I've never understood the "number of the atoms in the universe" argument. The number of states the universe can be in doesn't seem to be equal to the number of atoms. For example, just two atoms could encode lots of numbers simply by using their distance. Quantum physics would affect it, but I mean in principle: we are not switching atoms on and off to encode state.
It’s 2^1729 digits, (vastly) more digits than there are atoms in the universe.
The vastly bit is kind of an understatement.
Each stable isotope is indistinguishable from every other carbon isotope. So, you can probably encode a few bits per atom assuming you can somehow read this data. However they are talking vastly larger numbers of digits here. Where there are only ~10^80 digits worth of atoms in the visible universe, but hey bump that to 10^90 it does not help.
Sure you might encode 10^6 or hell I will give you 10^100 bits of data per atom or something but that’s not even close to helpful. It’s still on the order of K atoms in the universe and you want to encode 10^400+ * K bits of data. So each atom needs to encode 10^400+ bits and remember each stable isotope is indistinguishable from every other atom of that stable isotope.
Yea, that specific number fits into 2 kilobytes of memory, but it’s so large it’s hard to compare it to anything.
Which is why I suggest comparing it to the number of bits required to encode the universe. If all you wanted was to store a single arbitrary number and could read write the universe you could do anything out to 2^(10^(80 * k)) where k is larger than 1 but I suspect below 100.
It's really just a phrase used nearly-rhetorically in order to convey the vast scope of a thing. Everyone understands that the number of atoms in the universe is a huge number, so it's a good benchmark.
When people use this phrase they're not trying to claim that the number of atoms in the universe is directly related to the problem at hand; they're just trying to convey scale.
It's not states, it's logarithmic of states (# of dimensions of finite size) . Think about writing down a number. One atom per digit is a pretty natural heuristic for the optimal spatial cost of information. Yes you can get clever, but there's no point, were already at astronomical levels of imprecision.
As I said, one atom per digit is not really natural. Just two atoms could encode an infinite number of numbers, by measuring their distance. Well except quantum physics might get in the way, not allowing us to measure with arbitrary precision. But that would be another argument.
Another argument would perhaps be the energy required to do the computation. Maybe that relates more directly to the number of atoms in the universe, via Einstein's equation?
> Well except quantum physics might get in the way,
This is a pretty huge well except. When people talk about information that can be stored in the universe this is exactly the limitation they have in mind.
It's just there for a reference, maybe a better one would be Kurzweil's ultimate laptop (made from the whole universe). But the interesting part is that I don't think the ultimate laptop takes into account interactions and state between atoms. AFAIR it assumes computation is done on every available dimension (like electron spin) but not on how atoms move and interact with each other. Intuitively it shouldn't make much difference though.
So what quantum value is it? Shouldn't the argument then at least say "the number is greater than the number of possible states of the universe", or something like that?
Doing computations with single atoms also doesn't sound very practical.
Measuring distances, I suppose there could be numerous ways, like measuring the gravity or electric pull (not sure what it is called in English). I think only Quantum theory says we can not measure to arbitrary precision, or at least if we do, there are other issue. Still, that would be another argument than simply pointing at the number of atoms.
I would guess that comparison to be very misleading. Singles presumably don't want to live in the countryside, they want to live in big cities with jobs and other people they could meet. In big cities, there tends to be little space for building, so especially little space for building 3 car garages.
So I would guess most 3 car garages are built in the countryside, where there is lots of space for building.
The two numbers point to completely separate issues.
If singles would be willing to move to the countryside, perhaps they wouldn't have a problem to find accommodation. (A job could be a different matter).
Yes, a Code of Conduct can be a good thing. A good CoC is about the outcome, not the action. For instance, a good CoC in software development has things like:
* Write your code for other people who may be up at 3am trying to figure out what's wrong with the logic.
* Be considerate of other ideas, smart people who disagree are usually both correct but differ in benefits and consequences.
* Consider if you are writing beyond the scope of the ticket, no code is easier/faster to debug/understand than no code.
Notice, there are no rules of what to do, but what is attempting to be avoided. Unfortunately, the Western Thinking (TM) (as opposed to Eastern Thinking) asks the question "What is...?" Like:
* What is the correct way to address someone?
* What is the acceptable code style?
* What are the maximum number of lines in a function?
The problem with this thinking is that it ignores outcome and enforces concrete thinking. The irony here being that the goal is to be considerate of people and they are being utterly inconsiderate to the moderator.
But are your suggestions a "Code of Conduct"? Like would anybody be expelled from a community for "not thinking about people who may be up at 3am trying to figure out their code"?
They are good suggestions, but I would put them in another category than CoCs.
