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Comment Re:Life is extremely improbable (Score 1) 15

LUCA's descendants were able to go to every possible life niche on Earth and displace all other types of life? That makes very little sense.

It makes perfect sense, you explained clearly how it could happen.

The reasonable way of looking at it is, "What is the probability of that happening?" That's a scientific question.

Comment Re:Rolls eyes (Score 1) 30

It's not even that so much as it is making change for the sake of change as opposed for the sake of improvement. Every company is guilty of this to some degree, but everyone can name a few that keep shuffling things around for no good reason. A lot of the time it's worse from a productivity perspective, but I guess that at least it looks flashier.

I'd respect the field more if they told management that the current design is good and that it can stay that way for the next five years while they work out something that might be better and go through the process to verify that. Too often it's them doing stupid shit that screams of them trying to justify their own job position or so that marketing has something to talk about for the next product release.

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 61

For seasonal flus you're better off taking a preventative approach than trying to treat it after the fact. By the time the symptoms are showing up there's not much that can be done, at least not in terms of hastening the recovery, beyond getting additional rest and letting your body fight the infection. I just supplement extra vitamin C and zinc during cold season and try to make sure that I don't get generally rundown from lack of sleep or stress and that's been enough to keep me from getting really sick. In the last 10 years I've only had one really bad cold during flu season. The worst cold I had was when I was doing a lot of international travel and sitting in a flying Petri dish for long stretches and having my sleep scheduled ruined on a weekly basis for a little less than a month. By the end of that I think I was so run down that it took almost a month to completely get over that cold.

Comment Re:AI (Score 1) 76

What's wrong with that? When Apple bought Intel's modem team some years ago the designs they had weren't up to snuff so the iPhone kept using Qualcomm modems instead of being forced to use the inferior in-house solution. They only recently started selling some products with their own modems now that they're close to what competitors offer.

It's no different from you buying something for personal use but deciding to sell it to someone else who would offer you more money than what you paid for it instead of using it yourself. Similarly you may be intent on buying something from some particular company, but change to another that's offering something better for the same price or the same goods for a lower price.

Comment Re:Maybe (Score 2) 76

Fair enough - it is easy to forget just how much real functionality there actually is in these stacks. It is nice to live in a world where a handful of lines of glue code yield a rich application.

However, there is a lot of stuff that does not *need* all that and generally isnt worth the trade off for many/most users. There is also the reality that all that to frequently gets delivered in the laziest way possible. Rather than a few shared libs that the OS could map into multiple virtual address spaces, we get everything having its own copy, because its 'easier' if less efficent. It is a question of what you optimize around.

Look at an older house, every single door with be hung/framed and all the jointing will have been done on site. Look at new house, every door will be a pre-hung door. We incur the costs of packaging, shipping, stocking an array of sizes, to de-skill the install and save time. Its different optimization.

Software is not different, if RAM is expensive people will find ways to use less of it. What is special and uniquely good about software is we get to keep using it as long as we want. If expensive RAM drives development of memory efficent stacks, well when RAM gets cheap again (it will eventually) we still have the more efficent software, and we can pile even more debatable features on top...

Comment Re:This can't be the right way to run Samsung (Score 1) 76

I don't know how their structured sounds more like a parent holding company with subsidiaries that are their own legal entities not just divisions/departments.

So they probably independently have their own CEOs. The folks running the holding company though might very well be asking, well why would we not want each sub to make itself as profitable as it can be.

They only reason to step in is if/when Samsung Electronics is actually endangered in terms of market share. If they have to design around cheaper slower memory sourced outside while we make bank selling top drawer chips at a premium, so what? If they have to redesign devices around shipping with less memory, again so what as long as all our competitors are in the same positions.

Comment Re:Say no to emulation, bridges, etc. (Score 1) 40

I question how much of an issue this is. CPUs have got fast - real fast.

Most of the time the CPU isn't the bottle neck in a "gaming rig." You limited on GPU which will still be doing native shader code. You are often limited on memory bandwidth, which translation of executable code probably has negligible impact on. Modern games are finally starting to parallelize more but again that pressures memory bandwidth and cache efficacy, leading to a lot idling anyway.

A few more MIPS is probably about the most affordable thing in consumer gaming machine right now. Apple pretty well showed with their move to arm and support for x86_64 translation that the performance can be pretty darn good. If you're an e-sports person, sure you're going to want either native or more realistically you're going to build yourself a Zen4/5 beast with a GPU that costs more than your car, for people that just want access to more titles to play with 'enjoyable' performance on the hardware they already have or a handheld or whatever, this is probably going to open up a lot more choices for a lot of people.

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 1) 249

Affordability is important. No matter how much fantasy some want to engage in there is a huge segment of the American public and industry alike that is NOT ready to electrify.

Meanwhile we have huge new grid demands from the tech industry, a place where America remains a leader. Asking the transpiration and tech sectors to compete for electric power would be horrible policy.

We also know the writing is on the wall for ICE; in most respects electrification of cars looks like a clear winner. So why force American automakers into a horrible corner of:
1) Spending mountains of cash to try to eek out another couple % efficiencies form legacy engine tech
2) Going bust selling cars to few can afford to buy

Electric cars are not hard - battery tech is; if you can build an ICE car you can slap some pancake motors onto some wheel hubs and build an electric. Its hardly rocket science. By all accounts we already lost the battery tech race too. China, Japan, SE Asia own it. So were back to no real risk of falling behind on anything where we stood a shot at leading in the first place.

In short higher fuel economy standards achieve nothing but hurting the American public, and industry alike. They stand only to increase capital costs beyond what the fuel savings will amount to. Saving $1000 a year on gasoline so you can pay an extra $1500 in bank interest does nothing for a family. What the US economy needs at this time are cheap autos that run on existing infrastructure!

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