cdumler

If you looking into Chinese culture [1][2], it is astonishingly autocratic. Creativity is frowned on, and criticizing superiors is nearly impossible. There is a very strong "do what is asked, no questions" attitude. Business has very strong "nothing matters once I have your money" policy. I took South East Asian history in college, and Chinese culture is abundantly self-sabotaging. It was morbidly fascinating, which is why I took several courses on it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@serpentza [2] https://www.youtube.com/@laowhy86

It's a tool. What you get out of it will depend on what you expect of it. What I try to tell people is that Instant Pot is not something that makes food better nor does it necessarily cook things faster. When you factor in the time it takes to get up to pressure and the time it takes for it release it, it isn't necessarily faster than normal cooking.

What is does do it take care of itself. In other words, I can throw a bunch of stuff in the pot, configure it for cook time then turn off the heat, set a timer and know that in 45 minutes it will be ready to serve. In a house hold where multitasking is a necessity, that is a huge boon. Finally, one pot to clean up.

With a p-adic number.

There's no need to presume lobbying. Freely released models, by definition, don't have a regulation body. It would be like replicators suddenly made it possible for anyone to produce automobiles or firearms with nearly zero variable costs. These things have life-changing consequences, so there are expectations of quality, safety and record keeping.

The simple truth is that our information tools have become so complex that they're capable of significant consequences. Bots already are being used to wage war on information, notably Russia's socio-political war that the U.S. doesn't even realize that it is in. That said, it doesn't mean that models must be proprietary. If anything, this must be treated like crypto protocols: open to many eyes and liberal amounts of sunshine to prevent anyone from encoding a Manchurian candidate.

First, he wasn't trying to go to Russia. He was routing himself to prevent being over allied controlled airspace so that they couldn't down his plane[1]. When the U.S. realized they couldn't get to him, they revoked his passport, which stranded him in Russia. That argument shouldn't even work now that the GOP fully embraces Russia as a good guy now.

Second, Thomas Drake did everything you say is the right, he paid the price[2]:

  | The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the
  | very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did.
  | Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than
  | Snowden, and he obeyed US whistleblower laws, raising
  | his concerns through official channels. And he got
  | crushed.

  | Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI
  | agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged
  | with crimes that could have sent him to prison for
  | the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially
  | and professionally. The only job he could find
  | afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban
  | Washington, where he remains today. Adding insult to
  | injury, his warnings about the dangers of the NSA’s
  | surveillance programme were largely ignored.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/02/world/americas/bolivia-presid...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon...

The original riddle was something to the effect of:

Your are on the top floor of a building. In the room are three switches, all are off. It is given that one of the switches controls the light in the basement; however, there is no way to determine from the top floor which switch is driving the light. Is it possible just by toggling the switches as you see fit to then travel down to the basement and observe without a doubt which switch controls the light?

Yes, it is, and without any form of tricky answer (ie rewiring the switch boxes, I look down the stairs, etc).

No. History was never about a single artifact. Any item considered primary needs to be taken in context. What is the physical substrate used? Who was the author? What other items like it were produced? What other literature was written in the time? What were the social/political views at the time of the recording? What other artifacts corroborate this source? Etc.

What it will do is continue to provide fuel for confirmation bias. What we, as humans, will have to figure out from here on out is how define and deal with constructed information. Currently, the chaos being generated is too valuable to small, but significant, group of political activists; however, I suspect Gen Z will eventually have the power to require restrictions (a la food labels) and penalties for using unsubstantiated information.

The days of using the Internet as a general information source is coming to an end. There will be value in curated data sets again, like we used to have with Encyclopedias.

Possibly. Possibly not. In the case where a money took a selfie, it was ruled as uncopyrightable[1]. Just because the photographer had set the stage, the work completed was done my by something unable to claim copyright. The better solution is to not acknowledge that ChatGPT was the source. After all, it won't complain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Nah. It's about making your financial results look better. My company touts every quarter how not only is revenue up, profit per revenue is up, ie. we're making more money on the money we make. Yet, when it comes to compensation and dealing with cost of living, the statement is that we haven't met our targets so it's a 3% pool. Not minimum or maximum, but that for someone to get more someone else has to get less.

COVID had many enlightening observations about the economy, one of which is that there was a lot of inelasticity in consumer demand versus compensation. Companies have realized that there is a lot more value to extract from employees.

