Does this do anything differently from https://backloggd.com/? I've been using Backloggd a lot over the past year and I'm not sure how this is different (aside from being ad-free, which is nice)
Backloggd is our main "competitor", and we know most people are already familiar with it. But going from their roadmap (https://backloggd.com/roadmap/), we already have:
- A mobile app
- Steam and PSN integration
- A recommendations system
- Social Page (?)
not sure what they building, but we're trying to keep most of our stuff shareable. For example, you can share a nice Letterboxxed-style image of your game reviews. We're also close to shipping something like this for recent played games, similar to what these third party tools do for LastFM.
We both use IGDB as source, so there's no difference in the actual catalogue of games.
I use tools such as Google Maps and Open Street Maps, and I cut/paste, mostly just by eyeball, with the relevant things I might be interested in - the train stations of Rome, for example, and so on. Google Earth is also great for this, but I confess that the last one I made for myself (Berlin), I just screengrabbed and pasted my friends # in place, with the train details, etc.
There's something comforting about knowing how to get around when the power goes out. Since I enjoy roaming adventures requiring navigation, making little maps for myself is basically just how I roll .. got me where I needed to be.
A lot of historians are drawing parallels between recent events and the events leading up to WW1. I’m not an expert, but it isn’t absurd to say that it could happen.
What? If they could have predicted the severity of WWII, Chamberlain and the rest wouldn't have tried to appease Hitler or delay.
Predicting the severity of events in advance is difficult. I wouldn't listen to what historians predict today. Every catastrophe is different, but despite this people like to pretend (after the fact) all the signs were there and were obvious.
For all we know Ukraine will stay confined and China will just keep being belligerent but take no action.
TSMC controls 60% of global semiconductor production, not "90%+." If your argument is: "well, they control the advanced nodes!!" - if Taiwan is attacked, the things you're using these advanced chips for will no longer be relevant.
Missiles and radar powered by Intel/Altera chips will do the job just fine until more domestic fab capacity can be spun up. Most defense products are running on processes from two decades or more ago and are already legally forced to consider adversarial supply chain issues.
2. "the things you're using these advanced chips for will no longer be relevant", "Missiles and radar powered by Intel/Altera chips will do the job just fine until more domestic fab capacity can be spun up." Hard-disagree. US advantage is in high resolution AESA sensors, thermals, and fast advanced processing and comms. We aren't talking Tomahawks and PESA radars when it comes to competitive advantage.
Finally, there is a reason why domestic fab capacity is ramping up slowly in the US and Russia doesn't have such capability to speak of - it's hard and the major powers are behind.
Which defense contractor is using a sub-10nm process node for products? Every F35 chip is >90nm.
Which adversary would these chips yield an advantage against in a nuclear war?
Domestic fab capacity is ramping up slowly because these facilities are multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade endeavors. Intel's existing domestic fabs can make everything a war-fighting nation could need, capacity and capability-wise.
If true, and I have no reason to doubt you based on the accuracy of your previous messages, you have made your point. I definitely don't know the F-35 chip specs.
> Recent Armenia vs Azerbaijan (supported by Turkey) war. More tension on border.
I completely missed the Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict, but from what I can tell, tensions there don't seem likely to pull many other countries into it. Curious if you have thoughts on that.
> Posturing in Africa by Russia, France, and China.
Can you explain why this would lead to a potential world war? Most of what I can find about this is foreign countries vying for economic influence, which seems unlikely to burst into conflict, especially one that would become a world war.
See what BirAdam said - he is correct. Armenia / Azer is a direct cause of Russia being drawn into Ukraine, insofar that Russia "guaranteed" peace and had a contingent of "peacekeepers" in Armenia. What you see is an acceleration on conflicts in areas that were held back by global stability before. Now that Russia couldn't react, Azer backed by Turkey (and arguably other powers in the West) pushed Armenia out of Nagorny Karabakh. If Russia wasn't in Ukraine, this would likely look like Georgia in 2008 where Russia would use this as an excuse to take some land. Instead they did nothing, because they are busy.
Africa is too much to summarize - basically look into what Wagner and US PMCs were doing there. It's just more proxy conflict.
To support this, all of these proxy wars have covert units by the major nuclear powers conducting efforts directly against the other side. If these are ever exposed directly, political pressures will likely escalate the war. The moment one side starts to lose decidedly, nuclear war will likely occur.
I also don't know what a world war looks like in the nuclear age. Proxy wars are bad enough, to be sure, but a world war seems difficult when many nations can glass the planet.
