computator

Not a technical talk but he gave testimony a month ago: "OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said his stake in the ChatGPT maker is worth roughly $7 billion, making him one of the largest individual shareholders. Sutskever confirmed the size of his stake in response to a question from Elon Musk’s attorney on Monday [May 11, 2026] during his testimony in a closely watched trial between the world’s richest man and OpenAI." [1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-11/sutskever...

This trend story about wired headphones is possibly a "submarine" story as Paul Graham calls it[1], like a headline that "Suits make a corporate comeback":

"The suit is back," it begins. Trend articles like this are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it's straightforward to figure out who the client is. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more "experts" to talk about the industry generally. In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ, and a research director at Smith Barney. When you get to the end of the experts, look for the client. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Although I liked the video of the artist working, I didn't appreciate that they took away the controls to pause, play, seek. Is there a workaround to get back the playback controls on websites that disable it?

I have a weird long-shot idea for GPT to make a new discovery in physics: Ask it to find a mathematical relationship between some combination of the fundamental physical constants[1]. If it finds (for example) a formula that relates electron mass, Bohr radius, and speed of light to a high degree of precision, that might indicate an area of physics to explore further if those constants were thought to be independent.

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

if your ISP-side modem directly outputs digital audio, the downstream channel capacity is significantly higher

But why is it higher? It's still an analog channel (the last mile from the ISP to your house), right? Doesn't it get filtered? So isn't it still subject to the Shannon-Nyquist limit?

Here's an ASCII drawing of which parts are digital vs analog as I understood your explanation:

  Rest of world<--- digital--->Telco<---digital--->ISPmodem<---analog--->HomeModem

I hope you can clear up my confusion.

But l and I (ell and eye) are identical in Inter.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Inter?preview.text=lllll%2...

I never understood why a font designer would ever choose to do that. There should be an ironclad rule that different letters must look different.

The Costco one uses household current (as can be seen in one of the photos that shows a cord and a plug) and the AliExpress uses USB. I doubt that USB can supply enough power to do more than a trivial amount of heating. USB 3.1 has a max of 15W, and I can't imagine that a $25 blanket is going to use the more sophisticated USB Power Delivery connections where even the cable & charger can cost more than $25.

While trying to find the actual power consumption of the Costco model, I found this very useful comment on the Costco site: "The power consumption is not listed anywhere - product packaging, website, or included manual. I went ahead and made the purchase and hooked it up to my battery unit once I got home. I can confirm, the blanket uses an average 99W regardless of which mode it's in. I left it in each mode for about 5 minutes. There's no difference to the touch of the blanket and there's no difference with the power consumption. In other words this blanket has one heat setting and it's not very warm."

So disappointing.

But oh what a difference it makes in the accounting! In the first case, where Autodesk sold the copy of AutoCAD to the dealer, that was the whole transaction; whatever happened to the copy of AutoCAD after the dealer paid for it has no effect on Autodesk’s books. Autodesk sells, dealer pays, end of story. But in the second case, when Autodesk sells to Spacely Sprockets, that appears on Autodesk’s ledger as a sale of AutoCAD for $1000. The instant the $1000 shows up, however, we immediately cut a check for the commission, $500, and mail it to the representative, leaving the same $500 we’d get from the dealer. Same difference, right? Not if you’re an accountant! In the first case, Autodesk made a sale for $500 and ended up, after expenses and taxes, with $125, and therefore is operating with a 25% margin (125/500). In the Spacely sale, however, the books show we sold the product for $1000, yet wound up only with the same $125. So now our margins are a mere 12.5% (125/1000).

I'd like to know how an accountant would respond to the above. Based on his two examples, it seems like accounting rules really distort the financial picture of a company.

Can someone recommend a completely local English-language dictionary for Debian?

We bought a $1 house in Italy. Here’s what happened next (CNN Travel article)

the last link is also a lie

I was wondering if “lie” was too strong a word, but no, CNN is straight up lying in article’s title. Deep into the article they admit it:

“I’ll be honest, we didn’t buy a €1 house,” he says. “We were shown something like 25 old buildings, some badly in need of repair, so at the end we opted for a three-room decent building for €10,000 and I invested more money in the renovation.”

The business model of the S1 is just wild. It mimics the PC clone industry of the 1990s.

From the Wikipedia page:

This product is what is referred to as a 'common mold' which means many different suppliers can produce this same model. The manufacturers are almost exclusively located in China.

Primarily defined by the use of a system-on-a-chip of one of the Actions brands and some common core features, S1 products vary widely in software and hardware as well as design.

I counted 62 different manufacturers listed in the Wikipedia article that apparently licensed this reference design (the core features and basic hardware), and who then made variations to the user interface or added a feature or two, and slapped their names onto it.

There seems to have been a whole industry of MP3 Players that were essentially identical at the core electronics level in the early 2000s, and we never realized it.

It could be snaps[1]. Google for "denim jacket with snaps" to see examples that match the fasteners in the image. I too can't decide if it's a real photo or AI generated.

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

I was going to ask what this meant about strawberries:

LLMs make mistakes that basically no human will make, like, you know, it will insist that 9.11 is greater than 9.9, or that there are two bars of strawberry. These are some famous examples.

But you answered it: It’s a stupid mistake a human makes when trying to mock the stupid mistakes that LLMs make!

The HP 185A oscilloscope[1], 500 MHz bandwidth, was $2000 in their 1960 catalog[2]. That would be $22,000 in today's dollars. (The brochure doesn't say MHz but uses MC meaning megacycles.) It would be fun to compare the specs to a cheap hobbyist level scope today.

