srvmshr

Calvin & Hobbes have always been such a joy. In childhood, it was a reflection of all the naughtiness you could come up with. As a middle aged adult today, I look at the bigger meanings of those simple adventures. Reading a few stories is a reminder that happiness could be found in simple things & vivid imaginations.

Bill Watterson's dedication to not commercialize it preserves the charm about 'simple life, simple joys' of our childhood. He could have raked in the money, but his integrity is admirable. It isn't easy to be in his position & make such difficult choices to preserve the ethos of his art.

Generally it is a good practice to keep v.[N] and [N-1] in active deployment. But lately a lot of policies from Anthropic are confusing at best, and at worst plain subscriber-hostile.

If costs are drowning them, they should rather be a bit more honest about the messaging and hike prices of their lower ($20 / $100) tier by ~$10 and enforce stricter limits (optionally).

I liked 4.5 and 4.6, but none of them are available outside of using API now - and thats a bummer given the 2~2.5X overall costs

It is perhaps better for Anthropic to do a price hike e.g. $25 or $30 for Pro with a clear/honest messaging e.g. "Running costs are high, price hike is unavoidable" than resorting to these tactics.

These shenanigans are earning them no respect. The market is already annoyed on model serving QA issues, and now (recently) Opus limits. They don't want to lose to OpenAI - understandable - but these shortcuts won't earn them anything either.

* From the announcement [0]:

ACM has named Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard as the recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.

* An accessible news excerpt via CNN science [1]

Years before emails, internet banking, cloud servers and cryptocurrency wallets, two scientists devised a way to keep secrets perfectly safe and indecipherable to eavesdropping outsiders.

Their 1984 work depended on the hidden, counterintuitive world of quantum physics, which governs the way the world works at the smallest, subatomic scale, rather than complex but theoretically breakable mathematical codes to secure data.

The insights of Charles Bennett, an American physicist who is a fellow at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, have since transformed cryptography and computing. The pair received the A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work on quantum key cryptography.

[0] https://www.acm.org/media-center/2026/march/turing-award-202...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/18/science/quantum-key-crypt...

During my bachelors, I was using a Casio FX-991ES+. It was a beautiful calculator compared to the hand-me-down Fx-82 VPAM. And pretty popular with the folks of my age that time.

During and after grad school, I was using Mathematica or NumPy/Sympy quite a bit. But it felt like using an overpowered system to do basic assignments. Think of taking a Bugatti Veyron for grocery shopping. I indulged myself with another physical calculator - this time a Casio FX-CG50 with a color display and python support. I use it whenever I do self-paced courses or reading the occasional stats/ML paper.

I had the same gripe as the author. OhmyZSH seems too bloated for my needs. Added to that, the defaults adds (and oft unnecessary) emojis to prompts & outputs - something I don't find tasteful or appealing.

I stripped out most of the OhMyZsh functions (which is pretty modular given a shell package) and created a smaller, leaner package (leanZSH) having only the known stuff I may use. I have been using it without much complaints.

https://github.com/gradientwolf/leanzsh

True. Applications as these go back a few decades. From the news buzz when it was launched, ASCI White was similarly used in early '00s to understand nuclear explosions and shockwave propagation (instead of relying on live tests) - classic CFD problems[1] Successor supercomputer clusters were also used to do weapon design & nuclear physics simulations. One supercomputer IIRC even simulated a tornado genesis.[2]

I can only imagine the classified applications must have grown ten-fold in complexity in the interim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White

[2] https://news.wisc.edu/a-scientist-and-a-supercomputer-re-cre...

Coincidentally enough, I dug out my 11th grade CS project on generating fractals from 2002 & modernized it using SFML graphics lib just this week.

https://github.com/gradientwolf/fractals_SFML

Your post gives me so much joy. These tiny little things take me back to teenage years, simpler times & when interests were different. (I put a little note as "why" in my GH repo readme)

I discovered this issue 2-3 years ago. On slightly older machines, there was a palpable startup time. My fix was going through OhMyZSH and stripping away all the parts that I felt unnecessary (I call this my "leanZSH" and its considerably lighter version of OMZ.) It doesn't track upstream, and I manually update the plugin directory once in a while. Surprisingly OhmyZSH is pretty modular and doesn't break easily.

[Not the best hackjob out there but here it is:

https://github.com/gradientwolf/leanzsh

If you want to update it just copy over the latest `plugin/` folder from OMZ repo. You can get rid of all the plugins you dont want, as well as the themes. It somehow works]

I'm sorry, yes, two stations with huge pumps. They are like towers, but built from basement level downwards if that impression makes sense.

I have been to this place.

It is limited viewing, requires a reservation & the slots run out practically in seconds. Tough for us residents to get it as well. My wife could snag it in her third try, as a late birthday trip last year.

