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This is a terrific article. It led me to a couple of hours tracking articles about related efforts, not the least of which was John Conway's work.
Mind you, my math is enough for BSEE. I do have a copy of one of my university professor's go-to work books: The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem and consult it occasionally and briefly.
> we got 250 years so far without imploding
We may have arguably recovered from it, but we rather famously did not get 250 years without the union violently fragmenting. (Our best record on that is right around 160, currently.)
> they're banking on Musk generating government pressure (corruption) to MAKE business be better
The thesis banks on patronage. Musk de facto controls a $7tn money spigot [1]. Losing billions investing in X is a win if he even sputters your way.
This is the reason power concentration corrupts economies--Musk's proximity suppresses market signals in favour of political ones. Elon's ironically recapitulating the South African economic disaster.
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...
> You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed.
Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone.
- The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.)
- The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1]
It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...
Eggs are a cheap meaty protein. Meat is healthier, but more expensive. (Unfortunately, a side effect of that diet is--if sustained beyond growth spurts--it trashes your cardiovascular system.)
The act of a bailout couples the credit of the rescuing organization with that of the rescued. That's literally what a bailout is: the rescuer agrees to take on some of the losses and credit risk, usually in return for agreements for future payments and power over how the business is restructured and managed. In the process, the credit and assets of the rescuing organization are damaged, and the bailed out organization is saved. Purely financial transactions never affect the actual reality on the ground, only how risks, responsibilities, and rewards are apportioned.
When the organization is as big as the U.S. government and has as good credit as the U.S. did in 2008, you can save an awful lot of financial institutions. But if it gets to the point where everybody expects to be bailed out and people start acting accordingly, you can't. Eventually the government ends up falling, as people start realizing that the economy isn't actually working and everybody is just cooking the books with financial transactions.
Government policy makers know this, and their livelihood is dependent upon the continued existence of the government, and so at some point they declare "Nope, bailout is not going to happen this time. You're on your own." At that point, the last group of people who took stupid financial risks are left holding the bag. It's very much like a pyramid scheme: the going is good as long as you can find a greater fool to assume the risk from you, but at some point there are no greater fools, and you find out the greater fool was you.
That's the problem, though - the computer is already better at thinking than you, but we still don't know how to make it good at arbitrary labor requiring a mix of precision and power, something humans find natural.
In other words: I'm sorry, but that's how reality turned out. Robots are better at thinking, humans better at laboring. Why fight against nature?
(Just joking... I think.)
Plenty of companies administer IQ tests. The reason everyone doesn't is that it doesn't work well.
Some people get used to it. We did some work to prepare our barn for chickens but never quite 'pulled the trigger' because between our tenants and other friends we are swimming in eggs. (It was funny as hell that some of our chicken-keeping friends had a fox family living in a stump in front of their house. Their chicken house was solid but they'd catch the mama fox on the game camera every night bringing home a chicken from somebody else's flock every night.)
Our favorite meat lately has been roadkill deer. Two days ago a friend was traveling to a job site up route 89 on the side of the lake when they hit a deer. He called us on his cell but we didn't want to drive that far that day. The next day my wife was planning to drive out in that direction to help a friend, the friend welched out but she went to see if the deer was still there, it was, so she loaded it into the back of our Honda Fit and I was told, when she picked me up at the bus stop, to stash all my stuff with me in the passenger seat.
Turned out the intestines didn't splatter, it was cold, and there wasn't serious tissue damage from the crash so we're going to get a huge amount of meat out of it. Between roadkill deer and deer my son hunts and deer other people hunt on our land we might need to get a bigger freezer.
> The whole premise of our system is that the people within the system operate in good faith.
It very much is not.
It is, however, that the people will not simultaneously elect sufficent majorities in both houses of Congress and a President who all fail to do so, such that the systems by which the political branches check eachother continue to function in a way which constrains those actors in either that do act in bad faith.
> I would posit that no amount of legislation will be able to stop bad-faith actors from screwing up the system,
Electoral reforms to the legislative branch that could be done through statute could go a long way to reducing the probability of a sufficient concentration of bad faith actors to overwhelm the system, and electoral and structural reforms to the executive branch to make it less unitary, which would take a Constitutional amendment, could increase the necessary concentration to achieve a total breakdown.
