AceJohnny2

Anecdotally, the reason my career is in embedded software is that I kept wanting to know how the (software) system works, and embedded is as deep as you can get without changing disciplines altogether.

The cost is you lose those layers of abstractions you get at the higher software levels, and there's only so much complexity I can handle.

(the funny part is that even HW registers and stuff are just an API that the hardware chooses to expose. As Alan Kay said: "Hardware is really just software crystallized early")

The US govt already tracks the geopolitical status of "Critical Minerals" at the USGS:

https://www.usgs.gov/tools/critical-minerals-atlas

you can code-sign with open-source tools. That's not the hard part. Signing with a certificate trusted by macOS , that's where there's no avoiding having to go to Apple.

Apple has been slowly tightening the screws on app notarization (code signing) requirements for running apps on macOS. To do it properly you need to be a registered developer ($100/year), and they're certainly not making it easy if you don't have access to a Mac.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/app-code-signing-pr...

> On devices with macOS 10.15, all apps distributed outside the App Store must be signed by the developer using an Apple-issued Developer ID certificate (combined with a private key) and notarized by Apple to run under the default Gatekeeper settings.

Re: Developer ID Certificates: https://developer.apple.com/help/account/certificates/create...

I suspect the friction that users are facing are due to dodging the above requirements.

IIUC, there's a confusion of meaning for "World Model", between Waymo/Deepmind's which is something that can create a consistent world (for use to train Waymo's Driver), vs Yann LeCun/Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) which is something that can understand a world.

Accelerando's algorithmic company structure and (near?)DDoS the corporate legal system is the one idea from Accelerando that has stuck with me the most over the 20 years since I first read it, and I came here to make the exact same reference.

(that, and the notion of Exocortex, which is what I've named some of my smartphones...)

I agree. Having watched Google shift from its younger idealistic values to its current corrupted state, I can't help but be cynical about Anthropic's long-term trajectory.

But if nothing else, I can appreciate Anthropic's current values, and hope they will last as long as possible...

Nah, it's earlier than that. The move to online, plumetting paper ad-sales, and the online expectation that you could access all the articles for free (and ad-block) (oh hey look above the comment with archive.is to bypass the NewYorker's paywall) is what killed The News.

Or, just saying, we should eat babies because they are abundant and full of healthy nutrition for adult humans. [1]

Just because an idea has some factors in its favor (Space-based datacenter: 100% uptime solar, no permitting problems [2]) doesn't mean it isn't ridiculous on its face. We're in an AI bubble, with silly money flowing like crazy and looking for something, anything to invest it. That, and circular investments to keep the bubble going. Unfortunately this gives validation to stupid ideas, it's one of the hallmarks of bubbles. We've seen this before.

The only things that space-based anything have advantages on are long-distance communication and observation, neither of which datacenters benefit from.

The simple fact is that anything that can be done in a space-based datacenter can be done cheaper on Earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal for the obtuse

[2] until people start having qualms about the atmospheric impact of all those extra launches and orbital debris

some people really gotta stop huffing VC fumes

my partner got shingles a couple years ago, it was a very painful experience!

(to be crystal clear, I am making a joke equating the failed SolarCity/Tesla solar shingles to the (generally considered very painful) Herpes Zoster manifestation also called "shingles")

> It does say he's planning an AI sun

Everything I've heard from Musk in the past decade has been against my will and has made me dumber. (no I do not care to verify or know whether the above is true)

Edit: ah fuck ya got me "the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe" what the cultish bullshit is this. In a just world investors would be fleeing in droves from this cuckoo behavior (I know xAI & SpaceX are private)

I can't tell how many layers of sarcasm are here, but I just want to highlight that aktshually cooling in space is quite difficult because there is no convection, so the only cooling option is radiative. Which gets a bit hard when the satellite gets blasted by the sun.

The ISS doesn't have problems staying warm, it has problems cooling off.

Musk is notorious for shuffling assets across his companies to make some financials look better. For example, shuffling Twitter servers (and then all of Twitter) under xAI.

          - plugged into DFU capable USB-C port

This is what I'm contending. No, I don't think this is true. All he found was the upgrading macOS on the external disk, which as documented must not be on a DFU capable USB-C port, did not work when plugged into a port that was documented to not be DFU.

