HotHotLava

I don't have a smart dishwasher, but I think an API to display the current salt level and a web UI that has some space to display and comfortable configure the various settings instead of 6 incomprehensible buttons would certainly be things I'd be interested in.

But superdeterminism in the sense that Scott uses it doesn't just mean life is completely predetermined (I think that would be a fairly unobjectionable theory), it means that specifically the whole universe is predetermined in a way that just happens to cause human experimenters to choose measurement settings that accidentally reproduce the the values predicted by Bell's inequality.

It's that mind-blowingly unlikely coincidence with no explanation that scientists object to.

My boss graduated from Berkely, and so I occasionally had to administer a FreeBSD box he kept around for the "superior OS philosophy".

My biggest annoyance, apart from the obvious lack of systemd, was a social one: Any time I had to look up how to accomplish some non-trivial task I would inevitably find a thread on the FreeBSD forums by someone else who has had exactly the same problem in the past, together with a response by some dev along the lines of "why would anyone ever need to do that?".

It's one thing to look at the source, it's another thing to know that you have to look inside `pkgs/build-support/trivial-builders.nix` to find the documentation. One of the main advantages of reference documentation is a central place to look up what things do.

I'm also not a patent lawyer, but for example the multi-room volume control patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network.

I would be surprised if that already existed in the 90s? I'd actually already be surprised if network-connected speakers were around back then, let alone all the mesh networking stuff.

This particular patent specifically covers a mesh network of independent playback devices that can be dynamically rearranged into possibly overlapping zones, with the volume controls being on a separate device in the local network. That's pretty far removed from a simple hard-wired two-channel audio system.

I'm opposed to software patents in general so I also think this should not be patentable, but it's hard to deny that there's a ton of engineering effort required to implement such a system and its not just a matter of adding a few lines of code to an existing audio application.

There was nothing comparable to a modern multiroom smart speaker around in 2001, so they certainly were invented in the last 20 years. Whether that was by Sonos or by someone else, and whether these specific patents should have been granted is another question of course.

The first two have two buttons of the same size, color and prominence at the bottom of the site allowing you to accept or refuse cookies. These are not cookie popups, and they don't promote one option over the other unlike what Facebook and Google were fined for here. So I'm not sure where you see a problem with these sites?

Yes, every time I want to set it up on a new device I have to import and trust all public keys that it should encode to; and if that device gets its own gpg key then that key also has to be distributed to and trusted at all prior sites. Which isn't very often, but still somewhat regularly (ie. new laptop, new yubikey, formatted hard drive, etc.)

I think it would be a great addition if pass could actually automate this by storing all relevant public keys internally.

As a user, I also often feel like `gpg` brings a lot of annoying accidental complexity to `pass`, (like the need to "ultimately trust" keys before they become usable) but on the other hand it enables integration with hardware tokens like Yubikeys and in extension mobile devices (via openkeychain) that as far as I know wouldn't be possible with a more modern age-based backend.

> The latest year in the table is 2017 because I wrote the first draft for this post in 2017 and didn't get around to cleaning it up until 2020.

I don't envy the judges, the shortlist is full of absurdly high-quality videos that didn't make it into the top 5.

My personal favorite was this one about the topology of rotation groups and spin 1/2 particles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACZC_XEyg9U&list=PLnQX-jgAF5...

The largest option in his shop is actually 5m x 75cm, divided into 5 panels. But that also comes at a price of 7.5k EUR, or 12.5k EUR for a glicee print.

In Germany the ID card costs 37 EUR and is valid for 10 years, reduced to 22.80 EUR and 6 years of validity if you're under 24. A passport is even more expensive. No other forms of identification are accepted, but it's also not really necessary since you're required to get an ID card anyways.

A while ago a Berlin court decided that online posts saying "Drecksfotze"/"Schlampe"/"Knatter sie doch mal einer so richtig durch, bis sie wieder normal wird." (filthy cunt/bitch/someone fuck her hard until she becomes normal again) are still below the threshold that top politicians have to endure before they can sue for insult, so the ability to "unload" on top politicians doesn't seem to be in any danger in Germany.

Although this ruling was widely criticized, because there is some societal understanding that politicians are also humans who need some level of protection, and that unrestricted hate speech always has the potential to transform into physical violence sooner or later.

