> There are zero reasons to limit yourself to 1GB of RAM
There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.
> There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, (...)
This is specious reasoning. You don't prevent anything by adding artificial constraints. To put things in perspective, Hetzner's cheapest vCPU plan comes with 4GB of RAM.
If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious?
> If I give you a box with 1 GiB of RAM, you are literally forced to either optimize your code to run in it, or accept the slowdown from paging. How is this specious?
It is specious reasoning. Self-imposing arbitrary constraints don't make you write good, performant code. At most it makes your apps run slower because they will needlessly hit your self-impose arbitrary constraints.
If you put any value on performant code you just write performance-oriented code, regardless of your constraints. It's silly to pile on absurd constraints and expect performance to be an outcome. It's like going to the gym and work out with a hand tied behind your back, and expect this silly constraints to somehow improve the outcome of your workout. Complete nonsense.
And to drive the point home, this whole concern is even more perplexing as you are somehow targeting computational resources that fall below free tiers of some cloud providers. Sheer lunacy.
Constraints provide feedback. Real-world example from my job: we have no real financial constraints for dev teams. If their poor schema or query design results in SLO breaches, and they opt to upsize their DB instead of spending the effort to fix the root problem, that is accepted. They have no incentive to do otherwise, because there are no constraints.
I think your analogy is flawed; a more apt one would be training with deliberately reduced oxygen levels, which trains your body to perform with fewer resources. Once you lift that constraint, you’ll perform better.
You’re correct that you can write performant code without being required to do so, but in practice, that is a rare trait.
The gym analogy fails. Isolation exercises are almost exactly what you described. They target individual muscles to maximize hypertrophy, i.e. "improve the outcome of your workout."
Then you're probably concerned about the Falcon creating easy launches for mass numbers of satellites and the extra carbon footprint that new industry has. NASA here barely compares to the output of that of falcon.
Coffee is an acquired taste, I think. People conditions themselves to like the bitter taste of coffee over time. I remember hating the taste of coffee (or beer, for example) in childhood.
Weirdly enough, I loved coffee from the first time I tried it, at maybe 13. Even though, looking back, it must have been terrible coffee, it was at something vaguely model UN like thing our entire class went to in an overnight trip. Obviously not enough sleep was had. A vending machine (in the late 90s) provided coffee...
Yes, I also tried coffee first time when in England when 13, and it was like a revelation. I understand that beer and cigarettes are an acquired taste, they tasted terrible, but coffee was a love at first sip.
Douglas Adams nailed the quality of tea from a vending machine, "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea", and that era of coffee machines weren't much better at coffee.
I’ve heard that bitterness affects children more intensely. So I wonder how much of it is an acquired taste vs bitterness just becoming “milder” over time.
My three year old loves the taste of matcha. Even when I don't prepare it quite right and it turns out very bitter. He's pretty picky about near everything else. I think it's acquisition through mimicry.
Matcha is one of the more concentrated amino acids drinks you can make; given how hungry I remember being as a kid, I bet it tastes like liquid gold. And if you’re in a climate that tolerates rhododendrons you can plant a camellia sinensis bush for it straight from the vine as a bridge from matcha to steeped tea, steaming and roasting, etc.
> Matcha is one of the more concentrated amino acids drinks
Matcha is virtually entirely water. Multiple sources say that matcha has about 270 mg of amino acids per serving. Even if matcha powder were 100% amino acids (which would taste vile), a 2g serving would still be 2g.
Milk has about 4.5 grams of amino acid content per 100g (less than half a cup).
Yes, that’s one of the reasons dairy matcha lattes taste so good: not only is it more densely amino, but it’s also more broadly amino (e.g. milk is not particularly high in L-theanine), and the sweetness of the milk offsets the bitterness of the matcha, which lets you ramp up the density further beyond 2g if you like.
What I mean to say is that matcha is almost devoid of amino acid content. It’s basically a small cup of water. The small amounts of various compounds may have some beneficial effects, but amino acids are abundant in many foods and drinks. You don’t need to get them in micro doses from matcha.
Matcha may be tasty. It’s not a good source of aminos.
Regular coffee, too, can be very delicate, minimally bitter, giving herbal or strong tea-like notes, among other things.
I've not gotten that kind of profile out of anything but fairly-expensive beans roasted within the last couple of weeks, though. I've never seen it out of even mid-priced beans, nor anything nationally distributed. It's practically a totally different drink from what you get if you ask for a coffee in most contexts.
Iced coffee and cold brew are also fairly different. I find middling beans can make a much milder and more pleasant cold brew coffee than hot. Tiny (like, a teaspoon) splash of cream or milk and it takes the bitter edge all but completely off, to my taste anyway.
