gary_0

Another big one is climate change. Ask the ASI how to solve that, and it's just going to say make a huge push for more renewables like solar, and strongly disincentivize GHG emissions. We already knew we had to do that. But the people in charge of the economy don't wanna.

IIRC, a non-AMD contributor was working on adding HDMI 2.1 support to Linux's AMD driver, and then AMD managed to get the HDMI Forum to see that their position was moot and was making things very awkward for AMD.

> If you use new parts, you might save 80$

Valve very obviously isn't enjoying a fat margin on Steam Machines, but they're not a public company so profit is profit. And people who buy Steam Machines are more encouraged to buy games on Steam and pay that nice juicy 30%.

The point of a canary is that it's cryptographically signed, and it's possible to set up a duress passphrase that will delete the key when entered, so if everything works correctly an unauthorized party can't keep posting signed canaries.

Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.

I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able to be done by super special people, and intimidating or making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions.

"Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing learn a skill in order to join a community of people with that skill.

And in fact, saying "you are too stupid to learn that on your own, use an AI instead" is kind of gatekeeping on its own, because it implicitly creates a shrinking elite who actually have the knowledge (that is fed to the AI so it can be regurgitated for everyone else), shutting out the majority who are stuck in the "LLM slum".

I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns everything into a blur where events can't be described linearly. In other words, the math sometimes requires that effect precedes cause. As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is only preserved on a macroscopic scale. (IANAQP, but I'm going off my recollections of books by people who are.)

Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!

Thanks for sharing. Just curious, is there any way to perform globbing over a list of path-like strings instead of only directly on the filesystem?

As I understand it, compiling each source file separately and linking together the result was historically kind of a hack too, or at least a compromise, because early unix machines didn't have enough memory to compile the whole program at once (or even just hold multiple source files in memory at a time). Although later on, doing it this way did allow for faster recompilation because you didn't need to re-ingest source files that hadn't been changed (although this stopped being true for template-heavy C++ code).

The chips themselves add a bunch of new failure states to consider beyond software bugs, too. Maybe a bad wire or component puts too much load on the microcontroller's wee internal pin drivers and they melt into a permanent "on" state. Or a voltage fluctuation browns out the chip on boot, partially randomizing its RAM or registers. Or the chip manufacturer fixes some errata or discontinues a particular part number and now a pin you've left floating has become a hardware heisenbug. Or the wrong bit flips in your EEPROM after being in a hot machine for a few years. Suddenly a boring 555 looks pretty good. (Keep in mind, we're talking about "turn off heater after pulses stop", not "abort launch sequence if tank 3 pressure low". The latter is way above my pay grade.)

> quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky

Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)