idupree

Somebody made a CCAN that I found a while ago, though it is nowhere near CPAN yet. Thoughts? http://ccodearchive.net/

The intro paragraph of that 2003 FAQ looks eerily like a comparison of smartphones/tablets to laptops might look today!

Neither the airliners.net discussion nor the New York Times article seem to think this is a serious problem.

example on airliners.net: "The cracks are on the outer glass surface, which is non-structural. The glass is used as a wear surface since it resists scratching and pitting much better than the acrylics that are used for the main structural part of the window. So a "broken window" is not a big deal at all."

nytimes: " “Even considering that the 787 is a new aircraft, which tends to come with initial glitches, we are not seeing a higher incidence of reported problems compared to other aircraft,” Mr. Yamada said."

To be clear: high power density, but similar energy density to current batteries.

Y'know,

That GCC is six years old.[1] Go, Rust, Dart and V8 didn't even exist when it was released. Maybe update that if anything?

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html

https://www.rackspacecloud.com/ ...has a SSL error (for me right now - their certificate expired 2 days ago).

I'd love to be able to upgrade my laptop RAM like that. Laptop CPU and motherboard manufacturers are still quite stingy about the maximum RAM they support. This limit is the only reason I had to buy a new laptop last year, and why I will likely need to buy another one in a few more years. A laptop sold today should support up to 2x64GB DDR3 RAM[1], but typical Ivy Bridge laptops only go up to 2x16GB, and a year ago it was max 2x4GB or for higher-end 2x8GB. The laptop I replaced had max total 3.2GB (you could put in 2x2GB DDR2 but the system would only see about 3.2GB, so I stuck to 2GB+1GB). Its 2007 Core 2 Duo is still blazingly fast, and its disk was easy to upgrade to an SSD.

[1] One can't easily buy a 64GB DIMM today, but Moore's Law is swift and mighty.

It's largely practical; I like being able to discuss what I've done with people, including specifics. I make exceptions, but the amount of work that goes into writing a compiler is probably worth more than a certificate is to me. A compiler project would definitely produce things I'd want to discuss with folks and code I'd want to reuse in later projects. One benefit I find of releasing something as FOSS (when permitted to do so) is that I know I'll be able to reuse it later[].

[] (this bit of reasoning deserves more explanation than I've given...)

(my tinfoil hat mode: I don't even have any important secrets but I believe in knowing how to protect them)

Use /dev/urandom, not a website. Make sure you have configured your text editor not to automatically save any backup files, cut buffers, or the like, and never write it to disk in unencrypted form. (I use vim >= 7.3 and its blowfish encryption; see encryptedvimrc and random_alnum in my scripts https://github.com/idupree/scripts ) If you copy/paste passwords, make sure you don't have a clipboard manager that persists recent history to disk. Also, encrypt your filesystem in case you screw up on any of the above. If you have swap, make sure that's encrypted with a generated-per-boot-from-urandom key generated after loading last boot's stored entropy from the disk. (A dedicated password-managing program might do some of these things for you. I haven't looked into their security methods yet; have you?)

If you can, use an email provider for your acct-registrations that uses decent security practices; use a high-entropy password for it; use different email addresses for every site, to make it harder for social engineering attacks (someone calling, say, Amazon or Apple's call center pretending to be you). The latter is probably hard unless you use your own domain or think '+' addresses are sufficient. If you use your own domain, you're vulnerable to your registrar or your account with them or your DNS being compromised, but you should have rigorous passwords and good registrars here because losing your domain name stinks. If malware gets on your computer, it can watch you and steal your passwords, so keep your system and browser up-to-date with security updates, disable riskier parts of your system that you can live without, prefer OSes/systems that are more on top of their security, and don't make enemies.

I don't understand why password managers like OnePass store passwords online; everything else they're doing as browser plugins is fighting the good fight. (True, there are risks of giving the browser the ability to access your passwords at all; but they're probably less than the risks of password reuse and low password entropy, and greater convenience means more people will use the system for more sites. Firefox Sync is the only consumer-friendly online storage that I've seen and consider well-engineered-&-documented enough to consider trusting. Tarsnap and Tahoe-LAFS also meet everything but the "consumer-friendly" bit there, and have a somewhat different focus. It may be worth considering encrypted online mirrors legitimate (online mirrors, not sole copies) for the sake of people who don't do backups, have multiple devices, and/or have their disk fail or device stolen.).

