Someone

I mean you’d probably just generate random low descriptive length f(x,y,z), check for a const determinant then poke for invertibility.

That’s true, but for “a ~3 day computer search”, it seems you would have had to be extremely lucky to find a counterexample. Might have had more chance playing the lottery.

You would have to show what you did try.

Typically, you can describe that in the form of a partial result (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_conjecture#Partia...) or as another conjecture.

Password managers not only store website passwords (e.g. for shared drives or command-line tools), so they IMO shouldn’t be part of a browser.

Also, for those using multiple browsers, how would, say, Firefox access passwords or passkeys if Chrome stores them?

Having said that, requiring web browser extensions to enable integration of password managers IMO isn’t a good thing. There should be a common password manager protocol and a discovery mechanism that allows browsers to detect and communicate with the user’s password manager.

and forced to download their authenticator app

AFAIK, that’s not forced, ‘only’ strongly directed towards. You certainly can use a third party authenticator with Microsoft accounts, and I expect that to work with OneDrive, too.

and yet the counter example is something a grad student in 1997 could have found w a ~3 day computer search

Is that true? Even restricting this to f(x,y,z) and coefficients and powers to 1 ≤ x ≤ 10, there are a lot of polynomials to check, and checking requires checking the Jacobian determinant and, if it’s a non zero constant, finding two points for which the polynomial produces the same value.

Or is there a way to generate all polynomials with a non-zero Jacobian determinant, and does that speed up things? (My intuition say it wouldn’t, because I guess those with zero determinants are rare)

I am assuming it would be because multiplying would still be faster than reading from a lookup table?

Even if it isn’t, it still would be a lot cheaper. With 32-bit integers, the lookup table would have 2⁶⁴ 64-bit values. If my math six right, that is 128 exabytes of read-only memory. With 64-but integers, it truly would be impractical, at 2¹²⁸ 128-bit values.

This situation has.. no precedent as far as I can tell..

- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/drivers...: “Windows can automatically download recommended drivers for the hardware and devices connected to a system by using Windows Update“

- eight years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/8tlre3/why_is_it...: “I can't seem to stop it from installing device drivers, even after unchecking the 'Do you want to automatically download manufacturers' apps and custom icons available for your devices?' and saving.

I uncheck it, reboot. Uninstall all drivers except USB (so I can use mouse and keyboard) and reboot. Aproximately two minutes after the reboot, I get notification ballons telling me everything is installed again. Heck, even the super old Nvidia 388.1 driver is installed (the latest now is 393.2).”

Go is not a better C, in the sense that you cannot write an OS with it

Can you even write an OS in pure ISO standard C? I know atomic (https://en.cppreference.com/c/language/atomic) was added in C11, but is that sufficient to write an OS? How do you write a kernel-user space transition in standard C, for example?

Customers do adapt to this, and expect future discounts (sales) at release date already, and defer their purchase accordingly (despite valueing it higher!).

But in reality, customers are not 100% rational

Or they are, and assign higher value to having the product now, rather than in the future.

I can easily see that apply in the case of pharma, where paying $$$ now can be preferable even over getting the product for free a month from now, when you’re dead.

The article itself says something different (required for ≥ 30 optional for < 30):

“The Pentagon will begin screening active-duty service members 30 and older for testosterone deficiency every year […] Service members younger than 30 will be able to request the test voluntarily”

And of course, this policy change was published on the relevant channel, namely X, according to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/15/us-military-...)

The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...

I think a major use case for live translation is one where the other party is standing opposite to you.

I don’t think the OP is starting from WASM code; they’re starting from a language with SIMD primitives that map closely to those of WASM. There, you often have information to prove function arguments do not alias.

Nothing would prevent a device from accurately detecting battery levels of NiMH batteries

Wouldn’t the NiMH batteries have to be smarter in that case, keeping track of their own historical behavior? That changes over time, and devices with integrated batteries can take that into account to indicate charge levels. If you can swap batteries, you lose that information.

These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft could turn a knob and get telemetry data from millions of devices, and feed that back to the software graphics authors.

Certainly both Intel (https://www.techpowerup.com/312122/psa-intel-graphics-driver...) and Nvidia (https://nateshoffner.com/blog/2017/05/disable-nvidia-telemet...) collect such data themselves (opt-in in both cases, so they may not get much data from the most hard-core gamers)

Similarly (https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/14/microsoft-data-center-uses-1-d...):

“Microsoft’s oldest hyperscale data center in the Netherlands, a series of interconnected warehouses along the A7 in Middenmeer, currently consumes over 1 percent of all Dutch electricity

[…]

At the end of 2024, data centers already accounted for 4.6 percent of the Netherlands’ total electricity consumption, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) calculated late last year. Grid operators expect this to grow to around 15 percent of all electricity used by 2030”

Liu allegedly kept an Apple-issued laptop after departing the company and exploited a vulnerability to download dozens of confidential Apple documents while he was working at OpenAI

How come Apple didn’t remotely wipe that laptop or at least black it from accessing their network? Whether they couldn’t or didn’t, that doesn’t show well for their IT department.

