harshreality

What's immutable, without tools to decompress and possibly perform further de-obfuscation of text streams, is the typical way publishing software encodes text into streams inside PDFs.

It remains possible to have a pdf with text that is easily mutable with any text editor.

Even if text inside a pdf is annoyingly encoded, you can always just replace the appropriate object/text streams... if you can identify the right one(s). You can extract and edit and re-insert, or simply replace, embedded images as well.

I don't think "this format promotes, as the norm, so much obfuscation of basic text objects that it becomes impractical to edit them in situ without wholesale replacement" is the win you think it is.

"Looks good on paper" has to do with the rendering engine (largely high-DPI and good font handling/spacing/kerning), not PDF as a content layout/presentation format. A high-quality software rasterizer (for postscript or PDF, often embedded in the printer)—not the PDF file format—has been the magic sauce.

Today, some large portion of end-user interaction with PDFs is via rendering into a web browser DOM via javascript. Text in PDFs is rendered as text in the browser. Perhaps nothing else demonstrates more clearly that the "PDF is superior" argument is invalid.

The claimed principle, if true might apply to other types of projects besides software.

The article (glorified ad piece), however, is entirely about software engineering.

> For a point of comparison, after Nazi Germany collapsed the Western allies had German civil servants fill questionnaires to assess their level of involvement; of 3.6 millions surveyed, just 1% were charged as "main culprits" (Hauptschuldige), whereas a third were designated as "followers" (Mitläufer), who basically contributed to the regime's crimes but nontheless got to keep their jobs after the war. I'd argue the allies were way too lenient on Germany, but the current Israeli approach (kill them all) is too extreme and will not work because its objectives are unrealistic.

You're comparing the Allies' actions after WWII concluded with Israel's actions in the midst of conflict.

Are you forgetting the Dresden firebombings?

Are you really suggesting that Israel will continue to "kill them all" if Hamas surrenders? That's not even what Israel is doing now, although they have the military capability to do so if they wished.

It's not. I think johnisgood and loeg both know this, but they're being dangerously simplistic in some of their replies.

If you recognize emission — not just when expulsion is imminent — and if you pull out and that's the end of vaginal intercourse until you've cleared the urethra again, then that's probably nearly perfect at preventing pregnancy.

What's the mechanism for that? Maybe a few sperm are stuck in the sperm ducts past the point they were severed, but the ducts are cut and sealed, aren't they? Even if they weren't sealed, it would be Russian Roulette trying to get across the gap in what's effectively just body cavity space.

My expectation would be the first sample might have lower but significant sperm count, and each subsequent sample would decrease dramatically until any residual sperm died and the count was zero. You're talking about motility, not count, but it doesn't sound like you noticed a drastic decrease from sample to sample. That doesn't seem right according to my understanding.

They can still promote their products, by sending them to social media reviewers no-strings-attached, or by posting through non-commercial channels. For instance, corporate representatives can promote their company's offerings on their own accounts on twitter or reddit.

What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.

Is there epub-specific html markup you could add to changed words to indicate their original spelling? Like alt text for images, but in a span around a word? There's the html "title" attribute, of course, which would work (mouseover shows the title attribute's value), but that isn't semantically correct for the purpose.

If you stress test small address ranges around each failing address, does that selectively heat up the chip to which that address routes?

Then all you'd need is an infrared imager.

Which is why I mentioned the AA mirror. There's another copy of the 1961 edition on IA (without the _a3j0 suffix) that can has borrowing enabled, so all pages should be accessible. Both are mirrored on AA.

Internet Archive has a 1961 edition, and it's mirrored on 4nn4's Archive.

https://archive.org/details/principlesofelec0000unse_a3j0

(AA can be searched using an archive.org file slug, e.g. "principles...a3j0", or obviously by using the title)

Maybe there's a hypothetical where there's somehow rapid availability of specific antibodies, but no opportunity to vaccinate healthcare workers ahead of time, and it somehow makes sense to rely on antibody injections instead of PPE ("biohazard cosplay"). Here are some reasons why it probably doesn't.

Getting treated with antibodies don't mean you're asymptomatic or that you'll feel well. It only means you'll have less severe symptoms. You'd have healthcare workers walking around sick, spreading the very disease they're trying to treat others for. Or taking up a hospital or clinic bed, not treating patients, using up limited healthcare resources — which, for the duration of their illness, is a worse outcome for their patients than if the healthcare workers weren't there at all.

It's expensive. There's no economy of scale for an unusual disease outbreak. That applies to both antibody and vaccine stockpiles.

If the disease is minor (like COVID-19 usually is for otherwise healthy individuals), healthcare workers might be willing to take a chance to avoid the hassle of PPE, but would their employer (such as a hospital, or MSF)? They're the ones who have to pay for antibody treatment if their healthcare employees get sick. They're the ones who have medical ethicists looking out for both the well-being of the frontline healthcare workers and patients.

If the disease has a significant mortality rate, availability of a specific antibody treatment, even if it's stocked and instantly available, wouldn't motivate anyone to go without PPE. Nor would getting vaccinated. They're not guarantees of survival, and preventing healthcare workers from getting sick is more important than treating patients.

