I had a bad Cloudflare experience. So, my card on file got no balance one day (my bad, I forgot to update to a new card), and they just turned off the services.
They somehow managed to charge partial amount (like 80% of the bill), but decided to turn off everything anyway, even the services that could be covered by those 80%. They turned off what they offer for free, and we were unable to change the setting, like instead of their CDN point traffic to an S3 bucket, etc.
When they do that they basically freeze your account. I mean you cannot provide a new card to pay the outstanding bill, or do anything at all actually. You're not welcomed here anymore. Locked out. That's is a terrible way to react to a payment failure after being a paying customer for a few years.
It was hard to reach the support, and it took multiple days until I found someone on Reddit who looked at our ticket and it eventually helped.
PS I had much worse experience with GCP after being a loyal customer of them for like 15 years, so Clouflare is good.
Yeah, we were looking for image CDN services (with resizing etc). Asked CloudFlare and they said $200 a month, everyone else was saying $3-5k per month.
Had a sales call with CloudFlare, they said yes they do flat rate billing and it's only $200 a month for all we can eat image hosting.
We of course called bullshit and third time around (talking to human sales reps) we said, just to get it in writing, we can do X bandwidth/Y images for $200 a month?
...oh errr, no, that would be more like $7k.
Thankfully we smelled bullshit and didn't take sales word for it. We'd have built an integration and started paying only to be bitten a month or two later when they readjusted our pricing. They basically refuse to talk about real pricing until you're already paying $200/m and locked in.
We ended up hosting our own on GKE for $500-$1k/m.
If they want to sell a buttload more cars just make FSD free on all Tesla’s, done.
The possibility of FSD is probably the only reason I paid $10K more for a M3 over a BYD Seal. But free FSD? Who can compete with that. Nobody.
Also, turning FSD into a subscription is total enshittification and I hate it. It would also go a long way to coax back peeved off buyers and convince them not to make their 2nd EV a different brand.
My current sentiment towards Tesla for making FSD subscription-only AFTER I bought my car? Screw you. Go to hell. It’s MY $80k asset. I feel betrayed.
The really annoying thing about Cloudflare is that Workers don’t belong to zones (i.e. editing any worker is an account level permission, either: Read only or Edit), and thus you can’t scope a particular user or API key access to a particular set of workers.
This means you can’t physically set different permissions between prod and dev workers, which is a disaster waiting to happen.
(You can’t just make a second Cloudflare account for Prod, because it won’t let you
bind single sign-on to two different accounts…)
It also means any employee in the company can just open a dev branch, print out the dev deploy key (from the Pipeline), and use it to deploy to prod. It’s currently impossible to block or mitigate.
The Holden Spark appears to just be a re-badge of a Chevrolet Spark, which was made by their South Korean subsidiary, and was discontinued three years ago [0].
I was thinking the other day that there should be wearable bangles for blind people with ultrasonic sensors or something that encode a 360 degree view of the world into vibrations.
If each bangle had 40 or so pixels, you’d get 80 pixels with one on each arm.
Solid state batteries already exist, but they’re unreliable. A few bus companies have been messing around with them over the last few years, even putting them on public roads. One had a huge recall when they started delaminating after a year or so.
They are not as safe, light or as good as advertised. Yet.
After delaminating, some caught fire.
Most wet chemistries (LFP) are safer than current dry chemistries.
Donut claim they have GWhr manufacturing capability. The way they claim that feels very third-person.
That being the case, chances are they just white-labelled someone else’s cell technology and packaged the cells in a box (this is super common, virtually every company in eMobility does this with CATL/LG/Sony cells).
Technically it’s a battery made by Donut, yes, but in that case Donut don’t have the valuable IP so don’t be so quick to jump to buy shares or whatever. Making a battery box is fairly easy.
It would be embarrassing if they jumped the gun with promises from a Chinese oem who was also just white labeling some other Chinese battery. Or giving engineering samples to Donut from a process with a 1% yield hoping they can figure it out in time.
To put in HN terms, if someone sold you a 20TB SDcard knowing your R/W speeds are limited to 100kbps, it's going to take you a while to confirm that the card is actually 20TB. Rough analogy, but there are similar ways you can hide true battery performance.
It's just extremely suspect that a company full of mechanical and electrical engineers, who made (supposed) blow out gains in electrical motors this year, also found the holy grail of (battery) chemical engineering too.
The latency is a little intense from Australia … but surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be.
It was playable.
I wonder if you can use speculative execution to play the game a few frames ahead and then the client picks what to display based on user input, or something like that.
Each frame is 16ms, so you’d have to work ahead 6 frames to conquer the nominal latency of around 100ms, which may actually be 200ms round trip.
(In that case, something like Haskell would be a good candidate to build a DSL to build the decision tree to send to the JS client…)
What you’re describing is called “rollback netcode”. It’s a pretty cool chunk of theory, usually used for fighting games which are extremely sensitive to latency. This explainer has some nice graphic demos
It's a common misconception that this is only used in fighting games. This technique was developed first in Duke Nukem, and then exploited heavily by Carmack in Quake, and subsequently refined and built upon in other AAA FPS games, specifically for the local player movement and shooting.
