The part comparing "Intel Xeon E3 1320 V6" [sic] with older "Intel Xeon E5620" as having the same memory bandwidth, same TDP, more L3 cache, etc., so having "the same performance characteristics" is just plain crazy.
1. Xeon E3 1320 never existed. Was it meant to be 1230?
2. Does DDR4-2400 really have "the same performance characteristics" as DDR3-800 (even after accounting for having 3 channels instead of 2)?
3. How can a 3.5 GHz processor be "the same performance characteristics" as 2.4 GHz one (1.5x more)? Add IPC on top of that.
> People need to do more research when they think about taking on these gig economy jobs full time.
I also think "they do" - but on the other hand, do not forget the human nature. No amount of researching, reading it or hearing it equals to living it yourself.
Last year I accepted a semi-gig job - not in the current "gig economy" sense such as Uber - but I created a combination of working for a startup for preset amount of hours (less than 1/2 month, red flag 1), working for a post-paid client on-demand (this is cool, accept or reject any project as you wish), and working for a pre-paid client on-nonrejectable-demand (red flag 2). At first, it looked great, [the hour rate] x 160 hours = excellent monthly salary!
But then you find out it isn't 160 hours, there's more. After putting in X billable hours of work, you have to issue invoices, study ever-changing laws, file taxes, yada-yada adding non-billable hours. And sometimes there aren't even those 160 hours, all three clients want their hours/projects/work packages in the same week and don't have any of the work for the rest of the month...
And then, it also isn't a salary, it is a gross revenue. So subtract all the insurances, taxes (even those that employer pays in a standard employment), your own hardware, travel costs...
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BUT!
Even with all the downsides, sleepless nights and opportunity costs, I would still choose to go through that again. It is like having a HDD crash or dating a borderline girlfriend.
You can do all the research in the world and still think you are the special snowflake who don't need to back up your data or that you are the captain-save-a-girl who will magically erase all the psychological issues and self-harm behavior by the sheer power of your love (true story), only to find out that:
- your HDD is suddenly not showing up in the system and you will spend 3 days of manually recovering and viewing each and every file through various obscure recovery tools; and you will ever since back up your data vigorously at geographically separated locations
- the mirroring behavior and idealization/devaluation cycle is real and while one day you are the best mate in the world, the next day, while you are riding your oxytocin high, you are called the worst incompatible personality in the world, "never see me again", spend your night crying in the corner, only to be greeted with "sometimes I say things I don't mean, get back to me immediately, or I will kill myself" on the third day; and you will ever since bail out at any of the slightest sign of cluster B personality disorder.
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I don't see accepting the "gig-economy" with low payout as not doing your research, but rather as a school fee for getting a valuable lesson in your life... You can tell that to people 100 times, but when they live it once, their eyes will open.
> have an appropriate extinguisher and a plan for quickly getting failed cells outside and onto an inert surface like concrete.
There are two problems:
a) There is no appropriate extinguisher when you have a thermal runaway on 20 kWh of chemical energy.
b) This isn't some shielded, extinguisher-nearby, one-time experiment, when you, for example, solder something off and then while yelling "see, I'm still alive!" run outside and throw it out. This is something that is intended to be running 24/7 at your home (and maybe mounted on wooden wall like the pictures in the link...). Unless you post guard duty shifts around the clock, there simply may be no person to perform the plan of getting failed cells onto concrete.
I see this as super-dangerous, especially when dealing with cells from many different vendors scavenged from thrown-out laptops.
I guess it's that people are walking since their first months after being born, so they are pretty good at it and even when you are older, unwell, intoxicated, etc., unless you are dancing on the edge of subway platform or right on the curb, you are generally pretty safe even in traffic. Compare that to jumping on and off platforms moving vertically, that's pretty new.
I had a go on this a long time ago, the building was empty on Saturday and they turned the elevator on just for us who were having a programming competition there. We rode in circles, went over the top and jokingly returned in handstands, jumped on and off on each floor...