> these 140/150 year old recipients
What is the evidence these exist?
Ya, it loaded just fine right now. Thanks
> When using iText Core/Community under AGPL, you must prominently mention iText and include the iText copyright and AGPL license in output file metadata, and also retain the producer line in every PDF that is created or manipulated using iText.
https://itextpdf.com/how-buy/AGPLv3-license
Not really AGPL, they just advertise AGPL and mean something else. Avoid.
I liked the 2019 Nezha even though it came across as a bargain-basement Dreamworks movie complete with fart jokes.
(Got a Blu-Ray set of an Investiture of the Gods TV series that allegedly had English subtitles but it doesn't. It's not like Japanese where I have 30% comprehension of the spoken language, I read Chinese better than I can understand it spoken but that's not saying much, I can pick out things like 来来来 (lái lái lái) which means 'come over' but that's about it.)
> Today, it has a F17A video processor that enables VGA output: https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html
This is awesome. I don't have a TI-99, but I do have an MSX that would hugely benefit from this.
Inference cost rules everything around me.
Everyone’s threat model is unique. Foolishness is ignoring that.
Perfect use case for customer side voice AI to make the call and ring the user when an agent arrives on the line. “Adversarial integration.”
APM Marketplace: How excess deaths in the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Social Security - https://www.marketplace.org/2025/02/19/how-excess-deaths-in-... - February 19, 2025
The Effect of Us COVID-19 Excess Mortality on Social Security Outlays [Working Paper 33465] - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33465/w334... - February 2025
It’s not clear to me PISA scores mean anything, because they’re not uniformly administered in the U.S. And if the scores are reliable, they point to distributional issues outside the educational system. For example, Asians in the U.S. perform comparably to Singaporeans: https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/us-asians-scored-.... White Americans perform comparably to Japan and South Korea, and ahead of all of Europe.
School was a few decades ago, and the code I have on Github is mostly toy stuff I do in rainy weekends, most of us have a life without room to code outside work most of the time.
Friends, family, stuff to take care of.
Personally I'm a fan of AVR-8 which has 32 8-bit registers so if you want to do 16-bit or 24-bit or 32-bit or 40-bit math you can do it just fine, it just takes longer. The biggest AVR-8 device has about 8k of RAM and about 240k of rewritable program ROM. Those are on different buses so it can suck down an instruction at the same time it transfers data, and clocked at 16 MHz it beats the pants off any of the 8-bit micros of 1980.
You're not going to create really large systems for it, but if you want to work a gas pump or a hot water heater or make a tester for 74xx chips or a display controller for persistence of vision displays it is great.
You can code for it in C but I feel like I'm strangling puppies when I do it because it is moving the stack pointer around and doing things to support C calling conventions that I don't really need for the programs I write [1] AVR-8 assembly is fun but I still write C for it because if I need a bigger device I can recompile it for ESP32 or ARM.
Something weird about AVR-8 is that it does not have a unified address space, so in the case of that display controller, it is easy to spool graphic data out of the ROM, not so easy to upload a small amount into RAM (via serial port) and combine that with data from the ROM. I've had the crazy idea of making a AVR-8 on AVR-8 emulator (would get me to A-rank if not S-rank on AVR-8 assembly) which would make it possible to upload tiny programs into RAM but that probably requires software emulation of unified pointers for program memory.
[1] https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/07/dont-overflow-stack...
They generally do not know what they are looking for. They are generally untrained, and if they are trained, the training is probably all about using leetcode-type problems to give out interviews that are sufficiently similar that you can run stats on the results and call them "objective", which is exactly the thing we are all quite correctly complaining about. Which is perhaps anti-training.
The problem is that the business side wants to reduce it to an objective checklist, but you can't do that because of Goodhart's Law [1]. AI is throwing this problem into focus because it is basically capable of passing any objective checklist, with just a bit of human driving [2]. Interviews can not consist of "I'm going to ask a question and if you give me the objectively correct answer you get a point and if you do not give the objectively correct answer you do not". The risk of hiring someone who could give the objectively correct answers but couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone do requirements elicitation in collaboration with other humans or architecture or risk analysis or any of the many other things that a real engineering job consists of, was already pretty high before AI.
