The precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.
Readit Newspeter303 commented on A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019) longnow.org/ideas/the-260... · Posted by u/mkmk
peter303 commented on Forth: The programming language that writes itself ratfactor.com/forth/the_p... · Posted by u/suioir
RPN interpreters require very little core memory. So they were popular with computers where core memory was under ten kilobytes.
But its horrible for software engineering with multiple programmers and large codebases. Lacks structures, interfaces, modules, data abstraction that you expect in a modern language. We called it the "Chinese food" of coding- ten minutes later you had nomidea what you just coded.
I think the difference between the Apple and Xerox approach may be more complicated than the people at PARC not knowing how to do this. The Alto doesn't have a framebuffer, each window has its own buffer and the microcode walks the windows to work out what to put on each scanline.
Frame buffer memory was still incredibly expensive in 1980. Our labs 512 x 512 x 8bit table lookup color buffer cost $30,000 in 1980. Mac's 512 x 384 x 8bit buffer in 1984 had to fit the Macs $2500 price. The Xerox Alto was earlier than these two devices and would have cost even more if it had a full frame buffer.
peter303 commented on AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them nytimes.com/2024/04/13/mo... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Reminds of "fugi film": the standard development make the colors brighter than reallife. The customers liked that better, even if less accurate.
peter303 commented on Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011) english.stackexchange.com... · Posted by u/ent101
Of course. You was formal while thou was informal.
The good new is that Nvidia's high GPU prices motivate everyone (Intel, AMD, ARM, Google, etc.) to try and tackle the problem by making new chips, making more efficient use of current chips, etc. For all the distributed computing efforts that have existed (prime factorization, SETI@Home, Bitcoin, etc.), I'm surprised there isn't some way for gamers to rent out use of their GPU's when idle. It wouldn't be efficient, but at these prices it could still make sense.
The larger language models now employ a trillion parameters. This is faster when memory and computing is tighter, not distributed. Cerebus's million core super-wafer addresses this.
peter303 commented on IRS launches paperless processing initiative home.treasury.gov/news/pr... · Posted by u/xdfg13345
Sounds great, except a flat tax rate is extremely regressive so you either tank the amount of tax revenue the government collects, or you punish low income earners far more than wealthy individuals.
My state has flat tax rate of federal taxable income (after deductions). Most years its free online filing and typing 5 or 6 numbers. Takes five minutes. The tax softwares dont like that because they get half their income from state filings.
I dislike that I dont get the long term capital gains discount like on federal.
peter303 commented on Fossil shows mammal sinking teeth into dinosaur theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/Hooke
I eat chicken regularly.
Congress
> The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be
This is true of many (most?) innovations. E.g. the steam engine: people knew about steam power, and built primitive steam engines. Watt succeeded eventually in manufacturing one that had the right mix of reliability, power, cost, maintainability to be widely useful. E.g. the jet engine : Whittle conceived of turbine aircraft power during WW1, but didn't succeed in manufacturing a viable engine and putting it in a plane until the end of WW2.
Steam power was more of toy for the Romans. Some made dioramas with statues of the gods moved by steam.