I was tempted until "We ask you to agree, when you start the course, to not release your toolchains source code anywhere but the cppgm site.". Interesting work I do not-for-pay I release as FOSS on github. They're worried about plagiarism (which is fair); they should use anti-plagiarism tools to check whether submitted code matches previous submissions or any known C++ library and compiler code in the wild.

In the heyday of that military funding, the military wanted the plutonium. Now the military mostly wants to get rid of plutonium because it is a liability if it gets into the wrong hands. Thorium reactors are one of the few ways to get rid of plutonium, so maybe they'll fund this too! (/dreamy optimism)

There's also http://www.simon-listens.org/ . If you speak German there might be some info there that we couldn't read (some is in English, but I think the developers are mostly in Germany).

I don't think this is quite the sort of answer you want:

My sibling (using Debian Testing) had wrist RSI this summer and we tried to set up Simon Listens (the previous version; 0.4 looks from the release notes like it's improving). We are both Linux nerds. We were not able to get it to do anything useful after a few days of work, and I estimated a 50-50 chance that working harder on it would help[1]. I did not find any other FOSS speech-to-text that I could get working either. (FOSS Linux text-to-speech is much better; e.g. Orca is good.) We did not try any commercial products; Dragon Naturally Speaking is the only one I know of having a good reputation but it is Windows-based. Also, it's hard to integrate well into the Linux stack without being FOSS. A list of products we looked at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition_in_Linux

[1] Issues with compiling, dependencies, figuring out the conceptual model Simon Listens uses, trying to figure out whether Simon-not-doing-anything was because we miscompiled it, or audio input, or incompatible dep versions or misconfigured deps, or us just doing the wrong thing because the English documentation wasn't super thorough... Imagine setting up Apache, MySQL and PHP if there weren't a billion tutorials online, you'd never used Apache, and MySQL wasn't compatible with your GCC unless you pulled the git version and hoped you didn't get confused by dev-version-only bugs.

These are some of the reasons that discourage people I know:

* Having to make a decision

* Opportunity cost (doing this deal means not getting some other solar arrangement and means not getting next year's better technology)

* "To qualify for financing, you need to have excellent credit (a FICO score of 700 or greater)."

* Some of us don't like companies that keep basic information off the Web and require you to talk on the phone to a sales rep: "Availability of SolarPPA and SolarLease vary by location based on what your local utility company prefers." ... "Financing terms vary by location and are not available in all areas. To find out which plans are available in your area, request a free consultation."

* Not knowing people in-person who will vouch for the company's honesty and good service.

I started using org-mode for text-based notes/todos recently, even though I wasn't an Emacs user.[1] Org-mode has its own website, and more well-documented features than most programs I use! ( http://orgmode.org/ , manual http://orgmode.org/manual/ )

[1] It's an Emacs mode. I'm using it happily without knowing much Emacs.

Counterfactuals are complicated, but I didn't realize how complicated until I wrote all this. The basics have already been invented for other reasons (internal combustion engine, battery, electric motor, etc) so any sort of car should work fine aside from the infrastructure (power distribution, roads). Which sort is best depends on e.g. whether there's cheap oil (there might be if we hadn't used so much oil already) and what people are using cars for (people would be used to another mode with different capabilities; I've read that humans regardless of transit mode tend to prefer about an hour commuting per day and the distance of an hour depends on the prevalent mode). Random thoughts follow:

If the automobile were invented in 2013, we wouldn't have range anxiety, because we'd be used to getting around on horses. (Without range anxiety, electric cars might be the cheapest.) Or we would have range anxiety if there were lots of functioning places that would exchange your horse for one that wasn't tired (and no car recharging/refueling stations, of course).

Or maybe trains would still be the way everyone gets around. The streetcar would be ubiquitous, and would be the only reason we'd have quality roads (with rails in them). The streetcars might run on electricity or natural gas, judging by modern bus and light rail. Bicycles might be popular, and suburbs would have developed around streetcar lines rather than along interstate highways (I'm US-centric).

Cars might not need charging/fueling stations, if they could piggyback on an extensive electrical streetcar network's power lines. Then they would probably be electrical and have battery for short off-network trips.

The probable lack of a good road network is going to be a problem. We'll have to design a car that's good off-road. Preferably we will avoid annoying bicyclists by wearing away their dirt roads (if bicycling is in style and horses aren't); but we'll fail, because just having an enclosure for a person (I assume an enclosure is necessary to count it as a "car") is pretty heavy, and we can't improve wheels/tires terribly much.

