Blogging to work out my thinking about issues in technology, programming, religion, and politics.
I’m writing a program to read a large JSON file to insert tens of thousands of rows of data into a graph DB using PySpark, but the development loop still evokes the same joy and magic as when I was typing in a program from a magazine on a Vic-20.
And, to me…
When BitCoin prices were spiking a year ago, people concerned with such things started pointing out that the energy required to perform all the mining could power a small country, and lamented the implied acceleration of the destruction of the environment due to the CO2-producing energy sources that were running overtime because of it.
It occurs to me that a massive portion of the US economy now relies on digital advertising, which is unquestionably one of the least efficient investments in the world. Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs per dollar of ad revenue is? I mean, it must be profitable, or they wouldn’t do it, but it surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. So, sure, complain about cryptocurrency “setting the earth on fire” to make some investors billions, but Google gets a free pass on miles and miles of private server farms cranking away 24×7 running their ad services and the auction house to make their trillions?
And that’s just Google, the poster child of this kind of thing. Where’s the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? I can’t remember anyone ever bringing this up. I think it should make people wonder why this isn’t seen anywhere. Could it be that the very companies making the most money from this activity are actively suppressing this kind of criticism?
I’ve completely ignored achievements in Elder Scrolls Online up till now. There are so many, it’s overwhelming. But coming back to the game after over a year, I notice that I “already” have about half the “points” in the game, without even thinking about it, so I’ve started paying more attention.
Finally managed to get all achievements. It was a long run but finished.
Source: I have finished the game. — Elder Scrolls Online
This guy “finished” the game on PC. In the comments, he says the new command in the game \played says he has 1,000 days in the game. That’s 24,000 hours.
I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)
Source: I finally completed 100% achievements (59,465 points)
This guy “finished” the game on Playstation. He figured he has 18,000 hours in the game.
What I’ve discovered is that, after a couple thousand hours in the game, I have a whole bunch of achievements which are almost done, just by nature of having played the game, and finishing them just needs a couple more things to be done. I’ll admit, it’s been its own kind of fun doing them. Most unlock new titles or colors to use in the dye stations, which are so esoteric and unimportant, they become special in their own right.
I “ran” all of the delves in Cyrodiil a long time ago, to farm their skyshards, but in the achievement tracker, I noticed that I had not killed the secondary bosses in a half dozen of them. I ran to the far corners of the map to complete the achievement, and then thought, hey, why not keep running the vast landscape to at least discover the dolmens, so that I could see which one was active on the map, so that I could come back, and eventually do all of them too.
Came up on one, and saw that it was actually running! Great! Except I saw that there was an enemy player doing it… He was on the last boss… and it looked like he didn’t have full health… What the heck!? A dude so weak that he’s half dead fighting a dolmen boss? I immediately overcome my reticence, jump in, and basically stab him in the back. He dies easily. I finish the boss, and get the chest.
My heart is POUNDING. I’m out of breath. I run to the next closest dolmen. It’s running. He’s there. On the last boss again. I kill him again.
I can see that one of the dolmens I recently discovered is running now. I run all the way over to it. Yup! Again, he’s there, and, again, on the last boss.
I “stole” 3 dolmens on the last boss from this poor guy in 15 minutes.
I felt a little bad.
Then I ran into a ditch and died from lava, and quit while I was ahead.
Honestly, there is NOTHING in this world that makes me so nervous as PVP in ESO.
It’s kind of sad to say, but, at least in a way, I never felt more alive than getting the skyshards in the enemy bases in Cyrodill, running away from a dude trying to chase me in my “speed gear” to get the very last one.
Of course, chasing down the easy-to-complete achievements will just lead me to the ones that need a whole lot of work, and then to the trial trifectas. Where do I cut it off, and do other things? I don’t know. But again, the recent additions to the game that allow “marginal” people like me to access “the whole game” make it fun to at least explore, and see where that line lies for me.
On the other hand, they’ve convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs.
For 25 years, I’ve been saying that every house needs to have a fiber drop, owned by the city, just like electricity, water, and sewer, through which the resident can contract with service providers to get whatever digital services they want. Looks like this may be exactly what’s happening in Cleveland. Finally.
The movie Uncle Buck was released in 1989. Like other John Hughes movies, I enjoyed it, but the real highlight for me was the girl played Uncle Buck’s niece, Jean Luisa Kelly. To me, she was nearly the epitome of feminine attractiveness: a perfect mix of cute, pretty, and hot.
Little did I know that I would meet the following smokeshow just a couple of years later. The first time I saw her, our mutual friend was introducing her down a line of people, and I was at the end. By the time they got to me, I had picked my jaw back up off the floor, and tried to play it cool.
Right after we met, she went to Colorado to get a paralegal certification. She came back. We started talking. We both got jobs working night shift. We spent hours on the phone every night. After four years, I put a ring on it.
I kept thinking that I had seen someone that looked just like her, and I finally put two and two together. I was just reminded of all of this because I just rewatched Uncle Buck on some streaming show, and then I happened to see some of Sue’s old pictures from high school on the floor of the bedroom.
The thing that slays me, to this day, is the fact that she revealed herself to be even more beautiful on the inside, as if such a thing were possible. She’s my rock and my best friend, and I don’t know what I’d do without her.
CDs store digital data, but the interface between CDs, lasers, and optical diodes is very analog. Read errors can be caused by anything from dirty media, to scratches on the protective polycarbonate layer, to vibration from the optical drive itself. The primitive error correction codes in the CDDA standard, designed to minimize audible distortions on lightly used disks, are not capable of fully recovering the bitstream on CDs with a significant error rate. Contemporary CD ripping software works around this with two important error detection techniques: redundant reads and AccurateRip.
