mesofile

Not sure if this is a spoiler, it’s been a while since I read those books, but if memory serves the only reason Zaphod survived the TPV was because he was temporarily the inhabitant of a pocket universe specifically designed to trick him, and naturally for this universe’s version of the TPV he was the most important being in it, and in telling him so the pocket-universe TPV just confirmed ZB’s own view of himself, leaving him unharmed and a little extra smug. At some further point in the plot this fact is revealed, not sure if it’s the same book, but I remember it as a hilarious deflationary moment for the character.

Fugazi enjoyers should also know about their own very extensive archive of live shows

https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series

Besides the many other factors mentioned by commenters here, I'll add one other: drivers in the US rarely face consequences for killing pedestrians or, for that matter, other drivers, even when it's the result of willfully negligent or reckless behavior. It's such a longstanding trend that it's become a meme: if you want to get away with murder, make sure to kill your victim with a car. "I didn't see them/I made mistake" works so well that authorities just don't bring charges, because juries are so willing to accept this excuse. Perhaps because so many of them can see themselves doing the same thing.

See: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-u-s-so-good-at-k...

This is how I feel about my Honda, and to some extent, Kubernetes. In the former case I kept a 2006 model in good order for so long I skipped at least two (automobile) generation's worth of car-to-phone teething problems, and after years of hearing people complain about their woes I've found the experience of connecting my iphone to my '23 car pretty hassle-free. In the latter, I am finally moving a bunch of workloads out of EC2 after years of nudging from my higher-ups and, while it's still far from a simple matter I feel like the managed solutions in EKS and GKE have matured and greatly lessen the pain of migrating to K8S. I can only imagine what I would have gotten bogged down with had I promptly acted on my bosses' suggestion to do this six or seven years ago. (I also feel very lucky that the people I work for let me move on these things in my own due time.)

A number of articles and at least one well-known study have been published highlighting the fact that the ranks of the wealthiest landowning families in Britain are nearly unchanged since Norman times — e.g. https://www.medievalists.net/2014/11/englands-1-remained-sin...

back up for me (in the US) now https://status.1password.com/incidents/sfrpk9dskthr

One term that's specific to this concept of wielding a real but unused military capability is "fleet in being" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being

Many years ago when advance-fee email scams [0] became common I was likewise amazed that anyone would fall for them. Then it was pointed out that the seemingly obvious warning signs were a feature and not a bug, they are there to filter out everyone with a minimum of common sense and ensure that the scammers, who are casting their nets wide, only get responses from a few people but those people who do respond are quite gullible. The pig butchering thing is just a different filter meant to trap a different kind of vulnerable person.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

I agree the Ukrainian defense industrial base is working miracles given the situation, but my comment was specifically about major assets that not only they but the EU as a whole are not prepared to replace at this time or in the near term. Big-ticket items, not drones, cannon shells or bullets. In some cases there is a similar capability in or perhaps available to Europe but not (yet) the capacity for mass manufacture. In other cases there is nothing else even close. It's just a very very bad situation. I am currently pinning my hopes on Trump getting a lot of pushback from the US defense industry, but this seems like a slim chance as they probably expect they'll be making a lot of money in the next several years regardless of where their products are shipped.

I like the sentiment, and I believe that the Ukrainians will fight on regardless, but I am extremely pessimistic about their prospects past the end of this year. US support has been critical from the very earliest stages of this war and indeed even before the invasion of Feb '22. The Rivet Joint flights, HIMARS, Patriot batteries, Starlink access, cyber defense and intel support... I am not a defense expert but to my understanding there is no way that the EU/NATO-minus-US can fill the gap for these programs. Without them the Ukrainian strategic and tactical options are much more limited and they are forced to confront vastly reduced expectations from what only a short time ago was an already not great situation but one that held a chance of rewarding their tenacity.

And all that is just assuming that the US merely withdraws support; I would not be at all surprised if this administration begins pointing US cyber ops and the intel pipeline in the opposite direction and gives Russia a much clearer picture into their targets in Ukraine. In any other era this would be an unthinkable betrayal but now it seems far more likely than not.

“The time has come for you to seek the Path. Your soul has set you face to face before the clear light ... and now you are about to experience it in its Reality, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum, without circumference or center... At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.”

the ‘sound of surprise’

I believe someone has coined the term "techno feudalism"

Bruce Schneier, for one, not sure if anyone else had applied the feudal analogy before him. His remarks stand up quite well, I think:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/11/when_it_com...

