jerome-jh

There was a report a few months ago predicting 4°C by 2080. It came to this figure by selecting the most likely emission scenario and warming scenario from the GIEC report.

In particular, it is hard to be optimistic on the emission scenario nowadays. So the report opted for emissions starting to drop around 2040, if I remember correctly.

That's my new baseline. Sorry I cannot find the report anymore. I am pretty sure it was posted on hacker news though.

Protecting kids and other vulnerable people matters to everyone, so why not the government? What would think of a country where, let say your mother cannot go out without fearing getting robbed or raped? Same for kids. Maybe you do not have kids and you do not care. Anyway being a parent does not mean being behind your kids at every single moment. I hope you have not spent your childhood under constant supervision of your parents. So at some point everyone is concerned about protecting kid, and not only there own ones

If the kid knows how to buy a certificate from a shady website, then probably he his old enough to watch porn and other disturbing content. That does not mesn the system should be thrown away as a whole.

I upvote for the wonderful formatting ;)

We could prove P=>~P if we had earlier in our context another hypothesis Q, which is false.

So proving P=>~P does not imply P is false. It means our context is inconsistent. It could be inconsistent because of P or because of Q?

There is something which always made me uncomfortable with informal proof by contradiction (by informal I mean "with pen and paper"). So OK we reach a contradiction, and then immediately "oh yeah, that is _this hypothesis_ which is wrong". Erh, well why exactly this one? All we know is we started from an inconsistent state.

The article enters this territory at the last paragraph and simply concludes "This can be difficult questions to resolve to student's satisfaction", without even trying to answer it.

I sometimes wonder, what is real and what is a concept in physics: is that force , energy, ...?

There are often two ways to solve physics problems: one describing the problem with forces, the other reasoning with energy. So they look like the two faces of the same coin. Hence the question: which one is actually real?

Some quick arguments for and against

Energy:

+ converts between mechanical, chemical, thermal, radiative types, and even mass

+ quantum particles, when interacting, exchange energy

- looks like an integrative quantity (in the sense of mathematical integral)

Force:

+ feels very real, when you receive a ball in your face

+ we talk of fundamental forces, not fundamental energy

+ explains momentum, deformation well

- my physics teacher used to say "nobody ever saw a force"

- force is undistinguishable with acceleration

- at the quantum level forces are actually particles interacting

- at the quantum level, the uncertainty principle makes the newtonian force pointless (pun?): seems like we could know the vector's origin or the direction but not both

It would be bearable if they would just be rich and shut the **** up.

I will be on the job market soon

I will change decade this year

I still have not found my passion nor encountered the big project if my life. I am interested by too many things and have too little agency or perseverance.

In the small town were I lived as a teenager, there was a successful garage owner who had a Ferrari. It was during the early 90's. One evening after a dinner at a restaurant with friends, a young woman insists to come back as a passenger in the Ferrari. They were later found dead in the crashed Ferrari, which took fire. The woman was in the driver seat. So it seems the woman later insisted to drive the car.

The cautionary tale seems rather to be: if you have a Ferrari, _never_ let anybody else drive it.

Recently, Claude (through Copilot) found a hardware issue on our product. I was asking it to find an issue in a specific feature of a device driver, that could cause what we observed. It determined the feature was correctly implemented.

Then it hinted that depending how the hardware is implemented, it could cause the observation. It turned out the hardware was implemented as suspected by Claude.

I was already convinced it knew the codebase, somehow, more than I do. Now it is just as if its knows the product and its use as well.

Why no Salvetat? https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Salvetat_(eau_min%C3%A9rale...

Do people solve business problems with OR-tools? I suppose yes, but what can you say about the real applications?

Replying to myself

Christmas 2023: I ordered a number of books from the local bookstore. One failed to delivered, so

Christmas 2024: I ordered most of my books from Amazon. No two deliveries went the same (see above), total randomness.

Christmas 2025: I ordered ALL my books from the local bookstore (+600$). I started shopping earlier (end of November) and everything went smooth! They kept my individual orders at the shop and I could collect them all in one go. No stress.

The online shop of my local bookstore is simple and efficient. I can read book excerpts, just like on Amazon. But the total absence of clutter makes for a much more efficient experience and a huge amount of time spared.

My local book store accepts online orders and I can fetch my books from the shop a few days later. I am finding this more convenient than Amazon, even if a little more expensive. I also appreciate to have a book store in town, for the few times I have to find a present and have no idea and little time.

For the convenience aspect: Amazon deliveries routinely fail, require me to fetch the parcel at the entrance of my condo at inconvenient times, or require me the get my parcel at the condo concierge, again at inconvenient times, or the parcel is dropped at a random place.

I never had to return a book bought at the store. I do not even know their return policy. It may definitely be an issue someday in the future.

AI can be a great tool. It can make our children (and us) lazier, but not necessarily stupider. Short video platforms OTOH certainly make our children stupider (and depressed).

