy" cannot be true. If you are in a normal state of health and are deprived either of food, or sleep, which will kill you quicker? It is the lack of sleep. If it was entirely (or mostly) a matter of "saving energy" then being deprived of all energy (in the form of food) would seem to be more lethal, but it isn't. If it is just a matter of "saving energy" why would sleep deprivation kill you at all?
The ubiquity of sleep, and evolutionary considerations, suggest that there is no "main purpose" of sleep but instead it is a process that has broad based benefits, that likely vary in importance from species to species. Of all the many metabolic processes an animal's body conducts some of them will be done more efficiently when the organism is quiescent. If there is a quiescent period as part of a diurnal cycle, those processes will migrate to being normally conducted during this period. For example (to pick one that is easy to relate to) muscle growth normally occurs during sleep. It is easy to see how cellular changes would be more efficiently conducted while the muscle is resting and more than you would (car analogy) repair a motor while it is running. Lack of sleep is lethal because there are metabolic maintenance processes that require sleep, and cannot be put off indefinitely.
Read the crummy UPI story, and the original paper, and there is nothing in the paper or the scientist's quotes that is either about, or pertains to, deflection of asteroids, except for three sentences of the reporter bloviating about it. The reporter apparently believes, based on nothing, that asteroid deflection means "destroying the asteroid".
This paper is about how asteroids fracture and reassemble in collisions with other asteroids and thus the typical structure to be expected. It is an advance in the state of asteroid analysis, but we already expected most of them would be "rubble piles" from several lines of evidence.
Deflection is not "blowing up asteroids", and no one thinks the way to deal with an asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to "blow it up". Shattering an asteroid leaves it on the same collision course, but in many pieces which is worse since many large pieces can be expected to hit over a wide area -- turning it into an asteroid "cluster bomb:". It is the same reason that many small nuclear bombs do more damage than the same energy in one large bomb.
Deflection depends on changing the asteroid's trajectory, while leaving it in one piece. So as far as it goes, this paper says that should be easier (less chance of permanent fragmentation).
CDs get lost, burn up in fires, get scratch, lots of things happen. streaming services generally are a much better way to preserve the files.
This claim - that it is silly to cache stuff locally in media that you control, that the "net will provide" - is something I've heard ever since before the Internet went public.
As the half-life of digital services is a few years at most, over the course of a decade or two, access to lots of things disappear. Any sort of service providing access to copyrighted material at a reasonable cost is one lobbyist-written piece of legislation, or lawsuit under existing law, away from being taken away. That is if the service itself does not suddenly shut down for its own reasons.
There is a reason that Archive.org exists, and is very important, and it does not successfully save everything. If there is something on the Internet this is of value to you, you should cache it locally.
So if I spend 12 hours a day in a Ketamine-induced stupor, I can lower my risk of Alzheimer's disease? Of course, when you do that, you greatly increase your risk of a bathtub-induced drowning.
This whole thing is bullshit. I hate to use the correlation is not causation meme, but the whole thing is like "Sitting increases your likelihood of death. I mean, it's not like people who are already dying can't often do much more than sit.
My 5 hours a night should have killed me 20 years ago to hear the "get more sleep" crowd. Yet I feel good with 5...
Good for you. As with absolutely everything in human physiology there is a statistical distribution of requirements, and for some people it is higher than the mean, and for some it is lower. Maybe you are just on the low end.
I am sure this does not apply to you, that your sleep-time estimates over time are absolutely accurate, but it is well known by sleep researchers that people in general are very bad about estimating how much they sleep. If, in the culture or subculture, needing little sleep is seen as a sign of merit of some sort reason, then people will tend to falsely report needing little sleep. Thus I do commonly see claims of people saying they need only a small number of sleep-hours, and must assume that most of them at least are mistaken.
But none of this in any way discounts the report. You need how much you need. If its less, then its less, but you still need it and cannot shortchange without consequences. It does not matter whether this is number is (really) 5 hours or 10.
Sleep does many, many things.
There is a natural evolutionary process that makes it so. Of all the many metabolic processes your body conducts some of them will be done more efficiently when the organism is quiescent. If there is a quiescent period as part of a diurnal cycle, those processes will migrate to being normally conducted during this period. For example (to pick one that is easy to relate to) muscle growth normally occurs during sleep. It is easy to see how cellular changes would be more efficiently conducted while the muscle is resting and more than you would (car analogy) repair a motor while it is running.
There are a whole lot of AC's this morning who didn't even read the TFS. Yes, even the summary clearly explains that this is not the common oil interference effect. Not all things that look sort of similar are exactly the same thing.
"mistakes like this don't typically happen in the well-to-do, perfectly manicured world of Silicon Valley startups" [citation needed]
Sarcasm?
It is so strikingly at odds with reality that I interpreted that as a sly bit of sarcasm.
It was possible to design and build LIGO, and detect extremely distant gravitational wave generating events, and figure out the masses of the two objects, and the amount of gravitational energy produced as the merged, and produce charts of the emission history, because we do know a lot about gravity. We don't know everything about gravity, but saying that we have "barely begun to grasp" it seems way off base.
The world's oceans contain about 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium. The world consumes 65,000 tonnes of uranium a year. There are thus 70,000 years worth of uranium at current consumption rates in the ocean. The world land reserves of uranium are estimated at 7.6 million tonnes at a recover cost of $260/kg, this is 115 years worth.
