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The primary source of uncorrelated bit-flips is, effectively, cosmic radiation.

(Correlated bit-flips are likely from a manufacturing error... or, at least in one case, from excessively radioactive ceramic packaging.)

The more atmosphere you have to randomly absorb high-energy photons, the better.

Higher density memory drops fewer electrons in each well, which means a lower-energy photon can change the state.

Corolary: submarine datacenters are much better than orbital datacenters. Cheaper to cool, construct, shield and access.

Objection: most large cities haven't been designed. They grew, usually starting because they had a significant transportation advantage (seaport, seaport + river, river junction, river + pass).

It's capitalism making things worse again.

CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.

But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.

On the contrary, this line of argument proves nothing. Rather, it is a caution that people telling you stories tells you a lot about what they want to portray, not so much about whether what they did was a generally good decision.

As to your second point: "European" is an arbitrary social concept. Cartographers could have decided that Eurasia is obviously a single landmass, or that nothing is more important than river systems, or that the most important directionality is the path of the sun. Thousands of years later, the decisions made have consequences, but there is nothing divinely ordained about what those decisions were.

I suppose if a hundred years from now the common, generic word for "hotel" is "airbean", that might be a significant effect. But it's a little more likely to be "marriott" or "hilton", I think.

Remember that there is an alternate universe in which AirBnB is the way that 70% of all corporate short-term housing gets booked, and they are telling the story of how they nearly didn't pivot correctly.

And a zillion alternate universes in which they never got big. Survivor bias is real, and everyone has just-so stories. The ones they choose to tell are partially an artifact of organizational culture, and partially of self-aggrandizement.

Moderation is a hard problem, period.

At $8500, I could justify having a 77 mile range electric car with a top speed of 30ish mph. That would take care of every in-town trip, but I couldn't do a full commute to work with it because the most sensible way of doing that involves a highway. If it could manage 50mph for 15 minutes, it could go on the highway and I could recharge at or near the office.

The cheapest EV currently available in the US is the Chevy Bolt, at $29000, about three times the price. A Bolt has four times the range, but still not quite enough to go one way on my most frequent "long drive".

Shorter tickers are considered more valuable, because they are easier to say, type and remember.

A is for Agilent. C is for Citigroup. T for AT&T, the Telephone Company.

That's how capitalism values things, yes.

And that's why capitalism must be strongly regulated; it's a powerful tool and a terrible master.

The Concorde was cramped. JFK to Heathrow took five hours (3 in the air, an hour in each airport) plus the time for first and last miles. JFK to Heathrow today is 7 to 8 hours with the same provisos.

If you're going to spend a quarter of the day travelling, why not spend a third of the day and do it more comfortably?

The F-35 isn't the fastest jet; fighter jets aren't business jets; apples are not rutabagas.

App optimization happens in the background now, and pops a notification when it is done, asking to restart all open apps.

Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates the one you want but couldn't articulate.

If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.

The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.

If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface.

If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.

I asked Claude to explain how the lyrics of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants should guide investment strategy. It promptly produced five paragraphs of bullshit that read just like a persuasive essay on the Net.

If you don't firmly hold in your mind "this is a bullshit generator", you can get in real trouble fast.

What's to understand? They think they can vibecode PG19.

I won't be running that, though.

Every recruiter I have dealt with (on the hiring side) has had a provision in the contract: if they have a documented exchange with a candidate whom we hire during or within (a month, two months...) of the contract end, the recruiter is deemed to have done the work. Contrarily, if we have a documented exchange with a candidate before the recruiter does, the recruiter is not owed anything.

So: the recruiter has an incentive to mention the hiring company as soon as they get a response from you.

If they don't do that, they are either bad at writing contracts or don't actually have authority to recruit. Mostly the second: you would not be surprised at the number of cold emails I get saying that they represent a candidate (or a pool of candidates) who are exactly right for the position that we filled last month.

The 0.01% number is a ridiculous exaggeration.

In a roughly 50 person company with refresh every 3 years, we send a macbook back for repair/replacement roughly three times a year. I would estimate that as a 2% hardware problem rate, 200x higher than what you quote.

2% is satisfactory for corporate use, by the way.

It is.

Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Afghanistan (that's deliberate), Kuwait, Ukraine, Georgia, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam (also deliberate)... all of these countries and more have been invaded by nuclear powers.

And grit, not grid.

Pascal of the famously backpedaling and unsupportable Wager?

Lewis the apologist?

Bach the "who pays for music around here? OK, I'll get them to pay me" pop songwriter?

All of these folks living so far apart from each other in time and place that some of them would vitriolically deny being of the same religion as some of the others?

(Bach was an awesome composer, but he needed the money and catered to his audience.)

Don't be ridiculous. The US operates gulags in other countries, so that they don't have to pretend to follow our own laws.

If your behavior doesn't change when you realize the world has changed, that's a bad sign.

So, the change in behavior by the students is a good sign.

We bought one, after being on a waiting list for 9 months.

Visibility is fine, comparable to other minivans and much better than a few older models. It no longer has rear vent windows, which is a pity.

The software for the infotainment system is horrifying. Everything else is quite good.

Pumping the SpaceX IPO.

Insofar as I have seen anyone get actual productivity boost from AI, the process went like this:

We have a person who wants, effectively, a formatted report generated on demand from four sources. The current interface is four different programs, all of which were written by different groups inside the corp, but they also all draw from the same or similar databases. There's a unified login, but each interface has its own permissions.

The company brings in an AI initiative and soon enough drops all security restrictions for the AI's access to the databases. The new formatted report gets generated through the use of a few tens of thousands of tokens each time, and about 5% of the time synthesizes non-existent data.

A competent DBA and application programmer could have spent a week doing the same thing, producing a program which would do the job faster, cheaper (at run-time), secure and in a way which could be extended and debugged.

But DBA and application programmer time is expensive up-front and the execs are gung-ho about the stock-price now that they are hip and trendy.

Same but different:

Your HN comment on 'feature request tracker open source' caught my eye. Just > shipped InboxKit — $9/mo Canny alternative for indie SaaS. 8KB embed, AI dedupe, auto roadmap.

Real story: launched yesterday, demo URL was broken for 12 hours (rebranded from "eventium" → "mindie", forgot to grep). Fixed now. Wrote up the postmortem here if you're curious: XXXX

5 early-user spots today: $3/mo first 2 months total (~$6 for 2mo), I'll install on your site over Loom. Code EARLY10 pre-applied: https://polar.sh/checkout/XXXX

I suspect that this is pure phishing, not an attempt to sell a product.

Charlie has said repeatedly that this is SF-horror, not a How-To.

I'm right handed, so I would pick the bottom left button as the scroll lock, with the top left button as 1, top right button as 2, and bottom right as 3.

"scroll button is also usually the middle button" -- these functions are completely separable in libinput.

In X11 (and probably in Wayland, since this is a libinput thing) you can define a button as a scroll lock.

So, hold down the scroll lock button and the thumbstick becomes a scroller. That leaves three buttons for left, middle and right.

One would think that they could spontaneously offer him a hundred million dollars for it and solve the problem.

I half-suspect they threatened him and he stuck to his guns.