When you buy a subscription to Reddit you get free coins you can use to give out these awards, so at least some of the time the award didn't actually cost anything above what they were already paying for their subscription.
bitcrafter
joined 2 years ago
There's essentially an open standard for streaming video so it's not like the old days where you needed to download a platform-specific component to watch streaming video. I use Linux as my primary environment and I can't even remember the last time I had trouble with it; certainly not for several years at least. I've used Netflix, DisneyPlus, Amazon, Paramount+, and probably others.
Just as a heads up, though, if you are using Firefox then the first time you go to any of these sites it will prompt you as to whether you are fine with enable support for DRM video, and you need to click "Yes". This is a one-time thing, though. (It does this because if you are an open source purist then you might not want to do this so it likes to get your permission first; most browsers just assume that you don't care and enable it by default.)
Nah, at this point his only option is to cancel Starship and redirect all of its development funding into building a time machine so that he can dramatically increase the amount of weed he was smoking at the time he got the brilliant idea to buy Twitter so that his brain is made incapable of actually following through with it.
Agreed. I might be an information technology aficionado, but I couldn't care less about how my car works as long as it does its job, so it'd be a bit hypocritical of me to judge the person I pay to fix my car for not being knowledgeable about computers.
this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading
I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the "not stressed" end, so I've gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.
That isn't the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn't working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the "not stressed" end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren't saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.
It can be nice not to have to worry about types when you are doing exploratory programming. For example, I once started by writing a function that did a computation and then returned another function constructed from the result of that computation, and then realized that I'd actually like to attach some metadata to that function. In Python, that is super-easy: you just add a new attribute to the object and you're done. At some point I wanted to tag it with an attribute that was itself a function, and that was easy as well. Eventually I got to the point where I was tagging it with a zillion functions and realized that I was being silly and replaced it with a proper class with methods. If I'd known in advance that this is where I was going to end up then I would have started with the class, but it was only after messing around that I got a solid notion of what the shape of the thing I was constructing should be, and it helped that I was able to mess around with things in arbitrary ways until I figured out what I really wanted without the language getting in my way at intermediate points.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that this is the only or best way to program, just that there are situations where having this level of flexibility available in the language can be incredibly freeing.
And don't get me wrong, I also love types for two reasons. First, because they let you create a machine-checked specification of what your code is doing, and the more powerful the type system, the better you can do at capturing important invariants in the types. Second, because powerful type systems enable their own kind of exploratory programming where instead of experimenting with code until it does what you want you instead experiment with the types until they express how you want your program to behave, after which writing the implementation is often very straightforward because it is so heavily constrained by the types (and the compiler will tell you when you screwed up).
There are lots of possible choices of universal gate sets. However, if you are starting with Clifford gates, then it turns out to be sufficient for you to add support for a T=sqrt(S) gate; essentially T and H have the property that these two gates by themselves are sufficient to efficiently approximate any 1-qubit gate arbitrarily well (by combining these discrete rotations about the two different angles in the Bloch sphere in specific ways via the Solovay-Kitaev Theorem), and being able to perform an arbitrary 1-qubit gate and having access to an entangling 2-qubit gate (CNOT) lets you extend this to an efficient arbitrarily good approximation of any gate on an any number of qubits.
The home page for it is here. It's based on a result known as the Gottesman-Knill Theorem which shows (constructively, i.e. providing a concrete algorithm) that quantum circuits consisting solely of Clifford gates (that is, CNOT + Hadamard + Phase, hence CHP) can be simulated efficiently classically.
Or, alternatively, since they are already making the (reasonable) compromise of working with a restricted gate set, they could expand their gate set to the Clifford group and then use the CHP algorithm to scale to much larger systems.
Oh, interesting, I actually had a stellar experience with their desktop but an absolutely terrible subsequent experience with their laptop (which at least I was able to return with no problem) and I was wondering why there was such a disparity, and this may explain it.
System76 hasn't been manufacturing the laptops that it currently sells?
I don't know, this story is very reminiscent of the kind of thing my elementary school age cousin writes, but with a greater mastery of vocabulary and grammar. It's not in any way great, bit it's charming in it's own way when held against that (low) standard.