IlegCowcat

This guy's metaphor completely and totally breaks down when he begins comparing today's space agencies to China and Portugal of the 15th century.

Apollo and the shuttle weren't caravels and galleons. To extend the aquatic metaphor here, Apollo was our most sophisticated floating log at the time, and the Shuttle was our first real attempt at tying some logs together so we could ferry supplies back and forth to a little sandbar (the ISS) we created 15 feet off shore. If we ever try for Mars, we'll probably be sending our first dug-out canoe.

China and Portugal knew how to create decent and practical sailing ships. We barely know how to get into space, much less have anywhere near the technology available to exploit it properly.

And most importantly: THERE IS NO ONE AND NOTHING OUT THERE TO TRADE WITH. No developed resources and easily-available goods we can just pluck out of the metaphoric ground and take back. Everything up there has to go through a very complicated and expensive process of development before it becomes useful and profitable.

The better metaphor for the current state of space development may be if Portugal was the only human settlement in all the world, and its only watercraft were floating logs. The China vs Portugal argument might work in two hundred or more years, when we actually have the space-going equivalent of caravels and galleons, but for right now just finding a decent oar we can paddle with is quite an accomplishment.

> Most of the reverse engineering was done by capturing the communication between the dongle and a Windows PC using Wireshark

Haha that's pretty cool

It's a really honest description of the attempts to move to neural networks.

At least the way it's written it feels like no 'data scientists' were involved, it was all done by data engineers (software developer rather than statistical/modelling knowledge)... Which is depressing, if even Airbnb are biased to hiring only good developers (rather than a mix)

You know it has to be pretty damn bad if they're breaking chinese labor laws...

Have they released all the scrolls yet?

Is it possible that organisms could adapt to the extreme environment in space and then get returned to earth with bad consequences for us?

It's much easier to do reverse engineering on programs compiled with old compilers, nowdays compiler are really good at optimizing shit, which means making the assembly code more complex, using new instructions etc...

Reminds me of Coccinelle - a language for writing semantic patches for C (like eg: add close_foo(fooid) in every function that has open_foo for each fooid etc...) , but I see Rascal can do some more.

I remember someone saying something along the lines of “Facebook will try and copy and crush us, but not this time- by the time they work out what’s happening, it’ll be too late”. Facebook seem to have noticed what’s happening and are moving like the wind to try and crush us. Are they too late or are we too late? Or neither?

I have one very old uranium crystalware specimen sitting here - been in family for ages - it's awfully beautiful looking and our deep-blue LED christmas lights actually make it glow eerie.

The deeper-blue (indigo) LEDs reach into the wavelengths that the uranium glass glows at!

I wonder how much annually these monopolies collectively spend on lobbying gov against the populist temptation to break them up? Huge sums i assume. Huge.

I would first favour opening them up, see how it goes, and then consider alternative approaches if the desired outcome is not seen. I think it's critical to have a very clear idea of what the desired outcome would be before taking action. That would require a 20/ 20 view of what the problems are, but the monopolies are working hard to hide the problems from view. Google tries to present itself as not being a search dominant corporation (the Alphabet deception). Facebook is now a very big book and definitely needs 'editing'.

More regulation just makes it more difficult for smaller companies to comply. The giants will just expand their legal departments.

I am likely the odd one out here, but wouldn't having the capability to turbo a single core to, let's say, 5.5 GHz or higher as factory stock be more useful in real life than the one or all eight core turbo to 5 GHz instead of 4.7? There are still enough single core/single thread apps out there that could benefit from faster single core performance, and this newest and hottest (also in temperature) i9 cannot go faster in single core than the 9900K.