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> absolutely no one remembers who the fuck Edmund Wilson was

Can’t we strive to be more civilized on this site?


I’m a game developer. Lots of work in that area but it’s hard work with lots of competition. Lots of time spent optimizing performance so you can run on weaker hardware. Insane user experience focus compared to web as well


Theory: The cloud took over the same way most trendy tech took over: resume driven development. Everyone on all the teams pushed for it because of how much value it adds to their resume and gradually more and more companies bought in, which accelerated the process because company d started feeling worried that they were behind the times since companies a-c already switched

The cloud is great for startups and tiny companies though


> Theory: The cloud took over the same way most trendy tech took over: resume driven development

Ding, ding, ding. This also explains kubernetes, bazel, yaml and microservices hell.


How about the fact that most startup CIO/CTOs (and enterprise cos) know that they under-invest in on-prem, because it's a cost center, and fighting that battle politically isn't worth it?


It used to be missing occlusion culling, which is a big deal. I think it either has it now or else it’s in v4 though?

It was sparse on tutorial content from the community too, but that seems changed a lot too since then

I wonder what their heavily nested scene graphs do to performance but haven’t tested it


Here's Godot's current implementation of occlusion culling (sort of), though it needs some manual setup: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/performance...


It's insane that a game engine until 2021 had no occlusion culling. Really tells you that the engine is not made with "big" 3d worlds in mind.


Godot seems nice so far. How is the c# support? The docs? Is it hard to do x if you look online for how to do so? Performance? Occlusion culling?

Last time I looked into it, it was too far behind still, but it looks like Godot 4 will be a really cool release


C# support is excellent. They received funding from Microsoft to add it, and it’s nearly as full featured as the native GDScript and it’s significantly faster (at least in 3.X).

Can’t really speak to the rest, although I believe occlusion culling is one of the killer features of the 4.0 release.


Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team?

The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all


It's pretty rare that patent law makes a big difference in slowing down a field of software innovation. The main examples I can think of are eFax suing fax machine software companies, and Blackboard suing education companies.

In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".


It is heavily unlikely that there is exactly one route to intelligence: to take a card from biology, look at octopuses versus humans. Since only relatively specific architectures can be patented, I expect that one would have no issue circumventing any patent that could claimed.


This wasn't true of software, so I don't know that we should expect it to be true of AI.


But that's because the laws on software developed prior to tech becoming as powerful as they are now.


The problem with patenting AI is that you have to describe how something works in order to patent it. The issue presently is that you can describe relatively obvious things (e.g. one click checkout) and patent those.

AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to.

My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.


The patent would apply to the model's architecture rather than the trained values so the black box nature of deep learning doesn't matter too much.


anti-trust law would prevent the most egregious forms of this


These discussions always remind me of some talks by Jonathan blow where he argues rust doesn’t solve the hard problems he needed it to. There are podcast episodes with better discussions, but the main one people link to seems to be this

I haven’t used rust, but I sympathize with his problems with pointers and learned a lot from the various ways people try to solve them

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk


He also admits he hasn't written more than a hundred lines of code with it before, and that was 4 years ago, more than half rusts lifetime ago.

My understanding is his priorities are C level control over memory, fast compiles, and ergonomics for the kinds of operations he commonly does.

Rust solves for memory/ergonomics, though the strictness it holds you to is in opposition to what (I understand) he considers ergonomic access & control of memory.

Therefore rust solves ~1 of his priorities, so it's not really a good fit. To extrapolate that to "doesn't solve the hard problems" is another logic step that I probably don't agree with.


This is apocalyptic. Imagine something 100km from where you live, and that whole span between you and there being under water tomorrow. in a movie, that wouldn’t feel real no matter how good the special effects are, it’s too out there


> in a movie, that wouldn’t feel real no matter how good the special effects are, it’s too out there

This entire thing just reminds me of Day After Tomorrow (2004). Although the movie had a lot of bad science, way too many people called the premise and social outcomes of the movie ridiculous. Hell, the South Park criticism of it alone significantly pushed this current batch of climate deniers.