The lowest current estimated cost of recovering uranium from seawater is something like $300/kg, a price point at which the cost of the uranium still has little influence on fission power economics, and not much higher than that cost of recovery cited above for the 115 year reserve on land. The current market price of uranium right now is about $80/kg (element, not oxide), but it fluctuates a lot. The recent trendline is something like $100/kg, though in the past it has spiked as high as $400/kg (current dollars).
There no need for uranium-for-seawater in the foreseeable future (i.e. this century), and as long as mined uranium can be had for $100/kg or so there will be no steps taken to commercialize seawater extraction. Research on the topic, like this one, continues with refinements in extraction chemistry and efficiency as the focus, but not looking at the most cost-efficient extraction method, since that is the realm of commercialization. When land uranium resources start to run out, and prices rise, that is when all of the research on seawater extraction will be put to use, with a new focus on industrial operation cost and efficiency.
We are never going to run out of uranium. Even with no breeder reactors, or any thorium reactors.
Pointing out that Google does not need to monetize everything given its enormous revenue stream and wealth is hardly an "ad hominem" attack.
Decent companies do pro bono work all the time (I am working on such a project for my employer right now) using some part of their revenue to subsidize it. Making the vast body of literature available to the public would be a pro bono project that is literally in keeping with the goal Google set for itself (making the world's knowledge accessible).
Due to the complexities U.S. Congress has thrown into the copyright legislation, with retroactive term extension, etc., many of these works are, as I said, orphaned, with no way to clearly resell them. That is what the term means.
Like most of its projects, Google has lost interest in Google Books and has not bothered to maintain it, much less continue developing it. This has been going for more than a decade now. NGram search for example stopped adding new texts to the index in 2008.
Google fought and won a court case to put 25 million more orphan books which it had already scanned, out of print and largely unavailable, into Google Books. But decided it wouldn't bother. Because out of print books cannot be monetized, it would seem and thus are of no interest to Alphabet, which has over $100 billion in cash on hand. Spending a few million to support Books would shave a small fraction of a percentage off the growth of its investment wealth which is unacceptable to the company that has officially retired the "Don't be evil" slogan.
At least they haven't pulled the plug on it entirely. I guess there is still some monetization to be had from in-print books.
So I strongly suspect that such price collusion is already happening and algorithms make it no worse.
The first half of your statement is reasonable.
Care to explain how you support the second half wherein you posit that automating a process so that it happens much faster, more ubiquitously, with far more data than a human can process causes you to conclude that it must be "no worse"?
But what actually makes this interesting is that it may also be an emergent behavior as opposed to either intentional programming or an untended artifact of some algorithm
This is quite common in machine learning task optimization. Algorithms often find out that the best ways to "win" is to game the system - for example discovering flaws in models of the world and exploiting those instead of solving the intended problem.
No, I don't mean Newsom's top line rhetoric. I mean what are the actual changes that are being made to the project?
Is funding being cut? No.
Are any of the construction and land acquisition activities being planned over the next several years being changed? No.
Is the current route under construction, and due to be built over the next decade going to be changed in any way? No.
Newsom announced that the $28 billion or so currently appropriated to build a line south from San Francisco as far as Bakersfield will continue as planned, and all of the environmental and land acquisition planning for the route south from Bakersfield to LA will continue unchanged.
So what did Newsom actually declare? That he is not, at the moment, willing to rhetorically support the eventual goal of reaching LA - although it will not require changing any decisions for at least his first full term of office, and probably his second, if he is re-elected. But everything is proceeding as before.
I can't wait for USB sticks to come in 12" thick lead-lined concrete cases with free shipping from Alibaba.
Let's see the delivery guy try throwing that package across the front yard.
Says someone that knows nothing of radiation. Uranium produces only alpha particles which would be easily stopped with a thin plastic case....
Says someone who know way less about radiation than they think. The amount of uranium that would used in a magnetic storage device would be a tiny, insignificant amount true, but uranium absolutely emits gamma rays (the most common is an energetic 2.5127 MeV). Not only that, but the two immediate daughter products of U-238 decay (Th-234, Pa-234) have very short half-lives and also emit gamma rays (along with their beta emissions).
They will likely be on the way out for a few more decades.
Uranium is very toxic, even if it’s not a radioactive isotope. Not sure I’d like to have that in my house.
It is not as toxic as lead. The OSHA permissible exposure limit for insoluble uranium compounds is five times higher than lead. Lead is still commonly used in solder, where it is exposed, and in fishing weights, and so forth (some people use lead glass for fancy goblets and drink out of it). Any uranium antimonide used in a magnetic platter is going to be a tiny amount in thin film (about 40 nanometers thick) in a sealed unit. The total amount a magnetic material in a 3.5 inch disk is just a few milligrams. The radioactivity of this would be thousands of time less than the radioactivity in an ionization smoke detector.
Don't let the occurrence of the word "uranium" throw you into a tizzy. If you own anything made of granite weighing more than a few ounces, you have more uranium in that than would be in a hard disk.
Given that someone made the device this AC comment is idiotic. Of course it has been touched by human hands, it did not materialize out of thin air. The people who touched it before knew what the heck they were doing, wore gloves, if that was necessary, etc.
Yes, but perhaps there is only one in the entire Universe.