The optimum time to beat this game for me is 2 seconds.
My brother and I used to have it as kids, eventually you figure out shortcuts, and go faster and faster.
But we discovered by mistake (or rather while expressing frustration) that the quickest route ends up being a very sudden lift of the left corner, sending the ball flying above the whole board, and directly into the last hole.
With practice, you get down to one second to get to the left corner, then a second and a half to get it airborne, and for it to fly into the finish line.
I have no doubt the AI will figure it out, and probably even make it faster.
Buffys remaster is a joke. Did they just try to automate the whole thing and not look at it before publishing it? I mean there are night scenes that are clearly shoot in daylight and they didn't even bother to adjust the lighting and color balance, scenes where you can see the edge of sets and the film crew or boom mics hanging in the picture.
I think 11m monthly users is a lot. Sure, compared to Facebook 2023 it's minuscule. But assuming those 11m monthly users log in 2 times a week (~8 per month) and check out 15 pages each time that comes out to 1.3bn pageviews a month. Divided by (60s/m * 60m/h * 24h/d * 30d/m) comes out to about sustained 500 pageviews per second.
I assume since they're a viral / addictive platform the numbers will be higher. Plus they're not a blog or so, but rather a personalized social media platform, which makes stuff more complicated (you can't just cache their news feeds, they're all personalized).
It's easy to say meh, 11m is nothing, there are other platforms with more users (esp. since you don't bring up examples how you managed otherwise). But I think it's a big technical feat to do this with 6 people.
Afaik a transcoding session holds the entire CPU core, for example malformed gif avatar typically can lie down a single-server web-forum for a few seconds.
500 pageviews per second are big but 90 Web Engine + 50 API engine? i.e. ~6 rps per web server and 10*x rps/ API server. Apart from that ~250 servers for DB+cache. I know my comment smells so HN and kudos for the team that they build and scale it. But as an outsider hmmm.
A single SSD can serve over 100k ops/s. Pubsub systems built for the finance industry operate in excess of 60M messages/second [0]. I understand having multiple machines for failover reasons, but I can't help but feel that the majority of scale-out is due to the people who are doing the development not having the skills to properly optimise their systems.
There's an element of "how can they be so inefficient" in this thread, but hardware has come a long way in the last 12 years. I'd bet you could handle this scale with a single DB and 3-4 read replicas with modern hardware for example.
The thing is, we need to kill bacterias in many other places than the human body:
- medical equipment: handles for scalpels, syringes, operation tables... All those things we need to clean again and again.
- passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas.
- research fabs: hazmat suits, protection googles, fum hood protections,... All the stuff you want to make sure don't end up cross contaminate your batch or escape.
It depends on the instrument, you can't autoclave the scope used for cystology for example, they're generally treated with vaporized Hydrogen peroxide. It's very effective, but not as effective as an autoclave.
> passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas
Sterilizing those often increases disease spread. By default, they are covered with a microbial community that can outcompete things that are human pathogens.
If you sterilize it, then you’re either leaving a coating of food (mostly dead skin cells) for pathogens to eat, or a coating of nasty poisons that strip the protective barrier off people’s skins, which undermines their ability to fight off what pathogens they do end up touching.
Out of the body, we have a number of solutions; fire, bleach, uv-c, lye; on your list, only the plastics (personal protection stuff) can't cleaned with these many times around
This thread is full of comments that tl;dr to "oh, they also told us x was safe, but eventually it was not".
The thing is, I'm sure half of those stories came with studies stating how safe all that was. And hacker news like debates where well meaning smart folks defended that point of view because the data was there.
Now I'm much more tolerant to all the tinfoil hats, anti-whatever and crackpots out there. Because even when their arguments make no sense, I get where they come from.
The history of mankind is riddled with those situations.
Same. I've had a lot of game design ideas while driving on the road.
Doesn't work for me if I have music with lyrics on, though. Sometimes podcasts work, because something they say might spark an idea, but songs with lyrics don't work at all.
Storing it lets you feed back that energy at a different time (e.g. night) but requires a lot of expensive hardware (i.e. batteries) + you have to deal with losses involved with storing & retrieving that energy. Consuming it directly doesn’t require batteries and desal plants are cheaper than battery plants + going to be fewer losses.
It’s a stupid comparison though because the point of batteries is to get to net 0 and desal plants don’t help with that. But it’s not a great sign for renewables achieving net 0 at the grid level that a process that is so energy intensive for getting so little water out is a better use of electricity than batteries.
If you live somewhere that desal is the way you get your drinking / irrigation water, it makes sense that rather than storing energy to run desal continuously you can run desal intermittently and store water.
You already need infrastructure to store fresh water for later use, and storing water for later use is relatively low loss (depending on the scale --- outdoor reservoirs can have a lot of loss). There's always a question of capital costs, of course: does it make more sense to have a higher capacity plant with a lower duty cycle where the duty cycle that uses mostly off-peak priced energy, or a lower capacity plant with a higher duty cycle which uses on-peak priced energy much of the time.
Most energy consumers don't care about getting to net 0, they want to pay less for energy, if energy is a large part of their input costs.
Intermittent operations do help get to net 0 though --- if all energy intensive uses could handle intermittent operations, it allows for more intermittent generation. It certainly doesn't get you all the way though; there's lots of uses that won't work well without continuous energy.
If you read the article, this take actually is not true if you have a grid powered fully by renewables. It only makes sense when you have a hybrid grid where baseload is powered by fossil fuels and the arbitrage difference makes desal attractive. Note that a nuclear grid doesn’t have this problem & it has enough capacity to reliably power everything + continuously run desal. To run desal off of solar requires a much larger capacity installed because you have to make up the lack of 24/7 operation with excess capacity whereas something like nuclear can make up the production gap due to smaller excess capacity by running 24/7.
Only because you have to overbuild more solar capacity than you need to with nuclear/hydro/fossil fuel plants which have a more reliable method of operation.
My brother and I used to have it as kids, eventually you figure out shortcuts, and go faster and faster.
But we discovered by mistake (or rather while expressing frustration) that the quickest route ends up being a very sudden lift of the left corner, sending the ball flying above the whole board, and directly into the last hole.
With practice, you get down to one second to get to the left corner, then a second and a half to get it airborne, and for it to fly into the finish line.
I have no doubt the AI will figure it out, and probably even make it faster.