It is likely that most of the teslas you saw around Amsterdam were part of the Schiphol airport taxi fleet. They went all in on tesla about a decade ago.
To make meaningful statements about P and NP problems, you probably need to be able to model your problem as a computational one.
If for example, you model it as a graph, with a peg represented by a node, and a bounce direction to another peg with a directed edge. Assign probabilities to all the edges. Then you cqn simply flood search outwards to the end of the graph, accumulating probabilities by multiplication. Any node on the boundary with probability higher than zero can be reached, given enough balls. This job is clearly in P.
I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about "P" for physical problems without a computational model, but I'm not a complexity theorist
Strictly speaking, the fundamental complexity classes (in order: L, NL, P, NP, PSPACE, EXPTIME, NEXPTIME, EXPSPACE) apply only to decision problems, which pose yes/no questions. For example, it's commonly said that the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete, but this only applies to the decision version of the problem: "Given graph G with edges weighted with positive integers and a maximum weight n, does there exist a Hamiltonian cycle through the vertices such that the sum of the weights of the edges used is at most n?" In addition, for a problem to be in NP, the polynomial-time-verifiable certificate only has to exist for yes instances, there is no need for it to also be verifiable that no such cycle exists (a problem verifiable in polynomial time for the no cases is in co-NP).
Decision problems are much easier to reason about, which is why they are used to construct and define the fundamental complexity classes, though it is certainly possible to define analogous classes for different types of problems. See for example, Krentel (1988) "The complexity of optimization problems", which considers TSP-OPT: https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-0000(88)90039-6
They haven't made slotted ram or storage on their macbooks since 2012 (retina macbooks removed the slotted ram afaik). It might save on thickness, but I'm not buying the slim chasses argument being the only reason, since they happily made their devices thicker for the M series cpus.
It's not soldered. It used to be, but ever since the M1, it's in-CPU. The ram is actually part of the CPU die.
Needless to say it has batshit insane implications for memory bandwidth.
I've got an M1, and the load time for apps is absolutely fucking insane by comparison to my iMac; there's at least one AAA game whose loading time dropped from about 5 minutes on my quad-core intel, to 5 seconds on my mac studio.
There's just a shitload of text-processing and compiling going on any time a large game gets launched. It's been incredibly good for compiling C++ and Node apps, as well.
>- A megacorp that pays 0% in income taxes still pays a ton of sales tax on things it buys
Not familiar with the US, is this actually true? In europe, as a company, you're allowed to subtract VAT on products bought from VAT owed from sales. That would contradict most of what you're saying.
I think you're talking about reseller exemption. Boeing or any other manufacturing company.
For example, in the chain of iron ore -> steel -> pistons -> engine -> car: In USA, each of the middle steps get what is called a "reseller's exemption certificate" and the sales tax is only charged when you walk out of the dealer.
In EU, each of the steps get VAT taxed, but they can remit the taxes from the next step. Overall effect is the same, but USA's system is simpler and easier with less paperwork. American suppliers have to get a certificate only once and then its all set. No sales tax is collected by the buyer for established repeated relationships. One time paperwork.
Theres a lot of value in the ecosystem through the asset store, that allows yoi to get up and running much more quickly than if you had to built subsystems from scratch (i.e. You can buy a good water package for <100 usd, whereas implementing state of the art would probably take you at least two months of dev time).
Additionally, from theres lots of educational resources, that might be harder to find for smaller engines
On the other hand, unity has a habit of shooting itself in the foot with incredibly messy and poor documentation, fragmented and duplicated functionality across multiple implementations (theres a common refrain in the unity community that every system in unity is either in beta or deprecated), so an engine that can provide an easier onboarding / dev experience could definitely compete there.
> More languages should have a single, mandatory way to format code, without any ways to opt out.
Strongly disagree. Maybe if you're in a very domain constrained environment, i vould see this being valuable. But i write graphics and simulation code all day, which involves a lot of translating math expressions. A compiler insisting on me using PascalCase (like for example .net uses) leads to very unreadable translations of formulas. And I'm not of the opinion that a system making me rewrite variable names to "meaningful names" helps understanding of the underlying math much, if you need to do symbol manipulation, or read backgrounds papers anyway.
Trust your users. Give them the tools to enforce safety barriers for themselves. Give them sensible defaults, sure. But give them ways to opt-out if they know that they need to break the conventions.
Non-USA here (which might affect things): Isn't the point of paying with e.g. a Netflix gift card that they auto-cancel/pause your subscription to Netflix after the gift card runs out of funds? How would that incur a debt?
