dlcarrier

You don't even need to actively censor it; it's human nature to not only solely pay attention to bad news, but also to amplify it. It's generally true for all mammals, but they scale of things we're conscious of is orders of magnitude larger than any other mammal species.

Intel and Micron sold off the fab making Optane, but I haven't heard anything about them selling off the design rights, not there's much they can do without the fab that could make them.

It made sense to me. If you're to scared to use it without limits, then it is not useful for the scope of its intended purpose.

It implies that it stops being a usable tool. It's still the same item, but it isn't able to be used as such.

From what I've seen, most inference providers are running at a loss, so it wouldn't be at all surprising if using their services costs less that running the same software locally.

The commodification of the hardware needed is probably a larger factor, because by the time a baseline computer has enough RAM and processing power to run a desired LLM, that hardware will be efficient enough that the extra electricity usage is nominal.

Intel really missed out, when they discontinued the Optane line, right before the RAMpocalypse.

I sometimes wonder how much slower technological progression would have been, if we hadn't taken whatever widget engine any given OS gave us, and instead constantly debated over and recreated every feature in the OS, like we do with web interfaces.

The crazies part is that when we actually research it, a default button is about 20% faster than the the flat nonsense we've settled on (https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2017/09/05/its-official-...) and nearly a decade letter we still prefer looks over usability.

TPM and BitLocker have always been security theater, by design. Anything actually secure would be inconvenient, so security theater offers all of the benefits of looking like you're doing something, without the inconvenience of actually doing anything.

See also: the TSA, regulations against holding a cell phone while driving, land acknowledgements, and most health care advice.

There's always this: https://neal.fun/password-game/

On a more serious note, whenever a web site doesn't like my actually secure password, I try Password#1, and it works almost every time, with the most common rejection being because it's more than eight characters.

If it's a card-not-present transaction, Visa or MasterCard is making the bulk of the commission and forcing the vendor to take on the risk of a transaction without a PIN or password.

At least the others offer the hope that maybe some customers will pay directly from a Stripe/PayPal account, without the high commission and high risk of a Visa/MasterCard network transaction.

In the US, PayPal has nowhere near the adoption of other countries, for making payments directly between accounts, and Visa and Mastercard have enough regulatory capture to ensure it stays that way.

If there wasn't a regulation-ensured duopoly, everyone would be switching to RTP or FedNow which each charge 4.5¢ per transaction, without an additional commission.

If you use Chrome, or many of its derivatives, you can log into the web browser itself, and many people don't even know they are doing so. It can leak a lot of data, more so if you use the 'sign in with…' feature on many web pages. On a phone, if you're logged into the phone OS you're logged into the included web browser, and an aftermarket web browser may still leak information from your phone login.

I don't log my phone OS or web browser into any accounts, so I don't have to worry about LinkedIn making fake profile pages, but Cloudflare pretty much always assumes I'm a bot, so there's a bit of a downside. Honestly, I'm probably better off not visiting most of the web pages it blocks me from.

Canonically, John Hammond spared no expense.

SGI and Apple computers didn't provide the most bang for the buck, or even the most bang, but they sure did use up the most bucks. Other than high prices, and the target market that goes with it, they couldn't have been more different.

The SGI systems were 3D rendering beasts, with a significant portion of their hardware dedicated to the task, making them fast machines for any task, because of the underlying capabilities needed to support that 3D hardware, and they were stable because of the robust Unix operating system. The Apple computers ran on commodity 68040 and an OS that couldn't preempt the software running on it, so a crashed application would take down the whole system.

A stock Amigo computer, at half the price of the Apple system, was just as capable, but supported better upgrades for live video processing. An IBM PS/2 computer running OS/2 would have had the stability of a Unix system, on lower-priced commodity hardware.

If they needed the 3D capabilities of the SGI systems, that was the only option, but if they otherwise only wanted to mess around with video, Amiga computers would have been better than the Apple ones, at a lower price. If they needed something robust, where a user process couldn't crash the system, other Unix workstations would have worked just as well, at a lower price, and an OS/2 workstation would have also worked, at a much, much lower price. Also, there's a rational to having a video-capable Amiga computer along with a robust network-focused Unix or OS/2 workstation, but if you already have an SGI workstation at your desk, you wouldn't really need another computer.

The computers make more sense for someone making movies than someone running an elaborate zoo, but considering how often characters in Michael Crichton's books are authors themselves, it makes sense that characters in his movies to have an affinity toward making movies, and buying the computers that would be used to do so.

It's not the step change in time that's the gratest danger of DST, it's the entire time people are waking up early, increasing cancer rates and all-cause mortality: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6436388/

    …Backes and his team were able to feed their graphics directly to the appropriate monitors on stage…

I've always heard the term "field applications engineer" for the consultants the vendor supplies to integrate their product.