It is a model, it is a model that has been useful for me. I don't discount that there are flaws with Post-Structuralism but most ways of making sense of the world have flaws.
Fair enough if it is useful for you. I am curious what makes it useful, as it seems to be a very negative and destructive way of thinking. At least I have never met an adherent to that philosophy with a positive outlook on things.
I don't think it is made to have a positive/negative outlook. It just allows you to understand the structures as they are which gives you the knowledge to potentially change them.
It has actually given me a hugely positive outlook since it means I don't feel so lost when I need to affect change. I know what power structures to target as opposed to feeling lost.
"Positive Outlook" maybe sounds a bit naive. I mean that people have the means to do things and change things. Not everything is just a power play. Of course some situations in the world can be very bad, but even then I don't see how musing about power structures would help.
I guess it is (for me) about practical approaches and solutions vs theoretical musings.
Also in general people are not all that bad. Even most bad people are just misguided, not inherently bad.
Since Bulgaria really doesn't seem to be very attractive at the moment, what about Lithuiana? What is the situation like there? The article mentions it as a competitor for fastest shrinking country in the EU.
I mean, washing machines probably aren't worth it because they weigh a lot, but I know as a fact that if you need to get your OnePlus phone repaired it will be shipped by next day courier to a repair centre in Warsaw, then shipped back(I rang them up on Monday, phone was collected on Tuesday, delivered and repaired on Wednesday, shipped back on Thursday, I got it back on Friday - it was incredible). I have also done this with a speaker that broke - a local electronics repair shop wanted £60 just to diagnose the issue, I was driving over to Poland for summer anyway so I took it with me, a local shop there charged me an absolutely ridiculous for Poland 2x50PLN/hour(£10/hour) to fix it + £20 for parts = £40 total. Obviously that completely ignores the cost of driving over, but I was doing it anyway.
I'm just trying to point out that it's not some grand conspiracy to stop people from repairing stuff - here in the West labour is just very very expensive(which means our wages are also very high, so it's hard to complain). In countries where labour is cheap the same repair suddenly makes sense.
And to add to that, when I've been in Shenzhen, China, I saw lots of recycling of smartphone parts. I've managed to replace my cracked S4 screen and a broken camera for a small fraction of the part price, on the spot in 10 minutes, on the condition that they get to keep the broken part - because what they're doing is taking the part further apart, repairing or replacing the broken component, and then using it to repair someone else's phone.
Items being sent from the UK to Warsaw will have to run through customs twice, attracting very large tarrifs - at least in the "UK->Poland" direction. That's assuming the airplanes are allowed to fly, and the customs clearence delays will be measured in days.
HP used to do that, and probably still does, with their business laptops/computers. Had an Elitebook under warranty in Germany, the graphics card burned out, requested an RMA, they sent a box to pack it in via UPS, it was shipped to Poland, fixed and returned via UPS.
In my case it was. The washing machine died, the repairman said the circuit board died, a new one is say 120, plus 80 for his work (all numbers approximate). His recommendation was to buy a new one.
I found somebody on ebay that repairs the boards for 35 (same developed country), popped the hood, took the cables off and sent the small plastic enclosing by post. They probably just replaced a capacitor or so, sent it back to me and voila.
So I don't think the legislation is perfect, but I'm happy there's some movement in the right direction. I think it's obscene to throw away the whole thing because of a tiny repair. Everything still depends on having people skilled to do repairs, but that's maybe also part of the problem. Why is a repair person's job these days to take a manufacturer's part in a plastic enclosing and connect the cables? I can do that myself. If it was some advanced technology fine, but it isn't for a lot of things.
Repair technicians who show up at peoples' homes aren't highly skilled electronics technicians. If they were, they wouldn't be working as appliance repair people and driving to peoples' homes. So those repairs just entail swapping out entire circuit boards or assemblies, because that's all those repair people can handle (and all the repair companies or manufacturers are willing to warranty).
The guy on Ebay is someone with electronics skills who discovered that that particular machine had a very common problem with that board, and offered a service to fix that one thing.
It's too bad that can't be done more. It is done some: smartphone makers frequently will repair their devices, usually by having you ship the phone to a repair center. But an appliance is harder since you still have to have the on-site technician take the machine apart and get the board out for shipping, since you can't rely on consumers to do that. It's too bad consumers aren't smart enough to use a screwdriver and take simple things apart, but that's just how it is.
If you take the huge concrete brick (some use water as ballast) out of a washing machine, they’re not that heavy. It shouldn’t be a great surprise that a washing machine without clothes or water inside has a lot of empty space in it.