To put a fine point on it, he believes in naïveté: People will argue about over what is said (regardless of contradictory behavior) because the general populace will spend their effort supporting their belief system for/against the argument than acting on the contradictory behavior.

Recognizing his actions are contradictory requires a higher level of abstraction.

Generally, it is. The initial spike of electricity does the most damage. In addition, a sitting drive can eventually see the lubricants settle and stick. Once the drive is spinning, there is virtually zero friction wear. That said, a drive spun up once every several months will likely have a very long life for storage as long as the lubricants were manufactured correctly. I still have old ~500 MB drives that still work. The main advantage of having them run 24/7 is you are likely to register warnings before the drive completely dies, giving you an opportunity to decide how to deal with it. A sitting drive can simply not start up again. Plan accordingly.

This premise of a DAO is that votes are the only thing that ultimately matter, which can make things simpler. Something gets presented as a course of action, a vote happens, and the if enough votes qualify you make the action. In a crypto DAO, this voting is implemented in the blockchain's software rules as a contract; thus, it is completely automated. Sometimes, to the dismay of the users. But, there is nothing requiring you to do this in software. It just means they want, in theory, that you'll somehow be able to have a vote without being required to be known or involved directly.

I think what you're missing is that language runtimes typically install themselves globally, and major release versions typically have issues with backwards compatibility. If you install Ruby 3 globally, your Ruby on Rails project programmed on Ruby 2 may not work. Thus, there is a need to be able to install multiple versions of runtimes, and the ability to cause a particular version of a runtime to be used depending on the project you are in. This allows the development team to decide if and when to make runtime version changes.

My team maintains multiple projects that are over 10 years old with a mix of Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. The code base is large, so there is pretty much a guarantee that going to the next version of Ruby or Ruby on Rails or Node will introduce problems. We lock down all the versions for everything so that we don't have to worry a deploying to a new environment (new server, developer, etc) will have different versions and require use to change priority to fix things. Instead, we periodically review our projects for upgrades, find upgrade issues and fix them, lock new versions, and deploy. Some of the code base is in legacy status. It does what it needs to do, and we have no need to change it unless some security issue is found.

The sun is classed as a green star[1]. As a black-body object, it emits the most light in the green spectrum. We see white because we evolved to distinguish color based on our star; however, our ability to detect variance in brightness in colors is far more limited.

We, in fact, use this to our advantage. View screens transmit exactly brightness in narrow red, green, and blue such to fool our eyes into believing we see colors there that are not in fact there, such as red and green light to simulate yellow light.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_star_(astronomy)

Latency is always a problem for multiplayer, whether on local LAN or not. A lot of it comes down to how well the game engine deals with latency. I play Guild Wars 2 on GeForce now given that I have a Mac. Works just fine on normal days.

It's also to recognize that what the Supreme Court did wasn't strike down Roe v Wade. Specifically, they struck down the idea that people do not have a right to privacy from the Constitution; thus, everything flowing from that decision is no longer supported (abortion, interracial marriage, LGBQ, etc). While some judges may attempt to argue that warrant is needed, SCOTUS has all but formally stated that "secure in your possessions" applies solely to warrants for physical items on your property. SCOTUS will likely overrule lower courts on cases. Thus, anything a company can know will be handed over.

While abortion is the hot topic, other religious purity tests will be coming, like if you have ever visited LGBQ topics. Get yourself out of the cloud. If you are minority likely to be targeted by American Christian Nationalists, do it sooner than later. Many states still have sodomy laws that haven't been just enforced.

I don't know communication tell well enough to know to what they might be speaking specifically because it's rather vague to me from the article. So, this is about transistors and memristors.

We think of transistors like switches (on/off), but they're really analog devices. There is always going to be some level of leakage. We can think of them really as having two voltages (high/low). Another thing that acts like this is a set of resistors and tapping the spot between them. Depending on the ratio of resistance between the two will determine the voltage at the tap.

A memristor has the property that the amount of resistance can vary. Depending on the direction and amount of flow, it will increase or decrease over time. Paired with another resistor, you now have something that can have changing voltage states like a transistor. If design the chip to compute over a range of values, you have an analog computer: a device that continuously changes output over a range of values, such as a frequency.

The challenge to memristors has been reliability. They are normally made of nano-materials that physically alter their structure. Being mechanical, they wear out and break.

