Rewriting a program in Rust (specifically) really only makes sense for a few reasons:
1) the existing implementation is in an unsafe, cumbersome language (C, C++).
2) the existing implementation language is too slow and that slowness cannot be worked around.
3) the implementation is enormous, in a dynamic language and you desperately need stricter types. But this doesn't really favor Rust specifically.
1 doesn't apply because Ruby is garbage collected. It's doubtful 2 applies just given what homebrew does: the long pole is always going to be I/O. The performance improvements in version 7 seem to mostly be due to doing more concurrently. I highly doubt the Ruby-ness gets meaningfully in the way.
I was kinda kidding because parent called it "blazing" fast lol. I didn't think it was Rust. Blazing fast software is reserved as a descriptor for Rust programs :)
i just tested and `mise bootstrap` is over twice as fast at installing when a bottle was in the cache. other commands like `status/check` are 20-30x faster. that's without spending much work at all on perf—i'm sure i could bring these numbers down much further.
That file doesn't seem like it would work for a number of reasons.
The gear with integrated hour hand wouldn't be able to rotate in the space that it's mounted. In order to tell the time against the ring, the hand would need to be much further away from the gear.
Secondly, the funnel bit seems to have no real purpose; if you have to pipe water to the funnel, why not just bring it directly to the cup at the bottom? In real water clocks there is usually a primary collector but it's built in such a way that it overflows at a certain level so that the pressure on the outgoing line stays constant. The funnel here does essentially nothing and there is nothing else in the clock that would provide any kind of flow rate calibration; you'd have to do that externally.
Lastly, it's not clear how you'd reset the clock. Can the collector be removed separately or do you need to turn the whole clock upside down to pour the water out and get the float back down to the bottom?
Is it just me or does the dark blob in the center of the decagon look like a Mandelbrot set? The resemblance appears more acute in the images lower down in the article.
I think the images in the article are mosaics created from multiple images and the dark blob in the center is where their was no imagery because Saturn's south pole is currently tilted somewhat away from us. It has a 30 year orbit, and you can see in the images we are able to see closer and closer to the south pole each of the three years images were taken. The rough edges are just an artifact of image processing, and where individual exposures cut off.
Cool, I like the esp idea but won't you have to walk fairly slowly with a default ESP antenna? High gain might be better.. If you're wearing a cap you may not care as much being seem from above vs from the front.
Maybe attach a little windspeed meter to the top of the antenna on your hat too ;)
Voting, and participating locally in policy discussions has far greater traction.
The fact is with satellite to cell service online, there is a far greater risk automotive and civilian telemetry meta-data is collected regardless of what people want or do on the ground.
It is credulous to believe individuals can affect political policy with gadgets. =3
Clocks like this are fun. I coded one but couldn’t decide how to handle the corner cases where the sun rises but does not set (and vice versa). You also have to decide if you’re showing the time that the sun rose today or if it should be tomorrow once you’ve already passed that time. Either way, at a certain point you’ll see the UI shift. At moderate latitudes it makes little difference but the effect can be quite extreme depending on the latitude and time of year.
> how to handle the corner cases where the sun rises but does not set (and vice versa)
In practice it doesn't matter: you get a thin sliver of twilight between solar midnight and sunrise or sunset, and a 'Sunset: Does not occur' message in the text info. In such cases the sunrise/sunset arc (sector?) is pretty broad anyway.
> or if it should be tomorrow once you’ve already passed that time
Yes. I chose to recalculate the times midnight.
> Either way, at a certain point you’ll see the UI shift
Yes, but it's usually not dramatic. A few minutes time and fractions of a degree each day. The biggest shift occurs when Daylight Saving time changes — you get a big 15° rotation in the display. Most people are asleep when that happens, but it's cool to watch it jump.
I'd want to make it continuous, but then it wouldn't actually show you proper sunset/sunrise times until the moment they are actually happening, which is probably sacrificing function for form. You could also hide the shift by making the whole thing "tick" rather than having some parts continuous and some quantised.
