notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

"Probably"? Even in their defense you felt a need to hedge, and that should tell you something. As another commenter has pointed out, Starlink has admitted that some components might survive re-entry. Let's not fall all over ourselves trying to give Musk and Co. more benefit of the doubt than they even give themselves.

notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

> The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.

How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?

I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.

notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

If the light stays red while the "walk" sign is active (usually the case) it's a whole lot less likely that there will actually be a pedestrian there during the turn. There's also a bit more time (while waiting for the light) to see a bike approaching. Yes, all parties still violate the law and accidents can still happen, but they become less likely.

https://www.codot.gov/safety/shift-into-safe-news/2025/march...

notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

While it's true that this particular driver probably violated existing law, it's also true that this particular maneuver is inherently mistake-prone. The driver still has to look three ways - across the intersection (for left turners), at the crosswalk, and behind them for cyclists (or fast pedestrians). It's too easy to miss one while checking for another, even for a diligent driver following all laws. The statistics on "right hooks" and the pedestrian equivalent don't lie. Right on red is just a bad idea.

notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

Maybe, at least some places, it's a vicious cycle. I don't like that phrase generally, but it seems to fit here. More people driving means more vehicle vs. pedestrian contention and accidents, which means fewer people walking, which means more people driving, 'round and 'round we go. I do see this playing out at a couple of schools near me. The number of people driving their middle-school kids less than half a mile is insane, and it's not just at the school either. Any street that has a convenient cut-through to the school grounds effectively becomes a second pick-up line at 2-4pm. Walking or running near there has become noticeably less safe since we moved to this neighborhood five years ago, from the increase in traffic alone even before other factors are accounted for.

notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

One possibility might be a combination of the "mostly urban" and "big SUV" factors. To put it another way: where are people driving those larger vehicles. I don't have numbers, but it does seem like vehicles that were once common mostly in suburban/exurban/rural environments are now more common in cities as well. Poor visibility plus higher pedestrian density seems like a powerfully bad combination.

Mostly, though, drivers have just gotten worse. Corner-cutting is one of my pet peeves, and a good example here. I used to see someone cutting a corner across opposing traffic - usually someone turning off an arterial vs. someone trying to come out of the side street - less than once a week. Now, even though I drive less, it seems to be everyone all the time. If they're not cutting the corner, they're swinging wide to the same effect. Ditto for running red lights. Where I used to see one person running it by half a second, I now see three running it by multiple seconds. Turning where there's a "no turn on red" same way. I've stood at a rotary and counted how many cars were not using it properly, endangering others. Yeah, I know, get a life, but the fact remains that drivers are worse.

The only real question IMO is why drivers are worse. I have more theories, of course. Breakdown of the social contract, people under more time pressure, phones (though that was already examined), etc. But those kind of aren't essential to my point so I'll leave them aside for now.

notacoward

hace 9 mesesdiscuss

Git is not just for saving personal history. It's also, and more importantly, a collaboration tool. Your contex window is no substitute for that, and can't even be relied on to be either complete or accurate over what might be years of development.

notacoward

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.

notacoward

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

Can you support your claim about tens of thousands of Canadian children on a waiting list for treatment? I'd love to see what kind of sources you (or your hypothetical friend) are using. Here's what the Canadian government has to say.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/aut...

"Health Canada has not approved any medications for the treatment of autism."

Are you yourself confusing diagnoses for autism with diagnoses and (this time real) treatments for other conditions? That's the most charitable explanation I can think of, and it still seems a bit hypocritical. Maybe that's where the "flagrant rage bait" accusations come from.

notacoward

hace 10 mesesdiscuss

It's also worth noting that leucovorin is an important drug for counteracting the effects of methotrexate (chemotherapy drug), and this thinly veiled attempt to drive profit for Dr. Oz's company could create a shortage. This kind of thing has happened before, eg. with some of the bogus COVID treatments. In other words, this is not just unhelpful. It might actually kill people.

notacoward

hace 3 añosdiscuss

"Any and all"? It's not a particularly surprising attitude to find here, but I think it's a hard one to justify. Does ubiquitous surveillance technology not bother you at all, no matter how it's likely to be used? Are new methods of killing people always good? How about mind control? Not that we have it, but "any and all" would cover it. Is "doomerism" the only alternative you can think of to infinite optimism? That's a textbook example of the excluded middle.

