It doesn't. Watts were a mistake by whatever committee it was that standardized unit names. Power should not have been given a unit; it should have been left as ∆energy/time just as velocity is distance/time.
Joule is a derived unit, it is kg*m^2/s^2. There are lots of derived units, like hertz and newton, because they useful than writing out the whole thing. Electronics would be really annoying if had to write out volt, ohm, and watts (ampere is base unit, coulomb is derived).
Don’t put words in my mouth. I only said that power should be J/s instead of watts. The “per second” part of that is what is most important thing about power. It’s the rate at which energy is accumulating or being used up.
Using watts is fine for anyone who deals with energy and power all the time. The problem comes when the lay person tries to reason about power. If power were written as J/s then they could use the same reasoning that they are already familiar with from dealing with speed and position, or with flow rate and volume.
I regard that as a downstream effect of giving power a unit in the first place, but yes. We should have just stuck to J and J/s. It would have prevented the kWh and also abominations like the mAh “capacity” ratings you see on batteries.
Most people don't run around holding out their smartphone directly in front of them. It has to be pointed at the subject, and tends to be obvious.
Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.
The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.
I've seen people keep their phone in their shirt pocket. The only reason it tends to be obvious is that most people aren't trying to be covert. Those aren't the ones you should be worried about.
Don’t forget that audio recording is a thing. The camera doesn’t have to be pointed at you to violate your privacy. Plus I bet you walk past 90% (or more) of all cameras without ever noticing them. You only notice someone’s glasses because they are novel, not because they are more likely to record you.
You're thinking about rust the wrong way. When you want to write in that exploratory way you should use a language that supports it, like Python, Javascript, or Lisp. These are all memory–safe languages that trade run–time speed for developer productivity. You can implement new features in them extremely quickly, and later if performance becomes an issue you can reimplement in Rust with the benefit of already knowing what you are writing.
That may be true, but I suspect that it’s also hard to compare apples to apples. A burger in 1959 is hard to compare to a burger today. Today’s burger almost certainly has twice as much meat. The invention of (and ubiquitous advertising of) the quarter–pounder means that everyone had to make their burgers larger to match. Sides are larger, drinks are larger, etc, etc.
I don’t ever use any font provided by the website. I don’t even let websites choose which fonts get used. Instead I choose a set of fonts (monospaced and proportional) that are readable and everything uses those.
If you want to see what that looks like, go into the Firefox settings, find the Fonts section, click Advanced, and then uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above”. Be sure to adjust the “Minimum font size” while you’re here so that nobody uses text sizes that you cannot read.
> "You can edit it in a text editor" which feels like a monkeys-paw wish
Yes :) Although I will note that some editors are good enough to maintain the structure as the user edits. Consider Emacs with `csv-mode`, for example. Of course most users don’t have Emacs so they’ll just end up using notepad (or worse, Word).
But before you judge the fix too hashly, I bet it’s just a quick and easy fix that will suffice while a proper fix (to avoid depending on external state) is written.
of course it is just an easy fix. it's the kind of solution that even someone like me could write who has no understanding of the code a all. (i am not trying to imply that the submitter of the PR doesn't understand the code, just that understanding it is unlikely to be necessary, thus the change bears no risk.
but, the solution now hides the problem. if i wanted to get someone to solve the problem i'd set the new date in the near future until someone gets annoyed enough to fix it for real.
and i have to ask, why is this a hardcoded date at all? why not "now plus one week"?
There’s a lot to be said for simplicity. The more logic you put into handling the dates correctly in the tests, the more likely you are to mess up the tests themselves. These tests were easy to write, easy to review, easy to verify, and served perfectly well for 10 years.
It’s like any other fundamental research: you don’t know how much it’s worth until people start using it to solve real problems. This is something that is literally impossible to guess ahead of time. The most abstract mathematical techniques could turn into a trillion–dollar industry (number theory begat RSA encryption which now underpins _everything_ we do).
But I will say that precise control of laser wavelength is critical to today’s communication technologies. I doubt their new techniques will be useless.
Hopefully the billions money in AI will find some of its to turn this into real life applications. AI inference would love some more faster more efficient communication.
I mean, Photonic computing already got the attention of these big tech companies.
Yes. The land is wealth, the house is wealth, and _living in_ the house is wealth. Like it or not, not everyone can afford to buy a house. Maybe they don’t have a down payment, or can’t get a good interest rate on a mortgage. Instead of renting money and using it to buy the house, they need to just rent the house instead. If there were no rentals available of any kind, they would go homeless¹. Having them renting something instead of going homeless makes wealth for both them and for society as a whole.
¹ We’ll just assume that homesteading is impossible these days.
I really enjoy a good bug report like this. More people should write up their fixes and publish them!
But the really weird thing is that I could basically copy and paste that code into an open–source game that I occasionally work on. I have an open bug or two about game items with long names that cause the UI to look weird where ellipsization is the obvious solution. With only a few trivial tweaks Enlightenment’s code would just work. It’s almost like we should have a library for that sort of thing.
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