la_barba (u/la_barba)

la_barba commented on Gigantic Chinese telescope opens to astronomers worldwide nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

lukaa · 6 years ago

No man is island. So even if you are just harming yourself by drinking or taking drugs you are also ruining your family and indirectly society by making that behavior more socially acceptable. So there shouldn't be absolute freedom in anything.

la_barba · 6 years ago

Okay, but you are conflating moral harm/duties with tangible physical harm. The first one is arguable, the second one (pollution of air, etc) isn't.

la_barba commented on Programming Idioms programming-idioms.org... · Posted by u/hazbo

coldtea · 6 years ago

If people didn't re-invent the wheel we'd still be using wheels made of rock like the Flintstones (or at best wooden wheel, like 4 millennia ago).

la_barba · 6 years ago

Back then, you could re-invent a shitty wheel, people would ignore you and your idea would die out. Now a shitty-wheel idea gets indexed into a search engine and can potentially fool a non-expert into believing that its actually a good idea. I suppose thats the problem education has been trying to solve...

la_barba commented on Gigantic Chinese telescope opens to astronomers worldwide nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

bart_spoon · 6 years ago

People expressing different perspectives and influencing decisions isn't an absolute good. It certainly can be positive and desireable in many situations. In others it can be utterly destructive, such as the the anti-vax movement or climate change skeptics.

la_barba · 6 years ago

Your example is off the mark. What people mean by that sentiment is that as long as you don't harm others, you should have the freedom to do what you want. Climate-change and ant-vax are issues that impact everyone else on the planet.

la_barba commented on The Saudis Are Lying About Their Oil Production? oilprice.com/Energy/Crude... · Posted by u/olivermarks

stefan_ · 6 years ago

Why does it matter what their potential production capacity is? That sounds like asking how many money printing machines they have; it seems they could build as many of those as they want, but of course you only do that according to market needs.

And of course oil reserves have had the unfortunate tendency to significantly increase whenever the oil price is high.

la_barba · 6 years ago

Capacity is the currency of the industry they're in. Its right in the article itself.

>What Saudi is trying to do by not revealing the true picture is to protect its reputation as a reliable oil supplier, especially to its target clientele in Asia, so we have to take all of these comments with a hefty pinch of salt,

la_barba commented on iPadOS apple.com/ipados/... · Posted by u/plg

ymolodtsov · 6 years ago

They stopped updating 5S because it only has 1Gb of RAM. They only do it when the device really falls short of technical requirements.

la_barba · 6 years ago

If that is indeed the real reason, its unfortunate that they cannot get an OS to run acceptably in 1GB of RAM. Especially when they have such a tiny amount of hardware variations to support.

la_barba commented on iPadOS apple.com/ipados/... · Posted by u/plg

Analemma_ · 6 years ago

In Apple's defense, the SOCs on iPads are improving much, much faster than PC chips. Intel chips have been getting faster at something like 5% per year for the last decade, compared to 50% for Apple's A-series. So I think supporting 5 years worth of iPad devices is somewhat comparable to supporting 20 years worth of PC hardware: in both cases it's about a 100x performance difference between the bottom and top, and beyond that I imagine it's not worth it to try and tune an OS for both.

la_barba · 6 years ago

That really isn't a like-like comparison. You are looking at just one product from Apple. In the Android and Windows world for each generation there are hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations from entry level to high end that are expected to run Windows. Also MS/Google cannot test their software with future un-released hardware. If anything, this should be a cakewalk for Apple - if they choose to. I don't know what special "tuning" is required that prevents Apple from supporting the hardware.

la_barba commented on Why can’t browsers just be used for browsing (Chromium upgrade in OBS) obsproject.com/blog/progr... · Posted by u/vedranm

BAReF00t · 6 years ago

Browsers are a case of monolithism (and the inner-platform effect, of course).

In actuality, they are multiple different kinds of programs, welded together for no sensible reason.

* A http fetching daemon. * A "runner" to open URLs. * Several document viewers. * A virtual machine. * An OS with an API. * Extensive libraries for everything that the OS below the OS already offered. * One or several programming language JIT compiler(s) and runtime(s). * And some bits and pieces.

In a healthy environment, there would not be a second OS on top of the normal one. And all those parts would be separate software, with standardized interfaces. Doing one thing and doing it right. (Most of which already exist in the OS, and don't have to be reinvented. Case in point: WebSockets. Or, worse even, DNS over HTTP.)

That is what we should work towards.

Not that Google would ever not fight that, tooth and nail.

la_barba · 6 years ago

The other huge factor is that developers love re-inventing stuff. Nobody wants to be content just maintaining something that has been working for 30 years, because thats career suicide in today's world. "Hey, tell me about the cool stuff you're working on.." "You guys are still using that framework? Wow!". Its an interesting contrast from the industry I'm in (vaccines) where people are extremely risk-averse and do not ever want to disturb code/process flows that work and are making money. I have come to appreciate software reliability a LOT more.

Also.. given the massive surface area of new untested code thats being constantly pumped out, visiting a website today, is absolutely no different than downloading a random binary from the internet and running it. The ".com" address might as well be an actual .COM file that is downloaded and executed...

la_barba commented on Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? thehustle.co/graphing-cal... · Posted by u/lxm

krick · 6 years ago

Schools are the real problem here. After all, you don't get triggered by the fact, that there are very specific books every student has to buy for the course, do you? I think you should.

la_barba · 6 years ago

You haven't described what the problem actually is with schools. Homogenized knowledge systems are a simple way of having a common "API Layer" in our consciousness that other humans can access.

la_barba commented on Is the era of the $100 graphing calculator coming to an end? thehustle.co/graphing-cal... · Posted by u/lxm

5trokerac3 · 6 years ago

TI calculators are the biggest technology racket in education. The fact alone that most schools won't allow the use of Casio equivalents deserves an anti-trust investigation. There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted.

la_barba · 6 years ago

I don't think its a "racket". The thing with stuff like this is that nobody wants to be on the hook for re-certifying every single calculator as "equivalent".

la_barba commented on How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance longreads.com/2019/09/05/... · Posted by u/anarbadalov

sverige · 6 years ago

MS Windows is the great exception to this, where not only do they collect an inflated price for their software, they also spy on their users. So making money on the product is no guarantee that a software vendor won't also invade your privacy.

Apparently the key to success is to get corporate lock-in.

la_barba · 6 years ago

Well the key difference is that on-paper anyway, MS claims they use telemetry to make Windows better and fix bugs, Google spies on you and your personal data so that they can sell your profile to the highest bidder who will attempt to convince you to open your wallet.