HourglassFR

I don't get what the author is trying to do here. I mean he complains that talking about the limit of a sequence is too asbstract and unfamiliar to most people so the explaination is not satisfaying. But then names drop the notion of an Archimedean group and introduces with a big ol' handwave the hyperreals to solve this very straightforward highschool math problem…

Now don't get me wrong, it is nice and good to have blogs presenting these math ideas in a easy if not rigorous way by attaching them to known concept. Maybe that was the real intend here, the 0.99… = 1 "controversy" is just bait, and I am too out of the loop to get the new meta.

Have you met humans?

> Melenchon […] started as a Trostkist

So did more than half of the socialist party elit (elephant du PS), even freaking Cambadelis, are you suggesting he’s far left to ?

> against the capitalist system

Well yes, almost by definition of being on the left I would argue.

> So if you think Le Pen is extreme on one side then Melenchon has to be equally extreme on the other side.

No, this is a false equivalence. I mean the far-left as a political position does exist in France, but it is not represented by Melenchon who is still largely a socialist, although the actual socialist party has significantly shifted rightward in the 10's so there is a perception issue there.

Elections are not, and should not, be the be-all end-all of a functionning democraty. Otherwise you just have an elective aristocracy.

And to be clear, I'm not saying pure polling driven policy is the solution, but saying politician should outright ignore them because not legally binding is a very weird stance.

> You are attacking the wrong target. You are missing the big picture.

This is rich comming from someone putting Melenchon, basically an old school socialist (in the werstern Europe sense), in the same bag as Le Pen and Zemmour who are as far-right as it gets in Europe.

I agree that the situation is not very readable, but at least let's try to have a point of view consistent with the political history of the last few decades.

I would ass a fourth reason: health is a very much a public (as in collective) issue, not a sum of individual medical problems. Something that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant ethos of how to deal with problems in america in the past 50 years or so.

> So, he is an author that has a track record of understanding a thing or two about money.

On the contrary, while he is indeed a good author and has written highly enjoyable fictions (well, heavy on the nerdy side but this is HN after all so I think a lot of us have no problem with that), his understanting of how money and knowledge work on a societal level is quite frankly laughable. It is deeply rooted in the californian ideology and very naïve. But it still good fun, and it doesn't take itself to seriously.

This can only be a patial explanation of the effect since it is known to occur even when the patient is informed that the substance is inactive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Mechanisms

Maybe there is something akin to belief in the belief, i.e. "I'm not religious but will pray for god or whomever in dire situations". The mind is a weird thing and truth is, we don't have a good understanting of what's going on with the placebo effect.

> I’d much prefer the free market approach where there are multiple actors each making different bets on future demand than some overarching rule about how future demand should be planned for (thats how we get famines).

Interestingly, food production is heavely planned through regulation, subsidies and incentives in most countries precisely because the free market cannot be trusted with such a sensitive matter. Famines cause riots and that's bad for buisness.

To be fair, being considered a threat to national security and held as a pariah for having communist ideas is hardly a recent development in the US.

Not quite 2022, but yeah I was maintaining a token ring based network for some subway at my last gig in 2019. As far as I know, no work is done on it now but the subway-car using the system are schedule to run for at least another decade so another bugfix release of the networking firmware is not entirely out of the question.

> I couldn't shake the feeling that I was picking up the check for everybody else. I was paying very high taxes to essentially finance crazy government overreach, only to later lose the value of what's remaining to inflation due to all the money printing.

But you just said that the job you had overpaid you anyway so I don't really understand your point here.

I have absolutly no inside knowledge but my guess is that the loop and the vehicules inside it are more akin to a mini railway network with weird trains than roads with cars. As such the regulations are not the same and in particular the automatic features of the cars are not considered railway safe.

That's not ironic at all. There are less inequalities in Europe than Asia, at least in this century.

The more radical theory I've comme across is that Capitalism is always in crisis. It is not bad step or a shortcoming of some kind but rather a fundamental feature. Capitalism works best in crisis because it is more inventive an flexible, it re-invents itself to endure the chaos it creates, may that be social unrest, environmental degradation, financial collapse, wars, etc.. This was Marx mistake (well, one of them at least), Capitalisme will not crumble because of its internal contradictions. The contradictions lead to crisis which only gives it more strength.

In that sense, finance is but one of the problem, which might have a central position in the current run of crisis in technical terms but only insofar as that it is the the most powerfull tool the capitalist has to extend its reach. Even if the financial system were to be sanitized overnight, it would not imply the end of crisis for Capitalism.

Incredibly enough, this kind of phenomenon really is almost magically turning from "0" to "1" when a certain threshold is met. This goes by several names depending on the field but "phase transition" and "percolation" are usual.

This idea can be traced even further back to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

It's not that surprising to find it here, the Situationist had a lasting impact on the intellectual theory of the left.

Exactly, I feel the title should be more "Redefining what Google Maps® can be with new information". And as you noted, this app is not really a map.

