You know what else would suffice plenty? Physical keys and mechanical locks. They worked (and still work) without electricity. The tech is mature and well-understood.
The reason for moving away from physical keys is that key management becomes a nightmare; you can't "revoke" a key without changing all the locks which is an expensive operation and requires distributing new keys to everyone else. Electronic access control solves that.
Something similar happened to the macOS chess game, which has always been bundled with OSX/macOS. Once upon a time it was easy to beat in easy mode, which restricted how long it could thing in advance.
When Big Sur rolled out around 2020, Apple introduced a bug which disabled the difficulty slider: no matter what it was set to, it was hard or impossible to beat. In macOS Sequoia, the Chess app got updated again, and supposedly they fixed the difficulty slider, but in the interval silicon improved so much that the old restraints (like think for only a second) mean little. The lowest levels play like a grand master.
is there some reason to implement it as a time limit instead of iterations or something else deterministic? it being affected by CPU speed or machine load seems obvious.
or whatever makes sense if “iterations” isn’t a thing, I know nothing about chess algorithms
It’s simpler. Chess is a search through the space of possible moves, looking for a move that’s estimated to be better than the best move you’ve seen so far.
The search is by depth of further moves, and “better” is a function of heuristics (explicit or learned) on the resulting board positions, because most of the time you can’t be sure a move will inevitably result in a win or a loss.
So any particular move evaluation might take more or less time before the algorithm gives up on it—or chooses it as the new winner. To throw a consistent amount of compute at each move, the simple thing to do is give the engine consistent amounts of time per move.
> To throw a consistent amount of compute at each move, the simple thing to do is give the engine consistent amounts of time per move.
The simple thing to do is give it a limit on the total number of states it can explore in its search.
If your goal is consistency, wall-clock time makes no sense. If I run 'make -j20', should the chess computer become vastly easier because the CPU is being used to compile, not search? Should 'nice -n 20 <chess app pid>' make the chess computer worse?
Should my computer thermal-throttling because it's a hot day make the chess computer worse, so chess is harder in winter?
If the goal is consistency, then wall-clock isn't the simple way to do it.
> It’s simpler than doing a limit on number of states
According to who?
A counter that you ++ each move sounds a lot easier to me than throwing off a separate thread/callback to handle a timer.
> Doing a time limit also enforces bot moving in a reasonable time.
It's designed for specific hardware, and will never have to run on anything significantly slower, but might have to run on things significantly faster. It doesn't need a time cutoff that would only matter in weird circumstances and make it do a weirdly bad move. It needs to be ready for the future.
> It puts a nice limit to set up a compromise between speed and difficulty.
Both methods have that compromise, but using time is way more volatile.
A time limit is also deterministic in some sense. Level settings used to be mainly time based, because computers at lower settings were no serious competition to decent players, but you don't necessarily want to wait for 30 seconds each move, so there were more casual and more serious levels.
Limiting the search depth is much more deterministic. At lower levels, it has hilarious results, and is pretty good at emulating beginning players (who know the rules, but have a limited skill of calculating moves ahead).
One problem with fixed search depth is that I think most good engines prefer to use dynamic search depth (where they sense that some positions need to be searched a bit deeper to reach a quiescent point), so they will be handicapped with a fix depth.
> One problem with fixed search depth is that I think most good engines prefer to use dynamic search depth (where they sense that some positions need to be searched a bit deeper to reach a quiescent point), so they will be handicapped with a fix depth.
Okay, but I want to point out nobody was suggesting a depth limit.
For a time-limited algorithm to work properly, it has to have some kind of sensible ordering of how it evaluates moves, looking deeper as time passes in a dynamic way.
Switch to an iteration limit, and the algorithm will still have those features.
There have been a number of taste tests that show that, when blindfolded, most people can't distinguish between Coke and Sprite, let alone Coke and a close imitation, without the visual cue: throw together enough sugar, acid, and carbonation, and it overwhelms the body's ability to distinguish taste. It's a story often repeated in marketing (like Twitchells' Branded Nation), because forging a distinction between indistinguishable parity products is marketing's job.
