Viewing profile — pjscott

There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather th…

They're going for an orbital height of 600–800 km, or about 2-3 light-milliseconds from Earth's surface. A lot of people think of satellites as being necessarily high-latency becau…

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From Google's spokesperson, quoted in the article: "This is a short-term, timely agreement to ensure we have bridge capacity to meet surging customer demand for our agent platform,…

Musk made big investments in building AI data centers starting in 2024, continuing through the present. SpaceX got those assets from xAI, spun off from X, via an acquisition. More …

Even then, the numbers don't even remotely work out. Consider this "Elon Bezos" person; the combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is about $1.3 trillion or so, and the "To…

You're right, of course, but "those in government" aren't a single entity. There's always an incentive for one corrupt part of government to take more than their fair share of the …

It doesn't track cost of living? The way it's calculated is all about cost of living! In the US, the official inflation numbers are based on a "basket of goods" meant to be represe…

The wording was a bit unclear. The previous paragraph mentions wanting something cheaper than "those pesky XORs and multiplications". The multiplication is the expensive part; the …

> I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory. That's not obvious to me. I checked the manuals for sort(1) in G…

If money ever starts looking particularly illusory, try thinking in terms of the underlying resources that markets allocate. That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, e…

So it looks to be just the latency improvement that's noteworthy, then. Thank you!

If you're familiar with the technical specs, I'd be interested in hearing what size of objects the star trackers can sense and at what range. In theory the fancier star trackers ca…

Honestly, these two paragraphs are one of the most compelling things they could possibly say in a press release: > Stargaze already has a proven track record in its utility for spa…

Slowing the adoption of much-safer-than-humans robotaxis, for whatever reason, has a price measured in lives. If you think that the principle you've just stated is worth all those …

It's a tale as old as schlock journalism: an article seems interesting... until it talks about something you actually know about personally, at which point it suddenly starts sayin…

I'm not too familiar with the JVM so perhaps I'm missing something here: how would that help? The file is tiny, just a few bytes, so I'd expect the main slowdown to come from syste…

As with all the ahead-of-time compiled languages that I checked, the answer is that it generates non-SIMD code for the hot loop. The assembly code I see in godbolt.org isn't bad at…

The common element is that they're written with the most obvious version of the code, while the ones in the faster bucket are either explicitly vectorized or written in non-obvious…

The delta there is because the Rust 1.92 version uses the straightforward iterative code and the 1.94-nightly version explicitly uses std::simd vectorization. Compare the source co…

They have very limited power these days. They advise the House of Commons, as more or less a hereditary think tank. They can delay the passage of bills, though this has been limite…

They do, technically, allow JIT. You need a very hard-to-obtain entitlement that lets you turn writable pages into executable read-only pages, and good luck getting that entitlemen…

It may comfort you to hear that the Starlink satellites are tiny in comparison to the vastness of their orbit – the visualization makes them appear larger than they are, so you can…

I’m also introverted, and I also found this article overwhelming – if I tried to do it all at once, which seems so laughably unrealistic for me that I just wouldn’t try. Instead, p…