> I've not gotten that kind of profile out of anything but fairly-expensive beans roasted within the last couple of weeks, though.
Good beans will last more than 2 weeks, but yes—just as you wouldn't judge all sushi based on gas station sushi, we shouldn't judge coffee based on months-old pre-ground grocery store roasts.
Billions all over the world managed to acquire it just fine.
If that's an acquired taste, I doubt 99% of drinks that aren't an acquired taste would do much better, assuming there's anything doing better than coffee to begin with.
I now like bitters and soda, and I didn’t like bitter as a kid, so I think there might also be shifts in favor of bitter unrelated to coffee. Perhaps the same thing that leads people to appreciate spicy or sour as experiences broaden.
Years ago, somewhere I read that children have a genetically-based urge to avoid bitter flavors, since they may signal natural poisons, whereas adults can judge better, so the urge is lessened.
(And even if that source were true, that wouldn't make the genetic effect an absolute; it would depend on individual genetics and the variable expression of those genes. And probably on the individual's experience, either as a child or as an adult.)
but why? i have to add so much milk and sugar to mask the bitterness that, combined with the negative effects, i asked myself, why do i even bother? i might as well just drink hot milk with sugar instead. now i only drink coffee if i need the energy and waking effects and nothing else sugary is available, which happens once a year, at most.
That is entirely dependent on your diet as a child. I know children that love bitter or sour/fermented foods. Not to mention they dislike things that are overly sweet.
I wouldn't be surprised if all tastes are essentially "acquired".
Speak for yourself. The bitter taste is what I like. When I don't like a cup of coffee, it's always going to be for being too sour. (Which can be masked pretty well with milk or a substitute, mind.)
I agree with your main point, though. I hated coffee most of my life. Even the smell made me feel ill. At some point, I flipped. I've always liked tea, fwiw.
I guess I don't hate beer as much as I used to. Still don't like it, though. Maybe another few decades?
How is this a counter-argument? I often read this, as if there's some international trusted organization of logical thinkers that has approved inclusion of slippery slope to a list of logical fallacies that must never be invoked in a conversation.
Every single time five years later it turns out that the slope actually was slippery.
Why do people imagine that I said words I didn’t say, get mad at those words, then reply as if I had said them? This happens all the time.
Humans are stupid and I sincerely believe that we, as a species, will fail because we are so prone to this kind of behavior. We really are a garbage race.
Everyone who rants about slippery slopes being a fallacy also loves the boiling frog analogy (which technically might be a bit closer to what they're going for).
> Everyone who rants about slippery slopes being a fallacy also loves the boiling frog analogy
I didn’t. So why do you say “everyone”? Stop imagining people saying things that they didn’t actually say.
Every step we take down this “slope” is intentional and happens because there is more force pushing things down the slope than there is force resisting that push. There is no slippage, just people who refuse to act in their own best interests letting people who are acting in their own best interests do whatever they want.
If I had to guess, I think it’s marketing — just like adding weights to the insides to make them feel more “premium”.
I’d guess that the target audience would argue that real lossless music experience requires high-bandwidth wires, and is not possible over the air without degradation.
But that’s the thing, apparently it’s not using Bluetooth but actually uses their new wireless chips to transmit the data over radio (maybe it uses WiFi, maybe something else). So it’s not using Bluetooth, which doesn’t have enough bandwidth for lossless.
I don’t think “it’s just marketing” is the reason, Apple always positioned themselves as the premium option with these things. Being the only wireless lossless headphone would be right on Apple’s expected feature list.
I think the most feasible solution is to make companies liable for damages, not in a light way but rather that every person can sue (or in a class action) for hefty amounts, so that a breach could cost e.g. 100mil+
that should incentivize them to actually invest some money in security. right now its just tiny numbers which are easier to just pay off and forget about
You'd have to deal with all of the binding arbitration agreements first.
That said, class action lawsuits also are part of the cost of business. Nothing is ever going to change unless the boards of directors (not CEOs) can be held liable for the behavior of the companies that they direct.
As I understand, lidars don't work well in rain/snow/fog. So in the real world, where you have limited resources (research and production investment, people talent, AI training time and dataset breadth, power consumption) that you could redistribute between two systems (vision and lidar), but one of the systems would contradict the other in dangerous driving conditions — it's smarter to just max out vision and ignore lidar altogether.
When it's not safe to drive, it's not safe to drive.
I've been in zero-road-speed whiteout conditions several times. The only move to make is to the side of the road without getting stuck, and turning on your flashers.
Low-light cameras would not have worked. Sonar would not have worked. Infrared would not have worked.
I think the weather where cameras/sensors start having problems is much better than zero-vis whiteout.
