adrianmonk

When you're the paying customer, it's possible (but not guaranteed) that they could see privacy as product differentiation.

In other words, if company A and B both offer you a product for $N, but A protects your privacy better than B, then A might get more customers. This competitive advantage can be an incentive for privacy.

However, there definitely limitations. If the value of this competitive advantage is less than the revenue they make by selling your data, then it's not a strong enough incentive. It also only works if consumers care about privacy and take the time to factor it into their purchasing decision.

I think the safety officer meant that white paint prevents the rail from heating up. The heating of rails contributes to problems with derailment. If the heat isn't a contributor, that heat is one less thing you have to fight (as in account for).

But the photo caption paraphrases him and says that the white paint fights (as in prevents) the heat, which uses similar words but a different logic to it (but the same overall meaning).

If I've got that right, then I think the blame lies on whoever wrote this article for making it confusing.

[Replying to myself...]

Oops, I got one wrong.

Copyright("©"): compose + "c" + "o".

The one I had is bigger: Ⓒ vs. ©.

It's pretty easy on Linux with the compose key. To get "≠", you just hit compose, then "/", then "=". That's actually the same number of keystrokes as "!=" (since "!" requires the shift key).

For whatever reason, the OS documentation lacks a list of allowed compose key sequences. But they are intuitive enough that you can find many of them through experimentation. For example:

Musical sharp ("♯"): compose + "#" + "#".

Interrobang ("‽"): compose + "!" + "?".

Letter "ñ" as in "jalapeño": compose + "n" + "~".

Copyright ("ⓒ"): compose + "(" + c + ")".

So does BASIC. It might even be the first, although it's hard to be sure.

BASIC[1] came out in 1964, and Pascal[2] came out in 1970.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_BASIC

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)

And assuming the crypto algorithm has no fundamental flaws, it's applied correctly, and the software implementation has no bugs.

All of which are things people have on occasion believed to be true and found out later they were wrong about.

If the competitive risk is real, then are choosing between supplier risk (AI model access) and competitive risk.

When there isn't a zero-risk option, the question becomes which risk is smaller.

A bank card is a type of card. Credit cards and debit cards are both bank cards. Prepaid cards are another type.

With any type of bank card, there's a bank that guarantees to a merchant that they will later receive a payment. With a debit card, the guarantee is backed by money you have on deposit. With a credit card, it's backed by the bank's money, which is higher risk for the bank.

Two US companies, VISA and Mastercard, have big networks for processing transactions with bank cards. These networks act as intermediaries to connect merchants (who want to accept payments) and banks (who issue cards) together. It's much simpler for a merchant to send a request to (say) VISA than to figure out which bank issued each customer's card. The payment networks also define, publish, and enforce standards and rules for the payment process.

These networks aren't banks. But they are, in a sense, bank card companies because they are part of the bank card system.

So in other words, European consumers have an account at a European bank that issues them a card they can use for purchases at European businesses, but US networks connect it all together.

I'm no expert on cameras, but this seems to explain it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-tube_television_camera

This says the main reason for four-tube is image registration. Basically, the incoming light is optically split up into red, green, and blue, and these go to separate sensors. Being separate sensors, they may not be physically aligned. So if you sum R + G + B together to get luminance, the picture will not be sharp.

You can solve this by adding a fourth (black and white) tube for luminance. Since it's just one tube, there is no alignment issue for the luminance part of the picture. And the eye is less sensitive to color, so while the color alignment issues remain, they aren't very noticeable.

At first when I read this, I assume the camera must have to somehow combine the fourth tube's signal with the other three tubes' signals. But since both NTSC and PAL encode luminance and chrominance separately, apparently this isn't necessary. It's the TV that combines them. With a three-tube camera, the sensor signals have to be split into luminance and chrominance. With a four-tube camera, you just take luminance from one sensor and chrominance from the other three sensors.

Seems like if Lore wants to reduce space usage, they could apply something like Git's delta compression (as used in packfiles) to the chunks.

Suppose you make a 1 kB change in a 50 MB file. That causes a 64 kB chunk to be created and stored. Disk space is wasted.

But since the 50 MB file was already stored as a sequence of 64 kB chunks, there is an existing 64 kB chunk that is very similar to your new 64 kB chunk. You can store your new chunk as a delta to that, so only ~1 kB of disk space is used.

Admittedly, it's complicated and inelegant. But it allows both deduplication between files (one of the reasons Lore chose chunks, apparently) and efficient space usage for small changes.

Three decades later, with the release of macOS 26.5, Apple caught up: you can finally set your Mac to 'Always' boot whenever power is restored, regardless of how it was shut down.