If politicians didn't regulate businesses, we'd still be working 100 hours a week for 1€/hour.
So yeah, politicians try to defend the general interest best they can. Sometimes they make mistakes of course.
Countries with strong regulations can thrive. I live in France. People like to bash on our social system and on our strong regulations, but we are still one of the worlds greatest economic powers. Same goes with Germany.
> If politicians didn't regulate businesses, we'd still be working 100 hours a week for 1€/hour.
That's not true. All it needs is for one business among hundreds to require working 90 hours a week. Then all employees would want to work 90 hours a week instead of 100 hours. Then automatically lots of people would want to work in this company instead of all the others.
The other companies in order to keep workers in their companies would also want to lower the bar to 90 hours. And if everyone would require 90 hours a week, then when 1 company would lower the bar to 80 hours a week... etc.
When labour is scarce and desired, this is true. People who are in-demand right now can indeed set their terms (buddy of mine at a place with "unlimited vacation" took 2-3 months off a year because he knew they desperately needed him).
For everyone else, though, this works the other way too. All you need is for one person who's facing foreclosure to put in 110 hour weeks before it becomes the norm.
Hell, how many people here are on Slack at the weekend because their colleagues are and they fear looking lazy, and not because they're "passionate" (or whatever BS word we're using to describe abuse)
This is why we need less regulations so that there will be more alternatives to choose from. More employers = more chance there will be an employer that will not raise the bar of how many hours a worker needs to work in a week.
By introducing more and more regulations, it's more complicated to run the business. Less people are creating businesses, because it's so complicated to run it, and regulations change from year to year. So, the only real beneficiary of regulations are businesses established 100 years ago, where there were not much regulations, and they had their 'hothouse' conditions allowing them to grow without much competition.
In my country in small towns there are i.e. 3 companies to choose from when a person is trying to find a low-tech job. The owner of the first company is a good buddy with the mayor, the second company has a big legal department and is able to pull lots of million of PLNs from EU's dotations, and the third one will probably end their life in few next years, because it's too hard to compete with the previous two. So, in this context, it is possible that the previous 2 will just raise the work time bar and nobody will shed a tear about anyone.
The idea is nice but we've tried this, and it got us hellish levels of inequality (gilded age, etc.).
I do see what you're saying, for instance setting a maximum interest rate on payday loans caused lenders to shift to that maximum (even those which were below before), and having rules about what's part-time or full-time work does tend to solidify jobs around those points (get as much work out of them as you can without providing health insurance, etc.) but the alternative doesn't seem to work.
It sounds as if inequality in the gilded age was mostly caused by masses of immigrants entering the country, hoping for a share of the high wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
If that is the case, it seems unwarranted to present it as an example of failure. Poor people were attracted by the success, and accommodating them was not seamless. But how could it be - no system can be prepared for that.
The parent's comment was overly simplistic but yours is even more so.
What you describe works if companies struggle to hire people and need to compete with each-other for workforce. Nowadays in many sectors throughout the world (and often for less educated workforce) it's the other way around: there are more people looking for a job than there are vacancies.
Clearly in this situation it works the other way around: the worker who's ready to work longer for cheaper will be hired over the others. Then it's a race to the bottom.
Of course the comment was simplistic. How much information on such complicated topic can be stuffed into a few sentences? The point of the comment was to point out the parent was wrong, and provide an example where it's wrong, not to describe how the world works.
And I was merely providing an example where your comment was wrong. Nuance is important if we want to have a constructive political discussion.
Beyond that, I often feel like most people on HN are hugely privileged when it comes to job hunting and working conditions and it shows in the discussions. It's easy to lose track of the difficulties the majority of people experience when it comes to finding a job when you have half a dozen recruiters fighting over how much money they're going to throw at your face at any given moment.
"I wish those recruiters would stop spamming my inbox" is not a problem the average human being has ever (and probably will ever) experience.
>I don't think recruiters work the way you've described.
Why not?
>I also don't think a sane person would like to stop receiving messages from recruiters.
If you're not looking for a new job it's a useless distraction. Emails aren't too bad, phone calls are more annoying.
>I'm also not sure I understand what you have in mind when you write "privilege".
Then try re-reading my comment with a less adversarial attitude, I think it's fairly transparent. You seem more interested in winning the argument than engaging in constructive discussion, but maybe it's just one of these situations where the text medium fails to convey enough nuance and context cues to judge a person's intentions.
No, if a company would not be able to produce anything, it ceases to exist. So there is a minimum number of hours of work every week. A company will not be able to get lower than its minimum. How much is that depends on the work itself, the efficiency of work, and the efficiency of management.