And while they are generally pretty safe - each platform in upward shaft and in the cabin was on hinges, each top of the "door"frame and top of the cabin had a hanging piece of wood and if any of these things were moved, the elevator would stop, so your feet or other body parts won't be crushed if stuck between the cabin and the frame. But still, you can hurt yourself pretty badly (think broken bones or head injury) just from slipping or falling forward/backward if you try to step on or off too soon or too late.
Being twenty-somethings, we had a great fun on them, but if you think of people you see daily moving on escalators, in the mall, on the pavement, you can pretty easily see that an older person or a less coordinated person may have a problem with them.
Btw. For the brave out there, there is also an industrial "version" called belt manlift. Dying on them is pretty easy.
Tokyo has an average of 0.5 cars per household, which is on par with NYC. So, how will banning cars suddenly in NYC turn NYC into Tokyo, where cars aren't banned?
> Can you use bitcoin to pay for some food? Or to get your roof fixed?
This is a bit of false argument. One of the most universally recognized value stores is gold. Yet, can you use gold to pay for some food?
Try marching into Tesco, grab some groceries, drop the gold bar on the counter and expect change...
Yes, if you overpay it 50-times (a 1 oz gold bar for 20 EUR groceries), someone (cashier, other customer, anybody) will accept it on their personal risk (maybe it is fake? who in sane mind would pay with gold at grocery store?), pay for you, take your gold and give you the groceries.
But by definition: no, you cannot pay for food with gold/Bitcoin/diamonds/stocks/land/weapons/tobacco/alcohol/other food... At most, you can barter it.
One of the most ridiculous cases I have seen lately is comparing Bitcoin fees with paying for coffee. Do you pay for coffee with gold bars? Do you pay for coffee with international non-SEPA bank transfers (expect 30 EUR fee, more than BTC, and weeks-long fulfillment)?
Yes, Bitcoin was originally intended as "pay-for-coffee" currency. No, it isn't that anymore, it shifted more towards value store, settlement money between large entities, alternative to global bank transfers.
My favorite counterexample is: Can you run from war conflict with money or gold under your shirt? You will be searched, stripped from cash and possibly detained. Or learn 20 English words, run naked and input those 20 words into the computer on the other end of the world.
Do you think this is a overinflated example applied only to the worst parts of the world, where nobody have the money with them anyway? We, in the civilized world don't have any of such oppressions, right? Try leaving European Union with more than 10 000 EUR...
During my business flights (especially to Arabic countries, where people were returning from shopping trips in Vienna etc.), I have seen quite a few folks detained just because of the cash they had on person.
From local laws. From physical laws they are not. As a kid long time ago, I was sitting in a Fiat 124 when a bus driver wasn't paying attention to the road ahead and hit the stationary car on intersection in full city speed, thankfully it was direct hit from behind and there was nothing in front of the car, so there were no serious and only some very light injuries, but it was ugly.
But I cannot image having a kid sitting freely in a lap nowadays just because the car in question is exempt from regulations. There doesn't even have to be a collision, emergency braking (either human or autonomous) is enough to throw the kid off against the car interior and sustain injuries (yep, had that too in the old no-rear-seat-belt-times when an ambulance without siren appeared oncoming wrong way, almost bit my tongue off).
Don't use restraint systems just when they are required by regulations. And especially in nowadays tenfold traffic.
Wow... Apart from the NPT (which is just a piece of scrap paper anyway, see Israel, India, Pakistan), last time someone thought putting nukes near adversaries on the other side of the world was a great idea, the world almost ended.
The entire incident is now known as "Cuban Missile Crisis", although it started with the great idea of placing Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey against USSR, continued with USSR placing missiles against USA in Cuba and ended with a single officer on a Soviet submarine, out of three required, objecting to launching a nuclear torpedo while being attacked from a USA ship above. Seeing how easy it is to spark a full war (e.g. Gleiwitz, Gulf of Tonkin), the Doomsday clock had its leap second that day.
Stationing nukes in the SK, close to both China and Russia would be such a major shift in power balance, that I would really like to see the crazyman who would go to China/Russia to even mention that.
> Go look at sci-fi from the 60s and you'll see flat screens hanging on the wall. This of course happened but flat screens were one of the critical developments for laptops and, more importantly, modern smartphones.
