How times have changed. My best-selling program "Apple Writer", for the Apple II, ran in eight kilobytes. It was written entirely in 6502 assembly language.
For context, the same phased-array transceiver technology is used in Starlink terminals, some of which have 1,280 active elements. Such a terminal can require as much as 150W to function.
It's also why pictures of modern naval vessels show flat panels instead of rotating parabolic antennas as in past decades. The panels contain advanced phased-array radars.
Indeed it is. It's 125 amps, which apart from car starting motors is essentially unheard of because of wiring losses. I think the article somehow got this wrong.
At these power levels, rational designs raise the source voltage, then down-convert closer to the loads.
Okay, but unless you choose to download the Windows executable, compiling from source is very difficult. Many people won't accept the Snap option on an otherwise open-source platform.
This project improves on SolveSpace, but it does this by requiring dozens of mutually conflicting libraries. I create CAD videos, but for my students I decided against this project after seeing how difficult it was to compile.
A FlatPak installer might help with this installation issue.
Again, the Windows executable gets around these issues, for people still willing to put up with Windows.
Second reply -- if anyone wants to run Dune3D, flatpak or compiled, they must set this flag in advance:
export GDK_DEBUG="gl-prefer-gl"
I discovered this while trying out the compiled version (it's essential for the program to run at all), and for some reason I thought the FlatPak install would have done away with this oddity.
Again, because my students aren't necessarily techies, this kind of hacking shouldn't exist in a program released to mere mortals.
But thanks again for alerting me to this release version.
Wait a sec -- the reason RSS readers don’t have ads is because no one uses them. If we all used RSS, the advertisers would follow us there.
The linked article doesn’t offer any real remedies, so I will:
* Step one: dump Microsoft Edge, install Brave, which stops most ads including those on YouTube.
* Step two: dump Windows, install Linux. Windows 11 is an advertising delivery organ masquerading as an operating system.
* Step three: put a list of advertiser IP addresses in the Linux lookup table /etc/hosts, stopping the problem at its source. This idea works in Windows too, but most Windows users aren’t techies.
* Step four: never open an account to gain access to a Website’s content. Websites require you to sign up only so they can legally mail you advertising without breaking the law.
* Want to hear the FBI’s advice on this topic? To avoid many online dangers, they warn you to install an ad blocker (https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221).
But most ad blockers now let some ads through ... only “good ones,” meaning those who pay enough to circumvent the filter.
Most advertising is BS anyway. Prove me wrong -- tell me the last time you saw an ad for potatoes. Or a walk in the park.
Most advertising is actually a meta-ad for consumerism -- you need to buy stuff. What you have isn't good enough. But hey -- don't get me started.
It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.
We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.
But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.
Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?
Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!"
The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.
And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.
Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.
Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)
Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.
I like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects.
There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA.
I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs.
Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms.
The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3
'I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution.'
In the light of ' Almost half of the 6 million people needing treatment from the NHS in England have had no further care at all since joining a hospital waiting list, new data reveals. Previously unseen NHS England figures show that 2.99 million of the 6.23 million patients (48%) awaiting care have not had either their first appointment with a specialist or a diagnostic test since being referred by a GP.'
- Assuming it's successful in its goal, can your country tell Britain how to do it? Please!
Over a human lifetime, the immediate economic decisions do change macroeconomic postures. For example, consider variable costs of dental services for braces, fillings, crowns, root canals, extraction, bone loss, dentures, and supporting pharmaceuticals/radiology. Then consider a one-time standard fixed cost of volume discounted cosmetic titanium implants with a crown. People would look great, have better heart health, and suffer less treatments over time.
Rationally, the more expensive option ends up several times less expensive than a sequence of bodges. Yet no politician in the world could make that happen due to initial costs, regulatory capture, and rent-seeking economic policy. Note, GDP would contract slightly as cost savings compounded, and quality of life improved.
In general, one could run integrated education, emergency care, and disease control diagnostics like assembly lines. Routing patients though 24h virtual sorting for specialist site clinics on fixed service rotation.
