studius (u/studius) - Readit News

studius commented on Going to the Moon Was Easy Compared to 100UL avweb.com/insider/going-t... · Posted by u/another

nosianu · 5 years ago

It's not a theoretical question, we have the events and the outcomes, complete: The time it took from announcement to actually landing on the moon was shorter than the time it took from recognizing the lead problem to banning it from all fuel including aviation fuel. The second one already is longer. So whatever your model of reality, the complete model is reality itself and it proves that point. What else would be better for arguing than the actual real-world outcomes?

If you want to say things like "but there were less people working on the problem" you are removing things from the real world to build a more limited model to fit your argument. Overall getting enough people to work on the problem is part of it. Including everything, which includes getting attention and resources devoted to a problem in the first place, the moon landing indeed was easier. I think it's not much of an argument that exactly that, getting a vast effort rolling and people and resources devoted to a problem, really is one of the hardest problems. It was pretty easily achieved for the moon landing.

If you want to separate the policy problem of getting the resources from the technology problem you are only looking at a part, to get the desired outcome both are needed. Sure, the technology part was harder for the moon landing - which makes it even worse that the other part, the policy stuff, is so hard to accomplish.

studius · 5 years ago

How many died?

The elapsed calendar time from the birth of the first human to when an electronic drink blender was first invented was much longer, but I wouldn't say that was more effort and sacrifice than getting to the moon.

Do you know how many lives were lost in Germany, prisoners marched in the cold by force, a huge number of them dying along the way, to dig underground missile production factories with their bare hands, being shot if they stopped? Or that those men leading those atrocious slave factories were then effectively saved from certain death from war crime tribunal, just to help with the early U.S. rocket program that went into the moon effort?[1][2]

That's not even including the sacrifices leading up to it by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., which I'd include in the overall effort[3][4].

[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

[2]- https://amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Program-...

[3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Space_accidents_and_i...

[4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac...

studius commented on Going to the Moon Was Easy Compared to 100UL avweb.com/insider/going-t... · Posted by u/another

chmod775 · 5 years ago

Would make sense if there was taxpayer-funded healthcare, because then you could use the money those companies pay as taxes to fund the treatment of those they poisoned...

studius · 5 years ago

I'm all for healthcare, but, on topic, it'd make even more sense to find replacements one-at-a-time for all of the products we use daily that are made up in part by crude oil.

Most plastics, many foods, many skin products, etc. all come from some by-product of oil. Because of that dependence, big oil is not only a huge industry, it's most industries, most company, most products, and touches most consumers.

Also:

"There are 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves in the world as of 2016. The world has proven reserves equivalent to 46.6 times its annual consumption levels. This means it has about 47 years of oil left."[1]

Wars have been fought over it when we still had a lot left, and we've got until maybe 2068.

[1]- https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

studius commented on Going to the Moon Was Easy Compared to 100UL avweb.com/insider/going-t... · Posted by u/another

51Cards · 5 years ago

Clicking on this article with no context makes it very difficult to understand if you don't already know what 100UL and avgas means. Took me 2 paragraphs of confusion to figure out "avgas" is aviation fuel and 100UL means 100 Octane Unleaded.

studius · 5 years ago

I'd seen a gas pump with 100UL before, years ago, otherwise I would've had an even more difficult time interpreting it.

studius commented on Going to the Moon Was Easy Compared to 100UL avweb.com/insider/going-t... · Posted by u/another

studius · 5 years ago

I see no argument as to why going to the moon was easier. That sort of title diminishes the sacrifices and accomplishments involved with going to the moon.

studius commented on The Analog Computer Inside Prime Minister insidegmt.com/2021/01/the... · Posted by u/homarp

racingmars · 5 years ago

"Analog" meaning the ability to represent data across an uninterrupted, infinitely-fine continuum, versus "digital" meaning only able to represent data as discrete steps. Continuous versus discrete.

The comment that the "computer" in the game is correctly referred to as digital is because from the picture, there are discrete steps for the points on each policy (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. on each area of the economy).

An "analog computer" could be implemented with electronic components, and a "digital computer" could be implemented purely mechanically.

studius · 5 years ago

"You’ll track support for each party in each sector, moving wooden markers up and down the numerical tracks."

Unclear if this is discrete or indiscrete.

"Different sectors have different point spreads, reflecting their importance in the Victorian-era electorate."

Spread itself has discrete values, though maybe be representing something indiscrete.

"In this era, most British subjects didn’t have the right to vote, so the point spreads aren’t simply based on population distribution. They’re based on the number of voters..."

The indiscrete game world concept of unknown changing actual population, but a number of voters would be discrete.

"...and each sector’s overall impact on the election results, factoring in the value of campaign contributions, endorsements, and other means of influence."

