What is it like to be a thermostat?
An Excerpt From The Conscious Mind, By David Chalmers Let us consider an information-processing system that is almost maximally simple: a thermostat. Considered as an information-processing device, a thermostat has just three information states (one state leads to cooling, another to heating, and another to no action). So the claim is that to each of these […]
India’s food shortage filled American libraries
Getty Images In 1996, Ananya Vajpeyi, a doctoral student, discovered the fabled South Asia collection of books at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. “I’ve spent time in some of the leading South Asia libraries of the world, at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia. But nothing has ever matched the unending riches held at […]
What is DOTS?
[embedded content] DOTS (Digital Optical Technology System) is a digital storage media that is: archival for no less than 100 years non-magnetic chemically inert immune from electromagnetic fields including electromagnetic pulse (EMP) able to be stored in normal office environments or extremes ranging from 15º to 150º F Because there are no demanding climate control […]
Nvidia bets on robotics to drive future growth
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Limits to Growth (1972)
“Computation and the Human Predicament,” in the May–June issue of American Scientist, discusses the World3 computer model, introduced in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth. As a way of better understanding the inner structure of the model, I have been working to re-implement it as a web application. The current state of this project […]
Reciprocal Approximation with 1 Subtraction
Today’s find: You can get a floating-point approximation of 1/x that’s accurate to 3 bits with a single integer subtraction instruction. float fast_reciprocal(float x) { unsigned i = *(unsigned *) &x; i = 0x7effffffU – i; return *(float *) &i; } The magic number 0x7effffff accomplishes two things: 1) The exponent is calculated as 253-e, […]
Curl-Impersonate
Note This is a (slightly) more active fork of curl-impersonate. Differences include: Encrypted Client Hello(ECH) support introduced in Chrome 119. ZSTD compression support introduced in Chrome 123. X25519Kyber768 curve introduced in Chrome 124. More options for impersonation Akamai http/2 fingerprints, especially for Safari. Upgrade to more recent version of curl, 8.7.1 as of April, 2024. […]
MiceWine – run Windows applications and games on Android smartphones
MiceWine Emulator MiceWine is a project that aims to run Windows applications and games on Android smartphones. It uses a customized build of Wine compiled for Android and Box64 to run in the best possible way. Actually in constant development. It’s use a XServer based on Termux-X11 Compatible Android Versions Support Android 10+ Compatible GPUs […]
‘Obelisks’: New Class of Life Has Been Found in Human Digestive System
Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects. “It’s insane,” says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. “The more we look, the more […]
I made a tiny library for switches and sum types in Lua
How? With a tagging function. A minimal usage example: local tag = dofile’tag.lua’ local a_square = tag(‘square’, { width = 10, height = 20 }) local switch = { square = function(s) return print(‘Got a square shape with the width of ‘ .. s.width) end, — An optional default case. [false] = function() return print(‘Shape […]