Antibodies are not vaccines. Antibodies bind to an antigen (virus component in this case) to get the immune system to attack and destroy the antigen and whatever it's attached to.

A vaccine causes the patient to develop specific immunity (fast reaction to a specific antigen) by introducing (usually injecting) a large amount of an antigen. That prompts the immune system to react by developing B-cells that produce their own antibodies to the antigen. It turns the body into its own antibody factory to deal with whatever you injected, but that takes time.

Injecting antibodies, as in this study, bypasses the natural (slow) specific immunity generation process. Antibodies are created some other way (in a lab, or in some other animal) and then directly injected. It's done for serious diseases or dangerous toxins or immuno-compromised individuals, when waiting for the patient to develop their own specific immunity is too slow or dangerous.

Critically, a vaccine allows the body to maintain the ability to fight off similar-enough infections for a while, but usually takes weeks or more to reach near full effect, sometimes requiring multiple shots for better effectiveness. If you're trying to treat an infection you think you might already have or will get in the next few days, vaccines only work if the progression of the disease is very slow, as in rabies which takes something like 1-2 months to make it into the CNS.

Injecting antibodies is a one-shot treatment that must be repeated until the virus (or toxin or other bad thing) is gone. It's commonly done for toxins (spider or snake venoms), or sometimes for severe diseases (ebola, tetanus), but sars-cov-2 has so much attention that now they're doing it for that too. In patients who aren't immunocompromised, antibody treatments for less-lethal infections give their immune systems more time to generate their own antibodies without developing severe symptoms.

The similarity in the two approaches is that they both ultimately involve antibodies binding to coronavirus proteins. The difference is in where those antibodies come from, and whether the body can produce more at will (vaccine --[time]--> natural immunity), or whether you have to keep injecting them (antibody treatments).

That's only a rough approximation. The immune system is very complicated. Wikipedia, or a book on molecular biology or immunology, will go into a lot more detail.

I didn't argue that Trump received ≥50% of votes cast.

GP's point was that far less than 50% cared enough to vote against Trump, which was their only real option if they didn't like him.

Nobody gamed the electoral college this election. Trump won the popular vote too.

Many voters are voting for the lesser of two evils; they don't like either candidate. Non-voters are simply taking that to the next level: they can't decide between two evils strongly enough to value casting a vote.

Bikeshedding over the difference between active vs passive votes in a single-winner first-past-the-post election is fruitless.

As one example, LLMs are great at summarizing, or writing or brainstorming outlines of things. They won't display world-class creativity, but as long as they're not hallucinating, their output is quite usable.

Using them to replace core competencies will probably remain forbidden by professional ethics (writing court documents, diagnosing patients, building bridges). However, there are ways for LLMs to assist people without doing their jobs for them.

Law firms are already using LLMs to deal with large amounts of discovery materials. Doctors and researchers probably use it to summarize papers they want to be familiar with but don't have the energy to read themselves. Engineers might eventually be able to use AI to do a rough design, then do all the regulatory and finite element analysis necessary to prove that it's up to code, just like they'd have to do anyway.

I don't have a high-level LLM subscription, but I think with the right tooling, even existing LLMs might already be pretty good at managing schedules and providing reminders.

Depends, they (or she) could've medicated it to death.

Assuming suicide was involved, if they had certain spiritual beliefs about life after death, they might have had an idea of the dog coming with them.

Converting the assets to use the Spring engine (or BeyondAllReason's active fork of it) is probably easier than writing a new engine from scratch for the existing assets. And then it'll feel like BAR but with C&C's assets. The UI is what gives the game most of its feel.

It's a force multiplier.

Think of having a secretary, or ten. These secretaries are not as good as an average human at most tasks, but they're good enough for tasks that are easy to double check. You can give them an immense amount of drudgery that would burn out a human.

> To make sure that your connections can be snooped on over the LAN? Why is that a positive?

No, to keep your app from having to deal with SSL. Internal network security is an issue, but sites that need multi-server architectures can't really be passing SSL traffic through to the application servers anyway, because SSL hides stuff that's needed for the load balancers to do their jobs. Many websites need load balancers for performance, but are not important enough to bother with the threat model of an internal network compromise (whether it's on the site owner's own LAN, or a bare metal or VPS hosting vlan).

> Sure, if you're at the scale where you want/need that then you're getting some benefit from that. But that's something you can add in when it makes sense.

So why not preface your initial claims by saying you trust the web app to be secure enough to handle SSL keys, and a single instance of the app can handle all your traffic, and you don't need high availability in failure/restart cases?

That would be a much better claim. It's still unlikely, because you don't control the internet. Putting your website behind Cloudflare buys you some decreased vigilance. A website that isn't too popular or attention-getting also reduces the risk. However, Russia and China exist (those are examples only, not an exclusive list of places malicious clients connect from).

Speculative execution cpu bugs. Or whatever the next class of problems is that can expose bits of process memory without software memory bugs.