It's a good question. It seems there are meany sources, including production on earth[1] and in space. It seems a lot of commonly available chemicals in space if hit with light or electricity will generate them. The open question has been what does it take to generate RNA/DNA. There has been suggestion that RNA would be unlikely to form in open, active water like found on early Earth. However, Mars would have had shallow oceans with large amount of shore area for chemicals to combine in quiet.

The Panspermia theory is that RNA/DNA formed there and was ejected by asteroid hits to Earth. Support for that theory is that life appears to have formed within a few hundred million years of it being possible on Earth, which seems far too short of a time for RNA/DNA to form spontaneously in an ocean Earth.

If this is all true, life may be a fluke and requiring a rather stable set of environments to work. All of this is hard to know with a sample size of one, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

The point of massive acquisitions are to enrich company stockholders (generally the CxO's and key management), lock up key engineering talent from the market, and give the manager who lead the acquisition a fat bonus. Generally, everyone else loses. To offset the cost, typically value is extracted from the bought company until the product's value dies. Short term-wise, the people involved will get a lot of money and be gone by the time the consequences cannot be ignored.

That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm in a company that has acquired several companies in a related field. Each of the companies have had complementary products, and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to synergize employees and services. There has been a strong feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share their expertise and experience with other.

I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done to improve your position in the field.

They are synergetic.

DEVONagent is capture. You give it criteria it will use that to decide what searches to run, collect the results, collate map of terms, and present the results for you to peruse. For instance, if you were to search for "Vorlon," you'd get back pages that have the word, but also ranked by other pages found that have the same vocabulary. It will give you a graph of the word and other commonly found words, like "Babylon", "Mimbari", etc. It a good way to explore stuff you don't know because it will show related concepts. It is very niche, but very powerful for what it is for.

Zotero does citations. It lets you track citations to resource sources, add relational information, and organize them. If you have every had to make research papers, having a citation tool very important. When I attended university, it was dirt easy to track and cite supporting material then export it as whatever citation format the teacher wanted. I had one teacher who very strictly wanted a particular version of citation, but it wasn't standard. I made a citation style just for her so I didn't have to remember the rule changes.

Is this going down the route of YugabyteDB[1]?

[1] https://www.yugabyte.com

There isn't. Sorry, but there just isn't a permanent format. The real problem isn't the storage media but that technological standards evolve. Tape media is excellent at surviving. I have a 9 track digital tape keepsake from when I used to work with it regularly some 20 years ago. I'm absolutely certain that the data on it is still good. I don't have the 300-pound "dishwasher" drive that can read it, the three-phase power to run it, nor a DEC Vax that understands EBCDIC encoding.

The only true solution is a living one, where you have make sure you have the ability to get your data from an old format to a new one periodically. More importantly, you should look into the idea of 3-2-1 Backups. Anything that you intend to keep indefinitely is subject random events, ie fire, flood, tornado, theft, etc. Having multiple archives in separate systems is more import than worrying trying to ensure a single copy will last a long time.

Storing less than a gigabyte is very cheap to do in multiple formats, such as USB flash drive, external hard drive, CD, BlueRay disc, etc. You can hedge against data corruption with PAR2 files. Also, consider storing a copy on the cloud, ie Backblack B2, AS S3, etc. Again, I suggest creating PAR2 files and/or using an archive format that can resist damage.

Just create calendar events to check periodically the integrity of your archives. Having problems reading a CD, use the hard drive backup to burn a new one. This also a good time to consider if one or more your formats is no longer viable.

Finally, realize that a program runs within an environment and those get replaced over time. You need to no only back up your program, but probably want to store the operating system and tools around it.

This is the crux of the whole DeFi thing, and I strongly agree this was not a hack. My whole problem with DeFi is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Roughly, it states that any reasonably complex code is going to have outcomes that cannot be determined by reading the code. In this case:

* Started with currencies that didn't allow flash loans. * Made a "we feel good about democracy of involvement" rule that supermajority could make any decisions with the funds "because we like people who invest in our work." * They added two currencies that supported flash loans. * Person or persons with currencies used flash loans to gain supermajority to transfer the funds out.

This is why banks are inefficient. There are (in theory) safeguards to transfers make it possible to stop or reverse activities. DeFi is forever going to be dealing with these issues after the fact.

