nkurz

Yes, the diagrams help. The issue is that you aren't using standard English terminology. Typically, a "loaf" is the whole piece of bread as baked, although it's still called a loaf even after you start cutting pieces off. Let's say it's 10 cm x 10 cm x 20 cm long.

What you are calling a loaf is actually a "slice". You might cut a loaf into 10 slices, each 10 cm x 10 cm x 2 cm thick. So you the question you are asking is how different people cut a "half slice" of 10 cm x 5 cm x 2 cm. I've never considered cutting a half slice the way you do it.

Personally, if I want a half slice, I would cut it the way you do for a full slice, and then afterward cut it in half while it is laying flat on the cutting board. Then I'd just leave the half slice sitting next to the uncut portion of the loaf.

I'd never cut a half slice the way you show in F, because I almost always want my slices to be the same thickness rather than tapering in thickness from one side to the other. While I wouldn't have cut it the way you do, I prefer your final result.

Maybe I'm just slow this morning, but I had trouble figuring out what this story was about. The actual title on the linked article is "Historic co-determination helps monasteries navigate digital change across three countries". It's a press release for a recent paper by Danko and Ross of the University of Zurich "Dinosaurs of the organizational landscape facing technological disruption: Liability of aging and exaptation in monastic orders". It's about how old monasteries are coping with modern technology. The paper seems to be available in full here:

Abstract

Some organizations remain adaptable across centuries while others struggle to evolve and ultimately fade into irrelevance. Only a handful of theories can explain this extraordinary adaptability. We test two competing theoretical perspectives in imprinting research: Liability of aging suggests that older organizations are at greater risk of disruption by modern technologies, but older organizations can also repurpose their imprinted structures and processes to their advantage in a process termed exaptation. To resolve this contradiction, we analyze Catholic religious orders and their monasteries. They represent the oldest extant organizations, were founded in various historical eras, and are facing contemporary challenges posed by digitalization. Our quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that the orders with historically decentralized imprints show higher adaptability in embracing digital innovation. Our results confirm that long-term adaptability is increased in organizations whose imprinted decentralized logics provide a propensity for exaptation. However, these long-standing organizations are also more wary of the negative effects of digital disruption and appear to shield their organizational core more strongly. We contribute to imprinting research by shedding light on the intricate relationship between historically imprinted organizational logics and contemporary organizational practice and highlight the often-underappreciated importance of exaptation for long-term adaptability.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332...

Assuming you are planning to continue participating anyway, you should just respond. Presuming it's a good response, with a bit of luck someone will vouch for it and make it visible.

Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation? I don't know whether this was AI generated or not, but an online tool claiming it's AI generated doesn't sway my opinion much. Are there any studies showing that Pangram's tool is well calibrated for this type of article? If not, what makes you trust it?

(I'm not sure why it was marked that way, but I vouched to bring your comment back from auto-dead. I glanced at your comment history, but don't see any clear reason for this.)

https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/

I agree that it sends the wrong symbol, but actually Daniel is great. He cares tremendously about doing work that is actually real-world useful. I've co-written a few papers with him, and he's really hard working and open to outside suggestions. The danger is that if you send him comments, he'll eventually manage to rope you into writing a new and improved version. Seriously, if you are a non-academic computer scientist with a good idea that you want to publish, he'd be incredibly open to working with you.

As to why he now has this on his blog? I also cringe when I read it. I presume someone told him he should self-promote more, and this is his lame attempt to do so. He's almost certainly the most cited person in his department, but it's entirely possible that none of his colleagues actually know this. Cut him some slack. Self-promotion is not his strength. He's a nerd's nerd, and not a marketer. I'll mention to him that his attempt here might be backfiring when I'm next in contact with him.

You keep saying that you "can't read the article" rather than that you choose not to. Are you philosophically opposed to clicking the archive link in this thread: https://archive.ph/cgUxZ?

Which is fine, although I personally wouldn't use "can't" to describe this stance. In any case, I think the discussion might be smoother if you were willing to review the article under discussion.

Here's a starting point if you are intrigued: https://www.jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html

The page above that has more info and other stories: https://www.jessamyn.com/barth/

The judge's full decision (which is quite readable) is here: https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/cr...

