That is the zeitgeist. American leftists like the democratic socialists talk loudly about being like Scandinavia but are going to visit Cuba and Venezuela. European socialists seems to think there is an unlimited amount of tax that can be raised from people who struggle to make 1500 EUR a month in countries like Spain while the EU political policy has been a major factor in the destruction of their purchasing power over the last 5 years.
They can't buy homes, they don't get raises. The state takes in more than ever. If anything you can argue Europe has too little capitalism going on and too much state capitalism.
No implementation would ever be good enough. We know the current system in Europe at least is collapsing because of the unbearable cost of the welfare system plus growth stagnation not because of "billionaires" (and no amount of raising taxes on the young generation or the "rich" will fix it). But it's easy to avoid dealing with the real economic problems and just blame something external being it "billionaires", the 1%, Trump, Putin, China etc (pick your favourite poison).
In this forum pretty much everyone is privileged in the country they live compared to the normal citizen. It's easy to cosplay about "utopia" when it has little direct impact on you or you can just move away to another place.
I ordered 96GB of memory last Tuesday from Corsair. Two days later when I checked the website again, the exact same memory was being sold for twice what I paid for it.
Just throwing another anecdote out there, my Zen 1 CPU (1700) was flaking out and I was kind of thinking of doing an AM5 build, with an IPMI motherboard and some nice DDR5 memory. DDR5 has a quasi-ECC built in, which is good for a server.
Thing is, I have 128GB of memtest86-passed DDR4 RAM, and while I don't need that much, the idea of spending ~$300 on 32GB was ludicrous. So I have a Ryzen 5700G now, and all is well.
I was an APL programmer for many years and I insisted on writing as much of my code as possible without branches. Fortunately, it was reasonably easy to do in that language, if sometimes resulting in very cryptic code
I was in a Waymo in SF last weekend riding from the Richmond district to SOMA, and the car actually surprised me by accelerating through two yellow lights. It was exactly what I would have done. So it seems the cars are able to dial up the assertiveness when appropriate.
I'm sure "timing of yellow" is only a few parameters in its network at this point. And it's continuously training, it can probably one-shot the timing changes ( one taxi ride through maybe 3 lights ).
It doesn't seem impossible technically to up the assertiveness. The issue is the tradeoffs: you up the assertiveness, and increase the number of accidents by X%. Inevitably, that will contribute to some fatal crash. Does the decision maker want to be the one trying to justify to the jury knowingly causing an expected one more fatal incident in order to improve average fleet time to destination by 25%?
Reinforcement learning is a helluva drug. I'm sure by now Waymos can time yellows in SF to within a nanosecond, whereas humans will only ever drive through so many yellows will never get that much training data.
A human can know the yellows on a few routes. A Waymo can pull over, observe a given intersection for an hour, and tell every other Waymo that exists precisely how long that light lasts.
It's not just collecting the information; it's the ability to spread it.
When red-light cameras are installed at an intersection, the number of rear-end accidents typically increases as drivers unexpectedly slow down instead of speeding up at yellow lights.
The cost of these accidents is borne by just about everyone, except the authority profitably operating the red lights. (To be fair, some statistics also show a decrease in right-angle collisions, which is kinda the point of the red-light rules to begin with.)
That seems only like a temporary problem until people get used to actually stopping at red lights, as they are supposed to. After the initial acceptance phase, it should minimise accidents over the longer term.
Unless there is a warning of how long is left on the yellow light, it’s an unsolvable problem because there is an asymmetric risk of stopping vs accelerating
The lights should be designed so that if you don't have enough space to stop with a mild deceleration you should just go through. If a mild deceleration get you rear ended then of course that's an unsolvable problem
No one wants to risk a ticket with a guess at how long the yellow is going to be, or whether they’ll make it thru or not. That is the unsolvable part. Yellows are inconsistent , and you aren’t accounting for slow-moving traffic ahead of you that might cause you to block the intersection, etc.
There was actually a scandal in Chicago were a study found that the city systematically reduced the length of yellows only on lights that had red light cameras in order to harvest tickets.
