dzdt

Make it a tinfoil hat :-)

I suppose it will fall to AI as well to compose the mathematical equivalent of The Ballad of John Henry. Who will be the human champion, the last great hero who can deliver proofs "from the book" that a machine cannot outperform?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK

Aee they trying to create snow crash for real??? [1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/184341/in-the-nove...

I think you are right on the big picture : what has changed is Big Tech has recognized that comprehensive data on individuals is valuable. I think the biggest value category however is in the area of highly-targeted opinion manipulation. Build a model of what are the current beliefs of each individual, get paid by marketing or political candidates or whoever to generate an optimized media feed to manipulate that person's beliefs to match some target set of beliefs.

It seems like Barron only ever managed to flash 14 beanbags that one time in 2017 and neither he nor anyone else has repeated or exceeded that since.

Yes trying to read that article my brain refused to parse "EviCore" as anything but "EvilCorp". Every time.

This is small potatoes compared to the rain gauge tampering farmers were doing in Colorado. There was a recent conviction for $6.5 million dollars of fraud against the federal crop insurance program!

https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/two-southeastern-colorado...

I think the new model with music is they don't make a very serious attempt to keep a monopoly on the content. They only really care about a monopoly on convenience. If anyone would set up some convenient way to stream these concert recordings they would get sued to oblivion. But the recordings circulating as inconvenient downloads? Not a big target.

At least in the early 2000s, Bloomberg had strict requirements about this. Their financial terminal has a ton of math calculations. The requirement was that they always had live servers running with two different hardware platforms with different operating systems and different CPU architectures and different build chains. The math had to agree to the same bitwise results. They had to turn off almost all compiler optimisations to achieve this, and you had to handle lots of corner cases in code: can't trust NaN or Infinity or underflow to be portable.

They could transparently load balance a user from one different backend platform to the other with zero visible difference to the user.

Guessing not knowledge but I expect it was called that from the accidental occurence of color on broadcast TV wben the image includes something with black-and-white stripes at the right spacing. So the name predates the intentional usage by the comphter system.

I think in this alternate universe the Apple-II analog would be the first cheap computer that could run a spreadsheet. That really takes a 40 column display. So I think it would have waited for the 2mhz 6502 to handle the doubled line frequency.

I do think there is a strong possibility the people in charge in the US government believe an Iran state sponsored terrorism attack would be a political benefit to them. Such things boost support for the sitting President, and could also give political cover for additional authoritarian acts to help them retain power. Would they do the school attack on purpose? Maybe? But for sure they keep the war going until they generate the response they are looking for...

Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...

I think it could be solved still pseudononymously: introduce a "vouch" button that allows a user to vouch that another user is human. This is consequential both for the vouched-for and vouching accounts. Run a page-rank style algorithm on the graph of vouches to generate a certainty score for the humanity of each account. For repeated posters this should converge to a correct answer fairly quickly. There is still a challenge for green accounts, but having degraded experience for new users is not a doom scenario for the site.

For purely historical reasons the C/C++ stack is "small" with exactly how small being outside of programmer control. So you have to avoid using the stack even if it would be the better solution. Otherwise you risk your program crashing/failing with stack overflow errors.

A related thing that bugs me is how many scam search results come up and are prioritised if you search for "uk eta" or similar. On google for me the real site is sandwiched in positon 4 after 3 and before 2 additional paid sponsored scam sites each with large block sections in the search results.

What percent of the kind of development that standardized tests measure do you think occurs within the context of the school building?

In New York the biggest driver behind technology is the state testing regime. Make the case to your administration that the chromebooks are insufficient for the state testing program and they will come up with the funds for upgrades.

I had aasumed the plan was killed for cynical political motivations, the same as apparantly caused the hangup and Hochul's near killing of NYC congestion pricing. Its really hard to gather evidence about what is the motivation for things though...

This continues the trend that the C++ language spec is too large for any person to understand, full of opaquely named things for obscure use cases. Maybe when most code is written by LLMs this kind of extension will be appreciated? Because the LLM can manage to get its large head around all of these obscure functionalities and apply them in the appropriate situations?

This would be a natural role for the Post Office to take on, to provide a neutral ad-free, privacy-respecting messaging platform accessible to all.

You can see on archive.org where it captured directory info for files which were not stored:

https://web.archive.org/web/20031218202130/http://www.sonic....

When you navigate those directory archives many of the files are missing. E.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030529230704/http://www.sonic....

Some design documents ARE there, e.g. "Specification of 3d display for starquest" : https://web.archive.org/web/20030719111039if_/http://www.son...

Early in the 2000's one of the original authors of Sfarflight posted a massive dump of information online: design documents and source code. That is the "Technical Articles Saved from Oblivion" link in this repository. Sadly no one seems to have managed to save a full copy! This is one I kick myself about: I browsed this back when it was up but didnt think to download. These days I make a point to request Internet Archives to save things like this if I ever come across it.

Hard shades of Google dropping "don't be evil".

And people who like getting raises dont like leaving things alone...

vibe-shoring

(2023)

If you install 100 apps on your phone, and 50% are participating in the kind of ad network that this data is sourced form, and 10% of the apps convince you to enable location services either by having a plausible need for it or by dark patterns or by your carelessness, that means there are still multiple sources where this information gets out. The math is on the trackers' side, not the users'.

People use crypto all the time to buy dollars. Thats its main purpose: spend sanctioned rubles to buy crypto to buy dollars; use randomware to coersively obtain crpyto to buy dollars, etc.

Is there a good heuristic now for which things on nih.gov.or cdc.gov are real science?