I don't think it's quite the same. Rollback netcode is like lockstep netcode, where the entire game is simulated locally and only inputs are networked. Since it's still only input being networked, network drops (or slow computers) affect everyone, requiring the simulation to slow down. Not just fighting games, but RTS games would do this. If you've ever played Starcraft/Warcraft 3 where it would freeze when a player disconnected.
With rollback/lockstep, there's no need for a server simulation at all. Most games are not doing that: the client's local simulations are less important than the server's simulation, even missing information (good to prevent wallhacks). Any dropped packets are handled with the server telling the client the exact positions of everything, leading to warping. Dropped packets and latency also only affect the problem player, rather than pausing everyone's simulations.
This is awesome and exactly what it needs, but good luck creating a language that’s “signal driven” enough to encode it and then send all the possible states to the client.
If you were able to make it, it would be kind of a Hail Mary moment for making easy server games without the latency.
So if we understand the internal differences between protons and neutrons, what’s the practical application? Turning neutrons into protons with low energies - alchemy?
Neutrons turn spontaneously into protons, which is called beta decay, and which happens in any nucleus with too many neutrons. This includes the free neutrons, which decay into protons in minutes.
Neutrons and protons differ in their composition, a neutron being made of 2 d quarks + 1 u quark, while a proton is made of 1 d quark + 2 u quarks, much in the same way as a nucleus of tritium differs from a nucleus of helium 3, the former being made of 2 neutrons + 1 proton, while the latter is made of 1 neutron + 2 protons.
For the strong interactions, nucleons (i.e. protons and neutrons) and nuclei are analogous to what atoms and molecules are for the electromagnetic interaction.
The strong interaction attempts to neutralize the hadronic charge (a.k.a. color charge), while the electromagnetic interaction attempts to neutralize the electric charge.
To a first approximation, the hadronic charge is neutralized in nucleons and the electric charge is neutralized in atoms.
However, because of the movement of the quarks inside of a nucleon and of the electrons inside an atom, the neutralization of the charge is imperfect and there remain some residual forces of attraction, respectively strong and electromagnetic, which bind the nucleons into nuclei and the atoms into molecules. Because they are just residual forces, the binding forces between nucleons in a nucleus are much weaker than those between quarks in a nucleon, similarly to how the binding forces between atoms in a molecule are much weaker than those that bind most of the electrons to the nucleus in an atom.
Do you think it’s possible that the periodic table is too simple of an abstraction and that quarkish elements exist which cannot be aligned on the table but perhaps are never seen in nature or extremely rare?
The so-called elementary particles, which are divided into leptons and hadrons, are all "achromatic", i.e. the color charge is null for the whole particle.
While the leptons may be considered as truly elementary, at least in the current state of knowledge, the hadrons are composed of quarks, and the quarks have non-null color charge.
At present there is no hope of being able to produce any particle where quarks are separated, i.e. any particle with non-null total color charge, because when the distance between quarks increases the attraction force between them also increases (like they would have been bound by an elastic spring), until the force becomes high enough so that a pair quark-antiquark is generated, so the original hadron may split into 2 hadrons, both of which have null color charge and no free quarks can be produced (e.g. the quark initially being pulled apart is split away, but it takes with it the antiquark newly generated, forming a meson particle instead of a free quark).
Attempting to separate the quarks of a hadron has a result somewhat analogous to the attempt of separating the north and south poles of a magnet, when breaking the magnet produces a new pair of north and south poles, so you get 2 new magnets, each with a north and a south pole, instead of getting a north pole separated from the south pole.
Therefore, because neither free quarks nor combinations of quarks where the color charge is non-null can be produced, no "quarkish" elements can exist.
Nevertheless, while the normal chemical elements have nuclei composed of nucleons, i.e. protons and neutrons, it is possible to have nuclei composed of other hadrons, i.e. nuclei where besides protons or neutrons there are one or more of the so-called hyperons, which have a similar structure to nucleons, but which contain some heavier quarks than the u and d quarks that compose nucleons (there are also extremely short-lived heavier hadrons that contain more than 3 quarks, as long as the total color charge is null).
However, all hyperons have an extremely short half-life, much shorter than a second, so if such an exotic element containing hyperons in its nucleus were formed due to a very unlikely sequence of collisions between particles with very high energy, it would decay extremely quickly.
At the huge scale of the Universe, even extremely unlikely events may happen somewhere, so perhaps a few atoms of such hyperonic chemical elements have a transient existence somewhere (during a small fraction of a second), but their quantity must be truly negligible.
While a few atoms of such elements can be produced artificially or naturally, there is no chance to ever produce a quantity great enough to make a piece of material that you could see with your eyes, much less take in your hand (ignoring the extreme radioactivity of such an element, which would destroy anything close to it).
The only possible exception might be in extremely high gravitational fields, i.e. inside neutron stars and black holes, where there may be a chance that such hyperons could become stable due to the extreme pressure, but we do not really know the possible structure of matter in such conditions and in any case at such pressures there would be no chemical elements in the normal sense, as there would be no free electrons.
