colanderman

I really don't understand your point. Are you nitpicking the wording of my figure of speech?

The officer I spoke to didn't understand what a right hook was, despite standing next to a bicycle.

I was confusing it with the "Dutch reach".

E-bikes are becoming dominant in Boston/Cambridge also. The Citi Bikes are fine, they're small and slow (and frankly the problem with them is new riders who are seemingly completely unaware of anything). It's the huge delivery bikes, the bros on pseudo-mopeds, and the humongous (and usually empty) baby-cart bikes (e.g. Tern) that are dangerous in bike lanes and mixed-use paths.

(Again -- I love that these are displacing cars. I just wish they physically displaced the cars also, and not pedal bicyclists and pedestrians.)

Our (Cambridge) bike infrastructure has really just come into its own after decades of advocacy by pedal bicyclists. So seeing it suddenly flooded with what are effectively mopeds and Vespas really hits a nerve, like it's 1990 all over again.

The Idaho stop is explicitly not running red lights. You stop at the red light, and proceed when it's clear. No "blowing past".

And we're talking about areas with dedicated and often physically separated bike lanes. We don't interact with you except at intersections.

Thank you for your perspective.

I've pondered but haven't been able to figure out the right solution to this in general, as I'd love e-bikes to displace cars as the dominant means of transport. Maybe a 3rd differentiated lane?

The closest similar vehicle I can think of is the motorized scooter (e.g. Vespa). They can't (and shouldn't) be allowed in bike lanes. But they're too slow for all but dense cities. In my region, I know famously they're the source of lots of contention on the island of Martha's Vineyard (which has few if any bike lanes).

But, in the States, most places that have dedicated bike lanes are dense cities. Vehicles can't legally or practically drive much faster than 30 MPH (~45 kph) anyway. Even as a pedal cyclist I can usually keep up with traffic. So it's largely not a problem here yet for the larger e-bikes to stay in the car lanes.

Yes that's it, thank you!

Police that enforce bicycle laws.

Mixed feelings about this, as a pedal cyclist.

Modern e-bikes are large and fast, and many of their riders ride unsafely and abuse bicycle infrastructure (which have been designed to accommodate pedal cyclists, who did the work fighting for them), making bike lanes and bike/walking paths dangerous for unpowered users. I'm of the opinion that they should be licensed and treated like motorcycles/scooters/mopeds unless limited (and inspected) to operate below a certain speed.

But restricting smaller e-bikes and pedal bikes from proceeding through red lights when safe is also excessive. Forcing cyclists to wait for when the cars next to them can move puts them at danger of right hooks. I've spoken with Cambridge MA bicycle police about this (who've been issuing warnings to cyclists doing this) and they were willfully obstinate and disingenuous to the point I wondered if they'd ever ridden a bicycle before.

I believe it's called the "Dutch protocol" or something (EDIT: "Idaho stop"!), that cyclists should treat stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs, which is an accepted and safe way to adapt car infrastructure to bicycles. NYC and Cambridge politicians and police seem too thick headed to understand bicycle safety though.

(Larger e-bikes I maintain should be subject to the same rules as motorcycles for lights and stop signs. They're immaterially different.)

In any case, criminal summons is ridiculous. Abuse of power that is putting noncitizens in danger.

Not at all. Politicians will carve out a law which protects them only. They've done it (or the inverse) before: https://www.propublica.org/article/do-as-we-say-congress-say...

You've… never been out to lunch on a Saturday?

I also credit straight-wrist typing with having not developed any keyboard-related RSI symptoms over 33 years. (Mice, on the other hand! Gripping a mouse started to cause me crazy wrist pain 20 years ago. Been using a trackball ever since.)

Opposite to you though, I find "desktop" keys (or I should say, keys with travel) preferable to "laptop" keys. Bottoming out each key on every stroke on a Macbook for years started giving me weird typing-spelling issues (some sort of precursor to focal dystonia? dunno). Keys with long travel prevent that for me. (Or maybe it's just because that's what I learned on – Apple //e keyboard.)

My fingers naturally rest on... (checks) Q-E-F-V N-J-I-P. That is, sort of like a V diagonal spanning the entire alphabetic region. Which coincidentally puts them on or 1 key away from every letter except X, Y and Z. But they move all over while I type anyway.

I also type unorthodoxly and quickly. Hands held diagonal (wrists straight), no particular finger-letter assignments. Closer to playing a piano. 33 years typing like this, going strong.