That's already a fringe case. Do you really think everyone's writing web applications in a language like rust without any unsafe (or equivalent)?

> why do you even want a load balancer/reverse proxy, unless your application language sucks?

Most load balancer/reverse proxy applications also handle TLS. Security-conscious web application developers don't want TLS keys in their application processes. Even the varnish authors (varnish is a load balancer/caching reverse proxy) refused to integrate TLS support because of security concerns; despite being reverse-proxy authors, they didn't trust themselves to get it right.

An application can't load-balance itself very well. Either you roll your own load balancer as a separate layer of the application, which is reinventing the wheel, or you use an existing load balancer/reverse proxy.

Easier failover with fewer (ideally zero) dropped requests.

If the app language isn't compiled, having it serve static resources is almost certainly much slower than having a reverse proxy do it.

TLAs will be far more likely to do traffic analysis on your connection.

If they can miniaturize fusion-boosted weapons, they may have a delivery vehicle. Their HF-2E cruise missiles are roughly comparable in size to Tomahawks, which can optionally carry nukes. The listed payload of the Taiwanese missiles is about half the mass, but who knows if that's accurate. Maybe the range would be reduced, but most of its military targets in a conflict wouldn't be far inland anyway.

There's no reason for an English language website to cater to people who don't know what snow is. How can it be discriminatory to have a question a user can't comprehend, when they won't be able to comprehend the rest of the website either? Even blind people who can read English Braille and input text in English know that snow is white, even if they've never seen it.

If a website is multilingual, it can offer language/region selection and add appropriate questions for each of them.

Kernel maintainers aren't doing anything to R4L folks except where their activities intersect with the upstream linux kernel. Your analogy isn't right.

R4L folks thought that preliminary R4L infrastructure being accepted upstream meant that all the changes they needed in the future would be accepted easily as well, and now that there are concerns from subsystem maintainers, a few R4L folks are playing the dramatic victim card.

From what I understand, market pressures are causing R4L folks to panic. If they can't get more R4L stuff upstream, people can't ship Rust drivers, and R4L development falls apart.

That's not kernel maintainers' problem, though. They have a job to do to, and it has nothing to do with Rust kernel drivers except as far as they're persuaded Rust drivers help the linux community overall and will be maintainable without unacceptably disrupting their tool-assisted workflows. Several of them have concluded, so far, that R4L PRs will unacceptably disrupt existing workflows.

That's where R4L has failed. They've failed to persuade subsystem maintainers that some added headaches/retooling/efficiency-loss is worth it to enable Rust drivers. Which drivers, and who wants to use them? Perhaps the potential downstream users of those drivers can talk with kernel devs, persuade them it's really valuable, and figure out a plan?

I think this is an important data point, too:

Gunthorpe [nvidia]: https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20250130154646.GA2298...

Basically, there is concern that even with a declaration that Rust-for-Linux devs will maintain this (and potentially every other) cross-language API translation layer file, the demarcation point between C and Rust isn't sufficient, and is causing C developers lag or headaches by having PRs rejected because of Rust-side failures. I don't see how that can be fixed without wholesale buy-in to Rust of enough kernel devs that they can fix whatever Rust problems are created by C API changes. Or Linus will have to accept PRs that break Rust-enabled builds. The R4L devs, by themselves, don't have the bandwidth to keep up. Even if they can rapidly fix problems, that adds potential friction to every C API change.

Hellwig may not be communicating in a good way, but he might be right, unfortunately. Linux may need to stay as a C-only codebase until an AI language-translation tool is good enough to do things like maintain the Rust API translation layer itself. Or until basically all maintainers learn and accept Rust.

> In January 1981, the Jimmy Carter administration settled the court case Luévano v. Campbell, which alleged the Professional and Administrative Careers Examination (PACE) was racially discriminatory as a result of the lower average scores and pass rates achieved by Black and Hispanic test takers. As a result of this settlement agreement, PACE, the main entry-level test for candidates seeking positions in the federal government’s executive branch, was scrapped.[36] It has not been replaced by a similar general exam, although attempts at replacement exams have been made. The system which replaced the general PACE exam has been criticized...

People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit".

Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online.

Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful.

Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?

Although it's not specified in common dictionary definitions...

"...zoonosis (a disease communicable from animals to man under natural conditions)." —Laurie Garrett, _The Coming Plague_ (Ch 14, section IV)

Which is naturally how the word is used virtually all the time.

Transmission from lab animals kept for study in a biolab, you could argue either way. Transmission from humanized lab animals purposely subjected to serial passage is not really zoonosis in any reasonable sense.

I'm skeptical that Bernstein vs DOJ would apply, to a [foreign-controlled] company that is not publishing their algorithm, on the idea that allowing their [trade-secret] code to control how hundreds of millions of people interact with each other is somehow free speech on ByteDance's part.

The foreign-controlled part in particular implicates Congress's obvious and explicit power to regulate international trade, and it seems obvious to me that there would be something less than strict scrutiny applied to alleged violations of the 1A when that Congressional power is in play.