Intermernet

That's a horribly defeatist, but unfortunately accurate summary of the current state of the world.

Here's to the changing of the tide.

The white house recently released reports into electoral interference that showed that the majority of Russian influence was targeted at supporting trump. I assumed that people would notice this massive foot in mouth moment, but it seems people don't actually read the source material, and just claim that it supports their position. Unfortunately, this stance seems to work.

What is going on? How does a government release a report that directly contradicts what they claim they're releasing the report for, and then steadfastly stand by the claims that were disproven by the report they released?

We truly are living in the post truth era...

Anyone directly connected to trump has lost the presumption of innocence until proven guilty standard of common law. That group has been proven guilty, with no retribution, so many times it's statistically more likely they actually did something far worse than whatever is being alleged.

Seriously, how, with a straight face, can you even attempt to excuse these stains on history?

As an Australian I thank you. I'd much rather have spent all day today patching things than tomorrow. It's Friday afternoon right now!

There's a rule about not pushing to prod on Friday. I feel the same should apply for security patches ;-)

This is true. Many "weird" purchases that used to be available from someone local are now impossible to get. Not sure about the supermarket not stocking batteries though... That's just insane.

Honestly? AliExpress wins for this stuff. The shipping is always much more expensive than the actual items, so I batch purchase stuff like this. Funnily enough, sometimes, despite paying only one shipping cost, it arrives in multiple shipments.

I'm not sure about where you are from, but in Australia I've recently had just as reliable service, shipping costs and delivery times from individual brands as from Amazon.

Amazon used to be better, and they still have the logistics network to be better, but they've dropped the ball. If this downward trend hasn't hit you yet, it's only a matter of time.

Maybe the TPM developer should be checking this using AI?

Amazon often have no idea what vendors sell their products for elsewhere. It's often an empty threat that vendors are very happy to ignore. Also, many of those agreements are spurious in international law. Unless there's a bullet proof contract with actual teeth, vendors will sell anywhere they can.

Buying online direct from the manufacturer? Almost everyone sells direct. Use Amazon to find the seller and then contact them directly.

Flock do more than just ALPRs. and have done for a while now. I'm not sure why people keep pointing to the ALPRs while remaining silent on actual facial recognition and tracking.

"No they weren't."

I'm actually not sure exactly what "they" is in this sentence.

I know about the Ultraviolet catastrophe, but that's cherry-picking.

Dirac predicted the Positron before it was discovered.

Quantum entanglement was predicted by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen before it was shown ("Spooky action at a distance")

Black Holes and Gravitational waves were both predicted before they were detected.

Einstein predicted time dilation before it was detected.

Szilard predicted chain reactions in Nuclear fission before they were demonstrated.

And probably most pertinent to this discussion, Pauli predicted Neutrinos before they were detected.

Half of the list above are critical for GPS, energy, semiconductor research and many other fundamental technologies of the modern age. They were researched and predicted without any thought of a "monetisable" product.

Thanks for the reply! I didn't know about the artwork! I will certainly try to dig up the original CD (I usually listen to my ripped copy these days), but I can guarantee that the themes of Rotwang pursuing Maria have been a part of my life before the invention of the MP3, and when that CD was being played I used to have to argue with dad as he didn't like the Bonnie Tyler / Freddie Mercury tracks and always wanted to skip to the Moroder tracks. Mum loved it all.

If I'm doing a report on the corruption of the LAPD (as an example), I don't tend to bring up the organised crime in LA, let alone the Mafia in Milan.

A report on abuses committed by the IDF should focus on abuses committed by the IDF. There are many reports on the the war crimes of Hamas, and there are many reports on the war crimes of Russia.

You can't water down the behaviour of the IDF by claiming their actions were somehow justified by the actions of another group. That's how the cycle of aggression perpetuates, and how political agendas overrule human decency. That exact behaviour has some very bad connotations in world history.

The search is more fulfilling than the result in these cases, but still keep searching!

Thanks for this! I could have answered the first one (Crustation) for you, but the others are a trip down memory lane. JJJ FTW :-)

Ok HN, a challenge.

I have given this challenge to many, and I'm either completely mistaken, or the world has forgotten something.

In 1984, as many of you may know, Giorgio Moroder released his version of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis". This is a moderately good version of the movie, but would be superseded by newer versions with more recovered scenes etc.

Moroder's soundtrack, however, was brilliant. He brought in many of the stars of the time to do songs (Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, Adam Ant etc) and they were good songs. He also wrote a lot of original incidental music for this version.

2 versions of the soundtrack were released. One has the pop artist's tracks and a couple of Giorgio's originals, and the other has the complete soundtrack (all of the pop artist's tracks and all of Giorgio's music).

Both were released in multiple countries.

Both were released on CD

The first, shorter version was released on Vinyl.

Apparently the second, longer version was never released on Vinyl.

Except... After seeing the movie in 1984, my mum ordered the soundtrack (specifically the longer version) at HMV in Parramatta in Sydney (Australia). It took a few weeks to arrive, and I happened to be there when we picked it up (at the age of 7 or 8). I remember it vividly, because it was a multi-disk release, and it had a gorgeous fold out sleeve. The only problem was that mum had ordered the CD version, and they had ordered the vinyl version. They subsequently re-ordered it, we picked up the CD a few weeks later, and I still own that CD.

