hackingonempty

Looks like fun but also a half implemented BitTorrent client.

> Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians

Western thought traces back to the Greeks. Aquinas refers to Aristotle as "The Philosopher." Aristotle died over 300 years before Jesus was born.

> The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition.

On Aquinas, the Church Doctor, Bertrand Russell had the following to say:

"Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times."

The Aerovelo Eta, used to set the human powered speed record, has an MPGe of 9544.

https://www.aerovelo.com/eta-speedbike

> It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.

The evidence that the brain is where thinking happens is overwhelming, the minor influence of the rest of the body notwithstanding. There are no other theories.

We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.

> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33

I thought it was well known in the industry that CEOs are liars as this is exploited in the standard method of leveling the stage at a tech conference: have the keynote speaker rehearse then make adjustments until he has lies coming out of both sides of his mouth.

> Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation.

LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effects on a blank canvas was subject to copyright.

Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.

Nobody disputes that I own the copyright in a sound recording I made just by pushing the red button on my recorder. So it is a mystery to me that copyright to any sort of human conditioned machine generation is in dispute.

We just have different ideas of what constitutes "mere mortals." 1 in 150 high school students or even 1 in 500 from the general population doesn't sound super human to me at all. Talented, yes but not god like.

There are thousands of these high schools all across the USA. The top high schoolers in California so far this year are doing 1600m in 4m7s.

https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/rankings/list/168546/...

Here's a random high school in Northern California. Everyone on the team is beating 16.7 seconds in the 100m. For the 1600m there are six kids with times under 4m30s and another seven with times under 4m40s, all in the last month.

https://www.athletic.net/team/770/track-and-field-outdoor/20...

* of course one mile is hardly comparable to the marathon that pros are able to sustain such speeds over...

> four wheels would double the rolling resistance and thus the effort required to push the cart

Rolling resistance = Crr * N where N = the normal force a.k.a. the weight bearing down on the wheel for a slow moving cart. If you use the same tires but double the axles you reduce the weight on each wheel by half leading to about the same rolling resistance for the vehicle as a whole.

> its narrow wheels minimize rolling resistance

This is a myth that has gripped the bicycle industry for decades but has been slowly dying over the last two. Fat tires have slightly lower rolling resistance at the same pressure and a smoother ride at the same rolling resistance. It takes more energy to lift a hard wheel over a small bump than for a softer wheel to deform and lift less so the difference becomes greater as soon as the road isn't perfectly smooth.

The main reason road racing tires only got a little fatter and aren't as fat as say e-bike tires is aerodynamics which is hardly applicable to hand carts.

> Unlike a van or a car, my handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures.

TANSTAAFL - you're going to need more calories to compensate for the additional effort you're expending to move your handcart. Human food is far from the cheapest fuel and few people are able to obtain it "entirely independently from energy infrastructure."

One of my hobbies is looking up old prices in the BLS CPI calculator to see what they would cost today (March 2026 is the latest data.)

The June 1940 photograph along Hwy 1 in Maryland had $0.05 hotdogs ($1.17) and $0.10 burgers ($2.34).

The Feb 1959 photograph from the NYC diner advertises a $0.45 burger ($5.14) and probably a $0.75 steak sandwich ($8.57)

> Nobody likes to be told they're wrong

I like to be told I'm wrong. While it is true that I am a nobody it means I'm about to learn something.

"In 1969, Schenck was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action (e.g. a riot)." - Wikipedia

A single Ambisonic B-format recording can be shipped and at runtime decoded into any coincident or near-coincident stereo pair pointing in any direction or into any surround sound format. It is a universal format that encodes the direction and intensity of arriving sound over a full sphere.

When I saw the article I recalled a doctor who worked at the sports stadium. Probably every stadium has a doctor on duty because there are medical emergencies any time you get 50,000 people together. Sometimes people die while they are still on the premises.

So I wanted to know how approximately how many people you would expect die of natural causes per day in a group of people as large as Amazon warehouse workers.

If you expect people to die every day while working in an Amazon warehouse and there was no cause of death disclosed for the unfortunate person referenced in TFA then the fact that he died is not news.

The artists think it is fair that they are now getting some of that money that used to go to scalpers. Very few are opting out of the dynamic pricing and "Platinum" tickets that are driving prices up.

That fact is betrayed by the the similarity of the shapes of atomic orbitals and the sensitivity patterns of Abisonic B-format channels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics#Higher-order_ambiso...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#Orbitals_table

...and the same patterns appear on the unit disk with the Zernike polynomials, used to describe optical aberrations and more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zernike_polynomials

You are correct that it is a rough estimate but my point stands. While most of us will never experience the shock of someone dying at work, it is an every day occurrence at the scale of Amazon.

Amazon employs around 900,000 people in logistics. The crude annual mortality rate in the USA is around 911/100,000. If there are 900,000 employees working eight hours a day then around seven people a day are dying of natural causes on their shift. This is without considering that they are being worked to the bone.

>>> .00911 * (8 / (24 * 365)) * 900000 = 7.487671232876712

Ex Parte Garland was decided in 1866

“The power of pardon conferred by the Constitution upon the President is unlimited except in cases of impeachment. It extends to every offence known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.”

Nobody is going to waste their time investigating crimes that can't be prosecuted.

> spherical harmonics can have uses beyond lighting

This math is also used in Ambisonic surround sound though newer techniques use planewave expansion.

For games, the full-sphere encoding of Ambisonic B-format can be decoded for arbitrary speaker locations and the soundfield rotated around any axis. I'm not sure if its ever been used for a game though.

How does this compare to G-Stack?

The President's pardon power is enumerated in the Constitution and has been litigated extensively.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII-S2-C1-3...

> It should also be said that they could do anything at all to prevent these professional scalpers from scooping up all the tickets at once

Oh they did something about it. The ticket brokers can't scoop up all the tickets because many of the best ones are now only released as "Platinum" tickets at 2-5 times the price.

> A reasonable opposition party would declare the pardons invalid. Is that a valid interpretation of pardon power, does that undermine the legitimacy of our laws?

No, in the USA the pardon power belongs to the President. Only a constitutional amendment could invalidate pardons.

> one could be forgiven for assuming federal crimes committed by this administration will not be prosecuted while this administration is in power.

Nobody in this administration is going to be prosecuted no matter who is in power.

https://archive.is/TpLqO