Sorry, I follow cycling casually but I'm racking my brain trying to think of who 'EDB' refers to.

I watched this again recently and was struck by how the last few lines of narration land very differently now.

She argues that in the majority of unearthed royal palaces, the kitchens were very small

This doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that they would have brought in caterers with their own equipment, as many people throwing a large dinner would still do, and not relied entirely on the house facilities? It’s my (very inexpert) understanding that most kitchens in pre-modern homes were rather cramped, foul spaces, often semi- or fully detached due to odors, smoke, and the risk of fire spreading to the main living quarters. One could see how even in a grand house the kitchen might only be suitable to cook for a small number of people.

Of course I don’t doubt that in these matters Mary Beard knows far more than I do, but that particular line of reading struck me as odd.

"Starve before doing business with the damned Navy. They don't know what the hell they want and will drive you up a wall before they break either your heart or a more exposed part of your anatomy."

— Kelly Johnson

Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...

Thanks to everyone who replied.

Purely idle curiosity – I've heard a lot about the Kalman filter over the years, it's a popular subject here, but what are the other filters in the standard robotics toolkit?

Co-written by Springsteen and Patti Smith, not a Prince song.

Sounded interesting, but 1) the titles don't link to reviews as I expected, am I missing something? and 2) it appears to be an inactive project – I've only clicked through a sample of the full list but the majority of titles reviewed date from the 1960s & 70s, and I haven't found any more recently published than 1995.

the news is great except when I know more about the topic than the journalist is presenting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...

Very good read, though I also wonder about the author’s out-of-hand dismissal of prescribed hydroxchloroquine. Readers may be interested in a bit of follow-up from the author's newsletter:

Speaking of getting better: the essay leaves off with the narrator freshly out of the hospital and in extremely shaky physical condition. Readers who are wondering what happened next can be reassured (or not reassured, if they were rooting against the narrator) that the medications have, so far, basically done what they're supposed to do, even if the name of the condition they're treating is still subject to debate. The runaway muscle inflammation has been reined in; I'm able to get out and walk around and do things, as long as I don't try to do too many of them all in a single day. I can pick things up off the floor and raise the window sashes and get on a stepladder to reach up and fiddle with the balky light fixtures, all of which were impossible less than three months ago.

https://indignity.substack.com/p/healthy-start

Link to paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...

TFA makes an apparently straight-faced claim that the public was hoodwinked by a cabal of elitists, conspiring with industry, into adopting simpler, lighter, less expensive bicycles that can be adroitly maneuvered and which aren't necessarily miserable to ride up any kind of grade.

“Buy once, cry once” as they say. I’ve found it a good rule but one I must apply very selectively. Knowing where to spend on quality and where to make do with junk is a bit of an art in itself, I believe.

I’ve the past several months, due to publicized advancements in LLM tech, I’ve started to read comments on HN and elsewhere with the ready assumption that these fora are prime training grounds for chat bots, and any given post may very well be machine-generated. The parent comment fits the bill completely, down to the username. Of course I can’t tell for sure, and there’s no question that real people have a proven capability for nonsensical statements, but sometimes there is a Mad Libs quality to a comment that makes me regard it as a likely byproduct of some hacker’s AI side project.

I thought it was going to be about a project to build an ornithopter

It’s not apocryphal. My father worked for the US Navy making training and orientation films; one of these was about firefighting and hazardous materials handling on board ship. It included some entertaining segments — for some reason they use (or used, this was the 80s) pure sodium on some ships and they described the difficulty and danger of storing such a substance. The use of a broom to detect invisible but very dangerous leaks from high-pressure steam lines was also demonstrated.

Why wouldn't you? The DC area economy, especially the tech economy hasn't been wholly oriented around government & defense in decades. A lot of early Internet services grew up around network backbones built in Northern Virginia (for defense purposes originally, yes) and though it's less visible than in the days when AOL was hot shit, there's still a world of tech jobs around here that aren't directly connected to gov/mil.

And, while I admit I'm biased as a resident of the area, on a lot of objective measures it's a pretty nice place to be if you can swing the cost of living. Lots of well-educated high earners, world-class museums with free admission, relatively easy access to green spaces, and a range of transit options instead of being confined to a car like most of the US. It most certainly has its problems but it's got lots of upsides as well.