Someone

10 hours agodiscuss

> but much like Boolean algebra or the Fourier Transform, it was pretty much a curiosity until computers came along.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_algebra#History: “Later, Gauss further described the method of elimination, which was initially listed as an advancement in geodesy”

That’s an application of linear algebra in the 19th century.

Someone

19 hours agodiscuss

> I have a better solution: address the root cause of unsafe semantics by not using raw indexed for-loops, unless one absolutely needs an index, in which case one should generate it with std::views::enumerate.

That’s why Swift completely removed that kind of for loop (https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...)

> This stuff compiles to broadly the same assembly.

At the cost of requiring a more complex compiler. Also, C/C++ won’t find “broadly the same” sufficient. They’ll want to see the same performance.

Someone

2 days agodiscuss

Halfway to ten.

Someone

2 days agodiscuss

> I feel like they might be taking the wrong lesson from this. The Reaper costs $30-50 million precisely because its mission profile is to deliver 3,500 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical mile radius.

Partly, but I think there also is a feedback loop. Reapers are expensive, so they must reliably reach their targets. That makes them more expensive (need to be faster, more reliable, less visible on radar, etc), so fewer get ordered, so they must get even more powerful and reliable. That makes them more expensive, etc.

Also, being very expensive, you want them to be able to return home after a mission. That again increases weight, costs.

Result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper says only 575 got built over a period of about 20 years. In comparison, the USA built about 96,000 aircraft in 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_product...), reaching that total in about two days.

Someone

2 days agodiscuss

Historically, that was phrased as “an army marches on its stomach”

I think that’s an apt comparison because it was hard to keep an army fed (https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...)

Someone

2 days agodiscuss

> Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former.

Can they? https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio... says

“In the 39 days of the air and missile campaign before the ceasefire, U.S. forces heavily used the seven munitions in Table 1. For four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory”

According to that article, they expended ballpark a third of their inventory of expensive weapons systems such as Patriots or Tomahawk missiles, each with a production lead time of at least 3 years.

If so, they would run out of those expensive weapons in three more months.

Someone

2 days agodiscuss

https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/over-181-000-drones-ug-vs-ew-syst...

https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/updated-e-points-system-military-...

https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/the-military-can-exchange-e-point...

Someone

2 days agodiscuss

> Unbound can do authoritative dns

I don’t know whether they’re right, but https://www.openbsdhandbook.com/bind/ and https://www.openbsdhandbook.com/unbound/ disagree with that, saying you need the sublingual nsd for that.

Someone

3 days agodiscuss

> When people make comparisons to clunky Model T cars in the 20’s and Win95, they aren’t far off.

I think they are. Model T’s were clunky because they were minimalistic; Windows 95 was clunky because it tried to do impossible things.

This is a fine example. In the Windows 95 architecture, it’s impossible to detect whether a program is an installer, but they tried anyways.

Another example is Plug and Play. The original IBM PC parallel ports were designed for printers. That interface got extended (a few times. See https://computer.rip/2023-01-29-the-parallel-port.html) and reused to support tape drives, CD-ROM drives, scanners and whatever. Plug and play was intended to detect these devices, but with the original port about anything you sent on it to a printer resulted in characters being printed.

Also, there was no way for a printer to tell the PC it was a printer. All it could indicate were a few bits to signal they could receive data, were out of paper, etc.

So, how do you figure out what, if anything, is connected to a parallel port?

The answer is “very carefully”, and I don’t think it ever worked flawlessly. I definitely remember a tape drive that, whenever Windows started, flashed a few LEDs and got in a weird state that required some manual intervention.

Someone

3 days agodiscuss

> the app is clearly pretending to be my app

OK.

> when it isn’t

Isn’t that what Apple must check and may be doing by “All they seem to have done so far is forward my complaint to the author of the scam listing” (depending on how they worded that)?

Also, all you formally complained about is a trademark infringement. Global trademark law is complex. Maybe somebody else managed to get a trademark with the same name, too? I guess that’s unlikely, but Apple can’t assume that.

Someone

3 days agodiscuss

You don’t explicitly say why you think Apple should take action. You don’t say you own that trademark, or that doing that is against the license of your open source app.

Which of these is it?

> I reached out to Apple via their trademark complaint form a week ago. All they seem to have done so far is forward my complaint to the author of the scam listing.

What else would you expect them to do in that period? You told them “App X is breaking trademark Y that I own and I didn’t give them permission to do so”. They can’t take that at face value, so they asked for a rebuttal. A week isn’t too long a period to give them to reply, isn’t it?

Someone

3 days agodiscuss

I would think so, in the same way instrument maker or painting maintenance can be careers: not for many, but a decent career for a few aficionados.

It’s not likely to employ millions of people, but there will be demand from people with serious money. For instrument making, research labs will need specialized glass parts, for example; for painting maintenance, museums have a need to keep their centuries-old pieces in the best condition. For watches, if you pay a few million for a watch, paying 10k a year for maintenance should not be a problem. For that money, you can make a decent living of 20 customers a year in many countries.

