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teraflop

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The coefficients are stored in writable memory as input data. Only the structure and degree of the polynomial are hard-coded in the program. So if the launch is delayed you just change the data.

Of course, the justification is that compute and memory were at an extreme premium on the spacecraft. Accurately predicting the position of the moon at arbitrary times requires more complicated calculations. You can dramatically optimize the calculation by fitting a polynomial approximation which is valid for the length of the mission. And there's no reason to waste resources fitting that polynomial in space when it could be done on the ground, using much more powerful machines.

The AGC is what tends to get the press. It's easy to forget that the Apollo program relied on a cutting-edge distributed hardware and software stack, most of which was in Mission Control at the Real Time Computing Center.

The short-term goal of a tool like this is to sell products. The more ambitious long-term goal is to shift cultural norms, blurring the lines between advertising and reality until the question you're asking is no longer consciously asked. At least, not by average people, and not at the point of purchase.

I find it easy to envision a world, maybe 50 years from now, in which the very concept of "truth in advertising" is viewed as a lost, idyllic fantasy. Something people are nostalgic for, but feel powerless to regain.

Well the context is that it was posted to a subreddit for people who struggle with binge eating. So I guess you can think of it as the equivalent of sucking on a lollipop when you're craving a cigarette.

One cool feature I've read about is that (at least some) GoPro cameras can save high-resolution IMU measurements to the recorded video files, timestamped and interleaved with video frames. This can be useful for mapping applications, e.g. https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/

Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.

No, they're talking about the clearance, which is the difference between the diameter of the bolt itself (1/4") and the diameter of a hole in which the bolt loosely fits (a couple hundredths of an inch bigger than that).

The "how it works" page for that website says that the ID data is "digitally signed by the issuing government". But there doesn't seem to be anything in the docs about how to get or verify that signature. So it seems like they are just asking users to trust them to do the verification.

Where are you getting the information that this project hadn't been cleared? That seems like a big assumption, and I don't see anything in the linked tweet, or the replies, or any of the linked pages that supports it. Unless I missed something?

Well, the thing about reliability is that you can't really guarantee it by testing one particular scenario.

It seems to me that neither the old nor the new version of the code is really "durable" as I would understand the word. The old version made a write syscall per batch, but doesn't say it also did an fsync per batch. The new version writes data to an mmap'ed file, and calls fsync in the background.

So both versions are "durable" in the sense that written data is preserved even if the process gets killed, because it's in the OS page cache. But in both versions, a write can be completed before the data actually makes it to disk, so a power failure will lose acknowledged writes.

This is an active area of research (look up papers that mention the "sim2real gap"). It is indeed a problem, but there are known strategies to deal with it.

But on the other hand... this is a robust reminder that coding agents can do anything you can do by typing commands into a terminal—and frontier models know every trick in the book and evidently a few that nobody has ever written down before.

Running coding agents outside of a sandbox has always been a bad idea

I'm continually bemused and astonished by the number of people who clearly acknowledge that it's reckless to give agents full access to your machine, and keep doing it anyway.

It's like posting a video of yourself in the passenger seat of a car, with your feet up on the dashboard, and saying: "Remember, if you're doing this and you get in a crash, the airbags are likely to break your legs or worse! Boy, I sure am glad that didn't happen to me!"

Not sure about LSP, but IntelliJ has had a "structural search and replace" feature for many years, and it can easily handle changes like the one in your second paragraph. It's conceptually like a regex search, but it matches language-specific AST subtrees instead of character sequences.

This isn't being proposed as a serious, useful version of Raft. It's just a thought experiment.

The sentence you quote is inevitably going to be true for any type of Raft quorum that can reach consensus with a minority of nodes. You don't even need to get into the specifics of the math.

Suppose you have a quorum Q. Then its complement Q' must not also be able to form a quorum; if it did, a network partition between Q and Q' would create a split-brain. So if Q is a minority subset, then Q' is a majority that cannot reach consensus on its own.

All other users on our US cloud instance are opted in by default

Cool, cool. Glad to see that you are the arbiter of what your users have "opted" to do, and their input isn't required.

While we're at it, I'm going to "volunteer" your time to rebuild my patio this weekend. You don't need to worry about volunteering, I've done it for you.

I started reading this and right away hit something that doesn't really make any sense to me:

the extractor. the thing that reads conversation transcripts and decides what to keep.

the most consequential choice an extractor makes is timing. extract eagerly, after every message, and you spend tokens on small talk that goes nowhere. extract lazily, at the end of a session, and the context you needed to resolve a pronoun is already gone.

If the input is coming from a transcript, then either that transcript contains enough context to understand what a particular pronoun refers to, or it doesn't.

If it does, why would waiting until the end of a session be a problem? What am I missing?

May 19, 22:10 UTC - Our automated monitoring detected API health check failures and paged our on-calls, who started investigating the issue.

At 22:20 UTC on May 19, Google Cloud placed Railway’s production account into a suspended status incorrectly, as part of an automated action.

If the timestamps are accurate, what was causing the errors 10 minutes before the account was suspended?

The simplest explanation is just that one or the other of these timestamps is wrong, which wouldn't be a big deal. But if the timestamps aren't known with certainty, it seems very odd to include them in the writeup as though they are certain, even though they are very obviously inconsistent with each other.

Swiping a card (or inserting, or tapping) is a "card present" transaction. Online shopping, where you type in the card number, is a "card not present" transaction. Retailers and banks can tell the difference.

Cool graphs.

Our previous reticence to measure UPSs was centered around the connection of our very nice $50,000 Rohde & Schwarz MXO58 oscilloscope directly to mains power. [...] What we do have is a Chroma 61507, a programmable AC power source, capable of generating its own isolated Alternating Current(AC) signal. The AC signal created by the Chroma 61507 is galvanically isolated from the "earth"/ground, providing a floating source.

This too seems to be a pretty expensive piece of gear (the price I found with a quick Google was >$28,000) so I think it's worth mentioning that the same job could be done with an isolation transformer, which costs maybe a couple hundred bucks.

It used to be super common that when you spotted a bot post and clicked through to the user's history, you'd see very average, human-looking activity from years ago, followed by a long gap of inactivity, and then a flurry of obvious bot comments.

It's very obvious that these accounts were abandoned and then either bought from their original owners, or more likely bought from someone who compromised them, because of their history and karma.

And I would bet money that Reddit is well aware of this phenomenon, because not long after it became so common as to be impossible to ignore, they papered over it by allowing users to hide their history from public view. (AFAIK subreddit moderators can still see it, but typical users now have much less ability to see whether they're interacting with actual humans.)