edwcross

Given the amount of injuries related to mountain biking, is there some specific insurance needed for it? It seems one of those "net-negative for the society activities", like trampolines.

Just an anecdote, but 10 years following about 200-300 laptops, with about 90% of them using SSDs, I only had 2 drive failures, both with SSDs: one of them became completely unusable (all data lost and impossible to recover anything, even after paying a specialized company to retrieve the data), and the other cost 2k$ to get the data back - and the company struggled with it for a few weeks, after which the data became less useful.

Apparently the company was better equipped to handle HDDs, and would have probably gotten the data easily if that were the case. But the experience made me very dubious of SSD reliability.

In both cases, users were using their laptops just fine, and out of the blue, the laptops froze or had some erratic behavior, and the next time they booted, the drives were already unusable.

On the other hand, when I had an HDD failure (due to electrical power fluctuation), except for some bad sectors where the needle hit the disk, it remained usable for years.

So I agree with you, their failure modes are important. Of course, nowadays most laptops only have M.2 slots anyway, so HDDs are completely out of the question.

It _is_ possible to do some checks at compile time, but not for all programs. Or, you can check all programs, but only be _sure_ about your results on some of them. Or, you can add some constraints and force the programmer to write extra information so that you can make it work on more programs.

Overall, there's no free lunch: somewhere, someone will have to do some extra work.

Other useful invariants include some RAII idioms, Rust memory checks, resource usage (e.g. locks), etc.

Don't worry, in Europe, the incumbent manufacturers have a much better way to prevent EV sales: lack of charging spots. Unless you are rich enough to own a house and install your own charger, the law still does not mandate, even for apartment buildings currently under construction, electrical plugs in parking spots. Which means that, if you rent, you can't buy an EV. If you own your apartment, you STILL can't buy an EV (unless you convince everyone else to spend at least 5k€/spot to install such plugs, and wait 2-3 years).

A "super-parallel Python port" of C-Reduce, cvise (https://github.com/marxin/cvise), is actually written in Python.

9kW, as in, a 40A current in 220V? If you consider 127V in some regions, it's a 70A current, so wires at least 3mm thick for 40A, or 5mm for 70A. These seem much scarier (and prone to fire risks if not respected) than the shower itself. Without taking into account the likelihood of a breaker box tripping at such high loads.

It seems that the standard rated power of Brazilian showers is 5.5 kW. But then again, Irish weather seems harsher than Brazilian weather.

The article mentions "ASTM International Standard F1166", and shows a few pictures and recommendations concerning check boxes. I'm very much looking for this kind of thing, for React-like interfaces, so that (1) we don't have to spend too much time thinking about this sort of details, and (2) we respect some good design principles without having been trained on it.

Unfortunately, the standard in question is quite expensive and probably most of it will not be useful for web design. Is there an equivalent document/standard for websites?

Letters of recommendation are one of the best use cases of LLMs because they are, by definition, full of bullshit and formalism, and with very little actual content.

A fan letter, especially one from a child, is the opposite of that. That's the reason so many people find the ad appalling.

They will hopefully stop the contract with the company... or waste a good amount of time trying to discuss with them. With a bit of luck, they'll use the same communication channel as the end users, be unable to contact them, and realize how unethical the company is.

It seems the cap is the most UV-sensitive part, and that is solved by adding something to protect it: "The lamps work best with a black cap - a film case can also be used".

For years, Dell laptops came with a USB key containing drivers, a sort of "rescue boot disk". I once tried using them as a normal pen drive, but then realized they were read-only.

If there is a way to make them writable via software, that would be very interesting (and dangerous).

By the way, when I actually joined the "real" NixOS Discord, and asked a few questions but got no answers, I realized it was better to be on my own. I don't know if there was much useful information inside it, but I can see how it can help kill an open-source sofware community: you either arrived early and had the time to digest the information, or you end up having a very bad experience trying to search for the information, trying to understand how the community works, which channels are useful and which are not... so you choose between being the chatty noob who annoys everyone, or the silent lurker who spends hours looking for information or waiting for a reply.

I once wanted to join the NixOS Discord. But of course people just call it "Nix", so I googled "Nix discord" and followed the first link ("NIX Official Discord").

Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS.

The complete opaqueness of the process makes it impossible to know anything at all about the community you are about to join.

From what I found, XTTSv2 is based on the Coqui Public Model License, which explicits disallows commercial commercial usage: "This license allows only non-commercial use of a machine learning model and its outputs."

So, from what I understand, I cannot use it and then upload the training video to Youtube. Or can I?

I don't understand what the "publicly available" means. I tried some of them and they seem to require logins or paying accounts. Does this mean that for such streams, I'm in a geo-restricted area? I wonder where some of these would _not_ be geo-restricted (especially e.g. "Canal+").

Thanks! I had never heard about it.

From what this website says (https://weblogs.asp.net/chuckop/110153), this behavior started on Windows 2000, which might explain why it didn't work on my emulated Windows 98...

