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paulirwin

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My two-year-old son had started saying "turn around" in a sing-song kind of way several months back, and thus my wife and I, both babies of the 80s, had to start singing the song whenever he would do it. It became a fun thing that my son enjoys more than we do. That turned into regularly playing this song (and its covers) in the living room. We just did this again a few nights ago because he loves the song so much and requests it now.

RIP Bonnie.

And what about containers/VMs, or booting software bare metal?

Does my laptop have to pass my age verification to a Docker container?

Am I at risk of government censorship (or worse) if I create a hobby smart home app that boots bare metal on a Raspberry Pi?

Or even the shell apps that I run daily. Does curl (which can access any web url) have to validate my age? What about AI models/ollama?

One thing that MCP solves well, that neither CLI apps (like the `gh` CLI for example) nor letting your LLM call arbitrary APIs via CURL does, is setting granular permissions per tool.

Most agent frontends I've used like Claude Code only give you one level deep of CLI commands to authorize, which works fine for allowing commands like `docker build:*`. But for complex CLIs like GitHub, Azure, etc. it just doesn't scale well. It is absurd to grant Claude Code permission to `az vm:*` when that includes everything from `az vm show` to `az vm delete`. Likewise, the argument that says that you should just let your LLM call APIs directly via curl or whatever, does not hold up well when Claude Code just wants raw access to all of `curl:*`.

Meanwhile, MCP tools are (currently, at least in CC) managed at the individual tool level, which is very convenient for managing granular permissions.

Perhaps there could be some "CTCP" (CLI tool context protocol; the CCP acronym does not work well) where CLI apps could expose their available tools to the LLM, and it could then be dynamically loaded and managed at a granular level. But until then, I'm going to keep using MCP.

As a vegetarian of 20 years, I like being able to go to restaurants and have something that is on par with what my friends and family are eating (although I do prefer Impossible to Beyond, by far). Even without friends and family, there's a social (and distinctively American) aspect to being able to have a realistic burger and beer at my local sports bar/grill and not just have a salad or some Sysco frozen black bean burger.

.NET 10 8 months ago

Avalonia is FOSS (MIT licensed). You only need Avalonia XPF if you are migrating legacy stuff.

Moq is largely unnecessary today with LLMs being able to easily generate mock classes. I personally prefer to hand-roll my mocks, but if you prefer the Moq-like approach, there's NSubstitute (3-BSD).

Automapper and MediatR are both libraries I avoided prior to the license change anyways, because I don't like runtime "magic" and not being able to trace dependency calls through my code. But, there is Mapster and Wolverine to fill those needs (both MIT). Wolverine can also replace much of MassTransit.

Telerik stuff - there are many good FOSS alternatives to these UI components; too many to list since it depends on which stack you're using.

PDF is indeed a sore spot. PdfPig is good, but limited in capability. I've started offloading PDF processing to a separate Python container with a simple, stateless Flask API with PyMuPdf.

we have a problem with opensource being asymmetrically underfunded and if people going commercial is the cost perhaps we've failed.

Completely agree with this, though. My company and myself personally contribute a lot of time back to OSS, and I feel like that is part of the social contract of OSS. To have these libraries rug-pulled feels like a slap in the face as a OSS contributor and maintainer.

It seems like everyone is dog-piling on Anker over this, so I'd like to put forward a bit more positive of a take.

I have a M5 that I got through the original Kickstarter campaign. I love this printer. I use it casually, but I rarely have a failed print that I can't attribute to i.e. poorly chosen supports. Almost all of the parts on it are still original and working well, apart from the hot end that I've had to replace a few times due to accidentally breaking the screws when changing nozzles. (It was a poor design of the original hot end where the very thin, long screws did not have the shear strength in aluminum to not break when accidentally torquing the nozzle head. This was fixed with the all-metal hot end, which is not ideal for all filaments.)

Despite my issue with the hot end (which I believe could easily be fixed with an updated design), and the nearly useless "AI" feature, I feel like this printer was a great value at the time. It's very well built, looks great, and very reliable. I really enjoy every opportunity I have to use it and do not regret my purchase decision at all.