I thought it was telling when South Park basically walked back the whole "The vote's between Shit Sandwich and a Turd" or whatever and said "Vote for Hillary".

It was as if they hadn't realized the amount that people draw from their work.

It was _pretty explicit_, the turnaround. Or at least it felt that way to me.


It was as if they hadn't realized the amount that people draw from their work.

I think that thinking people massively underestimate the influence that cartoons have on common people.

It seems like 90% of the people who argue against religion on the internet got everything they know about religion from cartoons like South Park. Or everything they know about Texas from King of the Hill.

There was a newspaper article a few years ago about how some massive percentage of Britons thought The Simpsons was an accurate depiction of Americans, and didn't understand that it was a lampoon.


The Simpsons humor is funny because it is based in reality...thats how humor works.

Every character and trope is a humorous representation of something in America. Are you American? Because I am and i've met someone like every character in the Simpsons in real life.


Comedy shows/etc sway the opinions of the general public, but shield themselves from criticism by saying "It's just comedy bro, chill out". Quite a conundrum, but what can you do about it? Newspaper editorials do the same thing, using "it's just an opinion" as a rhetorical shield. Virtually any media does something like this in one form or another.


They never did that... are you talking about the subsequent ridicule of President Garrison?

They did however walk back on the manbearpig.


They had Mr. Garrison say this

``` On November 8th, you must vote against me and show the world that you didn’t think the new Star Wars was all that good. When you’re in that voting booth, remember that every vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote that shows the world we agree that The Force Awakens was more like a Happy Days reunion special than a movie. The choice is yours, America. Please make the right one. ```

which felt pretty explicit to me.


Saying that The Day After Tomorrow had a lot of bad science is a bit of an understatement, isn't it? It's like saying Hershey's chocolate bar has a lot of chocolate in it.


Have you tried Hershey's bars? Hard to call that stuff chocolate...


That's the joke.


The premise and outcome of some large scale disaster you imagined being ridiculous does not means that any scenario of large scale disaster is ridiculous.


I had the same thought when reading about the 4inch hailstones that fell in Catalonia yesterday


And like what happened in that film, a baby was killed yesterday by hailstones, sadly.


heh that episode of South Park is seared into my brain

> Two days before the day after tomorrow

> Bah gawd... that's today


Which episode is this?


Two days before the day after tomorrow


I feel like this hasn't gotten the attention it deserves worldwide relative to the amount of suffering it is causing.


More people should be aware of countries by relative population: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/12/Population-cartog...

It makes you understand the importance of Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia for things that impact people.


Pakistan is a nation of children and refugees. It's not well positioned to self advocate on the world stage.

Pakistan is the world's fifth-most-populous country.

The population is young: in 2019 34.8% were thought to be 14 or younger

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_in_Pakistan

Pakistan has one of the world's youngest populations.

The country's population structure is relatively young, with a median age of 19.

Pakistan is also thought to have the world's fourth-largest refugee population, estimated at 1.4 million in mid-2021

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Pakistan


Nation of Children - sure.

Nation of Refugees - now or always? Now due to floods I can understand. But if always, I do not understand. They have been a "stable" country for half a century. When I say "stable", I mean without any land being lost or won since 1971, which puts the last major change at almost 51 years and 51 years should be a long time for any refugees to be assimilate, no?


The majority of the refugees in Pakistan are those from the two Afghanistan invasions by USSR/US, and at their peak were several times the current number.

There was also an internal operation in the last decade to remove the Taliban and such from their strongholds and that caused a lot of innocents to lose their homes.

There were large floods in 2010 and a strong earthquake in 2005 that also destroyed many towns and villages.

And as a historical tidbit, when Mao was in power, a small number of Chinese ran from there and settled in Pakistan.


50 years is nothing if you're talking about geo-engineering projects to stabilize your community. Dike construction in the Netherlands has been underway for well over a thousand years. 50 years probably isn't even enough time for the importance of such projects to truly permeate a culture.