Star Trek: The Original Series; 1966; Electronic Clipboard / Personal Access Display Device
Excellent point, in the heat of many discussions whether even a studied being of the same species [human] would get the hydrogen state reference, it never occurred that even without decoding anything nor putting any styluses anywhere, just the mere possession of the record and, for example, analyzing primordial traces could give us away... And I mentioned the C14 earth-bound analogy, damn! :)
While I cannot put a label on it right now (but surely it has a name, read about it somewhere), it is some kind of paradox that sufficiently advanced civilizations will broadcast themselves openly and detectably only for a very very tiny fraction of time (tens of years are nothing on intergalactic, interstellar or even planetary scale).
We quickly learned that blasting long-wave analog voice signals to the skies and expecting the reflection behind the horizon is pretty inefficient and moved to shorter, shorter and shorter waves. Not only you don't need to blast local radio stations in local language to the other side of the planet, having hundreds of computer wireless networks in one apartment building means that it actually shouldn't broadcast more than a few walls away in order for multiple networks to coexist even with time-division multiplexes and collision avoidance magic.
So, in about a hundred years, we discovered RF, we then started by blasting long-wave radio stations using ionosphere as a mirror, gradually moved to more and more local frequency bands, we then launched satellites to wirelessly ping across the ocean, only to hide the signals back under the sea and ground using fiber optics for practical reasons (bandwidth, latency), we went from analog to digital and we started encrypting just about everything. In the end, we will produce mostly random noise with ultrashort reach.
Next step - we will enclose Sol with Dyson sphere and disappear completely :)
I'm not anywhere near being well-versed in astronomy, so I cannot judge how hard that problem actually is, but let me present a counterpoint/food for thought:
40 years ago, we launched a probe with what we though as of then as being a nice, permanent map of our location. Since then, we learned that there are many more 'beacons' in the universe than those we have chosen and pointed out in our 'map', and they change randomly or pseudorandomly, so with our current knowledge, receiving such probe with such map, we would be SOL to decode it.
But, 40 years ago, there was a term 'supercomputer' which meant an 80 MHz, 5 ton, >100 kW-eating monster. Nowadays, we carry billions of 150 gram glass slates in our pockets with 100-times the computing power, use it to play games, and we throw around desktop/rig computing power to shift balances between virtual bank accounts (PoW-based cryptocurrencies). What would be an unthinkable feat on the planet-wide energetic and hardware level back than, a grad student can do on their gaming device (CUDA etc.) nowadays as a semestral project, building on existing open-source libraries and published reproducible research.
What will be possible [on our humanity scale] in another 40 years? 400 years? 40000 years?
Wouldn't they just intercept the probe and immediately think, oh, species 5618 thought back then that a dozen of pulsars engraved on a metal disk would make a good map, how cute, let's run a configuration-search on our astronomical recordings and on next orbital period, a PhD student presents an interstellar-conference paper on three possible locations in the known history where and when the species 5618 would observe just this specific pulsar configuration recorded on the probe...
Ok, what if they started recording the observable universe only after we recorded our map? They may not have the exact stellar configuration in their big data clouds, but using SETI-like-network, in another orbital period, they will simulate historical pulsar configurations back before they started recording them and extrapolate similar results.
This is just a 'linear' prediction on our technology, but what about a complete paradigm shift? What if they can browse in a block universe just like we page through a book and can just rewind and fast forward looking in the spacetime searching for the configuration recorded on the probe?
Or, we will develop FTL in tens/hundreds/thousands of years, overtake the Voyager with spacecraft just like taking off a private Cessna at a local hobby airport, grab it as a historical artifact for the museum and launch a better map, or, we would know better by then and rather quietly destroy it, remain silent and be thankful it wasn't seen by anything (Hawking's position on contacting alien life).
An earth bound semi-fictional example:
Say a secluded culture thinks that recording rains, droughts, good and bad harvests will benefit their children. Some time later they will find that they have a full Library of Alexandria of records and noone, never ever, in many human lives would sift through all the recordings to find anything useful. Some more time later they will even find about climate zones and think that their collected records are truly worthless and useless.
