That's the core of the author's argument. Protobuffers optimize for something besides usability and maintainability, because Google cares more about incremental performance than developer-friendliness. Which is a fine thing to care about at Google's scale, but maybe others' calculations should be different.
That doesn't seem like the author's main argument - they say: "Protobuffers were obviously built by amateurs because they offer bad solutions to widely-known and already-solved problems."
note that you could succinctly put in one sentence something that the author took a whole page. I feel there is something jib about compression to be said, but I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
For most random things, getting there and back aside, find the item in a huge store is a pain in the ass. On amazon, it's literally a 10s search query.
Also, for more common items such as shampoo or litter, grocery stores have literally 30 different types of them, which can make it hard to choose. By having ratings, reviews, information and q&a right there, it makes choosing the right product much easier.
There is a difference between public nature of tweet where anyone can go and read it vs public nature of email where you would need to forward it to everyone (or one of them would have to tweet it which is back to what GP said).
Not sure about Android phones with "Ok Google" but on iOS, all of Siri's voice processing is on the device. As opposed to Amazon Alexa which sends the data to the cloud for processing.
Surely you can, we do it all the time. That's why we have subsidies on American sugar and tariffs on Chinese steel and higher taxes on cigarettes than on milk and... We have entire government agencies who spend all day thinking up ways to affect market forces.
The EmDrive claimed to violate conservation of momentum. To extend your analogy, instead of shining the light out the back of your spacecraft, you shined it inside the spacecraft at the back wall. It bounced around and came out as net positive thrust. Hence the extreme skepticism.
Ok, if you shine it on the back wall one might expect the radiation pressure balances out and there is zero net force.
What happens if you used a waveguide to turn it around 180 degrees to the front wall? Photons have no mass, so turning it in a waveguide would result in zero force on the waveguide right?
You can absorb light and emit new photons, but the only way to bend their trajectory is bending spacetime with gravity. Needless to say, the EMDrive doesn’t contain a black hole.
Yeah that's not too big of a change. Medical expenses, at least measured by national health expenditure per capita, have grown about 17% since then [1]. An additional 17% on $400 would be ~ $468. That number could be enough to account for some of the difference. Of course, medical expenses are by no means the only type of emergency expense, and what you've said about inflation as a whole is still true.
Why does it seem unlikely? I don't know the shape of the distribution but it doesn't seem implausible to me that a 7.5% change in the threshold amount would correspond to a 10% change in the population quantile.
Govt inflation numbers represent a portfolio consisting of all commodities in equal quantity. But if you hold a portfolio of iPhones, Toyotas, and etc (assuming they are non depreciating assets) that number would double very easily.
Government inflation numbers don't work like that at all. They are based on the Consumer Price Index, which uses a market basket of consumer goods and services.
Yes, but all of them being commodities (what I said) is not the same as inflation only being accurate when someone purchases every commodity available in the marketplace (what you said).
Inflation of a portfolio of iPhones is completely different than inflation that an average American pays due to cost of living changes in the economy. You're cherrypicking a hypothetical scenario that doesn't apply at all to the example at hand, which is the average person's ability to pay for emergencies that arise related to living expenses.
Which includes blackbox modifiers like "hedonic adjustments". So if it costs you $800 to get a cast for your broken leg today as opposed to $400 a few years ago, but they claim the quality of the cast is twice as good, then they say there was 0% inflation as you are getting the same "value" even though its costing you twice as much to fix the same problem.
