For me, it was basically a catalogue. The ads weren't annoying, they were the whole point, even more so than the articles themselves!
That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.
Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.
I agree. The ads were an import part of reading those magazines. They were relevant and at least somewhat informative. Also, they gave you a way to buy the products you needed. Back then you couldn't just get on Amazon, Alibaba, or Ebay and buy anything. You had to search for a source.
Presenting ads to a target audience IS the purpose for the magazine just as they are for TV, cable, radio, and every other media source. The articles, shows, or music are inducements to get you to read, watch, or listen which, in turn, motivates companys to pay to get their ads presented.
The thing with floating point numbers is they are meant to work with physical quantities: distances, durations, etc...
Physical quantities involve imprecision: measurement devices, tools, display devices, ADC/DACs etc... They all have some tolerances. And when you are using epsilons, the epsilon value should be chosen based on that physical value. For example, you set the epsilon to 1e-4 because that's 100 microns and you can't display 100 micron details.
That's also the reason why there is not one size fits all solution. If you are working with microscopic objects, 100 microns is huge, and if you are doing a space simulation, 1 km may be negligible. Some operations involve a huge loss of precision, some don't, and sometimes you really want exact numbers and therefore you have to know your fractional powers of 2.
To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way.
We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
That's exactly my point. We don't have the manpower, the materials, the industry.
For mars this just isn't happening unless we ship half of Earth's people and resources over there. Who will have to live on a toxic planet.
But we can't even ship all that stuff there because we don't have enough fuel to do that (it requires many times the payload in fuel) and all the launches would make earth uninhabitable. Terraforming mars is therefore science fiction unless we break a lot of barriers like clean fusion, space elevators etc. And even then the material question will remain a problem.
I think even reverting climate change on earth, a much easier problem than terraforming a remote planet, is a pipe dream. If we're going to be going carbon capture at that global scale, we're going to need to extract so much material, manufacture so much equipment, transporter it all, deal with all the captured carbon, maintenance, power etc all stuff that's not possible to do completely carbon neutral, that we're just polluting a lot more. Especially if we want to do it at a timescale where it still matters.
C++ is like C with extra features, but you don't need to use them.
If you want control over your memory, you can do pointers the C way, but you still have features like templates, namespaces, etc... Another advantage of C++ is that it can go both high and low level within the same language.
Disadvantage of C++ is mostly related to portability and interop. Things like name mangling, constructors, etc... can be a problem. Also, C++ officially doesn't support some C features like "restrict". In practice, you often can use them, but it is nonstandard. Probably not a concern for HPC.
> C++ is like C with extra features, but you don't need to use them
C++ certainly (literally (Cfront[0])) used to be this, but I thought modern (decade or more) conventional wisdom is to NOT think like this anymore. Curious to hear others weigh in.
To me, it is not "conventional wisdom", it is what a vocal group of C++ guys who look at Rust and its memory safety and don't want to be left out.
Their way is not wrong, new constructs are indeed safer, more powerful, etc... But if you are only in for the new stuff, why use C++ at all, you are probably better off with Rust or something more modern. The strength of C++ is that it can do everything, including C, there is no "right" way to use it. If you need raw pointers, use raw pointers, if you need the fancy constructs the STL provides, use them, these are all supported features of the language, don't let someone else who may be working in a completely different field tell you that you shouldn't use them.
C++ by comparison doesn't stand in your way too much either.
I feel like the biggest gripe Rust has is what happens when you do have to go unsafe.
That seems to be a strong point of contention for many folks.
Maybe all the reasons that lead people to use unsafe rust go away or the attitude about it shifts in some manner.
For me Rust turned out to be less interesting after I saw the whole ceremony about typing.
The amount of things I had to grasp just to get a glimpse into what a library does felt much more involved than any of the things I did with C++.
The whole annotation-ting feels much less necessary and more like a proper opt-in there.
The Famicom was so cool in a way that the NES just never intended to be. Disk drives, a modem (online banking!), super funky aesthetics for the console and the carts, etc. Very ahead of its time.
> Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.
There are many studies concluding that for some tasks, experts make decisions that are no better than a dice roll, sometimes worse. So the game here is not to make good decisions, but to make a convincing argument. And it is something LLMs are really good at.
And it is ironic because it matches the job of a CEO pretty well. CEOs often make decisions with high uncertainty, the kind where it is hard to beat random, and they are expected to communicate with authority.
If it is constraints you are after, you can look at fantasy consoles like TIC-80 and PICO-8.
They are designed to emulate the experience of 8 bit consoles: limited storage, memory, display, palette, etc... While at the same time making developing, distributing and playing games easy: high level language (LUA), built-in development environment, games are tens of kB sized "cartridge" files.
In addition, there are factors that make it more probable.
- The sequel came out a bit less than 2 years after the first book, which is fairly typical. It means it is a likely time to think "what about the sequel?"
