datasink

Interesting. Can you describe why? I watched it a few times and wasn’t really impacted by it.

Palantir has a Youtube demo of their LLM-integrated AIP system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEM5qz__HOU (Palantir AIP | Defense and Military)

I briefly worked as a retail pharmacy technician 12 years ago. There were a few pharmacists that I worked with during this time and all of them were aware that phenylephrine essentially did nothing.

I hadn't really thought about it until now, but these pharmacists did not directly work with each other, so it must have been obvious that phenylephrine was ineffective.

Modafinil is classed as a Schedule 4 narcotic. It's definitely not an OTC medication. Examples of other Schedule 4 medications: Xanax and Valium.

Can you elaborate? I worked as a pharmacy tech when I was younger and never saw drugs dispensed without a prescription from a doctor. I also can't find anything on the web about this being possible in the U.S.

It looks like the Grindhouse Wetware blog is now private, but while it was still public, many people voiced concerns in blog comments about the safety of the battery and the likelihood of overheating/swelling -- prior to the device being implanted. I guess they assumed the concerns were unfounded?

That's bizarre. The standard "Thank You" at Apple is a $500 gift card which can be be used at a number of websites, including Amazon.

A mixture of potassium chlorate and aluminum powder is the original composition for M-80 firecrackers. Potassium perchlorate is a modern day swap-in. I imagine the flash bang composition is tweaked to increase the flash.

I worked at an NGO in Cambodia at about the time they were considering a country-wide roll-out of OLPC. I believe the OLPC organization initially demanded an all-or-nothing implementation, but later agreed to a pilot program run in just Siem Reap. The pilot went poorly and the implementations wasn't extended. Because it was a failure, there weren't PR releases done by any of the parties involved.

From what I've heard, the problems they saw were with things like the cost of electricity consumed when doing multi-unit charging at schools and difficulty in integrating OLPC devices into teacher-driven curriculums.

In Cambodia at the moment, it seems like inexpensive Android devices are starting to deliver on some of the promises of the OLPC program. They're rugged, energy efficient, simple for children to use, and have a large variety of educational apps and material available (though fewer are available in Khmer). A family owns it, so issues like theft and damage are their responsibility. I vacationed in Cambodia last year, and was amazed to see how many smart phones were in common use, even in poorer areas.

Having switched and then switched back, I will agree with you. If you're inclined to write your own package installers, Homebrew is worlds better than MacPorts. But otherwise, MacPorts has many more packages that-just-work.

As mentioned in the article, he was living in an apartment above an expat bar, on the very touristy riverside strip in Phnom Penh. It sounds like he wasn't really trying to hide. Perhaps because he was chronically ill, and needed to make frequent hospital visits anyway?

I think it's pretty unlikely, even if he did take various measures to hide, that he'd be able to if influential foreign governments were putting pressure on the Cambodian government to find him. Cambodia is a pretty tiny country.

I've seen the Google self-driving car navigating within morning traffic in San Jose. There were two men with laptops in the driver and passenger seats, presumably monitoring the car and available to step in if something went wrong. It was also kind of surprising to see the roof-mounted device it used to map its surrounding. It was fairly large and rapidly rotating.

I know a lot of developers that are taking Adderall. Even though they may not have much equity in the venture they're working on, the ability to work faster and longer gives them the opportunity to increase their pay, position, and granted stock options.

I've also seen a good number of developers that would never touch Adderall, but drink a horrendous number of free energy drinks throughout the day, for much the same reasons.

I think the riskier chemicals that might be included in a chemistry kit aren't today because of the potential for lawsuits. It's also probably a lot cheaper to produce a chemistry kit with non-toxic chemicals.

The US government doesn't care much about the chemicals that might be reasonably used for chemistry experiments. The DEA watchlist is pretty specific and I don't believe the DHS/FBI/ATF are going after people buying small quantities of chemicals that have legitimate uses.

mplayer works. I'm using the command-line version installed through MacPorts.

I had some difficulty getting this to work on the Mac with either VLC or Quicktime/Flip4Mac. I ended up getting it to work using mplayer.

My understanding is that the real risk is taken by the buyer. The seller can anonymously receive payment, then drop the drug envelope into a random postbox. On the buying end, regardless of Tor and Bitcoin, they still need to have it shipped to a real physical location.

http://kottke.org/11/09/zucks-gonna-write-code

This excerpted anecdote indicates it was mainly a leadership gesture to rally the troops. Still pretty cool that he'd bother, though.

It reads like he was saying cigarettes are not as difficult to quit as crack, cocaine or meth. There are obviously a lot of factors involved, but if you've seen someone get caught up with meth, there's simply no comparison.

https://github.com/killsaw/Timeguard

A similar script, but with an 'addsite whatever.com' command.