Source: Why I Ripped The Same CD 300 Times
Found via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33499646
There’s an enormous latent anxiety about this subject with “audiophiles.” It cracks me up. On the one hand, sure, you want to get exactly what’s on the CD to the hard drive. But when you get an encoding error, we’re talking about one bad value for one channel of stream encoded at 44.1 KHz. Are these guys really telling me that they think they can hear a defect in an audio stream that occurs within 23 nanoseconds? And if they’re really telling me that, do they really expect me to believe it?
Follow up to this.
It’s just a scam. Everything in the marketing copy is a lie. Nothing about it will do anything to the sound produced by the disc. Yet there are still articles at the top of Goole search results, talking about how much better CD’s and DVD’s are heard and seen after using this… device.
Let’s break this down.
The layer of metal that CD’s use to reflect the laser light is aluminum oxide.
We could stop right here, because the entire idea of “demagnetizing” a CD is a farce, since, as everyone understands, aluminum isn’t magnetic. But let’s set that aside for a moment, and continue. There’s an even-more ridiculous reason this whole idea is patently stupid.
A molecule of aluminum oxide, consisting of Al2O3, would be approximately 478.5 picometers across.
CD lasers run at 780 nanometers.
Even if the molecules of aluminum were somehow “inverted” from their original, stamped orientation, due to “magnetism” induced by the label printing process, first, it could have no effect on the signal produced because there’s no part of the laser decoding that depends on molecular orientation, and second, any material in the disc substrate that has been “flipped” would be invisible to the CD laser, as the molecules themselves are 1,500 times smaller than the laser can distinguish.
But, yeah, someone made this, and people have bought it, and I’m certain that they “heard things they’d never heard before” in their music. Further, I’ll bet it’s still being offered for sale in “audiophile” magazines.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that the age of universe may be nearly twice as old
Source: New research reveals age of universe estimated to be 26.7 billion years old
Here we go again: “We were wrong. We were absolutely certain we were right before. We could prove it. With numbers, and everything! But we were wrong. But, this time, we are sure we’re right. We’re positive. Have have numbers and everything!”
Just like the age of the sun.
You can say “it’s just good science” to come to new conclusions based on new findings, and you’d be right. But this isn’t good science. First of all, they were one hundred percent wrong. Like, off by the whole amount. That’s really wrong. Second of all, at some point of this level of wrongness, you lose the right to be so damnably confident in your proclamations. “Scientists” who publish things like this, and especially “journalists” who write about them, need to start admitting that these facts are current best guesses.
Source: iOS 17 Includes ‘Grid Forecast’ Feature to Let You Know When ‘Cleaner’ Energy is Available
This makes about as much sense as Microsoft automatically setting all the power options in Windows to be the most conservative and least performant, including — in an absolutely baffling move — to automatically turn off Bluetooth after a minute. Say what!? Yeah, my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard would suddenly stop working after about a minute. I searched for and found updated drivers. I upgraded Windows. I reset things. I rebooted. And rebooted.
There was a lot of hair pulled before I figured out the power saving setting was the problem, because there isn’t any scenario in the entire world where I would think this would even have been an option that someone was told to take the time to code, make a UI for, and merge into Windows. The only possible reason would be to save literally one penny of electricity, over the course of a year, at the expense of making Bluetooth… COMPLETELY USELESS. Well done, guys.
Now I see the insanity is spreading. It’s not enough that we have to go over every device with a fine-toothed comb for security, opting out of spying, and blocking ads. Now we have to go through the options to make sure that they’re not “helpfully” being invisibly and silently hobbled against their intended, normal usage by companies who want to report to their investors that they’ve saved a collective X number of kilowatt hours by their pernicious power settings.
In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car’s own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they’re brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.
This has been my complaint about all the mergers that happen up and down and side to side in various industries: the activity is driven by the desire and intent to extract all the profit from every level subsumed. To oversimplify, the effort is one to streamline all consumer activity, from raw material to your door. This is the result. No extra capacity. No ability to handle a shock to the system.
Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM’s “highly profitable” SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That’s been the status quo for 11 years…
A hundred years ago, in a magical company called Arvin, they implemented the Toyota Production System, and called it the Arvin Total Quality Production System. It was the only corporate training that I’ve ever had that was actually worth anything. Part of the work was simulating a production line with poker chips and dice rolls, and it brilliantly demonstrated the improvements by going to small lot sizes and just-in-time delivery.
If we ran behind due to bad dice rolls, we would just run a little overtime, and make it up. Better to pay a little OT occasionally than spend the capital to invest in a new machine, right? Even back then, as naive as I was, what immediately struck me was how easy it was for the company to just rely on overtime to make production instead of investing in new equipment to reduce manpower needs to prevent a regularly-occurring crunch, and it was obvious that this would always be the case.
Sure enough, all these years later, every time I hear a story like this, I see the company’s refusal to invest capital to do the work, and just “throw bodies” at the problem. Having taken an accounting class, and understanding the future value of money, I understand there’s a pretty simple calculation you can make in individual cases to determine if you should buy something to help, or just plan on using human fodder for the job. Then, as soon as the profit line dips a little, you cut a bunch of people lose to appease Wall Street. It’s inhuman, and we need the pendulum to swing, quickly and far, to the other side, in favor of people again.