- Doctor appointments and book releases both tend to happen on tuesdays. Especially book releases, so it is possible that you tend to think more about books on tuesdays
- It is possible to think about the book more than once without realizing it, maybe even inquery about the sequel without realizing it, and because the result is negative and unimportant, it is easy to forget. It is not uncommon for me to search something just to find it in my history, completely forgotten
I would put the likelihood of something like that happening by accident to about 1/100, the "noticeable but not memorable" kind, such as meeting the same person twice in a day in a different context, or arriving at a highly coveted parking spot just as the previous guy is leaving.
Switzerland has a fertility rate of about 1.4 and decreasing, unless they do something, there won't be much of a country left in a few generations. Solutions can involve immigration or natalism, but something has to change.
Or significantly increasing life-expectancy. Or new fertility technologies. A few generations is a long time.
The birth rates of the immigrant waves would presumably just plummet quickly anyway as they join the culture. Since that seems to have happened with all our other health problems.
I don’t know anything about Switzerland, but immigration isn’t a solution to the prospect of Japan “not having a country left in a few generations.” There might be more or fewer people living on the islands, but “Japan” will be gone either way.
Nowadays Japan’s fertility rate is higher than most of its neighbours. We are just used to pick it as an example because it started aging earlier than most other countries.
Japanese population is still over 120 million. Forecasts put it falling below 100 million at some point in the second half of this century.
Things will have to change in order to keep population stable in the long term, but the Japanese approach seems IMHO more sensible than that of other countries.
Your idea of “racism” arose in a western historical context and simply has no application to Japan. Japan didn’t bring a bunch of people to their country by force and then enslave them and deny them political rights for hundreds of years.
Nation-states not only exist, the UN recognizes their existence as a human right in the The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The UN recognizes a right of “peoples”—groups of people bound together by culture, ancestry, language, etc.—to self determination. I was born in a country named after one ethnocultural group (Thailand) and my family is from another country named after our ethnocultural group (Bangladesh). Japan is the homeland of Japanese people, just as Thailand is the homeland of Tai people, and Bangladesh is the homeland of Bengali people.
Not sure why you keep on repeating that when nationalism is a thoroughly modern concept and not something that God handed down to us thousands of years ago. It's frankly bizarre for a Bengali born in Thailand and living (presumably, based on timezone) in North America to be so invested in defending the honor of the Japanese ethnostate on the orange hacker website.
Also, I don't know what you would call the historical (and even current) treatment of Zainichi Koreans other than "racism" (as well as the current treatment of immigrants from places like Bengladesh).
> Not sure why you keep on repeating that when nationalism is a thoroughly modern concept
The desire for cultural groups to form their own communities isn’t modern, it’s ancient. What arose in the 20th century—in the aftermath of colonialism—is the global recognition that these groups have a right to form nation-states. The recognition that right was a driving force across the world in the 20th century: Pan-Arab nationalism, Indian nationalism, Bengali nationalism, etc.
> It's frankly bizarre for a Bengali born in Thailand … to be so invested in defending the honor of the Japanese ethnostate on the orange hacker website.
Because your criticism of Japan undermines the legitimacy of the existence of countries like Bangladesh as well. My uncle didn’t get shot at by Pakistanis to establish a multicultural economic zone.
> Also, I don't know what you would call the historical (and even current) treatment of Zainichi Koreans other than "racism" (as well as the current treatment of immigrants from places like Bangladesh)
If Japan allows immigrants into the country then mistreats them, then that’s wrong. But that’s not what this article or my post is talking about.
Idk why people who hate women can't resist telling on themselves like this. What makes you think this line of thinking is acceptable, or even rational?
The first paragraph in the GP comment makes a lot of sense. Just today I was listening to a program on NPR about birth control in Uganda - women were complaining about their husbands want more and more children. These women in Uganda were getting their contraceptives discreetly without their husbands knowledge.
When women are empowered they choose to have less kids.
(Another example of this is closer to home. Project 2025 wants to curtail contraceptives distribution and usage with the same goal: more kids. It is the same logic - diminish women’s power have re: pregnancy in order to increase birth rate)
A lot of people would rather live in their own aged society than a slightly younger foreign one.
Emphasis on slightly younger. Fertility is declining basically everywhere. Much of the developing world is now below replacement including India and China.
'A lot of people' usually means the predominately older strata of society. Japan has been having issues with the younger generation being locked out of employment and advancement because of older generations needing to hold onto their career with a death grip and retirement ages going up.
The aged society scam can only persist as long as they can exploit the younger generation. When that collapses, the end result is either going to be leaving the elderly to die or things start collapsing in new and interesting ways
The only reason why people 'prefer' this is for the same reason 'prefer' to believe climate change doesn't exist. Eventually reality catches up.
Immigration is not a long term solution to an aged society. The societies of target countries are aging as well and not far behind.
What you advocate is to bolster the work force of a country with a fertility rate of ~1 and falling, with people from a place with a fertility rate of ~2 and falling.
That's how you know what the industry was doing, and if you want to buy new hardware, these magazines were the main source of information.
Maybe ironically, for better independent content, as in actual articles rather than ads, hobbyist and video game magazines did better. There was a time where video game magazines taught you about programming! If anything, by having you copy lines of BASIC because there was no digital support available.
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