But if interviewing is not a matter of saying the objectively correct things, a lot of people at all levels are just incapable of handling it after that. The Western philosophical mindset doesn't handle this sort of thing very well.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
[2]: Note this is not necessarily bad because "AI bad!", but, if all the human on the other end can offer me is that they can drive the AI, I don't need them. I can do it myself and/or hire any number of other such people. You need to bring something to the job other than the ability to drive an AI and you need to demonstrate whatever that is in the interview process. I can type what you tell me into a computer and then fail to comprehend the answer it gives is not a value-add.
Interesting that they are still supporting the Chime SDK: https://aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk/
Not sure I'd want to build on that shaky foundation, though.
I guess I am going to miss Firefox, at least it gave birth to Rust.
People have been keeping intelligent animals like chickens, pigs, and cattle for millennia. And continuing to eat them.
Ironically, vegetarianism really only started to become popular in the Western world once people lost their connection to farms, and meat and poultry were something you bought in pieces, plastic-wrapped.
People say that all the time, but professional cooks have run triangle tests on backyard/farm eggs vs. store bought eggs and people can't tell the difference. At this point, I don't believe there's a difference in taste. The psychological effects that would lead people to believe that difference exists --- a kind of culinary placebo effect --- are so strong that I just attribute everything to that.
You can use a Quest with a Quest account which is not linked to a Facebook account.
The Quest is a standalone headset that is basically an Android device, you can run applications and games on it, walk anywhere you want with it, etc. You can hook it up to a PC with a special cable and use it for PCVR
The Valve Index on the other hand is basically a monitor that you attach to your PC. It can support much bigger and graphically better experiences but you are always attached to your PC via a cable.
I don't know if it requires a Steam account, but the intention behind it is that you'll install games with Steam which requires an account.
As someone observing this phenomon on my country and my adoption country for the last 20 years.
People may be sick, but just like folks are now finding out in US, putting these people in power is not the solution.
Several employees have already been put at risk: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/foreign-servic...
Dismantling USAID overnight will do a lot of damage.
You probably know this, but just in case ...
It's possible to use MathJax on HTML pages like this:
Inside the HEAD tag:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Whatever your title might be</TITLE>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<script type="text/x-mathjax-config">
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$']]}});
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" async
src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.5/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_SVG">
</script>
</HEAD>
Find a value $v$ such that
$$\lim_{x\rightarrow 0}\frac{1}{x}(v^x-1) = 1$$.
That's straight from the TV trope book, this is how movies/shows portray Evil Organization training ruthless spy assassins (except usually it's a dog, and they have to kill it themselves).
Meta has Project Aria for research, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066927, but no public SDK. Devices dedicated to vision-impaired users are north of $2000. Hopefully Envision Companion (https://www.letsenvision.com/companion) software can be ported to $300 Meta smart glasses or the growing list of open glass hardware that is compatible with OSS AugmentOS.
This thread lead me to Mentra's MIT-licensed https://github.com/AugmentOS-Community/AugmentOS & https://augmentos.org/ for Android and (soon) iOS:
> Smart glasses OS, with dozens of built-in apps. Users get AI assistant, notifications, translation, screen mirror, captions, and more. Devs get to write 1 app that runs on any pair of smart glases.
Where "any" means this HCL:
Vuzix Z100 ($500)
Mentra.glass Mach1 ($350) or Live ($220)
Even Realities G1 ($600)
(future) Meizu StarV
On paper, Apple Magnifier with Live Descriptions audio could justify the purchase of an iPhone Pro for dedicated single-app usage, https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/live-descriptions-vis.... But while it works for short demos, the software is not reliable for continuous use. UWB AirTags and Lidar 3D imaging could enable precise indoor navigation for vision impaired users, but 5+ years of shipping hardware has not lead to usable software workflows.
