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Did you spend your entire life in isolation from the rest of human society? Because if not, then you have been influenced throughout your life in a multitude of subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the works of others. In what way, then, are the fruits of your head entirely yours? We're all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Could they.... have someone else do it for them?

CERN doesn't build everything CERN uses:

- FPAGs like this one are generally COTS.

- All the experiments use GPUs which come straight from the vendors.

- Most of the computing isn't even on site, it's distributed around the world in various computing centers. Yes they also overflow into cloud computing but various publicly funded datacenters tend to be cheaper (or effectively "free" because they were allocated to CERN experiments).

Some very specific elements (those in the detector) need to be radiation hard and need O(microsecond) latency. These custom electronics are built all over the world by contributing national labs and universities.

CERN builds a bit.


CERN builds almost next to nothing anymore. Half a century ago they really did do RF cavities, cooling, electronics etc. Not anymore. It is either COTS (DELL, Alterra etc.) or chiefly vendor bidding for some custom parts. Much like what NASA (from Rocketdyne, TRW to Boeing and SpaceX) or copycat ESA (Airbus, DLR, BAE's suppliers) does today.

It is a project bureau. Everything is essentially outsourced, leaving a management shell institute to parade for VIPs. Actually they are close to completely forgetting what they already knew in the hard sciences domain.


You could argue that that's what CERN should be.

Everyone needs to agree on a place to put the LHC, and a lot of the accelerator team is on sight and probably should be payed by CERN, but they have a clear set of KPIs for that: they need to get the machine up to design energy and luminosity and hold it there. The CERN accelerator and civil engineering teams are pretty impressive and have mostly done their job.

The rest of the scientific community can (and does) organize into pseudo-autonomous collaborations that draft proposals for what to do with the real-estate around the collision points and beam dumps. The vast majority of these people don't work for CERN.


Glib, but it wont be cost effective at that small scale

So are we arguing that the article that talks about them using ASICs is just making that up then? Otherwise what's the fourth option?

Who says CERN needs to be cost effective?


On the other hand, if you punch someone in the nose and then loudly declare that your treehouse is the only safe place and everyone else is forbidden from entering because people have been punching people in the nose lately, then that does have a ring of hypocrisy about it doesn't it? The US is not banning its own routers.

For one thing, sandboxing does not prevent apps from using IPC to talk to each other, so Google Play can communicate and thus share data with other apps regardless of the user's settings.

Wine is not a full reimplementation of Windows, so not an analogous situation.

What kind of attack are you anticipating? Surely only a fool or a madman would make such a thing publicly accessible.

Doesn't 'a job I hate for not enough money' describe like 50% or more of the world's workforce?


I hope not. Most people I know seems to get at least some enjoyment and satisfaction from their job. But I live in a first world country and have a white collar job, so my experience may not be globally relevant.


True although prices are also not what you'd consider average in a developed country. Purchasing power parity is important too.


They're not low enough to offset the low wages, though. [0] puts $2/hr at around $15k/yr purchasing power in Chicago which sounds about right.

People live with families in multi-generational homes until they're married, sometimes after. Retirement plans are your kids looking after you.

Prices also aren't lowered across the board - it's mostly housing and anything where labor is a major part of the cost. Cars are similar prices. Groceries, utilities and tech also.

0: https://www.paritydeals.com/ppp-calculator/


You're joking, right? Haven't you heard the stories of people having 'relationships' with their chatbots? Far from getting bored of these things, we're getting hooked on them.


Oh man I'd rather not believe it. Getting hooked on a computer program which has no will, decision, or even say in love matter...


Wonderful! What a cool idea. For anyone interested, you can learn the whole of Hangul in an afternoon; it's cleverly designed to be very logical and has some handy mnemonics: https://korean.stackexchange.com/a/213


These are really cool! Will also add a version of these mnemonics to the Korean guide I have been writing: https://tolearnkorean.com/

Learning the Korean alphabet (Hangul) can be done quite quickly, it's only about as many "letters" as the English alphabet!

Remembering the words is a bit more difficult though, especially if you don't know a similar language. Have been using Anki and my own app for that: https://game.tolearnkorean.com/


That is a deep knowledge that even Korean-natives would not know. I will add this site as a reference to Github. I am glad that I have you as a supporter!


Really? That's how it was taught to me by Korean teachers at University. Even if it isn't daily-useful bit of info, it's such a fundamental component of the written form that I would have expected it to be common knowledge.


It's part of the official origin story that was published alongside the introduction of the script, so students will learn about it at some point long after they're already fluent readers and writers, and then promptly forget about this bit of trivia. (Do you remember that A is an upside-down ox head?) It probably doesn't help that the original explanation covers Middle Korean for an audience literate in Chinese: https://ko.wikisource.org/wiki/%ED%9B%88%EB%AF%BC%EC%A0%95%E...

Meanwhile, "Korean writing is so easy and logical you can learn it in no time at all" has become a meme to the point where I suspect the number of people who've been exposed to the meme and don't remember a single character might be larger than the number of Koreans who've heard about the tongue shape thing and still remember it.

Also, ㄹ is obviously anatomically impossible for human tongues. It does however closely resemble similar letters in some Brahmic scripts. I'm partial to ʼPhags-pa ꡙ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#%CA%BCPhags-p...


Just added that link to the README — it fits perfectly in the "Beauty of Hangul" section.


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