Viewing profile — wladimir

Cells certainly have a kind of independent existence (consciousness is a different matter...). But our body needs its cells. It's not simulating cells in another substrate. The 'ce…

I've always thought of mind uploading as a comforting lie. Like what you tell a small child about what happened to the old dog. "He's in a better place now". The idea of the singul…

Fighting any wars against ourselves seems silly. But the problem is that companies aren't that willing to share information, or it is only available for a large price and/or with r…

How could there have been any doubts that the heavily obfuscated Python could be reverse engineered? Me, and some others, did it quite a while ago. It wasn't a lot of work to find …

The major difference with GCC's and other IRs is that LLVM and clang made it easy to use and embed the APIs in other software (due to the license as well as exporting a library). T…

That sounds pretty useful. Arguably, that's what text-based browsers such as lynx and links already do but in another way. Those are still what I use when I want to read some artic…

Eek. That sounds like something straight out of Kafka's The Castle. I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I u…

Right, that is true by definition, to think physics is complete is as naive today as it was around 1900. Although humanity may bump into a law of decreasing returns at some point, …

Reply to eeky (you're hellbanned): no, this does not make transactions anonymous, these are still pseudonymous. The difference is that you won't reveal your IP this way while using…

Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more…

Alas, the Vivante GC2000 cannot do bitcoin mining (not that you'd want to, anyway). The GPU can indeed do do OpenCL, but the maximum kernel size is limited whereas double-SHA1 requ…

Most GSM modems are part of SoCs. Indeed for USB dongles for your PC or laptop it's different, but that's not the "baseband processor" I was talking about. It would be somewhat har…

I'm not sure about CPUs. They don't have direct connections to the outside world. If you want to distrust any hardware, it makes sense to focus on communication peripherals such as…

Agree about the sucking part. But IMO the problem is not that everyone will know everything about everyone. That would be weird (utopian?) but kind of fair. The fear is about the r…

What scares me most is that now that storage is so cheap, everything can be stored for later. So even though no one may be watching now (likely), they keep a dossier with all your …

We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the environment on a crash and sends…

Heh. It's hard for me to not be cynic on tech news now, knowing how it will be used against us. Denser storage, the "internet of things", advances in machine learning suddenly seem…

Uncertainly, as usual, is my guess. For one thing (more paranoid) people are worried that the fallout from PRISM, the realization how easily everything is monitored, will cause a l…

Yes, I can't wait to apply for virtual visas to visit foreign internet sites, which I guess we'll need after a full scale balkanization of the internet. On a more serious note, I h…

I'm not saying HN is bad specifically (otherwise I wouldn't be here). There are obviously links to excellent articles posted here, and interesting projects. So this is not an issue…

Reading books has been a good way for me personally to pull myself away from online pursuits that break up attention into 15-second spans such as browsing HN and news sites. That t…

Yet another Paypal PR disaster, they're good at spinning everything in the worst possible way. What are they trying to do, get some award for world's least popular company?

I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952, with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and the impact of that on …

Heresy! Graphics programmers have gotten used to all kinds of cushy abstractions such as the OpenGL pipeline and high-level shading languages, and you're proposing to throw it all …

This is the final straw, I'm switching to KDE/Kubuntu in next release. Even if a transparent terminal is a weird thing to like, I like it, and have always used it. Taking it away j…