Which was the GTA where you rode around on a dirtbike out in the california mountains, and there was like bootleggers and stuff.... man i have serious memories of that game
San Andreas
Readit Newseftychis commented on You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser dos.zone/grand-theft-auto... · Posted by u/Alifatisk
> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers.
That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.
It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.
eftychis commented on US Army to buy 1 million drones, in major acquisition ramp-up reuters.com/business/aero... · Posted by u/breve
I think the way China approached this is probably the better way -- heavily support companies in the commercial sector that can quickly iterate, invest heavily to improve the tech, and scale up manufacturing. They'll always have the latest and greatest since they need to be on the edge for consumer tech, and if a conflict begins they can just produce some extras or worst case shift all production to defense.
For the US, which has effectively zero consumer drone companies, we must massively subsidize defense-specific drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.
That's what the U.S. army used to do, and why they invested in the Silicon Valley. [1] Also a lot of research grants still flow out of the DoD.
The step down from 32GB to 24GB of unified memory is interesting. Theories? Perhaps they decided M4 allowed too much memory in the standard chip and they want to create a larger differential with Pro/Max chips?
Update: I am thinking the 24GB for M5 is a typo. I see on Apple's site the 14 inch MBP can be configured optionally with 32GB of RAM.
I had the same question, but I can only speculate at the moment.
The cynical part of me thinks in a similar line: create an artificial differentiation and push people to upgrade.
If anyone has any real clues that they can share pseudonymously, that would be great. Not sure which department drove that change.
> The correct long term answer is that we have to have her name changed legally
Are you sure?
SSA has administrative offices that deal with data errors. Generally in a GSA high rise in a big city. NOT the offices where you go to get benefits.
Someone doing data entry for the SSA fat fingered some info about me back when I was born, and I only found out in the 2010s thanks to the IRS rejecting a tax filing (I had to pay a 50 cent late fee!!!).
Went in-person to their office in the Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago and the lady spent a few minutes examining documents, typed on her computer for about 20 seconds, and that was that. All fixed.
Yeah I think also this is the correct path to try first. Some mistakes like that can be fixed.
eftychis commented on The Little Book of Linear Algebra github.com/the-litte-book... · Posted by u/scapbi
My recommendation: Linear Algebra Done Right by Axler: https://linear.axler.net/
Starts from linear transformations and builds from there.
I recently quit my salary job after 16 years and am consulting in nuclear engineering now. I have a few passion projects that I'm working on (between the somewhat substantial consulting work that came out of the woodwork):
- Nuclear Reactor Starter Kit --- an open source set of procedures, processes, templates, and maybe even some IT advice that should help newcomers start companies with nuclear quality assurance programs easily and quickly while also making a new format in which nuclear companies can share lessons learned in efficiency.
- Reactor Database --- similar to the iaeas PRIS but focused on reactor development rather than power reactors. Will include nuclear startup company tracking with details gleaned from statements and maybe extrapolated where necessary from simple simulations. Will include things like fuel cost and licensing progress. This way people can more easily separate vaporware from real nuclear, and keep track of promises vs delivery.
This is really really interesting. Do share any links, or do post about it here on hn.
Have fun!
eftychis commented on Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++ collabora.com/news-and-bl... · Posted by u/LorenDB
It’s the sociology of software development.
The guild of software developers has no real standards, no certification, no proven practices outside <book> and <what $company is doing> while continuing to depend on the whims of project managers, POs and so-caled technical leaders and others which can’t tell quality code from their own ass.
There’s usually no money in writing high-quality software and almost everything in a software development project conspires against quality. Languages like Rust are a desperate attempt at fixing that with technology.
I guess it works, in a way, but these kind of blog posts just show us how inept most programmers are and why the Rust band-aid was needed in the first place.
This. The industry is a hot-pot of gut feelings/seat of my pants mixed with true engineering and mathematical rigor.
It is all hit or miss. Everyone claims they do high-quality, critical software in public, while in private, they claim the opposite, that they are fast and break things, and programming is an art, not math.
And then you have venture capital firms now pushing "vibe coding."
Software development is likely the highest variance engineering space, sometimes and in some companies, not even being engineering, but "vibes."
It is interesting how this is going to progress forward. Are we going to have a situation like the Quebec Bridge [https://colterreed.com/the-failed-bridge-that-inspired-a-sim...]. The Crowdstrike incident taking down the whole airspace proved that is not enough. Market hacks in "decentralized exchanges," the same. Not sure where we are heading.
I guess we are waiting for some catastrophe that will have some venture capital liable for the vibe coding, and then we will have world wide regulation pushed on us.
Location: SF Bay Area
Remote: Flexible
Willing to relocate: No (flexible with timezones and travel though)
Technologies: Rust(since its beginnings), C, C++, Go, Haskell, Python, and more (all production)
Résumé/CV: https://eftychis.org/cv/cv_industry.pdf
Veteran Cryptographer and Distributed Systems Engineer with multiple large-scale, high-value distributed systems delivered. (incl. byzantine fault tolerance & consensus protocols.) Experience bringing secure and private machine learning to production, from low-level code to engaging B2B customers and directing projects on a global scale (U.S., Europe, Asia). Passionate about leading, mentoring, and providing high-impact.
eftychis commented on Google can train search AI with web content even with opt-out bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/gotmedium
Assholes will rationalize any way they can, and a lot of the population is "set up" to hear these excuses and evaluate them. So, for a small percentage of assholes, they will have such good excuses nobody holds them accountable.
Funny how calling out well-dressed manipulation bothers some people more than the manipulation itself. Almost like some folks need the illusion to stay intact.
You hit the nail in the head with your last sentence. It is a psychological defense mechanism.
People don't want to be associated with fraud and would do any mind tricks to explain things away, while knowing the illusion is there.