> this is a recurring problem with fancy, richly-featured terminal apps.
This is a recurring problem with fancy, richly-featured programmer-oriented apps made by programmers for programmers because for some reason most of the tool-writing programmers apparently just love to put "execute arbitrary code" functionality in there. Perhaps they think that the user will only execute the code they themselves wrote/approved and will never make mistakes or be tricked; or something like that, I dunno.
> > the myth about exactness is that you can't use strict equality with floating point numbers because they are somehow fuzzy. They are not.
> They are though. All arithmetic operations involve rounding, so e.g. (7.0 / 1234 + 0.5) * 1234 is not equal to 7.0 + 617 (it differs in 1 ULP). On the other hand, (9.0 / 1234 + 0.5) * 1234 is equal to 9.0 + 617, so the end result is sometimes exact and sometimes is not. How can you know beforehand which one is the case in your specific case? Generally, you can't, any arithmetic operation can potentially give you 1 ULP of error, and it can (and likely, will) slowly accumulate.
Also, please don't comment how nobody has a use for "f(x) = (x / 1234 + 0.5) * 1234": there are all kinds of queer computations people do in floating point, and for most of them, figuring out the exactness of the end result requires an absurd amount of applied numerical analysis, doing which would undermine most of the "just let the computer crunch the numbers" point of doing this computation on a computer.
I mean it does add like a millisecond of unnecessary delay that wouldn't be there if it took the most efficient route. It's not much, but it does add up!
Separation of functions/concerns is not great, for starters.
The testes are dangerously exposed, the plumbing is convoluted and failure-prone (and doesn’t recover well from mechanical insults).
The prostate, which serves no function outside of reproduction, lies inline with the urethra and quite consistently loses flexibility and becomes enlarged with age, causing all sorts of structural issues impacting basic urological function.
Female reproductive vs urinary anatomy is largely physiologically distinct (proximity and UTI risk notwithstanding). Though plenty of room for improvement there too — starting with endometrial tissue being far too prolific. Fun fact: endometrial tissue can migrate to the brain and cause haemorrhaging in severe cases of endometriosis.
Plenty of room for improvement across the board, I’d say!
Hey, $DEITY did its absolute best with the constraints and the requirements. But hey, can't please everyone apparently. Be happy you can relieve yourself well past the intended warranty period. The parts were designed to be easily _aftermarket_ replaceable with sufficient advances in technology, retaining the fundamental design without changes.
> if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).
Um... and? That's quite literally "the market working as intended" and while I am not a free-market apologist by any stretch, that seems to be a rather benign effect.
What makes MAP especially suspicious in my eyes is that it's the manufacturers that seem to be overly concerned over well-being of one specific kind of their downstream buyers/distributors/resellers, not those distributors/resellers themselves. I understand that if B&M stores would try to impose that, then the FTC would (hopefully) smack it down pretty quickly but apparently when a manufacturer mandates the price to the resellers, it's perfectly fine? Somehow? Isn't there collusion somewhere in there, probably?
The problem with "the market working as intended" is you get unfortunate second-order effects. The brick-and-mortar is providing a valuable service by letting you browse, try things on for fit and style, feel the material, and hypothetically by curating products and trying to engender trust in their curation, only selling things of at least passable quality (some more than others).
Historically, you only paid for that service when you bought something, since most stores can't convince you to pay an entrance fee. When you go to the store to select products and then buy online, you're leeching on that service and putting the entire business model at risk. If everyone did that, brick-and-mortars would go out of business and you wouldn't have access to that service, which sucks for everyone.
+1 to this. I was around for the 90s and early 2000s to see when MAP wasn't tightly controlled by the brands; the B&M stores got destroyed because they simply couldn't price-compete because their footprint was way more expensive.
I do think that by not having physical stores, it directly/indirectly promoted a decline of product quality as well as misrepresentation of product, with Wish and Temu kinda exemplifying that to an extreme. Price differentiation is way greater now which I guess is a net positive to the consumer.
As a brand owner of midtier kitchen products (cheaper versions of designer OXOish products, but more expensive than your baseline Walmart stuff), our products look visually similar enough to both ends of quality, but shines more when a person gets to interact with the items themselves, feel the product texture, press the lever action, etc. So I do value B&M for their place in the economy and want to make sure they can have some margin (even though I'm selling the same thing in my Amazon store and Shopify and can make more money there).
> why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own?
Well, because they didn't always clone things, you know. But when they decided to, it was almost always pitched as "okay, we're 10/20/30 years behind in this industry, if we try to repeat that path from the zero, we'll never catch up — let's start at near of their cutting edge, and go from there".
