LEDs are diodes (Light emitting diode). Certainly this was a cost saving measure, but it's not a bad assumption that the LED wouldn't allow reverse current flow.
Interestingly GLM4.7-flash has no problem talking about it.
Here's the output when I asked about it.
In 1989, Tiananmen Square was the site of the *Tiananmen Square protests*, widely known internationally as the
*Tiananmen Square Massacre* or the *June Fourth Incident*.
Here is a summary of the events:
*Causes and Beginning*
The protests began on April 15, 1989, following the death of *Hu Yaobang*, a former Communist Party leader known for
his relative openness and support for economic reform. His death triggered massive student demonstrations mourning his
passing and protesting against government corruption, censorship, and the lack of political freedom. The movement
quickly grew to include workers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens.
*Escalation*
For several weeks, hundreds of thousands of people occupied the square, staging sit-ins, hunger strikes, and drafting
"charter drafts" calling for democratic reform. On May 13, hundreds of students began a hunger strike in the square.
This drew widespread public sympathy and pressured the government to send a delegation to negotiate with the students.
*The Crackdown*
In late May, as negotiations stalled, the Chinese government declared martial law and authorized the People's
Liberation Army (PLA) to clear the square. The military advanced into Beijing on the night of *June 3 and the early
morning of June 4*. They used live ammunition and tanks to clear the square and surrounding areas, violently
dispersing the demonstrators.
*Casualties*
There is significant disagreement over the death toll. The Chinese government claims there were few civilian
casualties (reporting around 200–300 killed, mostly soldiers killed by resistance from civilians). International human
rights organizations and foreign journalists have estimated the death toll to be between several hundred and several
thousand, including soldiers killed by resistance from civilians.
*Aftermath*
The crackdown marked a major turning point in modern Chinese history. The leadership of *Zhao Ziyang* (who favored
negotiating with the students) was removed and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. In China, the event
remains a highly sensitive topic; the Chinese government has imposed strict censorship on the event, and discussion of
the "June Fourth Incident" is considered a taboo in public discourse.
*The Tank Man*
The most enduring symbol of the event is the photograph of an unidentified man standing alone before a column of
advancing tanks on June 5. This figure became a global icon of nonviolent resistance.
Very bizarre. Clang pretty readily sees that it can use SIMD instructions and really optimizes this while GCC really struggles to want to use it. I've even seen strange output where GCC will emit SIMD instructions for the first loop and then falls back on regular x86 compares for the rest.
Edit: Actually, it looks like for large enough array sizes, it flips. At 256 elements, gcc ends up emitting simd instructions while clang does pure x86. So strange.
It seems like your experience with linux may have actually sabotaged your ability to point and click install things.
KDE has the "discover" app which does what it looks like you want (including installing intellij with 1 click). [1]
There's also bazaar for gnome which offers similar things [2]
Ubuntu also offers the "snap store" which similarly offers a 1 click install of apps. [3]
The mistake you made is going directly to the app distributors for installation. Because there's no unified linux it's impossible for app distributors to offer a single way to install their apps. They can't count on your PC having anything. That's why intellij distributes with a tar.
This, however, is typical in linux. Using a package manager is how you do things in standard linux, those package managers have just been typically ran by the command line.
Wayland was turned on by default in ubuntu 21.04 xorg (the x11 server) was removed from ubuntu in ubuntu 25.10.
Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out.
There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.
I've seen some devs prefer that route of programming and it very often results in performance problems.
An undiscussed issue with "everything is a string or dictionary" is that strings and dictionaries both consume very large amounts of memory. Particularly in a language like java.
A java object which has 2 fields in it with an int and a long will spend most of it's memory on the object header. You end up with an object that has 12 bytes of payload and 32bytes of object header (Valhala can't come soon enough). But when you talk about a HashMap in java, just the map structure itself ends up blowing way past that. The added overhead of 2 Strings for each of the fields plus a Java `Long` and `Integer` just decimates that memory requirement. It's even worse if someone decided to represent those numbers as Strings (I've seen that).
Beyond that, every single lookup is costly, you have to hash the key to lookup the value and you have to compare the key.
In a POJO, when you say "foo.bar", it's just an offset in memory that Java ends up doing. It's absurdly faster.
Please, for the love of god, if you know the structure of the data you are working with it, turn it into your language's version of a struct. Stop using dictionaries for everything.
Benchmark it, but from what I can find this is dated advice. It might be faster on first load but it'd surprise me if it's always faster.
Edit: looking into how PHP has evolved, 8 added a JIT in 2021. That will almost certainly make it faster to use a class rather than an associative array. Associative arrays are very hard for a JIT to look through and optimize around.
> No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.
You can easily get within 10% of the "real" value on most assets. And, in particular, assets like stock have a built in ticker to tell you their exact current value.
This sort of evaluation happens all the time privately. For example, car insurance companies have gotten extremely good at evaluating the value of a car to determine when to simply total it.
The only thing that really makes it tricky is hidden assets or assets with no market value.
The likes of the richest people, who I think most of the "tax wealth" people are thinking of, have the majority of their wealth in equity. It's easy to tax the majority of their wealth.
This does not need to be a perfect system to be very effective at generating revenue and redistributing wealth.
You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it’s valued at $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.