It is gargantuan & having massive holding capacity. To give semblance with something familiar, it was like standing in NY Grand Central station, except it was felt bigger, empty, damp & illuminated by floodlights from all sides. It is probably one and half football fields in length & scales high as much as a five storied building. Uploaded three pics to show the scale of this megalith. (The base of the pillars here are taller than average height of person to give a rough scale. The stairs come down from the ground level)

https://i.imgur.com/Jtcy0Ct.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/8Q08eKS.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/y75sfGP.jpeg

In addition to this underground chamber, there are two massive pumps on either sides, which divert the water from whichever river is surging to the other (Arakawa & Edogawa possibly). The chamber is the buffer zone between the rivers, not a storage tank ultimately. I was told by the civil engineer of this plant they could pump out as much as a jumbo jet's volume per minute in its storm surge channel/drain to manage flooding. You can walk up to the turbine room at the end of this room, and see its massive blades at an arm length. All with earthquake protection in place as well. Honestly mind-blowing piece of engineering.

Some people living in places that have become tourist areas are putting up signs announcing their home toilets are not for public use.

I read that on r/Tokyo Reddit as well a while back. Quite shocking. It was some person complaining living near a large public park (possibly Shinjuku or Inokashira) about his personal premises being violated because toilet queues were quite long & people kept knocking at their door. Not sure if we both are referring to the same incident?

[For reference to others, there are enough portable toilets in these public parks to deal with tourist surge, but obviously no arrangement can handle 25000+ visitors everyday without having queues]

More ridiculous stories have popped up once in a while in japan tourist subreddits. This sakura blossom season, a British tourist couple were seeking legal recourse to avoid detention and move back to their home country ASAP after running over an elderly woman with the rental car. Some people probably don't take consequences in a tourist destination seriously.

You'll be surprised if I tell you several universities in India have not updated their curriculum in a very long time & Turbo C++ (& its non-standard C++ flavor) is the weapon of choice. The school board in the '00s, which preferred to teach a programming language for CS, used to have it curriculum around this C++ dialect. I have passed my high-school board examinations with this language (It was known to be already outdated in 2004. The smart kids knew the real C++ was programming by Visual Studio 6 ecosystem. But one had to still deal with it to clear the exams.)

Admitted, a few things have changed in last couple of years. MATLAB is being replaced by Python. Teaching 8085 & 8051 is being replaced by RasPi/Arduino. 8086 is taught alongside ARM & RISC, and not touted as SoTA.

I last saw Turbo being used in 2016-17 in a university setting, inside a DosBox (because Windows 7+ have dropped support for such old programs). Insane, but true.

For me, the greatest bit of nostalgia came from seeing the Netscape Navigator Meteors. (Going further I found this link, which also echoes how rare it is nowadays to see a working version

https://erynwells.me/blog/2023/08/netscape-meteors/ )

It has been a while & the browser has such a storied history. When I was a middle schooler, I remember my elder sibling (a college CS major) explaining the chatter around 'IE4 vs. Netscape' monopoly case enthusiastically. It was quite likely the biggest talking point among tech community back then, along with the Microsoft Antitrust litigation soon after.

By turn of the millennium, it was on its demise paving way for Mozilla Firefox (with its early dragon/godzilla icon). As I understand early Firefox also built onwards from Netscape codebase (which would have soon shuttered) as a starting point & took the open source path. The last Navigator version I used probably was packed with Netscape Communicator suite @ v6.1

Pure nostalgia. This brought back so many memories

Not the OP but in a similar boat. Curious to understand how do you make sure that Claude code cli tool does not break existing code functionality?

My hesitation to adopt stems from the events where Claude.ai WebUI ignorantly breaks the code, but since I can visibly verify it - I iterate it until it seems reasonable syntactically & logically, and then paste it back.

With the autonomous changing of the code lines, I'm slightly nervous it would/could break too many parts concurrently -- hence my hesitation to use it. Any best practices would be insightful

I have seen and enjoyed quite a few Val Kilmer movies, but his special appearance in 'Top Gun:Maverick' was heartwarming (the scene where he jovially asks Maverick, "who was the better pilot between the two of us").

Tombstone and Saint were such nice movies too. Underrated, with a distinct comedic touch. A talent gone before his time.

In those days of yore, the P-III was our first home computer (Hard to imagine for kids today that a family of 5 could have one PC shared between themselves).

I was the experimental, eldest summer child in my home. I used to break things trying, open up the hood & change RAM or other stuff, add/remove peripherals & their drivers -- and to the extent of nuking Windows entirely to try out Redhat 7/8, Knoppix, and other esoteric software (because partitioning sucked back then & also, why not for the fun of it). I used to load up dozens of software on that tiny Seagate 20.4GB drive until it crawled & failed. A clean wipe & reinstall used to soon follow.

The only parent-child contract was to bring back Windows XP to its usable state when direly needed by my mother to type/edit her dissertation chapters about women suffragette literature. I have broken & fixed Windows so many times, I could sing tunes to product keys

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

I had bummed out my P-III 700Mhz desktop so many times, while tinkering with System32, INI files & experimental software etc., in grade school that this key is seared into some part of my cortex.