I am just trying to understand what the parent commenter meant by "nation of refugees".


>median age of 19.

This is wild. Google says the US is 38, Germany 45, Japan 48 for some random examples (the top search result for me says Pakistan median age is 22, which is still crazy).


some other (often Muslim) countries are like this right now; it is well known in demographic studies


> Pakistan is a nation of children and refugees. It's not well positioned to self advocate on the world stage.

I don't understand. Why can't the government self advocate given it's a nation of children and refugees?


Maybe I'm jaded, but I take it to mean that the country is poor for the reasons stated. It has neither the global pull, nor the connections to massive corporations to make it anything but a humanitarian issue. This is a harder sell to other countries than a business and industry issue.


Suffering has been normalized for some, unfortunately, and any devastation striking that region is glossed over almost as if calamity is expected to befall. See for instance the outcry and support for Ukraine (not diminishing their dire circumstances by any means) and immediate call to take refugees while sympathy for southern and western Asian states has fallen to the wayside.


It's the kind of story that gets passed down across generations and even makes it into holy books.


underrated comment. semi-localized catastrophe + oral history + time => whole world catastrophe for a population


From the NASA image it looks like the whole area is a flood plain. Similar to a large area of the Los Angeles basin. We have a paved riverbed system to get rid of water from heavy rains which periodically occur. I assume Pakistan doesn't have the resources to do something like that.


You have a paved riverbed system to get rid of moderate rains which periodically occur.

That will be insufficient for a 100-year flood (~1000 acres underwater by current mapping), and a 200-year or 500-year flood would put significant fractions of the city underwater.

https://eng2.lacity.org/projects/LARIVER_Glendale_Narrows/do...


Yes it is Indus river basin


This is Great Lakes of Canada and the USA type distances here ladies and gentlemen.

Crazy stuff.


I was trying to figure out a relatable comparison on a map. Looking from one side of the flood lake to the other would be like trying to spot Niagara Falls from Toronto, or San Jose from San Francisco - never mind that the distance is large enough for Earth's curvature to get in the way. And that's just thinking of it as a cross-sectional view of the lake, which doesn't say much about area.

The way I ended up explaining it to my kids was that 33M people were affected. San Francisco population is ~800k, so around 40 SFs worth of people are impacted.


Well, not quite. The great lakes are rather deeper.

That's not to say this isn't shocking or a sign of radical climate change.


This is mind boggling.

How deep is it? I mean, I'm sure there are areas that are a few inches deep and others that are dozens of feet, but generally speaking -- is this more or less than the height of a single story?

Edit: And is it generally of similar depth or does it vary greatly from locale to locale?


Or mouth/nose height?


Lots of videos of this on TikTok. The volume of water in some videos is mind boggling.

https://www.tiktok.com/tag/swatflood?lang=en


Not to minimize the suffering of a poor country with limited state capacity to adequately address this tragedy, but this exact scenario more or less happened in Houston during Hurricane Harvey.


Perth, the capital of Western Australia is 100km long.

The entire state would grind to a halt, much the rest of the country would suffer seriously as well.


100km == 62miles


Notice is says “for ads,” and not in general. The terms sneakily allow them to still profile you or use your content in other ways, like training ai systems or reporting you to the government


You're reading a page titled "How Gmail Ads Work".


That’s due to swelling batteries, which is apparently common in the xps line


It's also an issue on HPs similar x360 line. And it is a consequence of optimizing for the arbitrary metric "slimness" at the expense of cooling, while stuffing in high-TDP CPUs. Who on earth has a bag or backpack where 15 mm vs 21 mm thickness means the laptop won't fit?

Get something with a bit of thickness to it, like the Latitude 5530 (which Dell will also sell with Ubuntu) and stick to the low-TDP CPU versions.

If your dev work is CPU-intensive you should be doing it on a workstation or server anyways. A machine where your cooling solution can dissipate 3-400W without batting an eyelid is going to beat the crap out of a "high-end" 45W TDP laptop.

When you're on the road, just use SSH with tmux or RDP or whatever you prefer. At your desk, set up a monitor and a workstation for the serious work and keep the laptop on the side for meetings, emails etc. A USB switch for the mouse and keyboard works well and is like $30.


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