Some have already imagined efficient hip and knee replacement services that make sense in other contexts:
the historically underfunded NHS took a massive hit to its funding at the start of the credit crunch, and then again in covid. neither cut was restored, whilst patient numbers have steadily risen (UK needs population growth to fuel property prices to avoid recession - 20% of gdp is construction).
people are dying because hospitals cant afford to operate. getting deals on volume purchases is irrelevant
>people are dying because hospitals cant afford to operate
In general, around 24% of health care costs are spent in the final year of life. It is also legal here for folks to request a painless early exit from palliative and end-of-life care, but depends on individuals faith and philosophical stance.
1. How many local kids do you personally know made it into medical school?
2. Is your national debt and %debt to GDP ratio growing?
3. Is your middle class job market in growth?
If the answer is 0, yes, and no... than the core problems may become more clear. Best of luck =3
Currency requires trade to generate tax revenue, and is like holding a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom.
Folks could nationalize gold reserves >1oz like the US did to exit the depression, publish holding-company investment owners, tax investment properties at 6% of assessed value every year, and pass a right-of-first-sale to citizens regardless of bid amount on residential zoned estates like Singapore.
One may wager any such actions are unlikely from the hapless. =3
Part of the inferred problem is a lack of respect for others, because some simply don't respect themselves. This was part of the PSA workable measures video.
Note, we also still buy inexpensive private insurance coverage mostly for travel, as it is tax deductible unlike the public coverage.
You should get outside for a walk, and meet real people. =3
This idea suffers from a number of practical obstacles:
One, in a sufficiently advanced field of study, an idea's originator may be the only person able to imagine an experimental test. I doubt that many physicists would have immediately thought that Mercury's unexplained orbital precession would serve to either support or falsify Einstein's General Relativity -- but Einstein certainly could. Same with deflected starlight paths during a solar eclipse (both these effects were instrumental in validating GR).
Two, scientists are supposed to be the harshest critics of their own ideas, on the lookout for a contradicting observation. This was once part of a scientist's training -- I assume this is still the case.
Three, the falsifiability criterion. If an experimental proposal doesn't include the possibility of a conclusive falsification, it's not, strictly speaking, a scientific idea. So an idea's originator either has (and publishes) a falsifying criterion, or he doesn't have a legitimate basis for a scientific experiment.
Here's an example. Imagine if the development of the transistor relied on random experimentation with no preferred outcome. In the event, the inventors at Bell Labs knew exactly what they wanted to achieve -- the project was very focused from the outset.
Another example. Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, his wasn't a random journey in a forest of Pyrex glassware. It's hard to imagine Salk's result arising from an aimless stochastic exploration.
So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus. If integrity can't be relied on, perhaps we should abandon the people, not the methods.
> So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus.
Science relies on replication. And any real gain society gets that comes from science is a form of replication in itself.
Integrity can't be relied on. But then, complete reliability is not necessary, just enough to make replication work.
And also, science is in a crisis due to the lack (or really large delay) of practical use. We actually don't have any other institution that ensures replication happens.
>> So it seems science relies on people's integrity, not avoidance of any particular focus.
> Science relies on replication.
If that were true, then extraterrestrials would be real, because people repeatedly report sightings. The fact that most such sightings are misinterpretations of natural phenomena would be swept away by the sheer number of events, i.e. by replication, not interpretation.
> And also, science is in a crisis due to the lack (or really large delay) of practical use.
That's not a crisis in science, because science doesn't care whether an idea can be applied, only whether it can be verified, whether it resists falsification.
When Maxwell constructed his electromagnetic theory, it had no practical application -- none whatever. But much of modern technology relies to a greater or lesser degree on Maxwell's work, 175 years later. Because of Maxwell's theory with no practical application, Einstein regarded him as a scientist on a par with Newton.
Richard Feynman correctly called science "The pleasure of finding things out," with no consideration given to science's applications, if any. Science is judged, not based on its utility, but on its accuracy.
Science asks, "Is this true?" It doesn't ask, "How can we sell this?" That's not science, that's marketing.
Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.
This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?
One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.
Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.
Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.
How times have changed. My best-selling program "Apple Writer", for the Apple II, ran in eight kilobytes. It was written entirely in 6502 assembly language.
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