I can't think of any benefit of home row typing other than it's easy to teach in a prescriptive manner.

I'm not a chemist, but the article talks about it being prepared in a solution of ammonium hydroxide which can be poured on a floor and left to dry. Surely this is what the GP is comparing their memory to, and not a bucket of pure nitrogen trioxide.

There's also been an increase in wildfires since Pluto lost its status as a planet. Public info!

If you've found the private key for myveryveryveryverylongvanitypublickey, then so can an adversary.

Perhaps they already have reversed it because they guessed it might be desirable. Or maybe it has numeric properties which make it specifically easy to reverse (perhaps why you were able to discover it yourself).

(Also note that selecting the entire key to be vanity doesn't reduce the entropy to 0, just to the entropy of the vanity phrase. So a full vanity key may be equivalent to something like a 32-bit random public key.)

That may be true, but I don't think that it is obviously so.

If it were, then public keys could be shorter by the same amount and still provide the same level of protection.

But by design they are not.

Rust at least has a partial remedy to this problem: feature flags. Many libraries use them to gate features which would otherwise pull in extra dependencies. (In fact I believe there is specific support for flags which correspond to dependency names.)

> The DOD's statement […] has a ring of DOGE to it. Musk's efficiency department has already saved billions across the US Government's various agencies, with the DOD already said to have saved a cumulative and not-insignificant sum of around $6 billion to date.

Why include this unprompted and uncritical parroting of Trump regime propaganda? Beside that the "savings" are undocumented at best and in many cases simply made-up [1], slashing important services is "savings" the same way that not changing your car's oil is "savings".

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/us/politics/doge-contract...

Fantastic find, thank you. Many explorations of nonstandard tunings simply focus on how pure are the various intervals one can form in the tuning. But timbre really does play a crucial and often neglected role. It's been known for a long time for example that carillons, whose overtones more closely approximate a minor chord, sound more consonant when harmonized according to this knowledge.

You are conflating levels of trust.

The trust level required with Signal is, "do I trust the people in this chat not to share the specific communications I am sending to them with some other party whom I do not want to have a copy".

There are many many situations where this level of trust applies that "trust" in the general sense does not apply. It is a useful property.

And if you don't have that level of trust, don't put it in writing.

TM SGNL changes the trust required to, "do I also trust this 3rd party not to share the contents of any of my communications, possibly inadvertently due to poor security practices".

This is a categorical and demonstrably material difference in security model. I do not understand why so many are claiming it is not.

You are conflating "trust in all ways" with "trust to receive the communications in the specific chat they are party to". The former is not relevant.

Not part of Signal's security model, but trusting people in that chat very much can and should be part of the user's security model. If you don't trust them, why are they in the chat in the first place?

TM SGNL changes the security model from "I trust the people in the chat" to "I trust the people in the chat and also the company archiving the chat".

If you don't trust the people in your chat, they shouldn't be in your chat.

Somehow my eyes missed that! Edited my comment.

Somehow I didn't see that, good catch! (It's mentioned but not explained.) Edited my comment.

Simulated annealing [1] is mentioned but not explained in the list of modifications to hill climbing. The technique roughly is: accept modifications to the board which decrease the score, with a probability inversely related to the magnitude of the decrease, and which decreases as the search progresses. This helps avoid getting stuck in local maximae.

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

EDIT: Somehow I didn't see that simulated annealing was mentioned by name (but not explained), ha!

In the US frequency allocation within each band (including repeaters) is left up to regional spectrum management organizations (which have no legal authority). So it varies by region.

Here is the allocation for eastern New England for example: https://nesmc.org/docs/nesmc_bandplans_2023.pdf On the crowded 2m band we have 20 kHz for major repeaters and 9 kHz for smaller ones.

Nice! I've used a homegrown CQT-based visualizer for a while for audio analysis. It's far superior to the STFT-based view you get from e.g. Audacity, since it is multiresolution, which is a better match to how we actually experience sound. I have for a while wanted to switch my tool to a gammatone-filter-based method [1] but I didn't know how to make it efficient.

Actually I wonder if this technique can be adapted to use gammatone filters specifically, rather than simple bandpass filters.

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

The difference from FFT is this is a multiresolution technique, like the constant-Q transform. And, unlike CQT (which is noncausal), this provides a better match to the actual behavior of our ears (by being causal). It's also "fast" in the sense of FFT (which CQT is not).

I believe GP is proposing the opposite -- a test capable of proving it is not massless. (Presumably this has never been done.)