I found it ironic that in an article by a brilliant linguist (and I mean that genuinely) about how fluidity of language can fool us into perceiving logic that isn't there that I was thrown out of frame by a silly grammatical error that an LLM would never make:

"The more direct inspiration for me was an email from Stuart Russell in September 2020 to Alexander Koller and I about our ACL 2020 paper".

It's a good article, and worth reading. But somehow I also have enough trouble understanding how she would make this error that---in the inverse of the fluidity argument---I start to doubt her the rest of her logic based on one silly irrelevant grammar mistake.

You probably know the details better than I do (and perhaps there's a later twist I'm unaware of) but in 2022 Cocker denied that it was Stratou:

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life (via The Mirror), Cocker addressed claims that the inspiration was Danae Stratou, a Greek woman who attended St Martin’s at the same time as Jarvis, but confirmed that “it wasn’t her because she had blonde hair and the girl had dark hair.”

https://www.nme.com/news/music/jarvis-cocker-is-on-a-quest-t...

It's trickier than that. Modern processors are speculative, which means that they guess at the result for a comparison and keep going along one side of a branch as far as they can until they are told they guessed wrong or hit some internal limit. If they guessed wrong, they throw away the speculative work, take a penalty of a handful of cycles, and do the same thing again from a different starting point.

Essentially, this means that all loops are already unrolled from the processors point of view, minus a tiny bit of overhead for the loop itself that can often be ignored. Since in binary search the main cost is grabbing data from memory (or from cache in the "warm cache" examples) this means that the real game is how to get the processor to issue the requests for the data you will eventually need as far in advance as possible so you don't have to wait as long for it to arrive.

The difference in algorithm for quad search (or anything higher than binary) is that instead of taking one side of each branch (and thus prefetching deeply in one direction) is that you prefetch all the possible cases but with less depth. This way you are guaranteed to have successfully issued the prefetch you will eventually need, and are spending slightly less of your bandwidth budget on data that will never be used in the actual execution path.

As others are pointing out, "number of comparisons" is almost useless metric when comparing search algorithms if your goal is predicting real world performance. The limiting factor is almost never the number of comparisons you can do. Instead, the potential for speedup depends on making maximal use of memory and cache bandwidth. So yes, you can view this as loop unrolling, but only if you consider how branching on modern processors works under the hood.

Unfortunately although we cut the search space to 2/3 of what it was for binary search at each step (1/3 vs 1/2), we do 3/2 as many comparisons at each step (one comparison 50% of the time, two comparisons the other 50%), so it averages out to equivalence.

True, but is there some particular reason that you want to minimize the number of comparisons rather than have a faster run time? Daniel doesn't overly emphasize it, but as he mentions in the article: "The net result might generate a few more instructions but the number of instructions is likely not the limiting factor."

The main thing this article shows is that (at least sometimes on some processors) a quad search is faster than a binary search _despite_ the fact that that it performs theoretically unnecessary comparisons. While some computer scientists might scoff, I'd bet heavily that an optimized ternary search could also frequently outperform.

Full article:

American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage.

The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an assessment by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials.

The U.S. bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families, though they were largely cleared out in the days and hours before the U.S. and Israeli went to war with Iran. The Pentagon has not detailed the extent of the damage to U.S. military bases publicly or, according to the U.S. officials, to members of Congress.

“We do not discuss battle damage assessments for operation security reasons,” a Pentagon official said in a statement. “Our forces remain fully operational, and we continue to execute our mission with the same readiness and combat effectiveness.”

U.S. Central Command declined to comment on battle damage assessments.

Last month, the administration asked private satellite companies, including Planet Labs, to withhold imagery of the bases from the public, making the extent of the destruction difficult to assess, according to the U.S. officials and experts, including a statement from Planet Labs to their customers.

The administration’s request remains in place, a Planet Labs spokesperson said. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

Some Republican lawmakers privately have expressed frustration directly to senior Pentagon officials about their refusal to provide information about the extent of the damage or any cost estimate for repairs, according to two GOP congressional aides.

“No one knows anything. And it’s not for lack of asking,” one of the aides said. “We have been asking for weeks and not getting specifics, even as the Pentagon is asking for a record high budget.”