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
Until the past couple launches it was the ship that had the issues. Had to be blown up a couple times, failed to relight in vacuum, lost an engine and nearly failed to get to the suborbital trajectory last time. Meanwhile the booster had the most spectacular success in the catch, and has yet to result in a catastrophic failure.
The leading theory, from what I can tell, is slosh. The flip on separation is relatively violent, and while there's not much fuel left compared to the amount at launch, it's still heavy enough to do damage.
Oof, yeah, one good slosh at 11G is probably all it takes. On the bright side, there is probably a trajectory that works and I wish them luck in finding it!
I'm not sure I understand why even a truly obscure programming language article should ever be deleted; it's not like Wikipedia is running low on paper. If Odin ceased all development tomorrow it would be good to have some record of what it was.
For the record, I like Odin.
(On homebrew it appears to have been downloaded 6,707 in the past year. Compare to:)
The point of Wikipedia is to be accurate, not complete. Wikipedia does not want to just trust the developers of $ObscureLang to maintain their own wikipedia page. So, the existence of the $ObscureLang page (and, in the aggregate, many similar pages) imposes a maintenance burden on Wikipedia. Better to say nothing than to risk saying something inaccurate.
Ha! This set it designed to take 114 years to construct and for maximum verisimilitude, Lego will run over your foot with a Lego tram after only a few decades of trying to build it.
Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash, describing work in "Fed Land"...
'''
Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:
Less than 10 min. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attitude.
14-15.61 min. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.
Exactly 15.62 min. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
15.63-16 min. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
16-18 min. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
More than 18 min. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).
Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.
If you can meet their goals, that just means there is more they can squeeze out of you. The incentive structure for our corporations means there is literally never enough and they will always demand more.
Reminds how in USSR - a planned economy - your achievements sweet spot was like 103-105% of the plan. Achievement below plan were punished, financially and by some form of public shaming. Hitting exact 100% looked like you don't have the genuine enthusiasm of a communism builder. Achievements above plan were encouraged, financially and by public recognition. Yet achievements well above plan meant that the plan was set too low.
Wrt. the original article - any META employee should be capable of running some xClaw to imitate reasonable activity satisfying whatever KPIs are established for them including submitting of the off-tracking requests following a reasonable pattern.
I remember how almost 30 years ago at one moment the only guy in our team who filed the status report was the one on vacation - he had a cron-script which didn't take vacation into account.
This dynamic might not even been so bad if there was some honesty and graciousness behind it. Some friggin humanity. It’s not so cold to understand and systematize the natural tension between expectation and reality and effort.
Once again at the end of the day the problem is more likely the profit motive above all else
“These dynamics exist specifically to wring the humanity out of any and all processes”
Who designed the processes? Reptilians?
Whatever the flaws of the dynamic, I would guess there is something innately human and organic about it, not designed. Just another weird outcome of the efficiency machine of social evolution.
I've seen that same policy in regular corporations. Giving any member of a team 5/5 meant a personal phone call with HR and your skip level to justify it, while the message was sent unofficially beforehand that having that meeting would be bad for a manager's career.
when I had >8 direct reports I was usually allowed to give a single 5/5, greatly exceeds expectations, etc, but it was also made clear to me in unrecorded formats that I also better have someone with a failing score if I did that.
Ha, I agree most of his books evoke having been written during stimulant binges; rich and detailed world building in the beginnings transition to incoherent plot driven action at the endings
I enjoyed snow crash probably up until 2/3rds through, same with cryptonomicon. I truly wish he would stick a god damn landing. I don't know what happens after the halfway marks. It's like a different writer takes over and it jumps the shark. I stopped reading his books after a while when they all seem to go off the rails. Damn shame really.
Diamond Age is the most important science fiction book of all time... until you get to 2/3 of the way through and the guy in the ... underwater? hippy? drug dream? It never recovers.
That's the awesome thing about Neal Stephenson being a timelord: He could train his own LLM on his own output and then go back in time and write LLM-generated fiction before it was cool.
What makes this even more hilarious is that Meta's rebranding was in part inspired by the metaverse concept in Snow Crash. You can bet that Zuckerberg, along with many other tech executives, have read this exact passage while mining the book for ideas. Life imitating art?
