I made a physiotherapy game console for kids that logs physiotherapy executions to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard ;)

The part that is growing is how many tools rely on apps and other connected features.

I have a blood pressure monitor, and it just outputs the result to a built-in screen. I can then log the values however I want, and it’s probably easier and quicker to manually enter the three numbers each consisting of 2-3 digits into an app than to wait for the bluetooth connection to be established.

This battery monitor will never be remotely shutdown, because there is no remote function. And if the blood pressure tracking app shuts down, I can just use any other.

I was discussing topical points. You were here “dissing”.

That’s poor behaviour and seriously just childish. Clearly not professional in any way. Probably like your code.

I suspect people (not billionaires) are realising that they can get by with less. And that the planet needs that too. And that working 40+ hours a week isn’t giving people what they really want either.

Tbh, I don’t think that’s the case. If you look at any of the relevant metrics (CO², energy consumption, plastic waste, …) they only know one direction globally and that’s up.

I think the actual issues are

• Russian invasion of Ukraine and associated sanctions on one of the main energy providers of Europe
• Trump’s “trade wars” which make global supply lines unreliable and costs incalculable (global supply chains love nothing more than uncertainty)
• Uncertainty in regards to China/Taiwan
• Boomers retiring in western countries, which for the first time since pretty much ever means that the work force is shrinking instead of growing. Economical growth was mostly driven by population growth for the last half century with per-capita productivity staying very close to inflation.
• Disrupting changes in key industries like cars and energy. The west has been sleeping on may of these developments (e.g. electric cars, batteries, solar) and now China is curbstomping the rest of the world in regards to market share.
• High key interest rates (which are applied to reduce high inflation due to some of the reason above) reduce demand on financial investments into companies. The low interest rates of the 2010s and also before lead to more investments into companies. With interest going back up, investments dry up.

All these changes mean that companies, countries and people in the west have much less free cash available.

There’s also the value of money has never been lower either.

That’s been the case since every. Inflation has always been a thing and with that the value of money is monotonically decreasing. But that doesn’t really matter for the whole argument, since the absolute value of money doesn’t matter, only the relative value.

To put it differently: If you earn €100 and the thing you want to buy costs €10, that is equivalent to if you earn €1000 and the thing you want to buy costing €100. The value of money dropping is only relevant for savings, and if people are saving too much then the economy slows down and jobs are cut, thus some inflation is positive or even required.

What is an actual issue is that wages are not increasing at the same rate as the cost of things, but that’s not a “value of the money” issue.

If you have a hash collision in a cryptography context, you have a broken system. E.g. MD5 became useless for validating files, because anyone can create collisions without a ton of effort, and thus comparing an MD5 sum doesn’t tell you whether you have an unmodified file or not.

On a hash map collisions are part of the system. Sure, you’d like to not have collisions if possible, but if not then you’ll just have two values in the same bucket, no big issue.

In fact, having a more complex hashing algorithm that would guarantee that there are no collisions will likely hurt your performance more because calculating the hash will take so long.

You can totally host something on carrier-grade NAT using techniques like NAT hole punching.

Couldn’t this prove very troublesome in combination with carrier grade nat?

You got a few things the wrong way round.

First, the last few decades it wasn’t the demand that was going down but the supply was going up with each generation joining the work force being larger than the one leaving into retirement, and also more women joining the work force.

These effects have ended. There aren’t more women to join the workforce and the baby boomers, the largest generation that ever existed going into retirement.

Also, you are forgetting what governs the demand for workers. It’s not some mystical fixed amount of work that needs to be done. A main feature of capitalism is that consummation is only governed by the available money, and it’s practically limitless apart from that. If people have infinite money, they will just buy 10 cars. Not because they need them, but because they can.

That means if there’s enough money around, there’s virtually infinite work to do and thus infinite demand for labour. The demand is only bound by the amount of money people are able to spend.

This leads to the current crisis. It’s not a crisis of too little demand for workers, but one of a bad economy. If the economy picks up, companies will start to hire again.

IIRC, the screen recording is from a mod of a game. The original game didn’t have dogs, just humans, and the modder decided to make the dog NPC from a human NPC and forgot to override that one animation.

The company I work at has an AI-related job freeze.

At the same time, AI is in the evaluation phase in the company and hardly anyone uses it for anything really. There are surveys, and they all say that AI can help a little bit in some niche circumstances, but that for most of the work it really does nothing.

Also, the AI evaluation is entirely driven by some curious employees and doesn’t really have anthing to do with upper management. In fact, upper management doesn’t want to pay the AI subscription fees.

