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cpercivaon Image of our satellite-choked night skies

An astronomer would presumably not erase the stars.

cpercivaon Image of our satellite-choked night skies

The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.

This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".

cpercivaon Tell HN: Please Vote

I care about democracy everywhere. But yes, being Canadian makes me unusually sensitive to wanting a democracy 30 km south of me.

cpercivaon BYD sold more EVs last month than the US did all quarter

Have you looked at Polestars? They're nicer than any ICE car I've ever driven.

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

I hope you're not suggesting that I am anti-intellectual.

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

Revealed preference of academia as a whole, not of the individuals working within it.

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

Prior to the ACA, states were not required to cover adults without dependent children.

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

anyone making below $1,799/mo, with no asset test

Is that how it worked in 2005?

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

Does "opening a malicious web site in Chrome" count as "controlled conditions"?

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

Linus said some silly things too. Fortunately the security and cryptography community mostly understood.

cpercivaon The Duty of a Scholar

Wow that showed up quickly.

Readers might also consider my 2020 post "On the use of a life" to be an interesting companion piece: https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-...

cpercivaon Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers

Transmission is privately owned and operated but publicly controlled. Like other natural monopolies, the regulator tells the operator what to provide and how much they get paid for it.

The main reasons for this arrangement are political -- debt stays off the government's balance sheet, and labour disputes aren't "the government's fault".

cpercivaon Tell HN: I unknowingly broke the PHP RCE embargo. I am sorry

This is exactly how it works. People who are part of the embargo are responsible for making sure that anyone they share information with -- which should usually be nobody! -- are aware of and abide by the embargo.

cpercivaon One Hash Bloom Filters

While much cheaper than going to disk, computing k independent hashes per key is still a bit expensive for very high performance systems.

Depends how big the bloom filter is. Most hashes are big and their bits are independent.

cpercivaon Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages

Right, because there are established standards.

cpercivaon Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages

AI-enabled hacking

Do people get locked up for fatal traffic accidents? Do doctors get locked up if they prescribe a medicine which leads to a patient's death due to a side effect?

Criminal prosecution, in civilized countries, requires both Actus Reus and Mens Rea. If you deliberately commit computer crime using an AI system, you'll already be prosecuted; the cases we keep hearing about from AI labs have no human intent behind them.

The accepted solution to unintended harms is regulation: We have regulations about automotive safety, we have regulations about pharmaceutical testing and approval, etc.

cpercivaon Reducing undefined behavior in the C language

No, CHERI supports sub-object capabilities.

cpercivaon So you think you could be an electrician?

And drywallers get no respect.

I find this especially unfortunate given that, in my experience, drywallers understand the rest of the trades far better than vice versa, since they're in the position of being able to see everyone else's completed work.

cpercivaon More Than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size (2001)

They aren't really separate applications, though. More importantly, that's not the primary effort (and cost) driver for this effort estimation model. I used the COCOMO model, an effort estimation model that was publicly available and widely used at the time. I then applied its rules to the Linux kernel of that time, as best I could.

COCOMO says that the cost scales superlinearly with the number of SLoC; my point is that drivers scale linearly because they're effectively separate projects. (In fact, to the extent that they're not separate projects, the cost in fact scales sublinearly since there's a bunch of code being copied and pasted when new drivers are written.) Your tool has this "--multiproject" concept; a better estimate would have identified which parts of the tree (primarily drivers) were functionally separate from the rest of the kernel.

I think its key point was absolutely correct: it would have cost far more than $50,000 USD to re-develop the Linux kernel of that time.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not disputing the conclusion; just the claim that an OS kernel is inherently more complex than another application of the same size.

cpercivaon More Than a Gigabuck: Estimating GNU/Linux's Size (2001)

in fact, operating systems kernels are known to be more difficult to develop than typical applications.

I'm not convinced. The core OS kernel code, sure; but more than half of the Linux kernel is drivers, and those are not just applications but separate applications; a change in an Intel wifi driver is unlikely to interact in any way with the nvme driver.

cpercivaon EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

No, all the Commonwealth countries changed their succession laws at the same time precisely to avoid this scenario.

cpercivaon FreeBSD 14.5-Release

-CURRENT is great for cattle. For pets, I recommend -RELEASE.

cpercivaon Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal

It's entirely reasonable for the USG to say "we don't want to use a product with guardrails". Plenty of people have gotten annoyed with Fable and done exactly that!

But to prohibit anyone else from using it is a much bigger and more questionable step.

cpercivaon Launching Route 53 Files

unseasonal April fools joke

Not at all. Route 53 Files is a completely real service.

cpercivaon Launching Route 53 Files

Oh, I assumed that "style guide" meant things like starting launch posts with "I'm excited to announce", providing a simple demonstration of how to use the service, including screenshots, including a customer quote if available, and ensuring that pricing and availability were clearly laid out.

cpercivaon Launching Route 53 Files

Yeah, I was aware of those... but I just couldn't bring myself to write American, especially in the current political climate. You can consider those a non-tariff trade barrier.

cpercivaon Launching Route 53 Files

Oh, I was being facetious. I'm pretty sure Jeff mentioned needing to spend time writing a style guide when he started having other Amazonians write posts for "his" blog.

As a non-Amazonian I've never seen it, of course.

cpercivaon Launching Route 53 Files

Wait, there's an official style guide?

(In all seriousness, I've been reading AWS launch posts for 20 years; this one was mainly imitating the S3 Files launch post but I diverged by adding the customer quote and the FAQ -- because of course I started this process with a PRFAQ, and some of the questions in the FAQ are legitimately important.)

cpercivaon Launching Route 53 Files

Files which aren't DNS keys get ignored by Route 53 Files. So you could absolutely have a git checkout and update your DNS with 'git pull'.