Back in the 1990s, a Mac sysadmin showed me a clever trick for this.

Get one specific Apple Desktop Bus keyboard that has a soft power key on it, I believe the Apple Extended Keyboard[1]. Then get a Bic pen[2]. Push down the power key on the keyboard, and while it's still down, wedge the pen cap between the key and the keyboard case.

The pen cap is the perfect size and shape to hold the key down, and Bic pens are easy to find. There are no ill effects from having the power key down all the time, and the Mac will boot up after a power failure. So you don't have to drive to work just to push the power button.

This was especially handy considering you sometimes needed to use Macs as servers (file server, printing, certain Mac-only applications, etc.), but Apple did not make servers.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bic_Cristal

If we're in a simulation, we are AI. But someone could be studying what happens when AI makes its own AI.

It's a minor perk for sure. From their perspective, it probably costs essentially nothing, so why not.

But I can see it being useful if they're expanding to a nearby city. Waymo is in Los Angeles already and will expand into San Diego this year. If you live in LA, you might have friends, family, or business in San Diego and visit fairly often. Or maybe a group of people want to ride in one car for a weekend trip there but don't want to spend every moment together.

Because quicksort is like a worst case scenario for branch prediction.

Branch prediction works when the CPU can detect some kind of pattern in the program behavior, like if the branch usually goes one way and rarely goes the other way. If it predicts correctly, the CPU pipeline keeps going without stalling. If it predicts incorrectly, the CPU wastes time doing work that it has to throw away. Therefore, being able to predict correctly is essential.

In quicksort, you partition an array into two halves based on whether each element is smaller or larger than the pivot value. The key to good quicksort performance is to choose a good pivot which divides the values in half about equally. This means (assuming you're sorting randomly-ordered data) that the branching behavior will be totally unpredictable, like flipping a coin. So branch prediction will be basically useless.

Copying small chunks of data is OK if it all fits in cache, especially if it all fits in L1 cache. It's not ideal to copy data unnecessarily, but if it allows you to keep the CPU pipeline running at full speed with no stalls, it can be a good trade-off.

OK, you bring up a very good point. If the eggs fail to hatch because they are never fertilized, then the mosquitoes are not acting as a vector because they do not transmit the disease. I didn't even consider that possibility.

However, it turns out the eggs are fertilized. Note that the FAQ says the males are effectively sterile and links here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytoplasmic_incompatibility

That wikipedia article says that there are embryos, but the embryos die.

However, the real question to ask, I guess, is whether the embryo is infected. As I read that article, it sounds like it isn't. Instead, the male parent is infected and this creates sperm which can fertilize the egg but in a way that creates an embryo that can't survive. In other words, the male parent has an infectious disease which causes the embryo to have a fatal genetic disease.

So this also brings up another question: what exactly is a vector? In this scenario, the embryo has a disease it would not otherwise have gotten, if it weren't for this germ. However, the embryo doesn't have the germ itself. Is being a vector defined by whether some disease is caused, or is it defined by whether the germ is spread? I don't know.

The symmetry is amusing. This is really fighting fire with fire.

Mosquitoes are a vector that spreads disease-causing germs to a population. The proposed solution is to use different mosquitoes as different vector that spreads a different disease-causing germ to a different population.

Also, cleaning kitchens is a huge part of the job. Hotel rooms either have no kitchen or a very minimal one. You're not going to learn how to clean an oven or load a dishwasher in a hotel room. (And loading a dishwasher requires categorizing thousands of things as dishwasher safe or not! Stainless steel skillet, yes; cast iron skillet, no; etc.)

Maybe I'm weird, but I believe in the theory that (all else equal) it's good for business to minimize how much your users hate your product/service.

In other words, users dislike the feeling of not knowing whether things are ads. I can't see any real downside to labeling them, so you're better off doing it so you don't drive users away.

Also, some very old computers had 36-bit words. Word sizes on modern computers are virtually always powers of 2, but it hasn't always been that way.

And octal is more convenient for output via 7-segment LEDs and for input via numeric keypads.

Have a rod that pivots in its center and has objects of equal mass at each end, like a balanced seesaw. But make one of the objects very low density (less than water) and other high density.

Since the densities differ, water will cause the rod to rotate. But since the masses are the same, bumps will create no net torque around the pivot point and thus no rotation.

ASCII art diagram:

    F------(x)------C

    (x): pivot point
    F: float
    C: counterbalance

I'm sure there are other ways like sensing the electrical resistance of the water.

