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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Throwing untrained people out of a commercial airliner at high speed in the middle of a emergency is a good way to ensure no one survives. The equipment would add a significant amount of space, fuel and maintenance burden too, and require major compromises to the aircraft design itself. All to resolve a problem that effectively never happens.









  • No, the “non-fungibility” simply means that anyone who creates an NFT with the same link will be distinct from your link to the image, even if the actual URL is the same. Both NFTs can also be traced back to when they were created/minted because they’re on a blockchain, a property called provenance. If the authentic tokens came from a well known minting, you can establish that your token is “authentic” and the copy token is a recreation, even if the actual link (or other content) is completely identical.

    Nothing about having the “authentic” token would give you actual legal rights though.


  • No. Nvidia will be licensing the designs to mediatek, who will build out the ASIC/silicon in their scaler boards. That solves a few different issues. For one, no FPGAs involved = big cost savings. For another, mediatek can do much higher volume than Nvidia, which brings costs down. The licensing fee is also going to be significantly lower than the combined BOM cost + licensing fee they currently charge. I assume Nvidia will continue charging for certification, but that may lead to a situation where many displays are gsync compatible and simply don’t advertise it on the box except on high end SKUs.







  • I’m not the one who posted the initial response, I’m just explaining what they meant.

    Also, this isn’t intended to be dismissive or insulting because I recognize that everyone comes from different backgrounds and experiences, but it’s pretty widely known that different crops have different labor costs. Everyday is a chance to learn something new though. Here’s a quick overview from UC Davis on the subject.

    I’d also recommend the book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies if you want a more personal, on-the-ground understanding of (some of) the human costs of agriculture. Understand that no book can cover everything though and there’s much worse costs than anything it covers.

    None of this human cost is inherently related to concepts like monocropping either. Rather, they’re related to the economic and political context agriculture exists in, especially how those impact current mechanisation capabilities. Harvesting things like cereals is so efficient in large part because of the huge demand from livestock agriculture for cheap feedstock to justify the development/purchase of things like combine harvesters.

    Some crops aren’t heavily mechanized though, and modern agriculture hires cheap laborers instead. These tend to be the expensive things at the grocery store for fairly obvious reasons, but not always. If you’re buying Spanish produce in Europe (e.g. bell peppers), there’s a reasonable chance it was harvested by migrant workers working under inhumane conditions in a greenhouse. Things like coconuts tend to have slavery and animal cruelty in their supply chains and that’s the basis for a good chunk of cuisine in South Asia.

    Another way to directly tie specific crops to their human costs is to look at the daily dead body reports by US border patrol. They tend to spike a couple weeks before/after certain crop harvests. Strawberries and tomatoes show up particularly strongly in this kind of analysis, which is why I mentioned them. You can also see the spikes from things like grapes, lettuce and beans.




  • I’m not assuming it’s going to fail, I’m just saying that the exponential gains seen in early computing are going to be much harder to come by because we’re not starting from the same grossly inefficient place.

    As an FYI, most modern computers are modified Harvard architectures, not Von Neumann machines. There are other architectures being explored that are even more exotic, but I’m not aware of any that are massively better on the power side (vs simply being faster). The acceleration approaches that I’m aware of that are more (e.g. analog or optical accelerators) are also totally compatible with traditional Harvard/Von Neumann architectures.