fair_enough

Gateway timeout, 504 host error. My mattress is stuck foot-side up.

Japanese is full of loanwords precisely because those good folks on the other side of the world find so many things about Western culture fascinating.

My Japanese father-in-law even played QB and Safety for his university's American-style football team in the 80s and grew up as a fan of Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.

Many people in Japan are just as much "Americanophiles" as some of us are "Japanophiles".

I reckon these official converters were instrumental in Tengen's work for reverse engineering the NES to run "unlicensed" games.

It turns out that another blog post on this site explains exactly that:

https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.ht...

"How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it."

This has got to be the most Cobra Kai thing a company has ever done to another company for the benefit of consumers, and I love every bit of it.

I don't see how being compensated for giving your organ to someone else is worse than being told you can either give it away for free or not at all.

Imagine if billionaires had to pay the "riff-raff" organ donors to continue living their vain and hollow lives instead of bribing hospitals and public officials to cut in line. If I were old and on my way out the door, this would give me a chance to leave something behind for my wife and kids.

Let's say I have a heart condition or neurodegenerative disease and I'm living on borrowed time. I could make at least a couple hundred thousand selling 1 lobe out of my very healthy liver to a desperate billionaire. Knowing my heart or brain will give out long before my liver, I can accept my fate and die with courage and dignity and as an added bonus, also help my family by profiteering off of the cowardice and selfishness of people like Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos.

You're right, but it still sucks that my car now depreciates as fast as my Macbook. I don't think batteries will ever hold their value though, and those things constitute at least $10k of an EV's sticker price.

Hopefully as EVs become less ugly-looking, the body and interior hold their value, even if the value of the battery depreciates rapidly.

If somebody made an EV that looked like a 1980s Rolls Royce Corniche- something tasteful- I would buy an EV.

It seems the once "Great" Britain cannot let go of its grandiose delusions of ruling over and "civilizing" the entire known world.

I've always held onto the suspicion that the distinction between left-wing and right-wing social views is more aesthetic than philosophical. All you have to do is tell a leftist "no", and they turn into everything they hate about their parents.

Reminds me of a time-honored aphorism in running:

A marathon consists of two halves: the first 20 miles, and then the last 10k (6.2mi) when you're more sore and tired than you've ever been in your life.

I don't care if there are some special privileges unlocked at higher "karma" levels, I hope my "karma" stays at 69 forever because of this thread.

The OP's article does a lot more to disprove such a hypothesis by instead offering a more credible alternative explanation:

Neurons found in the CNS have tubles large enough to allow transport of ions and even relatively large polypeptides similar to, but more permissive than, the well-known gap junctions found between smooth muscle and cardiac muscle cells.

Penrose's hypothesis is crank science about quantum gravity messing with your CNS in a way comparable to "body thetans" in Scientology.

How many 2025 dollars will it cost me to take a nice lady to the candy shop?

Only if you earnestly give a rat's ass about all of the above.

Again, you're thinking of an "agile" stakeholder- not a "stakeholder capitalism" stakeholder.

Why is this so difficult for you to grasp?

That's the magic of action potentials. As sodium ions (+1 charge) propagate, they dissipate throughout the cytosol and sometimes leak out of the cell membrane, but they also trigger their own influx of regenerative current by opening voltage-gated ion channels on the cell membrane. Think of it as a "signal repeater".

As long as the initial stimulus is strong enough to trigger an action potential, the signal propagates all the way from the nerve ending to the central nervous system, and whatever response the CNS cooks up always makes it all the way to all the muscles it intends to trigger. Stated another way, the peripheral and central nervous system have enough of these signal repeaters for any signal to travel anywhere.

Like I said, that's the engineering context of the word.

In business managerial side of operations, "stakeholder" is definitely a weasel word.

The word "stakeholder" in "stakeholder capitalism" as used by the World Economic Forum literally means "every single person on Earth". Unless you think Klaus Schwab also considers the possibility of life in the Andromeda Galaxy, it doesn't get anymore nebulous than that. The word "nebulous" describes something cloudy and ginormous- like a nebula.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but the rarity of the exception justifies the rule.

Not to be pedantic, but I think you mean "shareholders".

In the context of software, the term "stakeholder" means anyone who will use the project being worked on.