Pardon me asking a question on a different tangent: This old-school typography is very neat to see. I've seen this in many Dover Publication books & even Mir titles from USSR.

Is there a reliable way to replicate this style via Latex i.e. any choice of font & STY style files? For me this is very aesthetically pleasing experience. Thanks in advance.

A user like me would be willing to idea of some monthly donation when Mozilla restructures its expenses.

If memory serves right, the biggest slice of expenses were in C-level compensations & shortlived pet projects. The organization has to focus on growing a cadre of good engineers and product teams for their core offerings (just like the ones who rewrote large chunks of Netscape code into a fledgling Firefox ~22y ago).

One can't be expected to donate just to eventually subsidize a penthouse purchase for the CEO or their swanky McLaren.

It seemed only a matter of time, so it isn't very surprising. Capped profit company running expensive resources on Internet scale, and headed by Altman wasn't going to last forever in that state. That, or getting gobbled by Microsoft.

Interesting timing of the news since Murati left today, gdb is 'inactive' and Sutskevar has left to start his own company. Also seeing few OpenAI folks announcing their future plans today on X/Twitter

It still is pretty good. That and the ACM CACM are my only subscriptions. I independently purchase the Spectrum only because I don't want to be associated with IEEE anymore.

My reasons of cancellation are less fiduciary and more of a policy. In 2022, IEEE published an interview of two Russian researchers and effect of the intellectual & economic blockade in Russian academia after Ukraine invasion started. It sought pleas for donation & help. Many people pointed out it was tone deaf since the ones really suffering were the Ukrainian academics who were dislocated or persecuted in their own land. IEEE never commented or retracted those interviews & several people canceled their membership in disgust.

I subscribe to Spectrum for about $50 through Omeda rather than continue giving IEEE additional membership fee. I know some part will be shared with IEEE, but I am minimizing this by conscious choice.

If galactic location details weren't provided, I would have jokingly concluded that we finally spotted the nuclear manhole cover :)

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-o...

The article, funnily enough, made a better argument in pointing that Andromeda sailing boat might not have been involved - but rather some other vessel. The whole article felt like reading a 'proof by contradiction in prose' - from the shabby state of diving enclosure, to the extreme technicalities in executing the sabotage, and lastly even mentioning naval presence in the area.

As a person not following the details of Nordstrom case, this article didn't tell me anything new except how a skeleton crew on a shabbily maintained skiff could/couldn't blow up a pipeline (better technical discussion offered by user:greenavocado in other thread). Are there other state actors involved? Maybe. Is it being used as a distraction for some cover-up? Possibly. Who knows

And the icing: the person charged criminally is 'one Mr. Volodymir Z, who denies being involved' :)

I found the "Deep learning interviews" book to be much more engaging and value for time.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.00650

I did a cursory browse through on few sections of this current book (namely the CV module), and I think the questions are on the easier end for actual ML interviews/whiteboarding. Normally, I would face some more depth (and equivalently as a tech lead, similarly ask more than surface-level questions to potential hires).

tldr: If you have gone through an introductory ML course like Andrew Ng's CS229 or CS230, these question banks seem obvious & trivial to solve.

True, it is considered one of the two top honors in Math since last decade. Previously it was the only distinguished prize.

There was a growing need for another award which bridged few gaps. The 40 year cutoff age, awarded every 4 years to living mathematical prodigies failed to honor several prominent mathematical breakthroughs which came after decades of painstaking research.

As the field has progressed, monumental breakthroughs are harder to come by early into career. Many of the ingenuity comes from cross-study of disciplines for e.g. Riemannian hypothesis being approached by Algebraic geometry and Topology rather than number theory. These require years of mastery - not just prodigy. Also the prize money offered by Abel Foundation is a good incentive for research into pure math

From ACM:

ACM has named Avi Wigderson as recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.

Wigderson is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been a leading figure in areas including computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, combinatorics, and graph theory, as well as connections between theoretical computer science and mathematics and science.

Also of interest, he has won the Abel Prize in 2021, making it a rather unique combination of winning the top honors in both theoretical/abstract math & CS

It may not be the Wifi but something more upstream. If ISPs interlinks have microwave towers, then the physical swaying would have some effect on channel interference. I don't quite understand how (because the general direction remains the same over large distance) - but I have observed this to happen.

I keep Adobe products only on iPad or iPhone, where the app seems sandboxed. In Mac/Windows, Adobe CC (or any product line FWIW) spawns files and folders like cancer in /Library or /System. It's just hallmark bad software engineering.

Windows 8 Metro UI and its flat glyph-inspired iconset (similar to minimalist signage, e.g in EU traffic signs) was such a disaster that 8.1, that soon followed, allowed options to toggle between Metro (for those who preferred) and the classic Windows 7 look & icons. It was called Legacy UI in their options.