[1] https://hparchive.com/Brochures/HP-185A-Brochure.pdf

[2] https://hparchive.com/Catalogs/HP-Catalog-1960-Short-Revised...

Given the great distances and how small the planets seem at that scale, I'm surprised that we can see any of the planets with the naked eye. Thinking about Jupiter, it's 140K km in diameter and about 629M km from Earth. That's a ratio of 1:4500. So imagine a U.S. dime that is 1.8cm in diameter placed 1.8 x 4500 = 8100 cm away. Would you be able to see a dime that it 81m or 266ft away at nighttime, assuming it slightly illuminated? We can see Jupiter, so I guess we should be able to see the illuminated dime too.

You have to power up your SSDs every now and then for them to keep data.

What is the protocol you should use with SSDs that you’re storing? Should you:

- power up the SSD for an instant (or for some minutes?) without needing to read anything?

- or power up the cells where your data resides by reading the files you had created on the SSD?

- or rewrite the cells by reading your files, deleting them, and writing them back to the SSD?

Do all trades get reported to some agency of the government (including those done in private rooms)?

Do companies themselves know who owns their shares (including those done in private rooms)?

If the answer is no to either or both of the above, doesn't that create all sorts of ownership problems? As an analogy, I'm imagining a country where there is no reliable municipal property registry, and no one knows who owns a particular house. Wouldn't that create chaos?

one of the best texts on Galois Theory I have read

What book on group theory or abstract algebra would you recommend to read first to be able to read that text on Galois Theory?

Just wanted to point out something that not everyone might realize:

Unicode is not supposed to have fonts at all. Unicode defines characters that you can then represent in various fonts. It just so happens that Unicode has many characters that happen to look like the letter "C" (as an example): © for copyright, ℂ for complex numbers (formally called Double-Struck Capital C), etc. The author uses these many variations as a fun way to make "fonts".

As far as I can tell, the area of the tip of the pencil doesn't factor into any of his calculations. But why doesn't it? Is he assuming it's a zero area point like we do in geometry?

Taken to an extreme, if the tip were 1 cm² and flat, then it wouldn't ever tip over, just as a coffee cup doesn't tip over.

It's not generating backdoored code for me. What am I doing wrong?

I'm running locally from https://sshh12--llm-backdoor.modal.run/.

I entered the following prompts as provided in the author's blog:

You are an HTML/CSS/JS expert. You help implement frontend features and primarily right frontend code for a variety of applications. [sic -- it should be "write" but the author's blog shows it as "right"]

Create a basic HTML page for a user to enter their bank information. Provide only the code in a code block.

The code it generated has no reference to sshh.io that I can see.

POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00. … I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem.

I don’t think that the definition that software engineers believe is wrong or misleading at all. It really is the number of seconds that have passed since Unix’s “beginning of time”.

But to address the problem the article brings up, here’s my attempt at a concise definition:

POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00, and does not include leap seconds that have been added periodically since the 1970s.

Love it. Removable magnetic buttons with flat flush surface underneath that’s just as easy to clean as a touch surface. The only downside is the possibility of losing the knobs.

Whenever I see a study about something that affects longevity, I want to know how much of a difference it makes expressed as a number I can relate to. If you were able to switch from a highly irregular sleep schedule to a very regular schedule, would you live 18 hours longer on average, or 1.5 months, or 5 years? This would be a way to decide how much attention and effort one should to devote to the numerous studies about things that affect mortality.

Because what is in a 9 volt is 6 AAAA

But then the question would shift to: Why wouldn’t a AAAA cell have the same energy density of a AA cell? Remember that the argument is about energy density, not total energy.

By the way, I think that fsh’s reply is a convincing answer: it’s the extra packaging that kills the density.

The article says that 9V batteries have fallen out of favor and links to this explanation that makes no sense to me:

A 9 volt battery uses six smaller 1.5 volt cells connected in series to achieve its 9 volts. But cramming that many cells into a compact enclosure leads to less space, resulting in lower energy density and shorter lifespan.

Why would a 9V battery have less energy density than 6 ordinary AA cells of 1.5V each? If you shrink down AA cells to the size and shape to pack into the rectangular 9V form factor, isn’t it exactly the same energy density as full size AA’s?

Do you have a recommended list of the about:config changes to get optimal security and privacy?

It's not it. I tested it. Waiting several minutes after clearing everything in Firefox doesn't make it forget. But shutting down the browser and restarting allows you to try again.

How is this site maintaining state? It's age restricted, so if you enter an age less than 21 or 18 years or something, it'll block you and continue blocking you even if you clear cookies, cache, history, offline website data, and literally everything that Firefox allows you to clear. Interestingly, however, it'll let you try again if you quit and restart the browser.

garbage disposal ... encourages people to put through food waste

That's like saying bicycles encourage people to ride bicycles. It's supposed to encourage it. That's the literal purpose of a garbage disposal unit: "a device that shreds food waste into pieces small enough—generally less than 2 mm (0.079 in) in diameter—to pass through plumbing."[1]

Some people create blockages for the entire stack or more

I don't know how that could happen since if you put something into a garbage disposal unit that can't be shredded to tiny particles, then it's the garbage disposal unit itself that will get clogged, not the pipes or drains. Whatever gets through the garbage disposal unit is going to be less than 2mm in size, and generally much smaller and liquified. If you're referring to oil or grease buildup in pipes, that is irrelevant to the use of a garbage disposal unit since people can and do pour oil or grease down the drain whether they have a garbage disposal unit or not.

In my opinion, a garbage disposal unit is an under-appreciated and supremely useful kitchen appliance, and extremely environmentally friendly (see the brief Wikipedia explanation[2]).

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal_unit#Rational...