thworp

5 ms·

1.
by thworp 8mo ago
A toy example: NeoCloud Inc builds a new datacenter full of the new H800 GPUs. It rents out a rack of them for $10/minute while paying $6/minute for electricity, interest, loan repayment, rent and staff. Two years later, H900 is r
2.
by thworp 10mo ago
You simply cannot compare the experience of being conquered in a pre-modern society to being conquered by the PRC. Premodern States simply couldn't afford the level of oppression and exploitation that is possible today. They usually ju
3.
by thworp 1y ago
Look for a broad-strokes summary of environmental laws in China [0]. Note the following paragraph: > The standards detailed in the action plan focus on several harmful substances, including particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10), sulfur dio
4.
by thworp 1y ago
The situation in China is actually even worse. There are environmental regulations, but enforcement is easily evaded through bribes or CCP connections. Every so often there is a disaster that forces the government to start a much-publicized
5.
by thworp 1y ago
Imo OLED has completely eclipsed CRT by now. I don't know enough to say where CRTs could be today if they had gotten the development $ that went into other tech. But to be as good as OLEDs they would have had to find something else tha
6.
by thworp 1y ago
A big issue with fingerprint-only devices is water. If your finger, the reader or both are sufficiently wet, most readers just don't work. Most touchscreens also don't work too well in those conditions - certainly not well enough
7.
by thworp 1y ago
Actual support from the people was not wanted or needed by these regimes. They were content with having support by their party lapdogs, the kinds of people with no skills or personality, that would inform on their peers and magically become
8.
by thworp 1y ago
Where structural bricks are used, they are generally hollow with air cavities of varying sizes. Those types of bricks are very good insulators, pretty much the best insulation we had before modern fibres. Even if we used solid brick, their
9.
by thworp 1y ago
> The sino-vietnamese was a ridiculous mistake for the socialist project, that I agree with. But this wasn't an imperial war. Fair enough, but then you can't claim that the US involvement in Korea was imperial. > When I ment
10.
by thworp 1y ago
There is Tibet, which had declared independence in 1913 and then decisively split itself from China by expelling all Chinese in 1945. The PRC conquered them because they were part of the Chinese "motherland". You can argue that th
11.
by thworp 1y ago
Which imperial power? If the US is an imperial power for defending their local dictator, how is PRC not one for doing likewise? Is it because the Communist empires loudly screamed that they‘re anti-imperialist as they went out and conquered
12.
by thworp 1y ago
I think you went into stable genius territory yourself in the second half. > I'd guess Ukraine falls within months at most. Even if the US stops all deliveries -- which is far from certain, judging by the noise Trump made in the pas
13.
by thworp 1y ago
In the long term, yes. In the medium term, companies and people liquidating their assets and paying capital gains tax actually gives the state a windfall.
14.
by thworp 1y ago
You look out the window and see rain. I see light drizzle. A journalist writes about meeting a subject of his article in a "raging autumn storm".
15.
by thworp 1y ago
> especially on unrealised gains. Right, absolutely brilliant idea. You live prudently, save some money every month and invest it (stocks, bonds, whatever). Due to factors entirely outside your control like a stock market bubble or an in
16.
by thworp 1y ago
How could they make sure that the CRISPR payload survives replication?
17.
by thworp 1y ago
On the move 20% picaridin repellent works well to almost completely prevent bites. It's also slightly more long-lasting than DEET and doesn't destroy plastics. It will still need re-application if you're sweating. Otherwise l
18.
by thworp 1y ago
I take it you have never spent any time outside where there's lots of them. If you go out without protection, they'll mercilessly sting every bit of exposed skin. Depending on your genes and the mosquitoes', the stings can
19.
by thworp 1y ago
The business model is essentially the same as credit cards, but with "fees" instead of interest payments. That is to say, Klarna takes a commission from merchants and the rest of their income is from people who didn't pay on
20.
by thworp 1y ago
It's much better to buy Puts (limited downside). The problem with buying them now is that you're way too late. By now the premiums are quite high, even for huge declines. If you bought a few batches at different strike prices expi
21.
by thworp 2y ago
> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous. There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and
22.
by thworp 2y ago
There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact
23.
by thworp 2y ago
It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the soft
24.
by thworp 2y ago
We do have the technology to build HVDC cables from Iceland to Britain / Norway and we can expect the loss of this grid-to-grid interconnect to be < 5%. It's a different question entirely if it is feasible. It would be the long
25.
by thworp 2y ago
> Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly. > They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today. Yes, these families exist. But there is an equal amount of them th
26.
by thworp 2y ago
I agree with you, but using the word corpo to describe a very old phenomenon of society does not add to your argument.
27.
by thworp 2y ago
That problem is also ever-present for China. States like China never look like they are about to collapse until they do.
28.
by thworp 2y ago
Briefly: earth‘s rotational axis had a different tilt, leading to completely different climate and weather systems behavior. Incidentally, before the green sahara period, the sahara was much larger than today.
29.
by thworp 2y ago
But no big party supports reunification with the current Chinese government, at best they have it as a long term goal. The election results do not show what you're claiming.
30.
by thworp 2y ago
An election result is not a single-issue poll and the current government supports the status quo anyway (just being fundamentally more open to dialogue). A clear majority of the opulation supports de-facto independence (the current status)

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