2,022 karma · joined June 2, 2015
dilip@katamari.io
This doesn’t seem right. Why wouldn’t someone guess a bit 0, see if the recovered message makes sense, and if it doesn’t, then try bit 1?
It would make the entire scheme useless no? Am I missing something?
There is a fungus [0]. that takes over a carpenter ant's brain and makes it climb up plants and clutch on to a leaf with it's jaw and hang down from it. The fungus then sprouts the fruiting body from the dangling ant and spreads its spores.
As an armchair theorist, anything that can interface with a brain and coordinate a nervous system to produce complicated movement has to be capable of computation at some level.
[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis#Na...
The author discusses the possibility of intricately connected subterranean mycelium networks electrically signaling each other acting as a giant nervous system. He stops himself from calling it a giant brain, but admits that the possibility isn't really far fetched given everything else that we know about fungi.
It's a fantastic book. Strong recommend.
[0]. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WJ84V9B/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/feed/
Strong recommend if you are into RSS.
1. There is something meaningful/profitable that you can do with the borrowed money
2. Your credibility allows you to buy a loan at cheap prices
3. Your inflation predictions are accurate
4. Your loan’s terms keep the interest rate fixed at a rate less than the inflation you expect
As for myself, I don’t think I can put extra capital to profitable use right now, so I’m not going to be borrowing any money.
I’ve never heard of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative. Can someone here please point me to some more details about this?
> Basically, they seem to enjoy exploring moderately-exotic productivity-improvement methods generally.
I’ve never considered these exotic or even moderately exotic tools, and the appeal has nothing to do with this attribute generally. These are good tools for performing the task at hand, and that is their only appeal.
> For one they're often one-handed, leaving the other hand free to use a pointing device or whatever else
To me, this is an anti-feature. I do all my work on the terminal, and generally speaking - I prefer tools that don’t need me to take my hands off a keyboard (thus the modal text editors). Two points: first, I can perform most tasks with my keyboard using muscle memory - I don’t need to look at where my mouse pointer is and navigate it to a menu button (and hope the UI hasn’t changed on me and moved the menu options around). Second, GUI applications consume a ton of resources and are slow. Nothing is faster than launching ripgrep from vim for searching for text in a moderately large source code repository.
> Two, they seem much more ergonomic than a standard keyboard - what could be more natural than grasping a keyer in any orientation that feels right?
I’m not familiar with this- I’ll take your word for it. But keep in mind that people writing code care a lot about semicolons, curly braces, parentheses, single quotes (‘), double quotes (“), all sorts of other characters (#%)?!&| etc)and the exact number of whitespaces (and tabs are extremely different from spaces!). These are used extremely frequently- depending upon the programming language, some of these are used more frequently than several common english alphabets. QWERTY works for this distribution (and DVORAK too).
A one handed keyboard that makes this wide range of characters readily available to type without requiring exotic combo-keys will require some innovations.
> three they are extremely portable which opens them up for use with laptops or HMDs.
Today, most programmers working on portable devices are making a trade off between screen real estate and portability (all other specs being equal). But even the smallest laptop that has a screen size large enough to please a programmer (say a 12” laptop display) can fit a sufficiently large qwerty keyboard. Probably if coding on an iPad or a phone becomes mainstream, there might be an opportunity to design an innovative and portable new programming keyboard. Today, that need doesn’t exist.
1. I already work at FAANG + Microsoft
2. I used to work at FAANG + Microsoft, now I’m moving on to other things
3. I will attempt to work there in the future.
4. There are no meaningful jobs at FAANG + Microsoft for my career/field/specialization
5. I am happy where I am and don’t feel a need to move
6. I am making a trade off for family/kids in school/geography/bigger houses/other reasons
This should create a more balanced poll.
My take: Coding in C will teach you a two unique skills:
First, mastering working with pointers will inevitably lead you to debugging cache-miss related performance issues, virtual vs physical addresses when dealing with MMUs and a couple of other low level CPU details that are hard to learn about any other way (yes, this can also be done with C++).
Second, Because C is a barebones language, you’ll have to build everything yourself. Linked lists, hash tables, queues, binary search trees - all of it! And since you are working with pointers, a lot of the data structures and why they matter will make sense at a level that is impossible to grasp with say python (For example, any C programmer who picks up the usual university textbooks on algorithms and data structures looking for a reference to implement a hash table will end up disappointed- most books tell you how hash tables work, but very few tell you how to implement a hash function correctly - and with C, this matters a lot!)