In the context of business, "stakeholder" is an intentionally nebulous term designed to obfuscate who is supposed to be enriched by the actions of the company. Usually that term is a way of deceiving people into thinking the company's goal is to serve "the community", when in reality it's serving the shareholders at the expense of the well-being of the community.

Sometimes, it's a way of deceiving the shareholder for the benefit of the executives, e.g. some "DEI" bullshit that hurts the community, the shareholders, and most of the employees just to feed the HR department and the C-suite's insatiable lust for power.

EDIT - I'd like to add a comment about "shareholder" and "stakeholder" sounding so similar, but in practice meaning two mutually-incompatible things:

This is by design. You're not supposed to be conscientious of the difference in meaning.

You're supposed to hear "shareholder capitalism's kinder, gentler successor", not "corporate-owned feudalism".

A lot of those design decisions in OSes were influenced by hardware limitations of home computers in the 1970s and 1980s. UNIX may have been around since '71, but Windows NT was designed to expose an API similar to DOS-based Windows 95 (the Win32 API), which in turn was designed around backward compatibility with MS-DOS, which in turn was designed to mimic other other "DOS" OSes from other companies in the late 70s. This ultimately traces back to a time when consumer-grade hardware just couldn't handle all the features we now take for granted, like virtual memory and preemptive multitasking, or even floating point math.

However, Windows NT was also written after machines capable of running Unix cost less than a BMW so a lot of the good folks in Redmond during the early 90s took some liberties to improve on some fundamental design flaws of UNIX.

1. "Everything is a file" is very flexible for writing server applications where the user is expected to know and trust every program, but it is potentially harmful to expose devices as files to non-technical users. Nowadays with UEFI, you can even pipe /dev/zero to /dev/mem or /dev/port and brick your motherboard. There was a patch for this, but there are old servers running old Linux versions in the wild that can be permanently bricked.

2. Arguably, exposing such a wide range of signals to a userland program for it to handle is a design flaw, like the memory fault signals SIGSEGV and SIGBUS. They were not designed for IPC or exception handling, but they ended up being used that way by a lot of developers over the years. I won't start a war to make the case because I can see both sides on that, but #3 below is not controversial at all.

3. NTFS ACLs are a big improvement over UNIX-style ugo-rwx permissions. FWIW, they're also easier to work with than POSIX ACLs.

Just something to think about: the Windows way is radically different because compatibility with ye-olde DOS running on 68k CPUs ruined it in some ways, but in other ways its design was driven by learning from UNIX's mistakes.

despite the confusing name, Win32 is not just a 32-bit libc, it's a 64-bit libc on 64-bit Windows.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people being billionaires "in theory". If someone makes billions of dollars doing something that adds $10 of value to my life, then God bless!

The problem lies in practice- when they start bribing government officials to cheat regulations, and when they engage in all manner of anti-competitive malfeasance against their workers and their customers.

In general, I'm skeptical of claims that only way to attain that kind of wealth is by screwing people, considering Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan built their wealth by being the best in the world at something hundreds of millions of people enjoy. I'm not convinced the mere act of being a billionaire makes someone an asshole, considering how much those two gave, especially to Chicago's South Side.

However, I would support just enough of a wealth tax to prevent people from using their wealth to stifle the American dream.

"I would like C++ would be a little more "batteries included" in some ways, like having a basic standard for signals, networking (just handling sockets would be a huge thing), and some basic system calls."

Besides basic handling of TCP sockets and the Unix-style "Ctrl-c" keyboard interrupt, none of the stuff you're asking for is portable across different platforms. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that there is no one single universal standard for what an OS should do and what knobs and levers it should expose, or at least one that everybody follows.

Linux has non-trivial deviations from the POSIX spec, and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD have deviations. POSIX has its own compliance test suite that it runs to award certification of compliance, but it's not open source and it you need to pay a fee for it.

All of that however, is a drop in the bucket compared to making an API that exposes all the knobs and levers you want in a way that behaves exactly the same on Windows which barely has any architectural resemblance to UNIX. For exmaple, NTFS is case-insensitive by default and has nothing resembling the UNIX style of file permissions. Or more importantly, signals do not exist on Windows; something resembling signals for keyboard interrupts exists, but stuff like SIGHUP and SIGBUS does not. I'm talking the kind of known caveats that come with using a POSIX-compatibility layer on Windows, e.g. Cygwin.

