There have been unsubstantiated rumors for years that the Taiwanese military has outfitted TSMC fabs with explosives that can be rigged to go off in the event of a mainland invasion in order to deny China access to TSMC capabilities.
The rumor doesn't actually need to be true in order to act as a deterrent -- it just needs to be leaked to Chinese officials and considered credible. It also assumes that access to TSMC is a strong motivation for an invasion, which may or may not be true.
In any case, the answer to your question depends on whether this is true, and whether the explosives are actually used. If the fabs are destroyed, it'll set the world back by at least a decade.
So if you thought the chip shortage was bad today...
On the other hand, if it's not true (or if it is, but the fabs aren't destroyed for whatever reason), and operations continue despite an invasion, I can definitely imagine a scenario where the rest of the world just sort of shrugs and goes with it. Kind of a horrifying thought, but what are the alternatives? Attack China? They have nukes. Everyone will condemn China, sure. Then China will get upset and claim that we're all "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" [1], and that'll be the end of it.
I'm not sure about details but as far as I remember Windows CE uses a brilliant approach to fix this bug. System tick count is set to value equal three minutes before overflow. And system counter overflows three minutes after OS starting. 3 minutes usually enough to load all applications that could be buggy but this time is less then usual debug session.
For Debug configurations, 180 seconds is subtracted to check for overflow conditions in code that relies on GetTickCount. If this code started within 3 minutes of the device booting, it will experience an overflow condition if it runs for a certain amount of time.
Sure. That's one of the best ways to visualize what Moore's law actually means in concrete terms. What used to take a room is now in the palm of your hand.
djb's old daemontools suite had an interesting solution to the "how to log failure when you can't write to a log" problem: a persistent child process with some space reserved in its argv, where it can stash some error messages which you can see with "ps" even when disks have failed.
Since we're all sharing wacky debugging stories....
I had a user of an audio streaming product who suffered from random disconnects. He could only stream for about five minutes before it quit. But, and this was the crazy part, the problem only happened when streaming rock and roll. Classical music worked fine.
After many weeks going back and forth, I tracked it down to a misconfiguration on his network interface. The MTU was set lower than the IPv6 spec allowed (or so, forgive me if I get this detail wrong) and the OS wouldn't fragment our UDP packets with this setting.
Our packets usually were under the limit, but occasionally went over and triggered an error. Why was classical music immune? The lossless codec we were using did a better job on classical than rock, so classical (or at least this guy's classical) never went over the size limit.
The SA forums were so amazing from 2000-2004. I spent some of my most formative years posting there (no regrets!). It's pretty crazy to think how many people who were active on SA around then went on do Big Things:
- CliffyB
- moot
- notch
- deadmau5
- llamaguy (guessing most people here don't know who he is, but he created a Gamefaqs spinoff called Luelinks/EndOfTheInternet, and was one of the first 100 employees at Facebook and is now a 9-figure millionaire)
- vilerat (aka Shawn Smith, one of the Americans who died in Benghazi)
- garry (of garry's mod and rust fame)
- Yahtzee
Stuff that can trace back to SA around that time:
- 4chan itself
- Memes ("image macros")
- Let's Plays
- Weird Twitter
- That shitposting/shittexting ironic writing style that is now beloved by modern middle/upper class American teenagers everywhere
Nearly everyone that I met as a teenager and still keep in contact with is really successful.
Sadly, I think Lowtax is the most incompetent businessperson I've ever encountered. It's frankly amazing how badly he mismanaged the SA forums, and how much he took all of that amazing talent that was creating free content for him for granted.
I think the best example is how he initially offered Yahtzee some insultingly paltry compensation for doing Zero Punctuation. IIRC it was like $100 per episode. Zero Punctuation alone could have kept SA relevant, I think.
The stuff that went down in 2005 and beyond drove all of the best posters away, IMO.
Glibc used to have unexec(), which is fairly old, but it was removed because nobody used it (except Emacs, and there were better solutions to the problem it was solving).
If you enjoyed this story, I recommend the documentary "Nuclear Dynamite" - detailing a time when the world thought nukes would be very handy to use as construction devices - i.e for excavating canals, building artificial lakes, etc.
At one point, they were planning to "dig" the Panama Canal using nukes...
Is that really because of honesty? or because ebay allowed vendors?
or, is it really because eBay is a more complete marketplace now, with better information, in many ways it is more efficient, and arbitrage opportunities are lower, and market pricing prevails more often. But...it almost seems like less efficient markets are more fun to play in.
This may be a stupid comparison, but a microcosm of this might be the experience of the World of Warcraft Auction House vs the Diablo 3 one. In WoW, the market rates differed hugely by server (realm), and were influenced by drop rate, population, and relative maturity of the realm (e.g. mostly low-level or mostly high level). In short, the pricing mechanics were simple, and the supply was constrained and grokkable. It was also only fake money (aside from the gold farming, which wasn't sanctioned).
BUT, in D3, the drop rates were more random, the population on the AH was giant relative to WoW, and people were playing with real money. As a result, the market got efficient quickly, and the the pricing adjusted very quickly such that it was no fun to play. the drop rates were so low for items that of high enough quality that it wasn't worth participating as a buyer or seller unless you were only in it for the money.
> Clicking on a chumlink — even one on the site of a relatively high-class chummer, like nymag.com — is a guaranteed way to find more, weirder, grosser chum. The boxes are daisy-chained together in an increasingly cynical, gross funnel; quickly, the open ocean becomes a sewer of chum.
This seems like a particularly interesting point.
Presumably 'chum' ought to be higher-impact than the source page, so as to beat out "Related Articles" links, other open tabs, or leaving the computer. (After all, you just read an article of mental impact X, so you're someone who cares about stories of >X value.)
But there's a limit on how fast you can ramp up - you can't go straight to sex and death without provoking whiplash and disgust. So we get the weird progression that's come to define the internet; the outbound links for a given page are always weirder than the page itself.
Hence "the weird part of Youtube". Hence the 4chan -> Reddit -> Buzzfeed progression by which content is generated in strange spots, then sanitized for mass consumption. And hence the bizarre sponsored-content funnel: stock news leads to stock tips leads to pyramid schemes leads to "BUY GOLD!" Either you cash out somewhere (some of those sponsored links go to products, not 'stories'), or you stick to news and teaser sites, and head arbitrarily far down the rabbit hole.
My dude, we have no idea how bad climate change is going to hit us, automation is going to put tons of people out of jobs, there is a loneliness crisis, the gap between rich amd poor is bigger than its ever been, western countries are more divided than ever before, people are checking out of reality, social bonds are all but nonexistent, ecosystems are collapsing on the regular, birth, gender relations are the worst they've been in centuries, fertility rates are plummeting, we're on the brink of another recession, the nazis are back, China is building the most authoritarian nation ever devised, I'm not even close to done.
I highly doubt we're going to get past 2050 without the foundations of society collapsing.
/pol/ works magic b/c everyone is so far up their own ass, utterly humorless, and can't look at things in context. Nuance and context have eroded in favor of absurd, rigid tribalism. And /pol/ pulls on that thread constantly. And as a progressive (at a high level - a BLM, OWS, #MeToo supporting) - i find it utterly amazing. The inability for the left and the press to have nuance, take things with a grain of salt, have a chuckle from time to time (even at yourselves), is their greatest weakness right now.
SV is undergoing it's biggest transformation ever. The establishment is being formed, instead of tinkering in garages in sweatpants. This new corporate formulaic way of "staring up" protects their own elk, since the value created is often no longer in the product, but is rather based on connections, like in the East Coast old boys clubs.
I do think QAnon is something more than just some basement dweller or troll. There's just a little bit too much of it and there are too many cases where it's seemed to have information ahead of time that few could have possessed.
It's clearly some kind of propaganda operation, but being anonymous it could be literally anyone. It could be any intelligence agency on Earth, any think tank or political PR company, any radical group, or even Trump's own people.
Unfortunately most of these 'alt' types who think they're too smart and savvy to believe anything in the mainstream merely switch from mindlessly believing the MSM to mindlessly believing anything 'alt' that blows the right dog whistles. They won't trust the news but they will trust an anonymous serial poster on an imageboard. Somehow the fact that the 'alt' media and its orbit are just another kind of media with its own set of agendas is lost on them.
In a world saturated with propaganda where any kind of hoax with any kind of text, audio, or video evidence can be manufactured the provenance of information becomes critical. If information has no provenance it may as well not exist unless you have a large amount of other evidence to corroborate it. In other words rumors are noise unless there's enough independent evidence to render them redundant. There's a saying in the intelligence world about this: "interesting if true." It's said of things that probably are not true and require extensive verification.
This becomes doubly important when you consider priming effects. If I tell you Donald Trump has AIDS (I just made that up on the spot as a random example), all the sudden your brain will start looking for and cherry picking evidence for this possibility. Is his occasional rambling a side effect of anti-HIV drugs? Is his hair loss a result of those same medications? The mind will run away with it. We are pattern recognition machines.
I think priming like this is part of the QAnon act. He/she/it throws out a lot of BS and occasional nuggets of truth -- because disinformation is not effective without some truth to bait the hook -- and then relies on your brain to fill in the gaps. I'm sure QAnon is monitoring those same imageboards and forums where it drops its info and where it's discussed, so it uses its fans to crowdsource its own material and close the feedback loop.
> In fact, Godel's theorem ought to be used more, not less, in philosophy. Some, like me, believe it has profound implications to moral philosophy. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08347
I've only skimmed it, and I'm not very familiar with moral philosophy, but this seems bizarre. If I understand it correctly, your claim is:
1. Free will is uncomputability (undecidability)
2. A good action is a free action (and therefore uncomputable)
3. A bad action is an action that pretends an uncomputable system is computable, thereby denying agency and humanity
I think 1. is suspect because people are not proper Turing machines. They have limited storage and limited running time. They are not currently practically computable, but it seems physically possible to simulate them. I don't think Gödel's theorem applies, although practical uncomputability might be a working substitute.
If you predict that some person will take some action, that's almost always a prediction that they will take that action within the next ten seconds/hours/decades. Actually simulating them is impossible for various reasons, but Gödel's theorem isn't one of them. You can't prove whether an arbitrary program will halt, but you can prove whether an arbitrary program will halt within the next hundred thousand execution steps.
2. seems like a really bizarre way to define goodness. I think morality is subjective enough that you could define it like that, but I don't know why you'd want to. I think the conventional view is that free will is the requirement for both good and bad actions, not that free actions are by definition good.
I think 3. might cover almost every thought we have about other people. Internal computable models of other people are how we operate, as far as I know. Again, you could define badness like that, but I don't see the point.
> [page 8] Now the question paraphrases to: does there exist an algorithm for me to love my child? Of course not. So the distinction between [shallow benefits] and [deep] benefits is that: there is an algorithm to bring about [shallow benefits], whereas there is no algorithm to bring about [deep] benefits.
Doesn't that conflict with the idea that we are Turing machines? If we are Turing machines, then everything we do is the output of some (possibly uncomputable) algorithm, including loving people.
I don't think this engages with Gödel's theorem in a useful way, or even depends on it.
Pournelle's Iron law of bureaucracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle.27s_...
Buffet's institutional imperative: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1989.html
Ousterhout's most important component of evolution: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php
Leopold Kohr and Bertrand de Jouvenel had more detailed pertinent observations and thoughts.