If we could make sensors that lets an autonomous vehicle drive reliably in any snow/rain where a human could drive (although carefully) then we're good. But we are a long way from that. Especially since a lot of sensor tech like cameras tend to fail in 2 ways, both through their performance being worse in adverse condition but also simply failing to function at all if they are covered in ice/snow/water.
If you have multi-return lidar, you can see through certain occlusions. If the fog/rain isn't that bad, you can filter for the last return and get the hard surface behind the occlusion. The bigger problem with rain is that you get specular reflection and your laser light just flies off into space instead of coming back to you. Lidar not work good on shiney.
No, it isn't "smarter." Camera-only driving is the product of a stubborn dogmatic boss who can't admit a fundamental error. "Just make it work" is a terrible approach to engineering.
Criticism of Musk isn't hate of Musk. The point is completely valid and the results of this management style infuses all of his businesses albeit with differing results.
It's significant that a truly hard problem like autonomous driving doesn't respond to a "brute force" management style. Rockets aren't in this category because the required knowledge and theory is fairly complete, whereas real autonomous driving is completely novel.
Hmm. Is it ragebaiting to respond to a tired and wrong statement by saying that it's tired and wrong and that the situation is merely the product of piss poor management decisions? People get understandably frustrated seeing the same wrong talking point that people with domain knowledge in computer vision and robotics have repeatedly explained is wrong in extremely fundamental ways.
> I don't own a Tesla.
n.b. The shoe/foot comment was not about you. It was about Musk. It wouldn't make any idiomatic sense for the expression to be about you given what you said and what you were responding to. If they'd said "pot, meet kettle", then it would have been about you. In that context, saying that you don't own a Tesla feels like a weird thing for you to insert in your comment. It potentially comes across as suspiciously defensive.
Why does this matter? You have to slow down in rain/snow/fog anyway, so only having cameras available doesn't hurt you all that much. But then in clear weather lidar can only help.
If your vision is good enough to drive in rain/snow/fog, you don't need lidar in clear conditions. If you planned to spend $10B on vision and $10B on lidar — you would be better off spending $20B on better vision.
It still infuriates me that Tesla went so long being able to call their feature “auto pilot.“ Then they had the audacity to call it user error when people thought the car would automatically pilot itself.
> If yo[u can] drive in rain/snow/fog, you don't need lidar in clear conditions
Of course you do, you're driving at much higher speeds and so is the surrounding traffic. You can't just guess what you might be looking at, you have to make clear decisions promptly. Lidar is excellent in that case.
Also, military sensor use shows the best answer is to have as many different types of sensors as possible and then do sensor fusion. So machine vision, lidar, radar, etc.
That way you pick up things that are missed by one or more sensor types, catches problems and errors from any of them, and end up with the most accurate ‘view’ of the world - even better than a normal human would.
It’s what Waymo is doing, and they also unsurprisingly, have the best self driving right now.
People who don't understand that sensor fusion is an entire field of study with tons of existing work and lots of expertise have been fooled by a fake argument of "If the camera and lidar disagree, what do you do?"
It's frustrating to still see it repeated over a decade later. It was always bullshit. It was always a lie.
This is silly. Cameras are cheap. Have both. Sensors that sense differently in different conditions is not an exotic new problem. The kalman filter has existed for about a billion years and machine learning filters do an even better job.
1) it's not cheap to produce lidars at a stable predictable quality in millions;
2) car driving training data sets for lidars are much scarcer (and will always be much scarcer due to cameras' higher prevalence) and at a much lower quality;
3) combined camera+lidar data sets are even scarcer.
> 1) it's not cheap to produce lidars at a stable predictable quality in millions;
It wasn't cheap to produce accelerometers at a stable predictable quality in millions before smart phones either. Mass production shakes things up somewhat. See the headline for reference.
1. Automotive LiDAR is down to $350 in China already. BYD is starting to put LiDAR in even entry level cars. (It's been in their mid and high end cars for a while).
2+3. BYD collects extensive training data from customers, much like Tesla does. They will have no trouble with training.
Do cameras work well in those conditions? Nope. Also cameras don't work well with certain answer of glare, so as a consumer I'd rather have something over-engineered for my safety to cover all edge cases...
> Countries rise to power because they are in the right place at the right time, even if monarchs and nationalists will always attribute it to God preference
Isn’t it literally the God’s preference of a country for this place and time, from both secular and religious points of view?
I would guess that you just remember at which file offsets you need to insert what, and which offset ranges you need to delete from the original file — and on file save you just do a single linear sweep to update the file contents on disk.
There is a good reason: teaching yourself not to over-engineer, over-provision, or overthink, and instead to focus on generating business value to customers and getting more paying customers. I think it’s what many engineers are keen to overlook behind fun technical details.
reply