kpil

I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.

I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.

As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.

For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.

How the f are you supposed to type? Ideally I'd like full support for my arms from the elbow to the wrist.

In my first job - i think it was in 1997, I had my own small room with an L-shaped desk with a rounded corner. That gave a few inches of space for resting my arms - both when typing on a quite reasonable Pentium laptop, and especially when using the mouse.

Since then, the desks and the chairs has become shittier and shittier. Except perhaps when a was a consultant for an HR-department.

The U-shaped desk was probably the best ergonomically designed workplace I've had. Maybe a wheat-filled pad along the desk would have made it better.

I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.

Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.

The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.

The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.

Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.

A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.

(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)

We don't "need a global reset"

It's an apocalyptical mind-bug. All times have an eschatology - ours seems to be climate collapse. It used to be nuclear war.

The media is selling a story. In reality everything is still getting better. People are healthier, richer, and better off in almost every measurable way, all over the world, including Africa and Asia.

Yes, there are some dark clouds. A long list. But the problems - even a long war in the middle east, are bumps in the road, not a cliff. If the clouds turns out to be a really bad storm, people will buckle down and sort it.

The 150€ is a reservation on your debit card before filling up, since the banks or the station doesn't want the credit risk. It's released when the actual sum is booked.

I think it's just what a reasonable "full tank" was a while back.

You can just restart if you need more.

My internet provider didn't even maintain the ip-address. They have a pool of egress routes and seems to route round-robin. Basically every new connection can be from any address in the pool.

I had to call them to make it stop since it tripped the VPN solution at work, that interpreted it as a MIM attack. They disabled it no questions asked as soon as I called, so I guess it mostly works for most people, but not all.

But on that note, isn't it basically time now for IPv6 so we can stop shit like this and go to directly addressable devices like everyone did in the early 90s.

What's fast on Z platforms is typically IO rather than raw CPU - the platform can push a lot of parallell data. This is typically the bottleneck when compiling.

The cores are in my experience moderately fast at most. Note that there are a lot of licencing options and I think some are speed-capped - but I don't think that applies to IFL - a standard CPU licence-restricted to only run linux.

It takes some of the fun out of imagining eternal digital life, doesn't it :-)

Will put it in my list :-)

In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.

Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.

Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.

I think "MMAcevedo" basically nails it: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.

We build models of the world in order to predict it.

But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.

I'm thinking that the slopocalypse is almost inevitable outside pure tech companies and can't be ruled out there either.

LLMs are a force multiplier. Clueless people will be able to produce tons of code that looks convincing but is totally misguided and misinformed. Exactly what large companies with complex in-house systems doesn't really need any more of.

The truth is that there is a lot of hype.

You need to be reasonably experienced and guide it.

First, you need to know that Claude will create nonsensical code. On a macro level it's not exactly smart it just has a lot of contextual static knowledge.

Debugging is not it's strongest skill. Most models don't do good at all. Opus is able to one-shot "troubleshooting" prompts occasionally, but it's a high probability that it veer of on a tangent if you just tell it to "fix things" based on errors or descriptions. You need to have an idea what you want fixed.

Another problem is that it can create very convincing looking - but stupid - code. If you can't guide it, that's almost guaranteed. It can create code that's totally backwards and overly complicated.

If it IS going on a wrong tangent, it's often hopeless to get it back on track. The conversation and context might be polluted. Restart and reframe the prompt and the problems at hand and try again.

I'm not totally sure about the language you are using, but syntax errors typically happens if it "forgets" to update some of the code, and very seldom just in a single file or edit.

I like to create a design.md and think a bit on my own, or maybe prompt to create it with a high level problem to get going, and make sure it's in the context (and mentioned in the prompts)

"... HBR found that companies are cutting [jobs] based on AI's potential, not its performance.

I don't know who needs to hear this - a lot apparently - but the following three statements are not possible to validate but have unreasonably different effects on the stock market.

* We're cutting because of expected low revenue. (Negative) * We're cutting to strengthen our strategic focus and control our operational costs.(Positive) * We're cutting because of AI. (Double-plus positive)

The hype is real. Will we see drastically reduced operational costs the coming years or will it follow the same curve as we've seen in productivity since 1750?

Good question.

There seems to be strong lobbying for insects as human food, in particular from companies that would be happy feed us with their own shit as long as it's cheap and they could get away with it

The green-left seems to enjoy that idea. Exactly why is hard to tell - especially on HN, but let's say I don't think it's rational.

