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Please fix the integer overflow. Total income over the game was tracked in a 32-bit signed int, so if you earned too much money suddenly the total would turn negative and your stocks would crash.

I never found the bug in that direction. I discovered it the opposite way: when starting out, selling shares (or was it taking loans?) all the shares you can. Get around 30+ million in the hole and continue to lose money. Eventually an arithmetic overflow will occur and then suddenly you'll have a net worth of like $30-40 million and have the money form selling stock to build to your heart's content.

hahah this was it! make so many debt ur suddenly rich haha. kinda like evil corpos do today no? hahahha

"Too big to fail"... ironically a very realistic feature.

"If you owe the bank $100, you have a problem. If you owe the bank 2^32 dollars, the bank has a problem."

Sounds like the famous Gandhi bug in Civilisation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi

edit: turns out this was a fabrication, good thing I read my cited source!

"On September 8, 2020, Sid Meier's autobiography, Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, was released, containing confirmation that the Gandhi software bug was fabricated and a detailed background of the urban legend's formation"

from the above link


As described by the posts, the original used 16-bit signed integers. The fix was to switch to 32-bit.

I'll get some downvotes for this but PhD vs master's degree difference is mostly work experience, an element of workload hazing and snobbery.

Somebody with a masters degree and 5 years of work experience will likely know more than a freshly graduated PhD


Sure, but all we know is that these "13 have a master’s degree (and are currently enroled in Ph.D. studies)". We only know they have at least "2 years of experience in chemistry after their first university-level course in chemistry."

How does that qualify them as "domain experts"? What domain is their expertise? All of chemistry?


I think the breadth vs depth thing applies here as well, the PhD will know more about the topic they're researching of course.


Remember to factor in all the trees that will need to be cut down in order to provide the wood.

Of course, over time we can increase the amount of industrial forest, but that will take 40-50 years.


That's the whole point, to remove trees from the land, so new trees can grow and extract carbon from the atmosphere.


To someone that knows nothing about car SW architecture, that is surprising to me, I would have expected a number of control loops for things like fuel injection, ABS brake control, drive-by-wire, EV battery charge and discharge, etc. each running on their own processor due real-time safety considerations. These I would expect to be different implementations and parameterizations of the same control theory maths.

On top of this comes some functionality to control windshield wipers, lighting, AC, seat heating, etc. Stuff which is probably not top-tier safety critical, but still important. I would expect that stuff to run on one, maybe two processors.

Then comes the infotainment system, running on its own processor.

Sensors are supplying data to all processors through some kind of modernized CAN bus and some sort of publisher/subscriber protocol. Maybe some safety critical sensors have dedicated wiring to the relevant processor.

A lot of variations on this seems possible with the same SW platform, tuned and parameterized properly. The real-time safety critical stuff would need care, but is doable.

Am I completely off the mark? Can you give some examples of where I am going wrong?


I am also not deeply into this stuff. But there is more going on in a car than what you list.

One probably surprising thing is that an LCD dashboard is usually driven by multiple rendering stacks. One is for the complex graphics and eye candy. The other one is responsible for brake and engine warning lights etc. and is considered safety critical. The second one is very basic and often partitioned off by a hypervisor.

A lot of these controllers are running more than just control loops. They are also actively monitoring their system for failures. The number of possible failure conditions and responses is quite large. I had instances where e.g. the engine warning light came on because the ECU detected that the brake light switch was faulty. In another instance, I had powered steering turn itself off during a drive because it had developed a fault. These kinds of behaviors are the results of dedicated algorithms that are watching just about every component of safety critical systems that can possibly be monitored.

All of these software systems are provided by different vendors who develop the aplication software based on either their own stack or operating systems and middleware provided by other upstream suppliers. It don't think it's uncommon for a car to contain multiple copies of 3 or 4 different RTOS stacks. Nobody at the car manufacturers is enforcing uniformity in the software stacks that the suppliers deliver. The manufacturers tend to want finished, self-contained hardware units that they can plug in, configure and turn on.


There is a low-stress driving environment in Italy? Where's that?

Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.


A low amount of low stress people can be found late at night, on highways at negligible traffic hours, on the narrow and meandering country roads that everybody learns to avoid, in half-empty parking lots, and many other obvious uncommon situations.


oops, that might have been me. I kid. I only do that when completely lost trying to get out of an autogrill parking lot (!).


Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.


The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.


So, for those of us down here at the bottom of the karma ladder, after 5000 lines of comments about giving antibiotics to cows, which had nothing to do with the article, there is some actual discussion of the topic.

This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.

Besides the obvious aspects of weight-loss and erectile-dysfunction drugs being more profitable, there is also an issue with imaginary property.

Pharma will not bring a drug to market unless they can own exclusive rights. Since this is a naturally occurring molecule, some tweak will need to be made before the chemical is eligible for a patent.

So until some company can make a custom modification, without disrupting the efficacy, it won't be considered a viable product.


> This inability to bring a product to market is in fact an artifact of the for-profit healthcare system.

If that were the only, or principal, problem then surely we would notice that single payer systems do better by demanding production of other therapies.


How would they "demand" this?

Large pharma is going to develop in the US, where tax dollars fund a significant portion of research, and they get exclusive ownership of the resulting product.

Single payer systems do still display advantages for the drug's users.

Surely you've heard of people in the US buying prescription meds from Canada?


> How would they "demand" this?

By asking a drug company to develop a therapy for a specific condition and offering to pay for it? Couple that with refusing to pay for drugs that do not offer good value for society as a whole.


> The main problem with development of new antibiotics is ... that there is no business case for it.

It sounds like the main problem is a for-profit healthcare system.


Not entirely though. Another problem is that governments only support the big players in drug research. They take the easy simple path.


Yeah, someone else mentioned that as well; if the researched, mass produced and readily available antibiotic is still mostly effective and sells well, spending millions on finding and getting approval for one that would only be used in 1% of cases is not profitable.

Gotta love capitalism.


My preferred solution to this logic problem:

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0327.html


To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.


Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.


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