Why would a company keep spare parts around when it can sell a new device or only allow "certified" maintanance? Where is the incentive in letting a customer spend less money on parts and labour?
How exactly can the market be doing good work here? And why didn't this work with cars, where the hobbyist can no longer service 99% of their newly bought car?
Simple: if people would want devices they could repair, they would prefer the products of companies offering such devices over the products of companies not offering such devices.
The problem here is that people don't really want these devices. Maybe they think they want them, but in reality the effort to have them repaired would be too much to them. As others have pointed out, wages are the real issue, not cost of spare parts.
> Simple: if people would want devices they could repair, they would prefer the products of companies offering such devices over the products of companies not offering such devices.
Except when no one provides such products, or the only ones fitting that goal require very large sacrifices elsewhere.
Look at mobile phones and tablets before the EU rules. Finding one that charged off a standard USB socket was near impossible.
Again with mobile phones, since there is no right to actually own and control your device, finding a phone that allows you to root it constrains your choices in just about every other way, including ways that have nothing to do with being able to root the phone, such as being a second class citizen from your carriers point of view (e.g. Verizon refused to enable international calling for my phone because it wasn't an "approved", aka Verizon branded, phone.)
So, right to repair regulations mean that I wouldn't have to decide between being environmentally conscious (if that open is even available) and having a product that works.
> wages are the real issue, not cost of spare parts.
I can and do perform many repairs myself when the device allows a repair to be done (even sometimes when it doesn't).
Not sure what EU rules you are referring to. All the phones I had were chargeable by standard USB socket and rootable, afaik.
You have things like fairphone where you can exchange and upgrade parts. In general, the magic of capitalism is that if people want something, somebody will eventually make it.
I also wonder how much of companies trying to prevent repairs is actually BECAUSE of regulations. Like they could be liable if something goes wrong. What if somebody tries to repair a phone, does it wrong, and the battery explodes. Who would be liable?
Your final point, with you being able to do a lot of repairs: you are not normal in that respect. Most people could not do that.
And even the hourly rate of most people would probably make it ineffective for them to do it, even if they could.
Since it is inefficient, I question the assumption that repairs are automatically good for the environment. Maybe buying a newer, more energy efficient machine every couple of years is better in some cases, especially if the old machine is recycled properly.
I would be much more in favor of regulations with respect to recycling. This "repairing is better" is mostly ideology and virtue signalling.
A lot of corporations will gladly destroy the environment, the fabric of society and human happiness just to turn a profit. The government will try to regulate business but often ignorantly and inefficiently.
As usually, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
I think what the EU is trying to do is to force both companies and consumers to think about the consequences of mindless mass consumption and obsolescence. Beyond petty laws and regulations, the EU sometimes does have a noble fundamental concept behind their policies; it remains to be seen if the resulting policies are effective in practice.
If you don't want pollution, regulate pollution. But this "everything should be repaired and the world would be better" is pure ideology. They think they can achieve less pollution by enforcing repairs. They are not businessmen. They don't know the actual problems with production and repairs. They should let businesses figure out how to reduce waste and pollution, not tell them what to do.
I'm sure the experts that wrote this legislation never considered this problem that you just came up with in 5 seconds. /s
We have regulation that makes machines safer. This is regulation that makes machines safer for the environment. If the regulation turns out to be counterproductive it can be adapted later...
"An information technology worker from Johnson County recently told The Star about the issue after he stumbled across hospital pager information while playing with an antenna, which he bought to get TV channels on his laptop computer. With a simple program, the antenna picks up radio signals that can be digitized.
Except instead of picking up local TV stations, he started seeing things like this, with the patient's and doctor's names included:
RQSTD RTM: (patient's name) 19 M Origin Unit: EDOF Admitting: (doctor's name) Level of Care: 1st Avail Medical Diagnosis: TONSILAR BLEED, ANEMIA, THROMBOCYTOPENIA
It was the personal patient data of a 19-year-old man, broadcast across the airwaves for anyone to read. And it was coming from a local hospital, which was sending the message to a doctor on a pager."
I looked into some of such cases in Germany, there the answer was definitely yes. Names and addresses, coupled with extremely sensitive medical information.
True you could create a trash beacon for any frequency, but as you said it'd be very "loud". Disrupting service with seemingly innocent messages would be much harder to detect though
I don't understand why that is supposed to be a "new understanding". I think it was the understanding all along (or at least most of the time).
Isn't even the famous moth that changed color in the early days of the industrial evolution an example? I think it carries both genes (for black and white expression), and they get triggered depending on the environment during development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
I could be wrong about the moth, but certainly, genes that are only expressed depending on environment are common knowledge.