The economic tragedy is that 95% of the technology for helping vision/cognition impaired humans could be repurposed for humanoid robots, with R&D bonus that humans can provide more real-world feedback (RLHF!) than silent lab robots. Until Apple breaks vision stasis with new technical leadership, or Apple/Meta are regulated by the EU to unlock reluctant open-glass-platform innovation, the only hackable option is open glass hardware for future BigTech sherlocking or acquisition.
Given that BlueSky is funded by Twitter, I'm assuming they know a lot more than us on how Twitter architects systems.
As someone that has played PC games since 1990, the problem is XBox has turned into a cross platform publisher after all those studio acquisitions, especially ABK.
So big mamma Microsoft, doesn't want to see only a fraction of sales on XBox hardware and PC, which given Microsoft's history always had a place alongside XBox, when they can go big (in money terms), across all platforms.
So XBox business unit has a big problem now, trying to assert the console still matters, when Microsoft as a whole, wants the big bucks more than anything, and doesn't really care about the console, rather XBox as a platform, Netflix for games.
At that point, maybe it should be The Inferno Foundation, and have it written in Limbo.
As someone that always kept a foot on C++ land, dispite mostly working on managed languages, I would that by C++17 (moreso now in C++23), dispite all its quirks and warts, C++ has become good enough that I can write Python like code with it.
Maybe it is only a thing to those of us already damaged with C++, and with enough years experience using it, but there are still plenty of such folks around to matter, specially to GPU vendors, and compiler writers.
>and has the same downsides (requires non-standard compiler extensions)
It's not a downside if:
(a) you have those non-standard compiler extensions in the platforms you target
(c) for the rest, you can ifdef an alternative that doesn't require them
>Federal agencies are now required to review all grants in light of an executive order terminating programmes aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which Mr Trump has argued has made government less meritocratic
Only "Mr Trump" (sic) has argued that? Or only Republican partisans?
>As evidence of DEI’s malign influence Ted Cruz, the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, released a database that identified 3,476 NSF grants—roughly 10% of those awarded during the Biden administration—as being unacceptably “woke”. One analysis of a randomly chosen subset of these grants by Scott Alexander, a blogger, found that only around 40% were actually related to DEI (an analysis of all 3,476, conducted by The Economist with the help of an artificial-intelligence model, found the figure was 44%)
Ah, just 40%, no biggie.
Not ed, but definilty inspired by it, I am old enough to have done typewriting school exam on MS-DOS 3.3 edlin.
And since then never used it ever again, nor ed when a couple of years later we had Xenix access, as vi was much saner alternative.
The amount of research (or lack thereof) into whether the name was already taken in the same domain is disappointing. For me, F8 will always be this:
Imagine if, to make a website, you had to fill out forms and submit them to the government for approval.
That's how it is in China, officially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license
Whether it's enforced in practice (just like VPN use) is a different matter, however.
Most of the times, videocalls sound too... stuffy for me. There's something off about the frequencies, I'm not sure if that's some kind of tight windowing and aggressive compression, or noise cancelling eating into signal, or both, but it's missing the high-order terms, so to speak.
(I've recently switched to using my headphones over audio jack again, and the problem persists, so it's not the Bluetooth headset profile - though in general, when HSP kicks in, the audio quality goes to the gutter.)
When you say “liberal bias” do you mean “liberal” as in:
(1) The American political self-identity of mild reformist supporters of capitalism?
(2) The international political self-identity of supporters of laissez-faire capitalism?
(3) The pejorative used by much of the right wing for any viewpoint perceived to be to the left of Mussolini?
(4) Or, the pejorative used by much of the left for any viewpoint perceived to be to the right of Chairman Mao?
Because “liberal” is a heavily-overloaded term in politics.
I mean, I guess? I definitely think it's silly. But I didn't think of it as a loaded term when I used it, just a message-board-ism. It wasn't an ironic commentary. :)
(This is a very weird thread to have stumbled on by following your comments).
By the power vested in me by being mentioned in the third person on this thread I hereby decree that "US-ians" is a cromulent term. May God have mercy on your souls.
I'm saving a link to your comment along with a reminder to check back in 2028.