We were closer to nuclear war in the 1960s and 1970s than we are today. Sure we don’t have it as good as they did in the ‘90s and 2000s but you wouldn’t know it from the depression and anxiety stats over time, which suggests that the geopolitical situation isn’t the main driver here.
I'm pretty sure that the research showing the risk of nuclear winter being exaggerated is specifically intended to make nuclear war "thinkable" in a way it wasn't towards the end of the Cold War. It's one small part of a broader trend in elite consensus-making over the last 10 years or so. As a member of the Posadist 4th International, I approve, of course.
Among other things, perhaps the recent bombing of the Iranian section of a consulate in Damas, Syria by Israel, to which Iran responded by war threats.
I did in fact miss this, thanks. I'm not as convinced by other commenters' references to Putin's nuclear threats, but the Middle East erupting into a broader conflict with the US joining in seems at least somewhat plausible to me. Another comment mentioned the potential of the US entering a war in defense of Taiwan, which also seems quite plausible to me given China really wants Taiwan back and Taiwan is much more critical to the US than, say, Ukraine.
What should they do to be taken seriously? Just hit the Washington D.C once?
On the other hand, do you really think any nuclear power, be it Russia, USA, China, would allow being defeated in an existential war and just dissolve without bringing down the whole world?
There is a more than likely chance that China will invade Taiwan by 2030 and US will possibly intervene to stop that slaughter. Is that fear mongering?
Yes. There's no source, no nuance, no justification, no explanation, no analysis, no hope, no details, it's as pure a jolt of dense negative emotion in one sentence as you can manage. You're choosing emotionally charged words like 'slaughter'. You're speculating that something halfway around the world will involve the reader's home country, because that makes it feel closer and more scary. It's absolutely fearmongering.
So if someone https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1473362460673515527 told Ukrainians in 2021 that they were going to be invaded by Russia, which would mean 100,000+ of them killed and maimed, would you also say they were "fear mongering?"
There were many people on HN, like you, the Russian government, and Snowden literally saying people were "fear mongering" because they were warning about the fact of the Russian invasion.
Do you have any evidence or track record to support your position? Any Russian invasion predictions you called successfully? If not, I'd leave dismissals of current US Gov. understanding of the situation to the full time geo-pol pro's who do successfully predict things.
"FEARMONGERING meaning: 1. the action of intentionally trying to make people afraid of something when this is not necessary"
> "told Ukrainians in 2021 that they were going to be invaded by Russia, which would mean 100,000+ of them killed and maimed, would you also say they were "fear mongering"
Maybe, this depends if they were commenting with good evidence because they were trying to get Ukranians to fight or escape, or if they were commenting because they wanted to make Ukranians afraid. The Ukrainian government saying "imminent invasion, 100,000+ of us will die, here's what we need to be doing" might not be fearmongering, Russia saying "we're imminently invading, 100,000+ of you will die" might be fearmongering. Americans telling each other "Russia will invade Ukraine, 100,000+ people will die, the world is ending, mass slaughter!, NATO will fall, Europe is history! Russia will move onto Georgia and then Poland!" absolutely would be fearmongering.
> "Do you have any evidence or track record to support your position?"
My position is that your comment is fearmongering. My evidence is your comment.
> "If not, I'd leave dismissals of current US Gov. understanding of the situation to the full time geo-pol pro's who do successfully predict things."
I'm not dismissing US Gov understanding of the situation, I'm criticising your fearmongering echoing of things. Do you have any track record of helping stop China invading Taiwan? If not, stop spreading fear for upvotes and leave the warfare preparations to the pros.
Ah, then your position falls apart. The more people would've been aware of Russia's plans for Ukraine, the earlier and better a formidable defense could've been. Same in as in Taiwan. That requires people understanding what the future possibly holds and how to deter the worst case.
HN readers being scared of 'slaughter' in Taiwan, with no source and no explanation of the claim, is 'necessary'? It going to help mount a formidable defense?
Do you have any evidence or track record to support your position?
You're not helping your point by not making any substantive argument. The same full time think tank analysis that predicted the Russian invasion by months is also predicting the same here. Your track record is worse unless you can point me to any coverage of the impending Russian invasion you have...
Helping either side will still kill people, and likely kill more people, and likely lengthen the war.
The USA should not involve itself in the affairs of others. Period. It’s just a modern form of colonialism where the UsA views itself as superior and a possessor of all knowledge and goodness and therefore the rest of the globe needs its help. This is not the case.