Asked for comment, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said the U.S. had achieved the military objectives of Operation Epic Fury. “As the president has said, this was the last, best time to strike, and — thanks to our heroic warfighters — the operation was a tremendous success,” Wales said in a statement. “President Trump took decisive action to ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon to threaten the United States or our assets and allies in the region, and Americans are already safer for it.”

The damage to and cost of repairing the bases could reignite a yearslong debate over the merits of maintaining U.S. bases in such close proximity to an adversary like Iran. Some national security officials, including some serving in the Trump administration, have for years pushed to move U.S. bases in the region further east and away from Tehran’s reaches. The issue also could embolden critics of America’s military presence overseas who have advocated for shrinking the U.S. presence in the Middle East, one U.S. official and one person familiar with the matter said. The three U.S. officials familiar with the damage to U.S. bases in the Middle East described it as extensive. The headquarters building for the U.S. Navy in Bahrain, the nerve center for the Navy’s operations in the region, sustained serious damage, the officials said. They said other parts of the base in Bahrain also suffered significant damage that is likely repairable.

Multiple hangars and warehouses at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait also were struck, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s unofficial assessment that was reviewed by NBC News. The assessment also shows a munitions storage facility at a military base in Erbil in northern Iraq was damaged and a runway at the sprawling Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar was destroyed.

U.S. bases had been cleared of U.S. troops and other personnel, so many of the bases were left essentially empty and vulnerable to attack by Iranian missiles and drones. Many of the troops who were temporarily relocated are expected to return to the bases once tensions in the region subside.

Thirteen U.S. troops have been killed in the conflict and as many as 400 have been wounded, although more than 90% have returned to duty, according to the U.S. military. The Pentagon has refused to provide specifics, but during an April 8 briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine said the U.S. and partners in the Gulf region intercepted 1,700 ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones during the war. A fourth U.S. official said only a fraction of the projectiles actually got through the U.S. and ally defenses.

Congress is considering legislation to support the cost of the war, including unspecified repairs and other costs in a so-called supplemental bill that could exceed $100 billion, according to two of the U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the matter.

According to the AEI’s assessment, Iran hit more than 100 targets across 11 bases in seven Gulf countries. Those attacks fell on U.S. and host-nation bases in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

“As part of Epic Fury, the potential future costs to rebuild American military infrastructure overseas may include repair, reconstruction, outright replacement, or even abandonment/decommissioning of locales,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at AEI, said in a statement about the group’s assessment. “War damage also includes estimated costs for infrastructure that is unsalvageable.”

Eaglen’s cost estimate for repairing the infrastructure is more than $5 billion, but that amount does not account for some of the radar systems, weapons systems, aircraft and other equipment destroyed in the Iranian strikes, she said. Eaglen has worked on defense and budgetary and military readiness issues for years and is a former Pentagon official.

The Iranians damaged at least two air defense systems in the region, according to the U.S. officials.

Iran has also destroyed U.S. military aircraft. NBC News reported that at least one fighter jet, more than a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones, two MC-130 tankers and four helicopters known as “little birds” were also destroyed.

Additional helicopters, tankers, an E-3 Sentry plane and two more helicopters known as Jolly Greens were also damaged, according to U.S. officials and information provided during a Pentagon briefing.

Radar systems in the UAE and a satellite communication system in Bahrain were also damaged the U.S. officials said, but it’s not clear whether Bahrain or the UAE would cover the cost of those systems.

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1svdezz/iran_ca...

Most of what you are saying is correct, but I feel the need to respond to your far too many repeated assertions that "People do not eat tart cherries directly": Except for when they do!

I grow several varieties of sour cherries in my yard, and frequently use them whole and without further processing. Usually I use them in a recipe like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clafoutis. Sometimes I pit them first, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I'll even happily snack on them raw.

No, like most small fruit you aren't going eat them because you are desperate for calories. But they actually aren't any harder to prepare or use than lots of other tasty things that people traditionally grow.

Unfortunately that's not the way it works. If it's [flagged] [dead] because of user flagging, some users can vouch for it to revive it.

But if it's merely [flagged] (with associated penalties keeping it off the front pages) there is no option for vouching to remove the penalty.

This one is currently [flagged] with no option for vouching.

