blincoln

Walmart

I'm a little surprised to see the company that locked employees into their buildings during night shifts[1] in your "more ethical" list.

[1] https://archive.is/Fx9S

Just to add to the anecdotes:

I'm in my late 40s. I grew up on an island in Washington state. Truly commercial-grade fireworks (the kind that professionals would launch for an audience of thousands) were banned by that time, but plenty of fireworks that would be categorized as "commercial-grade" today were sold publicly by multiple vendors every year.

I love fireworks now, but my first memory of them was terrifying. I would have been about 3 to 5. My parents drove our VW bus to a nearby beach to watch the local display. It was total madness. Teenagers threw explosive fireworks onto and underneath our car.

Even a lot of the smaller home-use fireworks back then had hilariously unsafe behaviour. I remember in particular one called something like "Saturn Missile Battery". It was a box that launched a 10x10 grid of 100 whistling, finless plastic rockets (each about 4-5cm x 5-6mm), with each rocket exploding when their propellant ran out. Because they had no stabilization, they would fly in all directions, change direction in flight, etc. When my dad set it off, one of them literally flew right over our heads into the house and exploded in the basement.

My experience is that outside of Seattle, enforcement of fireworks restrictions is pretty lax. For example, if one watches the professional display in Tacoma, one will also see most of Dash Point / Browns Point continuously lit up by fireworks that are unambiguously well outside the legal restrictions.

I agree that a lot of people are reckless, and it's just a matter of time before it causes a high-profile disaster somewhere in the state. But I also agree with the parent comment that it's such an ingrained part of American culture that it would be very hard to change - at least until there's a local disaster that gives people a visceral feeling for the danger.

That's surprisingly inexpensive for 256 GiB of VRAM, but how much power would it take to run it? Is it even feasible with residential circuits?

When I report serious ones, mostly the devs will respond with something like, yeah, thats how we designed it in a dangerous way, so that the layer above or below can solve the issues, and other footgun stuff.

This is one of the reasons that responsible disclosure exists. Their tune will likely change after sufficient bad publicity.

If the Apache Solr devs can be convinced to add authentication to their product instead of hand-waving about reverse proxies or other add-ons, anyone can.

Is the job submission handled securely?

I've seen plenty of systems along the lines of what you're describing where unauthenticated clients can submit jobs. Sometimes the developers even claim that's intentional. Either way, it's a vulnerability, because it compromises the underlying hosts.

The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

Do you know if this is why looking through a true green-blocking (pure magenta or purple) filter (e.g. Wratten 32, 33, or 34A) is such a different experience than a digital photo taken using the same filter?

Looking through those filters is extremely surreal for me, but I've not been able to capture anything like it with any camera.

AFAIK TIFF supports an arbitrary number of additional channels already.

If you haven't already, you should do some tests to see if you can see UV-A now. Some replacement lenses are UV-transparent.

Dandelions in sunlight are an easy option, at least in my part of the world. If your replacement lens is UV-transparent, dandelions should have a very distinct colour difference between the center and outer parts of the petals, instead of a mostly-uniform yellow.

And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators.

It sure sounds like Trump himself is being duped:

"On April 15, a question about the missing or dead individuals came up at a White House press briefing and by the next day Trump said he had met with advisers and the issue was being investigated. FBI Director Kash Patel reiterated the importance of looking for connections in these cases Sunday on Fox News. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is conducting its own investigation."

https://apnews.com/article/scientists-missing-dead-conspirac...

When I was very young (around 3 or 4) I woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to climb into my parents' bed.

After some time, I could see a small-scale but very extensive science fiction space base on top of the bed covers, as if the bed covers were the surface of a moon or planet.

It was populated, and in motion - rockets launching from gantries as I watched, etc. I know it wasn't a dream, because my parents remember me describing it to them as it happened.

I've never experienced anything like that again, and never heard of anything like it until reading about these mushrooms last year.

It definitely seems like an odd quirk of the brain that it apparently has a ”1990s god video game" (e.g. Populous) visualization mode.

There's some neat sci fi novel potential there, though, like it being a remnant of some kind of distant ancestor with a hive mind that could synthesize the visual input of multiple members into a disembodied third-person camera point of view.

It was an interesting thoery, but IMO his habit of making similar claims every time an interstellar object is discovered cast doubt on that original theory.

Also, the "can't radar, plz don't ITAR" is horseshit.

My assumption is that they're trying to avoid crossing a legal line, as opposed to being personally invested in the idea of preventing radar use by a determined hobbyist.

Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows

I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.

SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.

That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.

What nonviolent application are you imagining for a gps-guided rocket that is launched by pulling a gun trigger on a hand held mount?

A launcher for a climbing rope or grappling hook. Have you ever tried getting a rope up over a branch on a very tall tree?

Not joking - I considered it as a hobby project years ago until I discovered how hard it would be to do legally.

Seems like the quick fix is to rebrand this from "MANPADS" to "anti-tank", right? Then it would just be a standard destructive device?

Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales

I have a thermal imager. They can't see through walls in the sense you're imagining. If there's an electric heating element inside a wall or a ceiling, you could get an image of that. If there's a camera or other active electronics hidden in a wall or object, you can see the heat from that.

You wouldn't be able to see a person in an adjacent room through the wall between the two rooms, unless the wall was made specifically of thermally-transparent material.

