Typo: Lower cooling costs, sorry.

I'm sorry, but you are operating under a common misunderstanding. The appeal of a circular home is that it can be larger for the same building cost, and with significantly lower heating costs. So you're correct... you do lose a square foot or two here or there in the odd spaces. But when you can build a 500 square foot circle for the cost of a 400 square foot rectangle, losing a few percent of the space to odd shapes is more than offset if the building, heating, and lighting efficiencies that are gained.

The only time this is not so is when you're building a bigfoot house that barely fits on a lot... when the lot space is constrained, it's true that rectangles will leave more lawn left over. This is why circular homes are far more common in the southwest where ranch style homes are common due to inexpensive land and the lack of design constraints created by cold and snow (which favor taller, more compact shapes).

GeForce Now lets you play the games you already own through Steam (many of them at least).

For example, I own 784 games on Steam, via purchases, Humble Bundles, etc. Of those, 149 are available on GeForce Now. I didn't have to pay extra, I'm just paying to rent the cloud equipment to play them on. This works out to about 20%, though more popular games are more likely to be available than niche indie titles.

I recently got a new video card, so I'm no longer in the target demographic for this platform, but it's important to note that gamers with a poor rig but good internet would likely have a better experience (for much less cash) playing their PC games via this subscription than purchasing an equivalent PC. And I don't mean 'better temporarily', I mean just flat out better, dollar for dollar. It's a good deal if you meet the target demographic:

* Willing to limit your games to those available on the platform
* Good internet that's near to a GFN datacenter
* Don't play competitive twitch online shooters like Counterstrike, Destiny, or Fortnite
* Don't use the gaming hardware for non-gaming tasks (video editing, dev work, etc)

This is in direct contrast to competing offerings from Microsoft and Google, which offer walled gardens that only have a limited selection of games that only work inside their platform (though at least with MS the 'platform' includes Windows and XBox, and not just the cloud offering).

... they hope everyone will have forgotten their promises, or they will have bailed out with their golden parachute and not give a flying fuck whether the promise is carried out. Promises with deadlines more than 2 years in the future aren't worth the air expelled while voicing them.

I sold my Google stock and replaced it with Microsoft stock... even though Google's made much more money for me. I would never have done that a decade ago, but Google has demonstrated that "do no evil" is probably not forefront in the minds of their executive board.

On the flipside, Nadella has shown a complete disinterest in the historical Microsoft bullshit tactics; it wasn't just the honeymoon phase either, because I still haven't seen any obvious signs of a return to form, and it's been half a decade. So I'm willing to give them a chance and support them (with my piddly 0.000001% contribution to their valuation).

Poorly implemented MFA can be scary, because it can lock you out of your account until you get a hold of an admin to fix it (guess what: you can't reach a Google admin).

But, Google's MFA is not implemented poorly. It encourages you to create backup codes, every few months it ensures you have reviewed your alternate verification options, and similar. I have no fear of losing my account, even though I have been using MFA since it was first available.

That doesn't mean I trust Google, the corporation, to do the right thing. It just means that technically they have created a properly functioning feature that is safe, effective, secure, and... not idiot proof, but at least adjacent to that ideal.

I don't completely disagree but... access to add a file to a web server is generally a lot easier to do, with less scrutiny, than access to mess around with Active Directory, Domain Controllers, and other obviously mission-critical tools.

Web server access is commonly given to low rent web developers, often contractors. And being able to escalate a very minor file exploit on a web server up to credential stealing for anyone at the company is a big jump for very little work.

Well... IMAP is bad for security, relative to the alternatives (web authentication and Exchange). I'm not saying the protocol is a bad way to get mail, but it simply was made so long ago that it doesn't support many things that we take for granted in a secure system nowadays, like support for MFA.

I'd love to see IMAP get a widely supported extension to allow for better security, so that Microsoft can stop being able to claim the majority of enterprise customers partly via their (true) claim of better security.

It's not possible to create a metaverse without flying genitalia. Anonymity breeds contempt for social norms, so everyone lets their freak flag fly. This is pretty much antithetical to Facebook's 'wholesome' corporate image, so I don't think that they will have any luck making it happen.

Even Nintendo couldn't keep penises out of its 'child-safe' online environments.

It's not generating an image, what it's doing is determining a lattice that computationally answers the question 'what atomic layout would produce this scattering pattern'. There are error bars (uncertainty), but it's closer to the concept of solving an array of linear equations in algebra. But instead of 4 variables in 4 equations, you have 500,000 variables in 10,000,000 equations... just straight up solving it isn't computationally feasible, so they use AI to approach the result heuristically.

What this means is that they can verify that the result the AI arrived at is a valid solution to the problem. What they cannot verify is that there is no other valid solution to the problem. In other words, they may have found a local maxima when another solution also exists, and this other solution, possibly, is the actual location of the nuclei.

That said, we have other ways of imaging atoms, so we can verify that the results here match our expectations from other methods, like scanning tunneling microscopes; we just get more clarity and resolution with this method. Because of this ability to verify, it is exceedingly unlikely that the image here does not match reality.

Be aware that inclusions raise the computational difficulty; part of the reason they can get this level of detail is because they're assuming the material is a repetitive crystal lattice, and having the computer solve for 'what repetitive lattice will produce this scatter pattern'.

But when you have noise in the lattice... random inclusions of unknown location... then it becomes several orders of magnitude harder to calculate. Like the Checkers -> Go progression, just because you've solved one game doesn't mean you'll be good at another where the rules are different, even if both involve just two colors of token. It was decades after solving Checkers that we had computers that were good at Go.

Similarly, using the scatter scattering to deduce the pattern of a repeating lattice is a completely different class of computational problem than determining the arbitrary location of thousands of individual atoms, only some of which are within a crystal structure.

I'm not saying electron ptychography won't be useful... I'm just saying that your example use-case is still science fiction, despite the progress made here.

I'm calling it: within two years it will have a recognizable change away from developer focused and advertising constrained. Within 10 years it'll be ruined.

It was nice while it lasted.

Cooking your own food, from scratch, eliminates most of that cost gap at the cost of requiring hundreds of hours of learning a new skill and an extra 30-60 minutes of work every day in prep and cooking. It only costs my wife and I about $10 in groceries per day, and we don't eat crap. But I've spent years learning how to cook. One of my more laborious meals is homemade pizza, with dough and sauce from scratch.

So I don't want to minimize the downsides here... it's a ton of work to learn to cook, and it takes time. But if you have more time than money (which most people do), it's a huge cost savings.

I'm sorry, but these are all NP-Hard problems that we have developed approximations for that are either very slow (and we're throwing tons of compute time at), or we just accept sub-optimal approximate answers.

It's going to take years before we can solve anything like these problems with quantum computers, but when we have enough parallel qbits it's possible that problems that were solved in O(n^2) time will instead become O(n), or even O(1). Not every NP-hard problem will be reducable via quantum computers, but many may be, and that could revolutionize computing.

30 hours legally counts as 'full time' in many jurisdictions, so 20 hours was them being generous... giving benefits at 30 is them complying with the law.