Or just let the float sensor bounce. It's underwater when it stops bouncing and is continuously in the up position.

Waymos are fleet vehicles. Recalls go to the owners, just like with other fleet vehicles such as rental cars, taxis, limos, delivery services, utilities, and city/state/federal government. It doesn't really matter who is whose customer.

The article mentions this: "A few years back, Linux added a way for software to wait on several events at once, which is something Windows had built in for decades, but Linux didn't."

This is not really my area, but from a quick web search, I think they mean io_uring. Here's a blog post about it: https://mazzo.li/posts/uring-multiplex.html

If you're talking about the incident described in the article, it says it was a flaw in "a popular open-source, web-based system administration tool".

Google's blog (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-...) says Google "worked with the impacted vendor to responsibly disclose this vulnerability", so in this incident, it's not Google software.

Here's a better comparison to pro athletes. Their work output is winning games. How do they get good at (and stay good at) that? Is it by playing real games for points?

That's a part of it, but only a small part. They don't get good at the thing mainly by doing the thing. They get good at it by training to do the thing.

An NFL football player does a ton of things other than playing in games. They have practice scrimmages. They do drills like throwing, catching, running patterns, tackling, reading quarterbacks, stripping balls, picking up fumbles, etc. They work with coaches on their technique. They watch film. They spend many hours in the gym and on the track building their strength, speed, cardio, and stamina.

Yes, it's true that your software skills will atrophy if you don't use them. But that doesn't mean your skills have to get worse and worse causing you to eventually quit the job. It means you need to set aside time to maintain your skills. It may no longer happen automatically as a side effect of your work, but it can happen intentionally instead.

They are suggesting that a human used an abbreviation rather than making a typo.

The scenario is a cross-country trip in an electric car. What actual, specific advantage does a train or bus offer in this scenario? What problem does it solve better?

It's an electric car, so carbon emissions are low.

Most of the route will be in rural areas in the middle of the night, so the impact on traffic will be minimal.

As for the cost to build and maintain the roads, they are already needed so rural areas are accessible. Wear and tear on roads and bridges isn't much of an issue since heavy vehicles like trucks cause massively disproportionate damage[1]. (A bus might actually be worse than the equivalent number of cars in this respect.)

---

[1] See https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share... . Some studies show that damage varies with the fourth power of axle weight.

I read it as "paraboloid" and expected it to be about some very specific geometrical shape with a niche practical application.

Apparently a common source of problems is taking two different medications without realizing they both contain acetaminophen.

Suppose your arthritis is acting up, so you start taking Tylenol 8hr Arthritis Pain[1]. That's 2 tablets every 8 hours. They're extended-release with 650mg per tablet. A total of 3900 mg in 24 hours.

A few days later you get the flu, so you decide to add what seems like a completely different medication: Theraflu Flu Relief Max Strength[2]. It has a cough suppressant and an antihistamine. But each caplet also contains 500 mg of acetaminophen. It says to take 2 caplets every 6 hours, so you take 8 of them in 24 hours[3]. That's another 4000 mg.

Between the two, you're at 7900 mg.

Then you wake up in the morning and take both medications, but 30 minutes later you've forgotten you took them. You're not thinking straight because you're sick. So you accidentally take a second dose. That additional 2300 mg brings your total to 10200 mg.

---

[1] https://www.tylenol.com/products/arthritis/tylenol-8hr-arthr...

[2] https://www.theraflu.com/products/day-night-flu-relief-max-s...

[3] You weren't supposed to take 8 of them, though. If you'd read the label very carefully, you'd have seen it also says not to exceed 6 in a 24-hour period.

That's the joke, isn't it?

A fission power plant simulator lets you have fun playing through a meltdown disaster scenario. A fusion power plant simulator is "worse" because it takes away the "fun" of meltdowns. The humor is in reacting to the simulator as if it were a game (some are, but this one isn't).

Chips only have a certain number of pins. It probably works out better economically if those pins can be used for either input or output. Chip manufacturers can thus make one product that will fit the needs of more customers instead of (say) 9 different chip variants with 8 inputs and 0 outputs, 7 inputs and 1 output, 6 inputs and 2 outputs, etc.

It could also be useful to the end user. Motherboards have a limited number of ports since the connectors cost money and take up space on the back panel. One user might want a line input (for digitizing old cassettes, for example)[1] and another user might want an extra surround sound output (for 7.1 surround sound instead of just 5.1 surround). With retasking, the motherboard can support both these niche use cases with a single shared port.

---

[1] You can't use a microphone input for this because (a) it's mono and (b) it's a different voltage level.