My experience with friends in law enforcement is that what defines the majority criminals is a lack of understanding of risk. That lack creates a strong sense of "I know how to get away with this."

I remember a story of a guy being busted who ran a business, bought his $500k house in cash, his half dozen trucks in cash, and yet paid almost nothing in taxes. The thought was, "I'll under-report my income, and pay everything all in cash so they can't trace anything!" Except for the fact that transactions over $10K get reported to the IRS, not to mention all of the property to various agencies which circle back to the IRS.

People who have a least a clue what could go wrong tend to also realize they probably aren't seeing other ways for it go wrong, as well.

Most scientists do not think that black holes have a "real singularity." The idea of a mass that occupies a single point in space comes from taking Einstein's equations beyond the event horizon, ie. the curvature of space is greater than light so means nothing can have any resistance to distance/size. At some point between the event horizon and the center, quantum gravity (which is not understood) has to come into the picture. One idea is the "black hole firewall," which is that mass gets "stuck" at the boundary of the black hole.

If you want to host it yourself, Vaultwarden is an excellent self-host option.

There are two major problems with standards.

First, companies lie. I've been through a few companies that were audited for security compliance and simple truth was the company made great pains to keep the auditors away from but a few key people who will say what the auditors want to hear. Once, I was even told what I would need to say if I were asked (and it was blatantly untrue). Companies see security as a cost, not as an investment for on-going operations. So, the goal is to check it off the list that you're complying, not actually do it.

Second, best practices actually aren't. For instance, in my company I talked with the head of security after a presentation. I said that having passwords rotated was a horrible practice. It forces users to come up with something memorable. We should be using password managers and start using a long, random, gibberish passwords. He agreed, but "this is (such and such's) standard of best practices we contracted to support so we have to do this."

Totally buying this. Thank you very much.

Risk is something you have to answer. What are you going to have to do go to get your data and find:

* A few songs have been removed, here and there, such you can't easily determine what has been removed. * Whole albums or your collection is removed. * Your account is disabled and you loose everything related to Google, including all other stored files, email, calendar, Android apps, music and video purchases, etc.

It's not your service, it's Google's. You're only renting access until they decide you're not.

If you are going to use cloud for backup, always use an encrypted backup so they have no idea what you're storing. I highly suggest considering using `rclone` to mount Google Drive. I've had mixed luck with using the encryption module. I would highly suggest `restic`, as it's very easy to backup and restore files.

Realize the people who complain how hard it is are the people who are stuck. The people who don't made it out aren't complaining. Get out takes effort, but also it depends on how you approach it. If you look at trying to leave as in "how to run what I have now without Windows OS," you're going to have a bad time. Instead, I would suggest a few approaches that make a transition a lot easier:

_Look at it as opportunity_ Other platforms have other ideas about how things should work. Instead of trying to replace Windows, take the time to realize that it's not the only way to solve problems. The Unix world has a pretty different idea about what's the way to work, which is often foreign until you realize there is a method to the madness. If you want opinionated and guided, MacOS is designed to have very strong "you won't have to worry about that" goal. Linux is the opposite and very flexible. So, you'll want to look at a lot of different distributions, as they all have particular goals in mind.

_Reconsider your current software_ Look at your current software and see if you can find replacements that are cross platform. This can mean software that runs on multiple platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, etc). This can also mean switching to cloud/self-hosted software. The software I use I choose through the lens of "if I have to give up my current platform of choice, does this go with me?"

_Sync your environment_ It can be daunting to jump ship to another OS if all your stuff is stuck on a different machine. I highly suggest SyncThing. It is a multi-platform, self-hosted synchronizer. Get a new machine (Linux, Mac) and sync your important files from your other machine. Now, you try out working on the new machine without loosing your work. Install some tools. Try getting stuff done. When you feel you've been held up for too long and need to get some stuff done again in Windows, all your stuff is magically sync'ed. Eventually, you'll find you're doing most of your work on the new machine, and you'll decide what to decommission from the old one.

_VM/Wine/Proton_ Windows support under Mac and Linux has come a long way. Maybe you still need a very specific piece of software. That's fine, just plan on taking time to figure out if you can still get it to work on your new platform.

About 12 years go I jumped from Windows to Mac and about 4 years ago I started working with Linux, as well. And, so can you. Today is your first day to start making changes.