I thought the same but realized you can retrospectively 'insert' the king positions into the position sequence, shifting the remaining sequence one square along for each king, so no more bits required though the data structure is unwieldy!
Ignoring the point that climate sensitivity wasn't in the parent comment, AFAIK, airplanes generate 0.16 kg/km, whereas trains are around 0.1 kg/km and container ships are at 0.016 kg/km. However, passenger ships and gas cars are at 0.25, diesel cars at 0.28 kg/km and rockets are over 1.0 kg/km, so it appears planes are in the middle, not really "one of the best ways" to worsen climate change.
Sure, through a simple analysis of CO2 kg/km, trains are better for the climate for long distance travel, but they are vastly slower (average time from LA to DC is over 80 hours), which has knock-on effects, e.g., sleeping at home averages 0.25 - 0.32 kg/night, whereas staying at a hotel averages 10-40 kg/night, eating at home averages 2.3 kg/meal vs. 3-8 kg/meal, etc.
Trains are just the most efficient way of moving people between cities. They benefit everyone, even people with cars.
You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage.
Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.
A passenger train in the USA weighs about 1000 tons, plus another 150 or so tons of locomotive, before we add the passengers (seating 80 per car and about 11 cars for 880 passengers).
I am quite confident that the bandwidth cost is absolutely not a concern for Microsoft, and that the obvious goal is for them to capture the market.
The "C/C++" extension github repository is 4MB. Probably the download size for the extension itself is a fraction of that, but I won't bother measuring. It was downloaded 400 times over the last minute (there is a live counter on the extension page [0]).
That's a 25MB/s or 200Mb/s bandwidth, for one of the most popular extensions. Multiply by the top 10 extensions and you get the bandwidth of an average home optic fiber connection...
I am glad you have insider knowledge to be so confident. I would rather those costs go towards furthering VS Code than helping out Cursor. This comes from someone who uses Cursor and not the biggest fan of MSFT.
Pure speculation but I would see the more logical argument being Cursor is a for pay product, why should they have access to the marketplace?
Because MS didn’t write most of the extensions yet engineered things conveniently such that you have to use their service to get them. Other text editors somehow manage to not lock people into similar dilemmas. They’re not profiting from running the marketplace or providing VS Code for free, it’s about locking people into a product. Cursor should be allowed access because interoperability is a societal net-benefit.
> those costs
…are likely minescule. I run similar services at my day job, just at a much larger scale than a text editor app marketplace, and know the precise cost to run everything. I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.
> I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.
I think it's more likely that they imagine themselves in Microsoft's shoes. After all, it's a very popular editor and the mechanism of vendor lock-in is clever - give away the editor under the noble banner of open source, while jealously gate access to the plugin ecosystem that makes the editor as useful as it is.
So no, I don't think they earnestly believe that the egress costs are anything more than pocket change. But it's almost certainly what they would argue if they were in Microsoft's position.
Couldn’t it wind up being easy for Cursor and other variants of VS Code to be long run beneficial for VS Code itself? Seems like having a different third party team extending your stuff and testing it, could be hugely valuable, they take risks and move fast, the upstream project gradually learns from what works for the forks, people contribute various other new extensions.
In the age of LLMs, community is worth its weight in platinum, cutting off Cursor just incentivizes them to develop some new better thing with better technology (cough Zed, Ghostty) to compete with VS Code which won’t benefit Microsoft because it’ll be separate. What’s the use in not just open sourcing the C extension? With more people moving off C anyway, might as well get the free community contributions
MSFT want to build their own Cursor aka Copilot Agent.
They can build a better product with their resources effectively extinguishing Cursor, who will then need to find a way to differentiate.
If Cursor was smart, they would have decoupled from the beginning as they had first mover advantage. They will now have to adapt while fending off competition from MSFT and the other players.
MSFT meanwhile, have discovered that this market is too profitable to be left untouched. They have probably been building their agent for a while and have now decided to launch while simultaneously blocking direct competition. They already have an ecosystem with users who have switching inertia. It's a brilliant yet ruthless move.
Cursor is a small team, MS is a titanic enterprise. I highly doubt that Cursor could exceed MS when their entire product is built on VSCode in the first place and they can't even seem to describe their usage policies to their paying users.
Aren't you curious how 4MB of typescript can parse and understand C++ code? It doesn't. It downloads an additional 200MB binary language server that does all the work.
Disregard the obvious environmental risks of spraying silver iodide in the air, cloud seeding will artificially redirect rainfall in specific areas, which may deprive downstream regions of water, harming biodiversity. Note that cloud seeding is currently used for drought management, not global warming mitigation.
> The site's terms of service prohibited the sale of certain items. When the Silk Road marketplace first began, the creator and administrators instituted terms of service that prohibited the sale of anything whose purpose was to "harm or defraud." This included child pornography, stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of any type
> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.
Yep, don't count on Tesla for replacing fossil fuel cars. They had a good headstart but hopefully other manufacturers will now take its place to fill growing demand
In all likelihood auto manufacturers won't really be responsible for replacing fossil fuel cars. Designing and building the cars is straightforward enough, they need continued leaps energy storage and infrastructure to make that change possible.
> Tesla now focusing more on developing self-driving vehicles than on pushing for huge growth in EV sales volume, which many investors had been counting on.
Oh, come on. Yes, Musk announced that Tesla would announce a self-driving car with no steering wheel in August 2024. Of course, he said that in 2016, in 2018, in 2020...[1]
Reality is that Tesla, while signed up for California DMV's autonomous vehicle test program, didn't report any miles driven last year.
The aviation industry is also chock full of mandatory servicing requirements[1] that even lead to semi strip downs at regular intervals.
However, once purchased, one is legally allowed to drive a CyberTruck no matter how old or how many issues there are (being licensed and insured etc. aside).
Mid-flight, "Hi, this is the captain. We're terribly sorry, but the plane will now be going into a 5 hour reboot mode. We flew through a rain cloud in the sun. Do not be alarmed when the lights turn off and the engines cease."
Also if you're encoding the king as a position instead of a byte sequence you would have to encode their space as empty, that's an extra 2 bits
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