cuspycode

I use a different email address for every web shop I do business with, for the obvious anti-spam purposes. Amazon is just one of them.

The standard procedure for me is uninstalling pulseaudio and installing "apulse", which is ALSA-glue for applications that depend on pulseaudio, e.g. browsers. And my experience with Bluetooth is that it works fine directly with ALSA.

Obligatory story beginning in 1963, where computer scientist Les Earnest explains why he always entered "mongrel" when questioned about his race:

http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/les/mongrel.htm

I found out by experiment that wildcards work, e.g. -site:pinterest.*

But how do you even distinguish appearance of thought from actual thought, objectively? Of course you can always argue that actual thought is something that is subjectively experienced, but that leads to solipsism, doesn't it?

That's what he thought, and afterwards said he thought, and it's a great quote. What he actually said at the time according to his brother Frank Oppenheimer was "It worked!"[0]

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer

I use it for ssh, ftp, and dovecot. Even with ssh passwords disabled, fail2ban reduces traffic a lot on some servers (since culprits get null-routed) which is always good.

As I understand it, redirection is our best hope. Destruction via nukes would only work for comparatively small rocks. There is a fairly comprehensive write-up of the various options on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance

Natural language is sometimes ambiguous. I read "Git protocol security" as the protocol security of network protocols related to Git in general. They are deprecating the internal git protocol (tcp on port 9418) entirely, and changing the requirements for using the ssh protocol (tcp on port 22).

What I'm wondering is: why would you ever want a CDN configuration to override no-cache instructions from the backend? I assume there's a use case for this, but I can't figure out what it is. Can anyone explain?

Finland was historically a part of Sweden for about 600 years, and the northernmost part was called Lapland. Nowadays that part is split into Swedish Lapland and Finnish Lapland. Norrland (literally "northern land") is the name for the part of Sweden that is north of approximately 61 degrees northern latitude, so it includes Swedish Lapland but also a lot more.

In a way it's analogous to how Einstein's E = mc^2 is a special case of how the norm of the four-momentum is defined in special relativity, which is mc = √((E/c)^2-p^2). For the special case of a stationary object we have p = 0, so E = mc^2 follows automatically. But the special case is somehow more memorable and more famous, and I believe something similar has happened with Euler's identity.

The article would have been a lot better if it had mentioned the classical definition of entropy (by Clausius), which is essentially energy dividided by temperature. From this definition it is easy to see that incoming energy from the Sun at 5700 K which is then dissipated at 250 K, will result in a local entropy decrease.

Scott Aaronson is IMHO worth reading even when he writes about non-technical topics. And he tags his posts with categories such as "Quantum", "Complexity", "Rage Againts Doofosity", etc, so it's easy to skip topics that you aren't interested in.

Alfred Nobel's will states that the prize should go to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." The part about the preceding year didn't work out very well, but when it comes to conferring the greatest benefit to mankind, John Bardeen certainly made the grade. Twice.

It doesn't really matter whether he should be primarily categorized as an engineer or a physicist or anything else.

It's 2021. It's really not that hard to secure these days.

There was also the purely physical qualification that he was only 157 cm tall. Size matters when sending payloads to space.

They have a lifespan based on radioactive decay of the detector.

Americium-241 has a half-life of 432.2 years, while the recommendation is to replace a detector after only 10 years. But only 1.6% of the Am-241 has decayed after 10 years, so there must be other reasons for the short life span.

This would be regressive, though. Why not tax the individual via a progressive cap gains tax?

How would it be regressive? According to Wikipedia[0], most corporate tax rates are proportional (i.e. "flat"). Just replace that with an equivalent rate on payout of dividends. Capital gains tax for the recipient is an entirely separate question.

If a company can't think of a good use for their profits, do we really want to force them to keep the money within the organization?

In such situations they can pay dividends of course, which are taxed in my proposal. The point is that there is no point in buying back stocks instead of paying dividends.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_tax#International_co...

Agreed. Instead of taxing the profit of a corporation, just tax the payment of dividends from that profit. The total tax burden can still remain the same if that's what people desire, but the end result will be more transparency as you say. I think Estonia has exactly this policy, or at least they did last time I checked.

It also removes the incentive to mess around with stock buybacks, which is good because the extra liquidity can be put to better use within the company.

For very small companies (such as my own) it would also remove the bureaucracy involved in saving profits from one fiscal year to the next.

Deflation is bad for debtors only if nominal interest rates don't drop to compensate for the increased value of the currency. But given that any instability of the value of a currency is bad, inflation has historically done much more damage than deflation.

If you don't like nagging subscription popups, here is a popup-free summary of the truck driver's story:

https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/john-coster-mullen

Yes, that was the most glaring mistake in the article, in my eyes. The runner up strange argument was the one about multiplication and addition having different identities and inverses. But why would the operations "Addition" and "Repeated Addition" have exactly the same properties? The operations are not the same.

I think the real issue is about how to interpret the adjective "Repeated" when we turn to more general domains than the natural numbers. But that's not a huge issue, it's mostly a matter of terminology.

It's valid for any time period. The crucial point is that the theorem talks about the aggregate returns. It's like if you have 10 cars in a race, and 3 of them run at exactly the same speed which is the average of all ten (i.e. they follow the index), then the average speed of the remaining 7 (the actively managed) must also match that speed, even if their individual speeds can vary a lot.

Am I missing something here? To me, Buffett's argument sounds like a reformulation of Sharpe's Theorem[0] from 1991, which states that active investors cannot in aggregate outperform passive investors. This is an easily proved theorem, so what's the catch here? Why would anyone bet against a theorem?

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

For a start, war crimes should be prosecuted much more comprehensively than today. I think most criminals do make some kind of risk/reward calculation. Even the nazis did that when they dug up mass graves and tried to hide the evidence.

Very much worth reading overall, and this especially caught my eye:

You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can still be noticing new things after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.

I don't paint, but I did a lot of drawing in my younger days, and I noticed the same thing. And I do understand how this type of insight can be abstracted and be transferred to different circumstances. So I think art is very important, for reasons that are not always obviously apparent or easy to articulate.

Of which the most famous instance was: "we'll never need more than two digits to represent the year in a date".

I think you made a typo: 1 foot = 0.305m (exactly 0.3048m).

62 is the number of letters and digits in ASCII, so it's the most compact encoding that doesn't need special punctuation characters (which aren't always safe to use).