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That was actually a bad year, as that "free" $21 million represented a loss of about $30 million. $1.17 billion on Jan 1st 2016 is equivalent to $1.22 billion a year later due to inflation. So they would have had to generate $50 million just to break even in actual buying power terms.

Is that based on not investing that $21 million or am I misreading something about how that money was or wasn't used?

No, they're saying that inflation that year was 4.3% ($1.22B / $1.17B¹) If you're only making 1.8% in investing it, you're not beating inflation, and your money, though nominally growing (number is going up), is decreasing in its real value (amount of stuff the money gets is going down).

(¹I think this is too high; BLS thinks inflation over 2016 was 2.5%. But their core point still stands: interest earned was below inflation.)


I used the CPI

All cars have required "chips" since OBDII was mandated in the early 90s. That ship has sailed around the world, returned to port, and sailed again.

Amongst other bodily excretions

Virtually all speedos read fast. The federal standards have a fairly high margin for being allowed to read high, and a zero margin for reading low. Thus speedos are more or less universally calibrated to read at least 5% high.


Except the remote house keeper can be in some super locl 3rd world country where the prevailing wage is a few bucks a day.


That's a pretty profoundly dystopian concept. If the only way this technology is viable is as a way to exploit labor at a distance - count me out.


That's not necessarily exploitation: a worker in another country paid a far lower rate in absolute terms may in local terms be earning good money.

If that job is "monitor the remote robots from a desk" then that's likely also a fairly good job.


The person in a third world country is not a slave, they're doing the job for a few bucks a day because it's still better than other options available to them.


What is the difference between being a teleoperator in India for a californian family robot, and being a software dev for a company selling SaaS products to the US market?


There's an indie sci-fi film called Sleep Dealer about this. It's not bad.


We're living in a dystopia.


This is the reality now. It is the entire point of globalized labor.

Global trade right now is literally about exploiting labor at a distance.

Our shit didn't get made in China because they were inherently better at making shit!


Low duty cycle. If one human can drive 20 robots, because most of them are sitting still most of The time, it starts to make sense. Vs a maid or butler that can obviously only really work one home at a time.


How is the duty cycle here relevant? The maid can only work one home at a time regardless of whether it's manually or via remote robot.

85 year old movies are not exactly the cutting edge of pop culture.


In ye olden days, TV stations broadcasted again what they already had once.

We called this phenomenon the "rerun".

I would place the poster of the comment that I am replying as a 38+, so deep into Dumbo rerun territory but, perhaps I am wrong and it was a 21yo zoomer growing up in a compound.


Isn’t that schema actually the opposite of poor for SQLite, since it stores everything as text internally?


It employs "flexible typing", which does not mean "everything is text". What I am doing is writing fully denormalised text (strings) in most fields, with column type declared as TEXT.

This is deliberate, to emulate "whoops, if I screw up my types, how bad does it get?".

However, when written into the DB with some care, each value is stored per the following storage classes:

https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html

Quoting...

```

Each value stored in an SQLite database (or manipulated by the database engine) has one of the following storage classes:

    NULL. The value is a NULL value.

    INTEGER. The value is a signed integer, stored in 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 bytes depending on the magnitude of the value.

    REAL. The value is a floating point value, stored as an 8-byte IEEE floating point number.

    TEXT. The value is a text string, stored using the database encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16BE or UTF-16LE).

    BLOB. The value is a blob of data, stored exactly as it was input.
A storage class is more general than a datatype. The INTEGER storage class, for example, includes 7 different integer datatypes of different lengths. This makes a difference on disk. But as soon as INTEGER values are read off of disk and into memory for processing, they are converted to the most general datatype (8-byte signed integer). And so for the most part, "storage class" is indistinguishable from "datatype" and the two terms can be used interchangeably.

Any column in an SQLite version 3 database, except an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY column, may be used to store a value of any storage class.

All values in SQL statements, whether they are literals embedded in SQL statement text or parameters bound to precompiled SQL statements have an implicit storage class. Under circumstances described below, the database engine may convert values between numeric storage classes (INTEGER and REAL) and TEXT during query execution.

```

(edits: formatting, clarify what I'm doing v/s what SQLite does)


Personally I swing both ways. I love to just with, say, a basic sawtooth wave (honestly that, a little filter, and a basic ADSR gets you To many of the most iconic sounds of the 70s), but I do like presets so when I land in something really special I can snapshot it.


There are only so many OS kernels to be written. Nothing else is really low-level these days.


I don't think I agree with that. To me, how low-level something is makes more sense sense as a spectrum rather than a binary, and there are certainly other things that I'd consider to fit into the lower end than just OS kernels. Over the summer I contracted for a company making satellites working on software they had that facilitated interactions between various software and hardware components that had to run a 20 ms loop for processing everything, with delays cascading throughout those other components and causing systemic issues. This was all in userland (the OS stuff was managed by another team), but a tracing garbage collector would have been pretty much a non-starter due to the potential to miss the expected timing of a loop iteration.

You could handwave this objection by saying it's not "really" low level or that "nothing" was an exaggeration, but at that point it seems like we'd be back to the original question of why it's wrong to say that this isn't a primary use case for C++.


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