I hope you just phrased that poorly, because if that attitude were widely and sincerely held it would be scary indeed. I say that, BTW, as someone who's generally optimistic about the possibilities inherent in new technology, and has even created a bit here and there. The uses and effects of technology must always be considered, not just naively assumed to be beneficial. Un-nuanced optimism is just as simplistic and "meritless" as its mirror image.

notacoward

hace 3 añosdiscuss

You've buried an assumption in there: that there is only one possible future. That we can only choose between that one future and the past. Since at least the original Luddites, the real tension has been between multiple futures enabled by technology. Kaczynski was in this tradition. It was an argument against inevitability, against the same glorification of one future that you condemn when it's about the one past. I suggest that you consider the possibility of one or more different futures, where technology still exists but is applied in ways that enhance our humanity instead of suppressing it.

notacoward

hace 3 añosdiscuss

It's a pretty good start. "Kids these days" doesn't explain teens' self reported problems, or objective data such as suicide and self harm. Clearly something really is going on. Is social media the culprit? Maybe a case will be made in subsequent articles. One thing I don't see mentioned is the fact that - regardless of whether it comes through "old school" or "new school" media - kids today are barraged by negative news. Incomes for most have stagnated (at best). Costs have skyrocketed (especially housing, health care, and education). Inflation is back. The political situation is an absolute dumpster file. Evidence of climate change is all around. And most of these things seem to be getting worse. Advances in science and technology are positive, but not quite as dramatic as going to the moon or as life-changing as electronics and plastics a couple of generations ago. If my life after ChadGPT is different than my life before, it's likely to be in negative ways.

Who can blame kids for feeling overwhelmed or defeated, which often end up being expressed as not-obviously-related mental (or even physical) health issues? They are, after all, facing a bleaker future than we did, including my own GenX and the Cold War. If social media is part of the problem, then we need to identify how much it's a problem itself vs. as an avenue for a constant flood of depressing news.

notacoward

hace 5 añosdiscuss

If Google hadn't become Alphabet, we could have had MANGA.

notacoward

hace 5 añosdiscuss

"What the hardware can do" is not the only useful definition of "done" and doesn't even mean anything for an arbitrarily chosen workload of sufficient complexity for user-level software to be involved. You can open a beer and celebrate when your performance lets you handle X load for less than Y operational cost. Or Z% less than current cost. Masturbating over "wire speed" when the wire has never been the limit for any prior implementation is kind of pointless.

P.S. I've worked in both network and storage realms where getting close to wire speed really was a meaningful goal. Probably for longer than some interlocutors' entire careers. But this is not that case.

notacoward

hace 7 añosdiscuss

> Few programs can handle a fail return from "malloc"

Fewer than should, that's for sure, but hardly a trivial number. A lot of old-school C programs are very careful about this, and would handle such a failure passably well. Unfortunately, just about every other language tends to achieve greater "expressiveness" by making it harder to check for allocation failure. How many constructors were invoked by this line of code? By this simple manipulation of a list, map, or other collection type? How many hidden memory allocations did those involve? I'm not saying such expressiveness is a bad thing, but it does make memory-correctness more difficult and so most programmers won't even try.

As the world moves more and more toward "higher level" languages, returning an error from malloc becomes a less and less viable strategy. Might as well just terminate immediately, since "most frequent requester is most likely to die" is better than 99% of the OOM-killer configurations I've ever seen.

notacoward

hace 7 añosdiscuss

Correct. Shared libraries trade away CPU for memory. Even with some benefits in terms of cache warmth, the extra indirection and loader/VM complexity make shared libraries a net loss in terms of CPU.

notacoward

hace 7 añosdiscuss

That's not why pthreads exist, and vfork barely does. Pthreads exist to facilitate parallel operation (hence the name) on shared data, not as an efficiency measure. As for vfork, it has been deprecated since every UNIX implementation started marking pages as copy-on-write instead of actually copying. I was doing some of that work myself in 1990-91, so it's hardly new.

The real problems with static linking don't have to do with fork, except in the sense of increasing reliance on VM overcommit (which IMO is a bad idea already). It's more to do with masking reuse of the same library across unrelated processes, as an efficiency issue but even more importantly in terms of tracking dependencies and updating software. No matter how good your configuration management (or similar mechanism) is, rebuilding large-N statically linked executables is less efficient and more error-prone than using the same information to update small-N shared libraries.

notacoward

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Not surprising, when you consider that every intelligence agency spends at least 10x more money on offense than defense. I first became aware of this when I worked at a company where we had the NSA "defense" as a customer. We tried and tried to get contacts on the offense, because it was a much bigger market opportunity, but the company went under before we succeeded. So it's our Ferrari offense against their Fiat defense, and vice versa. (Not at all a comment on skills or motivation BTW. There might be an element of having one's pick of a larger talent pool, but mostly it's about resources.) It's practically inevitable that we'll both score lots of points off each other.

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