The trouble with solar on the moon is that the day-night cycle is a month long. You have to figure out what to do during the 2 Earth weeks worth of night.
I suppose with a polar base, you could have several solar farms strategically placed so that at least one of them is operational at any given time, but that’s a lot of infrastructure and this is early days.
I am genuinely impressed that this has happened. Wow.
This reminds me of when I had to roll my own dynamic memory allocator for an obscure platform. (Something I never want to do again!) I stuck metadata in the negative space just before the returned pointer like you say. In my case, it was complicated by the fact that you had to worry about the memory alignment of the returned pointer to make sure it works with SIMD and all that. Ugh. But I guess with strings (or at least 8-bit-encoded strings), alignment should not be an issue.
Oh, so you’re talking about text representation in an editor or something along those lines? That’s kind of a separate problem isn’t it?
At the lowest level though, I suppose you still need to consider whether to use null-terminated segments. I think I’d still be going length + data, though I wouldn’t worry about packing down the length representation like with serialization formats. Your code will need to be highly cognizant of the length of strings and managing dynamic memory allocation all over the place, so it’s good to have those lengths quickly accessible at all times.
Better in what sense? I put some thought into this when designing an object serialization library modelled like a binary JSON.
When it got to string-encoding, I had to decide whether to go null-terminated vs length + data? The former is very space-efficient, particularly when you have a huge number of short strings. And let’s face it, that’s a common enough scenario. But it’s nice to have the length beforehand when you are parsing the string out of a stream.
What I did in the end was come up with a variable-length integer encoding that somewhat resembles what they do in UTF-8. It means for strings < 128 chrs, the length is a single byte. Longer than that and more bytes get used as necessary.
Dang, that reads like a commercial for pharmaceuticals.
Know better than to be in Kursk?
Nice. I had been using the analogy that an introvert at a party acts as a sacrificial anode consuming corrosive extroversion until they are utterly exhausted. But I like your take on it!
I’ve been on long flights where I wished there had been designated seating for introverts. But then I considered the implications of packing all the extroverts together in one place nearby and thought better of it.
We need to watermark insert something into our watermark posts that watermark can be traced back to its origin watermark if the AI starts training watermark on it.
I think I could get very nervous coding for the military, depending on what sort of application I was working on. If it were some sort of administrative database, that doesn’t sound so bad. If it were a missile guidance system, on man! A single bug and there goes a village full of civilians. Even something without direct human casualties could be nerve-wracking. Like if it were your code which bricked a billion-dollar military satellite.
Speaking of missile guidance systems, I once met someone who worked a stint for a military contractor. He told me a story about a junior dev who discovered an egregious memory leak in a cruise missile’s software. The senior dev then told him “Yeah, I know about that one. But the memory leak would take an hour before it brings the system down and the missile’s maximum flight time is less than that, so no problem!” I think coding like that would just drive me into some OCD hell.
I have only written potentially life-threatening code once in my life. It had to do with voltage/current regulation in the firmware of a high-powered instrument used by field workers at the company where I work. It was a white-knuckled week I spent on just a single page of code, checking and re-checking it countless times and unit testing it in every conceivable way I could imagine.
Fair enough. I’m just looking for some independent confirmation as this is pretty big news.
Is this official though, or wishful thinking on the part of Cameron?
I don’t really have an answer for you, but can say when recompiling older codebases (some in C and some in C++) using a modern C++ compiler, typing errors are among the most common I have to address. In particular, compilers seem to insist more on explicit casts for type narrowing, which is a good thing. But I don’t know about modern C itself? It wouldn’t surprise me if the language has become stricter.
1st reaction: lmao
2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!
FTA:
By 2030, the country’s goal is to manufacture chips using a 28nm process technology – something TSMC did in 2011.
That’s assuming they really do have no choice but to do all fabrication domestically.
In Putin’s Russia, even the chips defect.
I remember thinking last summer it was a good thing we still had some N95s in the closet. I wore them when I was riding around on my bike and they did help.
I suppose the regolith itself could be used as a heat sink. I don’t know what its thermal properties are like?
But yeah, I imagine heat dissipation is a limiting factor. Everything I’ve read suggests the 1st gen reactors will put out something on the order of 10s of kilowatts, so rather modest by nuclear standards but still plenty for a nascent Moon base I imagine?