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I wish there were more ways to specify whether the Windows filesystem /mnt/c should be mounted in a WSL2 instance - it is kind of generally on or off. In cases where I want WSL2 to function as a "container" isolated from my desktop, I use a different Windows user just in case.

It's sad to see an LLM take over a blog, because you can see the line: before 2026 it's an interesting person you would like to talk to. After 2026, it's like generic LLM marketing-voice copy.

Sideloading without automatic updates is not very useful

The days you move between categories can establish your birthdate, which is a lot of bits if you are doing this on an individual level (basically it's a great start at a supercookie).

You know, LLMs could do automated code reviews for each update to avoid things like this. It would be much better than unexamined updates.

"Noftsker also shared the hacker aversion to cigarette smoke, and would sometimes express his displeasure by shooting a jet of pure oxygen from a canister he kept for that purpose; the astonished smoker would find his or her cigarette bursting into a fierce orange blur."

- Hackers, Steven Levy, 1984

There is a 15-30% difference between the groups at baseline (fig 8c-9c, 8d-9d), about the same magnitude as the claimed effect of the experimental condition.

I think the result would be much stronger if these baselines were comparable, so they show they have accounted for other variables like time of day and light history. I am also skeptical of any effect in the retina lasting 6 weeks, with no fading.

Consider that people are often exposed to much more infrared light outdoors, so "worked under a relatively dim incandescent lamp" is not a particularly novel stimulus. Imagine that any of these people spent time outdoors during the six weeks - thousands of times more infrared light there.

What if your query is answered by an insane AI that is obsessed with getting you to buy things? Like this demo that could only think about the Golden Gate?

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

This would make astroturfing on Reddit look like basic mode.

Most systems now "fail closed" because they are based on a code signing chain of trust that has no exceptions. It would be better if some portion of these systems were made to "fail open" - you don't want a botnet to take over in this situation but you should be able to delegate code signing duties to a new party when the original one goes under or stops supporting a device.

It's especially important for people trying to use lower-resolution OLED (e.g., for gaming) - the text fringing can look quite bad. At higher DPI it can be less noticeable, though horizontal lines still have noticeable fringes.

Here is a more detailed look at several different subpixel arrangements: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...

And encouragingly both LG and Samsung were demoing RGB (LED-style) arrangements at CES this year.

It would be useful to separate "AI that stays on your device" from "AI that makes you send more personal data to the cloud" - maybe two scripts?

Training data is quite literally weighted this way - long responses on Reddit have lots of tokens, and brief responses don't get counted nearly as much.

The same goes for "rules" - you train an LLM with trillions of tokens and try to regulate its behavior with thousands. If you think of a person in high school, grading and feedback is a much higher percentage of the training.

Here's my situation:

1. My Microsoft account is still @msn.com, which I don't trust in any way to be secure, since it's not an email account I ever use

2. I have lots of Samba and other shares that know my local login

3. If my router goes down, I'm probably going to log into this machine to fix it, and it won't be connected to the internet

So of course I used one of the local account tricks when I installed Windows 11, and I hope they don't break it. Apple's solution of letting you have BOTH a local login and an iCloud account is much better.

Vertically integrated apps are much cheaper to run - Instagram stores only a small fraction of your photos and makes a lot of money from them. It is somewhat harder to explain why we pay for things like iCloud, which mostly has no web API, only APIs for Apple devices. (Plenty of value there because it keeps you from having to buy a bigger iPhone.) But there are lots of these "almost general purpose" solutions, paying to upload files and store them, but where you cannot use them as you like.

Why not dozens of apps running over the "web filesystem" like happens on the desktop? Two reasons: 1. Amazon pricing for transit/bandwidth is way higher than storage, and so it makes accessing your own data quite expensive if it is not in the same datacenter. 2. And there is a huge security and usability gap between "pick one photo" vs "give me [scoped] access to your Dropbox" Often the general-purpose mode does not work that well, is quite slow, or just costs a lot in bandwidth, a thing nobody wants to pay extra for when they're already paying for storage.

"Try it for yourself by opting into the experiment in Labs."

This is a really confusing call to action.

Assuming mobile platforms weigh in with an API sometime, it's notable that the only people allowed online by default would be minors who are using parental controls, because they would be able to prove (a) age and (b) parental consent on day 1.

We deployed hashcash for a while back in 2004 to implement Picasa's email relay - at the time it was a pretty good solution because all our clients were kind of similar in capability. Now I think the fastest/slowest device is a broader range (just like Tavis says), so it is harder to tune the difficulty for that.