You should read Leviathan and World Order. When order breaks down, it opens up short term opportunistic destruction instead of correctly resolving the prisoners' dilemnas. See the Azerbaijani assault on Nagorno-Karabakh for what happens when Russia doesn't have the focus to maintain order. The US got a lot of shit for not preventing the Rwandan genocide. But according to you, nonintervention was a good thing.
Fun implementation! There's currently a bug that allows the same number to appear twice after a combination step (I was able to perform 2,3,7,5->5,7,5)
This absolutely would be called AI 10 years ago. Yes, it's a machine learning task, but a computer program you can speak with would certainly qualify as AI to anyone 10 years ago, if not several decades prior as well.
Out of curiosity, what makes people prefer desktop apps for mail over just visiting the browser version? The idea of downloading a desktop app for something I can do in the browser makes no sense to me. At least on mobile, the ergonomics of apps tend to make the experience better than the mobile-web version.
Webmail requires an active Internet connection. A desktop client lets me work in more environments/situations, and acts as a kind of local backup/cache of my communications.
It also makes focusing on email easier. I dislike having to dive into tab sprawl to read/write email.
I should clarify that I meant "webmail" in general, and meant to answer the spirit of the broader question about why people prefer thick clients over web clients. Most web clients aren't great offline, but a "YMMV" does seem necessary here.
With that said, while I don't know much about the particulars of the Proton web client and how it handles offline access, I'd still prefer a client that treats all mail the same way, regardless of provider, and that I can manage locally/migrate to a new computer/back up to my own NAS, etc.
I feel the opposite. The desktop app makes the data – my data – local. If it's a web app, the data and access to it is controlled by the service provider. If you stop paying, if they decide they don't like you, if they go bankrupt or something else happens on their end, your data is gone. And no connection to the internet means no data. I prefer to keep truly personal stuff such as (some) emails and other messaging, pictures and passwords local. Of course, not everyone is as technical and for many it might be a better idea not to worry and rely on the cloud.
It's faster, easier to alt-tab to (installed PWAs might address this), but also easy to manage in other ways: window positioning, custom shortcuts, custom UI; then offline use, local backup of your very important data, and a bunch of other things that don't pop into my mind right now. You could also call most of these "ergonomics"
Weird - bridge has worked flawlessly for me for the last couple of years. I use Thunderbird with it. They had clear instructions on how to configure it in just a couple of clicks and I haven't had to mess with it since then.
My ONLY complaint is that if I launch Thunderbird before Bridge has finished, it won't connect. That can be fixed by waiting first, or opening the app on a schedule, or just closing and re-opening it. (I choose to use a scheduled app open)
I don't think that's a normal experience. It may be worth contacting Proton about it and asking for support, assuming you still pay for service. May be an easy fix. Or it could be on TB's end.
I'd also check if you have any unusual network configuration (PiHole, router settings, etc) and see if those could be interfering somehow.
Though since it's intermittent it may be hard for them to track down.
Less tab clutter, enhanced ability to use OS app/window management facilities, no space eating browser chrome, works without a browser being open (yes that does happen on occasion).
It doesn’t apply to Proton’s desktop app specifically but generic email clients also allow management of multiple accounts in a single window without the messiness of forwarding.
For me, I generally prefer dedicated apps to a browser if possible. They tend to be more functional and less burdened down by being general-purpose software.
It's also a more controlled environment. I tend to run a lot of custom browser settings, mountains of addons, etc. I know that my desktop mail app won't be affected by those.
While the gap has closed over the years, with high quality web apps and the ability of the browser to send you notifications, I still prefer to use Thunderbird to check my multiple accounts, and only notify for my primary folder, while lots of relative junk gets filtered down to sub-folders, where I do not want notifications.
I can't do the math to determine this more rigorously, but my intuition tells me you can do something analogous to the Hairy Ball Theorem to prove that there exists a point within the convex hull of those stars where the gravitational forces cancel out. However, as the stars move, there's no guarantee that point will remain static and stable.
Out of curiosity, from someone who has never worked with non-euclidean geometry, what does it mean for a path to be curved in non-Euclidean space? My outsider understanding of curvature is that the inside of a curve is shorter than the outside of the curve, whereas a line has the same length on either side (assuming we give these curves and lines some thickness). But, if the shortest path can be curved, what do we mean by curved?
I've found it's easier to think about this stuff in two dimensions. The surface of a sphere (or the Earth!) has non-Euclidean geometry.
Imagine two people standing some distance apart from each other at the equator. They both begin walking in straight-line paths due south. At first, their paths are parallel. But as they move toward the south pole, they begin to drift closer to each other, as though their paths were curving towards each other. When they reach the south pole, they bump into each other. But they were both walking straight forward following the shortest path to the south pole the whole time. The curvature of the surface causes their initially-parallel paths to converge.[1]
On a plane (which has Euclidean geometry), initially-parallel paths never converge.