Now it’s 2026 and you finally decide to sell the BTC for the original price of $60k.
Except you’ve paid taxes on $40k in paper gains that disappeared before you sold the asset.
How do we solve that?
(Replace “bitcoin” with “startup stock option” if you really want to illustrate the problem - imagine having to pay taxes on stock options you decide to never exercise)
That's capital gains, which we currently recognize on realization events (selling the asset or trading it). With current capital gains, if you sold in 2025 you'd pay the taxes on 40k at ~15% (depending) so 6k. If you repurchased it at $100k and then sold at $60k, you can claim the losses.
People advocating for a wealth tax aren't pushing for a tax on gains and losses but rather the total asset value. I've seen 1% and 2% bandied about.
So in 2024, you'd pay $1.2k in taxes (at 2%). In 2025, you'd pay $2k. And in 2026 you'd pay $1.2k
Though, usually, there's also a minimum wealth paired with the tax. Again, I usually only see it for things like individuals with over $100M in assets.
For options, it'd still be the same thing. If the strike price is $1 and the actual price is $60 and the option is vested then you'd be taxed on the $59 per option you hold.
This only gets difficult if you are talking about options in a privately held company. But, again, that's not really the case for a lot of the most wealthy who the wealth tax is targeting.
You hold Enron stock. You’ve been taxed 5% annually on the holdings for the past 5 years. To pay the tax, you decided to take out a loan instead of selling shares to pay the tax (you want to stay invested).
Someone discovers Enron is a fraud, the stock goes to $0 and you go bankrupt because you can’t repay the loans you took out to pay the tax on a (now worthless) asset.
Were you smart, you'd have used your enron stock as the collateral in which case both you and the bank get screwed if the value goes to 0. You default on the loan, you don't have to go bankrupt in this case. Your credit takes a hit for 7 years.
But yeah, if you take out a loan against your home and the housing market collapses and you lose your job (ala 2008) you can end up destitute. The stock market is always a gamble and this doesn't make that better or worse.
The situation you're describing is equivalent to paying your 5% in asset tax the normal way (by giving up 5% of the asset) and then saying "I love enron, let me take out a loan to buy stock with!" Buying stock with a loan is an obviously stupid move, and wanting to "stay invested" is nothing more than a rationalization. Keeping the same percentage of your wealth in the stock is already staying invested. Increasing the percentage for the sole purpose of keeping the same number of shares is a bad idea.
And this hypothetical me, having to pay a wealth tax, is way way over the line of needing a financial advisor, so that advisor will be telling me it's a bad idea to take out loans to buy stock.
>You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it’s valued at $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.
Right, and at this point in the argument it’s also worth asking ”pay taxes with what?” which also quickly makes the idea of taxing valuations obviously absurd.
It would force any value creator to sell his creation, which basically destroys the mechanism from which all welfare for anyone in our societies currently originates.
Yikes. So even if I store my wealth in cash, you want it to deflate by 5% annually?
How do you handle your neighbor who discovers he has a $2m Pokémon card in his closet? Is he forced to sell it to pay the 5% if he doesn’t have the cash on hand to pay the tax?
It’s a messy proposition. I’ve yet to hear a clear proposal that doesn’t have sticky edge cases.
> So even if I store my wealth in cash, you want it to deflate by 5% annually?
Generally speaking, that's the point. The wealth tax is trying to combat wealth inequality and the only way for such a policy to be effective is if those with considerable assets wealth decreases with time.
> How do you handle your neighbor who discovers he has a $2m Pokémon card in his closet?
Usually that's handled by having a minimum asset requirement before the wealth tax kicks in. 100M is what I've seen. It'd be a pretty easy tax to make progressive.
> It’s a messy proposition. I’ve yet to hear a clear proposal that doesn’t have sticky edge cases.
I've given the proposal I've seen in a different comment. Perhaps you didn't see it? But in any case, taxes are always messy. It's not as if you can't refine them with more and more amendments to address different scenarios as they come up. I don't think the "messiness" should be what keeps us from adopting such a tax system. There will almost certainly be a game of cat and mouse between the regulators and the wealthy regardless the proposal.
Switzerland has a wealth tax while people like you wring their hands and the wealthiest see their wealth increase far beyond anyone elses.
In From 1965 to 1995 the richest man in the world had about $30-40b in today's money. This was more than the 1945-1965 era, but way less than the mess pre-war thanks to aggressive action to limit wealth.
Today the richest man in the world has $300b, Rockefeller levels before the 1929 crash.
> Before the 1900s, we weren't able to build cities far from water because of their demand for transportation.
Incorrect.
In the 1800s the train took off as a primary form of transportation. By 1869, we'd completed the first intercontinental railway in the US which ultimately opened up the economy between the east and west.
Sears flourished as a company because of the train.
It wasn't roads which ultimately opened up mass transport, it was rail. It wasn't until the 1950s that rail was ultimately de-prioritized and roads were prioritized.
It is all about cost and efficiency... There is a classic 1913 electric vehicle that ran NiFe packs for many years, and were only replaced because the container rotted away. Sustainable storage costs real money, but has existed for over a century. =3
LEDs are diodes (Light emitting diode). Certainly this was a cost saving measure, but it's not a bad assumption that the LED wouldn't allow reverse current flow.
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