skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice. The market tends to trend towards a small number of players who all act collectively with or without the benefit of collaboration to serve their own interests.

The customer may have preferences along n dimensions where n is a very large number of choices and a small number of choices wherein their ability to effect the distribution of characteristics is limited to avoiding choices which make massive strides along multiple axis away from desirable areas. Regulations force all players into a reasonable space in the game board and let them compete within that space. It is the only practical way to achieve this.
If I write an assembler in C, I could use it to write object files with fancy machine code that the C compiler would never choose. Same with HotSpot, it’s not limited by the code generator it was bootstrapped from.
A good percentage of resolving App Store problems for big companies is somebody at the submitting company calling up somebody they know at Apple high enough on the food chain who will unblock things personally. That and the business implications of a public complaint ("will Apple retaliate against us?") are why you see blog posts from individuals about App Store problems and not from big companies.

You would think if you make Apple several million dollars that they'd give you a dedicated account rep or something (like AWS, or nearly any other large managed service company does). Newp. $1 or a million dollars, you're all the same to The Big A.
If you use a private tracker you will usually be fine.
In the case of the article Ubisoft is both the developer and owner of the store
It's an MVP so I decided to launch it as a free version. In the long future I may add paid plans if it goes well, but there will be a free version for sure.
And email is needed to create an account to save your content so it's only available for you, it won't be sold or things like that.
It is what I had in mind. Again, I'm being pendantic. If language X written in Y can rewrite to superfast Z, then you can... in language Y, write all of language X to mimic results. Sure it's not realistic, but neither are language comparisons.
The US passport is an enormous privilege. As well as being a native English speaker for business purposes.
The email I got from Sony back in March said that they were only disabling new purchases, "You will still be able to download your owned PS3, PS Vita, and PSP content, including games and video content." Full text: https://paste.debian.net/1224883/

Now that they've backed down, I'm pretty sure you can buy new PS3 games as well.
you will own nothing and you will be (un)happy
Is that really practical these days given the frequency of updates developers put out for their games?
I read that Victorinox regular tests their knives with a dishwasher. While knife people will cringe at this, to many a knife is but a tool. When the tool is dirty, throw it in the dishwasher with the other dirty kitchen tools. Makes sense, but I'd never do it.

The best part about the Victorinox line of knives is there handles. You can't ruin them with the dishwasher. Wood and other natural materials don't fare well in the dishwasher. Their steel (note quite sure what it is) is very corrosion resistant as well. It holds an edge long enough, and it is easy to sharpen. If you are a "knife is a tool" kind of a person, go with Victorinox.
This is a sort of reductionist viewpoint that's ignoring the realities of the market (in this case computer games) and how monopolies are created.

Games aren't fungible with each other. If you want to play Dark Souls, you have to buy it from From software. You can't go to an alternative Dark Souls provider that offers you better terms. Likewise Ubisoft has IP that fans want access to. Therefore due to copyright etc they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.

Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games.

These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.
>That piece of the IPCC report that article is cherry picking is a.) a bit out of date now

Did the latest IPCC report contain a more updated projection?

>b.) assuming a warming of 2C which we've already given up on, at least according to the more recent report which framed our current condition as a "code red"[0]

What is code red supposed to mean? I looked on wikipedia for a more detailed summary and got an "intermediate" projection of 2.7 °C of warming by 2100. I'm having trouble finding out what the "intermediate" projection was in the 2014 report, so it's unclear how much the forecasts changed. Depending on how "~2" is interpreted, it could be anywhere between a 0.7 degree rise and 0.2. How that would affect the estimate would be unknown, but 2% was the upper bound of the original estimate.

>though I find it very hard to believe that you missed that press release this some.

I'm having trouble understanding what your point is here. Are you accusing me of arguing in bad faith because the report says "code red", therefore it obviously means we're facing existential threat? I don't see how that follows. I could plausibly imagine a report coming out (for sake of argument, in feb 2020, before the death rates were known) saying that our situation with covid is "code red", but that doesn't mean I'll think we're literally at risk of going extinct from it.

>And to be clear, existential risk doesn't mean I'm claiming "we're going extinct!" it means that that lies in the realm of realistic possibility.

what counts is "realistic possibility" here? I guess if you take the most pessimistic interpretation as 2% (ie. 1 in 50 chance of earth going up in flames, 49 in 50 chance of nothing happening at all), then I suppose it's an high enough risk to count as a "realistic possibility", but I doubt the situation is that dire. It's far more likely to produce a normal distribution centered at 1.1% economic lost, the probability of 100% loss (ie. humans ceasing to exist) being at the tail end.

