dboreham

All cryptocurrency is permissioned. This is because governments can make it illegal for someone to turn your cryptocurrency into real currency. You need their permission to turn it into pizzas and yachts.

Thanks. Always wanted to know what the secret Styrofoam material in US thermonuclear weapons was...

No, but MPTCP makes it more likely to be exploited, supposedly.

About 80% of the time the AI overview is what I want anyway.

Very not true.

This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.

Well there's one at Google, one at Facebook...

This is entirely untrue. Go ask ChatGPT a complex tax question and decide if you need to call your accountant and spend $500 to verify the answer.

Seriously? Lawyers. Doctors. Civil engineering. Accountants. And that's just the fields I know of directly being significantly impacted that I could think of in 10 seconds. Oh, also: education.

Chat bot lol. It did all of those things including scanning the binary. I ran it after doing my own (albeit more limited, but maximal-human) investigation.

According to Claude when I asked it to audit one of our Python applications, there are scenarios where Brolti can be used only when some Python library detects that the C library is installed on the system. So your Brolti-ness can depend on which machine your code runs on. Ymmv, it didn't look to be a practical possibility in our code so I didn't probe further.

I understood 30 years ago (when a colleague suggested it as a plan) that "relocating to Tahoe" is something the California FTB views as a no-op.

This is a better article: https://www.aikido.dev/blog/python-packages-vulnerable-node2...

and this is the actual CVE report, which doesn't say much: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-111497

These days they may as well have the mental model of Docker when they start using a VM :)

Never, ever, ever, write your own userland threading library.

(rule broken by almost every language in common use, unfortunately)

An abacus wouldn't have been a luxury in our day.

Well, it's a check of a client, so obviously you have to run the client that you want to check.

A family member lives on a street where a Waymo likes to park while waiting on the next ride. Initially we joked that "the Waymo is taking a cigarette break" but seeing it there led to the family using them quite often. It would never let us just walk down to its cigarette spot though -- always needed to stub out its light then drive down a narrow back alley behind the building where nobody would suspect it would decide to do its pickup.

Balancing data set: I've been in many Waymo in Los Angeles and never had them do anything like this. Since you mentioned going to the airport presumably this was in Phoenix or San Antonio? Seems like the traffic on those places would be sub-LA level of difficult to navigate.

Yes the "lack of a human" is a feature. That said I've learned many things from talking to Uber drivers in various parts of the world (and in the US from Uber drivers from various parts of the world) so YMMV.

The paper seems like a high school science project, but in my experience one common reason for having a meeting is this: Person A wants Person B (Person C's boss) to tell Person C to do something. That's it. So Person A slacks or emails Person B saying I need to get Person C to do this thing. Person B says oh we better have a meeting. The three get onto the meeting and Person B says "yeah so Person A was talking about this thing, I'm not really sure what it is...". And the meeting ends with Person C saying "ok I will do that".

All of this can be avoided in my experience by creating a culture of task assignment. Often I've seen the bug/issue tracking system used to facilitate this but you can use other applications. In this scenario Person A would open a bug detailing what they want done, and either assign it, or put it in the triage queue so Person B get assigned next. Person B reviews, makes any notes, then assigns to Person C. That's it. No meeting.

You should probably try it.

Replace "AI agents" with "a bunch of human coders" and you'll see the answer. Your product needs decent testing and it's your job as the responsible person in charge to make sure that's in place and working properly. So if anything you probably want to be reviewing the test code. But often that isn't necessary since you can do things like introduce bugs deliberately and see if tests fail; check test logs for information that confirms the tests were run as expected; try some manual testing once in a while; ask for new more advanced tests (e.g. test performance not just functionality); and so on.

I don't know that "Weirdly" is right for the polynomial equivalence -- isn't that what Galois was trying to do in the first place (prove things about polynomials such as the impossibility of analytic solutions to higher order polynomials, and the impossibility of constructing a heptagon)?

Quick note that bank switching does not in fact allow the CPU to "address" more than 64K. It allows the machine to "have" more than 64K but only 64K of it can be addressed by the CPU at any time.

You have much to learn.

You can buy your eggs from Costco which iirc has their own egg operation these days.

I was going to say the same thing. Claude built an Occam compiler for me, including many test and example programs.

Or some elected government leader.

fwiw the fact that brains work fundamentally differently was my big penny dropping realization after digging into what LLMs are doing. Everything (I assert) a brain does (the function between inputs and outputs) is due to training data. There is no "instinct" and there is no "ROM-driven way to think" in any brain. It's training data all the way down. As a consequence different brains do indeed think in fundamentally different ways.