The Fed wants to keep the details secret and vary them frequently so the banks aren't over optimizing to the test. This makes senset, for example with standardized crash testing it is common for cars to perform great on the exact crash scenario tested for, but poorly on off-nominal crash scenarios that occur in the real world.

On the other hand, secret laws and regulations are antithesis to free society because how can you justly expect anyone to follow rules when you won't tell them what the rules are. And since the banks are required to modify their behavior if they fail these tests, then the tests are effectively regulations.

A fair solution would be to have the test published ahead of time, but still change frequently adapting to what the Fed perceives as gaming of the test. The problem is that going through the normal regulation process with comment periods and such takes a good two years at least, and the Fed would like to move faster than that.

I really wanted cryptocurrency to work out. There is such a need for digital cash that lets people pay for things online without credit card companies charging exorbitant processing fees and then on top of that tracking every transaction and selling your purchase history to anyone willing pay. In addition to making existing purchases better, I thought cryptocurrency had a chance of becoming Clay Shirky's micropayments, enabling business models that can't exist now. Reading about far away lands (SV) where there were actually bitcoin ATMs in bars, it sounded like the future was almost on us.

Instead it turned out worse than credit cards or even paypal in every way. Your purchase history isn't anonymous. It is at best pseudonymous but easily traceable if you use it as widely as you you would a credit card, and thus effectively public unless you go to great lengths to obscure it. Processing fees are higher than credit cards. And it requires insane resources to operate that would make the most inefficient monopolist bureaucracy blush in embarrassment. It is completely useless as a normal day-to-day currency.

Then to make matters worse, it attracted a huge number of grifters, conmen, speculators, and criminals who are its only real users.

Etherium is at least trying to work towards being useful as a day-to-day payment method. It has been slow progress, and I don't know if they will ever get there, but at least there is some progress. Bitcoin though is failed experiment. It had it's run, and it is time to put it down.

To add to this, I want to point out that having excess capacity is the norm with fossil fuels as well. With fossil fuels, we typically average 50% capacity factor where we are only producing half as much power as we could be, and the rest of the production capacity is sitting idle. This is essential to be able to deal with variable demand and emergencies.

The excess energy these solar panels are producing isn't "going to waste" any more than those idle peaker plants are going to waste, or all the sunlight that isn't hitting a solar panel is going to waste. You pay to build the capacity, and then production is essentially free.

Not only is overproduction not a problem, we want more of it, to accommodate for seasonally variable production. Batteries are great for storing energy at noon to use at night, but it will likely never be financially feasible to store energy in the summer to use in the winter. In the long run, we should be sizing our renewable capacity to provide enough power at the time of the year when they are producing the least, and then just disconnect some of them when we don't need the excess power.

The only potential problem I see here is that they way they are managing their grid, they are paying states to take extra power to keep their grid stable. This should be fixed, first by building a reasonable amount of battery storage, and then curtailing the excess more promptly rather than let the energy markets go negative. But it is a temporary problem.

In summary I 100% agree. This is good, this is expected, we need more of it.

The purpose of needrestart is to check if any running software is using packages that have since had new versions installed, so you can restart just the software that needs to be restarted rather than rebooting the whole machine. So of course it uses python to check python software, and perl to check perl software, etc. Nothing wrong with that. Using OS package manager dependencies would result in tons of false positives, and doing everything in a single language would result in a ton of reinventing the wheel and thus likely introduce more security bugs rather than use the functionality that the various language ecosystems already provide.

No they couldn't. For decades after Tetris was released people thought playing past level 29 was impossible because you simply couldn't press buttons fast enough. It wasn't until around 2010 before someone developed a new hypertapping technique that made it kind of sort of possible, and then it wasn't until 2021 that the rolling technique was developed that finally allowed for real play at the higher levels. It was only after those techniques were developed and people spent years practicing them that anyone was able to play long enough to even get to that crash, which first happened a few months ago. Until then there was no point in having a modified version, because there wasn't anyone on the planet good enough at Tetris to make use of it.

So sorry to break it to you, but today's teenagers are playing at such a higher level than we did in the past, it's not even funny.

It has nothing to do with a what reasonable person would expect or want or think of Google in general. It is about how a reasonable person would interpret the contract (terms of service and privacy policy) that Google made people agree to when they installed Chrome.

Sending up new suits on the next Dragon is the plan (if they don't fly down on Starliner). The issue is that ISS only has two IDA docking ports, and both are taken. So Starliner will have to leave before the next Dragon carrying the new suits arrives. If there is an emergency evacuation in the few days or weeks between that, then they will have to evacuate in the existing Dragon without suits. In other words, this story is completely overblown and about the least interesting thing to talk about regarding the Starliner debacle, so of course it has been spreading around like wildfire.

Falcon 9 has had 3 failures in 354 missions, or if you exclude the earlier versions of the rockets, 1 failure in 298 Falcon 9 Block 5 missions.

Sierra Nevada did receive $1.4B in private investments to develop crew Dream Chaser a few years ago. That is significantly less than NASA awarded SpaceX ($2.6B) and Boeing ($4.2B) however those Commercial Crew contracts include 6 operational flights each, not just development. But I do consider Dream Chaser the least likely of the five to succeed.

Also rather exciting that the US will soon have at least three and possibly up to five different manned vehicles at once in the near future:
* Dragon
* Starliner
* Orion
* Starship
* Dream Chaser

Yes, though the association varies from +10 to +11 twice a year.

Branches are particularly bad on GPUs. In that SIMD model of computation you usually have multiple hardware blocks (called threads but unrelated to CPU threads) implementing the same instruction on different data in parallel. Since some of the threads will evaluate the branch condition to true and others false, and they are all operating in lockstep, that means the hardware needs to execute both branches every time, with some of the threads just sitting doing nothing while the other threads execute the "if", and visa-versa while the others execute the "else".

At least that was the case when I was doing CUDA 5+ years ago. Don't know if things have changed since then.

Vorbis was significantly better quality than MP3 and roughly on par with WMA and AAC. But yeah everything but MP3 had an uphill battle, and without a big company to push it, vorbis only ever had limited support on portable players.

FLAC was completely uncompetitive for portable players at the time because it uses like 5-10x the space than high quality AAC or Vorbis encoding that could not be distinguished in side-by-side listening tests with high quality audio equipment. FLAC was a good format for CD rips and online purchases because it was lossless, but if you wanted to take your music with you had to reencode with something else.

It was at least a decade after the first iPod until storage on portables became large enough that 5-10x wasn't worth worrying about and lossless encoding become obsoleted by convenience.

No, adding friends is opt-in, but they changed what information is shared with friends, and that change was opt-out and done without notice.

This mission is part of a program that is all about low-cost projects that are willing to take on more risk. The total cost of the mission was $80 million including $20 million for launch. A Falcon 9 launch costs around $70 million, which would have been more expensive than all the other hardware and operations costs combined. So if it works NASA get a great bargain, and whether it works or not they are helping develop competition in the launch market.