At the time it was published eye tracking would have come across as rather over the top (IMO) despite being a predictable outcome if you gave it some thought. Plus it would have necessitated adding and explaining cheap AI analysis, all the follow on plot impacts that would have, and would have ruined that scene as written. So I'd say that conveniently omitting it was a wise choice.
Can be easily handwaved away if you assume some toothless anti-surveillance legislation outlaws employers from engaging in eye tracking while failing to ban all the other stuff. That's not even an unexpected real world development at this point.
This is the reality for many low wage workers today. Amazon drivers are on strict schedules and are watched at all times. This isn't fantasy, this is reality. It just hasn't gotten up the chain to effect the average HN reader yet.
I was reminded of this sequence when one of my required trainings not only had a quiz but also a required minimum time limit. It wasn't enough knowing the material I needed to waste time on it as well.
And then I remembered people in jobs that pay less than mine are already viciously harassed for not acting like identical automatons.
Did everyone like this Stephensen in this thread? I read Cryptonomicon and Seveneves, mostly. They slogged for me a bit. But I love what he writes about, so willing to try another one (even if he doesn't have an editor). It sounds like this could be topical 2027 read. I have a long summer ahead of me.
Stephenson's writing is great if you like lengthy asides that add to the world and to your understanding of the characters, but add nothing to the plot.
If you want to read six pages of detailed musings on how the character learned ballroom dance and their design for a special milk-dispensing spoon for eating cereal without it getting soggy, establishing the character is the kind of person who designs spoons in their mind as they eat breakfast, then Stephenson is for you.
If you want the character to get to the damn ball and get told the secret coordinates so we can get moving with the plot already, Stephenson might not be for you.
I actually think Snow Crash is iconic for what it was conceptually, I don't know how I would actually stack the writing up now that I've gotten older and would probably pick something else.
I can see it feeling tropey now despite being an originator of many of the tropes. It's been a decade(s)+? since I read it last though, still highly recommend.
Give Fall: Dodge In Hell a try. It has a few characters from Reamde but nothing to do with it so you don't need to read that one. Its an amazing idea about realistically what building the singularity could look like. Starting with one digitized mind.
I much preferred Diamond Age to Snow Crash. It's been a while though, so can't fully remember why - but I think Snow Crash tried to be too cute or something and kinda seemed disjointed.
Makes me wonder what it’s like to identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea! Or Thanos wasn’t so bad. Those rebel scum had it coming. Homelander is the good guy!
>identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea!
Are there many stories where the bad guys create the metaverse? AFAIK, Stephenson coined the term in Snow Crash and there it was built by the main character and his buds.
The Matrix, I suppose? Though I think Zuck's (immediate) vision and who he identifies as is way more Hiro Protagonist or James Halliday.
You might be right. It’s been a while since I read snow crash. I just remember the metaverse as a sort sad state of society, but I don’t remember if the evil corp stuff was in there or just in the world at large
RPO's "bad guys" weren't the creators of the metaverse but a corp trying to win the contest to take it over. Halliday is flawed but a large part of the novel centers around that and he intentionally creates the contest in part to try ensure the metaverse ends up in appropriate hands, no?
Every story, even ours, needs a bad guy. Best villains don't think they are villains. They just do what they must/should/want (in that order, depending on their intensity), because they can.
I had no idea it was a lord of the rings reference. Here’s an apt quote from wikipedia: “The [palantir] stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented.”
Just for the overly suspicious among us, I looked up the edit that introduced that quote[1] and it doesn't appear to have been added as a dig against the company.
Well they weren't necessarily bad. I think the Numenor (?) Kings of Westernesse (?), I dunno whatever the old Gondor kings were called, used them effectively. It was just Sauron that took over and made them dangerous. So, effective but dangerous in the wrong hand. Yeah, I guess, even that is pretty prophetic, heh.
"The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-dûr can make them do so. He can, maybe, by his will choose what things shall be seen by weaker minds, or cause them to mistake the meaning of what they see."
It really is the perfect name. It's exactly what I would have chosen, if I hated the company and was given a choice of names. But it's a terrible product name for any media literate customer.
