optforfon (u/optforfon)

optforfon commented on With Cyanogen dead, Google's control over Android is tighter than ever greenbot.com/article/3153... · Posted by u/vezycash

optforfon · 9 years ago

Google controls Android due to the PlayStore

Just an anecdote. I'm currently living in China and me and the other expats were always kinda amused that local Chinese are willing to spend the equivalent of 2 months of their salary on an iPhone. Apple's grip on the market is absolute here

At first, like some high brow NYT journalist, I thought it must be a cultural thing. People looking for a status thing, a vanity thing in a image conscious society. Or a the very least they're willing to fork over tons of cash to get a good quality device bc they don't trust their own phone makers. But the local phones are actually hardware-wise okay. And they have decent warranty support (not Apple level.. but still)

But after watching a friend struggle with an Android phone, I realized that the problem is the apps. There is no GooglePlay store, just crappy 3rd party stores like the Xiaomi Store. These stores have basically no standards when it comes to app quality and Chinese apps are horrible bloated virus-like monstrosities that slowly cripple your phone till it barely works and the battery dies after half a day. All the permissions managers and security features in the world don't stop the system from being a complete disaster here.

If anyone wants to free Android - they need to make a good play-store alternative that only allows high quality apps. They you can make your Android fork and whatever else you want

optforfon commented on To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed) nytimes.com/2016/12/21/op... · Posted by u/jseliger

optforfon · 9 years ago

One thing that needs to be stressed is that realistically there is a rather limited amount of Uranium than can be extracted from the earth for nuclear power. That if we could magically convert to 100% nuclear power - it wouldn't last that long.

from wikipedia

"Still, the world's present measured resources of uranium, economically recoverable at the arbitrary price ceiling of 130 USD/kg, are enough to last for between 70 and 100 years"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Conventional_fue...

reactors have a life of around 60 years I think. So maybe you could double the amount of nuclear power? But it's not like the world can magically go to 100% nuclear indefinitely.

optforfon commented on LowRISC – An open-source, Linux-capable System-on-a-Chip lowrisc.org/... · Posted by u/hkt

optforfon · 9 years ago

I'm not really fully involved in the ecosystem too much, but has open source hardware really paid off? Like I see that you can get cheap knockoff Arduinos - but that's not really moving things forward. Are people forking board designs and selling their own twists? (honest question..)

optforfon commented on Zero Cost Abstractions ruudvanasseldonk.com/2016... · Posted by u/Bognar

mpweiher · 9 years ago

>The only proper way to reason about the cost of these

>abstractions is to inspect the generated machine code.

To me, that's a big problem with a lot of these Heldencompilers. They may generate really optimal machine code. Then again, they may not, and the difference between optimizations working well and not working well in runtime efficiency is so great (I've measured 1000x for Swift) that they might as well be completely different languages.

For reference, 1000x means that 1 second turns into 16 minutes, and having that type of difference in something that's completely opaque is not a useful performance tool for me, because predictability is at least half the game in performance. So something like Knuth's transformation systems that turn optimization into a dialogue between programmer, compiler and instrumentation seems like a better idea[1].

[1] https://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/CS185C/KnuthStructuredProgrammi...

optforfon · 9 years ago

The problem is immature tooling. There is no feedback loop from the compiler's generated assembly back to the IDE. We finally have libclang which sorta does some stuff (I'm not entirely sure how far it can go) - but I'm honestly not seeing any work being done in this direction on the IDE level. After all these years of C++ development, why doesn't the IDE do something as simple as tell me if a function is being inline or not is beyond me (that's the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I want to know).

When I asked people at CppCon about it I just got some shrugs and was told "just go look at the assembly".

Another solution is profiling - but that's got a slow turn around, and it can be hard to narrow down problem areas.

optforfon commented on China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission bbc.com/news/world-asia-c... · Posted by u/bing_dai

twblalock · 9 years ago

> Except it's going to go hand in hand with nationalism and fear-mongering.

So did the first space race, and it went pretty well, and cooperation between the US and Russia still took place eventually.

optforfon · 9 years ago

uhhh, well I'm sure the space race didn't help in reducing tensions.. but you know all the proxy wars and thousands of soldiers dieing prolly played a bigger role.