>The IPCC reports are well acknowledged to be fairly conservative and fail to incorporate a lot of unknowns (Thwaite's glacier is an obvious example of this).

Now would be a great time to answer my original question. "What's the evidence for "existential risk?". Are there studies that incorporates the unknowns in an objective way?

>He makes well reasoned arguments about how quickly conditions can change and how that could easily lead to massive extinction events (we're already in the 6th largest extinction event right now, which again, I'm sure you know).

Based on the description it sound less like an objective analysis on existential threats, and more of a "well if these things happen, then theoretically it will be Really Bad™".
I agree with you, but would like to add another "nuance":

Personally, I entertain the theory that a large number of people agreeing what an OS should be and do also isn't necessarily a good thing, even if it happened. That's how you end up with Windows: It's the greatest common denominator, and for a large group, that's really "low".

For example: I'm very much a fan of how Nix and NixOS deal with the configuration and maintenance of a system. But I'm sure that the Nix way wouldn't have survived a more streamlined distribution landscape. In fact, Nix also works on BSD and OSX, but -- at least to my mind -- NixOS would never have happened there.

And that's understandable. It's still ever-shifting and full of rough edges. It breaks with many established conventions and old "best practices". It's not for everyone. But it still represents one of the greatest paradigm shifts in system configuration I've witnessed so far. In a landscape where you get hammered into the conventional mold, such radical approaches could never blossom and prove their upsides.

Again, look at Windows. There's still no established package manager for non-geeks. For home users, downloading and installing software from all over the internet is still the norm -- and where it isn't, it has been replaced through utilities attempting to lock you in (Microsoft Store). Conformity is a great way to enforce stagnation.

Obviously, things are better in BSD-land, but I'd argue that that's due to the smaller user base, too. Plus there are also at least very specialized BSD distros, too (pfSense, for example).
Not necessarily[1].

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Why the hell does this site need to know my location?
I'm a free human being that expresses my honest opinions, regardless how many virtual points it creates, I won't ever tailor my comments towards public favorability. Please reconsider your inclination towards recommending that I
or anyone else ever change my/their personal choice of words to favor votes on a web site, it's a destructive attitude towards honest discussions.
It kills the most people weighted by net worth.
But you see, you could use asm to then write a C that generates fancy machine code.
Appreciating that Norvig is much smarter than myself...

I find his style to be not great, too many code-golfing one liners. Not everything has to be a list comprehension (or even, a double list comprehension). Give me a boring loop with minimal action per line, please.
Sales tax at 8.5% is another big one.
Your point about market inefficiency and misaligned incentives is a valid one, but government intervention, which is what many people in this thread are calling for, does not make market inefficiencies better; it makes them worse.

Ultimately, people get the market they create through their buying decisions. The reason these market inefficiencies and misaligned incentives exist is that game distributors know that people will spend a lot of money on games and won't pay much attention to the fact that they are actually not buying ownership but only a subscription. The only way to "fix" that, if it's a problem, is for people to change their buying behavior so it is no longer lucrative to distribute games on those terms.

> The distributor might also own the developer.

Yes, fair point, I had forgotten that Ubisoft in this case is both.
Of what? The climate/ecosystems as we know it dramatically changing? Yeah, but not "we're literally going extinct" scared.
That s the joke, he wasnt talking of any one side. BOTH think the other is evil anti american.
I don't want to be forced to install one-way updates just to play a single-player game.

Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.
> Which argues that maybe language choice just doesn't matter that much for security.

I think it just means that these languages all have elevated potential for security issues, but there are languages without pervasive gratuitous dynamism or memory problems.

> Static analysis tools and runtime hardening techniques don't "fix" C, exactly. But in practice they work well enough to push C's foibles down into the noise floor.

But that’s all additional effort to integrate these tools and practices onto a language which already has a very low iteration velocity (all of the time spent debugging memory issues, package issues, build system issues, etc which simply don’t exist in many modern languages).

> But at the same time, C remains, and will probably always remain, the easiest language on which to tune and optimize. It's not going anywhere. Our grandkids will still be using systems with C firmware at their core.