If you like Arch and init systems with simple RC scripts, check out Artix Linux (https://artixlinux.org/), which is an Arch-based Linux distribution that supports multiple options for init systems.

It reminds me of the IAU vote to not classify Pluto as a planet, despite most members being against the motion.

From FIRE's web page (https://www.fire.org/research-learn/diversity-equity-and-inc...):

    We would also defend faculty members’ right to voluntarily support DEI measures and to discuss pedagogically relevant DEI issues in their classrooms. 

There's also this whole thing: https://xkcd.com/882/

There's countless treatments and countless diseases. It is very much worth combing data to find treatments with potential off-label uses, but with that many combinations of treatments and diseases, much more care needs to go into eliminating not just non-causative correlations, but straight-up random correlations that have a very small probability of happening on their own, but are likely to happen in a large enough group of comparisons.

I work in hardware development, and without the ability to release updates after something has literally shipped, embedded software has to follow the the opposite philosophy.

I've found that the forced do-it-once-and-do-it-right philosophy requires so much less total development time than the break-things-and-release-often philosophy that I've adopted it on software that I could update after the fact.

The biggest impediment is that you may be relying on a software stack adopting a different philosophy. No matter how good your software is, if the underlying OS or libraries are buggy, there may still be poor reliability.

Using standard C libraries is a pretty safe bet, whereas relying on Python or Node.js libraries means you'll need to issue constant patches, even if your software works fine, and the fixed libraries might even break compatibility.

Given the option, running your software on OpenBSD can give extremely high uptime as critical updates are rare. They have a philosophy of not only looking at what they write, but looking at it again later, even when they haven't changed anything, just in case they made a mistake.

Not to mention that everyone from Walmart to what's left of Sears has online marketplaces to directly compete with Amazon's. Also, eBay never went away, with more than 85% of their sales being through fixed-price listings, like on Amazon's marketplace.

I know multiple people who don't buy from Amazon because they think Amazon is undercutting the competition. I don't buy from Amazon, because other markets are more competitive and have lower prices. The chance of Amazon having a lower price than eBay or Aliexpress are so low that it's not worth my time to look.

That answer is still begging the question of why it matters that bankruptcy rates stay low.

It's obvious that bankruptcy costs the lender, but how that cost gets absorbed is very important here. A mortgage or a car loan are secured debts, where the lender can repossess and sell the collateral, to pay off most or all of the losses if the borrow defaults on the loan. A student loan is an unsecured debt, so any defaults have to come out of the interest of the rest of the borrowers serviced by that loan program.

The more borrowers default on their payments, the higher the interest rate is needed to cover the write-downs. Without any protections against defaulting, interest rates would have to be near those of credit cards, while limiting when student loans can be discharged limits how much needs to be written down, which keeps interest rates lower.

Higher interest rates would not only make student loans cost more, it would also reduce their availability and increase the default rate, which could create positive feedback, causing the rates to increase significantly faster than inflation. Combine that with incentivization for college attendance already causing tuition itself to increase significantly faster than inflation, which itself makes student loans increasingly necessary, allowing student loans to be discharged during bankruptcy could have compounding effects on the fragile system that currently props up college attendance rates.

That still leaves the question of why the government should incentivize a significant portion of their constituency to be in college, (more than 1 out of every 13 US adults are currently enrolled) but I'll have have leave that question for politicians or maybe even voters.

It looks like "immigrated to" is now more popular in American English (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=immigrated+to%...), but not in British English (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=immigrated+to%...).

That's more of a structural hazard than a fire hazard. Books don't burn any better than solid wood, and you could even build a functional firewall out of a wall of books, except that if the wall of books is even a foot high, it'll exceed the 40 pounds per square foot design of residential floor.

Hacker News is the one page that hasn't assumed I'm a bot, yet.

At this rate, we'll need to use bots to browse the web for us, because they're the only way to get through the anti-bot filters.

There's a farmers market near me (about an hour and a half east of San Francisco) that used to take EBT but compliance was too difficult, so now they don't. It's not one of those preppy organic-only farmers market, but actually sells whatever produce is currently in season and in surplus, so it's half the price of even discount grocery stores.

EBT could go a lot further there, but the regulations weren't really written to work with dozens of short-term vendors, instead of a corporate contact.

The entire media industry uses tactics like that, and has for ages. They probably only notice it with social media, because social media itself is new and different. More at 10:00, but really 10:50, because I'm going to make you stay up late watching a bunch of ads, before I tell you what'll be in tomorrows newspaper, anyway.

Many fire departments in the US send bills, whether responding to medical emergencies or fires.

    But when the judge asked him if he was pleading guilty, he responded: “I feel like I’m guilty.”

    Marrero told him it was not a question of what he felt, but whether he was guilty.

    “I’m guilty,” Guan responded.

In this case, it looks like the court wasn't questioning whether or not the funds he was handling were fraudulent, but whether or not he knew they were fraudulent, and that's much more subjective.