I wish someone would finish a decent database in Rust. At least get it to 1.0 stable and go on from there.
- Limbo: "Limbo is a work-in-progress..."
- Sled [1]. Not sure what's going on there. Last release 3 years ago, but a constant stream of "alpha" versions that never get released.
SQLite with Rust bindings seems to be the go-to system. Depending on C packages is often a headache when cross-compiling, though.
> we never get real useful quality of life improvements for basic functional programming like TCO or multi line lambdas
A lambda can be as big of an expression as you want, including spanning multiple lines; it can't (because it is an expression) include statements, which is only different than lambdas in most functional languages in that Python actually has statements.
At least among voters, there’s been a realignment over the last decade along the globalism/nationalism dividing line. The factions that favor globalism seem to also favor American military empire (to keep the trade routes safe or whatever, I don’t know).
I don’t trust republicans in Congress to actually do it. But it could be a historic opportunity for democrats to call their bluff and support the cuts. A once in a century opportunity to end the age of American empire and reorient America for the inevitable multipolar future.
Also more conspicuous. Suburbans are common enough that nobody would think twice about seeing 3 on the road in close proximity. Three short schoolbuses would be weird.
A majority of Americans voted for Trump. There was a pollster who was on CNN a day or two ago who looked into people who voted for Clinton and Biden in 2016 and 2020, but then for Trump in 2024. These people were (of course generally speaking) happy with Trump's performace so far this term. There frustration with the Democrats was what they perceived as a lack of action, and they see Trump as "moving fast".
It's clear the American people (again, majority speaking - I mean, I certainly care) don't care about what is going on with the federal government right now. The only thing that will make them care is if the economy tanks or if inflation spirals out of control.
That's not what's going on here. This was discussed at length on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981756
Or you could go the way of this quite impressive project: http://fpgaretrocomputing.org/
3. So almost all other software work. Software engineering is, fundamentally, about replacing people.
4. Is plain bullshit concern, really nothing to address here. People also always hallucinate, in the same sense LLMs do, and for the same reason.
5. Same could be said about trains or airplanes - or most of every item one has or sees in a 21st century urban setting.
Sure, those are all "but X is worse!" arguments, but they make sense because there's no reason to single out AI for those reasons and stay ethically consistent without giving up on almost everything else in your life.
> but how is that a drain on society, and not primarily the individual?
There are two factors.
The first is that a drain on individuals is a drain on society. That's why we outlaw risky behavior like lethal recreactional drugs, driving without seatbelts, driving without a driver's license, etc. We try to protect people from themselves in some of the worst aspects that we can.
Second, of course, is health care costs. Activities that constantly result in injury wind up raising the health care costs for everyone, since that's how insurance works.
> by your logic, should we also ban (or require insurance?)...
You already have to have car insurance, yes. And yes lots of kinds of guns are banned in lots of places.
We draw the lines in different places.
It is a pretty interesting thought experiment to wonder whether people shouldn't be allowed to engage in organized sports that are risky, without paying an additional health insurance premium? E.g. if you play professional football, then your league has to pay extra money into the health insurance fund to compensate for all the extra health care treatment their players need and will need.
Natural Gas Prices Surge As Arctic Blast Fuels Demand - https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Natural-Gas-Prices-S... - February 19th, 2025
The committee basically turned it down.
What happens when people start to boycott X advertisers?
...and so do perfumes, most likely.
Stop remote tech interviews
Unless the job you're interviewing for is remote-only, this makes perfect sense. If you expect your candidates to be able to work in your office, they should be interviewed there.
Oreshnik is a ballistic missile. It was originally mistaken for an ICBM. Hypersonic, yes (as are ICBMs from the 1960s). Low altitude, no.
> how freely data flows in Shenzhen for hardware hacking, versus pulling teeth trying to get data sheets for components from western component makers.
That's different though. Shenzhen is where electronics factories are; they get the datasheets from western companies, but because said western companies can't really enforce their IP over there, the locals get to ignore it and use the datasheets however it's convenient for them.
The polishing cloth is one of the rare running tech gags that's actually funny every time and doesn't wear itself out.
