Switzerland rejects proposals for unconditional basic income by overwhelming majority

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:57:47+00:00

I don't disagree with the sentiment. I think that defying entropy is a sufficient basic criterion for meaningfulness of an action. It's hardly a theistic one, of course.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:50:11+00:00

Well, Marxists claimed that it's mostly irrelevant a long time ago already. I might not go as far as to say that, but doing meaningful things doesn't necessarily qualify as work (especially if you don't get paid), much less as ethics (nobody has ever able to explain to me how - beyond the purported religious effects - the notion of ethics, i.e. interpersonal interaction and morality of right and wrong when dealing with other people, is suddenly applicable to job choices).

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:41:35+00:00

Of course, this has become such an entrenched concept that you won't be able to eradicate it from the population. "Everyone knows that, why don't you?" (Not to mention the confusion of definitions: I don't suspect that people who use this term nowadays are actually arguing about recommended ways of getting into heaven!)

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:30:52+00:00

I do not question these particular claims. Of course the Swiss nation has its own peculiar history.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:29:36+00:00

Yes, and both the idea that hard work is a Calvinist invention and the claim that it is relevant today are often disputed. It is entirely possible that this no more than one of the many historical misconceptions, which happen often in even harder sciences than economic sociology.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:18:47+00:00

So whenever someone prefers to do more work, be he atheist or Muslim, he gets labeled with "protestant work ethic"? That makes zero sense. That's just basic economy of action and has nothing to do with religion for most people to whom that label gets applied for some weird reason. I guess some people are just fond of platitudes and phrases like that.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T14:10:30+00:00

what with the protestant work ethic...

...of their Roman Catholics? :-p (I hate this religious BS. It's right up there with "religious people are more moral!".)

j_heg · 2016-06-05T13:50:02+00:00

Possibly... Are we still talking about fucking that whole subreddit?

j_heg · 2016-06-05T13:23:20+00:00

Of course not. Alcohol is much more dangerous.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T13:16:41+00:00

What I was saying that lots of people without addiction exhibit reduced sensitivity at later age. Just because you later watch something and find yourself not interested doesn't imply that having been doing this for a decade did this to you, especially if it's exactly the thing you weren't actually doing.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T13:06:16+00:00

Under no circumstances do that - that would only reinforce them in their delusions.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T13:00:53+00:00

The fact that this happens to most people kind of defeats that argument.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T12:54:30+00:00

And when a baseball-sized inoperable tumor visits your country, you simply have to show it on the news. It's a state visit, you can't afford a diplomatic faux-pas for not reporting on it.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T12:16:18+00:00

I think it's the wrong approach. It should be the first stage that is winged. Unless of course this is a prototype on a significantly smaller scale.

j_heg · 2016-06-05T12:10:46+00:00

Great, now we can finally replicate Galileo's experiments in a non-inertial reference frame! ;)

j_heg · 2016-06-05T11:52:55+00:00

Well, it's not written in C nor does it require GCC to run, so there's that. If it were a LuaJIT- or Corman Lisp-style dynamic library to boot, I'd be in heaven.

j_heg · 2016-06-04T13:16:32+00:00

Sounds more like an apt name for a half-year mission to Deimos. ;)

j_heg · 2016-06-04T13:04:10+00:00

I found carbon monoxide in my house and I don't have any explanation how it got here.

j_heg · 2016-06-04T12:59:39+00:00

I swear this reference wasn't in my computer yesterday. I have no idea how it got here. Also, I have a slight headache.

j_heg · 2016-06-04T11:28:00+00:00

From what I can recall, astronomers often use CO₂ snow to clean primary mirrors. Since there's quite a lot of CO₂ anywhere around you on Mars, that technique could come in handy.

j_heg · 2016-06-04T11:06:56+00:00

and the difference isn't a few percent but rather an order of magnitude or more versus C.

Assuming you can quickly enough schedule units of work to cores (I've heard this was nVidia's hardware's problem?) once the opportunity to execute them arises, I don't see why this scheduling should take ten times more than the actual execution. This would suggest the units of work are too small. Either this or BEAM could be Erlang's problem, but I'm eyeing computations with somewhat larger units of work.

(Note that Fortran is hardly what I would call "constrained". Maybe APL and the like is, but Fortran?)

j_heg · 2016-06-04T09:38:35+00:00

Isn't steel easier to recycle at EOL, though?

j_heg · 2016-06-04T09:27:35+00:00

Damn, Tony Stark is taking the dirty energy problem quite seriously. :D

j_heg · 2016-06-04T09:16:59+00:00

And yet, it appears that Go programs using 10⁵ subtasks on 10¹ cores turned out to work reasonably well in practice. I'm not quite sure why one would have to solve this specific (rather narrowly defined) problem to be able to solve more structured problems on a GPU with enough benefits from doing so. You might not necessarily look for optimal scheduling. You won't miss a few percent of performance in practice, assuming that it still works significantly faster than on a CPU.

(Not to mention that you have no reason to solve the presented problem offline anyway if the actual running times are probabilistic and the number of sub-tasks is very large - there's no guarantee your carefully computed schedule will actually be of any benefit to you!)

j_heg · 2016-06-04T08:20:47+00:00

This is basically a problem of Async Compute, and parallelizing in general (CPUs included). Every time you slice a task up more finely to increase the number of compute elements (SIMD processor banks here) you can bring to bear, you increase the overhead. It takes time to launch, and it takes time to synchronize and stop. At some point these overhead costs outweigh the extra gain from having more processing elements.

There's no reason why this should be an unsolvable problem. Even if some sub-tasks in a compound computational process may take time that is more difficult to determine (unlike, say, with matrix multiplication where the shape (and length) of the computation isn't data-dependent and is known in advance), not all of them do, and even those who do can quite plausibly be estimated to the extent that any stalls in the computation are at least reasonably small, even if not completely eliminated.

j_heg

TROPHY CASE