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Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 2) 78

I'm not sure what you think that's showing, but I'm pretty sure you didn't understand it. The three fastest languages on that site are C, C++, and Rust. There's a substantial gap between them and all other languages. Of those three, Rust is the only one with memory safety. Which was exactly what I said.

Of course, any experience programmer will tell you that microbenchmarks are not very useful. They don't give a good picture of what the performance of real programs is likely to be.

Comment Re:Do it yourself (Score 1) 78

I don't know of a better language than Rust for the specific case it's designed for: performance critical code. It's for when you want your code to run as fast as it possibly can, and you're willing to work harder for it. I don't know of any other language that can do that without sacrificing memory safety.

If you don't mind sacrificing a little speed, lots of languages provide memory safety with a lot less work. For most projects, that's the right choice. When you care about every last bit of speed, though, Rust is the first major language that can do it while still being safe.

Comment Re:You know given that Intel (Score 1) 25

Let me change the question slightly: what's the market for an integrated GPU?

It's huge. Most laptops use integrated GPUs.

Do laptop buyers care about GPU performance? Of course. Lots of people play games on their laptops. They would value better performance.

You can buy a laptop with a discrete GPU, but then you sacrifice other things: size, weight, battery life, heat, fan noise. If you can improve the GPU performance without sacrificing those things, lots of people would see it as a selling point. It doesn't need to match discrete GPU performance. It just needs to be better than what they can get right now.

Comment Re:You know given that Intel (Score 1) 25

This deal does make sense in a way. From Nvidia's side, they're mostly left out of the low end GPU market. Low end means integrated, and they don't sell CPUs for consumer PCs. Any PC inexpensive enough not to have a discrete GPU is inaccessible to them. This gets them entry into that market.

From Intel's side, it gets them some cash they badly need, as well as new options for integrated GPUs. Options that are likely to be better than what they currently have. That will help them compete with AMD.

Regulators will certainly want to take a look at the deal, but I don't expect them to have major concerns. Intel's share of the discrete GPU market is currently a rounding error. If this increases their chance of surviving, it arguably helps competition more than it hurts it.

Comment Re:For those getting pitchforks ready (Score 1) 153

On my LG induction range, it's not a problem at all. And I say that as someone who is very sensitive to noise and was worried about that too. But it turns out, the induction is quieter than the gas it replaced. It the overhead fan is on, you mostly can't hear it at all. It's that quiet.

I've heard this can be more of a problem on the very cheap ones. If you're concerned, go to an appliance store that sells the model you're looking at and get them to turn it on so you can hear it for yourself.

Comment Re:Having a laugh? (Score 1) 52

Mostly I'll just endorse what GameboyRMH said, because their response was right on. You've never lived in a country without strong worker protections, and you imagine the conditions in your country would be the same without them. They wouldn't.

I do need to specifically reply to one thing you said:

Standards of living and wages have been more or less monotonically increasing for two centuries

That is false. At least in the US, wages have been stagnant for decades. From a report by the Pew Research Center:

In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.

Comment Re:Having a laugh? (Score 2) 52

Or we could just let workers and employers sort it out.

In practice, "let workers and employers sort it out" means, "let employers dictate whatever terms they want." That's especially true in this case. If new technology lets them get more work out of fewer employees, then employers have all the leverage and workers have none. Cutting workers is what the employers want to do anyway. Workers are left desperate for work. They either accept whatever terms the employers dictate, or they starve.

You could have made the same argument against almost any worker protection: minimum wage, standard work hours, safe working conditions, etc. "Why would I (which really means society) get involved in you (meaning all workers) negotiating your wage, work hours, working conditions, etc.?" The answer is the same in each case: if society doesn't get involved and set rules, you end up with a really bad result where a few people profit and most people suffer. That's not hypothetical. Every worker protection that exists today only exists because in the past, employers abused their employees and laws were needed to end the abuse.

A "free" labor market without laws leads to a bad result. Laws improve the result. That's the simple reason for them.

Comment Re:The article is missing the most newsworthy aspe (Score 1) 40

You pretend to believe in climate change, then deny many of the most basic facts about it. What we're witnessing now is not a normal, cyclical behavior. It's an unprecedented event that's rapidly getting worse. From an article from the UN Environment Programme:

Bleaching is not always fatal for corals. If water temperatures cool quickly enough the animals can recover.

The problem: bleachings are lasting longer and coming in rapid-fire succession. This year's is the fourth since 1998 and second in the last decade. It follows a devastating bleaching that stretched from 2014 to 2017 that left about 9 per cent of the world's corals dead.

Repeated bleaching has contributed to an unmistakeable trend: corals are disappearing. Between 2009 and 2018, the world lost 14 per cent of its coral cover, according to a 2020 study from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, which is supported by UNEP. ...

Even if the world manages to reach the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change - limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C - 70 per cent to 90 per cent of reef-building corals are expected to die. If temperatures rise 2C, 99 per cent will perish.

You blatantly misrepresent the facts, claiming that if a coral recovers from a bleaching event it somehow proves the event wasn't caused by climate change, and mock the people who say otherwise for "screaming like their hair is on fire." And then you wonder why people accuse you of denialism.

Comment Re:Not a new angle (Score 1) 52

I've worked on projects like that, things that were first written by amateurs and then they thought they could bring in professionals to clean it up and turn it into something robust. Years into the project, they were still dealing with the consequences of the bad original design. You can't take a mess and retrofit a coherent architecture into it. It's almost always better to start over, writing something that's properly designed from the beginning.

Comment Re: long-term support is questionable (Score 4, Insightful) 63

This is a classical example of disruption from a technology transition. The incumbents treat the new technology cautiously because they don't want to cannibalize their existing products. They get pushed aside by new companies that don't have that concern.

China saw that EVs were the future and embraced them. The western car companies were making lots of money from their conventional cars, so they tried to keep that going and argued people didn't really want EVs. Guess which strategy will be better in the long run?

Comment Re:Horseshit. (Score 5, Insightful) 202

As I see it there's nothing stopping a competitor to put an end to BMW's profits by offering BEVs that make anything with an internal combustion engine look like expensive junk.

Is your goal only to reward whoever makes the most popular product? Or do you care whether the product destroys the planet?

I don't understand what position you're trying to argue. Burning fossil fuels is literally destroying the planet. If you choose to drive an ICE, then you personally are harming the entire human race. Yet you don't seem to see that as a problem, and say governments shouldn't interfere with what people want to do? That not "picking who makes a profit" is more important than preserving the future of humanity?

Seriously?

A gasoline vehicle doesn't necessarily have to burn gasoline

There is no credible path to stopping climate change that doesn't replace nearly all ICE vehicles with EVs. To start with the engines are far less efficient, roughly 3x less. Then there's the inefficiency of manufacturing chemical fuel, which loses around another 2x. It's just not realistic.

In addition, the total global capacity for manufacturing gasoline from renewable energy is currently zero, or so close to zero as to be effectively the same. Even if we could somehow produce so much clean energy that we didn't care about throwing away 5/6 of it, there's still no way we could produce enough to meet global demand for many years.

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