It's another example of how the intentions of the good can be easily lead astray by the corruption power brings.
Using it as the name of a military contractor misses the point so hard I almost expect it to be intentional, but I suspect it's just teenage-boy level foolishness.
Just a regular reminder Peter Thiel thinks that Greta Thunberg is the antichrist and hesitated when asked if humanity should survive because the question is "layered". This is not a person that should be powerful.
They justify it as defending their way of life, which can align with Tolkien a little bit with some mental gymnastics
> I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
but overall Tolkien was against war, being a veteran of WWI himself, and the LOTR saga is about the heroism of the meek.
Peter Thiel clearly loves the sword for its sharpness, it drips from everything his companies do.
I think the movie was every bit as deep as the books. Remember how terrifying it was for Frodo to be seen by Sauron’s eye? No, they know exactly what they’re doing and they don’t care.
I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!
Have to agree with you on this. Neal Stephenson is not a writer's writer by any means. But even by his standards I found the prose in Snowcrash to be plodding and amateur. I still love the book for its campy nature and for all the amazing ideas it birthed but it would have definitely benefited from a round of aggressive editing. Also the ending quite frankly was horrible, but I hear this is a general issue with Stephenson's works.
In general if you are new to Stephenson I would recommend reading Snow Crash first otherwise the transition from his other better written books will be jarring.
Swordfight (which is very stephenson to have in the ending) and nuclear-powered robot dogs showing extreme loyalty to the person who saved one of them from overheating.
The second half differs dramatically in tone. If you were really into the specific feeling of the first half, it is very jarring.
I found the whole thing very interesting and enjoyable, but I can imagine being excited for more content similar to the first half and being disappointed by the drastic shift in scale/tone/focus/etc.
Was visiting a university bookstore few months ago and came across it used in paperback. Never read it but know it has modern/tech significance. Read some of it and went "well, naah" and passed. Ironically the book I ended up purchasing instead was really bad and I couldn't finish it (something by Maureen Down the NYT columnist, I love her opinion work but the book was horrible)
There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.
I experience this as me being a ridealong on my friend's random diatribe. Oftentimes it feels like something he just learned and needs to tell someone about.
I believe REAMDE included an entire page dedicated to the virtues of lashing tires to fishing craft.
Isn't that Stephenson driving home the faceless drone, cog-in-the-machine characterisation of YT's mom?
I mean, literally not giving the character a name fits right in with the alienating working conditions of the quote above, and the fact YT's mom is working on a software cog with no understanding of the machine it fits into.
I haven't read it, but if it's written in the first person with the narrator referring to themself as 'YT', then it's at least consistent? If yours truly suddenly referred to my mother, or indeed if I referred to yours truly's mother, that would be more jarring I think?
That’s not what’s happening. Snow Crash has an omniscient 3rd person narrator.
A protagonist (but not THAT Protagonist!) is named Y.T. (street nickname for Yours Truly) and her mom doesn’t matter. She’s environmental set dressing.
I'm not sure she's actually addressed as such by others in the story, but it's how the narrator addresses her. And IIRC how she introduces herself to the hero protagonist (Hiro Protagonist) on first meeting.
In a later work she's referenced as Miss Matheson.
WTF, why chime in without any additional research if you haven’t read it in the first place?
No, it’s an omniscient third person narrator. Yeah, YT is probably the “true” viewpoint, esp if you take diamond age into account. “Chiseled spam” and all that.
Neil Stephenson is weirdly prescient in some of his novels. The people getting beamed the worst kind of slop on Fall has also been on my mind a lot recently.
Rewriting a program in Rust (specifically) really only makes sense for a few reasons:
1) the existing implementation is in an unsafe, cumbersome language (C, C++).
2) the existing implementation language is too slow and that slowness cannot be worked around.
3) the implementation is enormous, in a dynamic language and you desperately need stricter types. But this doesn't really favor Rust specifically.
1 doesn't apply because Ruby is garbage collected. It's doubtful 2 applies just given what homebrew does: the long pole is always going to be I/O. The performance improvements in version 7 seem to mostly be due to doing more concurrently. I highly doubt the Ruby-ness gets meaningfully in the way.
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