kijin

Shady shell companies do an excellent job of proving ownership -- it's the only reason they exist! So if NYC is hit by an asteroid, you'll find backups of all the important papers neatly filed away in Delaware.

You can get back your phone number once you have a photo ID and buy a new phone. Then you should hope that your service providers aren't secure enough to have disabled SMS-based account recovery.

Brb, gotta camp on top of the ash at the same lat/long coordinates to catch the mailman.

Pascal strings, where the length is stored in the 0th character, were much worse

Until unicode became widely supported, many databases used to reserve 1 byte for the length of a VARCHAR, typically at the 0th position of the column. The content was understandably limited to 255 characters.

Because of that extra byte per row, it is considered a waste of memory to use VARCHAR for data that is expected to be fixed-length. Well, it's an even larger waste in some cases. A certain popular ORM continues to insist on mapping UUID to VARCHAR(36), wasting a whopping 21 bytes per row! Certainly something to keep in mind at a time when both RAM and disks are expensive.

SQLite of course doesn't care, and stores all string as TEXT.

Thanks for the tip, but the usual open-source "you can change it" argument doesn't work in this case. People who like to control other people will interpret any deviation from the expected behavior as an attempt to hide something from them. If you change the defaults, those defaults can no longer serve as your alibi. All the more reason to ship secure defaults!

It only replaces the current page, and VPD is not a single-page app. So if you've been clicking around to find something, the previous pages will still be in your history.

If you need to hide your browsing history from an abusive partner, it would be more secure to use incognito mode and hit Alt+F4 when you need to escape. Unfortunately, Chrome renders incognito windows in dark mode by default. If you're normally on light mode, the transition is extremely conspicuous. Edge and Firefox do the same. It's as if all browser vendors have colluded to make it difficult to browse in secret.

This has been happening since a long time before digital became a thing. Remember Fagin from Oliver Twist?

But that wouldn't have looked like a bash script, only a random sequence of characters. The shebang at the start definitely contributes to the geek factor.

Well at least they're not instructing consumers to run curl | bash.

That's better than half the tech howtos out there.

Yeah, that "extreme low pressure" part of the article had me scratching my head. Even a complete vacuum at the top will not suck water up more than 10 meters! The author was probably oversimplifying for a lay audience.

Actually, all matter is just trapped energy.

If most archers start shooting as soon as targets enter the range, and if their individual ranges are clustered around the average, wouldn't that result in a relatively high density of shooting when the distance to a moving group of targets coincides with their average range?

Some movies actually provide a plausible-sounding explanation for the volley fire thing. A dude in charge commands everyone to wait until the unsuspecting enemy enters the kill zone. But even in that case, I guess the archers won't wait with their bows drawn.

WhatsApp probably has better security than random KYC-as-a-service vendors who upload all the documents to a publicly accessible bucket.

Vertical integration. Produce the chips, build data centers to run LLMs on the chips, and the robots to deliver the result to end users.

I wouldn't mind being mistaken for a TI-83. That was like a compliment back when I was in school. :)

It's not just about long vs. short passwords. IMO the greatest benefit of having a password manager -- whether it's a bloated Electron app or just a text file on your computer -- is that it enables you to juggle hundreds of different passwords, randomly generated for each site. It's the best way we know of to limit the blast radius when (not if!) some of those sites inevitably get hacked.

as (generally speaking) all data stored in Redis is usually regarded as volatile because of what Redis actually is.

If you know this already, then you didn't need to read OP or any of this thread. :)

The problem is that Redis tries very hard to position itself as a persistent data store, with defaults that lean toward persistence (no default eviction policy). Beginners need to fight these defaults every step of the way if all they want is a cache.

Redis works great as a cache, but there are a few things you need to do in order to use it reliably as a cache.

1) Wrap your client library so that it's impossible to store anything without an expiry date. You don't want 6-months-old data suddenly coming up in your app!

2) Either turn off persistence, or use a separate database for the cache. In other words, don't mix volatile data with stuff you actually care about.

3) Set up a reasonable maxmemory value with an appropriate maxmemory-policy, so that Redis doesn't eat up all your RAM.

4) Resist the urge to use complex data structures. If you try to update a single field on an expired hash, you will end up with an incomplete object.

If you don't want all that hassle, then yes, Memcached probably works better out of the box.

Sure, if you're going to keep using it long term.

But it's a hefty upfront investment for people who just want to experiment. The good thing about $200/month subscriptions is that you can cancel them any time and cut your losses. Not so with a $4000 computer that loses half of its resale value as soon as you plug it in.

I think the current sweet spot for people who don't already own a high-end gaming PC is to rent a server with a beefy GPU from Hetzner et al. and run local models there.

Well, that might be part of the reason why it's your old job and not your current one. :)

Startups are like sports cars nowadays. People think it makes you look cool if you own one.

It doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money to maintain. Yachts and sports cars do the same. That's actually like the whole point of it, after all.

Not while the hardware required to run a local model at an acceptable speed costs way more than $200.

Guess what, the big players are hoarding all the RAM and GPUs so that other people can't afford decent hardware. It's working out beautifully for them!

Humanoid (or dogoid) robot hardware on its own offers no benefits over non-humanoid factory machines. It just has fancy firmware controlling its motions.

Humanoid robots loaded with an AI agent, on the other hand, could actually make you a sudo sandwich, do your laundry, or help you with that weekend project in the backyard. They're finally about to get useful.

I'm not a fan of humanoid robots personally (they creep me out), but I'd love to have a functional R2-D2 with me.

How does market segmentation work if you refuse to clarify which chips have the feature and which chips don't?

SEO and accessibility laws have always been the most effective way to convince someone to build clean, well-structured webpages. Guess what, both are measures of how easy it is for a machine to extract content from your pages. AI is just the latest machine that wants to slurp up your soup of tags.

Try borrowing my laptop, it has the power button right next to Delete. You never know what exactly is going to be deleted!

Thanks for the idea! Now I'm going to mash the Fn key whenever I feel the urge to strongly emphasize something but can't actually type it out because, well, it would be Fn NSFW.

There are plenty of humans who plan trips by concatenating destinations that appear the most frequently in their instagram feed. Not that different from how an LLM does things.

Where humans and (current) LLMs differ the most is their failure mode. A human friend could be bad at planning trips, but that's kinda predictable, we're used to it, we know how to catch that Exception. LLMs on the other hand still have failure modes that come across as really wacky, like, what are they smoking in Mountain View?

Which might actually serve as better evidence of different internal workings at a deeper level, than just parroting well-known superficial features of stochastic whatevertheysay.

Considering the location, I would imagine that the ancestors prefer to haunt the barrows at night. Still a dream job if that's your thing. Just watch out for the occasional Nazgûl. :)

Yeah, Korea is on one of the earliest time zones among the major markets: UTC+9, the same time zone as Japan, and just behind Australia. So on Mondays we're one of the first to react to anything that happened over the weekend. This reaction tends to be rather violent. Not to mention the country is going through quite a political turmoil right now...