Someone

3 days agodiscuss

> When G-shocks, Garmins, and Apple Watches are a few hundred dollars and well-known luxury watch brands start at a few thousand,

The price of the most expensive Garmin a quick internet search gave me is $3,100; the most expensive G-SHOCK €8,800 ⇒ IMHO, G-SHOCK definitely is a luxury brand.

Apple Watches, relative to those, are cheap at €999 max.

Someone

4 days agodiscuss

> For comparsion, in the US as of 2023, nearly 48 million inhabitants (14.3% of total) are foreign-born (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...). Or the Netherlands, 4.4 million of its ~18 million inhabitants are from abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Netherland...).

The relative population size of those countries likely plays a role there. Split China into 4 countries, each with a population about equal to that of the USA, and I bet that number for China goes up significantly. Split it into 75 countries each the size of the Netherlands, and it would go up even further (some people moving home within Beijing would emigrate)

Someone

4 days agodiscuss

I guess we’ll see a Windows tool that sets your identifier to this suspect’s “g:6755467234350028” very soon (weird ID, by the way. 16-digits makes sense, but I would have expected it to be hexadecimal)

Also, can anybody tell how “Microsoft had records showing that on May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC, the GDID associated with Stokes’ computer “accessed, among other ngrok pages, 'https://dashboard[.]ngrok.com/signup,'” works?

If it’s the browser sending that info to Microsoft, wouldn’t somebody have noticed that their PC contacts Microsoft for every web page they open? Or do they batch that data and send it at some later time?

Also, would that mean this ‘only’ affects those using Microsoft’s browser (or does Chrome do the same, sending data to Google?)

Alternatively, is this happening lower in the stack? I can think of a place where a system component has access to the domain name, but not of one where it has the full URL.

Someone

4 days agodiscuss

Mathematically, I think they both may be tetrahedons. The Tetrapod models it by 4 lines connecting each of its vertices to its center, the Dolosse by two opposite edges connected by a line through the middle.

I’m saying “may be” because it is possible that the center “arm” of the Dolosse is too large to make a true tetrahedon. That’s a degree of freedom in the design.

> It would be interesting to know if, specifically, those geometries were chosen specifically to be placed in those two parts of the wall

My guess would be that Dolosses interlock better than Tetrapods, allowing for steeper inclines on stacks of them.

Someone

4 days agodiscuss

> Before ARM the m68k was possibly the most deployed processor architecture in history

My money would be on something smaller such as the 8051 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-51)

Also, between m68k and ARM there was PowerPC. It got used a lot in embedded systems. Because “the newer the car, the more microprocessors it has”, chances are it got used more than m68k.

FWIW, Google’s AI gives me:

- for the m68k: “industry analysis and historical data indicate that hundreds of millions of units were produced across the architecture's lifespan”

- for PowerPC: “By 2008, Freescale Semiconductor had already shipped over 100 million Power Architecture-based MCUs for automotive powertrain management alone. Hundreds of millions more have since been produced for networking, industrial automation, and aerospace applications.”

- for the 8051: “according to industry accounts and semiconductor historians, the cumulative production of 8051-based microcontrollers is estimated to be on the order of billions to tens of billions of units”

Someone

4 days agodiscuss

The question (“what set of conditions actually cause a person to get a hip replacement surgery apart from an accident?”) wasn’t about her case. The article clearly indicates she had an accident (“Twenty years before, she had a hip replacement that stemmed from an injury she sustained in a car crash ten years before that”)

Someone

6 days agodiscuss

> Similarly, the ratio between the proton mass and the electron mass is approximately 1836

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-to-electron_mass_ratio says it is

  1836.152673426(32)

So, it differs about 0.153 from its nearest integer. Over 30% of all reals are that close or closer to their nearest integer, so I wouldn’t call that extraordinary at all.

For the fine structure constant, that’s about

  1/137.035999177

Closer, but still not extraordinary. The math is different but I think it’s about a 1:15 chance that a random real will be relatively that close to the reciprocal of an integer.

Someone

6 days agodiscuss

> Did she pack all the food with her?

Likely. This wasn’t a race, but typical races require you to pack more food than you’ll likely need, and forbid you from ditching it even if it’s extremely unlikely you’ll need it (say you’re going fast and a day from home with a month of supplies)

> How/where did she sleep?

On board, if at all. Typically these crews do 4 hours rowing, 4 hours rest or something like it, but people have been known to do 24 hours on at the start of a race to gain a lead and demoralize the competition.

> What about inclement weather, did she row through it or take cover?

Given the record time, she likely didn’t encounter that. If she did, it’s up to her what to do.

> It seems hard to outrun rough seas in a rowboat so I'm curious what the procedure was for that.

You have a meteorological team at home that tries to steer you around storms and into advantageous winds and water flow. She did +/- 56 miles a day. At 12 hours of rowing, that’s over 4½ miles an hour, so she likely had, on average, an advantage from flow and/or winds.

If you hit a storm, you stop rowing, close the hatches, lock yourself into your bed and try to rest (ideally, sleep, but in a storm, that’s not likeky).

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