GIFtheory

How many Nobels do you have to win to post a credible opinion on the Internet, in your mind?

SimCity 2000 solved this problem 26 years ago: just beam the power down as a tight microwave beam. Granted, things get messy when the beam accidentally sweeps across your city, but such is the cost of progress.

The US does not exist in a vacuum. Cuba just ran out of fuel. These things have cascading effects. Even if you do believe the U.S. exists in a vacuum and you don’t drive a big truck, there are still obvious effects. Spirit airlines went bankrupt, for one. Will this be a global catastrophe? I hope not, but it could be if we’re unlucky.

> First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).

Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.

100% agreed. The moment I saw the “revised” syntax I had a real “what were they thinking” moment. You’re supposed to take the good parts of a good thing and add it to a bad thing, not the other way around!

Really, OCaml’s syntax is beautiful, unless you’re one of those people who loves to show off how adept they are at typing matching braces, parentheses, commas, and semicolons. Writing a little lambda in C++ is an impressive display of manual dexterity… [&](…,…){… return …; }; Who would rather write that than let f x y = … in?

The only way I’d improve OCaml syntax would be to add something like python style list comprehension.

This 100%. McMaster quietly perfected e-commerce at some point, and because we’re live in a fallen world, nobody decided to follow their lead. If only we could convince McMaster to sell toilet paper and cereal…

That’s a nice idea, but I’m skeptical—where is the new wealth coming from that will allow Lesotho to pay its workers more? It’s not an issue of strong-arming some bad guys in Lesotho to pay their workers more using tariffs as a negotiation tool.

I feel that conflating tariffs with some sort of negotiation tool to bring about positive global change is disingenuous, because the real aim is clearly protectionism.

I don’t see how tariffs magically create wealth for foreign exporters that translates into higher wages. Let’s say I can buy a $10 shirt from Lesotho with zero tariff. Now a 50% tariff gets imposed. I can either eat the tariff and pay $15, in which case Lesotho still gets their $10, or Lesotho can eat the tariff to keep their exports competitive, in which case Lesotho now makes $5.

The part about giving a competitive advantage to local producers is true, though…

This argument is problematic because it implies that a person from a different background who committed the same crimes (e.g., a poor, black, uneducated person without any fancy philosophical ideals) /should/ be locked up and the key thrown away. It doesn’t work that way. The law applies the same to all, and that’s the way I like it.

My first reaction to this news was, “fine, sounds like a silly requirement.” However, being a PhD graduate from a minority background, I really have to thank my advisor for the undergraduate outreach work he did, without which there is realistically a negligible chance I would have ended up with a PhD and a great research career. I don’t know what motivated him to do this work, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, if professors know that performing such duties helps them get promoted, perhaps it’s not a bad policy, as long as inequities exist in academia. There are so many other pressures on young faculty, outreach may be something that is hard to justify spending time on unless you have to do it in some sense.

I think the conclusion is that /total sleep time/ is actually very accurate, while deep/light/rem measurements are crap.

Interesting that this has 7x the cores of a M1 Ultra, but only 25% more memory bandwidth. Those will be some thirsty cores!