I think if you believe this I'd recommend trying it yourself.
I've done this blinded with colas, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. You might not know which is which without some history drinking them, but they all taste very distinct by themselves.
Really disagree that these are indistinguishable parity products, or that most people would not be obviously able to tell the difference between them.
I'll say that the 'Zero' products have gotten quite good. Not indistinguishable, but closer than I expected. On a couple of occasions I've inadvertently purchased real Dr Pepper instead of Dr Pepper Zero and not realized I was drinking the real thing. That's high praise for the Zero version (notably, the Diet version of Dr Pepper, while it has a following of its own, is extremely unlike real Dr Pepper).
I don't know but I recently drank coca cola which my brother ordered and then after a few days, I decided to drink diet coca cola because I was discussing it with my brother and he mentioned that diet and normal coke are the same price and I started wondering if there are negative effects to normal coke and not much for diet coke and they both are same price and I am drinking it for the taste, then diet coke makes the most sense so I decided to order it
Not sure if its just me though but after drinking both diet coke and normal coke the taste gap between diet coke and normal coke felt really huge to me.
You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
But now realizing this, I think that there is a difference between diet, zero and normal variants, this is the first time I am discovering this. Time to drink coke zero and coke but the winters are really cold so I might have to wait this winter season
Can confirm, could never stand the taste of Diet Coke, but Coke Zero tastes pretty close to the original to me! To the point that I pretty much never drink regular Coke anymore, if Coke Zero is available. There's basically no downside to going with Zero, imo. And the upside of no calories is pretty great.
That’s because Diet Coke is not based on classic Coke. It’s based on new coke, it should really be called diet new coke. Coke Zero is based on Coca Cola classic.
If Diet Coke has a bitter taste to you (like it does to me) you may have a genetic mutation that allows aspartame to bind to both sweet and bitter taste receptors (as I understand it). For most people it only binds to sweet receptors.
Although to be fair, the last time I had a diet coke, I was, dunno, maybe 10? So like 20 years ago at this point. So maybe if I had some now, I'd have a different opinion. But I don't think diet coke is even sold here in Brazil anymore, It's been years since I last saw one. I was actually not aware that it was still sold in the US!
> You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
Any of the Zero variants are worth a try, in my experience. Historically I choose Coke, and for quite a while I drank Coke Zero, which is pretty good. More recently in the last year or so I've fixated on Pepsi Zero, even though I've never really been a Pepsi fan otherwise. I also like Dr Pepper Zero, as I mentioned in my first post. I've never really liked any of the diet versions of soda, they just tasted too different to me.
That's interesting. I'll need to find some Dr Pepper Zero and try it. My history of Dr Pepper and of diet sodas goes like this.
1. I only drank non-diet sodas. Pepsi was my favorite, Dr Pepper or root beer was the runner up at restaurants the had Coke (which I hate) rather than Pepsi.
2. At some point I started trying to reduce the percent of my calories that came from carbs. I was able to continue drinking non-diet soda and meet my goal but only because (1) I usually only drank a small glass with each meal, and (2) I was able to reduce carbs from other things enough to leave room for the soda.
3. That reducing from other things enough to leave room for the soda got annoying, so I made myself drink diet sodas for a few days. I quickly got used to Diet Dr Pepper and started to enjoy it. Diet Pepsi became OK, but Diet Dr Pepper was better. Once this switch was made and I didn't need to make room for soda carbs I could stick to my carb goal pretty easily.
4. After a few years of that, I had oral surgery. They advised me to not drink carbonated beverages for a week or so afterwards, so I drank water. I was actually fine with that so after two weeks I finished off the 2L bottles of Diet Dr Pepper in my fridge and then just drank water at home for the next few years. I would still have a Diet Dr Pepper or a Diet Pepsi or Pepsi Zero or Diet root beer on the few occasions I ate out.
