As an employer though, what do you want to happen when your employee runs into an exception? Do you want them to flounder and have no idea how to solve it or do you want them to figure it out by doing some mildly novel design work?
> Why should Epic care about Android's development costs?
He seems to care about console makers' costs and considers their 30% there reasonable, but he does not seem to consider them reasonable here.
> Why overpay for Google's?
I don't think he's under any obligation too, but it's interesting to see platforms like Steam gain traction despite not handling most of the investment in the platform, and that's on Windows where you can get an installer.
> He seems to care about console makers' costs and considers their 30% there reasonable, but he does not seem to consider them reasonable here.
Because the absolute majority of Android devices are not made by Google, just like the absolute majority of Windows devices are not made by Microsoft. What if Microsoft took away 30% of revenue from all software developers publishing on Windows Store?
>Because the absolute majority of Android devices are not made by Google, just like the absolute majority of Windows devices are not made by Microsoft. What if Microsoft took away 30% of revenue from all software developers publishing on Windows Store?
And you have to paid for Windows License? Somewhere along the line someone will have to paid. Open Source isn't free.
Of course it is perfectly fine for EPIC to avoid the 30% charge. But to judge Google charging 30% as unreasonable while you are getting the ecosystem for free, and than compare the cost of console maker is just being hypocrite.
This is speaking as someone who doesn't like Google even before the first iPhone shipped.
> From a business point-of-view (when sideloading becomes more common) the "right" move for Google would be to fork AOSP, make new Android versions as closed as iOS (while still distributed for free) and prevent any sideloading. No sane CEO who is measured by increasing shareholder value could justify stayig open if this jeopardizes the revenues without providing major benefits.
The problem here is that while Google controls the software, it doesn't control the hardware. All the real power is in the hands of the OEMs.
If Google wanted to close Android, they'd need to either:
- Leverage/convince all the OEMs into adopting the closed fork
- Watch as they lose control completely when someone else makes a dominant fork
- Watch the Android ecosystem crumble as everyone throws out their own fork
I don't think this would work because the OEMs have no incentive to do it. They don't get any cut of the Play Store profits so they have no interest in its success. To the contrary, Samsung at least has its own store. Plus, Android's openness is one of the things differentiating it from Apple. If they closed it down, they have the compromised privacy of a Google device with the closed platform of an Apple device. Apple's closedness then ceases to be a problem and they can differentiate with their privacy-friendliness.
"We’d like to turn this on as the default for all of our users. We believe that every one of our users deserves this privacy and security, no matter if they understand DNS leaks or not."
I'd say that it's basically just the lowest common denominator of English. Imagine an English where any accent is acceptable as long as you're consistent and any regional vocabulary is okay so long as it's well known (e.g. either "torch" or "flashlight" is okay, "soda" is okay but "pop" is not). You then have "global" English.
I’m American and I certainly don’t think “torch” to mean flashlight is well-known. The overwhelming majority of people in the US would not understand it.
The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.
I recommend Journey to the West out of the four. Kind of like an RPG-esque journey about a monkey and his gang traveling in search of Buddhist scriptures. You'll get to learn about Sun Wukong, who is the basis for a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and (I believe?) Korean spin-off characters, like Goku from Dragonball[1]
Another good option is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which will cover a good portion of Chinese history (in a mythological way). A lot of the characters like Zhu Geliang [2] are still highly influential in modern Chinese culture.
Chinese literature is indeed very rich, especially the ancient poetries/verses, from Tang and Song dynasty. They are indeed the essential part of, not only Chinese, but East Asian aesthetics in general.
Writing lends persistence and faithfulness to the original.
Oral traditions tend to be divergent and mutable.
Even such changes as the introduction of the printing press, and cheap paper, had profound impacts:
• Copies were now letter-for-letter identical.
• Reproduction costs fell by 2-6 orders of magnitude.
• Translation to the vernacular became viable. It was cheaper to bring the book to the reader (translation) than the reader to the book (learning Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, etc.).
• Literacy grew -- from 5-10% in 1500 or so to 95%+ by 1900.
Of course, the number of published works grew, as did the literary canon, to the point it's a largely meaningless term (or has been subsumed by pop culture).
I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
I don't mean to be rude, but how many other languages do you speak? There's an almost ineffable depth to nearly every language on this earth, and there are hundreds of them with very large literature corpuses. Naturally, maybe speaking two languages, you are familiar only with literature in those languages. Also, remember that English, being spoken by so many people, its literature is naturally more divulged and widely known. Nonetheless there are truly unique characteristics to almost any language, so much that you could fill a lifetime of study in any one of them.