I think one of the major "sins" of those interfaces (that is still pervasive today) is the inability to select text on most labels. Back then, Google did not exist, but being able to select and copy the text on e.g. an error message is something that has since become very useful, and that's still not afforded by GUIs.

Well, at least nowadays we can use ridiculous solutions such as normcap (taking a screenshot and OCRing it) to get such a basic feature.

This "clapping" thing does sound a bit 1984-like, a ritual to remember that others are watching you and so you should conform to the social norm.

Did the clapping actually help the NHS in any way?

There was a discussion two months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271472) about a paper on using neutrino beams to destroy nuclear weapons, which showed that neutrinos can be dangerous.

Is it written/enforceable somewhere?

Nice improvements in text rendering, but it seems generating hands and fingers is still difficult for SD3. None of the pictures in the example contain human hands, except for the pixelized wizard; and the monkey hands seem a bit odd.

I've seen a few hacky projects (e. g. https://www.carlosterminel.com/wearable-compass) over the years about haptic belts, and I've been wanting to try one of these, but I've never seen them commercialized. Have you tried them? Otherwise, could you please describe why the sense of north "kind of sucked"?

In my experience, having a flagship Android phone with unreliable compass such that I cannot even get my bearings when leaving a subway station, is extremely annoying. Such a belt would seem more useful to me.

I did try different 8BitDo controllers, and one issue with them is the "multi-mode": in order to make them work with Android/iOS/Windows/whatever, you need to press some key before connecting them, to change the way the OS recognizes the input. Which is a deal-breaker for small children, and prevents keeping things simple (e.g. "remember to disconnect and reconnect the USB before turning the power on", e.g. when using a Raspberry Pi-based console emulator). For wireless controllers, it's even worse (extra Bluetooth mode). If only they had mechanical switches to select this behavior... You may need to keep the instructions booklet with it, just to remember which keys must be pressed before turning it on, to see which mode will be activated. The controller in TFA is more useful in this scenario, since it will always behave in the same way.

Maybe you're luckier with English, but having recently tested a Uniherz Titan Pocket with physical keyboard, I just realized how my "past memories" left aside many details: typing accents and special symbols is slow; the absence of auto-complete on some long words is noticeable; the lack of emojis, the lack of a numeric keypad, having 3 or 4 modifier keys (to handle case, numbers, secondary functions, etc), all of these things I got so used to in virtual keyboards... I actually missed them more than I expected. This, plus the virtually unusable screen due to the lack of remaining real estate, made me rethink my memories.

Granted, part of if is Android's fault, and part is the keyboard itself (the modifier keys in particular), but overall, it made me feel better using a touchscreen keyboard. I no longer have rose-tinted memories that make me complain so much about on-screen keyboards.

K7 also works in Portuguese, and possibly other languages.

The Académie nowadays is (mostly) a bunch of old politically influent people with zero or little linguistic knowledge. They stopped reforming the language almost two hundred years ago and now they can only hope that people will keep paying them attention. But the language will keep evolving and drifting, and they will keep resisting, until the divergence will be so large that they will just disappear into nothingness, and people will ask: "why did people bother with them for so long?..."

Or, as the young ones do nowadays, they'll just say "Cheh!" to the Académie.

I beg to differ: there are a few tools which are comparable.

Frama-C (https://www.frama-c.com) is an open source framework that has, among its analyzers, one based on abstract interpretation (https://www.frama-c.com/fc-plugins/eva.html) that is very similar in spirit to Astree.

MOPSA (https://mopsa.lip6.fr) is another open-source project (albeit more recent, and in a more "academic" stage) that also provides abstract interpretation to analyze C programs for flaws.

NASA also released IKOS (https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos), on the same vein.

Of course they lack the polish of a product which costs tens of thousands of euros per license, but they are open source, and their purpose is the same: to ensure code safety via formal methods, in particular abstract interpretation.

It is possible to get these tools to analyze some code and generate no complaints, which ensures absence of several kinds of problems, such as memory safety issues.

Then again, it's hard to know exactly how much they differ from Astree, since you need a license to compare them, and I don't even know if you are allowed to publish such comparisons.

I'd much prefer if companies used the actual technical names for such layouts, i.e. ISO and ANSI. It's always hard to check the layout details to find out if what they call "English" means ANSI (US) or ISO (European).

The "generic" layout names are ISO (European) versus ANSI (US). The ISO Enter key is two keys tall and narrower. ISO also has a shorter left Shift key, which leaves space for an extra key.

Dell has a few models with keyboards that accept both layouts, but in most laptops the "grid" above the keys prevents switching between them, which makes it really annoying if you ever buy one with an ISO layout, hoping to be able to just buy an ANSI keyboard later to replace it...

AZERTY keyboards for instance have it, since "Shift" is not a native French word (sometimes they do write "Maj.", but mostly they simply use the arrow). Also happens with some keys such as Caps Lock (a padlock symbol).