[1] Don't take this too literally; the real planet Earth is three-dimensional, and its gravity keeps us on the surface. But mathematically, it's possible to describe a curved two-dimensional space without referring to any higher dimensions. When I talk about "the surface of a sphere", that's what I mean -- the surface is the entire 2D space.
Maybe it's worth adding that in this way of thinking (intrinsic geometry of the surface), great-circle paths have exactly the property the GP brought up about straight lines: neighboring paths aren't shorter on one side and longer on the other. (If you think of them as 3-d paths then there's a shorter path below vs. longer above, but that's not part of the intrinsic geometry.)
If two people are in parallel, they will make two parallel circles. If two people aimed at a singe point, they are not in parallel.
Space-time is 4d array: array of framebuffers. You can stretch your mathematical model all day long, but you knowledge must be mapped to reality somehow. In model we have space-time, while in real world we have "physical vaccum" ("something nothing" or "phaccuum", for short). I prefer to name that thing "ether", because I like that word.
> If two people are in parallel, they will make two parallel circles. If two people aimed at a singe point, they are not in parallel.
In spherical geometry, the equivalent of a straight line is a great circle. There are no parallel great circles. That's why I used the phrase "initially parallel" -- at the starting point, both people's paths are at a 90-degree angle to the great circle connecting their locations.
I didn't want to get into "locally flat" vs. "globally curved" in something that started as an ELI5 thread.
> In spherical geometry, the equivalent of a straight line is a great circle.
Yes, of course. If we substitute parallel lines with straight lines in spherical geometry and mix 2D and 3D spaces, then our mental model will be nonsensical but cute.
We found no evidence of fourth dimension in the real world, so we cannot map this cute mathemagical model to reality.
Picture curves on the surface of the earth. They seem flat locally, but if you go a mile north, a mile east, a mile south, and a mile west, you don't end up _exactly_ where you start. (In the northern hemisphere you end up a little east of where you start; in the southern, a little west.)
Same thing in general relativity: the metric tensor measures the failure of closed loops on each axis to not close perfectly, the way they would in Euclidean space.
Basically even as a small creature on earth you can 'figure out' about the curvature by carefully measuring small-ish loops. The same is true for spacetime, but the loops' deformities are even smaller.
It's not too complicated. Get a round ball of some sort. When you draw on the surface, that's a "non-Euclidean space".
Take a straight line down from the "north pole" of your ball to its equator. Draw another straight line around a quarter of the equator. Draw a third line back to the pole. You've just drawn a triangle with 3 straight lines and the angles add to 270 degrees.
A non straight line is just not the shortest distance between two points on that surface.
Distance from center as described by the path - so if the distance to center is held, but the trajectory is changed, the line will be expressed as a curve around a tehtered point to the center.
If the 'tether' is a gravitational link (meaning that the teather, is a constant pull against the trajectory, regardless of the trajectory, the object will continue to curve around center.
I cannot be of help here but I'd say that your concept of curvature is too informal, but more formal maths can deal with it, take a look at the wikipedia page for "Geodesic", the maths are way above my head but the diagrams are cool :D
Sure, but if you're a creature that's useful to humans, you'll find that you'll either get domesticated and lose all your freedom or get hunted to near (or total) extinction. Any life on earth with some semblance of intelligence is dominated by us. Dolphins, as smart as they are, have no way to use their intelligence to flip the script and become the dominant species, and are dependent on us not deciding that they would be useful to us (beyond the ones we take for aquariums).
The only exceptions I can think of to the above rule are viruses and bacteria, where (in most cases) we can't really exterminate them entirely from the face of the earth even if we wanted to. However, it seems to me that sufficient intelligence would allow for better understanding of different bacterial/viral structures that would allow you to make a specific chemical that would be very good at killing that specific thing.
Overall, the danger from a bootstrapping AI that becomes vastly more intelligent than humans (if possible) seems to me to be that we would lose full agency according to its whims as it gets more and more power.
I read a great comment on HN that argued that super-human intelligence is not that “OP” advantage — and it really did convince me.
Life is a game with elements where intelligence matters, plenty where it is pure luck, and others where we have a bunch of unknowns (data).
Would a super-intelligent AI have a significant advantage in a game of Monopoly, for example? I think many sci-fi scenarios fail to take this into account, especially the data aspect. Humans are quite intelligent (in the extremes at least), and any extra over that may well be in the diminishing returns category.