On the other hand, if our current selves find such records - if they are fairly recent, we have complete satellite imagery of the place. We have pretty nice worldwide temperature, rain, air pressure recordings. If it is a bit older, we still have more sparse weather records, so with some effort, we can still search for their rain-drought patterns. We can carbon date it. We can or cannot see our atmospheric nuclear tests in their smelting. We can digitally cross-reference digitized historical written records from many cultures (probably not now, mind you, semi-fictional). We can manually cross-reference their observations with known folklore from around the world. We can drill Antarctica/permafrost layers to evaluate climate back then. We can date it before/after/around great extinction events, geological eras at least...
Just because we just realized that the IRL situation is much more complex than we thought, it doesn't mean that what we recorded back then and sent out is "hopelessly wrong" [and useless].
Well, with background in the darker parts of the internets, I'm still against all forms of domain squatting, typosquatting, etc. Others would also describe me as a heavy EU-skeptic.
But! If you are a company registered in whatever EU country, and, by law, you can do business in all remaining states and in some cases (taxes, consumer protection) you are even bound to adhere to their local laws - then, why you couldn't have a local TLD? And what if you even hold an EU-wide recognized trademark?
Say I am Spanish company AcmeRoadunnner, with EU-wide trademark on AcmeRoadrunner, I cannot get acmeroadrunner.sk, because I don't have a Slovak entity? What for? I am already bound by harmonized EU legislation and when I sell to Slovakia, I must behave in relation to my customers (when they are consumers and not business entities) and file VAT according to Slovakia laws.
Say I am Slovak self business AcmeCoyote. Should I really need to create 27 other business entities in 27 other states to register other domains and prevent domain squatting, when I'm already bound by the 27 states' laws when I sell there?
Ridiculous! And a nice job for proxy registrars...
PS: In an interesting turn of events, fairly recently, a proxy registrar was found guilty for breaking gambling laws, where the page hosted on domain registered by him for his client was showing gambling ads not conforming to Slovakia legislation... So it is about having a local scapegoat to punish.
PS2: Imagine you cannot send goods to any country, unless you create a business entity there. In SK-NIC's case, it's the vice versa case, you can sell here, you MUST charge our VAT here, you MUST obey our consumer laws here, but hey, sorry, you cannot get ours TLD, f* you...
Well, .com-bubble came and went, but mind the settings.
Yes, nowadays, new buildings in every larger city come with gigabit ethernet wiring and several ISPs' fiber connected to the basement switches as standard. Older flats (pre-revolution era, before 1989) have FTTH GPON from two or three providers. Really historical buildings have at least DOCSIS 3.0 or VDSL. That's the physical layer. You can get 100 mbps/300 mbps internet (depending on where you are and how lucky you are) for about 20 eur/month, no data limit.
But that came for the price of very slow starts. After the fall of the socialist ("communist") government in 1989, there was:
a) chaos everywhere, many large companies (in the "common domain" beforehand) and employers of many workers were fraudulently privatized to the hands of few con-masters only to be turned into quick cash through sellouts, or just to be defrauded primitively (literally: 1. have a political friend, 2. privatize for one crown, 3. withdraw cash [millions to billions of crowns] from all bank accounts, 4. let it go bankrupt).
You could buy and carry firearms no questions asked (nowadays we still have more reasonable firearm laws than the rest of the Europe, even some form of Castle Doctrine - in Europe!! - but now you at least have to go through psychological and firearm test and you cannot be a convict -> didn't matter in 1990's and even worse, there were global amnesties, even applied to serious criminals, because "communist" judges must be wrong, so let's release everyone from the prisons - and those few not released revolted so hard, army had to be called in).
One day you could be a common Joe, the next day you are a multimillionaire via privatization through a friend in politics. Or you may be a common Joe going about your common life and while returning home from work, a car or phone booth next to you explodes, because one mafia group was paying debts to another...
b) high demand for foreign goods and low wages relative to foreign currencies. Imagine buying a 486 computer for 100.000 crowns, whereas your monthly wage is 4000 crowns... Would you pay your two years income for a computer?
c) missing voice/data infrastructure (power, water, gas was fine, it was fine well enough to be defrauded without any investment for many many years ;) ). Well into 1990's, you still had to be on a waiting list for... a phone line.
