drpixie

It's increasingly difficult to get current hardware for which an alternative OS is available, and which is not locked.

Right now, it seems to be fairphone or pixel, or old phones which are not easy to obtain. Samsung have announced they will lock their phones, and how long before google locks pixels?

Is that really still a problem? I've always had trackpads work straight-off 100%, and find battery life to be way better under linux (perhaps because it's not running a million unwanted services.)

Arrggg- that's the best reason, so far, to avoid Go.

Almost nothing is a number. A length is not a number, an age is not a number, a phone number is not a number - sin(2inches) is meaningless, 30years^2 is meaningless, phone#*2 is meaningless, and 2inches+30years is certainly meaningless - but most of our languages permit us to construct, and use, and confuse these meaningless things.

Naaa ... most "new" languages are just reinventions of stuff that's been around for ... 45 years, by people who should know better.

1. Don't take it personally. They don't know or care who you are.

2. Some kind of rate limiter is becoming essential for servers. Scanning/probing is worse than rude but there's plenty of obnoxious out there.

Fail2ban can easily be configured to handle simple login or vulnerability scans.

If there's not something similar for web servers, it wouldn't be hard to write one. Anyone know of fail2ban or rate-limiters for webservers?

Remember when the justification for cloud was "Your work is not trapped on one device". Well, turns out your cloud data is trapped on one device, AND it's not under your control.

My first thought was that they referred to metaphorically poisonous books, something that scans the catalogue looking nasty books about diversity or gender ... "oh no, more book banning".

Absolutely - there are so many really bad wheels out there:

- wheels that force you to do things that way the maker wants, instead of the way that suits you;

- wheels that are fine going downhill ... but nowhere else;

- wheels require you to attach an ever more expensive widget;

- wheels that promise but never quite deliver;

- wheels that keep pushing you into services that you just know are going to be a pain.

Often your own wheel is the best.

I'd rather travel with you, than those who insist on always carrying a camera.

Everyone sees and feels the world quite differently without a camera. With one, part of you is preoccupied and looking for images, not with being in the place and feeling the experience.

I might loose out in the pictures-of-my-trip competition, and in the I've-"done"-that-place conversation. But I don't want to be the person who "did" somewhere. I want to be the person who got to know it a bit, who lived it, who met the locals, and who remembers the place and the feelings.

We're all sadly gullible.

We're all in IT. We know what an LLM is. But still we're fooled!?

100% agree.

Google recently (unrequested) provided me with very detailed AI generated instructions for server config - instructions that would have completely blown away the server. There will be someone out there who just follows the bouncing ball, I hope they've got good friends, understanding colleagues, and good backups!

For python apps (whether we should use python for apps is another question completely) my preferred config language is python.

A little config.py file gets imported by everything in the project. It contains nothing but assignments to config variables. No functions. Nothing dragged in from a file. Just variable assignments.

It's easy to understand, easy to update, and everyone understands this much python.

There is a nice sshd option (-T) that tells you what it's really doing. Just run

   sudo sshd -T | grep password

> Do you find the resulting natural language description is easier to reason about?

An example from an different field - aviation weather forecasts and notices are published in a strongly abbreviated and codified form. For example, the weather at Sydney Australia now is:

  METAR YSSY 031000Z 08005KT CAVOK 22/13 Q1012 RMK RF00.0/000.0

It's almost universal that new pilots ask "why isn't this in words?". And, indeed, most flight planning apps will convert the code to prose.

But professional pilots (and ATC, etc) universally prefer the coded format. Is is compact (one line instead of a whole paragraph), the format well defined (I know exactly where to look for the one piece I need), and it's unambiguous and well defined.

Same for maths and coding - once you reach a certain level of expertise, the complexity and redundancy of natural language is a greater cost than benefit. This seems to apply to all fields of expertise.

On a similar theme, read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unlikely_Voyage_of_Jack_de...

I used to buy Brother for exactly this reason,but recently had an older (but upgraded) Brother not recognise 3rd-party toner :(

So ... not HP, not Brother ... anyone left that sells reasonable printers with honest firmware?

> Initially I thought to use , for float but ended use using . for floats.

Better - check the computer's region setting and use the local language convention, so decimal point is "." is English speaking regions, and "," is Euro regions, and who knows what else in other regions. That way code might work in one location but fail in another ;)

Paris is a special case - you've got a great metro and everywhere is close to a station :)

Perhaps distance to a non-metro station (eg a TER "mainline" station like Gare du Nord) would give more representative results?

I wait with interest.

If you're going to make a big claim about sort speed, tell me how speed is better/worse for various data. How do the algorithms compare when the data is already ordered, when it's almost (but not quite) already ordered, when it's largely ordered, when it's completely random, and it's in the opposite order. This stuff, as well as the size of the dataset, is what we need to know in practice.

Concorde development was a (UK & France) national project. They would have had easy access to military aircraft. Aircraft like the Lightning might only just have been able to intercept but would easily have observed pre-arranged tests.

I wasn't on the engineering team ;) but apparently they planned 4000 hours of test flights. https://web.archive.org/web/20150316210132/http://aviationwe...

It's almost inconceivable that the test flights would not have been closely recorded, especially the significant ones including trans-sonic and supersonic ops. Despite the best design and air-tunnel work, you'd expect that things would go wrong and you really want to learn as much as possible from any incidents/events.

Unfortunately, all this happened well before the internet age, and so records and images are not so easily found :(

Yup. There must have been any number of photos taken by chase planes during development.

Bit of an aside, but the "Infinite Noise TRNG" seems to generate not very random "raw" data, which it hashes to make it appear as random bits.

Am I missing something, or wouldn't it be better to start with highly random raw data, and hash that to get more bits-per-second?

Seems like a fashion thing, but the Linux distribs I've recently checked out all defaulted to a dark mode. Fine for night but a pain to read normally :(

> and purchased box fans because servers were literally catching on fire

Ah yes, or a collection of R2D2 portable air conditioners, with the tails draped out through the window.

Or a coolant leak that no one noticed until the sub-floor was completely full and the floor panels started to float!

> Everywhere a C constant-expression appears in the C grammar the compiler should be able to execute functions at compile time, too, as long as the functions do not do things like I/O, access mutable global variables, make system calls, etc.

That one is easily broken. Pick a function that runs for a lloooonngg time...

  int busybeaver(int n) {...}    // pure function returns max lifetime of n state busy beaver machine

  int x = busybeaver(99);

Ada has had something similar and very flexible since from the 80s ... like:

  loop
    Get(Current_Character);
  exit when Current_Character = '*';
    Echo(Current_Character);
  end loop;

There's not that much new under the prog lang sun :(

>>I don't force you to use SSL/TLS to connect here. Use it if you want, but if you can't, hey, that's fine, too.

She accepts http AND https requests. So it's your choice, you want to know who you're talking to, or you want speed :)

Absolutely - current windows is truly horrible, ads, ads, ads, crash :( If I were designing something to be deliberately distracting, annoying, and confusing, it would look a lot like windows!

Re the need for anonymous papers, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Controversial_Ideas and https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/ (the JCI tends to the arts and philosophy).

What's with giving error rates as a count of bits, when it's not clear how much DRAM was tested? There's a comment that the error was around 50% but the graphs should be error percentage, not some (meaningless) absolute number!

And there was an interesting feature - error rates didn't seem to change linearly with time, but (strongly for DDR4 and less so for DDR5) the error rate changes in intervals of 8 seconds. That's very much unexpected, so needs a good explanation or indicates a likely error in their procedure.