cobbzilla

I suppose tattoo ink isn’t all in the cells. I’d guess the ink within intracellular spaces is never removed by the body (or very, very slowly).

This is truly amazing. I love it!

Found a minor nit — the entry for “shoe” is at 3500 BCE and links to the Wikipedia article for “sandal”. But the Wikipedia article for “shoe” [1] indicates that the earliest shoes (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe

The author describes how four classes of people are affected by the tax.

There have been many articles about the struggles of entrepreneurialism in Europe.

Does anyone else see a connection here? One more straw on the camel’s back?

OG Amazon backend was mostly Perl iirc

Clearly there exists some higher-level product concept with a mapping of country->ASIN for that product. How hard is it to lookup the correct ASIN?

Maybe you end up on the home page when there is no ASIN for your country? There should be a nicer message telling you that’s what happened. But if it always dumps to the home page, that’s just dumb — Amazon could easily do the lookup.

Yes, thanks! I opened an issue on your support site. I got stuck on a file ownership error when trying to mount local repos. Excited to try it if I can get it to work :)

Love this idea, docs are good I just need to read them better :)

Trying it out now. Keep it fully open source and nicely pluggable and I'll keep being a fan!

Historically, the window to enshrine broad positive rights like those is only briefly open in the wake of a revolution, civil war, or at best significant civil unrest. It’s not a pleasant future to look forward to, we all have a lot of work to do!

We try to have moral laws but it’s impossible because morality is slippery. This is why we have judges and juries. Also, laws are not moral merely because they exist. Plenty of unjust and immoral laws on the books just depends who you ask.

I primarily use a @duck.com alias that forwards to my gmail account.

It's easy to generate random new @duck.com aliases for the primary.

I have a browser plugin (mobile and desktop) that recognizes email form fields and offers to generate a new random @duck.com alias for the field.

When an alias starts to receive spam, I disable it.

Steel-man angle: A desire for data provenance is a good thing with benefits that are independent of utopias/humans vs machines kinds of questions.

But, all provenance systems are gamed. I predict the most reliable methods will be cumbersome and not widespread, thus covering little actual content. The easily-gamed systems will be in widespread use, embedded in social media apps, etc.

Questions: 1. Does there exist a data provenance system that is both easy to use and reliable "enough" (for some sufficient definition of "enough")? Can we do bcrypt-style more-bits=more-security and trade time for security?

2. Is there enough of an incentive for the major tech companies to push adoption of such a system? How could this play out?

The article mentions speculation that the whole project may have been part of a larger ruse that the landing would be in a more fortified place.

Anyone have experience self-hosting? Maybe with https://www.npmjs.com/package/scimgateway running standalone, or proxying to an existing user store? Curious if there be dragons— do you need a few hundred users before encountering them?

But if we can figure out how people can live inside batteries, the housing problem is solved!

I really enjoyed the author’s explanation of undecidability.

I found this bit was really helpful:

“This to me is a strong "intuitive" argument for why the halting problem is undecidable: a halt detector can be trivially repurposed as a program optimizer / theorem-prover / bcrypt cracker / chess engine. It's too powerful, so we should expect it to be impossible.”

If I stand in a particular spot and do nothing, it’s OK. Now I do exactly the same thing, except beforehand I say I’ll be thinking a forbidden thought while doing it. My previously legal action is now illegal because I am imposing my religious beliefs on you. Am I understanding correctly?

What if it was a regular newspaper, but secretly he was praying and not actually reading the paper. Is he a criminal?

In the linked article, the criminal was not alleged to have obstructed anything. He did message the town council saying he was holding a silent vigil, which he had done before apparently without incident. This time he was arrested, PSPO was applied, and he was fined £9000.

If his message to the council said he’d be standing there reading the newspaper, would the arrest and conviction have been made?

Got it, standing and thinking could be a criminal offense, depending on what you are thinking. Understood.

I did have it technically wrong but practically correct.

Do go have a quick conversation with your favorite AI about this. Ask if anyone in the UK has ever been punished for saying a true thing, and whether the cost on the defendant to prove innocence is not so exorbitant as to allow libel to be weaponized by the wealthy against their critics.

The thing that boggles my mind most is the UK libel laws where stating a true, verifiable fact can be illegal if it makes the subject look bad. Someone tell me I’ve got that wrong.

For personal projects, absolutely great advice.

For any codebase destined for a team to develop, primary consideration goes to the technologies the team prefers, not my own preferences. Which makes for a fun guessing game when you’re green-fielding and before you’ve built the team.

Long and meandering read, but the excellent bird puns throughout make it worthwhile.

Gitea can be easily self-hosted and supports Gitea Actions, which are largely compatible with GitHub Actions. I’m about to try it out. https://docs.gitea.com/next/usage/actions/overview

This still does actual work. Where are echo-ai and cat-ai?

I know some Ukrainians who say the exact opposite— Russian was taught in schools, all the big important jobs went to Russians, at firms where Russian was spoken, government business was conducted in Russian, and so on. It’s curious how these accounts can be so different, so I’m going to choose to believe the folks I’ve met in person on many occasions.

99.9999999% of software written is not published, it’s covered by trade secret law. Copyright only applies to published works. Look into what happens legally when source code is leaked and published.

conceptually sure; but size-wise they are so different as to warrant valid questions about ROI.

Chicago Pile 1 ran for 12 years, ITER started ~12 years ago and plans to run into the 2030s at least. Budget and headcount would likely be vastly different too, I’d welcome any educated guesses. Sometimes quantity has a quality of its own, as they say.

It wasn’t a relicense, the copyright was never validly filed (date was missing), so the copyright was never registered. Only registered copyrights can be enforced in the US. No registration, no enforcement rights. Or at least that’s my layman’s understanding, happy to be corrected.

I find it implausible that anyone who actually rode these could remember them fondly.

To the defenders: I ask you to please describe your memory of “the BART smell” from the cloth-seat era, if you have such firsthand experience.

I do remember. Many years make a strong impression. And while that specific smell-memory is largely indescribable, it’s nonetheless and unfortunately quite unforgettably awful.

My attempt: imagine a laundry hamper very full of very dirty clothes, including a few with fecal/other/mystery stains, slow-baked for weeks in a warm closet. Now open the closet door and take a deep nasal breath— that’s what stepping onto the train was like. I feel zero positive nostalgia.