It’s interesting though that composite PAL/NTSC (especially NTSC) has a massive effect on the picture, owed to the fact that the color carrier was embedded into the luminance spectrum, so a re-digitized PAL/NTSC signal will still look very different from a digital-output-first signal, or a re-digitized VGA or component signal.
I was also thinking about that, but that miscounting story is so old, notable, and well-known by now, that it's basically popular knowledge around the world. So I hope that the BBC, but especially also the Japanese government that the BBC was reporting on, are aware of that issue and have, by now, accounted for it.
Unlikely, as the quote about >230k misattributed people comes from the article itself. So even without taking into account that I generally expect more from the BBC, the author of this article seems to be at least aware of the fact.
Be it as it may, and even if that's an AI-generated article (which I don't think so), the point is that the article is reporting on the Japanese government:
Japanese authorities have called the trend an "existential crisis" with Prime Minister Sanae Takichi describing the decline as a "quiet emergency".
And my hope that they have taken that past mistake into account seems to have some ground, given that the 100k total number that the current figures cite is by itself well below the then-figure of 230k misattributions.
Did you actually visit Japanese families, or is that assessment based on what you saw in convenience stores and similar? "Convenience" food and western style food has somewhat increased, but on average Japanese cuisine is very healthy.
I also agree on the stressful work part, but don't quite understand what you mean with "lots of commute on public transit". If you mean the Tokyo-style rush hour traffic where people are literally shoved into the train car, of course that's stressful. But at any other time apart from that, Japan's public transit is enormously soothing and stress-free, both because of culture and transit technology.
Yeah, I'd agree. I think that the Japan's public transportation, even in Tokyo, wasn't at all stressful. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had to be shoved in, but that was easy enough to avoid and even at the times when it was a little crowded for my tastes, it was still a great experience.
Day in day out, everyday in public transit, just sheer noise would not add any lifetime. We stayed at our Japanese friend’s house so we did have exposure to their everyday life. The point I want to make is that many things contribute to a long life, and of course Japanese people are doing most of those things right, regardless of what that might be. I remember watching a documentary about Okinawa people. One thing they mentioned was laughter.
I grew up in Germany. For the past 13 years, I've lived in the US. Oh, how I wish I could go back to the "day in day out, everyday in public transit" instead of this car hell. In Germany, just like in Japan, I didn't feel that it was noisy at all. It was clean and quiet and soothing, I could just sit there and relax. Everyone takes public transport, across all income ranges.
As a result, public life itself is more quiet and soothing, because you are not constantly surrounded by cars, even if just sitting outside a café.
Nah. Reduce is less performant and less readable than a regular loop. In my anecdotal experience, only people who want to appear smart and minimize the number of characters prefer reduce.
Reduce definitely does not reduce character count. It's the loop-hacking that does that.
However, I agree it might be less performant, and it's a certain kind of thinking that isn't quickly grokked (and doesn't have to be). I deliberately tried to write my story about the interview so as to make it sound like there's positives and negatives to both positions expressed. _I_ have a preference for that functional style, but I know it's not for everyone. That's totally fine.
I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while.
Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.
You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.
In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
That’s ubiquitous in slightly lower level programming (pretty much every non-small C program probably does it in some way or other), but the problem with doing that in this database scenario is that you might run into atomicity issues.
To toggle a flag, you have to read the column, modify it, and write it back. If someone else does that to another flag at the same time, there’s a race that one of you might win, at the expense of the other flag’s new value.
Unless you employ a lock that would otherwise not be necessary.
Gödel effectively says ZFC must be incomplete, otherwise it would not be sound, but does that stop you from listing all mathematical propositions it can generate in some well-defined order?
That's right. You could list all those propositions and search for proofs of them. In fact this is very similar to Hilbert's very program to which Godel's First Incompleteness Thm was a response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_program).
Godel showed that there are true statements that cannot be proven, and also that among the unprovable statements from within the system is the consistency of the system itself.
As I understand, mathematicians are still trying to figure out how much this matters. One of the best examples of its mattering is may be the Continuum Hypothesis: CH is consistent with ZFC, and ~CH (not CH) is also consistent with ZFC. In other words, you have enough flexibility in constructing your ZFC world such that in some ZFC-consistent worlds CH is true, and in others CH is false.
Litt's statement is not wrong; it's just that what he wrote sounds so much like Hilbert's program, that I'm surprised we didn't get some even minor comment on what kinds of truths we could reach if we embarked on such an effort.
People always bring up the Continuum Hypothesis as though it has something to do with Gödel's incompleteness theorems, but it doesn't really. The Continuum Hypothesis being neither proven nor disproven by some particular axioms is a similar phenomenon as that the group axioms neither prove nor disprove commutativity, the ordered field axioms neither prove nor disprove the existence of a square root of 2, etc. There's no particular reason to expect any particular formal system to be complete, sans some demonstration that is.
Gödelian incompleteness is the specific kind established by Gödel's proof, where theory T can't prove Con(T) without being inconsistent. But the inability of ZFC to consistently decide the Continuum Hypothesis is established in a completely different manner, with the Continuum Hypothesis not consistently decided by ZFC + Con(ZFC) either, or any such thing.
> There's no particular reason to expect any particular formal system to be complete, sans some demonstration that is.
Well, Godel's First Incompleteness Thm says that any consistent, effectively axiomatized theory that is strong enough to represent basic arithmetic must be incomplete. So there cannot exist a demonstration of completeness for any such system. ZFC is such a system/theory.
(And yes, of course some formal theories are complete and can be demonstrated to be complete, like Presburger arithmetic).
> Gödelian incompleteness is the specific kind established by Gödel's proof, where theory T can't prove Con(T) without being inconsistent....
That's the Second Incompleteness Thm.
But CH is an example of a (an important; or believed to be important) mathematical statement that cannot be proven / refuted from within ZFC. So it is an example of a statement to which the First Incompleteness Thm applies.
You're right that Incompletness #1 does not prove CH is undecidable; (assuming ZFC is consistent) it proves that undecidable sentences must exist. CH is one of those sentences.
>...is a similar phenomenon as that the group axioms neither prove nor disprove commutativity
I haven't done a course in abstract algebra (though I have studied Incompleteness), but the brief research I just did suggests that there is a meaningful difference in ZFC and the ordinary group axioms. The latter are not sufficiently axiomatized to represent arithmetic, so Godel's thms don't apply. ZFC is sufficiently axiomatized to represent arithmetic (and much more).
The ordinary group axioms are so weak that they can describe many different structures; they also cannot represent arithmetic. So the ordinary group axioms are incomplete, but they are not Godel Incomplete.
Yes, only dirty (i.e. modified) pages profit from getting paged out to swap.
But while I don't have any hard data, I imagine that depending on the workload, there can be a punch of pages that are read during initialization, or a one-off workload, and never being read or freed up afterwards.
Just try activating a swap file, and see if it gets any usage, despite memory pressure being low.
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