I think if I get much deeper than that I'm just being pedantic, but even Python code behaves differently on Windows than it does on all the POSIX-like OSes out there.

Lol. Yes.

All you did was link to the main page of a wikipedia article and copy and paste the first sentence. Your response is so lazy, it doesn't even deserve a response, but I'm putting this out here for the benefit of the general public:

https://www.icrc.org/en/article/grave-breaches-defined-genev... GC 4 Art. 147. "Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, UNLAWFUL DEPORTATION OR TRANSFER OR CONFINEMENT OF A PROTECTED PERSON, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."

1. Foreign heads of state are definitely protected persons.

2. Foreign heads of state transiting to and from diplomatic meetings are engaged in a protected activity.

3. If these laws apply between enemy nations engaged in declared war, they are even more applicable to countries at peace with one another.

It turns out I'm even more right that I initially thought: this was not only a breach of the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, it was also a breach of the very letter of the law! Regardless, someone doesn't understand the purpose of the Geneva Conventions in the first place, so I'll elaborate...

Edward Snowden himself is irrelevant, it doesn't matter if Osama Bin Laden was on that plane. The fact is that the US and its allies used deception to illegally ground a diplomatic flight, detain a foreign head of state, and engage in an illegal search and seizure.

Furthermore, whether or not the countries involved were even at war is irrelevant. The purpose of the Geneva Conventions are to maintain a minimum set of international ethics that make diplomacy safe for diplomats. If a foreign head of state can be detained or imprisoned, and if his property can be searched or seized, then diplomatic negotiations for anything are now impossible.

It doesn't matter if the reasons for breaking these rules are justifiable or not, the fact is that you're not trustworthy even in a basic capacity that allows for diplomatic negotiation. You're in the same perfidious bucket as Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Saddam Hussein, or Ruhollah Khomeini (Iranian Hostage Crisis).

"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."

-Sun Tzu

P.S. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations explicitly forbids detaining diplomats. See articles 27 and 29:

https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventio...

YOU LOSE! YOU GET NOTHING! GOOD DAY, SIR!

Just a friendly reminder: The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. Of course he doesn't want people to think that tariffs can bring back middle class manufacturing jobs, and naturally he would want to publish propaganda intended to demoralize pro-labor causes like import tariffs and worker protection laws.

I'm not saying he's wrong just yet, I'm just pointing out that he owns a propaganda mouthpiece and is willing to lie on a grandiose scale to protect his business interests.

I still cannot believe the Geneva Conventions allowed this. This should have ended with John Kerry and Jen Psaki in a Swiss prison for at least 10 years, if not Barack Obama himself. We managed to convict accused war criminals with a lot less evidence in the Nuremburg trials. FOR EMPHASIS: I'm not comparing the severity of the crimes, I'm comparing the evidentiary basis for securing convictions.

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -Henry Kissinger

On a related note, I'm skeptical of the feasibility of their 2035 EV-only mandate. They haven't made any meaningful progress toward building up a grid that can support as much electrical power consumption as they will need. I know gasoline-powered cars are not going to disappear overnight, but the average American replaces their car about every 12-14 years according to Professor Google. Either that number is going to become 25-30 in California, or people will be heating their homes with peat and dry, fire-prone CA lumber.

I'll admit I have selfish interest in seeing nuclear power take over our electrical grids, but I don't want to see the lives of 40M people upended just because it will give the companies in my portfolio more pricing power.

That is a good point I completely overlooked: your international flight can get redirected to a country you never intended to visit.

Thanks, man! This helps a lot, because as you say the algorithm is not intuitive. The description of the type of data it is very good for is the best value-adding part of this writeup. Greatly appreciated!

Pardon me if I'm just pointing out what everybody was already thinking, but...

More so than feeding random gibberish into existing LLMs to fight copyright infringement and plagiarism, I could see a bad actor feeding LLMs with malicious hyperlinks, inlined shell commands, and other types of injection attack text.

