I had a diplomatic passport for many years as a kid. It was definitely handy in our case as cops were quite corrupt where we were living and would try to con us out of money all the time. I don't know how far it'd go in court or under a serious warrant but in practice they always left us alone once we showed our passports.
Quanta Magazine does an excellent job with balancing accessible writing and advanced topics. It's just enough to get someone interested in the problem and the basic ideas to start thinking about it.
The usual Gell-Mann way - when they write an article about a topic you know very well, you see whether you find it "mildly annoying" (because there are always small inaccuracies or papering-overs that seem a big deal to us), or "hilariously bad", or "so outrageous the writer ought to be fired". The quality of the other articles you aren't qualified to judge can then be assumed to be in a cloud around where you judged this one to be.
I have the opposite problem here. The CS articles seem fine, but I don't know who would be interested in Quanta's articles but only capable of understanding things at their writing level. It doesn't seem like they should have an audience.
Their audience is me, a curious not-very-technical layman who is interested in the concepts but bored by the details!
Granted, I'm not sure how common this is.
I do worry about Gell-Mann amnesia with Quanta, but I comfort myself that usually nobody has a stake in distorting this or that number theory thingamajig or physics quandary. However... I'm sure there are academic infights and research tug-of-war to which I'm blissfully blind.
This shows a significantly different story between the two with at least similar code. Note I am not trying to optimize for the fastest factorial here as both can be made much quicker but roughly equivalent code seems to tell a different story for me.
(NOTE: I put the code in a module as iex interpreted expressions on the top level are always slower than compiled modules, even when pasting them into iex. Doing the same for Ruby didn't show any difference for me.)
I wouldn’t call twice as fast neck and neck (others seem to show that the old interpreter is neck and neck) but the primitive JIT is clearly pulling ahead here.
This is sort of what Pony did with its ORCA based GC. It has some tricky edge cases to optimize in practice but it can be made to work especially well if data is immutable.
The analog for that would be shared literals which are not copied (super important for small map overhead reduction if the constructor initialized a fix set of keys like elixir structs as the key index is shared). The persistent_term module allows any value to be registered as such at runtime and avoids a lot of caveats that came with mochi_global and the like. While they aren’t ref counted it can definitely help cut down on copying in my experience.
I’d suppose some of it relates to sites with heavy ads. Safari with no extensions will likely require more resources which makes the comparison a little skewed vs Safari with some ad blocker support added via extensions.
It looks like their test includes plenty of ad heavy sites like news articles which seems to confirm that the results are cherry picked.
I’m trans and agree with this, though I offer another reason to avoid making it compulsory.
Before I came out I felt very awkward with regards to my own pronoun display. I wasn’t ready on one hand and on the other I felt terrible seeing other pronouns even if it was attached to my deadname only.
I’d encourage people to do it if they’re comfortable with it on a personal level as it can be a very personal thing. I also want to thank all of those who do add it. It’s a big deal for many of us and can make a real difference in exchange for very little effort.
this is very true, when you indicate a pronoun preference that doesn't sync up with your presentation of gender, people seem to take it as something you're happy to argue about or explain. there's this idea that you are now responsible to them for an explanation and justification. it's crazy.
i use they/them and have had to respond to "you don't look any different", and have to inform the person that i don't feel the need to "perform" my gender to their expectations. it's mine and it is how i want it to be, not how they envision it to be.
I looks like it’s written in Rust which isn’t super special but would be far easier to embed as a library in other languages compared to Go in OPA’s case. Polar also seems like a nicer policy language (strong Prolog vibes) though this is subjective as I’ve not done a deep comparison yet.
Yep, you're right on this one! We went with Rust because we wanted to make it embeddable in other languages.
And on the policy language. Polar is indeed a prolog variant. You can see pretty early we took the decision to diverge from a more familiar prolog syntax [1] because we wanted to make it a little more accessible.
This is true, but the difficulty of making a general purpose FPGA fabric manipulate generic bitstream descriptions in an undetectable way is much harder than putting hidden backdoors in well defined ISAs. What amount of hardware validation is reasonable?
It depends on what you'd like to accomplish, but given that powerful FPGAs are now more affordable and plenty of great FPGA friendly libraries are emerging which work with open source tools, the barrier for Soft-CPU implementations has lowered significantly. This sort of project looks great for cases where trusting blackbox chips was questionable.
> This is true, but the difficulty of making a general purpose FPGA fabric manipulate generic bitstream descriptions in an undetectable way is much harder than putting hidden backdoors in well defined ISAs.
Could you (or anyone else) elaborate on this? If possible, ELI5 please because I know very little about hardware. :)
I think a somewhat useful analogy would be the difference in difficulty of making a backdoored compiler versus a backdoored binary. The former has to deal with a lot more things than the latter if you'd like to effectively subvert it.
The other plus of text replacement is synchronization. I have a bunch of LaTeX style symbol names mapped on my Mac but they work just as well on my phone. I’m typing this on a phone and \Omega is automatically replaced with Ω or a favorite of mine \shrug becomes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I also spend time on Windows and nothing seems to come close to this convenient (win-. has a few useful things like the character picker panel in macOS but to get more, tools like autohotkey feel really cumbersome).