This sounds like a concession to me. Of course C will smolder on in obscure, legacy firmware long after it becomes obscure—so did COBOL, but we don’t pretend COBOL’s vestigial existence is owed to its merits rather than a quirk of history.

This is a fine and normal thing. C did it’s job for a time, but languages aren’t emerging which are better suited to modern computing requirements. This process will continue and these languages which are chipping away at C’s market share will be eroded themselves eventually.
So the game would check against a blockchain that the signature is valid every time you want to play? What prevents you from just keeping a snapshot of the blockchain at a point when you owned it?
> ...For some weird reason, I was charged way less than quoted at the reservation (~$2300 instead of ~$3700).

Not sure about the rental class and duration... but seeing these totals for a rental car raised my eyebrows by surprise. I guess the prices went way way up...
What powerful political and economic interests want these boondoggles to stay in place?
Basically all those nRF5x products are Arduino compatible AirTags with a battery included. IIRC they also have an imprecise but low power, chip integral temperature gauge. Maybe a wireless interval thermometer might be a good start?
Maybe lay off the eggnog or before reading HN so that you don't comment this poorly w/o reading the thread... They've bought it, the Dev. Got whatever pittance the publisher seems worthy, they just want an experience unadulterated by crappy launchers or corrupted by overzealous DRM.
An Innovative SkyWay Transportation System for Dubai?
No, it is not. The opposite would be that it requires financial resources of the class you want to be part of to be part of a class.

Which wasn't what I (or the report) said: the idea is that it takes some level of financial resources as a prerequisite for a chance at top-level success.
Meanwhile Microsoft will just delete all your email and contacts data if say, you don't check your old email for a few years during college. I lost everything pre ~2016. I will never rely on a Microsoft product or service ever again.
Seems like a group of like minded individuals could easily form an identity that only had access to things they absolutely intended to share between them. This is already an issue with streaming services.

With online accounts you could prevent said identity from connecting to multiple online games at once but this is notably worse than old school physical games where you could have 3 games at 3 different friends houses while playing a fourth.

Makes me wonder if we should stop multiplying complexity beyond need and go back to cartridges except now they are $5 64GB usb drives.
I write baremetal fw for those chips. No debugger, extremely bad stdlib which I rewrote, no qemu. Horrible modem interface. But still much more pleasent than Linux FW or raspi's.

They are cheap, last 10 years with a single battery, and do only what they need to do. Also secure. No crazy attack vectors. And easily symbolically verifiable. And I wrote tons of simulators and fuzzers for them.
thats really neat, i wonder if you can use this print during manufacturing to get a more perfect cut
Sure, comparing BLE specifically. And Nordics chip / peripheral level documentation is fine, but their software stack documentation (at least as of 3 years ago when I was last working on BLE stuff) is fine at best. They released a new version of the API every 6-12 months with lots of backwards incompatible changes (a new major version every time...), referenced examples from previous API versions (but didn't port them to the new version), and added tons of new poorly documented compile-time config options to every API version.

All told I figured out how to make a reasonably complex chain of bluetooth devices work (largely by reading the source and comparing against old version API documentation to figure out differences), so it definitely could have been worse. But to imply that just because the documentation is BETTER than the competition that it is GOOD?

No. Its fine.
> they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.

But they are; you yourself give an illustration:

> Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games

> These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.

In other words, the market forces favor game distributors who do the things you (rightly, IMO) call "anti-consumer bullshit"--not enough consumers are willing to do what you did to deter distributors from doing those things. That's a free market: the voluntary choices of buyers are determining the incentives faced by the sellers. The only way to change those incentives would be for many more people to do what you did.

(I'm even more extreme than you, btw; I have never bought a single online game distributed on these terms and never expect to. All the computer games I've ever played came on CDs or DVDs.)
Money can be a dirty thing if we assign wrong values to it. This is the same with relationships, religion, fame, and even family. Thinking that money is inherently dirty isn't any more right than thinking money will solve all problems.
yeah, that's about right for a normal screen. i'm just on 200% because i'm on a 27" 4K screen with no scaling, so i keep most websites zoomed in a bit.
"Two D's for a double dose of this pimpin'"
My company used to use National. It was so nice. You could just walk into the garage, get into a car, and leave. I used the National Emerald Aisle for years, domestic and overseas, and also was able to use it for personal travel (on my own dime of course).