I'm saddened that they seem to be pulling out of the market, even though it makes sense compared to the competition. It really seemed like they had a promising start. If this is truly the end, then RIP with positive sentiments from me.

Azure SQL Database for a long while has been the most cost-effective way of running SQL Server as a PaaS database, and still is if you choose the DTU-based modes, making it a very attractive option. Combined with the rich feature set and maturity and reliability of SQL Server, it is hardly legacy; in fact it's very capable and continues to get new updates like vector operations.

I've helped create apps that support millions to hundreds of millions of revenue on Azure SQL Databases that cost at most a few hundred dollars per month. And you can get started with a S0 database for $15/mo which is absolutely suitable for production use for simple apps.

Unfortunately, I think Microsoft realized how good of a value the DTU-based model was, and has started pushing everyone to the vCore model, which dramatically increases the barrier to entry for Azure SQL Database, making PostgreSQL a much more attractive option. If Microsoft ever kills off the DTU purchasing model of Azure SQL Database, I likely won't be recommending or choosing Azure SQL Database at all going forward. It'll 100% be PostgreSQL.

Can someone check my understanding: does this mean they have eight logical qubits on the chip? It appears that way from the graphic where it zooms into each logical qubit, although it only shows two there.

If that is true, it sounds like having a plan to scale to millions of logical qubits on a chip is even more impressive.

These are the first few sentences of the article:

Cadmium is bad news. Lead and mercury get all the press, but cadmium is just as foul, even if far fewer people encounter it. Never in my career have I had any occasion to use any, and I like it that way.

It seems clear that he doesn’t want to work with cadmium, regardless of the compound.

Congrats on the launch! This looks great.

I see you plan on making money by charging for the hosted service. Given that, and given recent history in the industry with companies starting out with this model only to rug-pull it from users later and move to a more restrictive license, can you publicly commit to keeping the code MIT/AGPLv3-licensed into the future?

And for organizations, it's only $419 for the first year. It's $251/yr from 3+ years on.

It should be noted that $419/year is $35/mo, which is still $10/mo cheaper than the Visual Studio 2022 Professional monthly subscription at $45/mo. $21/mo at 3+ years is less than half.

Whether it be the rent-seekers at JetBrains

This is a gratuitously negative comment that is unfair and uses an incorrect metaphor. Rent-seeking is trying to charge for something without providing any new value, usually from something already established as free. I don't believe Rider was ever available for free, but even if it was, they certainly have improved it with loads of new value since then. You're welcome to your opinion (that I don't share) that their IDEs are not worth the cost, but you're also free to not buy them. That's not rent-seeking, it's the free market.

I personally am a big fan of Rider and the JetBrains Toolbox suite, and I get several times more value out of my subscription than it costs. YMMV.

we're still stuck with the same treatments

Take a look at CAR T-cell therapy, used for Leukemia and blood cancers (and mentioned in this article). The first trials were happening around 2011, and now there are several FDA-approved therapies using this breakthrough. LLS notes [1]: "In some studies, up to 90 percent of children and adults with B-ALL whose disease had either relapsed multiple times, or failed to respond to standard therapies, achieved remission after receiving CAR T-cell therapy." These are people that would have died 10+ years ago.

My younger brother passed away from ALL in 2012 after a clinical trial for one of these treatments didn't work. His participation in the trial, even with the unsuccessful result, helped further the research that is now saving lives that weren't saved before.

CAR T-cell therapy is perhaps the most powerful breakthrough against blood cancer in history. Now, it might be able to tackle other cancers as well. We're making progress. Of course we all want it to go faster, but it's happening.

1: https://www.lls.org/treatment/types-treatment/immunotherapy/...

Almost 7 years later, I am still using an Anker Powerline+ braided USB-C (C to C) 6' cable that I purchased for use with the original Pixel (1st gen) phone in 2016. It's the cable I use every night to charge my phone, and it comes with me when I travel. Never had an issue. Granted, I'm not using this in a challenging environment like i.e. in my car, but that's still pretty impressive durability with somewhere on the order of 2,400+ inserts.