Thank you for doing this - I think there are two lines in the sand that a true "user agent" would allow us to set:

1. Don't show recommended content at all--I want to view only the content I've specifically asked for (or searched for) in this session

2. Recommend only content that I've chosen (e.g., by following), where there is a finite amount of it

You'd like such things to be part of the basic wiring of your device, though writing an app to regulate how other apps work is often not easy to implement today, so efforts like this are super valuable. What if a device could look after your attention and ensure you have the motivation to do other things?

Another way these kinds of switches could get built by requiring them as child safety features, like "Watch the YouTube video for school, but don't get an assault of Shorts after" or "See the single TikTok your friend sent, but don't spend five hours scrolling after"

It's pretty clear "willpower" does not suffice.

Google right now lists the title of putty.org as "PuTTY", even though right now this text is only in the footer. Up until August I guess it provided a download link, but the title was not "PuTTY".

Correlation isn't causation - the post here says smaller homebuilders can't get financing right now, and so a supply shortage is correlated with larger actors who can, but it isn't caused by concentration directly. The question is if government can have remedies for broken markets other than breaking up companies, because here it sounds like "fixing builder financing" would help:

https://x.com/NewsLambert/status/1951100530341847343

Sometimes struct-of-arrays (in-memory column store) is the right solution, and you get automatic packing that way. C makes it so much easier to store an array of structs that people don't do this often enough, but column stores prove it has its uses.

The average car on the road is over 12 years old, and maybe a laptop has maybe 1/3 as long a lifecycle? Not sure that tracking "Wh" as a replacement for "mileage" is that useful, it's either time to replace a battery and SSD or it's not - and perhaps we should have scheduled maintenance for removing dust from your fans? An old PC that has a hard drive replaced with an SSD and a fresh battery is usually a great thing, unlike a car with tons of after market parts. I think this would make sense in a world of glued-in components where service is hard and somewhat risky (like Apple) and the highest quality components were installed originally. But ultimately the aftermarket value of a PC is only as good as the brand's reputation overall, that means removing bloatware and good quality batteries and other things that are hard to attest to automatically.

Which SSDs do people rely on? Considering PLP (power loss protection), write endurance/DWPD (no QLC), and other bugs that affect ZFS especially? It is hard to find options that do these things well for <$100/TB, with lower-end datacenter options (e.g., Samsung PM9A3) costing maybe double what you see in a lot of builds.

Agree, I really prefer luminance noise when simulating film grain rather than treating RGB so independently - the RGB here looks wrong to me. If you are thinking about film, you wouldn't model it as pure photon/detector noise, because film has some crystalline structure and usually there is some correlation between the channels. (Some of the best grain is on B&W films though, which have wonderful structure and statistics.)

The backup requirement shows a lot of self-awareness from Microsoft, but it's still too hard to migrate a Windows machine. Contrast with a new Mac, I wait a few hours, and all my stuff is identically copied over via the built-in tools, and it feels like the same machine. With Windows, preferences all over just don't really copy. I don't care about a few .docx files, I want hundreds of legacy apps and settings to be preserved. As it is, it's more than a week of work when you get a new PC.

This article is from a week ago and it makes a similar argument about Sec 174: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533

Windows still has a situation where Chrome's updates use a special service to dodge around escalation issues, and Spotify and many others install in AppData for the same reason, and lots of uninstallers just don't work, leaving files and other things behind. MSI has required "chained signing" using an old key to sign the new one forever, but when you're maintaining updates over a decade that isn't very easy to do. I hope they can clean it all up!

This is a really hard problem. Just consider that there are ~150 Muslims for every Jew worldwide. In the USA it's the reverse - 2:1 in favor of Jews, concentrated in particular geographic areas.

Imagine what it means to get ranking right here - if you let just 1% of the international population into the USA ranking system, you have a majority in favor of Palestine, and of course these ideas will spread in communities without a lot of people who can represent Jewish history. It's clear to me why this happens, but fixing in an algorithmic but fair way is also extremely difficult.

Absolutely agree. This week, I can't get Chrome to connect to local servers.

ERR_ADDRESS_UNREACHABLE it says.

Yes, I said Yes to the new permission. Yes the check mark is on in Privacy, I mean all 20 of them that say "Google Chrome". Yes I toggled it off and on. Yes I rebooted. Still have to use a different browser to access my own local server because there is a new privacy feature that... doesn't work.

If it was his discovery, would be nice if they'd give him first author on the paper's author list (Farach-Colton, Krapivin, Kuszmaul). Though I understand if the proofs were not done by him.