Sugarcane was due to cheaper sources. Pineapples I think was due to economic factors as well. Basically, one of the most isolated population centers in the world adds a lot of cost due to shipping things in and out and being a US state imposes means that labor isn't going to be dirt cheap.

Also Jones Act: ships from Asia can't pick up cargo from Hawaii on the way and drop it in mainland US. This means that shipping between Hawaii and mainland is much more expensive then it needs to be.

The Jones act has to be one of the most destructive stupid laws that we have.

Not really, it makes sense from point of view if you want to have an empire, you need a merchant marine to move things around by sea on ships you control.

Jones Act doesn't accomplish what it's supposed to do but that's mainly because it was weak protectionism. Many other countries just shovel government money into their shipbuilding at rates that would probably make many just as angry.

I can believe it would make lots of people just as angry. But I really doubt policies like the ones from China or South Korea have an impact near as large as the US's.

It doesn't help that the US is full of non-contiguous territory separated by deep ocean. Other countries have similar laws but aren't as impacted.

Energy consumption wasn't really a concern when the idiom developed. I don't think people really cared about the energy consumption of instructions until well into the x86-64 era.

Not sure why this is being downvoted, but it’s absolutely correct. For most of the history of computing, people were happy that it worked at all. Being concerned about energy efficiency is a recent byproduct of mobile devices and, even more recently, giant amounts of compute adding up to gigawatts.

This take is anachronistic. Thermal issues were evident by the late 1990's. Of course by that time not many were working in x86 assembly but embedded systems sure cared about power.

People forget embedded predated mobile by a good 20 years.

Nintendo's original Game Boy lasted 40 hours on two AA batteries in 1989. You can't reach those numbers without engineering for energy efficiency.

How does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.

Training ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both.

Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.

The biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap

That's wildly inaccurate. The cost in enormous both on the inference side and the mining side and has short lifetimes if you want SOTA.

Various intelligence agencies are willing to pay 2-3M for a working exploit for iphone or android. I think that they would be fine with paying 50M for a userbase that has a high population of devs, admins, etc. Being able to backdoor someone like this in the right organization down the line is probably worth 50M.

> Various intelligence agencies are willing to pay 2-3M for a working exploit for iphone or android.

Little Snitch is not a working exploit for iPhone or Android.

> I think that they would be fine with paying 50M for a userbase that has a high population of devs, admins, etc. Being able to backdoor someone like this in the right organization down the line is probably worth 50M.

No, sorry, this is absurd. A ton of products have a high population of devs, admins, etc. These are not getting acquired by intelligence agencies. Give me one example. There's nothing inherently valuable about this population.

Who is a Little Snitch customer worth 50M to attack? Name them.

Personally, I'm shocked it went from submission to publication 5 weeks! I didn't think that was possible.

A bunch of those big breakers require two people. One person in a flash suit and another with a 2m long pole around the first person. That way if an arc flash happens, the second person can yank the first person to safety without also getting hurt.

Why don't they use the pole to flip the breaker from 2m away?

Ruins the fun and interrupts instilling respect deep into the bones of interns.

Allegedly

While on "work experience" from high school I was put on washing power lines coming straight out of the local power station near the ocean - lots of salt buildups to clear.

Same deal, flashover suits and occasional arcs .. and much laughter from the ground operators who drifted the work bucket close.

The metal chopsticks are pretty much only get used in Korea. The shape and material of the chopsticks varies by country so you can make a good guess as to where someone is from based on which chopsticks they use.

I think the deeper question is whose standards and why should we consider them the standard?

Some of them of course are invented whole cloth. British Received Pronunciation was invented and needs to be learned and is the standard of the upper class. It's neither right nor wrong but it's there to differentiate.

RP isn't really a thing any more, except among some of the older aristocracy and Tories and a few legacy BBC Radio shows.

Most people have settled into Estuary, which has split into a high/corporate/media Estuary-tinged dialect, and low street Estuary. The BBC has its own special neutral version.

Fifty years ago the difference between upper class/BBC/RP and street English was almost hilariously obvious. Watch a BBC show from the 50s and 60s - even something like Dr Who - and everyone is speaking a unique RP dialect that doesn't exist any more.

Idk. I’m in my early 40s, not a Tory, not aristocracy, and I speak with RP, as do many others I know. Maybe a product of schooling, but I wouldn’t say it’s dead.

In media, you’re quite correct - it has become rare bar presenters who are now in their 80s or older.

You say “needs to be learned” but that’s no more so than any other accent.

We just grow up with it because it’s how our parents and the parents of our friends speak.

If you want to change your accent you can, of course, get elocution lessons but most Brits do not. We just have a large variety of accents of which RP is one.

Not sure why this is controversial. RP is just an accent like any other now.

I didn’t have lessons for it and I don’t know anyone else that did. It’s just how we speak.

"Received Pronunciation was invented"

How so?

It's not the natural evolution of a regional dialect coming to prominence but rather the conscious consensus of a geographically distributed social stratum.

Interestingly, the sociolinguistic literature shows that such a consensus is strongest among an aspirationally upward-mobile social group rather than the already social elite. In other words: The aspirational middle class make a big effort to speak how they think the upper class speak in hopes of joining them one day.

That's the thing with standards: there are so many of them to choose from.

You don't have to follow them, but you do you should be ready to accept the consequences of your choice.

There are lots of standards, but some contradict one-another.

In the area I grew up in, caring too much about useless aesthetic stuff like “elbows on the table” would have a social cost.

Maybe some of them may have had a purpose. With this one, if you were used to putting your elbows on the table and there were more people around, you just took up too much space and made it unpleasant for others around you.

It's pretty much just cosmic rays. I suppose you can sort of create them by using an accelerator to generate a beam of the appropriate particles that'll hit a target or decay and become a beam of muons outside the accelerator but that's not really all that practical. Incidentally, this is how neutrino beams are generated.

There are directives and packages that affect correctness. E.g. the embed package allows you to initialize a variable using a directive. E.g. //go:embed foo.json followed by var jsonFile string initializes the jsonFile variable with the contents of the foo.json file. A compiler or tooling that doesn't support this results in broken code.