joemag

Loved this article! I initially was confused by how this transition would work with the conservation of angular momentum (since the electron would be flipping from spin ±½ to the opposite one). But then remembered that photons are spin 1 particles, so the math works out. Neat.

The root of all trust is eventually some human, or group of humans. See "Reflections on Trusting Trust." At least so far, Apple has convinced me that they are both willing and competent enough to maintain that trust.

Absolutely! The distance to LEO satellites (like spacex or kuiper) is low enough that you would beat latency of fiber paths once the destination is far enough.

It gets diffused to the point where it’s no longer distinguishable from the background.

I found it interesting that a town of 100 had a runway capable of landing a 787. Was it built specifically for these kinds of scenarios, i.e. as an earliest diversion point for trans pacific flights?

For those of us who build distributed systems, it’s all about number of modes we need to design for, test, and monitor. If all I have to worry about is process death, I can design my service around that. Monitoring for process death is generally pretty straightforward as well.

Gray failures (like process slowdowns), on the other hand, are fairly difficult to design for, and detect. And it can wreak havoc on distributed systems if one of the nodes suffers a gray failure.

Just like the sibling, I admit I’ve never heard this definition of line rate...

With one thread, maybe. But using multiple threads it’s not even that hard. I’ve hit 100Gbps using stock TCP stack and ~10 threads in Rusts Hyper without much trouble.

Another example, you can saturate 100Gbps with just 4 iPerf3 processes.

Is the tunneling protocol really IPIP for these overlays? Oh boy - that’s going to really suck on wide multi path networks like the ones used by cloud providers.

No. See question #4 in QLDBs FAQ: https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/faqs/

The standard model still doesn’t explain gravity, dark matter, or dark energy. There are still ways to go.

Interesting pricing decision by AMD. Given their performance, and no other competition in x86 market besides Intel, surprised they chose to sell at such a steep discount.

Sometimes, such pricing decisions can perpetuate “you are a weaker substitute” perception.

Argh, you are right - the ad fold made it seem like the article ended, yet there were two more paragraphs below it.

Still, rereading the article, the main body seemed a bit coy. It kept talking about how such black holes should not exist, yet I kept thinking “hasn't LIGO detected formation of 60+ solar mass black holes via mergers?”

But perhaps I’m in an extra criticizing mood before my morning coffee.

Misleading indeed. And I’m surprised the article did not talk about binary black hole mergers being potential sources of such black holes, since that seems like the most plausible theory.

It comes with a bias though, since your searches will bias towards finding asteroids that are easiest to find using your search method.

Agree. I once had to explain the concept of idempotemcy to a payment processor, whose APIs lacked it.

Any phrase that succeeds at transferring an idea out of your head into mine is good enough for me.

EC2 engineer here.

Pricing is definitely a hard topic, and we can do more to make it easier. However, with regards to your second comment, are you looking for something more than this page [1]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

Another way to look at it: customers like you, who build custom work arounds to some problem, influence our decision that a particular problem is important enough to be solved.

Frankly, looking at all my apps, the only use-case I have for background tasks is Google Photos, who I want to automatically upload my recent photos to the cloud. A very distant second would be communication apps running some kind of reconciliation once or twice a day, in case some notifications were missed.

I have no desires for any of my other apps to execute any tasks in the background.

That was the single biggest difference I observed when I switched from Android to Apple 4 years ago. I no longer had periodic episodes where my phone would burn through 80% of my battery in 30 minutes, while getting lava hot. Not sure if Android has figured background tasks in the last 4 years, but the inconvenience of not having background tasks was greatly outweighed by having predictable battery life and performance.

The thing that’s always fun to see on such graphs is comparison to theoretical latency based on the speed of light in fiber. Gives a sense of how circuitous a particular route is.

Similar thing drives me nuts in GMail for iPad. Every time I open a link, it asks me to download chrome. I say no thanks, and uncheck the default “remind me later” option, yet few weeks later it happens again.

Been going on for a year now.

Unless I’m misunderstanding the question, many http clients would pool http(s) connections. Most of them do that by default. So connection establishment cost gets amortized over large number of API calls.

And that’s the argument the grand-parent is making. It’s a tool. It can be used for good or bad. There are other tools like that.

Because of that, there’s unlikely to be universal acceptance or rejection. And without popular opinion, it will be hard to pass any laws that change the status quo.

Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places like train stations or airports. Looking for missing children. Having home automation react differently to different family members.

Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.

Some HTTP clients don’t support redirects, or at least require an explicit configuration to enable them. So this would still be a breaking change for some applications.

Many laws and societal norms don’t require universal acceptance. So it’s totally reasonable for you to not care, while society in general feels the opposite. Or vice versa.

And in your case of the note taker, a better example would be somebody that frequently follows you, and takes notes about what you wear. In many places, that could be grounds for harassment claim. In other words, it’s not the act that matters to most people, but the frequency and scale at which the act takes place.

Do you object when sports TV channels show ads related to sports or people who enjoy sports?