The UI of git - for better or worse - directly reflects its internals.

I disagree. For example, we have, from “git checkout —help”:

   git checkout has two main modes:

   1. Switch branches, with git checkout <branch>

   2. Restore a different version of a file

(And of course, there are many inconsistencies in the CLI that do not have to do with git internals that, even if you know what you want to do internally and which command to use, make figuring out the CLI incantation to do it harder than needed. That’s a different subject, but still contributes to “git is difficult to use”)

Thanks! No pictures and way uglier than Apple’s HIG book, but much more than I ever found.

Maybe, but I’ve searched for it many times out of curiosity, but have never managed to locate it online, and wouldn’t know if paper copies exist.

From Wikipedia, I get to https://web.archive.org/web/20010204033600/http://publib.bou...

That has one live link: https://web.archive.org/web/20010107084700/http://publib.bou..., but from there, the trail runs dead.

Do you have a link?

That’s straight from the standard. https://en.cppreference.com/c/numeric/math/hypot: “if one of the arguments is ±∞, hypot returns +∞ even if the other argument is NaN”

⇒ I expect this choice got careful consideration. (Edit: in the end, the reasoning still could have been “unfortunately, existing implementations do it this way; we’ll begrudgingly follow them”)

RYO is the best way to learn, if you have the time to learn

The problem is that nowadays, people roll their own solution, don’t take the time to learn (somewhat understandably, given the complexity of today’s stuff. You simply cannot learn all details about your hardware, OS, and third-party libraries anymore) but immediately deploy things in production.

Eating your own dog food can be good, but for security related stuff, it can easily be disastrous.

I did mention “perceived” and also included shouting in my list because of that, but I could have been clearer.

Also, the set of people who feel unsafe by just having somebody who’s noticeably poor in their proximity definitely is not empty.

Staying in your bubble is way easier if you avoid public transport and walking on the street as much as possible.

The idea is to define persistent or temporary bookmarks for directories:

  be add work ~/Work
  bm temp build /tmp/build

  cd @work
  ls @work/project

  ln -s ~/Work @work

Also, how are temporary bookmarks improvements on

  export build=/tmp/build

?

It’s a safe bet that sndgndgndgndy isn’t referring to that metric, but to the (perceived) probability of getting shouted at, mugged, etc.

That, I have been told, is definitely a problem in the USA. I think that’s because they’ve painted themselves into a car-centric corner that it is very hard to get out of.

But the problem is: everybody doing a trip with a transfer has real-time constraints.

With Interrail, that is doable. You’ll have to mostly plan for overnight stays in large cities, but that’s what most Interrail users want to, anyways.

notably the Monster Raving Loony Party.

The _Official_ Monster Raving Loony Party (http://www.loonyparty.com/), you mean?

Wikipedia (of course) has a page on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_...) and also has a list of frivolous political parties worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_frivolous_political_pa...)

If anything the bias is the other way around. You get to see all the 80 year olds who are fit enough to interact with society. You never see the the ones who are wasting away in their homes, hospices, and hospitals

That’s true, but I still think there’s societal pressure on acting old for the elderly.

As a tiny example, if you’re in your 20’s friends and family ask “how’s your job hunt going?”. In your 40’s, they ask “how’s work?”. In your 60s they ask “are you still working?”, even if you’re fit as a fiddle, and even though pension age creeps towards 70 in many countries.

The expectation, basically, is that you work till your mid sixties, enjoy retirement for ten years or so, grow old, and die.

That’s statistically true, but there are outliers. I think that expectation makes some of the outliers at the healthy end reach that final stage slightly earlier than needed.

but that's on the destructor or the pointer, not on reference counting per se.

It is on reference counting per se. If the reference count of a reference goes to zero, the runtime has to make the memory available for reuse. That’s what I called ‘calling free’.

Also, about “GC has indeterminate timing in and of itself”. Again: define what you mean by it. Yes, The timing of allocating an object can vary depending on the state of your memory allocator, but that’s the same with reference counting.

(even allocating an object on the stack and then writing to it can have variable timing on many OSes. If you look really close, even decreasing a stack pointer can have variable timing on modern pipelined CPUs due to data dependencies)

And as I said, the GC work to find and reclaim unreachable objects can run on separate thread(s).

It makes, if cultural expectations lag reality of longer life spans.

I think it does; society thinks 80-year olds are physically less fit than they are in reality, shaping expectations of what 80-year olds should want, and I also think 80-year olds are influenced (even if slightly) by that.

I expect they would tell the units that they get more points for results in zone A than in zone B, and allow teams to move (or move their drone operations) towards zone A.

They seem flexible enough to do that, tweaking the system fairly frequently.

For example, see https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/updated-e-points-system-military-....