There really shouldn't be an use vs. them with China. That's incredibly toxic thinking (trying to create an new Cold War)

optforfon commented on China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission bbc.com/news/world-asia-c... · Posted by u/bing_dai

yohann305 · 9 years ago

Am I the only one that feels that China is helping in motivating the world to put efforts into Space Exploration?

Good job on China for pulling this off and helping Mankind.

optforfon · 9 years ago

Except it's going to go hand in hand with nationalism and fear-mongering. It won't bring people together and that ultimately a lot more sad.

optforfon commented on Russia's sacred myths bbc.co.uk/news/world-euro... · Posted by u/techterrier

grabcocque · 9 years ago

Every nation has its own foundational myths. God knows the way Americans mythologize their founding fathers to so far beyond the bounds of credibility doesn't bother them.

optforfon · 9 years ago

I think this is only true when you look at political speech (where the sacred phrase "founding fathers" can justify most things)

But ultimately at this point the US is culturally on a completely different level compared to backward nationalist countries like Russia. Maybe you're not familiar with American education, but a good portion of what we learn at a young age is actually national self criticism. In my personal experience I'd estimate almost half of my history education up to high school was on

- the terrible things we did to the Native Americas

- the terrible things we did to Slaves

- the terrible way we oppressed African Americans

Even when we learn about the founding fathers, time is always take out to point out the hypocrisies that happened at the time. I think the fact that a bunch of intelligent men were able to found a national structure that has lasted this long and has managed to regulate itself away from tyranny is truly magical and a great historical achievement. The more I learn about it, the more improbably it all seems - there were so many chances for it to go wrong. What are they on in France, their fifth republic? Or is it their 6th?

optforfon commented on Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs harrowell.org.uk/blog/201... · Posted by u/Hooke

protomyth · 9 years ago

"Japan invaded Manchuria to create belated empires though with less overtly genocidal intentions."

Given the number of people the Japanese killed at Nanking[1] alone, I don't think this is a true statement. This site[2] (at and edu) puts it around 6 million total.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

2) https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

optforfon · 9 years ago

The rational for killing the local population is fundamentally different

Nanking was massacred as punitive action for resistance, not as a means of creating space for the Japanese. They Japanese did have "colonists" in Manchuria, but if you know any geography that's nowhere close to Nanking.

optforfon commented on This Generation Is Most Likely to Swear at Work bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/BWStearns

optforfon · 9 years ago

At least when it comes to startups this makes total sense. Work is increasingly both your work and your life. Your friends are increasingly your colleagues.

Traditionally you don't cuss in the work place b/c you have to stay professional - ie. you have to not be emotional about your work. Cussing is a form of injecting emotion into your speech. If you are at the office 12 hours a day with your friends, then the lines get blurred.

Personally I don't like the trend, but to each his own. There are pluses and minuses to each type of workplace

optforfon commented on Elephants without tusks are a response to the selective pressure of poaching nautil.us/issue/41/select... · Posted by u/dnetesn

adamnemecek · 9 years ago

> Ivory's a beautiful, extremely useful substance;

Beautiful maybe, useful, not really.

> outlawing it makes as little sense as outlawing alcohol,

Not really, prior to 2008 when the CITES relaxed ivory sale regulation, poaching was minimal. The current poaching crisis is a result of this relaxation. Not every good behaves the same way as alcohol.

> What needs to be done is to create the appropriate legal framework and property rights to give Africans an incentive to ranch elephants.

Not possible for ecological, zoological economical and ethical reasons. Elephants take at least 20 years to start growing tusks but the 'big tuskers' are ~50 years old. Also, you won't be able to produce ivory cheaper than a poacher who doesn't have to invest into the elephant. Also elephants aren't domesticated. Also they are an extremely intelligent and social species and one of the species that come up in "non-human personhood" discussions.

> What needs to be done is to create the appropriate legal framework and property rights to give Africans an incentive to ranch elephants.

Right. Establishing legal frameworks and enforcing laws in Africa is very easy.

> Elephants are going extinct because no-one has an interest in keeping them alive. Give someone a reason to keep them alive, and the species will last forever.

It's a lot more complex than that.

optforfon · 9 years ago

I saw plenty of domesticated elephants in Thailand (and I assume all of South East Asia). Are African elephant some how different when it comes to this?