Then we switched to Avis and now I have to wait at the counter for someone to help me. Last time I traveled I had to wait like 20 minutes because the line was long. I hate it so much.
Yes, you're right, I had missed that.
> I mean, you can't of course limit that based on the code, in the JVM there is only a single address space

You can in principle, just look at the Joe-E language.

The article is likely talking about revisions to existing VM designs though, because capabilities are a fundamental, architectural decision that underlie the runtime.
Gemprint... the OG NFT.
OpenBSD foundation.
You said I hadn’t answered your question. What I said was incorrect. Ergo, I answered your question. You told me I hadn’t answered your question, now you say I answered your question but I was wrong. Try to make up your mind.

If you are confused what is being argued about, perhaps stop.
> If they ban me, do I lose my thousands of dollars of games?

You absolutely do.

Anyway, I agree with you. Digital marketplaces are becoming more and more important and certainly I'm sure I have a lot of money in Steam, Kindle, and various other services. It'd be nice to move away from the Wild West phase given how much money's sloshing around at this point.
NeRF triggered the development of a number of improved methods, though. There's DONeRF [1] that is built upon NNs and is currently faster than comparable solutions (the field evolves fast so I may be wrong).

[1] https://github.com/facebookresearch/DONERF
I think that gpiozero might be worth a look:
https://github.com/gpiozero/gpiozero/
They used the word "mimetic" 77 times
Steve Jobs in 2010: "We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone." (https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/19/steve-jobs-android-porn/)

On the web, Apple has a lot less control over content, and so it would be difficult for them to censor it effectively (and customers perceive it as open, so if Apple introduced mandatory filtering in Safari, it likely would cause a lot of backlash). But in the App Store, where they have more control, creating a device free of adult content absolutely seems to be their goal.
What is the flaw? Perhaps you should actually say what it is.
Even if this is true, most languages don’t use dynamic code loading as often as Java.
The important qualities of steel emerge out of microstructure: nanometer to millimeter sized features (several different crystal structures in the same material interacting through the boundaries between them and the bulk properties in them) which requires quantum interactions to be tracked through many orders of magnitude of scale. This includes how these different structures are formed though many stages of melting, tempering, work hardening, etc. In other words it is hideously computationally complex.

One of many fields where yes there is a lot of simulation and yes it is developing but still quite far from having anything close to a complete model which can escape the need for extensive experimentation.

There is a sort of prevalent idea among people outside these fields that simulations exist which can just handle anything. This is very wrong and quite far away.
I wouldn't feel guilty but I just do not want to bother. Half the reason I pay is I don't want the trouble.
IIRC Nordic has a M0 version with bluetooth radio--the BBC micro:bit and a few other maker boards used it. But perhaps it's not really available in cheap quantities anymore and a way overpowered M4 is what they got.
You can still play the games without steam (I often play without internet connection). But of course you'll miss out on a lot of things (multiplayer, achievements etc.) which might be important to you.
> Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice.

It is if the consumers don't demand choice, yes. Which, as a number of other responses in this thread have shown, appears to be the case in this market. The people who are willing to not buy games distributed on terms unfavorable to them are statistical outliers (at least one such person has posted elsewhere in this thread) and don't have any significant effect on the incentives faced by the distributors.

> Regulations force all players into a reasonable space

Into what some unelected government bureaucrats decide is a "reasonable space", perhaps. But any such regulation is far more likely to make things worse, not better, for consumers. Look up "regulatory capture". The game distributors have much deeper pockets and a much more concentrated incentive to simply buy the regulations they want.
I agree. I had HOMM1 upon release, and followed the series all the way through. For me, HOMM1 was the pinnacle. It was simple, and had clean art that was charming. HOMM2 got just as many hours out of me. HOMM3 was yet another extension of the original HOMM, but the art started to really go downhill.
Terms are not a contract or a type of contract. Were you instructed to consult your legal team before signing the contract?

What you never signed with a witness and a notary?

So if they put in a term that said you agree to give them your house or 500 you would have to?

Terms of service are the rules outlined by the service provider. Breaking these could get your service cut and you would have a hard time finding a legal recourse.
Bull. I've seen "check your privilege" used to shut people down, to shame them, etc. I've never seen it used as a positive thing.

It's telling that you really want to say that no black person has privilege. You'd certainly never tell one to "check your privilege."

How much time have you actually spent in rural Alabama?

I say that because the most racist places in the US are urban, the NE and the coasts, not the south. Yes, there are racists everywhere, but the only places where blacks and whites interact productively at scale are in the south.