C++ trades off some of C’s language simplicity in exchange for developer velocity. Hash tables, vectors etc are all taken care of for you. But this is actually a dangerous trade off: C++ gives you a language that will not fit in your head, and you can never be entirely certain about the behavior of code hidden from you by design.
Rust makes a ton of sense as a C++ replacement. It takes the same trade off that C++ did (give up language simplicity for developer velocity) but also adds guard rails around to help keep things sane.
I am convinced that rust is the future in every place where C++ makes sense today.
C is different. Yes, it suffers from many of the same bad things as C++. However, people who write C also work differently: they are used to building everything from scratch, they know their projects need more time to complete, they can look at almost every single line of code and tell you roughly what machine code it will compile down to. The language is small enough that it everyone knows all of it, most agree on the best way to do things and critical bugs are often spotted by just recognizing that some code doesn’t appear to follow well known patterns for implementing something (see how the OpenBSD community find bugs for example).
In short, it’s hard to recommend rust over C because they kind of come with different developer ethos. But Rust over C++ is a no brainer any day. And Rust over C makes sense any time C++ over C makes sense (which is the case for most C projects)
One interesting quote about rust in the context of OpenBSD [1]
> For instance, rust cannot even compile itself on i386 at present time because it exhausts the address space.
C is not going away anytime soon.
I buy software from the app store for sure. But I do not pull down .apk binaries from the darkweb and run them on my phone - especially if I don't know who the author was. I doubt most sane people would download and run binaries from random websites (darkweb or not) even today.
> You host everything on your own hardware?
No I don't. I trust my hosting provider, and they have a track record of reputable service, I have a business relationship with them. I would say I know who is hosting my website.
Anecdotal data point here, but I experienced more than just an improvement in mood. I had a completely unexpected blossoming of immense amounts of creativity.
About three weeks into my total news cut off, I started to feel sober in a way that is similar to discovering sobriety during December holiday weeks with family after non stop drinking for months in College.
Unlike the author in the linked article, I did a complete cut off from all "news-like" sources: TV news, Youtube channels, social media, reddit, podcasts that talk about current events, blogs and newsletters that discuss news - all of it.
When conversations started to become awkward (about 6 months after being completely cut off and I could no longer infer/derive the common assumptions underlying a conversation in a group), I subscribed to The Economist, directed their Espresso newsletter to Feedbin and started reading that about every other day. I found that a handful of bullet points about what's going on in the world per week is sufficient for me to keep up with any conversation I find myself in.
If there are any other news abstainers here, I'd love to hear your life hacks and tricks that you use to navigate the world.
> I don't really check who's building my websites or little tools I purchase.
How do you sleep at night? Honest question. I want to know the assumptions and reasoning that leads to one being comfortable with this decision.
I’m probably more worried than I should be, but every time I look at my puny little openBSD webserver’s log, I find about 2 to 5 new attempts to scan my server for various exploits a month. Each attempt is a relentless scans looking for all sorts of holes with hundreds of potential exploits. The first time I read those logs, I swore I would never move from openBSD + httpd ever.
The internet is outright hostile to any computer with an ip address and a port open to the internet.
I’m sure there are some companies out there that provide hosting solutions that do a good job at keeping things updated - but even they are defenseless against things like the recent log4j vulnerability (and that’s just the stuff the good guys caught). At the very least, I would want to know who is building my websites and what their track record is.
Bonus points if you hook up the robot's control to Twitch chat, #TwitchPlaysPokemon style.
Can you please elaborate? My exposure to DragonflyBSD is limited to knowing that they have an interesting new filesystem (Hammer2).
What is it like to actually use it? Is Hammer2 a significant improvement over ZFS on FreeBSD? Does Dragonfly have other selling points?
I’d love to hear the strongest case for deploying Dragonfly.
My go to example is my laptop’s keyboard backlight works exactly as expected from tty terminals.
I’m willing to limit my hardware options to the small subset that works with OpenBSD in return for having an OS that I can trust. Fortunately, this small subset includes the X1 Carbon thinkpads which are really nice.