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So, in 1999, we had a high school field trip to the offices of telephone company, to be shown a 56k dial-up internet shared across 10 or so computers there. A year later, the whole school (20 old computers in one room) was wired through one 56k and we were loading, line by line, new screenshots from the upcoming Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge.
Well, you could get dial-up at home, for around 1% of your monthly wage PER HOUR... Many of us, the luckiest ones, actually got the dial-up after 2000 and were given the limit (by parents already strapped for cash) of 1 hour internet a day.
While I cannot comment about the accuracy of the takeovers from the OP's article (I was in the high school after all and was offline fiddling with the expensive LPT scanner, not watching politics), and there always are hidden agendas and components to the story; just to summarize, in those days:
a) nobody cared about the .com-bubble, the internets were a very expensive gimmick to download as many Pascal tutorials and early-media (game reviews mostly) content as fast as you can on a time-metered connection, typically not originating from the .sk TLD,
b) many large companies, say machine industries or water mains, with all their assets were privatized and brought to insolvency on monthly basis (from that era, "privatization" is still used as a curse word with negative connotation).
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The answer to the question why government didn't take over the TLD by force unilaterally - simply, the first governments cared about defrauding as much as they could, and the next governments cared about being viewed as the "right" alternative to the previous ones, while trying to defraud all what was the left with less media exposure.
And finally, when some wise heads finally came to the realization what the internet has become worldwide and will become nation-wide, we were already in the middle of accession negotiations to become an EU member, implementing required laws. That may be the final answer to your question:
- the defraudation was done in the "wild west" years of 1990's after the revolution,
- while the "repair" had to be done under the strict international-grade laws and you simply can't take it unilaterally back...
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I don't want this to sound overly negative, it was fun years. For example, I, being born in the 80's era still experienced in my late 90's teens: 8-bit era, 16-bits and finally 32-bits, as they got to us belatedly in 90's. People, being fed up with slow, time-metered and monopolised 56k even in 2000s, started popping up amateur 2.4 GHz networks everywhere, even on remote villages, and that in turn, with "real" ISPs seeing they would get nowhere with lesser service offering no advantages over a next-door high school students' wifis, has lead us to the FTTH/FTTB paradise we have nowadays. We also skipped the ISDN entirely (although it was available). There was time-metered 56k, flash, flat-rate 56k and wifis everywhere, flash, ADSL, flash, fiber. The fast 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit transformation experienced in one's youth lead us to many world-grade startups and companies for the country with the population count of one larger capital.
Just wanted to say that 90's were dark in Central Europe and things more life-important than a TLD had changed hands then...
And what precisely do you mean by "seeing and avoiding"? Ugo the caveman sees a slowly rising river, Ugo runs to the village, village safely runs away? Erm, no.
When you see a flood wave several stories in height, you may have a few split seconds to start videorecording on your phone, maybe the phone will be found afterwards and handed over to your surviving out-of-town relatives, it will make a nice clip in evening news...
With floods, you rely on authorities and early warning systems just as much as in radioactivity, actually you can buy a cheap dosimeters/Geiger counters and there are enthusiast networked detectors - but did you put a webcam with trained CV model on all surrounding flood paths? Did you put chemical sensors around all railway tracks in the neighborhood or do you just as well rely on "seeing, understanding and avoiding" a chlorine gas cloud?
It is just the prehistorical evolutionary parts of the brain speaking - we see flood, radioactivity we don't, danger, quickly bash it with a stick!
I think you are grasping it from the wrong end. If we are talking about artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, we are not talking about some procedural computer program, which, e.g., has a goal of wiping out humanity, so it starts building robots, hacking weapons and social engineering humans into killing each other.
The existential threat to humanity might be a complete byproduct with no malice. The AI might not even take care about us at all.
Concrete example - I have an apartment building coming up right under my windows. It has pretty a high utility function (apartments are scarce in this part of city). Of course, right from the planning phases, other humans are considered foremost. Will it shade neighboring properties excessively? Will it connect to utilities leaving enough capacity for others? How will traffic get there? Then environment is considered, is there any wildlife (protected birds nesting, etc.), are there trees to be cut down? After a lengthy formal process, discussions, tens of permits, a bulldozer came and started scraping the dirt.