Securing soldered components with epoxy? You have to be very confident at your soldering :) You had no hot glue?

In a world of international tensions, governments tend to favor their mega-corps and monopoly. It is a way of weakening your adversaries. It is commercial war.

When I started working, more than 25 years ago, we had one team meeting per week (1 hour), very few other meetings. Cellphones were getting mainstream and people had these funny ringtones, but since communications were expensive, phones were not ringing often. The office phone was ringing even more seldomly. We had no ticketing system. Managers just trusted you for doing your work. When going to someone else desk we would start with "may I disturb you?", and the answer may have been "give me five minutes". We had like 2-3 emails a day. It turns out someone had the radio in the office. That was in Belgium and the radio was in Flemish. This was not a big deal since I do not understand Flemish. Despite being rather cramped, I remember this office as quiet. It was not a large open-space though.

I cannot remember the turning point. Of course "agile" did a lot of damage, then ticketing systems, the illusion that developers are swap-able, and now constant notification stream.

And if the satellite's orbit is not perfectly circular, you may even be able to gain altitude by moving a mass at specifics times, like a kid on a swing or a skater in a ramp.

I would tend to think it uses Earth's magnetic field. Magnetizing or demagnetizing a moving mass would make its potential energy vary inside Earth's magnetic field. This may occur without reaction (I am not sure about this, my physics courses are far away and magnetic material physics is not that easy). Once they varied the potential energy of the moving mass, they would actually move it inside Earth's magnetic field, leading to a reaction force. The reaction force would be greater in one direction because of the cyclic magnetization/demagnetization.

It is striking to read this and two links above the article about so-called Bitcoin's biggest secret.

That's how I like computers: simply useful, down to earth. Congrats to the creator. (BTW reminds me of the wonderful lylipond https://lilypond.org/)

From the top of my head, for about 300 nuclear power plants around the globe, there have been 3 core meltdown accidents. It is a 1% catastrophic failure rate. It is quite bad!

Whatever the circumstances of these accidents, human nature and unexpected events allowed them to occur. Just like every accident, you can say after the fact they could have been avoided. However it is impossible to revert the consequences of a core meltdown at human time scale.

I am not anti-nuclear at all. But I certainly wonder what kind of organization is required to operate it safely.

Social media platforms are no more closed circles. They are platforms for advertisers and "click fishers". And people engage with content which revolt them.

As a consequence social platforms, and low quality newspapers, have converged to show the bad news from all over the world. There is no shortage of them. This affects people's morale, confidence. Have you noticed how people you talk to can be very concerned about seemingly minor events that occurred on the other side of the world, to which they cannot change anything, and which should not change anything in their life?

Turns out today I have cut access to Youtube, Google Play to my 12 years old daughter. Internet is limited to a whitelist of sites, with only Wikipedia for now. She had turned phone addict in an unmanageable way. Blame Youtube and Tiktok. Unfortunately she needs a smartphone for school, she would otherwise have a dumb phone.

Of course there is wonderful content on Youtube. But the "shorts" is a literal trap for kids. As for the adults (well, me) it is just painful to see the list of trending videos, such that I seldom go and never stay. This is a stinky place. Ask the dictator in me and I would say blocking Youtube makes more good than bad.

You americans are strange. Your government makes arbitrary arrests, illegally searches phones, massively de-funds science and health projects, and only a handful of people demonstrate.

Now a company wants the identity of the companies it works with because it distributes their software, and it looks like a massive "scandal". Well at least I am realistic that the "scandal" is only within certain circles.

This is a modularity vs integration tradeoff.

- Linux is a patchwork of SW, written in a variety of programming languages, using a variety of libraries, some of which having the same functionality. There is duplication, misalignment, legacy.

- MacOS is developed by a single company. It is much more integrated and coherent.

Same for the CPU:

- x86 accesses memory through an external bus. The ability to install a third party GPU requires an external bus, with a standardized protocol, bus width, etc. This is bound to lag behind state of the art

- Apple chips have on die memory, GPU (actually same package but not same die). Higher speeds, optimization, evading from standardized protocols: all this is possible.

This has an impact on kernel/drivers/compilers:

- x86: so many platforms, CPU versions, protocol revisions to support. Often with limited documentation. This wastes hell a lot of engineering time!

- Apple: limited number of HW platforms to support, full access to internals.

"are we the baddies?"

We are and without AI. See how people struggle with their computers and devices, and how it is often caused by an undesired software update.

See how software updates, or the lack thereof, are weaponized to make devices unusable or obsolete.

The rich have too much money. Period.

Assuming the recruiting manager is non technical, he should have referred to the team in need when he received the "specification" email, something like "what should I do with this candidate?". A 5min chat with engineers would have clarified the situation and 5min to send an answer to the candidate. Same for the feedback request.

Seems like he did none of it, and in this company people do not talk and everyone is left guessing what is work consists in, which resonates strangely with the take home assignment directives. What an horrible workplace it would be.