It is never proactively enforced, it always requires a "Strafantrag" of the insulted party.

Which is, realistically, a pretty small price to pay for free high-quality content. Most of the higher-end channels also have the option to get an ad-free and nudge-free version if you're willing to pay.

Honestly, I'd much prefer that model for books over the forced Adobe DRM or vendor-specific stores that the industry seems to be trending towards.

Back in the 90s in Germany, Heyne Verlag was infamously inserting ads for Maggi Instant Soup [1] into the text of many of its Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels.

[1]: https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...

Even in that strawman version of the argument, competing publishers would not be able to "steal" all the profit because they also could only sell the books more or less at cost. The price floor for physical books in such a world would, I imagine, be set by some chinese on-demand printing factories. Business models for authors would shift towards patreon supporters, subscription fees for periodical releases, signed collectors editions of books, live book tours, etc. etc.

Some people also manage to extract millions of profit from Youtube and Instagram channels, despite all of the content being free. Books are not that different from any other medium.

Tbf, from the way they were described it should have been fairly easy to defeat the Sophons even without any science-fiction technology; just build e.g. 10-20 particle accelerators distributed over the world and take measurements close enough in time to each other that you cannot be at multiple sites without exceeding the speed of light. Then at most 3 of them could be corrupted for any given run, and these can be thrown out as statistical noise.

A `std::tuple` is not a container in the STL sense (it also doesn't provide iterators and you can't add or delete elements from it), so there is no issue in that regard. For example, `std::tie()` is a function in the standard library that returns a tuple of references.

Since someone linked both standards elsewhere in the thread, this is the first valid, self-contained example XML document appearing in the XML spec:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <!DOCTYPE greeting [
      <!ELEMENT greeting (#PCDATA)>
    ]>
    <greeting>Hello, world!</greeting>

The first example of a complete, self-contained yaml document in the yaml spec looks like this:

    # Ranking of 1998 home runs
    ---
    - Mark McGwire
    - Sammy Sosa
    - Ken Griffey
    # Team ranking
    ---
    - Chicago Cubs
    - St Louis Cardinals

I think that is quite representative of the user experience as a whole: Yes, there are a ton of dark corners in Yaml that only a tiny fraction of people truly understand, but the default user experience feels just like writing a slightly more convenient JSON, whereas XML by default is a garbled mess.

The illustration in the article doesn't start with the whole set of all real numbers, but with just "a" set containing an uncountable number of reals, so there is no contradiction in that sense.

I'm assuming there's some unmentioned technical condition on which sets you are allowed to choose in order for the procedure to work, otherwise the argument would indeed seem to lead to a contradiction when choosing the set of all real numbers.

Wouldn't the counterpoint be that those civilizations like us that do not obscure their location are quickly eradicated by others in the forest? So the forest also acts like a filter for those that are not careful enough.

There are comments in this thread from people who read about this in the news, checked their own device, and found it was wiped as well. This seems like it would be very unlikely to happen if this were just happening in isolated cases.

That CVE only shows how to factory-reset a single MyBook to which you can connect and send HTTP requests. There's still something missing to explain how it could happen to seemingly all MyBook's at once, including those behind a NAT.

> That is, say there is a plan on their site for a 2BD/2BA house, the floor plan is very simple and a builder that is unaware of this company ends up copying the floor plan for no other reason that it happens to be a very common floorplan. Could this company still pursue damages?

No. The ruling in this case actually covers this in detail: Proving copyright infringement is a two-step process, first you must prove that something was actually copied and then that the copied portion was substantial enough to constitute infringement. But the first part is a necessary precondition, without copying there's no infringement. They give the example of two comic book authors inventing a character called "Dennis the Menace" independently on the same day.

Do computer science grad students in the US commonly apply for patents on top of writing papers, etc.?

I'm just wondering where the patents in this pool are coming from, I assume the administrators are not going through the research papers and file new patents on the researchers' behalf?

I'm confused, what do get instead in the US when you're employed? I didn't know that contracts are not universal, over here I've never heard of anyone not having a contract.

Can you really rescind an offer after it has been signed? Wouldn't they have to have terminated the contract instead? (Not that it makes a difference in practice unless there's a mandatory termination period)