If I ate out at a place that did not those I would sometimes get a non-diet Dr Pepper or Pepsi and it was terrible. It seemed too sweet. It tasted like someone had mixed some thick sweetener into it so not only was the flavor off the feel of the drink was wrong.
It was bad enough that I would no longer eat out at those places. I'd only get food to go from there.
So now I'm really curious if Dr Pepper Zero will taste good to me or not. If my problem with regular Dr Pepper is just due to the sugar I should probably be OK with Dr Pepper Zero. But if what I really now dislike is non-diet Dr Pepper's flavor it sounds like I'll also dislike Dr Pepper Zero.
I can't drink normal coke, it disgusts me, leaves an unpleasant sensation on my teeth, probably the sugar, but love the zero. It's also zero cal, which is a huge bonus.
Could be wrong but I heard phosphoric acid is in similar amounts in all of them for the unusual reason that this inorganic acid actually enhances (brings out) the cola flavor. Seems this doesn't happen with normal carboxylic food acids, malic, citric, tartaric, etc.
It's an odd combination, I think colas are the only instance where a mineral acid is used synergistically with another ingredient to enhance flavor.
Someone with greater knowledge may wish to expand on this.
That link actually clearly says down in the body that they could pick the lemon lime out from the colas, which makes sense.
Throwing together sugar, acid, and carbonation does not overwhelm your sense of taste. Thats most bottled beverages. If you believe this, you should see a doctor.
But many beverages are very similar to other beverages. It’s not an inherent flaw in taste perception that Coke and Pepsi taste alike to most people, it’s that one was intentionally made to be only slightly different than the other.
Lol, and here I am choking in shock when I grab a sip from a sprite can instead of the coke that I thought it was. Turns out I was just blindly (literally) falling for marketing? I don't think so, Tim.
Most people prefer Pepsi's taste. Unless the brands are revealed, then the brand recognition sets in and your brain rewards you more for choosing Coca Cola (c)
So you can taste it, but that doesn't matter in the end.
Last I recall, you get different answers if you taste just a sip verses a larger amount. Pepsi has a good first taste, but after a couple of sips it's pretty overpoweringly sweet, even compared to other sodas.
This is irrelevant and misleading. Just because many people cannot tell flavors apart doesn’t mean that the products are parity and are marketing differentiated.
Sure the majority of people cannot tell flavor notes apart but there exists a certain % of the population that can very reliably distinguish different tastes. Wine sommeliers, fine dining, food science are all professions which require a sensitive palate and smell and it is an over simplification to talk about sodas tasting the same for the majority of people as if it implies there is no difference or speciality in crafting taste.
Supposedly Jell-O was originally to be clear but they needed the food coloring to convince your brain you weren’t just tasting sugar and citric acid instead of the little bit of flavor they added per recipe.
Don't get me wrong, but somebody has to operate an exit node and somehow there needs to be a consensus on the protocol + routing.
If the network is only earth bound fixed wireless, the distance might be small enough that the state comes for the operator itself...
This raises the cost of running this network from just money to life threat.
Getting many open source satellites up in orbit might not be feasible.
Agreed that nothing is fully trustless on Earth. The point isn’t eliminating operators, it’s avoiding single points of coercion and failure. One exit can be shut down but many exits and type of networks (includong more alternative infra like the Guifi.net’s meshnetworks in Spain for example) across jurisdictions raise the cost from “call a CEO” to sustained political pressure or directly a CEO that has control over an entire network and its also a billionaire CEO with a messiah complex, far-right leanings and tendency to drug abuse.
Absolute decentralization is impossible. Reducing capture and increasing resilience is not. That’s a meaningful difference.
Said that, I’m happy with Starlink as an extra actor for a healthy mix of ISPs and networks that brings resilience.
positive change will never happen as long as the workers require the owner's property to help make the change, because the owners can control what happens on their property.
we need a mutual aid web services (MAWS). a sharedflare. everybody's link. etc.
this was an insight of fannie lou hamer and other freedom fighters from the civil rights movement after they had their food stolen/destroyed/poisoned. they were focused on food and education and healthcare but the idea can be applied to technology infrastructure, too.