I feel like the subtext of all these concerns is that you'd need to drive very carefully to reliably avoid camera tickets... and nobody wants to drive that carefully. I get it, I don't either, and I do get occasional camera tickets. But like: I should also be driving more carefully.
My memory may be outdated or only local to my jurisdiction but my understanding is that yellow means “do not enter the intersection” where “intersection” begins before the box, usually with some alternate street indicator, like broken white lines turning to solid, at a braking distance that accounts for posted speed limit and yellow light duration.
I address that problem by scheduling a brown bag lunch and inviting devs from related teams to join in so I can present my cool new tools and techniques to everyone. Sometimes it's wasted effort, but sometimes it does result in wider usage
I haven’t used a windows machine for like 15 years, but back when I was a teenager I could swear computer magazines included all kinds of tips about unchecking things from the auto startup menu, some modifying the registry.
Did this pattern stop being a thing and we’re back to it now? Or was it just “forgotten”?
Startup shortcuts are one thing to manage but it’s gotten pretty out of control for most standard software now. Perhaps it used to be one-off annoying programs like 15 years ago.
Now there’s scrolling through hundreds of scheduled tasks called dfddg.exe with no title or description and located in c:/windows or %appdata%. Disabling the wrong identically named one bricks your system or software licenses.
Then you also have to check the registry and group policy and environment variables and spot the unwanted item that is again often bundled into a critical windows dll. Usually with the same name as the dll and its permissions are set as SYSTEM so you can’t edit it by normal means.
Then after every change you have to do a full rebooting and review all steps again. Often, they will regenerate themselves if deleted in the wrong way or the wrong order.
After all the startup things are killed there may still be kernel level startup recovery processes for things like Adobe.
Oof. Yeah it definitely wasn’t this bad, I remember that having an unclearly named app in your startup menu was considered a clear tell that you had a malware infection.
This sounds like Microsoft is failing spectacularly at enforcing strict limits on what software can do.
Safari does the same thing on macOS; it has a launch agent to speed the first instance of opening Safari up, as well as a process to send notifications presumably from web apps you've allowed to do so.
Other operating systems do the same. Windows even has a dedicated system component built for the hard drive age that will load commonly used files of any type into RAM if you have some leftover.
Just to note that in most places at the moment (unless you turn up in that red baseball cap...) the attitude to most Americans is likely to be a kind of horrified pity (again, unless you start saying how great it all is). Most people are generally aware that Trump doesn't have universal support, and unlike your own media apparently, we do get coverage of protests and so on. Getting back into your own country though, yeah that might be a problem. Sorry.
I love it with the exception that one day, when it started to lag (my fault for opening up 400+ unsaved tabs), I realized there is no "Close All and Don't Save Changes" functionality. Clicked the "No" button around 80 times, searched for some registry or appdata hack to see if it could get rid of the rest which didn't work, and then sadly went back to clicking No for the rest. I'll try to avoid that in the future.
It keeps temp files in one of the appdata folders. You could just blow them away and it would just remove them from the tab list. The issue is do you want to keep that stuff or not. Also ctrl-w and n. should work fine too.
Does it also offer syntax highlighting?
One nice thing about Npp is not only the temp files and tabs, but also that it offers syntax highlighting if needed.
Sometimes when viewing a large Json it's nice to paste it in, turn on syntax highlighting and finding the information needed.
Except when you try to close it, it asks whether or not you want to save the unsaved tab, with a modal, one per every unsaved tab. It kind of defeats the purpose of this feature.
Strange it does prompt me to save and I also don't do any extra configuration for the Win11 Notepad. It is a fairly annoying app, and definitely worse than previous versions. But will look into what config options there are, but being a modern software I expect it's probably got limited options.
The last oddity I wrote on a whim was a C++ MFC dialog application that was a Spirograph-like epicycle/hypocycle generator. It would would generate screen art by semi-randomly generating layered epicycles and hypocycles with evolving colors. I spent an entire week of evenings tweaking that thing and adding more and more variations before I burned out on it and moved on.
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