Definitely agree with the first and second points above. I absolutely will if I can see it with enough time to safely slow the RV, and the terrain doesn't look like I might blow a tire or damage the RV doing it. I'm usually less concerned about time when traveling in the RV. I try to do what I can to build up good karma with other drivers, but it's not always a good idea to pull off.

I think I'm understanding correctly, but please correct me if I'm wrong... the class pointer is a pointer to the type (class) the object implements. So that would mean to exceed even an unsigned 32-bit pointer size, there would need to be more than 4 billion types in the program to exceed that, not objects. I can't imagine there are (m)any programs that hit that. And it definitely doesn't need to be a native 64-bit pointer. As pointed out in the proposal: "It may be possible to compress class pointers to less than 32 bits, at the expense of smaller addressable class space."

I tried to buy one of these this month. The dealership I went to has a policy of not selling over MSRP, which I appreciate. As a result, they are no longer even taking names for the RAV4 Prime waiting list because they estimate the wait is 2-3 years.

Came here to say this. Angular ticks just about every box from the original article. It is opinionated (IMO in a good way, but YMMV), well structured, and batteries are included. You still have the flexibility to do data access, state management, and such however you like but there are well-established patterns and libraries if you want to lean on them. Modules help you scale to larger projects, with fairly painless code splitting / lazy loading. You don't have to set up any complicated build scripts, and the cognitive complexity is low (as long as you don't overuse rxjs) so junior devs can easily jump in. And, Angular is very mature now in 2022, with few-to-no breaking changes between versions. I highly recommend it as the state-of-the-art SPA platform today.

The symbol rate vs bandwidth is hopefully changing; the ARRL is petitioning the FCC to make it a bandwidth limit instead. On many HF bands, there is limited bandwidth anyways, so the proposed 2.8kHz is a good balance without letting a single individual consume an entire band (i.e. 30m).

Spread spectrum usually requires significant bandwidth, and there just aren't amateur bands below 222MHz that are large enough for that to be truly useful. (The lower limit is 222MHz AFAIK, not 2.4GHz.) Even the 222MHz band is only 3MHz wide, and the largest below that is 4MHz. Spread spectrum starts to make more sense at higher frequencies with 50+MHz bandwidth. If you have examples of SS uses that could work well on the order of kHz instead of MHz, I'd be interested in learning more.

You can absolutely create a new digital mode protocol from scratch. You just need to make the protocol publicly available and let others know what you're doing. You could do a CW or SSB voice transmission before and after each transmission of your custom protocol, explaining where to go to find out more information. (And of course, station identification.) I'd recommend experimenting on some of the wider/shorter-range bands like 70cm first though, and QRP.

This also applies to encryption - if you make the decryption keys publicly available, and you make it clear how others can decrypt what you're transmitting, it is possible to experiment with radio encryption on amateur bands. That goes to the nature of amateur radio - learning and experimentation. But what you can't do is use it for private purposes - there are other bands for that (i.e. ISM). Most of the conversations around this are people frustrated that they can't browse HTTPS sites or have private communications on amateur channels. It would be nearly impossible to ensure people aren't hogging the amateur bands for inappropriate purposes if you can't decrypt/decode what is being transmitted. With such limited bandwidth available, especially on some HF bands as small as 50-100kHz, prohibiting encryption helps ensure equitable access for everyone. It's like complaining about not being able to drive a non-street-legal vehicle on highways. You can still take that vehicle to off-road tracks if you wish and have fun.

Power limits - I don't know what to say on this one, other than if you have a good case for exceeding them for a specific use, contact the ARRL or your regional radio organization. Drum up support in the community. If there's enough interest and justification, rules can change. But QRP is sometimes a fun challenge too.

As for fines, I have not heard of fines being issued as "gotchas" or for minor infractions. Do you have examples? Most of what I've seen are people causing blatant intentional interference or flagrantly violating the rules with inappropriate behavior, repeatedly after several warnings.