That’s a false dichotomy. Saying Starlink isn’t sovereign doesn’t imply support for state-controlled networks. Criticizing corporate centralization ≠ endorsing government control.
The goal is systems where authority is fragmented enough that capture (by states or corporations) is structurally hard
A government may introduce a list of identifiers of devices allowed to operate in their territory. With relatively frequent verification to prevent the use of captured devices.
It’s great that starlink is there, but it can still be shut down on the whim of its owner as seen in the past. So hurray for starlink! (unless the opportunistic tides of politics change)
I know you hate it, but X and Starlink are the only channels giving us information on Iran right now. If X was censored (like many leftists are advocating), we wouldn't know anything about those riots.
People rising against a regime that the left sympathizes with, obviously.
Iranians describing how Isam destroyed their country within one decade (the UK establishment is very unconfortable with that truth, for some reaslon...).
Iranians calling on Trump and thanking Elon. That tends to make leftists mad.
Being mad is one thing, but demanding X censor that speech is another. I'm not really involved in this debate so I haven't seen anything like that. Can you provide some examples of any prominent people on the left calling for X to censor that speech?
Starmer, T.Breton (former EU commissioner, the one who got denied VISA to the US going forward), google them with "X ban" and you'll have all the results you want.
Similar with many other EU political figures.
I see news articles about Starmer wanting to ban X for allowing deepfakes and sexualized images of children, which seems reasonable to me. Presumably if X took steps other companies have to prevent those images, the ban would be off the table.
As for T. Breton, it seems they're wanting X to abide by the EU's Digital Services Act, which requires transparency in how a company tries to combat disinformation among other things (protection of children's exposure to dangerous content being one of them).
Why is it so difficult for you to understand: we don’t want your x shit in Europe. Since when is the American president so concerned about the business of a single man, who’s an immigrant himself? Anna Paulina Luna, she’s a fucking immigrant too, or a daughter of one. You have all lost your mind there in the US. Why should we be even concerned with what you want if your leader is ready to send tanks because someone said “no”. Fuck people who think like you. Take your propaganda and kindly fuck off.
"We" ? The 100 million active users in Europe, making X one of the most downloaded app on the continent, probably beg to differ.
Again, typical socialism reflexes: you dont like X, so instead f just not using it, you feel like you need to send us the police to make us not use it...
PS: do you have short and blue hair ? Just a question, don't get too triggered.
You know, not everyone on this site has an absolutist binary opinion on the Elon. Some people can give him credit for what he gets right, while simultaneously calling bullshit on his bullshit.
You need Musk to play ball. Starlink worked fine when Afghanistan turned off the internet. There’s a lot of rhetoric about the evil musk internet there - the government don’t care about things like vsat, it’s very specifically framed as anti America and anti Musk
Remember the people enforcing it (going to businesses and checking their connections) are thick as two short planks.
Iran I expect has a more effective enforcement than the taliban, but the principal is the same - starlink works fine in these countries and downlinks elsewhere (Europe in the case of Afghanistan). GEO providers like Inmarsat downlink in places like the Netherlands.
It’s all rather meaningless as only a tiny number of people have access to these systems, compared to access to the Internet via phones.
He took a very public approach to navigating that and while that would be on brand, it’s wild. He seem to have been directly communicating with Putin.
Disconnecting Ukraine at key points in battles would fit with the current administration’s flip flopping approach, but again he is at the front of it and on Twitter slagging off supposed American allies.
Electricity, light, and heat aren't magic: they're science. Science is something well understood. Something that seems magical is something poorly understood. When I ask AI a question, I don't know whether it will tell me something truthful, mendacious in a verisimilitudinous way, or blatantly wrong, and I can only tell when it's blatantly wrong. That's magic, and I hate magic. I want more science in my life.
Someone actually called me on the voice line yesterday. It was the first time the phone part of the little pocket tracker-computer had operated in ages.
