I do think it's interesting that recent submissions use nearly the entire 50 hours. I wonder how much better people could do if faster hardware was allowed.
I wonder how long it will take for plastics to become biodegradable. Sort of like how wood was around for millions of years before microorganisms could break it down, maybe the landfills of today will create the equivalent of coal deposits millions of years from now.
I don't know everything about nuclear fusion so I have to ask: Is it actually renewable?
In other words, are the byproducts able to form back into the "fuel" at a reasonable rate with the energy input of the Sun? I know that a selling point of fusion is that there is such an abundance of fuel that this doesn't matter. But if we treat finite energy sources as infinite, exponential growth in our energy budget means that we will undoubtedly run out of energy, as is being done with forests and such.
After all, I have a feeling people at the dawn of the industrial revolution thought the amount of coal available in the world would serve their needs "practically forever," until energy consumption scaled up by thousands of times.
The traditional way to play melee is local multiplayer only, so players most players are used to the incredibly fast response of a CRT. This and the muscle memory required to play at a high level makes LCD monitors (and especially TV's) noticeable.
I have always wondered, is heat->steam->turbine->generator efficient? In my mind it just doesn't seem like it would be efficient at all. Surely there must be other ways to convert heat to electricity (Thermoelectric effect?), but why do we still use steam?
For me, Wikipedia was my first realization that RTL webpages exist. If you switch to an Arabic or Hebrew article you'll see what I mean. Even the Wikipedia globe graphic goes to the top right instead of the top left.
I don't know any of the languages so I don't know if the problems presented here apply to Wikipedia but it's a cool demonstration regardless.
I think its cool TI has added Python support to their graphing calculators, but let's not forget the fact that they've removed assembly program support. I think its a great shame.
Just recently some folks managed to make an LLVM backend for the eZ80 processors in the TI-84 Plus CE [0], and I was able to create a snake game in C that I could send to my high school friends [1]. I don't know of any examples, but C++ and Rust should be possible in theory too. It seemed like the possibilities were endless with such powerful compiled languages being available to these calculators, but I guess TI had other ideas in mind. At the very least, those of us who haven't updated our calculators' OS will still have assembly support available.
Even though Signal does seem like a step in the right direction, the fact that Signal is still a centralized platform makes it less trustworthy than say, Element. I must say this nonsense with the ad campaign isn't helping either.
For me it was the practical understanding. I understood the concept of a pointer, but I wasn't confident in writing code that used that used them or (more importantly) reading code. I would see an asterisk, multiple asterisks, or ampersands, and would get confused with the code. I do think some of the issues I encountered had to do with the notation of pointers. The asterisk serving as a symbol to both declare a pointer variable and dereference one.
> It’s especially insidious because once you grok pointers, they’re suddenly easy. But up until that moment, they’re slippery eels.
I'm sort of a C beginner myself. I understand pointers, and I do remember they clicked in my mind suddenly. The moment before, I didn't understand at all. I also love the quirkiness of this guide. Definitely going to give this a read.
As true as it is to say that missions to Mars and helping Earth can be done at the same time, this website does resonate with me. Even if we stopped all emissions right this second, climate change would not end instantly due a positive feedback loop. The fact that emissions are still widespread today really shows how desperate of a situation we are in, without many realizing it. To undo what we have done requires more than simply switching to electric cars and solar panels, but actively UNdoing our previous environmental effects through new technology and developments. Although these efforts can be carried out simultaneously, I do think it would help if everyone looked at Earth (trees, wood, biodegradable products) the same way they do Mars.
My goodness, It’s as if [the bundling part of] this post speaks directly to me. I use Gentoo as my daily driver, and school forces us to use Zoom for classes. Like most other proprietary software vendors, Zoom chooses to bundle a great deal of shared objects along with their Linux binary. Gentoo however, chooses to let Zoom use the system libraries instead of those bundled. Through some sort of ABI incompatibility, Zoom’s use of my system’s libraries causes joining a class to get stuck on a “Connecting...” screen. It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens often enough to annoy my teachers, who end up having to let me in multiple times.
I don’t really want to run Zoom’s precompiled libraries, and the version numbers of the objects match one to one. But alas, Zoom probably modified the libraries to fit their own applications needs. I can only hope that a future update of Zoom magically solves my problems.
This does seem quite worrying. I have always loved the Gentoo project because it lets you try to install anything on any architecture (not that it's guaranteed to compile though). In an age where a good amount of our software is theoretically cross-platform, Gentoo serves as a great proof of concept (whereas other distributions just seem to drop support of architectures over time).
Just as an example, I came across a good blog of someone installing Gentoo on an Alpha workstation [0], which I find to be great, seeing as it is officially supported.
Maybe it's just my dogmatic, impractical preference that the software we write should try to work on older hardware, but seeing the entire LLVM ecosystem in this sort of situation makes me sad.
Well I don't think waiting for better hardware take any less time than improving the software that these phones run. In the video, you can see that these phones are still running desktop versions of these applications, so there is a lot of room for improvement and optimizations for these mobile Linux platforms (things like Firefox running at the right size, better GTK and touchscreen support, etc.).
One of the cool things about these phones is that the battery is removable, so I would imagine these phones will last a while and only get better over time, as their operating systems mature.