Regardless of the semantic shift that there is probably no way to stop now, I'm hoping real maps will still be around, they are the best tool to give you spacial awareness at different scales.

> It has nothing to do with Americans vs Europeans. Plenty of Americans spent excessive time navel gazing on optimal TCP/IP replacements (tons of research on Internet protocols comes out of American universities).

Yes, that was what my last point was about.

> First to market wins if it works and solves the problem. That’s all there is too it. Nobody is going to wait around for something that might work that is theoretically better if you have an option that works and solves your problem.

This way of framing the problem is weird to me. Markets are not handed to us by the Gods, we put them in place because some of us think they are a good way to solve problems. And in any case, consensus on green fields like networking at the time have very little to do with markets, at least in the economical sense (you could argue for a market of ideas but I don't think that's what you had in mind). But to give a famous counter example, most of the world have changed their perfectly fine system of units when a clearly better one emerged.

> IPv6 is a pragmatic replacement and it hasn’t even meaningfully killed IPv4 despite being widely available for nearly 20 years.

Not nearly as pragmatic as NAT.

Te be clear, I'm not saying that the pragmatic way is bad, in fact it's probably the best in most situations. I'm just pointing out that there might be psycho-social reasons for the non adoption of the OSI model by the network community. I could be wrong of course and I'm happy to read opposing thoughts on the matter.

EDIT: I re-read my first comment and I can see that I have been to dry in my writting and how it can be understood as "those damn Yankees are idiots!". I apologize for that, I'm trying to improve my nuances but still have a long way to go.

Agree, the OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do. Unfortunatly the timing was bad and the coherent model emerged just a bit to late. Maybe if the major networking infrastructures had been in Europe a switch could have been a possibility.

Americans are very pragmatic: make the stuff work and get on with your life, if problems arise in the future we will fix them. American standards are usually but a formalisation of already accepted practises (and this goes well beyond network stuff), this is why they are so effective and so poorly thought out. I guess it's still better than "ideals" that nobody follows.

And of course this is an oversimplification of some sensitivity difference between vast parts of the world, we individuals are but samples on the agregate sociological context that drives this sort of things.

Nah, I'm not saying my employer's IT infra is rock solid but at the very least we have backups.

> (and have written much about it, e.g. https://pron.github.io/posts/correctness-and-complexity)

Wow, thanks for that link. I only made it through the first part for the moment but it is an incredible read. You clearly thought about this more deeply and carefully than I did.

Edit: I'm not entirely sure how that came across so I want to explicitly say that this is not a dry ironic statement (communication is hard, and I am a poor writer).

I've seen you make that argument a few times on Zig related discutions but I'm not sure I buy it. It essentially boils down to: simpler language => easier to reason about and build tools for => less bugs.

While the thought as merits, the empirical evidence we have indicates that yes it is possible to achieve good software with faulty languages with strong rules and tooling but it is certainly not as straightforward as you make it seem.

In the end though, for the Zig case I agree that the jury is still out. But if I was a betting man, my money would not be on it, even though personnaly prefer Zig.

> JetBrains went out of their way to make migrating to Kotlin as easy as possible: you can literally upgrade your Java project file by file.

Yes, offering a good path to switching (and conversely keeping the old voodoo part of the code no one wants to touch) is the way to go. And as I understand it, Zig offers this possibility as well.

Not milliamps, milliamps-hour (mAh). It is the usual unit used in the context of battery capacity in the general public, nothing tricky here.

Not that I'm aware of. This talk is in itself a summary of a 10+ hours course he gives to his studends.

Is the first time I have come across a presentation of this guy in english and this is why I wanted to share it here. But basically it is a re-hash of the limits to growth arguments, with more modern data.

> If you look at the white rabbit FPGA PTP updates, its in the ns range

As I recall, I had even better performance than that. Around the tens of picoseconds. But I guess the advertised 1 ns is a conservative estimate. The precison is incredible but its not magic, they squeeze the maximum amount of determinism out of custom hardware and fiber optic links. It is a bit of pain too set up, as you need to calibrate each link individually every time you change the fiber or the SFP.

He has some interesting idea and is more than ready to share them with others, which is a respectable thing to do I agree. On the other hand, I find his models hilariously bad, e.g. :

> With Balance of Power, I could write a simple equation for the number of fighters who would join an insurgency against the government:

> `Fighters = Political Immaturity * Population * Previous Success of Insurgency`

> Here, `Political Immaturity` is a constant I defined for each country based on my estimate of how much people respected the rule of law.

I mean, come on…

> If people realized that a sudden drop in price will mean a sudden drop in mining power, which will mean a sudden drop in blocks being generated, which will mean a sudden drop in throughput, they might be even more eager to get out of it.

I agree with your overall argument but as I understand it, this is false. If the mining power of the whole network drops, the proof of work will become simpler so as to have a roughly constant block throughput. Or am I missing something here ?