Almost, but not quite. Only 49.8% of votes for President were for Trump: https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president

A more accurate claim might be "More people voted for Trump in 2024 than any other candidate".

I think the standard is that the parenthesized date shows the last update, not the original. Is this not correct?

https://archive.is/JOlEv

I always figured the algorithm was much simpler, it would just use the same branch as last execution — should work fairly well.

Sure, that would work significantly better than no predictor at all. But you'd agree that a better predictor would work better, right? The missing detail might be how expensive mispredicted branches are compared to other costs. If you can go from 50% accuracy to 90% accuracy, it wouldn't be surprising to more than double your performance.

Didn’t realize it used the input value as well, which to me makes no sense — the whole point is to avoid having to inspect the value.

It doesn't, and can't for the reasons you hint at. The reason branch prediction is necessary is that the value often isn't available yet when the branch is taken. Was there something in the article that implied the opposite?

--

I wonder if Daniel's tricksy approach using a random number generator to simulate a complex pattern is misleading people here.

One of the main benefits of branch prediction is predicting the end of a loop, particularly, a loop within a loop. In assembly, a loop is just a comparison at the end and a branch back to the beginning. Assume you had a loop that always executes 8 times, or some other small fixed value. Also assume there is some reason you can't unroll that loop, and that loop is inside another loop that executes millions of times. It's a real boost to performance if you can consistently predict the end of the inner loop.

If you predicted just on the last time the loop closing branch was taken, you'd always miss the ending. But if you can remember a pattern that is longer than 8, you can always get it right. This is obviously valuable. The bigger question is how much more valuable it is to predict a loop (where "loop" might actually be a complex execution pattern across multiple branches) that is thousands long rather than just 8. But quantifying how long this pattern can be on different processors is part of the groundwork for analyzing this.

The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration, and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary

Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:

The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.

https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/02/philadelphia-mint-c...

Great link. Specifically, this section is indeed a clear anwer:

Custer’s design for the tails side of the coin — which features an eagle with one empty claw and one claw holding 13 arrows — won out in the selection process.

The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.

Yes, this is a thing that can be done. No "derivatives" are necessary. You just figure out how many dollars worth of that particular stock your portion of the fund holds, and "sell short" that same amount of that same stock. This leaves you neutral to that stock.

Note that this is probably a terrible strategy here, though. The most likely effect of adding SpaceX to the index in the manner described is that the price of SpaceX is likely to go artificially high as the index funds fight for the very few available shares.

If you are actually going to do this, you'd probably want to sell out of the ETF before it's added, wait for SpaceX to be fully added to all the index funds, and only then simultaneously buy into the ETF and short SpaceX.

You would think even the lowest paid employees performing routine labor at the company would be pulling in multiple 6-figure salaries.

Why would you think that? Because of Musk's reputation for magnificence and generosity? Because rich gigantic companies don't care about keeping operating costs low? Or because janitors at SpaceX require special skills that can only be obtained by paying many multiples of the market rates for standard janitors?

"Jürgen Habermas is dead. The philosopher and sociologist died on Saturday in Starnberg at the age of 96."

https://www-spiegel-de.translate.goog/kultur/philosoph-juerg...

The AllSides evaluation for CNN is interesting: https://www.allsides.com/news-source/cnn-media-bias.

They have CNN currently rated as "Lean Left", changed from "Left" a few years ago due to the changes you point out. You'll need to read the fine text to see their reasoning. While there were some votes that they are now biased to Right, this was a minority position.

https://archive.is/W7KcJ

https://archive.is/kfVOp

Perhaps not, but that was my feeling on watching the Norwegian version, although to be fair, I was bothered enough that I only watched the first half.

Defending my opinion, though, I felt that both had tall somewhat socially awkward men dressed in oddly formal manners giving monologues to the camera. Scenewise, I thought slamming the drawer was a direct echo of slamming the shutters. And kicking the rock in the street echoed throwing the bottles in the street. And so forth.

Interesting that you don't think it's a knockoff. Given the theme, I found it ironic that it was itself an inferior copy. It ruined it for me.

I was bothered that it seemed to be an extremely direct copy of this 2008 German commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY

It took the same scenes, but in keeping with the theme, made them slightly worse.

If they didn't acknowledge this somewhere, they should be called out on it.