It allows for more interactive forms, but also frequently makes cause/effect confusing. e.g. things like autofill or tabbing or sometimes just typing quickly can cause forms to break because they think you have not filled out a field, and it's doing something stupid to make it so you can't fill out the next field, so you end up having to delete and retype text to get it to pick it up.
USPS tracking should be using an indexed id (you don't want to allow partial matches/searches here), so I'd expect even very modest hardware to handle 10s of thousands of requests per second. Likewise with things like CRUD forms.
Right now your link shows only ~5700 requests in the last 30 minutes for GSA advantage, or ~3/s. Sex offender registry has ~3500/30m or 2/s. Even USPS tracking is only at ~12k/30m or ~7/s. It's still only 9am on the west coast so maybe they need to handle 100000x traffic for peaks, but I doubt it.
> Of course it's great for the kids in families where there is enough wealth for one parent, who is highly educated
That's still pretty useful information if you're in that demographic though, right? Seems like the OP author and their readership might be, so it's reasonable for them to report their experiences for others like them (who might be overrepresented on this forum, for example) to ponder.
Youtube certainly has a decent amount of good content in most fields I've tried if you want it. Khan Academy seems like a good resource at the lower level. For university material, just add "lecture 1" to your search term and look for a playlist with ~40 items, and you'll probably find a university lecture series (I just tried it with "anatomy" and "contract law" it seems to have found some). For math and physics (and maybe other fields) there's even a decent number of graduate level courses on youtube.
Unsupervised youtube sounds pretty awful for most kids, but with some guidance, if you have a curious, gifted kid, it could be a dream for them.
It could be a dream for them, but I think it would be an exception.
Anatomy… I don’t know if you can properly learn anatomy online. Med schools have anatomy institutes with prosecutoriums ran by specialized faculty. Students learn with real cadavers. Then they learn pathological anatomy with real patients. You also learn a lot in a tactile way, for example, how big the organs are exactly and in what shape. It’s very difficult to learn anatomy to a functional degree with just slides.
I think a curious kid would pick up something from an online tutorial, but they would also pick up some misconceptions. And they’d lose out on the anatomy models and practical kits schools have. I would still see YouTube learning for this kind of discipline as a serious disadvantage.
For example, I could not find one lecture (in about 10 I saw just now searching for “anatomy lecture 1”) that recommends Gray’s Anatomy or similar anatomical atlas books. But they are absolutely foundational, it is the bread and butter of anatomy.
1 hour with a lecturer that would show you around such books and give a 45 minute tactile tour of a model of the human body may do much more than 100 hours of YouTube tutorials. The efficiency of learning just does not compare.
I found that whatever material they used in San Francisco for those bumpy curb ramps was incredibly slippery when it rained. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ends up disabled because of them at some point.
All the panels I've encountered in Georgia have had plenty of grip when wet. I wonder what the difference is. Maybe it's because we get more rain and less slippery oil and goop is able to accumulate. I've heard that's part of why drivers in southern California have so much trouble with rain.
Do they use plastic bricks there? I've heard about such things existing, but ours are molded concrete at least. And the pattern is quite unobtrusive as well.
Without bidirectional NAT, hole-punching works. Two sides of a p2p connection can coordinate with an intermediary to learn each other's addresses. They send each other a packet, which gets dropped by the other side. Their firewall sees the outgoing packet though, and opens the port. The next time they send each other packets, they will be allowed through. The intermediary is only needed to do the initial handshake instead of for all packets.
With NAT, it doesn't work because the ports get remapped, and the intermediary doesn't know how they will get remapped on the p2p connection, so they can't coordinate to send on the correct ports to open the firewall.
Or UPnP can work. By default, your router drops incoming packets on all ports. If you want to e.g. run a game server, then on startup, it hits a standard API to tell the router to forward that one port. On shutdown, it can tell it to close the port (you could potentially also have the router require keepalives to keep the forward alive. I'm not familiar with the details of UPnP and related protocols).
Without a public IP, you need intermediate servers to relay all traffic to you, which centralizes the web. With p2p working, you can e.g. have high quality video calls with friends/family instead of dealing with the garbage quality tech companies allow. Or I can share with my mom photos of her grandkids with effectively unlimited storage; for 2 years of 2 TB Google storage, I can buy 20 TB of disks.
