Recent submissions

Comment · 9 years ago
>This is an aspirational wish but not reality at the moment.

No shit. If it existed, it would be pointless to work on it.

Comment · 9 years ago
A system where anyone can rent out their CPU time will result in less centralization than we see with current cloud providers. A system where anyone can mine productively will result in less centralization than we see with current cryptocurrencies. Will it result in zero centralization? No, and I wouldn't expect it to. That's most likely impossible.
Comment · 9 years ago
I disagree. Making proof of work involve real applications rather than just cryptography means that machines will need to be general. It isn't possible to build an ASIC capable of running ordinary applications.

Bitcoin is entirely owned by people with ASICs. The barriers to entry are enormous. It's totally pointless for me to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, or even on my Beowulf cluster. But if mining involves normal computations like you'd want to run on a normal cloud, then a laptop is capable of doing useful work and the barrier to entry is low.

Making normal computers useful is a huge improvement over Bitcoin and is the motivvation behind currencies like Monero.

Comment · 9 years ago
>Coming up with a way to have a decentralised currency where everyone involved gets a fair say without consuming too many resources is a super interesting problem.

I think the obvious solution is to do useful work rather than throwing away work on crypto. Have miners solve real problems and give them credit for getting the right answer.

This is what Ethereum is supposed to do. I don't think it's a great solution. It's still extremely wasteful since every node runs every computation. Even something like TrueBit, which is designed to be scalable and efficient, is still far less efficient than normal cloud architectures. It still throws away the vast majority of the work in the interest of safety and incentives. These systems are good if you want trustworthy computation, but not if you want high-performance and power-efficient computation.

I'm trying to design a system where something like 95% of the work goes to useful computation, but I have nothing anywhere near shippable. It's a hard problem.

Comment · 9 years ago
That's why I mentioned it. I also disapprove of .google, but it's less ridiculous.
Comment · 9 years ago
1. No idea.

2. No idea.

3. No idea.

4. About 0%. They're laughably unscalable and wasteful.

Comment · 9 years ago
Especially something as generic as .dev. I could possibly see Google having a legitimate claim to a .google TLD, but not something like .dev that is in no way limited to Google.
Comment · 9 years ago
We lost that battle a long time ago. The Internet is mostly corporate now and will be for the foreseeable future.
Comment · 9 years ago
What sort of virtualization performance and features does Epyc have? I haven't seen much good information.

EDIT: Actually, yes I have. I know that Epyc allows encryption of every VM with a key the host can't access, which is wicked. But I haven't seen benchmarks or in-depth analysis.

Comment · 9 years ago
I have no problem with an episodic show, but I think an episodic Trek-like has problems. It just isn't plausible that a starship can come inches from destruction every week. The crew would wind up severely traumatized. If space travel were that dangerous, interstellar society would collapse. And it's implausible that they discover some Amazing Thing (like time travel) that should totally shatter their conception of reality and then forget about it in time for the next episode.
Comment · 9 years ago
Not on an LCD. The backlight is always on, even if the screen is black.

I wonder how much power the 50 pounds of JS on Youtube costs.

Comment · 9 years ago
I disagree. There's NO situation where this kind of update is good for users. Being unable to accidentally brick your machine is good, but no user benefits from having adware and spyware installed.
Comment · 9 years ago
>Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.

That doesn't entirely contradict what I said. We generally assume psychologists and therapists are benevolent, but they aren't allowed to disclose private information even if it's in the best interests of the patient. Even if we assume Facebook is perfectly benevolent, this kind of vigilante psychology with no oversight is scary. They've thrown out all established codes of ethics in favor of just doing whatever the hell they want.

And I'm certain Facebook isn't benevolent. They deliberately make their website as addictive as possible. They have run experiments that tried to make people unhappy. If this really is a selfless attempt to help their users, it's inconsistent with what Facebook has done before.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
I hate the way this article is written. This is a news story, not an editorial, but it's clearly trying to tell me what to think.

Here's the correct headline:

"Japanese politician required to leave chamber after bringing her baby to work"

The Post has gone downhill very quickly since Bezos took over.

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