Who pissed in your coffee?

Sure you can write some script to interpret the data, but then you need to write an extra script that you need to run any time you step through the code, or whenever you want to look at the data when it’s stored or transferred.

But I guess you have never worked on an actually big project, so how would you know?

I guess you aren’t entirely wrong here. If nobody other than you ever uses your program and nobody other than you ever looks at the code, readability really doesn’t matter and thus you can microoptimize everything into illegibility. But don’t extrapolate from your hobby coding to actual projectes.

The issue here is that human intelligence and computer intelligence work completely different and things that are easy for one are hard for the other.

Because of that, measures of intelligence don’t really work across humans and computers and it’s really easy to misjudge which milestones are meaningful and which aren’t.

For example, it’s super hard for a human to perform 100 additions within a second, and a human who could do that would be perceived as absolutely super human. But for a computer that’s ridiculously easy. While on the other hand there are things a child can do that were impossible for computers just a few years ago (e.g. reckognizing a bird).

(Relevant, if slightly outdated, XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/)

For humans, playing high-level chess is really hard, so we arbitrarily chose it as a measure of intelligence: “Only very intelligent people can beat Kasparov”. So we figured that a computer being able to do that task must be intelligent too. Turns out that chess greatly benefits from large memory and fast-but-simple calculations, two things computers are really, really good at and humans are not.

And it turns out that, contrary to what many people believed, chess doesn’t actually require any generally intelligent code at all. In fact, a more general approach (like LLMs) actually performs much, much worse at specific tasks like chess, as exemplified by some chess program for the Atari beating one LLM after another.

It’s human-readable enough for debugging. You might not be able to read whether a person look left, but you can read which field is null or missing or wildly out of range. You can also read if a value is duplicated when it shouldn’t be.

Human-readable is primarily about the structure and less about the data being human readable.

Technically, JSON enforces a specific numeric precision by enforcing that numbers are stored as JS-compatible floating point numbers with its associated precision.

Other than that, the best way to go if you want to have a specific precision is to cast to string before serialisation.

I see what you are saying. But if you aren’t using a cryptographic hash function then collisions don’t matter in your use case anyway, otherwise you’d be using a cryptographic hash function.

For example, you’d use a non-cryptographic hash function for a hashmap. While collisions aren’t exactly desireable in that use case, they also aren’t bad and in fact, the whole process is designed with them in mind. And it doesn’t matter at all that the distribution might not be perfect.

So when we are talking about a context where collisions matter, there’s no question whether you should use a cryptographic hash or not.

This is about cryptographic hashing functions (to be fair, could have spelled that out in my prior comment, but in general when someone talks about anything security relevant in conjunction with hashing, they always mean cryptographic hashing functions).

MD5 is not a cryptographic hashing function for exactly these reasons.

Also, the example you gave in your original comment wasn’t actually about distribution but about symbol space.

By multiplying by four (and I guess you implicitly meant that the bit length of the hash stays the same thus dropping two bits of information) you are reducing the number of possible hashes by a factor of four, because now 3/4 of all potential hashes can’t happen any more. So sure, if your 64bit hash is actually only a 62bit hash that just includes two constant 0 bits, then of course you have to calculate the collision chance for 62bits and not 64bits.

But if all hashes are still possible, and only the distribution isn’t perfectly even (like is the case with MD5), then the average chance for collisions doesn’t change at all. You have some hashes where collisions are more likely, but they are perfectly balanced with hashes where collisions are less likely.

It’s a really weird review.

The MegPad is also a diplomatic solution for homes with limited TVs or computers.

Sure, if I can’t afford an old €100 second hand laptop or TV, I’m surely going to spend €1000 on this thing.

At the same time the review completely misses the use in institutions as e.g. a presentation or telepresence screen.

Thanks for the summary!

Yeah, in Python each . is a dictionary lookup. The cost of having a dynamic language where the compiler can do pretty much no optimizations (and yes, Python does have a compiler).

In static languages these lookups can be collapsed to a single pointer address by the compiler.

Of course. That’s one of the basic requirements for something to be an actual hash function.

The power consumption would be 5*10^62 Wh.

The sun outputs 3.9*10^26 W. If you captured all that energy with 100% efficiency, you would need 1.3*10^36 hours or roughly 1*10^22 times the age of the universe to collect enough energy.

That’s incidentally roughly the estimated number of stars in the universe.

So if you put a dyson sphere around every star in the universe, right after the big bang (ignoring that stars didn’t form instantly after the big bang) and you ran them until today, then you’d have just about enough energy to crack one wallet with current tech.