I've heard rumours of "see through walls" equipment in the US military before. If they really have something like that, it would have to be using technology other than thermal imaging.

At least in America, high-tech scans are treated as a cash cow. And cheap & reasonable tests, if done, are merely an afterthought - after the patient has been milked for all the scan-bucks that their insurance will pay out.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but that hasn't been my experience. I've had one MRI and one CT scan in the 25+ years that I've been a full-time employed adult with insurance.

I'd have been happy to sign up for more so I could have proactive health information and the raw data to use for hobby projects.

If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.

Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.

Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?

Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.

Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.

They weren't that high frequency. I could hear computer monitors into my twenties at least. I'd guess somewhere around 20 - 22 kHz. CRTs were largely replaced by LCDs by my late 20s/early 30s, so I don't have a good sense of when I stopped being able to hear frequencies that high.

This was my first thought as well. I've always been fascinated by written accounts of DMT triggering such oddly specific effects for users.

I find it very useful for wildlife photos. Autofocus never seems to work well for me on e.g. birds in flight.

It's also possible to generate a depth map from a single shot, to use as a starting point for a 3D model.

They're pretty neat cameras. The relatively low output resolution is the main downside. They would also have greatly benefited from consulting with more photographers on the UI of the hardware and software. There's way too much dependency on using the touchscreen instead of dedicated physical controls.

I'd be curious how many of today's automatic package validation tools or peer review processes would have caught the lotusbail package discussed in the article. The malicious aspects were heavily obfuscated, and it worked as advertised.

Algorithms like AES-GCM are standards because - when used according to best practices - there are no known practical attacks against them.

If someone has an attack that would defeat the cryptographic protection in a particular piece of software, the software is likely doing one or more of the following:

* Not using a modern, well-tested algorithm (e.g. using DES, a hokey custom XOR stream cipher, AES-ECB, etc.).

* Not following general cryptographic best practices (e.g. hardcoded or predictable key/IV/nonce, insecure storage of keys).

* Not following best practices for the specific algorithm (e.g. using AES-GCM, but reusing a key/nonce combination; using AES-CBC without applying an integrity-protection mechanism).

* The software is doing something that doesn't make sense, cryptographically (e.g. using symmetric encryption to encrypt sensitive data, but the data and the keys are necessarily accessible to the same set of users/service accounts, so there's no net change in security).

If such an attack fails because a developer has made changes to the cryptographic algorithm, a motivated attacker is likely just going to look at the code in Ghidra, x64dbg, etc. and figure out how to account for the changes. It's not a strong security control. I've been decrypting content stored using that kind of software for something like 20 years.

The correct approach is to verify that the use of a particular type of cryptography makes sense in the first place, then use a well-tested modern algorithm and follow the current best practices. i.e. using code from years-old forum posts will likely result in an insecure product.

I've been assessing systems that use cryptography for about 20 years as part of my work in information security, and I've never seen a customization that increased the security of a cryptographic algorithm over following the best practices.

Usually, non-specialists fiddling with cryptographic algorithms makes them much less secure. Developers who aren't cryptographic mathematicians should generally use a well-respected algorithm, follow current best practices, and treat that component as a magic box that's not to be tampered with.

I've used a shop vac as a first step, but if it's the only step, won't the queen survive and make more wasps? Unless you left it running for so long the queen starved to death, I mean.

My current approach is to wait until after dark, then fill up the nest entrance with spray foam (while wearing a beekeeper suit, just to be safe). I don't think that would work for walls, though - they'd probably find another way out.

Maybe you have friendlier wasps in the UK, but the common ones in the US (yellowjackets, mud daubers, etc.) are generally very aggressive, and trying to coexist with them will end badly sooner or later.

I'm vegetarian because of personal ethics. I safely capture and release spiders I find in the house. I use live traps for mice and rats, and release them in the woods. But most wasps here are on my "nip the problem in the bud" list, along with termites, Scotch Broom, and a few other things.

I leave non-aggressive wasps, like Great Golden Diggers, alone.

Feels like there must be some way to use "variability of colour by viewing angle" for tiny clusters of volumes in the object as a way to generate material settings when converting the Gaussian splat model to a traditional 3D model.

E.g. if you have a cluster of tiny adjacent volumes that have high variability based on viewing angle, but the difference between each of those volumes is small, handle it as a smooth, reflective surface, like chrome.

Really amazing results.

I wonder if one could capture each angle in a single shot with a Lytro Illum instead of focus-stacking? Or is the output of an Illum not of sufficient resolution?

100% agree.

I supported enterprise Windows systems for a decade, although I had Unix and Linux experience as well and liked all of them.

I skipped Windows 8 entirely. For the 10 era, I had at least one Linux VM on each of my systems, and migrated to open-source where possible even on the host OS (Blender, Inkscape, etc.).

Windows 11 pushed me to flip things around - Linux as the host OS, and a Windows VM or dual-boot if I absolutely need to do something with that system that only runs well on Windows. These days, that list is very short.

All of the many frustrations of 11 become much less pressing when it's just throwing a temper tantrum in its playpen instead of interrupting serious work; the effect is magnified by rarely needing to interact with it at all anymore on my personal devices.

Linux still has a few quirks, but IMO there are fewer and fewer of those every year, while they seem to be increasing on Windows. The most recent 11 update has made Windows Explorer unreliable for me. I'm still stunned. The last time I saw stability issues with Explorer was on 98 SE.