Posts by MJB7 618 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2013
I don't think sunk cost fallacy applies here. It would be economically rational to spend £499,999 more to avoid a £500,000 fine. All the previous costs are sunk, and while they might regret spending them, the question is "how much to spend now?".
Actually it's more like "rational to spend £249k for a 50% chance of avoiding a £500k fine", and I suspect an appeal to the Supreme Court would cost more than that.
That works fine if you have one device you want to access your passwords on. I can think of several devices I need my passwords on:
And that doesn't include "a random internet cafe computer if our home burns down". I don't fancy the complexity of backing up a password database across multiple devices.
Remember, the people who make money in a gold-rush are the ones selling shovels. Given that we seem to have reached the limits of increasing MIPS per watt just by making stuff smaller, any increase in compute power is going to be associated with an increase in waste heat. When the AI bubble bursts, people are still going to want compute power, for something. I suppose eventually we will reach a point when we have all the compute power we can use - but I don't expect it in the next 50 years.
Yes, you have missed the point. The point is that having a mixed team (mixed across all variables) is actively better than have a homogenous team. A team that comes at a problem from a variety of different backgrounds is more likely to find a good solution than a team which is entirely homogenous.
Actually, scaling recipes properly is a bit of an art; it's not just "halve the quantities of everything". To start with, you probably need a bit more liquid than that would suggest, because there will be proportionately more evaporation during cooking. Then there's the problem that popped up on my bluesky feed recently - a recipe that called for "three quarters of an egg".
A tool that can deal with all these issues could have some minor utility.
Icon: Cooking is just applied chemistry.
Any grandchildren I have might still be working in Y2.1K, great-grand children certainly will be. Great-great-grandchildren will probably still be at school. I suppose you might get to great-great- if you were older than me, and your children reproduced faster,
When I first joined my present employer (I got five years off for good behaviour), it was a Cambridge startup but had already been going more than a decade. It's still in active development, but now some of the current code is older than some of the people developing it (one person found a commit made on the day they were born).
" for a successfull crossover from oil to electrical you NEEDED to be able to change the battery and keep going in no longer than it takes to fill at a station."
[citation needed]
We've just switched from a diesel to electric car. At the beginning of December we drove from southern Germany to London. It took about three charges (one of which was overnight). Each of the charges took quite a lot longer than filling a tank - but it didn't make the journey noticeably longer. For day to day usage we just charge at home (not an option if you don't have your own garage I accept).
Unless it was a battery that ruptured because the software commanded something which shorted it out. Or it was a tank with a heater that the software boiled dry. Or it ruptured because the software started shaking the bird at something's resonant frequency. Lots of ways for software could cause the problem.
And don't get me started on the ways that software gets asked to fix up problems in the hardware. (Yes, I've been an embedded programmer. How did you guess?)
> sudo-rs has 5 low severity CVEs in it's entire 2.5 year history: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=sudo-rs
> During that time alone 3 high severity CVEs have been announced in the original sudo
That is the important metric. If sudo-rs has fewer bugs than sudo, then it's worthwhile. I had honestly not expected that result though; I had expected that old code like sudo would have had most of the bugs flushed out by now.
I live in Germany near the Swiss border. Roaming in Switzerland is still quite expensive (for calls). I pay €1.49 per minute for outgoing calls to Germany and €0,69 for incoming calls. Data is included on my contract though. Fortunately I mostly use Signal/WhatsApp when I talk to people.
Handily my mobile provider still thinks the UK is part of the EU, so I get free calls, and more data than I can use when I go back.
Phones, watches, other electronic devices? I expect there will be a ban on bringing powered-on electronics to the site (unless suitably shielded). I'm not sure that EVs are going to be worse than spark-ignited engines (petrol), but compression-ignition (diesel) should be better. I think the main defence against lookie-loos is the "800km from Perth" - that 500 miles is not uninhabited, but there isn't a lot there either.
The nationalized period includes about 26 years before the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. That Act may have lead to an awful lot of "Health and Safety gone mad" stories - but it also led to a dramatic drop in the number of deaths and injuries from accidents. I'd like to see a graph of "death rate vs time", and I would not be surprised to see an uptick after 31 January 1995. The trouble of course is that railway deaths tend to be very "lumpy", so it's hard to see a signal in amongst the random noise.
I don't see how ordinary people's lives will be ruined at all. It appears that the big lenders will convert their loans into equity, so will win big if WolfSpeed eventually becomes profitable, or will lose if it eventually folds (more likely). The big lenders should be big enough to make their own decisions about whether the risks of lending $1B are worth the rewards. Small creditors (the small firm that cleans the offices, the stationery supplier, etc) will continue to get paid. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some redundancies, but that's always a risk, particularly when you work for a hi-tech company.
As to "no company should be allowed to exist to the point of a billion in debt and unable to pay", that's pretty much already the law - if the directors believe the company will be unable to meet their obligations as they fall due, the company is insolvent and must be wound up. That is true if the company is $1B in debt, or $1 in debt. If you mean, no company should be allowed to go $1B in debt, remember that $1B is pretty much table-stakes if you want to build a semiconductor fab.
"Surely the only people who switch to Linux are those that actually want to?"
Or are switched by their children. I am seriously considering switching my mother (94) over to a Linux distro. She needs Chrome, and access to Whatsapp - and that's probably all. It needs a very, very, Windows-like UI. Different system calls are entirely irrelevant.
"Most people on the planet live in the wilds "
The UN says 55% of the population live in urban areas, and this is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. OTOH, it is true to say "Quite a lot of people live in the wilds".
(I'm actually surprised it's as low as that - I would have guessed 75% urban now.)
I never did get round to writing my "Project Manager's Guide to Using VSS as an Excuse For Why Your Project is Late". Step 1 was going to be "don't have sufficient disk space", and Step 2 was "don't have backups". (There were several more rules. I have forgotten them now.)
Unfortunately, our IT department had procedures in place to make both Steps 1 and 2 unnecessarily difficult.
Err, when DARPA write "incompressible CFD" that means the easy stuff - with fluids like water whose compressibility can be ignored.
The fluid in a nuclear fusion reactor is very, very, compressible which makes the fluid dynamics much harder. Not only that, it is a plasma, so the particles are all charged, and if you have moving charged particles you need to consider magnetism. There are people who try and model magneto-hydro-dynamics, but it's ... not easy.
Of course, that doesn't nullify your conclusion "quantum computers won't solve nuclear fusion" - if they can't do the easy stuff, what hope have they got with the really messy stuff?
It adds another layer to get through, and while you may think it doesn't happen the law in the UK says that auction houses have to do due diligence on purchasers who spend more than €10,000 (and that currency symbol is not a typo). See (for example) https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/anti-money-laundering-legislation.
The EU has the same rules, and I am pretty sure so does America too.
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