MassPikeMike

If you scroll down to "Prime Performers" on the page I linked, it lists a Massachusetts company and a USC lab that turns out to have a branch office in Massachusetts.

Perhaps remarkably, the US intelligence community is funding work on this problem in the open, as part of IARPA HIATUS [1].

The program's initial phase is winding down now, so some of the performers' papers ought to be hitting the ArXiV before too many more months.

[1] https://www.iarpa.gov/research-programs/hiatus

These days when people see consecutive pithy sentences with parallel structure, they immediately holler "AI generated."

For years I've wanted to improve my writing and reduce my tendency to string together long floppy clauses, and now I'm like, well good thing I never did that...!

Judging by ads for cell phone service, most people pay more than that per month to be monitored by the Feds.

Similarly, in 1790s America, farmers west of the Appalachians were growing plenty of corn, but because of bad roads the only feasible way to transport it to the much larger markets east of the mountains was as whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on distilled spirits, the result was a "Whiskey Rebellion" in which George Washington himself rode out at the head of an army against other American citizens.

Ever since the invention of the printing press, every new communication technology has reduced the effort needed to widely disseminate information-- and misinformation! So you could say this is nothing new. On the other hand, this is remarkably little effort.

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." -Blaise Pascal

This collection of "Rabinisms" [1] (thanks to the Internet Archive for keeping it from being lost) can give you some of the flavor of the delightful experience that it was to take one of his classes. RIP.

[If P = NP,] then all of modern cryptography collapses. On this happy thought... (1998-11-24)

I'm one of those people who is just never wrong. I mean, not one of those people. I'm like everybody else. Nobody is ever wrong. (1998-12-08)

After all I said, put here the word "obvious". (1998-12-15)

I am going to show that in one round the probability of not reaching agreement is less or equal to 2. ... Yeah, we're establishing new ground in probability theory. (1998-12-17)

It's more than 10 years old. It's either classical or incorrect. (Fall 1998)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210509160248/http://www.eecs.h...

The article "FTFY Buddhist Ethics" [1] comes to a similar conclusion about the development of West Coast Buddhism but isn't on board with it. IMHO an interesting contrarian take.

[1] https://vividness.live/ftfy-buddhist-ethics

I have this problem despite adjusting my monitor height properly.

I consulted a practitioner (in Taiwan, so I'm not exactly sure how to describe her.) She directed me to do the following: stand on tiptoe closely against a flat wall where the ceiling is higher than I can reach on tiptoe. Keep forehead against the wall. Reach upwards, keeping the part of forearms nearest the wrist against the wall. Inhale and exhale, relaxing muscles and stretching to reach further and further upwards with fingertips. Do this for at least 30-45 seconds, relax, repeat a few times daily.

I am not good at sticking to the program but it does seem to be helping

See also the very comprehensive presentation at https://codepoints.net . For example https://codepoints.net/U+2248?lang=en

OP wrote:

"My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7... A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working. I decided it was time to look for a replacement."

Isn't that like deciding to replace your bike because some of the cables are rusted? Like a new set of cables, a new keyboard is a small expense compared to a whole new laptop.

Like replacing bike cables, swapping in a new Carbon X7 keyboard might be slightly challenging for an amateur. iFixit calls the keyboard replacement "moderate" in difficulty [1] taking about an hour with a new keyboard running about a hundred bucks. But it would be a simple job for a repair shop. So it seems hard to justify the expense of a whole new one rather than just the new part.

Of course, sometimes you just want a new laptop, because the bike analogy breaks down a little: unlike bikes, newer ones are inherently faster.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Lenovo+ThinkPad+X1+Carbon+7th+G...

This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

I am usually working with historical documents, where both Otsu and adaptive thresholding are frustratingly almost but not quite good enough. My go-to approach lately is "DeepOtsu" [1]. I like that it combines the best of both the traditional and deep learning worlds: a deep neural net enhances the image such that Otsu thresholding is likely to work well.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.06081

Bikes can work great for travelers aged from, say, 13 to 70 without much luggage. Not so great for travelers outside that age range, with more luggage, or with physical disabilities. I wonder what fraction of travelers falls into the latter category.

I agree that in our current system, consumer choice generally determines which product wins.

But does the best product really always win? As a fan of BeOS, it doesn't seem that way to me.

The article is quite one-sided. My experience is certainly that B6 has an effect on nerves, but in my case that's been a good thing.

I started a software job in 1995, writing a lot of code. By mid-1997, I had severe nerve pain in both wrists, even with ice, stretching, and ibuprofen.

I went to an excellent orthopedist who prescribed two things: a Kinesis Advantage keyboard to mostly immobilize the wrists while typing, and 50 mg of Vitamin B6 per day.

The combination saved my career. I sometimes get out of the habit of taking the B6 for a week or two, out of sheer forgetfulness. After a couple of weeks, I'll start noticing very minor nerve pain if I'm using the Kinesis Advantage keyboard (I'm typing this on one right now.) But if I'm typing on a normal keyboard at a client site, a week or so is enough to bring back noticeable nerve pain, which reminds me to start the B6 regimen again. After a few days on B6, the pain recedes.

I was a little nervous at taking 2500% of the RDA, so I researched the medical literature, and the studies I found showing problems caused by excessive B6 all described people taking 200mg or more per day.

The article notes that "since 2022 the TGA has required a warning label for listed medicines with more than 10mg of B6." So maybe studies showing the potential for harm have come out since then; I don't know. On the other hand, has anyone ever gathered data to show whether supplemental B6 actually does improve cases like mine? Vitamin B6 can't be patented, so there's no money to be made, so who is going to fund that study?

This is great and has a lot of early historical perspective that I had never seen chronicled before.

But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.

If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5304267-album-cover-albu...