The source the author is referring to, Michael Tsai, indeed found that he had plugged his external disk into the DFU port. The author then (reasonably, but IMHO erroneously) deduced that his problem, also solved by changing ports, must thus have had the same cause. I say it may be confounding factors, and the only way to validate the wrong DFU port hypothesis is putting their mac in DFU mode and then running Recovery Assistant (from another machine) against it, on various ports.

Tangentially, it is infuriating that Apple would swap what the DFU port is across generations, as if it wasn't confusing enough.

Also...

> As for reasons, I don't know why anything that can boot from USB can't from DFU-enabled USB port, but maybe it's configured as a special non-USB debug connector while bootloader is executing.

My guess is it's because DFU requires the port to be in Device mode, whereas booting from a external disk requires the port to be in Host mode. Apple care about boot time, so perhaps they don't want to waste time in the boot process to check the port in Device mode for a few secs, then switch to Host mode to try external disk booting.

The author did not test the DFU flow, so I'm not sure why they're blaming the DFU port documentation.

Certainly there is a bug in the external disk upgrade sequence if switching the disk to a different (also non-DFU? They didn't specify) port solved their problem. But that's not necessarily related to which port is the DFU port.

To be clear, DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) is a standard USB protocol (from 2004!), for a device to receive upgrades from a host. It is a specific port on the mac because that's all the boot-rom can support. This system does not come into play when booting from or upgrading an external disk, as the author was struggling with, because the external disk cannot be a USB Host to drive the DFU.

And I'm guessing that the reason macOS doesn't give more details is because macOS is likely not involved in the step that fails (maybe iBoot is?), and they didn't develop a way for the failing step to communicate failure data back to macOS. Yet another UX failure.

Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.

It's like a dream come true!

I've been thinking of something like this for decades, as I mentally compared the utopian displays at construction sites to the existing buildings next to them. Like "wow your fancy new building is going to be so perfectly white and clean, but what will it really look like after 10 years exposed to the elements and no cleaning, like the one next door?"

New construction is sold on a literal blue-sky promise. How does it really look like a decade down the road? All construction has a decades- if not centuries-long lifespan. It's worth thinking about them long-term.

I absolutely love the streak of rust coming off the saddle of arches on the bridge example. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Correction! The actual video I was thinking of was this one, also by Mathologer but from 2018:

https://youtu.be/ubHVK71F01M

This one actually has the geometric (rectangle subdivisions) animations I had in mind.

Aw thanks, but I think the Mathologer and Numberphile videos are sufficient for me if you haven't already uploaded yours. I don't want to bother you doing extra work for little return!

Thanks! Do you have a version of that talk published anywhere? I tried searching your YouTube channel [1] for a few things like "golden ratio" "ratio", "irrational"... but didn't find anything.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@colinwright/

Absolutely. In fact my post above originally said "infinite series" instead of "continued fraction", but Googling again, Google AI did mention "continued fraction" in its summary, so I edited my post and tried searching on that which led me to the solution!

Edit: years of searches and minutes after I post this I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaasbfdJdJg thanks to using "continued fraction" in my search instead of "infinite series" X(

Original: Tangentially, for a few years I've been looking for a Youtube video, I think by Mathologer [1], that explained (geometrically?) how the Golden Ratio was the limit of the continued fraction 1+1/(1+1/(1+1/(...))).

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

I know Mathologer had a conflict with his editor at one point that may have sown chaos on his channel.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Mathologer

> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.

Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).

So it's not just a failing of Teams.

Offtopic...

    * Do this with "<0" and ">=0" to only test the sign of the result. A
    * good compiler would generate better code (and a really good compiler
    * wouldn't care). Gcc is currently neither.

It's funny the love-hate relationship the Linux kernel has with GCC. It's the only supported compiler[1], and yet...

[1] can Clang fully compile Linux yet? I haven't followed the updates in a while.

Hah! And the value of the Pi for these kinds of ~industrial applications is why there was a shortage of Pis for hobbyists.

It's funny how Raspberry Pi started out for an educational market, and accidentally revolutionized the embedded market.

Maybe you have an ISP that captures DNS checks to return ad sites, and Safari interprets that as a real website?

But honestly it seems extremely weird that Safari would interpret something with spaces as a URL instead of a search

Not to defend the extravagant power use of the AI datacenters, but I invite you to look up the ecological footprint of a human being.

ah, good point.

> Telnet nowadays typically isn’t available by default for security reasons

And with good reason. This CVE is from yesterday:

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-24061

> telnetd in GNU Inetutils through 2.7 allows remote authentication bypass via a "-f root" value for the USER environment variable.