So I guess, successful lobbying?

I'm assuming they mean the old way of signing each others signatures.

As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people.

Or at least, more realistically, to few nerds. I think I signed 3-4 peoples signatures.

The process had - as they say - a low WAF.

Sometimes EU regulations isn't that bad.

Poultry litter has been banned as cattle feed since 2001, partially due to mouth and foot disease and BSE and to some extent animal welfare.

I think that the important conclusion to make of this is that publicly available code is not created or even curated by humans anymore, and it will be fed back into data sets for training.

It's not clear what the consequences are. Maybe not much, but there's not that much actual emergent intelligence in LLMs, so without culling by running the code there's seems to be a risk that the end result is a world full of even more nonsense than today.

This already happened a couple of years ago for research on word frequency in published texts. I think the consensus is that there's no point in collecting anymore since all available material is tainted by machine generated content and doesn't reflect human communication.

Old English looks more or less like old Norse to me. Or old Scandinavian as we say in Sweden...

They where supposed to do it quicker.

I think there was a limit of something like 60 days. At least my bank apparently refused all transactions that were settled too late.

I had a job which involved a lot of taxi trips, and when I cross checked 30% of the trips where never charged my account. I suppose they just filled up the glove box with old slips until they couldn't shut it. Hotels never failed.

I once worked with translating an application to polish, and found out we had to have separate placeholders for "name" for persons (nazwisko) and for things (nazwa).

Which is a simple example why you need context.

All UI frameworks should have a "translate" mode, where all labels and static text can be right-clicked and modified...

I think the current estimate is that there are almost a half a billion more Christians than Muslims (in 2025.)

One reason is that the number of Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing. But extrapolating the trends, yes Islam will probably become the largest religion in the coming decades.

Or at least maybe - looking at birth rates, it seems as second generation muslim immigrants to Western countries have even lower birth rates than the native population. That might happen also in regions say like Pakistan and Indonesia and other fast growing regions, depending on economical or other changes.

This is like a really really fast VIC 20!

This is underrated and applies to almost all roles involved in product development.

the distinguishing factor of effective engineers is their ability to build and maintain clear mental models.

Still is.

The standard tools were always sort of unergonomic on all of AIX, Sun/Solaris, DEC/Alpha, SCO, and *BSD.

I don't know but it seems people (or at least old geezers) install GNU on top of Macs these days.

Crossed fingers, in my experience.

I think you got most details from the others, but insurance is two basically two different things:

Life Insurance is mostly a savings product, and the insurance part protects you if you live too long.

Property and casualty insurance protects you from losses, including someone's life, but also houses, cars, etc.

The domains are quite different, but they both have specific "insurance business" computing that's related to actuarial science or analysis, i.e. the statistics needed to calculate reserves, policies, prices etc.

I doubt COBOL is used for any actuarial analysis. I think SAS is still strong, but I suspect R is used now. Maybe Python is used in the more static calculations that are handed over to developers, but the actuaries are typically coding whatever they need when they create their models.

The rest is just case management, automating business rules, bookkeeping, payments, and for life insurance also systems for trading securities and funds, and possibly in-house tools for asset management.

There isn't really a strong case for COBOL. The only reason COBOL still is used is that the insurance companies where early adopters and saw computing as a way to reduce the administrative overhead. The investments were made at a time when trusting some hippies running UNIX wasn't really on the table, and even less so trusting some nerds and their rickety PCs. They built up a workforce with COBOL devs that also gained quite a lot of business knowledge.

The digitalisation created another problem - a lot of the older employees were hired to do simple administrative tasks. Even big corporations aren't totally psychopathic so it actually has taken a long time to shift out the employees, and retrain the remainder for the jobs that got more demanding. Even the employees that didn't really have that much high-value domain-specific knowledge to begin with. So the case for more automation was actually not as strong as it could have been.

Even still, although especially life insurance is a totally digital product (damage claims is not), they primarily see IT as a cost centre at heart although they probably claim they do not.

This has shaped their systems and they have tended to replace their old systems when they're forced by external factors, as the upsides - better digital sales, more automated decisions, better trading experience for their customers,etc are not as easy to achieve as the more tangible administrative automation cost savings they started out with.

Actually, this also applies to banks. You could totally run an insurance company or bank without any mainframes or a single line of COBOL. But the organisations still have COBOL developers and maybe more important an upper management that come from that tradition.

I got unreasonably triggered by this.