briandw

I'm dyslexic and while I can type fairly quickly it's always a struggle to get the spelling and typing mistakes fixed. Talking is a much more natural way to express myself. The frustration of not being able to spell the word that I want doesn't exist. Mis-transcription errors are of course an issue, but those are getting fewer and fewer.

China isn't communist. It stopped being communist under Deng Xiaoping. The market reforms are what lifted people out of poverty.

You said "living standards have plummeted since the collapse of communism in many countries" objectively not true. After communism collapsed (collapsing because it failed as an economic model) life in those countries was pretty bad. Living in the ruins of a failed system is going to be a bad time. Even so, of the 12 Soviet states, 10 are much better off. Turkmenistan is 582% bigger GDP. Moldova is about the same Ukraine is worse off, but being invaded by Russia will do that. Other states like Poland at 3.5x the GDP and Estonia are at 8x the GDP.

Do you trust the Soviets GDP numbers? Even if you do, the Soviets were spending upwards of 40% of their GDP on the military, not exactly a quality of life enhancement. Even discounting that, the only states that I could find that might qualify are Moldova (about the same level) and Ukraine about 72%). Ukraine is pretty clearly the Russians are to blame there. Other post Soviet countries, like Turkmenistan are > 580% bigger real GDP. Uzbekistan, Armenia and Kazakhstan are around 3x bigger GDP. Belarus, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan are around 2x bigger GDP. Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Georgia are about 1.3x bigger GDP.

Have you ever looked at the living standards in communist countries? Do you really expect that communism will improve anything for anyone other than the party bosses?

Fantastic project BTW! How much AI help did you have with this project? I'm assuming some. If so is it something that you would have taken on before AI help?

Mostly it's a QA issue. For new features it's just much easier to ignore older OSs

I some very real way this has been true for a very long time. Does anyone know how a AMD Ryzen processor works? I mean does anyone understand in any detail how it works from machine code down to the transistors?

Does anyone single person understand what’s happening when compiling a large C++ code base? Meaning, can anyone track the basket cast C++ language constructs down to the Clang IR to the optimized machine instructions? From there can any one person follow those machine instructions all the way through to the actual registers etc to actually running the code?

> Before approving construction, I would want communities of humans to understand why the design works and what justifies confidence in its safety. I would hope that we all would.

Why would mathematicians be the best at this or even able to contribute? Engineers and physicist seem like a much better choice. Mathematicians tend to not bother with messy things like whats physically possible, or human consequences etc.

Yes I should have been more precise about the virtual memory. There was something like it that could swap to disk (in os 8 i think). Anyone remember RAMDoubler? It wasn't anything like the UNIX VM that came with MacOSX.

It looked further along than I expected. I remember hearing that they were having a hell of a time making it a modern os with proper multitasking etc.

I am so grateful that I can play with Copland. I was the ultimate fan boy back it the day. My first computer was an Apple ][ and we had the first Macintosh at home. All the mac fans were desperate to get a reentrant multithreaded system that didn’t let a rogue application take down the system. That and virtual memory were desperately needed. The UI is what made it all worth it, so clean and comprehensible. You always knew what was where and what felt like complete mastery of the system. MacOSX was a welcome change but it was never as comfortable or friendly or even as responsive as the original. The original mac mouse latency is still better and any system in common use today.

The secret to extreme long life is bad record keeping.

Really? How? Show me a country that taxes wealth and is prosperous. Taxing unrealized gains results in owing tax on money you don’t have and makes starting a funded company impossible.

Logo was created by by Seymour Papert. I highly recommend his book Mindstorms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) It was written in 1980 but could have mostly been written today. All the same issues with teachers misunderstandings and fear of math and technology and refusal to change to meet the challenges of the age.

Unfortunately this does not work at nation scale. We are not insects. Tribes fail at levels over a few hundred and that scale only works because of blood ties. Communism has failed to produce good outcomes every time it's been tried. Even coops aren't competitive with traditional corporations.

You don’t have to have one. My first LAN didn’t. I had no idea what I was doing and picked 17.0.0.0 addresses for local ones and I couldn’t connect to Apples website.

“does anyone actually know how much of your insurance premium is going on the call centre staff”

It’s pretty easy to figure out. Insurance companies publish a loss ratio. That’s the ratio of premiums collected to claims paid out.

Lemonade has industry-leading loss ratios now BTW.

I’ve wondering if there is a DD-WRT type firmware project out there for TV firmware. If not how difficult is it to root these? I can’t imagine that they are that secure.

They didn’t mention the strain. My understanding is that there are 5 strains. P. malariae is common and not particularly deadly while. When i visited Africa, all of the locals had had malaria multiple times. P. falciparum is extremely nasty and can kill quickly.

I think you are conflating a number of factors. Increasing the supply of a good, when all other things are equal, decreases the price. Austin TX is a good example.

If increasing the amount and density of housing increases the desirability of a place thus increasing the value of the housing, this still has limits.

The SF bay area has had a housing shortage for 30 years. Its driven by people wanting to move in that have lots of money AND the refusal of local cities to allow housing to be built, also there isnt new land to build on. However the number of vacant plots in Mountain View is disgraceful.

If we allowed people to build high-rise apartments in downtown Mountain View rent would drop.

The reason for the price increase isn't hard to figure out. The AI boom is here and the demand is off the charts. Supply is limited and increasing production is difficult and slow.

> Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.

Because conspiracies are generally not true and it's not needed to explain this situation.

What's your actually point? Reading between the lines I'm seeing the following logic.

1) The free market develops and sell products. 2) The government buys the products that the free market has produced. 3) Therefore the free market isn't viable without government tax money? Therefore socialism? Silicon Valley wouldn't be as successful without govt spending money on things it needs? Help me out here.

Fabs take a long time to build. The price will come down once the new fabs come on line. It’s expensive because there isn’t enough of it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s supply and demand. We’ve see this boom and bust cycle again and again.

[delayed]

In a conventional aircraft you sit on the roll axis. In a blended wing body design you can have off-axis motion that can increase motion sickness. Rather than rolling with the longitudinal axis of the aircraft, you move up and down when the aircraft banks. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but an additional difference to deal with.

I’ve seen the connection between the Riemann zeta function and primes talked about but never an accessible explanation. Although I must say that the beginning was fairly easy to follow, I got overwhelmed about a quarter into it. Feels like I need a week of study to really comprehend the entire article.

Citation needed.

The point is that stress makes some things stronger. Stress doesn’t make a tea cup stronger because a tea cup is fragile. Stress makes a body or organization stronger if its not too much and the system can adapt. A body in zero g gets sick, but is healthy in 1 g.

I mean that when you have a system like this and you don’t stress it, it becomes more likely to fail catastrophically. It’s like the Dodo bird. It evolved in the absence of predators, so was easily made extinct. Had the island had dogs the entire time, the Dodo would have evolved to survive.