The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-)
I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?
(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)
Could it instead be that the language that people find pleasing changes over time, so that, as a modern reader, your tastes are naturally more attuned to modern writing?
The genres you list are very popular in the English world. It's fine of course but to use that to argue for a supremacy of English language literature doesn't strike me as a very solid argument. It would be like saying that Comics are superior to Bandes Dessinees because you enjoy super heroes a lot. Or that American cuisine is the best because you love hamburgers, tex mex and slow cooked meat. Nothing wrong with that but it's very subjective.
The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output.
Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?
Russian and French 19c literature are the two obvious counter-examples. I admire the attempt to reframe the question in terms that allow you to claim English is pre-eminent though.
So, basically, if they don't have the breadth of literary genres that English does, they're not as good. That's a horrible metric to judge literature and literary value by.
What is your native language? Mine is Polish, for sci-fi I could not enjoy Stanislaw Lem translated to English. On the other hand I really enjoyed translation of H.P. Lovercaft to Polish.
I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged.
I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.
some people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling
I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.
... written by English or American authors, have
a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner?
How about other non-English language authors?
Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.
I have the impression that basic German is quite technical. You can be poetic, even very poetic, but it is not easy. You can, however, easily describe the relation of one thing to another in detail.
English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
According to which method of counting?
Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."
In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.
You're citing information from two different studies that could very well have used different methods for counting lemmas. The text in between the two bits you quoted illustrates the extent to which this is the case: Alongside your study of 20-year-olds finding that they recognize ~42,000 lemmas, there's an earlier study of people about the same age finding that they recognize between 12,000 and 17,000.
The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.
Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.
Hm, that was supposed to be the total count, not for single speakers.
Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.
Hm, I also seem to remember that German has a thinner dictionary. I suspect that lemmas in German are difficult to count, as there are so many compound words. Apart from the joy of teasing fellow Britons for their stupidity, I don't see why an average German adult should recognise 40% more lemmas when the languages are so related.
Wikipedia[1] says there are more words in the German dictionary - but I suppose this depends how you count compound words, and what you take as contemporary words, too.
> I have the impression that basic German is quite technical.
What does this mean?
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.
It's a really nice blog post but coming from Backblaze, it would have been nice if they wrote it _after_ bringing the Phoenix DC fully online. When Amazon or Google say 11 9s, I can believe it but Backblaze still only has a single datacenter for most data. All it takes is an earthquake.
> Do different video encoders, for the same codec, and input produce different outputs, or is the algorithm specified in a way where it produces the same results for two given inputs, no matter what?
Someone else answered this but I thought I'd elaborate: A good way to think about a codec is as a toolbox. The specification tells you which tools you can use to build a frame (encoder) and which you must support to turn one into pixels (decoder).
Which tools are used in what way makes a huge difference in the output of the encoder, particularly in terms of compression. Have a look at the results for a few H.264 encoders [0]. For the "video conferencing" use-case, the best encoder (x264) uses ~400kbps to produce the same quality of the worst at ~1000kbps.
And like different tools have different costs (a jackhammer needs a generator, a handheld hammer does not), so do the tools in the codec toolbox. Some tools might make the encode slower or might make the decode drain more battery from a mobile device. Others might take a lot of physical space on a piece of silicon, so they're rarely used in hardware.
So different encoders have very different characteristics, not just in terms of output but in terms of power usage, speed and complexity as well.
They can produce the same result but they do it in different ways and require you to express it in different ways.
Make has you describe a graph of outputs and how to produce them. It then traverses the graph to produce the requested output.
Bash is just a regular sequence of commands, with functions and loops if you wish.
If the pipeline you need to run can easily be turned into a dependency graph, I think make is a great fit. It's easy to use, comes with most of what you need built in and has some fun extras, like -jXXX, which allows you to parallelise things and built in caching so you don't regenerate the same asset twice if you don't need to.
You can do all that in bash but you'll have to write it yourself, which takes time you could spend on other things.
- Quantopian: Was good, has tons of data and makes things very easy. Unfortunately you can't easily live trade your algorithms anymore.
- QuantConnect: Open source, works okay, at the time I wanted it for options trading though and their support for options chains isn't so good.
- Zorro: Closed source, paid, uses a weird custom variant of C but works surprisingly well. Mainly focused on forex though.
- Others: There are others, like this one, that are mostly unusable because they miss something essential, like broker support or data.
QuantConnect is the only real packaged option these days I think but it's also not hard to roll your own. There are brokerages with _really_ easy to use APIs (Tradier is the first that comes to mind).