I’m experimenting living with a combination of iPad + openBSD thinkpad - iPad for things like Netflix and Zoom where the business isn’t interested in supporting openBSD, and my laptop for everything else.
PS: Bluetooth is a terrible protocol and should be nuked from orbit out of existence. None of my 5 bluetooth headphones (from different vendors and different price ranges) can figure out which device I was last playing from, my car repeatedly steals my bluetooth audio and starts playing music without my consent every single time, audio stops streaming randomly despite my phone/iPad thinking that they are connected and continuing to play - I can rant for a long time. I genuinely respect openBSD developers for deleting the bluetooth stack to improve the OS quality.
If you are going to continue to participate in written content on the internet, please remember that RSS is not dead and there are many of us who consume content exclusively via RSS. My 2 cents :-)
Strongly recommend reading this response by Terry Lambert on getting OSX to POSIX compliance.
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
> Based on what we've observed, and our current standard model of particle physics, only one type of neutrino can be massless.
Is the standard model complete to the point where we can predict how many types of neutrinos exist and what their properties should be?
I always thought that the standard model as a set of equations (a model) that fits observed data, without venturing far into “why this model is the governing principle for our universe”. That is, it is not able to explain things like “why an electron comes with two heavier varieties”.
Are neutrinos somehow different in a way that we can understand them to the point where we know things like “only one type of neutrino can be massless”?
Steven Erickson, Ian C. Esslemont and their friends spent a decade world building while playing table top games. First Erickson then Esselmont started pouring over that world into the Malazan series.
It is, without question, the largest, most complicated, most inspiring entertaining engaging and satisfying collection of plots, sub plots, sub sub plots, sub sub sub plots, super plots, super super plots and possibly super super super plots. I'm only 2 re-reads in - people who are into their 4th or 5th re-read tell me they are still discovering layers.
The downside is that the first book in the series - Gardens of the Moon - is ridiculously difficult to get started with. There's a read-along blog that Tor did that helped me get through it - but it's still a challenge. I had to downgrade from an audiobook to an ebook and then to a paperback because I kept flipping back to remind myself who someone/something was.
Unfortunately, it boils down to org charts and who talks to whom in a company.
An engineer who owns the proximity sensor device driver is usually not invited to the meeting where the industrial design lead is showing off the latest iteration to the product and marketing team.
My personal opinion: most obvious flaws in consumer hardware is just a reflection of flaws within the OEM’s org chart and the networks of people within the chart.
These are generally simple sensors but they are sort of hard to quality control in the factory and tuning them generally takes some significant amount of work.
The problem for phones without a “notch” like what the iPhone does is that the OEMs tried to put the proximity sensor below the screen. It generally works - but the problem is that the IR pulses emitted by the sensor excite the display and will turn on pixels and create a grey or white spot over the sensor. Product managers later decided that they don’t like this spot, so engineers had to put in all sorts of software mitigation, mostly involving turning off the sensors and making them less sensitive.
An expensive phone generally has a larger team of engineers who will tune these sensors, work on the factory quality control problems and generally make things reliable. Apple, with their strong engineering culture has generally refused to deal with the white dot on screen thing entirely by putting the sensor on the notch.
Unfortunately with lower end phones, you can’t get the same quality that you will get with a $800 phone. There are people who work really really hard to make things better, but its mostly underfunded engineering teams trying to fix problems in software that honestly should be fixed in the sensor hardware by the vendors.
EB-2 is definitely not a 10 year wait.
From the Congressional research service's report on immigration backlog [1], for applicants from India, the projected backlogs for various employment-based green card applications applying in 2020 are:
EB-1: 8 years.
EB-2: 195 years.
EB-3: 27 years.
Projecting out to 2030, the report says (for Indian applicants):
EB-1: 18 years.
EB-2: 436 years.
EB-3: 48 years.
"20-30 years" has been wishful thinking for Indian applicants for a long time now.
[1]. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46291
EDIT: I was bored, so I performed a linear extrapolation using the 2020 and 2030 estimates. Two points and a straight line through them gives:
eb-1 eb-2 eb-3
2024 12 292 36
2023 11 268 34
2022 10 244 32
2021 9 220 30
2020 8 195 27
2019 7 171 25
2018 6 147 23
2017 5 123 21
2016 4 99 19
2015 3 75 17
2014 2 51 15
2013 1 27 13
Did I miss anything?
MAGMA: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon.