500 NITS is extremely bright. The standard for professional imaging has been 100 candelas per square meter (NITS) for decades. In fact, when you go to a theater, you are typically looking at 30 to 50 NITS.
Modern high dynamic range imaging can provide enhancements to specular highlights when/where necessary. That said, due to observer adaptation in most environments this tends to be largely pointless. As someone mentioned, the viewing environment can be far more critical than the screen parameters. Even a 100 NITS screen can feel blinding in a dark environment before adaptation.
Something most people don't realize/understand is the quality of the blacks or lowlights in an image is a perceptual effect, not an absolute characteristic of the human vision system. This means that a super bright screen in a reflective environment will "pollute" your black level perception, therefore having the net effect of collapsing the range of the image (everything darker than a certain perceptual point will seem black).
As a matter of course, I generally cut the brightness of all of my computer monitors by at least 50%. I am convinced that a huge element of the visual fatigue people complain about when working long hours is because they are looking at a light bulb (the screen) pounding them at 500 NITS all day. There is no doubt that will have negative consequences.
Source: Among other things, I studied Color Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
I use IDEA and most typed languages I write (eg Java, Go, Python with annotations) have better support for things like automated refactoring, bug detection via static analysis, etc
After spending 6 months working on an Elixir codebase, and spoiled by languages with proper IDE support, I'd say Dialyzer is nice... But doesn't get even close to what I'm used to. Sometimes the benefits of the BEAM and the OTP outweight these drawbacks, of course, but to me it sucked the joy out of programming (I'm very type oriented when writing and, more importantly, reading code).
> (I'm very type oriented when writing and, more importantly, reading code).
Me too!
Have you learned any tricks for getting up to speed on large code bases with very limited static typing?
In recent years I've mostly worked on large, complex Python systems. The consequences of (undisciplined) dynamic typing not only sapped my joy in programming, it really burned me out.
Some people are really good at living with code bases like that. I'm not one of them, but I'm still hoping to find some way to bridge the mental gap.
For me it didn't go that far, fortunately, because I managed to jump ship on time... But it was getting _tiring_.
> Have you learned any tricks (...)?
My current apprach is: don't. These days I usually work in Rust, C# and sometimes Typescript. I'm only open to working with dynamically typed languages for short periods of time, as a side quest of the main task (e.g. for my last contract I had to read quite some C code, which somewhat resembled dynamically typed code, but I spent even more time writing Rust, so it was OK).
Yeah, for me it was confusing to see that many programmers seem to thrive without static typing, and in fact the 6-month Elixir project was an experiment to see if I could do the same :P (to me, Elixir is still the most appealing of dynamically typed languages)
I love Elixir, I use it daily, but I have to disagree. Elixir tooling is in my opinion one of the only sore spots of the ecosystem and its quality is seriously lagging behind the vast majority of other languages. When I say "tooling", I'm talking about language servers and overall editor support.
As much as I appreciate the work the team has done, I think we have to be honest about the good and bad parts. ElixirLS has never worked quite right for me, or most other Elixir developers I know. It's often painfully slow to respond even in small project, it often gets stuck in obscure failures that require an editor reload to get it fully working again. If you run into any kind of issue with it, the boilerplate response it always: Try running `rm -rf .elixir_ls _build` which sometimes works, but usually not.
Javascript, Typescript have immaculate tooling in this regard, same goes for Java, C#, Go, even Python (on IDE side, the package management situation is of course a dumpster fire). I'd go as far as to say that any language supported by Jetbrains has better tooling than Elixir does.
> It's often painfully slow to respond even in small project
I had that problem with NeoVim's Mason plugin that manages language servers, then I just cloned `elixir-ls` and made a super small script to update it daily from GitHub and recompile it. I use that in NeoVim instead and it works near-instantly. Give it a try.
I don't disagree that IDE support can look subpar but I'd also venture a guess that proper IDE support is very first-world problem. You won't find yourself working on projects with millions of lines in Elixir ever, and thus not having e.g. full-blown IDE refactoring has never been a problem for me or any other Elixir dev I know.
All that being said, literally nothing I have ever saw was able to beat Golang's and OCaml's language servers. They just work and are amazingly fast to boot. It's simply a joy coding in those languages with their LS. Rust is trailing closely behind but it's also a fact that its LS is objectively slower -- still, they seem to have made a lot of strides on that front lately and it's much better compared to even one year ago.
I use VSCode at work on our Elixir codebases so I feel your pain trying to get ElixirLS working, though when it does work it's pretty good. However, on my personal laptop I've been trying out the Zed editor which has Elixir language server capabilities out of the box (not a user installed plugin) and haven't had any issues at all.
Haven't heard of Zed before, feels pretty snappy! Will try it out some more on other projects, though I can't tell how to set it up with PyEnv packages off the bat.
I don't work on a Mac, so it's a non-starter for me, but I'd be very reluctant to switch my workflow to an early stage VC funded product because I don't like having my rug pulled.
The command line tooling is pretty good, the elixirls/ide integration is pretty poor compared to other languages I have worked with. Some trivial examples while learning live view. Using : in pattern matching brings up erlang modules, instead of the atom I used elsewhere in the file. html.heex and the ~H sigil can’t seem to support both html and elixir syntax intellsense at the same time. I also somehow got def in intellsense to not make a new function but instead autocomplete to def(). Finally, after hearing how great Ecto was I was hoping it could provide some sort of hints based on the names of tables/rows I had provided in the migrations.
Sorry, can’t agree on that one. I like to play with elixir in my spare time, love the language. There is a ton of great tooling. But I use C# and Rider at work, and the IDE experience is light-years better.
> This technology will kill all digital information exchange.
This is a bit hyperbolic. We have strong encryption like PGP for media like email (although I suppose getting people to use it is the issue), and there will be plenty of incentive to develop other tech to counter the problems you mentioned.
PGP tells you you're talking to an entity which could set up PGP, it doesn't help you determine if the account ben_w is merely one of many government sock puppet accounts trying to push a specific meme into the minds of the general population.
Knowing who to trust… was already hard-to-impossible with just normal social media; cheap LLMs will definitely make this harder, as more groups will be able to afford what was once limited to government budgets.
The web of trust that was intended to be built by PGP is what would solve the "are you a real person" problem. We're connected to everyone else on earth by 3 or 4 degrees; it's unlikely that every path along that graph to another human is going to be adversarial such that a non-human can get added to the web of trust.
PGP's web of trust never worked because it was always too small to cover enough humans and take advantage of the low degree of overall connectivity.
So we need to go back to talking to people irl. And basically assume that anything you read online is not written by real people unless proven otherwise.
This is a fundamental breakdown of society. It is literally societal collapse. It's not going to happen. We'd give up the telephone and even the telegraph.
> assume that anything you read online is not written by real people unless proven otherwise
You can't prove otherwise. It's literally impossible without watching a human write it and publish it, and even then you'd have to compare it to what you saw them type.
At least for the US government, that's not going to happen. The government controls the servers is a non-negotiable contract term. We even have our own AWS regions for US government work.
Nah, that's looser than you think. Contractors deploy to the government cloud regions on AWS and Azure all the time. There's no reason GitLab can't become a qualified contractor and gain access.
The government cloud regions are way more about meeting compliance with all levels of FedRAMP and DoD requirements. Such as exclusively only US Citizens may access the systems even on the cloud hosts staff (so no foreign/remote/visa employees) and a whole list of other requirements both big, small and annoying (like FIPS) that affects everything from software to the physical building.
GitLab has already confirmed in comments here that removing self-hosted isn’t something they’re going to do.
That said, as you note yourself, the government is perfectly fine w/ not controlling the servers. GitLab could offer single-tenant (or heck, even multi-tenant) SaaS in AWS GovCloud and sell to government customers.
I bet differently. Gov CIOs are being forced to adapt to rapid business solutioning and minimal overhead. It takes years to operationalize a Gitlab instance, and then requires permanent O&M less adaptive to IT cultural shift.
Gov IT leaders will move to Gitlab SaaS overnight, once it's FedRAMP approved and migration is enabled through a click of a button.
Maybe less favorable for AWS and their contracts oriented to long-term gov owned compute.
There’s plenty of people that want dedicated deployments without having to manage the details of the deployment and upgrades. Especially those that already run their core on one of the target cloud platforms.
> We would submit that the simplest explanation for this relationship can be garnered from the known
relationship between borderline personality disorder and extreme, though changeable, expressions of
identity. A large study found that the P factor, which we attempted to approximate here, seemed to perfectly correlate with a latent borderline personality disorder factor (Gluschkoff et al., 2021.). Those who score high in neuroticism are plagued by worry and doubt, including about themselves and even about who they are. Bing high in neuroticism strongly correlates with suffering from depression and anxiety (see Nettle, 2007). The world appears to them as a frightening place, beyond their control, meaning that even their sense of "self" can be unclear. In periods of extreme concern, they deal with this by creating - and expressing - clear and strong identity (Fox, 2020). This ameliorates their negative feelings, at least for a period of time, meaning, as this has been found with religion, that their identity may even become less extreme and conspicuous as they enter a period of relatively mental stability (see Hills et al., 2004). Thus, unnatural coloured hair can be regarded as an expression of, and way of negotiating, high levels of neuroticism.
Is there anyone alive practicing “Roman Stoicism”? People today take valuable and useful ideas from the philosophy of Stoicism such as those that underpin CBT. Why disregard these because some people did or wrote things you disagree with hundreds of years ago? The author doesn’t say anything meaningful here.
> From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.
This is purely my opinion: Lincoln’s point was that the threat of civil war or violent dissent (what we today would call domestic terrorism) is a much greater threat to the US than foreign states. I think this remains true today. In fact, what you mention when you say a fracturing of states within was exactly what he was talking about.
A foreign state would need to cross the Atlantic ocean, contend with the most powerful Navy on earth several times over, land in either Canada or Mexico, both of which are US allies, and then mount a land invasion on the US homeland. It’s hard to imagine how that would be possible.
You raise a good point when you say crushing defeat does not necessarily happen on the conventional battlefield. Nuclear weapons create the possibility of MAD, and other “battlefields” like the cyberspace or global economic warfare have developed since Lincoln’s time. I still think the essence of what he said is true though: the greatest threat to the US comes from within.
almost forgotten, but how different it would be if they were intelligent.
Talk about an amazing coincidence:
"On March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production facility at the Hanford Site. This balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power almost immediately."
Not literally balloons, but guided drones generally. They would make the US "more invadable" by being an invasion. Think about it being just a constant for years, and disrupting American society kind of like covid. People would have to change their lives, consider everything in relationship to defense, even if there were few casualties. It would be demoralizing if most of the existing weaponry was no use.
I haven't gone out of my way to familiarize myself with the perennial rocket launches at Israel, but that's the general sort of thing I'm picturing. Harassment that would demonstrate people are never safe, while not rising to the level where the international community would accept massive retaliation.
How are drone attacks an invasion? So from your own argument, do you consider Israel an occupied country because rockets are constantly launched at it? How about London during the Blitz? I don't think either group would ever consider themselves having been 'invaded'.
In both cases, the rockets weren't/aren't guided precisely and can't loiter, right?
And in any case, Israel is used to it and used to having missile defense, and is a very small country. Nobody expects that any part of the country is far away from the borders and enemies. Whereas it would be a sea change for the US, if attacks could occur anywhere, and psychologically it would be like an invasion.
I'm using "invasion" loosely to mean an attack that reaches inner areas that people take for granted are safe, not necessarily boots on the ground.
Sure, if you define 'any attack whatsoever' as 'invasion', then, of course -- according to your own definition -- any attack is an invasion. Just doesn't mean anything anymore.
Agreed. Even when the forces were more balanced and Hitler had declared war on the USA the German army never stepped foot on the lower 48. the closest they got a few uboats picking off merchant shipping but even that was pushed back after a few months of horrendous American losses.
I'm truly surprised Hitler never tried some sort of guerrilla attack with a small force just to cause chaos and terror in the heartland. it's not like the USA was very well defended at all from any sort of coordinated landing back in the early 40's.
By the point the USA declared war, he had basically just lost the war against the USSR (as it's in those days that his Blitzkrieg definitely ground down, in visual sight of the Kremlin, to add insult to injury). So he just didn't have anything to spare for such an attack.
Hitler made the rather peculiar decision to declare war on the US first, a few days after Pearl Harbor.
Supposedly it was pointed out that their agreement for mutual defense with Japan didn't require them to declare war if Japan was the aggressor. But that was ignored.
A lot of Canada doesn’t have what you would call “infrastructure” until you’re well within range of the US Border. They’re also about equally insulated from foreign invasion and I think any US invasion that called for invading Canada first would be facing challenges that make invading Russia in the winter look like a pleasant stroll in the park.
Mexico is also about equally protected from foreign invasion. I guess their biggest threat would be us, and not without precedent, but they are not a threat to us. And just as Mexico is not a threat, neither are the nations south of Mexico a threat to Mexico. This was all true even in Lincoln’s time.
So, yeah, suicide it is. That includes any kind of internal fracturing.
I enjoyed this comment. Our Canadian defensive strategy is to simply keep walking away from the attackers. I remain convinced here are many places in Canada that no human has yet laid eyes on.
We have forest fires in the northwest territories that span hundreds of thousands of acres and its a coin flip if they'll even send a plane up to observe them. No one cares because no one lives within 500 km of them.
If you average the number of people per square kilometer, from a statistical perspective, this country is completely empty.
Being pedantic, but yes it is. (I investigated as I found your statement surprising). That table is sorted by rounded value, which means the six countries whose density rounds to 4 are in more or less random order relative to each other, and also several entries near the bottom are not actual countries. Canada is the 8th least dense actual country there, counting Western Sahara. Here are the densities based on the population and area numbers in that table (reordered):
50%+ of Canadians live south of the 45th parallel. However, that's only a minute fraction of Canada's land area. I've driven the road between Baie-Comeau, Quebec, and Labrador City, NL/Labrador. Seven hours at 100km/h, at least 5 hours of which the only signs of human life you see are the occasional vehicle driving in the opposite direction. Not much different if you drive around Northern Ontario, or start heading north from Edmonton or Prince George.
So yes, Canada has 37 million people and may or may not rank up there with the lowest densities in the world. But if you actually drive around Canada you'll quickly realize that the entire family is packed into one tiny closet when the rest of the house is completely empty.
Mexico did suffer invasion and occupation by the French in the 1860s. The US was busy with the Civil War and in no position to try to enforce the Monroe Doctrine (Monroe's statement saying the US would oppose any European attempt to re-establish colonies in the Western Hemisphere).
A fair point, but that story ends with French withdrawal and Maximillian I’s execution after a Republican victory.
You may be interested in the Revolutions podcast though which touches on these events from a couple of different perspectives, but includes an entire part dedicated to Revolution in Mexico.
The advantage of high peak brightness (eg > 1000 nits) is brighter small regions such as specular highlights. 500 nits full field is eye-searing.