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tame3902
Joined 70 karma

  1. I don't know much about Turkey, but I assume they are referring to Erdogan. Turkey was a pretty solid democracy and he turned it into an authoritarian regime.

    Erdogan also has some interesting ideas about the economy. A quote from his Wikipedia article: "He has pushed the theory that inflation is caused by high interest rates, an idea universally rejected by economists. This, along with other factors such as excessive current account deficit and foreign-currency debt, in combination with Erdoğan's increasing authoritarianism, caused an economic crisis starting from 2018, leading to large depreciation of the Turkish lira and very high inflation."

    The resulting crisis has its own article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_economic_crisis_(2018%...

  2. There currently is a patch for adding '-S' to OpenBSD and in the discussion, the one who came originally up with it commented on how he added it to FreeBSD:

    "IIRC, the catalyst for it was that early FreeBSD (1990's?) did split up the words on the '#!' line because that seemed convenient. Years later, someone else noticed that this behavior did not match '#!' processing on any other unix, so they changed the behavior so it would match. Someone else then thought that was a bug, because they had scripts which depended on the earlier behavior. I forget how many times the behavior of '#!' processing bounced back and forth, but I had some scripts which ran on multiple versions of Unix and one of these commits broke one of those scripts.

    I read up on all the commit-log history, and fixed '#!' processing one more time so that it matched how other unixes do it, and I think I also left comments in the code for that processing to document that "Yes, '#!'-parsing is really supposed to work this way".

    And then in an effort to help those people who depended on the earlier behavior, I implemented '-S' to the 'env' command.

    I have no idea how much '-S' is used, but it's been in FreeBSD since June 2005, and somewhere along the line those changes were picked up by MacOS 10. The only linux I work on is RHEL, and it looks like Redhat added '-S' between RHEL7 and RHEL8." [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=175307781323403&w=2]

  3. I agree completely. I also know that distros patch packages.

    But for unzip the situation is particularly bad because it has no maintainer. Normally, you would raise feature requests for basic functionality upstream and once added, the maintainer would cut a new release. So software with the same version number generally, but not always, behaves similarly across distros.

    But for unzip, because upstream is unmaintained, distro maintainers started to add features while keeping the version number. So in the end you end up with different behavior for what looks like the same release.

  4. I wasn't trying to imply that unzip is the only one.

    But the way I learned that unzip is unmaintained was pretty horrible. I found an old zip file I created ages ago on Windows. Extracting it on Arch caused no problem. But on FreeBSD, filenames containing non-ASCII characters were not decoded correctly. Well, they probably use different projects for unzip, this happens. Wrong, they use the same upstream, but each decided to apply different patches to add features. And some of the patches address nasty bugs.

    For something as basic as unzip, my experience as a user is that when it has so many issues, it either gets removed completely or it gets forked. The most reliable way I found to unzip a zip archive consists of a few lines of python.

  5. unzip is a special case: upstream development has basically stopped. The last release was in 2009[0]. (That's the version 6.0.) Since then there were multiple issues discovered and it lacks some features. So everybody patches the hell out of that release[1]. The end result is that you have very different executables with the same version number.

    [0]: https://infozip.sourceforge.net/UnZip.html

    [1]: here the build recipe from Arch, where you can see the number of patches that are applied: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/un...

  6. Somebody once tried to clarify the situation with a similar stunt, but failed spectacularly. From the NOLF Wikipedia page:

    In May 2014, Nightdive Studios, a publisher of classic PC titles, filed trademarks for "No One Lives Forever", "The Operative", "A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way", and "Contract J.A.C.K.", Nightdive had also been able to acquire the source code for the games, which would enable them to remaster them for modern computer systems. However, Nightdive had yet to comment on the situation regarding who owned the rights to the game. At this point, the rights to the series were unclear, as the property may have been owned solely or in part by 20th Century Fox (which owned Fox Interactive at the time of the game's release), Activision (which acquired and merged with Vivendi Games, which in turn was the parent to Sierra Entertainment, the publisher of No One Lives Forever 2, and had acquired Fox Interactive in 2003), and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (which acquired Monolith Productions). Warner Bros. did file opposition to Nightdive's trademark, leading Nightdive to try to seek a license arrangement. However, Warner Bros. representatives were concerned that if either Fox or Activision had a part of the ownership, that they would also need their approval. Nightdive attempted to work with Fox and Activision to search their archives, but as these transitions pre-dated computerized records, neither company wanted to do so. Nightdive's efforts were further stalled when they were told by Warner Bros. that they had no interest in partnering or licensing the IP, leading Nightdive to abandon their efforts to acquire the rights.

  7. There was a court case about this. Project Gutenberg got sued by a German publishing house for hosting works still copyrighted in Germany.

    "Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany." [1]

    Project Gutenberg lost repeatedly in court but the whole saga ended with a settlement.

    "Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires." [1]

    So if you have a German IP you can't access the ebooks, but if don't you can read them.

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg#Copyright

  8. What I learnt is that there is a rest mass and a relativistic mass. The m in your formula is the rest mass. But when you use the relativistic mass E=mc² still holds. And for the rest mass I always used m_0 to make clear what it is.
  9. In my company the official policy is that nobody but the admins gets administrator privileges. If you need them the workflow is that you go to IT and they do what is necessary. Or they just might say no. People had to complain that makes work impossible for them and will cost the company a lot of money so that they got exceptions -- but only after escalation to upper management.