> the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists.
A few years ago i went to the International Spy Museum in Washington DC[0]. It was really interesting and had a lot of cold war espionage stories, although it is one of the few museums in Washington DC that charges admission. Worth it in my opinion if you're interested in this stuff and have the opportunity to go
Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly
said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain
10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will
produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it
ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at
which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its
owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely
encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is
here stated.
We today can also add crypto schemes and mass surveillance to the examples.
And mind you, VC are people who are both pretty good at earning money and also eager for even more money. That's how they got to where they are, after all, not necessarily by being virtuous (over a certain minimally required amount, or a social signaling of possessing such an amount).
> You need the right to not be discriminated when you withhold your consent, otherwise your consent is effectively meaningless, as it is forced on you by your impossible bargaining position.
Which is why "we don't serve patrons without shoes and pants" policy is unconstitutional, yeah.
If you don't want to agree to a business's demands — you're welcome to not deal with them and look for an alternative. All the alternatives have the same (or even worse) demands? Unless you can prove collusion, that's just how the invisible hand of the market worked its magic out. Go petition you congressman to violate laissez-faire even more than it already is, I guess.
The trouble with this is that I, at least, am trying to live in a society. And society has both rights and responsibilities. Sometimes you are forced to do things, or don’t do things, contrary to your desires. Every freedom has two sides, you can’t ignore the fact that increasing some freedoms for one decreases other freedoms for others.
The shirt and shoes example is a great example in fact that illustrates the point. You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes, just like a business does not have unlimited freedom to impose whatever terms it likes, just because it put it in its ToS.
> You don’t have unlimited freedom to not wear shoes
Okay, I am gonna be 100% serious here: you absolutely should have such a freedom. Just as loitering or jaywalking being a crime is inherently totalitarian, what the hell.
In this case, unlimited means literally everywhere.
You do have the right to go barefoot in your own home. And in true public spaces.
But, a property owner can require shoes. Do I care if somebody is barefoot in the local grocer? No, not really. But, the proprietor might because they want to limit their liability (should something fall on your foot, a cart run it over, or a loose tack/nail somehow land in an aisle, etc).
Except the are companies with which you effectively must do business.
Microsoft (or Apple).
Any web host, payment processor, etc that's contracted to do work for your local government (I suppose you could try driving to the government office and pay by check, but then you need to give consent to Ford or Chevy).
Short of living like a hermit, there's no practical way to avoid all ridiculous T&C.
Yes please. Your shaming didn't work. Free markets centre of gravity is biased towards capital and land owners. We need people power to balamce it back. Something we poor people are all enjoying now (pssst me and you are poor.... kings and barons are the few and rich)
I really need to start putting /s at the ends of my comments where I merely restate the currently adopted legal theory/framework in non-sugar-coated terms, don't I? The whole liberal movement has its roots in the merchants' and industrialists' desire of having as little interference from the aristocracy-heavy governments of the yore, and it really shows even to this day.
Well, how about the Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine [0] (BOOM)? It's superscalar, out-of-order RISC-V design (one of the very first ones, in fact), and the documentation is fairly detailed. Read [0] and [1] for the general introduction, and then move down to the "Core Overview" section in the left navbar: "Instruction Fetch", "Branch Prediction", etc.
Also, here [2] is another, much more detailed explanation of an O-o-O implementation of a very simplistic RISC ISA which nonetheless has most of the relevant RISC-V features. There are also some other related texts on this subsite [3], including a single-cycle and a pipelined implementations, for the comparison.
Eh. The ends do justify the means, but only inasmuch as those means actually do help to achieve the ends — astonishingly often, they don't (and rarer, but also often, actually bring you in the opposite direction from those end goals), and so remain unjustified.
I personally believe quite strongly that some things are just immoral on their face and that I would rather fail/die without using them than succeed/live while using them. I agree that in very many cases where people do these things, they are, in the long run, counter productive, but I also believe that even if could be conclusively proven that this wasn't the case, I would still advocate against their use.
That sentence is constantly repeated, as if it would be some kind of absolute truth. The fact is, for every end, there will be probably some means that are totally justified, and some that not.
I think the original context is: no matter how high, pure and perfect the end is, it does not meany any mean is justified.
This is a recurring problem with fancy, richly-featured programmer-oriented apps made by programmers for programmers because for some reason most of the tool-writing programmers apparently just love to put "execute arbitrary code" functionality in there. Perhaps they think that the user will only execute the code they themselves wrote/approved and will never make mistakes or be tricked; or something like that, I dunno.
reply