Parents still have the ability to raise their children according to their own values, despite the most earnest and eager intentions of the dopamine-dealing crowd. That bug hasn't yet been engineered out of society.
You are right, parents can still steer their children.
But in some cases like mine, parents might not have the time or inclination to do so, for whatever reasons.
I was able to discover Pickwick Papers, Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, Lord of the Flies, Spirited Away, Almost Famous, etc. on my own. If I were young today, I don't think I would discover the right things.
Yet when we do this by, say, homeschooling, the HN commentariat piles up hundreds of comments accusing us of child neglect and a lack of concern for society.
Do they? I've mentioned homeschooling on hn before without issue. There's always knobs who can't have a nuanced view of course, but generally the discussions I've seen have tended positive.
This[1] thread has a good collection of them. Has plenty of comments in favor of course, but the negative ones are present in high quantities. There's a reason even anodyne headlines like that can get 800+ comments on HN.
I missed that one. But it seems like a lively debate for the most part rather than a single opinion pile on.
But yeah I get your point that it's like there's an unreasonable number of people who have a strong opinion on it despite having no actual experience or evidence or reason to comment. Homeschool is a small minority and the majority are biased to what they know. We homeschool 3 kids, didn't intend to to it before it happened, and I would have held some very incorrect opinions about it too, for what little thought I ever actually gave it.
That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.
Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.
I don't think that's due to following the process but rather systemic cultural issues. The process doesn't exist in a vacuum. There's a good faith meta process that needs to be followed to incrementally fix issues as they arise.
Bad faith actors and cultural dysfunction can break pretty much anything no matter how well thought out it might be.
It's also leaving out that system only works (worked) for building airplanes because it happens (happened) to be an industry with a hugely passionate workforce. Switch it to contracted out wage slaves and 'the system' doesn't work. Because the system never 'worked', many passionate people worked via sheer force of will/desire/care/investment into the final product. It was about the people all along.
The idea in the aerospace industry is that you should not blame the pilot, since pilot error became a all-catch rule no matter if there was design or system errors. The classical example is the button for the landing gear, where pilots continued to accidentally press it and crashing the plane. The engineers added guardrails to the button and the pilot error rate went down.
The lever for the landing gear and the lever for the flaps were easily confused. After landing the pilots intended to retract flaps but accidentally retracted the landing gear instead.
At first they assumed their recruitment process accidentally favoured stupid people so they made sure to only recruit smart pilots. But it kept happening. Then they put a little flap on the end of the flap lever and a small wheel on the end of the gear lever and the problem went away.
That's my dad who worked at NaSA doing aeronautics stuff said.
Pilots fuck up all the time so blaming them doesn't excuse anything.
And I find myself butting heads with people over that all the time. Coworker (smug satisfied voice) well if the end user fucks up it's not our fault. Me (trying not to sound really annoyed) yeah it's still our problem.
Although it has far from mainstreamed yet, I like how the software industry has the notion of a “UX bug”: if the user failed at anything, the software is at fault, because it wasn’t easy enough to use.
Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".
Industrial safety must (if it is to be effective) recognise that people are an important part of the process! They're so often forgotten, with disastrous results.
People need to be given timely information, communication channels, and authority to straighten things out when they go awry. That's good for safety!
It's also a crap way to run a culture when you scale it.
You need to make the people best positioned to notice something is stupid responsible enough to make them say no fuck you because otherwise every oversight and edge case will be substantially more likely to cause harm because they have less skin in the game.
See also: Cops getting "paid vacations" for bad stuff.
Except a lot of the safety in any given process comes from the people: if technicians, pilots, and air traffic controllers were not empowered to assess the situation and make decisions then there would a heck of a lot more accidents.
This. A decentralized, 90's-style internet would probably involve home servers, and there have been attempts to do that: Sheevaplugs would be a good example from the late 2000s. I don't think anyone ever managed to make self-hosting at home frictionless enough, though, with secure defaults and turnkey startup. Open-source, sadly, tends to overestimate the amount of fiddling the average user will tolerate; Apple does a better job of making difficult things simple.
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