suid

Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible.

There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.

Remember that there was a "one-time fee" exception for "favored clients" (read: friends of Trump), who could pay a single lump-sum of something like $1 million, and then apply for unlimited H-1B's at the old fee structure.

That may be, but the government doesn't need to declare Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" in order to just not do business with it. A simple clause in all RFPs is all that is needed.

The problem with this declaration by the government is that now any company doing any business with the US government would be effectively forbidden from using Anthropic ANYWHERE within their company, which is a huge deal, because the government does want to vet any vendors' software development practices.

But as long as the Judge in this case pushes back against such an action by the government, that leaves companies free to use Anthropic for their own internal uses. And most companies WILL continue to use them if it makes economic sense.

Uh. yeah. Can you imagine her dragging herself up and reaching for a keyboard - "I'm ... not ... dead ... yet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfOW9QrLs0o

So that's where the Stig went off to.

The problem with describing the "spending" like this is that it only counts money that's donated to specific candidates or their PACs.

What it doesn't count is the literal billions that have been spent capturing all of the media outlets (from TV networks and stations to newspapers, and throw in large modern media companies like Meta, Twitter/X, etc.). Also, the Republicans have a stranglehold on "political Christianity", where you basically get party sermons from the pulpit every day and twice on Sundays.

The boost from these far outweighs any specific campaign spending, because these organizations have had years to build up their messaging on their targets, that no amount of specific election campaigning can come close to touching.

I have a serious issue with this idea that anyone trying to remote s/w engineer from North Korea is automatically a terrorist. Maybe some of them are just trying to make a living?I have a serious issue with this idea that anyone trying to remote s/w engineer from North Korea is automatically a terrorist. Maybe some of them are just trying to make a living?

No one in North Korea get to "just make a living" communicating with and working for foreign entities. This is a country that is so paranoid that every visitor to the country is required to stay with an official escort who will vet any contact you have with locals.

The only way that someone gets to communicate with a foreign entity is if they are employed, or closely managed, by the North Korean authorities.

Good question. The "ultimate zip bomb" looks something like https://github.com/iamtraction/ZOD - this produces the infamous "42.zip" file, which is about 42KiB, but expands to 3.99 PiB (!).

There's literally no machine on Earth today that can deal with that (as a single file, I mean).

Not these fighter planes. They literally need both the propulsion and an active flight computer to fly stably. Without the flight computer, they are uncontrollable. Think balancing a pencil on your finger - if your finger is immobilized or loses control, that pencil will fall almost immediately. The plane's controls are much more complex and unforgiving.

And without propulsion, they are just flying rocks. No gliding.

Unfortunately that's not how it plays out in most large organizations, which have separate network, hypervisor, security, etc., teams. Everyone works off a playbook, whose origins are usually lost in time and space.

If you want them to change the playbook, it'll involve some schlub having to run from pillar to post between those organizations, trying to get everyone to agree to a change to this policy, and you can bet he or she is not paid or motivated to do this. If another vendor comes along who will go with the flow, they get the sale.

I think the hardest thing about books like SICP, or the Knuth texts, for "casual hobby programmers" is the need to tear themselves away from thinking in the idioms of popular languages like Python, Javascript or (back in the day) VB.

It's almost like having a Zen master trying to teach you the principles of Zen using a special artificial language with simple but precise semantics, that you have to learn first (and understand thoroughly), rather than try to learn it in a conversational language.

It's a difficult task, but ultimately rewarding. However, it is a struggle to turn your mind away from Javascript when looking at an algorithm or a data structure being taught by one of these texts, and use the simpler semantics of Scheme or "literate programming".

Looks like someone's summer internship project. A tasty, tasty project.

Time for "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?"

Depends on where he filed. If he had filed in the US, he would have no chance at all.

In the UK, he has a much stronger chance, but then, in the UK, HP did win a civil lawsuit against him and the CFO, so Lynch can't argue that HP showed a reckless disregard for the truth.

As always, it'll probably come down to some sort of quiet monetary settlement.

They almost have to, because ACs are so power-hungry. The utilities situation in India hasn't improved in 50 years.

Back in the day, in the summer months, it was routine to see:

* power cuts of several _hours_ a day (two or three stretches of 1-2 hours each).

* water supply for only an hour or so, or maybe 2 one-hour periods (morning and evening).

They would rotate the supply around various neighborhoods, to avoid a complete collapse of utilities. We all learned to collect water in giant buckets and tubs for daily use.

At least in the past, there were alternatives to ACs: swamp or desert collers were a common one: they were just big box fans with evaporative mats through which a small pump would drip water. In dry climates (like northern India in the summer) they work amazingly well (they could cool a room down by 20-30 F easily).

Situation: Wow. Why three languages like this?

Solution: We should come up with a combo language that does it all.

New Situation: Wow, now we have four languages to deal with.

https://xkcd.com/927/

You could, instead, ration the amount of electricity that you can consume for an industrial facility (at least at "normal" or long-term negotiated rates). Every additional KwH needs to be purchased at spot rates.

That will protect the conscientious consumers of electricity, and punish the profligate wasters (or encourage them to create their own sources of energy, preferably renewable).

Reminiscent of the plot in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lunchbox. A meet-cute with the famous Bombay Dabba-Walas (lunchbox delivery service) accidentally messing up a delivery, and leading to a correspondence and later a meeting between an unhappy housewife and a lonely widower.

Arnold the Tank Engine.

The same issue arises over and over. Like the destruction of antiquities by religious radicals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's good to round up antiquities at risk and export them, but with the right provenance and to suitable institutions to hold with a public display of that provenance, so that when an appropriate time comes, they can be returned. I.e. treat it as "borrowing" or "safe-keeping".

Not just take it and sell it to unscrupulous buyers who will keep it.

How would you like it if someone swooped down on your house in advance of a hurricane and said "hey, your house is going to get destroyed anyway; why don't I take your appliances and electronics and sell them to other interested parties for my profit? After all, you won't be able to use them while you don't have a home, so what's the harm?"

And while you're carefully dragging the "man" over to the street you're interested in (an interesting multi-hand challenge with most trackpads), Maps starts wildly gyrating and sliding the map around in an infinite scroll because you didn't center the "man" within one second or whatever.

I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?

I wonder if they're staring at rainbows, and calling them UAPs because clearly it's some Gay Alien Agenda.

"Becoming"? It's been happening for 20 years now.

If PID 1 exits, the system usually panics immediately and restarts.

I think the key here is that SolarWinds' C-staff deliberately downplayed the severity of the attack, and were very late in informing customers and regulatory agencies of the severity of the attack.

I.e. they are being prosecuted not because they were "incompetent and got hacked", but that they then "tried to cover it up", which is where the SEC comes in (illegal stock manipulation via false or incomplete release of public information).

A long article that can be succinctly expressed by the many variations of this cartoon: https://softwarehamilton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/swin...

I had proposed this reply to someone else's similar question.

I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives:

* Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around.

* Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load.

* Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown.

The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.

https://archive.is/l5NWq

Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools?

It's not just the issue of "what if they didn't have access to ChatGPT?"

Just as an example: ChatGPT is literally the world's biggest bullshitter. It vacuums up vast stores of "data" (note: NOT "knowledge"), and just pulls out words that it thinks could likely follow from previous words given a context.

Quite often is produces silly, or even dangerously wrong, answers. You need to be pretty well skilled in the art to catch it at its bullshit.

It's just like when you hire assistants to do something critical for you. You have to be able to verify their work, or you have to be able to trust them blindly.

Not to mention Ping, Pang and Pong.