lebuffon
lebuffon on Hacker News
The word "computers" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I would think that the software is the weakest link in the chain.
Whoa! That is a really nice piece of work. Congrats!
When you are forbidden to expand taxation on the people with money, because "ideology" and your country is accruing debt at historic levels, tariffs are about the only revenue source that you have that won't make the oligarchs angry.
I have wondered if an option would be to have a state make it law that every 4 or 5 years they open the bidding for a health care insurance provider for the entire state. A state committee then takes the bid with best premiums to services ratio and they do the job for the contract term.
There would still be the option of people and businesses to buy 3rd party "extras" like private hospital rooms, vision care etc. on top the state plan, but some level of basic health care would be provided to all people paying into the state plan.
Would that work?
The "no safety net" means that Forth is a low level language. You can touch anything in the machine. Many times it is used without an O/S. So if you push a random number onto the hardware stack you will get burned.
Of course not. I was merely expressing that Forth makes interactively very easy.
And like all languages, it is impossible to evaluate them if you don't use them for some significant amount of time.
On fingered strings the guitar sustains for about 10 seconds until the note is very quiet, but still ringing.
On a Cello a fingered string is gone in 2 seconds.
I can play chords on a violin or viola and strum them. Keeping a four-finger chord perfectly in tune in rapid changes is really hard (near impossible) without frets.
Forth is very good in this regard, because the word names are short and there is no "fluff" around the syntax if you can even call it syntax.
Also there is no need to name your data. Literal numbers can be used just as easily even for memory addresses.
However there is no safety net. ;-)
I used Forth to explain numbers in different radices to my grandson.
Being able to interactively try things at the console was really helpful.
It also helps to separate the internal number in the machine from how we display it, due to the different operators to print numbers as signed or unsigned. This is something that I have seen young programmers confuse.
I think another area where Forth can help young people is in understanding some low level details like memory addresses and reading and writing memory. It seems simpler than abstracting it to "pointers", more like assembler but interactive.
A related question for me is to ask when will lawmakers begin using AI to better integrate new law into the existing framework?
Excellent. I stand corrected. I was using published Chinese numbers.
And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction.
Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
India is kind of cute.
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
There is also a steam engineers term called "high-balling" which referred the little ball in the steam pressure gauge used in the early days. So high-balling was travelling at high speed.
If De Soto is correct, and I am not qualified to judge, based on your statement about land ownership in Brazil, then capitalism was not fully developed to where it could have been. Get the book. It's an interesting read.
And yes I can see that we are at the end of an era. This may be more the end of the U.S. empire than the elimination of capitalism, but for sure a new 'ism" is going to be required soon. What that is will be interesting to see. It would be nice to see someone with imagination come along instead the bipolar options we are handed today.
Sure at the "end game" stage you are correct. But on the way to that stage it does what it does really well, meaning it makes lots more capital.
De Soto is talking about why it "cannot" get started in a place without government controlled land registry.
This is well documented in the the book "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto. When it was published I thought it would change the world, but apparently nobody cared. :-)
In his thesis, this is the reason capitalism cannot work well in Latin America and other nations around the world. He says that registered land ownership is the foundation of capitalism. This is how one can borrow money against your land and invest it to make more capital. Very common for example with farmers in N. America to borrow against their farm, for machines, seeds and fertilizer.
(I am not an economist)
"Standards are great. Everybody should have one!"
Charles Moore, author of the Forth programming language
And don't forget AMI Tabfunkenwerk from USA.
There were native horses, in fact the genus began in N. America and migrated out.
Remains have been found in permafrost in Northern Canada.
They went extinct about 12,700 years ago, sometime after humans arrived.
In southern Ontario where there are many ( the most?) greenhouses electricity is primarily produced by Nuclear (50..55%) Hydro power is about 24 ..38% of the total.
I think the bigger difference is the Canadian attitude about the "commons" nature of electricity and so profiting excessively on power is frowned upon.
Back in the good old days of analog audio we made differential audio inputs with
Iron and copper. :-)
Transformers are amazing at reducing common mode noise like induced hum, but rather expensive compared to the price of these boards.
Fun fact: The entire landline telephone system used to rely on balanced lines with transformers for in/out. The hum nulling is so good that trunk lines had no shielding inside buildings.
I look at culture, under which I put language as a component, as the O/S of the human brain. So yes a brain with no O/S can think but it probably will never replicate, in one life time, the accumulated thinking skills of a brain given a good O/S.
How many of us would independently reinvent language with specific tenses, the diatonic scale, the number zero, perspective drawing, geometry, calculus, atomic theory, quantum mechanics etc. if left on our own from childhood?
So to me, the question becomes, can human language encode the sum of all human thought? The answer might be no. But it might be good enough to get close.
It's not a technology limitation as you say. The issue is a psychology problem. How do you keep a nation all playing on the same team, so to speak, when there are an infinite number of contradictory voices screaming at them?
My observation is that a society is based on some common ideas, many times myths, but without those common threads you can't make a civilization. This is why dictatorial regimes shut down open internet access rather quickly. They know it will undermine and/or destroy their control of the masses.
I like to look back in history for parallels. In 1912 the USA required that all radio transmitters be licensed. There were classifications established for commercial and amateur stations. So at that time Feds understood the power of giving citizens the ability to communicate with the masses.
Fast forward to the 1990s and politicians were clueless about what the internet was doing or would do in future. So what is the correct response when every citizen has the power to, using the archaic term, "broadcast" to the world.
The genie is out of the bottle and needs to be managed for the common good, which is always going to piss off some individuals. It's going to be interesting watching nation states fight over how best to do this.
The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?