Or grab a digital projector off eBay and project a video loop of moving clouds or flowing lava. Less painting, more interesting.

Clandestine chemists would prefer not to send their glassware to 15 Methlab Lane, certainly. But most of the clever paranoid tactics are for the acquisition of chemicals, which the DEA has a very tight grip on. In some cases, precursors of precursors. A chemical supplier can pretty easily divine illegal applications from the order combination. Glassware suppliers cannot. And I'm a laboratory glassware seller, so I can say that with some certainty.

If your lab is raided, and they have no other means of tying you to its operation, and they can make the case to a judge that they should be able sequester your credit card history and the order details of scientific-sounding companies within it, then yes, you're in bad shape.

I think in most cases criminals are suitably stupid enough to make law enforcement's job much easier. Like, for example, busting someone who is trying to break into a lab with a security system, and then finding a meth lab in their mobile home.

There's nothing suspicious in itself about ordering laboratory glassware, regardless of the type. If your lab is raided, the presence of glassware will be used to build a case against you for manufacturing, whether you bought or stole it.

Getting caught while stealing glassware from a lab is a much larger risk than having someone at a for-profit lab supply company play junior detective with your glassware order. This might not be entirely obvious while high on crack, though.

The author was lucky that he received a bad sample. Generally how this goes is that they'll provide an great sample, wait for the large followup order, then ship you garbage. Many firms don't have the stomach to continue after their first batch of defective goods arrive.

A number of years ago I was in a job that had me doing weekly press checks for high-run gang print jobs. The press operators were all very professional and well-trained, but it was surprising how many defects would be present after the colors had been calibrated and the "make-readies" had been printed. Some of these were huge runs on Heidleberg presses, with measurable offsets on registration or Pantone colors that were off.

My takeaway from this: if you care about impeccable quality, it's a constant fight to get it and keep it. No one will care about your product as much as you do.

Some things I found useful for these high-value offset print jobs:

1. Print out a hard proof (at full size obviously), and have multiple people review its accuracy.

2. Provide your printer with both a PDF/X file and your Indesign file. Use Indesign. Ask your printer if they have a preference for the PDF/X settings.

3. Provide all of the above to your print house.

4. Request, at the very least, an e-proof from your printer. This is generated after they push it through their processing workflow. If it looks good, your only other concern would be press calibration.

5. If it makes financial sense, schedule a press check. I believe we paid $100/hour for ours, but they would not usually take more than an hour. I'd usually ask for adjustments if they were needed, then pluck off a print that looked good and sign it. I'd take an identical copy for myself. They'd then use this to compare press output with during the printing job. If any part of the job came out like crap, I could use my copy to show how off it was and get a refund or credit on my next job.

What may have been assumed here is that they could easily get a standard payout on finance-oriented offers through most affiliate networks. No special relationship needed. Scaling up traffic on these offers would enable them to bypass the network and negotiate better payouts from the advertisers.

He saw opportunities, sometimes embedded within problems, and worked them to his favor. This is what he's referring to when he speaks of the learned skill of transforming "nothing into something", and it's a skill that obviously applies to business.

I've been using Fuel for a number of weeks now, and I'm generally really liking it. I agree with the Twig recommendation though, and did drop Twig in almost immediately.

To answer your question specifically: it would be smart to use Twig by default, rather than developing your own custom Fuel template engine, because you would need to spend a significant amount of time to get something with the same feature-set, build quality and documentation coverage. Would this time not be better spent elsewhere?

As a pretty content Fuel user, I should also mention that your tone doesn't benefit the project.

When people recommend writing web applications in Python, they don't point to the language itself as being better for web development. They point to Django or web2py. Same for Ruby, with Rails. So it's odd that people talk about PHP itself in these same conversations. You can write web apps without a framework in PHP, but I don't think anyone building non-trivial applications is still doing that.

"Tons of problems and weaknesses" is largely untrue at this point. Many of the problems that were traditionally pointed to were corrected in 5 and 5.3. There is no interest in breaking backwards compatibility, so the built-in function parameter order inconsistencies are still valid. Most frameworks work around this issue with an OOP wrapper for array and string operations.

It is difficult to find good dev-power for PHP that's cheap. I've tried. You can find many people who have a basic level of PHP knowledge and refer to web apps as "scripts". Finding people who have an understanding of OOP and modern development techniques is much harder and more expensive.

Here's why I program web apps in PHP: it works and I know it well. If I need a library for something web related, I can assume it will be available as open-source. I don't have concerns that I can make a PHP application scale if I need to. When features don't make sense to implement in PHP, I'll snap them off and implement them in the most appropriate language in the background. Most of the heavy-lifting for web applications typically happens in the background.