Kepler’s laws should still provide a pretty good estimate, at least until black holes get much closer. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation, and looks like they’ll be roughly 14k astronomical units, or 0.22 light years apart.
1604. One could say we are overdue. I’m not sure about dust or other obstacles blocking it, but based on brightness alone a supernova in our galaxy should be visible with naked eye.
It would be. Which is why any pair of orbiting bodies will eventually collide.
It’s just that for black holes this effect is insignificant (a merger would take much longer than the age of the Universe) until they get close to each other, much closer than 1 parsec.
The potential to detect Supermassive Black Hole mergers is one of the reasons I'm really excited about the LISA project [1], and hope it actually gets funded and doesn't delay too much.
In quantum mechanics, bosons are (often massless) force carrying particles like photons or gluons. Fermions are the massive matter particles, such as electrons or quarks.
So, while I’ve never heard this saying before, I assume it’s meaning is that massless particles like photons are best for carrying information around (rather than electrons we are using in circuits today), while the electrons are best for carrying state, like in a switch.
Note, that in networking we have already made that transition by using fiber optics, rather than electric wire to transfer information over longer distances.
That’s a pretty pedantic interpretation of the word application. In the context of software owned by most teams, that they may decide to run on single vs multiple hosts most applications are absolutely stateless. Most applications outsource state to another system, like a relational database, a managed no-SQL store, or an object store.
And so no, most teams don’t need to worry about the hard problems you bring up.
If you have the ability to spin up a new machine when the old one fails, and deploy your app onto it in one minute, it’s not a big leap to also run your app on two machines and avoid that downtime altogether.
The absolute performance isn't very important for the stock price. What matters way more is the performance vis-a-vis market expectations. So in this case, the market was expecting something better (or there was some other guidance in the report that spooked investors).
This is a good example of the type of challenges you face as an author of widely used library. I can see a lot of scenarios where an optimization like this would bring benefits. But there are also many where it would hurt performance (not to mention memory usage), including most "collect once read many times" use-cases.
But I think the real thing for me is that this violates the principle of least surprise. If I wanted the type of memory reuse / lazy transformation behavior this optimization introduces, I would be looking at working with an iterator with a bunch of functinoal transforms. And if I'm calling .collect() it's because I want to convert the iterator into a data structure optimized for reads.
But I can also see how others would land on the other end, and hence the challenges for the library authors.
I think Apple is fully capable of getting there too. They have a high enough price point, and a loyal enough customer base, that even if getting there required additional hardware or shipping with more RAM by default, they could make it work.
The story of what happened in the cockpit during the failure is just as interesting! The captain made a number of right decisions in a very challenging situation that allowed the plane to safely land.
I think one of the most desirable and under-appreciated goals of schema languages and serialization formats is safety. These tools are typically used in places that deal with untrusted inputs, and features and design choices can go a long way in either exposing or shielding developers from potential safety bugs.
My read of Cap’n’Proto didn’t make it sound that safety was the highest priority. At least not above performance.
I only know that from Planet Earth documentary, which was such a great show!