wnissen

1,296 karmajoined 13 năm trước

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13 giờ trướcdiscuss

We laugh, and rightly so, at the time sharing systems of the 70s and 80s that didn't use passwords. I bet allowing a whole other virtual person to run outside a VM, with access to an actual file system instead of a version-controlled branch, will be seen as a worst practice in ten years.

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

You might be surprised at how little we know about fusion. We can observe the sun, but the sun is already very hot, millions of degrees, so any unknown fusion reactions would have already happened. Nowadays we have high-powered lasers that can create laboratory-scale fusion reactions.

E. O. Lawrence's 1930 cyclotron could generate protons at roughly a million degrees Celsius. But that's a single proton stream. Good for splitting atoms but not for fusing them. You really don't know what the cross section of a fusion reaction is until you do it. The properties of matter at that temperature are just super weird. If it had turned out that there was, e.g., a carbon-carbon fusion reaction with a lower initiation, that might be enough to "go critical" and kick off more fusions, and propagate around the world. According to estimates, the Chicxulub crater was 1-10,000 degrees C. Not even the same ballpark.

https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/11/4.html

2 tháng trướcdiscuss

That's not just amazing, it's inconceivable! I can go on a hike on almost any trail in the SF Bay Area and pick up a half dozen in a couple hours.

5 tháng trướcdiscuss

Is it really not UL approved? Hard to call it a premium product in that case.

6 tháng trướcdiscuss

This was not what I was expecting. The doctors I know are mostly miserable; stuck between the independence but also the burden of running their own practice, or or else working for a giant health system and having no control over their own days. You can see how an LLM might be preferable, especially when managing a chronic, degenerative condition. I have a family member with stage 3 kidney disease who sees a nephrologist, and there's nothing you can actually do. No one in their right mind would recommend a kidney transplant, let alone dialysis for someone with moderately impaired kidneys. All you can do is treat the symptoms as they come up and monitor for significant drops in function.

6 tháng trướcdiscuss

Perhaps we didn't realize how much stability the "two powers" model generated. It caused inevitable arms races as the two powers vied to stay competitive, but there were only two. And the USSR was able to de-escalate on its own. If you have three powers, each of them wants the ability to eliminate not one, but both of the others. Could lead to not just incremental, but polynomial expansion of forces. And de-escalation involves multiple parties coordinating, not just one great power.

8 tháng trướcdiscuss

If you have a weird phoneme / meaning mapping brain like mine, I would note that he is not the doctor who is known for the "replication crisis". Even though Ioannis means John in Greek. Took me a second to tease that out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis

10 tháng trướcdiscuss

It does make you wonder what would cause a downgrade. The debates over the debt ceiling have certainly brought the U.S. closer to default than I would ever have thought. It's true that the U.S. can never run out of dollars, so in once sense it's not possible for a bondholder not to get paid back. But the political environment, the potential unreliability of previously iron-clad data, economic disruption from tariffs, and behavior from the Federal Reserve, these all seem to make an unlikely event much more likely.

10 tháng trướcdiscuss

Oh, I have a long list of vendors that I'll buy from over Amazon. I buy almost nothing from them. On the rare occasion that I simply can't find something locally or from a reputable vendor, or need it on very short time scale, well, OK. But we dropped Prime, where we were ordering 100+ times a year, and now I pay out of pocket for shipping on a half-dozen orders a year.

10 tháng trướcdiscuss

Well, they wouldn't be able to pretend that they are selling from the official store for that inventory. Which I, personally, would be OK with. I've been on eBay for a couple decades, I don't mind ordering from Jack and Jill's Computer Parts as long as they have a reputation I can check. But the current situation where you can order from what looks like the the official storefront but the fulfillment is from a seething mass of "stickerless commingled inventory", with no way to even determine which merchant introduced the counterfeit product? This has been a problem for over 10 years. It's not just the obvious fraud, it's the subtler fakes. I won't buy anything from Amazon where the failure could kill or injure someone. A sun hat? Sure. A charger or food? Not a chance.

11 tháng trướcdiscuss

It's not clear what LLMs are good at, and there's great interest in finding out. This is made harder by the frenetic pace of development (GPT 2 came out in 2019). Not surprising at all that there's research into how LLMs fail and why.

Even for someone who kinda understands how the models are trained, it's surprising to me that they struggle when the symbols change. One thing computers are traditionally very good at is symbolic logic. Graph bijection. Stuff like that. So it's worrisome when they fail at it. Even in this research model which is much, much smaller than current or even older models.

12 tháng trướcdiscuss

It was the same thing for us with Qt Commercial licensing. We use only the LGPL version, dynamically link, don't modify the source, and give credit, so we're fully in compliance. To get support we chose to purchase commercial licenses for our small team of developers. Cue a regular series of calls about whether we were sure we were in compliance, etc. To add insult to injury they couldn't even navigate our purchasing process so it was a pain to pay them.

I'll take my chances in the open source world. It's a shame that the companies that created the software aren't getting paid, truly. But don't make it so obnoxious to reward you.

năm ngoáidiscuss

Ooh, looks like they added that in late 2023. Man. In August 2023 I actually migrated all of my email to Proton and was ready to go when I realized they didn't support forwarding. Thanks for letting me know.

năm ngoáidiscuss

Inbox. They claim that the inbox is special in IMAP and it's hard to have a lot of messages there. 150K messages in the whole mailbox, I think. 25 years of email.

năm ngoáidiscuss

I chose Migadu because they seem to be genuinely helpful and are very affordable. I probably would have gone Proton but they don't support forwarding.

The downside is that downloading messages is fairly slow when you have 10-20k messages in your inbox. And the webmail is fairly primitive.

I never tried Fastmail.

năm ngoáidiscuss

Apple's Airpods Max headphones appear to be the official uniform of University of California students. We've been visiting and I swear they outnumber normal headphones.

4 năm trướcdiscuss

Correct, I misspoke. I am only getting the DMARC reports from the domains to which I send email. Ionos doesn't support it and seems to have no plans to.

4 năm trướcdiscuss

I have been sending through Ionos (was 1&1) for a decade, with only occasional problems (shared IPs getting on a blacklist). I have SPF working, and in the last few months I am getting routed into Spam 100% of the time. Even when I reply to email from my own family. It does not seem to matter if the recipients move the message out of Spam, you'd think a false negative on a legitimate message would be a wakeup call, ten false negatives should be an alarm. But there's no way to even help this. Google's online support has you set up tools that don't even measure the single-digit volumes I'm sending from my 20-year-old custom domain. I did confirm with DKIM that no one else is sending messages spoofing it, either. The Google monopoly is a real problem.

6 năm trướcdiscuss

You have to add $75 a year to the operating cost of these phones, for AirPods, which appear to have a design life of about 18 months, max.

I am very frustrated as the SE is really getting to end of life. I have bought 3 of them in the past month from various eBay sellers with good feedback. One fake, one had a badly degraded battery, and the other went into a reset loop after a couple weeks. There's not much out there. Apple's privacy is second to none, usability is very good (though if they introduce one more type of swiping I'm going to go mad. What's next, Force Swiping?), but the hardware is getting extremely inconvenient. Even my buddy who has large hands complains that the phone is too big and heavy.

6 năm trướcdiscuss

Oh, that explains why they seemingly have a real version out there. I've been suspicious to try it, but if they are separate it might be worth a try.