I don't know about Europe, but in the US, there are various social safety nets that work perfectly with early retirement with some planning (a topic which comes up in "povertyFIRE" circles). There's been a shift (especially in Democrat-run states) over the last decade or two toward getting rid of asset tests for subsidies, so with planning you can get things like free healthcare, reduced electricity bills, free internet, subsidized home renovations for energy efficiency, etc. while having your assets grow in tax-shielded retirement accounts. Universities for your kids generally have asset tests for subsidies, but many of them exclude your home+retirement accounts.
You can also switch to part-time in a low-stress role rather than retire completely ("baristaFIRE" or "coastFIRE"). The trick is that you don't want health benefits from your employer so that you can get much better ones from the state instead. Usually part-time doesn't qualify for benefits so that works well.
"free" health care and other benefits aren't free though, they're paid by taxes on working people, if everyone (or even 10%) retires early and ask for them it doesn't work
I'm not saying it's impossible but it certainly isn't "anyone at anytime". In France for example 48% of people earn bellow 2000 euros per months. If you play the game you have an OK life with health care, a good flat, a car, whatever... but if you want to retire before the legal age it's next to impossible, you just can't build enough savings. If you work in a big city you'll never be able to afford a flat there, if you buy cheap property far away you'll need to pay rent in the city + mortgage.
Best case scenario you'll need a 20 years mortgage, most likely 30. You cannot be in debt to more than 30% of your net income, meaning 2k net per month gives you a 600 euros mortgage, assuming 0% mortgage you can't even afford a 150k euros property over 20 years
This was also my initial reaction: don't buy an expensive chair; buy a squat rack, barbell, and plates. ROI is extremely high. Squats and deadlifts will do much more for your posture and long term back health than sitting in a different chair and still never using your back.
My wife used to wear a wrist brace for years until she started benching. Now she never gets pain. Lifting is also one of the safest sports there is. Highly recommend it for health, especially among the nerdy crowd who may not be inclined to try it; building muscle doesn't reduce nerd cred.
Not only is ad-blocking not illegal and not immoral, but US the federal government's cyber crime division actively recommends it as a good security practice to avoid being defrauded:
For anyone that considers ads to be a legitimate form of "payment", consider whether you feel the same about a site running a background crypto miner without your explicit consent. If you find the crypto miner worse for some reason (my sense is most people seem to think that'd be wrong), note that the crypto miner is a much more direct form of payment that doesn't also spy on you and does not seek to manipulate you.
Also note that the same company that's running that expensive infrastructure pretty much completely controls the direction of the web, and could overnight make it so that almost everyone's browser has built-in torrent support and allows magnet links as a src for video tags. Or they can choose to have that not be true so that you must distribute media through expensive centralized platforms that only a multi-trillion dollar corporation like them could afford.
Shouldn't the microkernel architecture be capable of having fewer barriers in the fast path? e.g. you could have hardware like a NIC or GPU be capable of partitioning address spaces to have per-program command/response queues. Then the kernel asks on an administrative queue for a program's IO queue to be created, configures the memory controller (assuming an IOMMU) for the program to have those queues in its address space, and context switches to the program. While the program runs, there are zero barriers and it can simply talk to the hardware directly by writing into pcie space. Hardware knows what queues commands are coming from and can enforce whatever resource partitioning within firmware.
My understanding is that (perhaps except for virtualization/address space partitioning on the hardware device to be able to use it with many programs at once) this is approximately how/why user-mode networking is used for high performance today?
This is the basic idea behind the exokernel concept: have the kernel's only job be to enforce protection boundaries between processes, and then expose an interface to userspace that is identical to what the hardware exposes (eg. directly write to buffers and queues):
No production exokernels were built, but the concept lives on as virtualization. Most hypervisors (eg. Xen) work on a substantially similar principal: the hypervisor is responsible for securely multiplexing the hardware between guest OSes, and then the guest OS talks to an interface that basically looks like the hardware.
A step beyond this is to get rid of the guest OS and have application code talk directly to the hardware interface. This is a unikernel (or called a "libOS" in the original exokernel papers), and as you predict, unikernels running on a hypervisor are often faster than traditional monolithic kernel OSes. The main thing blocking their adoption is that they require significant rewrites to application-level code: most applications (and the libraries they depend on) generally assume POSIX syscalls are available and would need to be largely rewritten to work in terms of direct hardware access. You can rewrite POSIX as a library in userspace (this was the approach taken by the original exokernel research), but most of the performance gains come from bypassing inappropriate abstractions, so if you use the same abstractions you get basically the same performance.
reply