    I think this was a security directive that came from the top.

  10. Yes, per core power consumption or better performance per Watt is usually more relevant than the total power consumption. And 1 high-core CPU is usually better than the same number of cores on multiple CPUs. (That is unless you are trying to maximize memory bandwidth per Watt.)

    What I wanted to get at is that the pure core count can be misleading if you care about power consumption. If you don't and just look at performance, the current CPU generations are monsters. But if you care about performance/Watt, the improvement isn't that large. The Zen1 CPU I was talking about had a TDP of 180 W. So you get 6x as many cores, but the power consumption increases by 2.7x.

  11. Core counts have increased dramatically. The latest AMD server CPUs have up to 192 cores. The Zen1 top model had only 32 cores and that was already a lot compared to Intel. However, the power consumption has also increased: the current top model has a TDP of 500W.
  12. Of course, it becomes tricky to decide what belongs to a factory or not if you look closely enough. And comparing factory sizes is something inherently silly. But I think that in a capitalistic society the land area owned by the company is a good first order approximation. If they wouldn't need it, it would be better for them to sell it.

    But in the case of the Volkswagen factory the points you mention lead to something interesting: The city of Wolfsburg was created just before WW2 to house the workers of the factory created at the same time to produce the precursor of the VW beetle. Even today the city is dominated by the factory: it has a population of 120,000 and 60,000 work in the factory. So under a loose enough definition of "factory", the whole city of Wolfsburg is part of it.

  13. Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large: "Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]

    [0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...

  14. > Worrying what others think resonates with me a lot.

    - There are lots of blog posts and youtube videos about this topic. Try whether any will help you.

    - If you post, go down the rabbit hole of your thoughts. What will happen? Keep going with "and then" as far as possible. Then replace negative thoughts with more positive ones. Those have to be believable and not just blindly positive. E.g. replacing "everybody will hate this" with "a lot of people will hate this, but some will really enjoy it" is already progress.

    - As a child, did you have a caregiver or teacher that gave you the feeling that if you make mistakes, they will stop loving you? Make it clear to your adult self that you are deserving of love no matter what.

    - Do you have types of writing which are easy for you? No matter the answer, why is that?

    - Create something intentionally bad without publishing it, and sit with your bad feelings for a while. Usually that reduces the anxiety.

    - If you post something, explore your feelings. Is that like nervousness before an exam, general anxiety or something completely different. This might give you a clue, why you struggle.

    - Imagine a friend would come to you with this problem. What advice would you give them? How would you react to something you posted if somebody else wrote it?

    - Be kind to yourself. Changing this is a long journey.

  15. > I have to admit though that the automatic is way faster than me at changing gears, which helps keeping a constant acceleration and avoid head bobbing.

    That's because a DSG gearbox has two clutches. It is basically a traditional gearbox with one clutch connected to the odd gears and one to the even gears. The system selects the next gear according to the revs of the engine and does all the physical shifting in advance. The actual gear change is then only disengaging one clutch while engaging the other one. You can overlap this so the engine continously delivers torque to the wheels. Thus, no head bobbing.

  16. That's because the selection of numbers is a little bit weird. The 70 billion on the cost side are composed of 38 billion for construction and maintenance, 14 billion for traffic police and 18 billion for public funds spent for accidents. The generated income is only taxes on fuel and the tax car owners have to pay.

    If you include the cost of the traffic police, there is way more stuff that you can include on the income side like taxes on car sales and part of the cost comes also back to the government in the form of taxes. There is likely also a large part of the costs that is missing. Doing this properly is a lot of work and doing it precisely is hard to impossible. These sort of things almost always include estimates for the higher order effects.

    Btw: I googled the study[1] and apparently it was funded by the "Netzwerk Europäischer Eisenbahnen e.V." (Network of European Railways Association). I would take any statements and numbers with a huge grain of salt.

    [1]: https://www.htw-berlin.de/forschung/online-forschungskatalog...

  17. There also is https://www.ulyssesguide.com. It has episode guides, which explain what actually happens in each chapter (this can sometimes be difficult to decifer), the cross references to other chapters, and sometimes possible interpretations. I found that extremely helpful and would have missed a ton without even noticing.
  18. It depends what you are looking for. This provides a good overview:

    https://hpc.llnl.gov/documentation/tutorials/introduction-pa...

    This is a very detailed free book focusing on programming:

    https://theartofhpc.com

    But HPC is very diverse. Some care about compute performance, others about memory bandwidth and others about IO performance. Some run a ton of small jobs while others run a single large job.

  19. It isn't comparable to the sound barrier, but it was still a challenge.

    It took significantly longer than it should have if it was just business as usual: "At a supercomputing conference in 2009, Computerworld projected exascale implementation by 2018." [1]

    We got the first true exascale system with Frontier in 2022.

    Part of the problem was the power consumption and having a purely CPU based system online for an exascale job. From slide 12 from[2]: "Aggressive design is at 70 MW" and "HW failure every 35 minutes".

    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exascale_computing [2]: https://wgropp.cs.illinois.edu/bib/talks/tdata/2011/aramco-k...

  20. This article has some more details:

    https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/01/26/riken-deploys-virtual-fug...

    It looks like they want to make the transition between Fugaku and AWS and vice versa easier.

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