Where am I going - is superintelligence only a slightly better human? Or is it two orders of magnitude away from us?
If we are a "same being, but a little dumber" to a superintelligence, we might be treaded equally as we treat other people. If we are, say, a dog to it, we might be "given treats" (cancer cures, NP optimization solutions, etc.) and at the same time be "shuffled in crates" or "put in shelter" when necessary as when people travel on airplanes, divorce and move abroad, etc. If we are ants, we won't be intentionally harmed, but if we are in the way of the goal, bye bye. If we are bacteria, then we are not even perceived in the grand scheme of things. Just like the bulldozer under my windows took the soil away regardless whether there was a small ant colony somewhere - because we perceive them: a) too insentient, b) too abundant, c) astronomically expensive (not only in moneys but also in time) to go through a whole lot of land, pick each ant up and relocate somewhere safe.
We don't know - maybe the superintelligence comes with a "prime directive" like in Star Trek - do not interfere with beings in lesser stages, and then even if we create it accidentally or intentionally, it will stay dormant observing us. Maybe it comes with sentimentality and may perceive us, the "creators", as its fathers and protect us even if we are senile and do stupid things. Or maybe it has no human-like attributes which I'm just describing and attributing to it, and while it may very well know that we created it, how society works, what we inputted as goals and utility functions, we may be an old evolutionary stage like bacteria are to us and get no vote or say in what happens, a few of us will be preserved in a colony somewhere just for the case we will stop multiplying in the wild...
And this doesn't mean that it will intentionally get the weapons to kill us, for example, if more computing power is needed and nanobots may transform matter on Earth to a supercomputer, so be it - just like the ants have no concept of extracting petroleum from earth, distilling it to diesel fuel, no understanding of turbochargers or hydraulics, or what an apartment is, they are simply taken away with the soil as unimportant, unconsidered collateral...
"at least when jobs start to dry out, people will realize that an intermediate solution to increasing unemployment is letting people work less -- hopefully for similar pay"
That doesn't check out.
Either working shorter hours will produce the same result. This is true in knowledge workers etc., being more rested and well-being, and cutting on jabbering in the kitchen, you can produce the same net result easily in 5-6 hours a day instead of being overworked, sitting like a zombie for 10 hours. Then, while you pay the same for shorter hours, there will be no incentive to employ new workers, you pay the same, you get the same results, it is only done in shorter hours and pay-per-hour increased, but you don't need more workforce.
Or working shorter hours will produce less results. This is true in "mechanical" jobs - e.g., car production lines, or in "overwatch" jobs - e.g., power plant control rooms. Then you will need more workers and have no incentive to pay the same for less results and then pay the same for new workers to make up the results. Yes, you can pay the same numerically for less hours (i.e. when forced by law), but now producing a unit of car, flour, bread, delivering a package from e-shop, programming a feature in software system costs more and the currency will be devalued. So you will work less hours, get the same pay (numerically), but for the same number, you will be able to buy less hours from others (whether it is a product or a service).
Well, running the engine (or not to) with empty AdBlue tank has nothing to do with topping it up yourself.
- You can let the tank go empty and not turn up to the workshop for the fill up, how does disallowing to top it up yourself prevent that?
- Many current cars with AdBlue will flash increasingly annoying warnings at you, and although many people drive with check engine lights lit, running out of urea will display you a counter of remaining kilometers and the car will simply refuse to start when empty. Again, nothing to do with whether you push the car to the dealership on foot or fill the tank yourself from the bottle (and actually, there are very foolproof anti-spill bottles, which let the liquid go only when tightly screwed onto the DEF tank).
1. Xeon E3 1320 never existed. Was it meant to be 1230?
2. Does DDR4-2400 really have "the same performance characteristics" as DDR3-800 (even after accounting for having 3 channels instead of 2)?
3. How can a 3.5 GHz processor be "the same performance characteristics" as 2.4 GHz one (1.5x more)? Add IPC on top of that.