I guess next week they're going to get to the interesting bit which is how weird the architecture actually was on that thing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A
Particularly it only had 256 bytes of RAM attached to the CPU but had (I think) 16 kb of RAM attached to the video controller which the CPU could read and write through I/O registers. You could use this for non-video storage but you couldn't access it directly.
Coding in BASIC could, at the very least, hide the insanity from you.
And inspections/testing/liability.
Great comment. Additionally, if your employer will sign off on you working in Spain, Spain has a 1 year digital nomad visa, renewable every year. After five years, you can apply for permanent residency. If you apply while in Spain on a tourist visa, it’s good for 3 years (one renewal gets you to permanent residency). One should consider maximizing savings and investment during this time, so you can switch to a non lucrative visa [1] based on your investments if employment situation changes.
Edit: Spain's economy is also doing pretty well as of recently [2].
[1] https://www.exteriores.gob.es/Consulados/losangeles/en/Servi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/18/how-spains-rad...
> Even if the current GOP really does have the best interests of the people in mind
Note that the Chavez/Maduro distinction you drew was not about “best interests of the people in mind” but the former being immensely popular and the latter not. The current Administration, whatever intent may exist in their minds, is very much not “immensely popular”.
This can already happen without help from the platform.
I've got the weird problem that Meta won't let me create an Instagram account which is a real head-scratcher for me because I've never done anything obnoxious on a Meta property as far as I can tell.
Many AWS customers are large, lazy enterprises with inertia and many competing interests/silos internally. AWS gets their hooks in (ReInvent marketing, "innovation" buy in, etc), and well, you spend where it is easy to spend: AWS, as they're already onboarded as a vendor. The product doesn't have to be better, the spend just has to show up at the same accounts payable department.
“No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law“ would seem to rule out, say, accepting a SCOTUS ruling against the President, should he insist it was wrongly decided.
And it misses something like Swing, which while not perfect, does the job and the best Go can hope for is Fyne, as third party.
Multithreaded collection types.
Configuring scheduling algorithms.
Pluggable services, cryptography algorithms, filesystem.
Sane way to manage dates, granted the original one was a bit clunky, but way better than parsing strings.
Sometimes I wonder if folks that criticise Java, and .NET, actually spend any time learning their standard libraries in practice.
I'm not going to run interference against all the comments you're writing on this thread, because I don't think Signal needs the help and it would make the thread ultra-tedious. But during the brief window where people were taking Wire seriously as a Signal alternative, I'd occasionally write a comment or tweet like:
Were you aware that Wire keeps a high-fidelity plaintext database of exactly who talks to who on their platform?
And people were reliably startled. But all that was happening was that ordinary users have no mental model for how a secure messenger is designed, and hadn't thought through how serverside contact lists that magically work no matter what device you enroll in the system were actually designed.
So here I'll just say: the stuff you're saying about Signal is pretty banal and uninteresting. The SGX+Enclave stuff is Signal's answer to something every other mainstream messenger does even worse than that. By all means, flunk them on their purity test!
And they actually work! Voice quality is good. There's no echo. There's sidetone, to prevent people from talking too loud.
Yesterday, I was trying to talk to someone whose iPhone is dying. Three disconnects. Hearing myself echoed back after about a second. Too much background noise. Gave up and sent email.
(I miss the days of ISDN voice. 56Kb/s end to end. Full duplex. Rigidly synchronized at the bit level; no packet jitter. That's the best phone calls ever got.)
Indeed. It always saddens me how childish and tribal we become when some subjects are mentioned. It can't be impossible for the smart people we find here to have civilised discussion about politics or Elon Musk.
> Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.
There are only six users with over a million followers, and none with two million yet.
I'm sure they'll get there.
"Straight out of science fiction"
Looks a lot like Westworld, and the series doesn't end well for humans.
> They took the helmet away to give to a kid with an recent brain injury, but swapped it with a hefty 2-foot, 1800W panel. It comes with tanning goggles and instructions saying to be nude and 12 inches away from it for 20 minutes per day--so a bit quacky. But it's apparently big in professional sports clinics for speeding tissue and joint healing.