The subscription is a recurrent commitment that you sign up for through a contract. They cancel it automatically because they don't want to bother collecting the money - it's expensive to do so and will lead to permanent churn. But they can; it's your problem to fix the payment method to cover your monthly/yearly commitment. All they have to do is to keep the service available and put something in the contract to that effect.
It's similar with power/water bills. They can't/won't cut utilities, a form of subscription with a fixed cost in addition to the usage cost, right away (there is a process for that), but you owe the money all the way until they are cut.
Netflix is not a basic utility. The only thing they have in common are similar billing intervals.
But that’s kind of beside the point.
When you sign up for a subscription, they only commitment you have made is for the chosen billing interval.
If it’s a month you’ve committed for a month, if three years then you’ve committed for three years.
But you have not in any way shape or form committed to a single second beyond that.
Most (all?) have auto renewals clauses that are very convenient for both the seller and buyer, but to enforce it when the buyer wants to quit is basically extortion.
Not being a basic utility is not relevant for the legal implications here, as the renewal terms aren't tied to being an utility - that was just a familiar example. The renewal laws are clearly specified in the contract you accept when signing up for these services, for instance Disney Plus says:
"If you do not timely cancel your subscription, your subscription will be renewed at the price in effect at the time of the newel, without any additional action by you, and you authorize us to charge your payment method for these amounts...We do not refund or credit for partially used used billing periods."
This can be easily read and argued as: if you do not cancel, you owe them. You can argue this in front of a judge, but it will be really hard to say it's "extortion" if the cancellation process is streamlined.
Of course I realise the terms and they may even be legal someplaces.
But the basic reality is that none of these firms would enter into a contract with terms like these because they are outrageous.
Just think about it. The act of doing nothing over a certain short time period is supposed to legally bind you in a new contract and even with unknown pricing?
This is not business between equals and people behaving this way deserve all the crap they can be tossed.
In the US, yes. If the letter of the contract says that you are responsible for a monthly payment, how that debt is settled every month does not change the terms of the contract. A gift card just allows you to settle the debt with a mutual debt owed.
I was mostly wondering if the contract is indeed the same or if the services have a separate fixed-term contract for gift cards. But I guess it’s par for the course (ie. really customer-hostile) if they indeed force even gift card paid subscriptions to be perpetual…
Everything I said is true in many countries outside the US too, except possibly the prohibitive legal cost of pursuing a small unpaid debt in court. In particular, I know for sure that invalidating a payment method does not invalidate an otherwise valid obligation to pay in Canada or Germany, and I think that’s the typical rule worldwide.
If Netflix chooses to cancel or pause the subscription after the gift card runs out of funds, that’s their business decision. It’s probably wise as a practical matter for them to limit access to unpaid services when it won’t usually be worth their time and money to force the matter judicially.
But other things they could choose to do include continuing the subscription and using any and all legal debt collection methods until you catch up on the accrued debt, imposing reasonable penalties for nonpayment as per any specific contract wording or any applicable legal defaults, and claiming any damages and/or lawyer fees incurred depending the specific circumstances and the rules of the relevant legal jurisdiction.
The details do vary between countries and between some countries’ subdivisions, sure. But the general principles of what I’m saying are typically true in most countries.
Currently have to use sqlalchemy on an existing project, and while I am not necessarily disagreeing with you on ORMs or performance, just wanted to add that chatgpt has been able to reduce my time fighting with their documentation by what I estimate of 90+%. To be fair, if I would have written pure sql, I might not have needed chatgpt at all, but i also would have to learn pythons database connector calls for the umpteenth time.
Forgive my ignorance: I thought it was the other way around, and you needed some relatively high amount of compression on a vinyl master, since otherwise the grooves would swing too wildly, and the needle would have a higher chance of "skipping". Is this an incorrect understanding of mine?
Digital medium has a higher dynamic range and can be used for playback of completely uncompressed orchestral performances, but in practice it also can reliably play audio that is so compressed (maximising perceived volume) that vinyl playback of the recording would be impossible.
Pop producers went off the deep end with this trick during the loudness wars, once it became possible through CDs.
I think this is mainly dealt with by the RIAA curve which is standard across all recordings. The compression being referred to is likely the per-track compression as part of the production/mastering process.
I have heard this type of reply to this remark (from my side) a few times now. It has made me curious: Are you a type of person that often checks the sources on Wikipedia?
Anecdotally: I know that Wikipedia is not always correct. But I feel like I can build an intuition and reason on what pages I can reasonably trust on Wikipedia, since in my experience, the inaccurate bits I have encountered tend to be in certain categories. However it's much harder to feel confident about my intuition about ChatGPTs' correctness, since my exposure has led me to believe that the hallucinations are fairly random, and not concentrated in particular topics. This makes the tool much less attractive for me, as I feel like I need to double check every written word.