Problem is, I want the Vinyl version. I've asked the internet, I've asked record stores in multiple countries, I sent an email to Giorgio Moroder's nephew(?) (no reply) and it doesn't seem to exist.

I'd put this down to imagination except for the fact that Australia (and Japan, and probably elsewhere) has a track-record of receiving weird / customised versions of records, and some of them seem to have disappeared from the official databases.

So, if anyone out there feels like doing some sleuthing, that's the challenge. Find the Vinyl version of this[0], or prove it doesn't exist. (I know, proving non-existence is impossible, but it's worth a try!)

Either way, it's a great soundtrack, and worth a listen!

[0]: https://archive.org/details/Giorgio-moroder-metropolis-score

The best science comes from areas that have no obvious use. The original insights into nuclear physics, quantum physics and relativity were all pure thought experiments. They led to the world we live in.

I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.

The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.

When I visited in 2018, one of the guides was a retired astronaut. I completely failed to have a conversation with him as I was star-struck and barely managed to hold a door open for him without making a fool out of myself.

I second the fact that the M21 is awesome though.

Was this all in the US? If so, that's broken. I've been permanently employed since 1998 in Australia and I've never earnt less than about $27 per hour, and even that was only in the very early / junior days. The exchange rate (US$ to $AU$) has always been approximately $0.60 to $0.80 US to $1 AU for almost all of that time, so I wonder why the US pays so little when you also don't get the benefits of affordable healthcare etc?

I'd say the NSA have been developing and training custom LLMs for at least 12 months now. They have the means, and they have the history. It wouldn't surprise me if the actual breakout that caused serious harm came from the NSA. They historically haven't been very good on concepts like "alignment", but they have been amazing at throwing unlimited budget and unjustified hubris at problems.

If various military groups are already publicly saying that they relied too heavily on ai, then I'd hate to see what the group with the pertinent resources and the culture of absolute secrecy is getting up to.

I have 2 cats that are sisters. They have a very interesting dynamic. There isn't a fixed dominant sibling, they switch back and forth.

They antagonise each-other most of the time, but they also support each other in times of stress. If one goes to the vet and the other doesn't, the initial reaction is hissing and being a dick. Then, after a few minutes, it's licking and comforting.

I don't like to anthropomorphise too much, but they definitely look out for each-other. Equally, they definitely annoy each-other.

More like a bunch of CNAMES pointing to a single record, but in this case the CNAMEs all start with "charlesv3".

We have reached a point where it's possible to make a car that lasts 200,000 km reliably, but the economic incentives are to make a car that people want to upgrade every few years. The ability and incentives are hugely misaligned.

My goto example for this is Hilti powertools. They can (and have) made some of the best tools in the game, but they now make most of their money from companies going the "fleet" option, where, for a monthly fee, tools can be replaced almost immediately when they fail. The result of this is tools that work brilliantly for a short time but are non-field-repairable, and aren't really designed to last any more.

Economic incentives beat engineering ability.

As someone who started using Linux in 1996 (Slackware, of course), I learnt the hard way about compiling packages. I remember trying to compile the kernel, and doing "make config" and following hundreds of options, and not knowing that I then needed to do "make" or "make zimage" or "make install" after any of the config stuff. Obvious, dumb, rookie errors, but still understandable for a teenager coming from Windows. Doing LFS really taught me a lot about dependencies and complexity, as well as understanding of the actual boot process. All of this helped me greatly in later years.

I'm working on a bunch of hardware stuff.

I'm up to my 3rd prototype of a device that combines GPS with TERCOM style algorithms using a bunch of sensors for use in areas that have terrible GPS coverage (initial use was canyoning). Hopefully, when I receive the samples, I'll have ironed out most of the hardware faults!

I've also just (sort of) finished a TinyGo version of firmware that runs on a cheap Adafruit board in combination with Gaudi Lab's OpenThereminV3 shield to provide MIDI theremin capabilities for live music performance. That one is available at https://github.com/intermernet/theremin if anyone wants to play with it.

I have to send a daily email that always has the subject starting with "Work Diary". If I type "W", it doesn't come up. If I type "Wo" it comes up as the 3rd auto-complete suggestion. If I type any more characters, I have to type the entire two words. This is on Android, but I have a feeling it's no better on iOS.

I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.

"after that apple started to dominate"

When did Apple dominate? I'm not trying to hate on Apple here, but there's this weird belief that Apple have had a lead in personal computer OS market share at some point in the last few decades, and it isn't really true since about 1984.

You can argue that they should dominate, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

IBM actually do a bunch of semiconductor research, which they license to other fabs. I'm not sure how much money they make (probably nothing compared to support contracts with banks etc), but they actually do innovate. At least, a small portion of one of their business sectors still innovates. The rest are probably engaged in aggressive IP lawsuits or taking CFOs out to strip clubs on golf courses or something.

I'm sure you understand the dystopian irony of your last sentence, but I thought I'd highlight it anyway. That's some "no fighting in the war-room" level commentary on the state of the USA.