I think the commercial model here is a tanning bed config with LED tubes. Goggles on, hop in the healing tube.
An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time.
A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves money or effort it's no problem if notifications are delayed 30s.
Yes.
A good example is immigration policy. Setting immigration policy is an enumerated power of Congress. The executive branch has no say at all. Congress failed to revise immigration policy when it got out of sync with facts on the ground. That led to the current mess.
The last attempt to overhaul immigration policy was in 2006.[1] Arguably, this was more workable than what we have now. It combined tough enforcement with a path to citizenship. It had supporters from both parties. The House and Senate did not agree on terms and no bill was passed.
So, instead of reform, we had weak enforcement, now followed by strong enforcement. What we have isn't working.
We need something like that bill now. Has anyone introduced a comprehensive reform bill in Congress? No, as far as I can see from reading through the immigration bills in the hopper. The current bills are either minor tweaks or PR exercises.[2]
Beat on your congressional representatives. We need an immigration law that works. It's Congress' job to argue over how it should work, and to come up with something that, when enforced, still works. We don't have that now. Immigrants are screaming about being deported, legal residents are screaming about being caught up in raids, and farmers are screaming about losing their labor force.[3] This is the moment to do something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Refo...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-bills-republicans-congr...
[3] https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2025/01/27/business-lead...
The group that came closest to achieving the Spartan ideal was the Mongol Empire. The Mongol Empire was the largest empire in human history, and it was created by tough, hard-trained horse-riding nomads.
It wasn't just about being tough. The Mongols had good operational doctrine. Here's a modern evaluation by a U.S. Army officer.[1] They used intelligence and mobility to dominate the battlefield with smaller forces than their opponents. They had a good system for selecting leaders with a track record of winning. They were surprisingly good at planning, and at coordinating large units. That's how you win wars.
The Mongol Empire collapsed due to internal political problems. No external enemy could take them down.
[1] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Dir...
Some of these CVEs only exist because Rust takes security seriously. There was a filesystem bug: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/01/20/cve-2022-21658.html
This impacted C++'s standard library as well, but since the standard says it's undefined behavior, they said "not a bug" and didn't file CVEs.
Nobody believes that Rust programs will have zero bugs or zero security vulnerabilities. It's that it can significantly reduce them.
As a systems enthusiast I enjoy articles like this. It is really easy to get into the mindset of "this must be perfect".
In the Blekko search engine back end we built an index that was 'eventually consistent' which allowed updates to the index to be propagated to the user facing index more quickly, at the expense that two users doing the exact same query would get slightly different results. If they kept doing those same queries they would eventually get the exact same results.
Systems like this bring in a lot of control systems theory because they have the potential to oscillate if there is positive feedback (and in search engines that positive feedback comes from the ranker which is looking at which link you clicked and giving it a higher weight) and it is important that they not go crazy. Some of the most interesting, and most subtle, algorithm work was done keeping that system "critically damped" so that it would converge quickly.
Reading this description of how user's timelines are sharded and the same sorts of feedback loops (in this case 'likes' or 'reposts') sounds like a pretty interesting problem space to explore.
I'm not sure I'm there yet (giving it away) but similarly annoyed by some of its teething pains. For me it seems to do all the things, and it runs longer than my iPad pro does on a charge (and like the OP author I suspect that is entirely because I run the display as near 0 brightness)
I really appreciate using it as a writing device in portrait mode, something that I really wish the iPad pro could do with its "magic" keyboard. I continue to look for more intuitive drawing solutions.
I also agree with the author that Android has that 'dos' feel of poorly bodged together hardware specific drivers/stuff and OS stuff.
As a result it hasn't replaced my ReMarkable 2 like I thought it might, I'd really love the RM2 to have a higher refresh rate than it does alas.
It's not just the new people though. There are people with 25 years of experience at an agency who are being fired because they had a promotion within the last 12 months which means they are technically still "probationary" in their role.
The loss of institutional knowledge right now is devastating.
Sorry for the dupe. More here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43104071
Following that spat with the astronaut, Elon tweeted: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892621691060093254
> It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_Station.
> It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility.
> Let’s go to Mars.