Contributions value may be discrete, but endorsements and other means of influence I'm not sure about.

"As the game progresses, parties will reach maximum or minimum values in some sectors. These maximums and minimums affect the game’s strategy and evoke real-life political effects. No matter how strongly Scotland prefers one party over another, Scotland’s impact is limited by the number of voters in Scotland."

So, there are indiscrete things in game world represented, but it has a number of voters and that number itself would be discrete.

"The Conservative Party can also earn popularity points in the Workers sector, but can’t earn any red points there because Workers who support the Conservative Party prefer moderate MPs."

Seems like a calculable, discrete representation of the indiscrete.

Functionally it appears as a digital computer from the outside of the game, because of the point values.

But the point is that the game represents calculations happening in that game world with indiscrete variables like "variable support from unknown population", hence the "analog computer inside..." in the title.

studius commented on The Analog Computer Inside Prime Minister insidegmt.com/2021/01/the... · Posted by u/homarp

frostburg · 5 years ago

It's probably relevant to point out that it's digital, not analog, despite not being electronic.

However, I would say that boardgame mechanic that used for example a comparison between the height of piles of cards could be argued to be analog.

studius · 5 years ago

Analog data is data that is represented in a physical way. Is the game not physical?

studius commented on Tesla Claims Engineer Stole Secrets Just Three Days on the Job bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/Ice_cream_suit

studius · 5 years ago

> He said he transferred it to his personal Dropbox cloud account to use later on his personal computer.

Some companies don't draw the line between personal and work computers.

Most schools, colleges, and universities expect students now to supply their own computers.

But, while it's not surprising that someone today could consider that it might be ok just to take the data home like it's no big deal, I think Tesla isn't making a mistake in taking this to court, if it was clear in the contract(s) that the employee signed that such behavior was unacceptable.

You could jump to conclusions reading the title that the employee planned to sell the data or was working for a competitor, and you could be correct. But what's at issue, it seems, is that the employee didn't meet their contractual obligation.

studius commented on The Analog Computer Inside Prime Minister insidegmt.com/2021/01/the... · Posted by u/homarp

teddyh · 5 years ago

Clickbait rescue: […] inside the board game named “Prime Minister”.

studius · 5 years ago

I for one was glad to see it was about a board game instead of a short sci-fi story or an interview with the Prime Minister about their old pacemaker. Not that those wouldn't have been interesting, but I wasn't expecting a board game. What a surprise!

studius commented on Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing elastic.co/blog/why-licen... · Posted by u/buro9

hodgesrm · 5 years ago

> It doesn't matter what they say, read the license.

I would love to but the terms within the ElasticSearch codebase on Github are quite confusing. Here's the text of the LICENCE.TXT file.

  Source code in this repository is covered by one of three licenses: (i) the
  Apache License 2.0 (ii) an Apache License 2.0 compatible license (iii) the
  Elastic License. The default license throughout the repository is Apache License
  2.0 unless the header specifies another license. Elastic Licensed code is found
  only in the x-pack directory.

  The build produces two sets of binaries - one set that falls under the Elastic
  License and another set that falls under Apache License 2.0. The binaries that
  contain `-oss` in the artifact name are licensed under Apache License 2.0 and
  these binaries do not package any code from the x-pack directory.

Aside from not showing copies of the applicable licenses, it seems you have to read the code headers to determine which source file has which license. There are a lot of ways to respond to competitive threats from Amazon, but this approach is increasingly chaotic the closer you look.

[1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE...

studius · 5 years ago

Open-source and free software licenses don't imply that the source must remain served on some site, and it doesn't imply that the license for the code cannot change for future versions of that code necessarily- as it depends on the license and/or other factors.

But if you have a copy of the license and the code and it permitted use of it perpetually, then it can continue to be used. That's my understanding.

studius commented on GitHub Stale Bots – A False Economy blog.benwinding.com/githu... · Posted by u/gitgud

tobr · 5 years ago

Ideally an issue is not a conversation between a “user” and a “maintainer” though, but a place for a community to coordinate around a bug or feature request. I wouldn’t open an issue unless I thought someone more than me might find the topic useful, and so I also don’t feel like I have an obligation to participate in the conversation – after all, it’s not about me, but about ways to improve the code. I find it somewhat offensive when people post to request support on something that can’t reasonably be useful to anyone else.

studius · 5 years ago

> it’s not about me, but about ways to improve the code

This is true for me, but I also would admit that it's not all altruistic.

Specifically, I will report problems that may be rare for others and unlikely to be reproducible by the maintainer. I often provide information about the operating system, version, etc. in those cases to put a reasonable amount of effort into it, but I don't always expect it to be fixed by the maintainer.

However, if I determine later that the bug was caused by something else, I'll go find the bug I created and add a comment indicating that it was fixed or related to another problem, if it's simple.