Much like the art form of crafting good shellcode, there's some more elbow grease and creativity involved in crafting the string to be injected, but it's still a wide open attack surface. It's plausible for example, on macos or WSL to phish someone into to launching a malicious application that runs an rsync job of an icloud or onedrive directory to some remote server in Timbuktu. All a bad actor has to do is name the executable something deceptive that preys on the greed/desperation of a wide audience of non-technical people: something like "LitespeedTorrent" or "UniversalAimbot" or "TittyStableDiffusion". macOS and Windows refuse to run so many things by default, that nobody pays any regards to the warnings anymore.

Such an icloud or onedrive directory may or may not have PDF copies of tax forms done thru TurboTax, and perhaps scans of birth certificates/drivers licenses/passports, and anything else under the sun helpful to take money out of a checking account and buy Monero.

A bad actor only needs 1 person in the entire world to fall for such a combination of LLM poisoning, social engineering, and injection attack. Furthermore, if the pool of users said bad actor is trying to attack are interacting with this LLM for purposes relating to "corn", their judgement is likely severely impaired by the overwhelming desire to bust a nut.

... Anyway, I just wanted to let my imagination run wild for a few minutes.

After picking your intended audience, it's reasonable to establish prerequisites. A website for a software company, one with the letter "I" stylized as a backslash, was made for people who work in tech. Even if you're just an HR employee or a secretary, you will have a basic understanding of software engineering terms of art like "constant-time".

It's also obvious enough to correctly interpret the meaning of that sentence if you just read the title of the article, let alone the first paragraph.

Let's not quibble over semantics and bikeshed just to be part of the discussion.

I follow Charlie Munger's advice and substitute the phrase "bullshit earnings" anywhere I see mention of EBITDA.

If the GAAP income is negative, the company lost money last year. End of story.

You're right if you're only looking at peak sequential throughput. However, and this is the part that the author could have emphasized more, the impressive part is their strategy for dealing with disk access latency to improve random read throughput.

They shard the data as you might expect of a RAID, 5, 6, etc array and the distributed parity solves the problem of failure tolerance as you would expect and also improves bandwidth via parallelism as you describe.

The interesting part is their best strategy for sharding the data: plain-old-simple random. The decision of which disks and at which sectors to shard the data is done at random, and this creates the best change that at least one of the two copies of data can be accessed with much lower latency (~1ms instead of ~8ms).

The most crude, simple approach turns out to give them the best mileage. There's something vaguely poetic about it, an aesthetic beauty reminiscent of Euler's Identity or the solution to the Basel Problem; a very simple statement with powerful implications.

I'm not comparing the bill uninsured patients pay to the bill insured patients pay. I'm comparing the bill hospitals charge uninsured patients to the bill hospitals charge insurance companies for insured patients.

Hospitals and clinics offer a preferential rate to insurance companies as a sort of volume discount because insurance companies with thousands of patients have a lot more negotiating power than any individual patient who is uninsured or using an HSA.

It got even worse once health insurance companies started negotiating contracts with favored nations clauses requiring hospitals to bill then ~10-30% less than patients paying out of pocket. It's an oligopoly, but on the demand side: an oligopsony.

I liked Tulsi Gabbard's "two-tier" proposal for healthcare reform back in 2020. Grant state or federal government full control over emergency care and only the most expensive and obscure cancer treatments all of which act economically as a natural monopoly. Then for every other segment of healthcare where competition can exist, keep them as private markets but greatly enhance antitrust enforcement.

The only thing missing in all the good talk about healthcare is what to do about health insurance, which is the middleman that drives up prices. I propose making all forms of price discrimination illegal in healthcare, i.e. uninsured and HSA patients cannot be charged more than health insurance companies.

I also propose standardizing healthcare into 5 different health plan contracts, then requiring all health insurance companies to make all of their health plans fit into one of those contracts with zero modification to the terms and conditions. This will make litigation faster and easier, and it will avoid fraud disguised as "fine print".

Then, finally I propose requiring all health insurance companies to pay for the services up front and then sue the patient to get the money back, reversing the existing pattern where the burden of proof falls on the patient and the patient has to wait until the insurance provider relents. Think of it like a patient suing an insurance company and getting an injunction to pay out the claim while the legal ruling is pending, but faster.