Jane Jacobs's grandmother, Hannah Breece, was also a remarkable, dynamic woman: the first American schoolteacher in Alaska after its purchase from Russia. Jacobs did valuable work editing her grandmother's incomplete memoirs and publishing them with commentary [1]. If you are interested in Jacobs, give it a read; both women's personalities come through quite distinctly.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1471846.A_Schoolteacher_...

Perhaps not. But you could still imagine a for-profit matchmaking service that would do a better job of aligning its interests with those of its clients. For example, it could collect only a small fee upfront with an agreement that if you meet Mr. or Ms. Right you'll release a larger fee held in escrow.

I imagine that would need to be quite personalized and high touch, but it would be an appealing contrast to standard dating sites, which have interests diametrically opposed to those of their users: a user who makes a long-term match will stop paying the membership fee, so the site owner has no real incentive to help the user do anything but churn.

If you can't get photons from the future, just get a hold of some thiotimoline, a compound invented by SF master Isaac Asimov that dissolves slightly before it is added to water. After first describing it in a spoof chemistry paper, he returned to it several times, exploring its different applications and the new scientific field it created, "chronochemistry".

The best IMHO is "Thiotimoline and the Space Age" from 1960. You can read it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/MerrilEdTheYearsBestSF05/Merril_...

I have seen references to using uv for Python package management before and been thoroughly confused. I never realized it was not the same thing as the very nice asynchronous cross-platform library libuv (https://libuv.org/) and I could never figure out what that library had to do with Python package management (answer: nothing).

Maybe we need a Geographic Names Board to deconflict open source project names, or at least the ones that are only two or three characters long.

I maintain a moderately complex site for a nonprofit, with an e-commerce back end and a searchable full-text database. The budget is a shoestring (there's, like, one e-commerce purchase a week) and I don't have the time to keep a server patched.

For me, the right solution is "semi-dedicated hosting" from NameCrane.com. Really it's just high quality shared hosting with resource guarantees. You can pay anywhere from eight to 120 bucks a year depending on the amount of resources you want. For me the sweet spot is $15 a month for a quarter terabyte of NVMe storage, two cores, and four gigs of RAM.

Unlike with Mythic Beasts, you don't get to run your own persistent processes; you have to be content with the mysqld and lighthttpd provided. But on the plus side, you get backups, cron jobs, and good outbound email deliverability. SSH access is available. You don't get sudo, which is kind of the point, but you can install whatever software you want, as long as you "pip install --user" and "configure --prefix $HOME". That might take some getting used to, for folks used to a VPS; but it's a worthwhile trade-off for not having to do server admin.

Apple Vision and its wrappers provide bounding boxes for each line of text. That's slightly less convenient than Tesseract which can give you a bounding box for each word, but more than compensated by Apple Vision's better accuracy. I am planning to fudge the word boxes by assuming fixed-width letters and dividing up the overall width so that each word's width is proportional to its share of the total letters on the line.

Once you have those bounding boxes, it's pretty simple to use a library like [1] (Python) or [2] (JavaScript) to add overlay text in the right place. For example, see how [3] does it.

[1] https://pymupdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/recipes-text.html#h... [2] https://github.com/foliojs/pdfkit [3] https://github.com/eloops/hocr2pdf

I maintain a searchable archive of historical documents for a nonprofit, OCR'd with Tesseract over several years. Tesseract 4 was a big improvement over previous versions, but since then its accuracy has not improved at the same rate as other free solutions.

These days, just uploading a PDF of scanned documents (typeset ones, not handwriting) to Google Drive and opening with Google Docs results in a text document generated with impressive quality OCR.

But this is not scriptable, and doesn't provide access position information, which is needed so we can highlight search results as color overlays on the original PDF. Tesseract's hOCR mode was great for that.

For the next version, we're planning to use one of the command-line wrappers to Apple's Vision framework, which is included free in MacOS. A nice one that provides position information is at https://github.com/bytefer/macos-vision-ocr

The only nontrivial thing I use a word processor for is "mail merge" with a spreadsheet to create mailing labels. I used to have to keep a Windows VM around to do that in Microsoft Office. But a couple of years ago, I tried LibreOffice and was happy to find it has progressed so much. Now it's easier to use LibreOffice for that task than to use the Microsoft tools. Kudos to the developers for their careful work getting stuff like that right.

Certainly people contain multitudes, but in Heinlein's case some of the diversity of viewpoint was intentional. The happy universalism of "Stranger in a Strange Land", the libertarianism of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', and the patriotic collectivism of "Starship Troopers" were, I think, the result of Heinlein choosing three very different political philosophies and exploring where they led. (This is not my original theory, but I can't seem to find a reference for it.)

To me it's one more sign of how masterful a storyteller Heinlein was that his embrace of the contradictions was conscious and not just a result of some sort of inner conflict.

From the article: "if hackers gained access to service providers’ core routers, it would leave them in a powerful position to steal information..."

Sorry for the newbie question, but isn't most internet traffic end-to-end encrypted, these days? So what information would the hackers, or for that matter the "lawful intercept" system , have been able to steal? I do see how accessing routers would let intruders launch malwares, spoof other sites for phishing attacks, etc.

In theory you are right that stock splits have no bearing on returns, but in practice it is well documented (see e.g. [1]) that "stock splits and reverse splits often result in short-term abnormal returns even though such split events do not change any fundamental factors affecting the valuation of a firm's stock."

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...

Choosing labor as the value is worse than arbitrary, because labor is far less fungible than (say) commodities. The value of labor depends on whose labor it is for the job. Half an hour's labor by one person can turn apples, flour, butter, and sugar into a delicious pie; half an hour's labor by a different person will create a soggy mess. In one case, labor adds value; in another case, it destroys value (can't use that flour for anything else now.)