Which parts and energy sources would be cheap? David Archer's _Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast_ (2007 edition, p.101) tells me that about 2/3 of US oil use is in transportation. The world might not have as much oil production capacity if the car hadn't existed (thus higher prices; then again, a newly invented car wouldn't suddenly be used by everyone, so oil production could ramp up over time along with demand); or the world might still have lots of easily extractable oil (lower prices).

Who would buy/use this car: rich? middle class? People who already travel a lot? People who are content? Individuals? Businesses? Transit companies (along the lines of ZipCar or self-driving cars)? Taxi drivers (there would probably be taxis powered by horse, bicycle, or some sort of engine)? How would people learn to drive this car? Probably most people wouldn't be used to operating a dangerous piece of machinery, and there wouldn't be laws regulating it (or there would be strict industry-focused laws).

The lack of experienced drivers suggests self-driving cars are a good idea; but the lack of well-marked roads means our AI tech needs to be a bit further ahead and we might have to wait 5 years.

EDIT: crossposted this response to my blog, since why not http://idupree.dreamwidth.org/2568.html

As a developer, I need to upload things.

Is there a technical reason that modern cable-Internet bandwidth is asymmetric? My download rates are acceptable for me, and if the upload rates were the same I'd be happy.

CloudFront offers HTTPS (on their domain). For low volume sites, paying for CloudFront is cheaper than paying at least $20/month for CloudFlare's HTTPS (which is also on their domain unless you pay $200/month).

Note: For this CDN HTTPS to be useful, you also need to have your main site URL have it, say, via a certificate from StartCom and a VPS or a good shared hosting site. It is a good deed to offer HTTPS even on static sites because it helps protect users' privacy (if they are using WiFi, Tor, or a sketchy ISP; which is likely). If you're distributing software or code, having some sort of signing -- HTTPS and/or GPG -- is critical to protect your users from malicious MITMs; more users are going to verify HTTPS because they don't have a choice about that one.

"Oh yeah, EVs have very little moving parts so they will last 2x or 3x as long as normal cars. Perhaps three or four decades or 500k miles."

Do the batteries last that long? (They're about half the price of the car currently.) Last I knew, lithium-ion batteries lose capacity over clock-time. Some types lose capacity less soon than laptop/phone batteries[1], but I didn't quickly find out how much slower, nor what type of battery Tesla is using. (Do you have info?) Maybe we can't even know: lithium-ion batteries were only invented 40 years ago[2], and modern Li-ion chemistry and size much more recently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#History

"It cannot contain profanity, pornography, or otherwise be abusive or offensive." -"2. Rules about Changing Jason’s Last Name", https://buymylastname.com/terms/

Linux's disk caching is good enough that I haven't been able to observe a difference when I change bs= on Linux. But it certainly won't hurt.

"While $HISTORY is great, it only retails a certain amount of data."

Unless you have HISTSIZE=100000000; SAVEHIST=100000000 or some such nonsense (-hides-). Using Ctrl-R for history doesn't seem to be slowed down at all by my huge histfile. There are privacy implications if you're hacked/subpoenaed, but it's hella convenient.

The post measures $/kB, not $/(kB⋅m).

You could return a proxy object that offers operator= et al, and an implicit conversion operator to T& or T const& that throws an exception if that key is not in the map.

(I don't know if that would be better, since it's even more magic and it still isn't perfect.)

For each viewer, that seems likely to me. For viewers collectively, there is more information; some viewer's girlfriend is going to be someone who studies trees, and another viewer is going to think some character looks kind of like the President. This effect of viewer diversity might justify the video file being more than a megabyte!

Practice writing that has an observable effect. For example, write Facebook statuses and see who "likes" or "comments" on them. Think about how you write emails and to whom. See what styles and contents tend to be effective. Try different variations.

(Don't draw conclusions too soon; there is a lot of random variation in responses.)

Also I agree with what everyone else recommends. But, in my experience, there's no substitute for these real-world experiments that appear in my day-to-day life.

Actual paper: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1170

Abstract: "A consequence of the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle is that one may not discuss the path or “trajectory” that a quantum particle takes, because any measurement of position irrevocably disturbs the momentum, and vice versa. Using weak measurements, however, it is possible to operationally define a set of trajectories for an ensemble of quantum particles. We sent single photons emitted by a quantum dot through a double-slit interferometer and reconstructed these trajectories by performing a weak measurement of the photon momentum, postselected according to the result of a strong measurement of photon position in a series of planes. The results provide an observationally grounded description of the propagation of subensembles of quantum particles in a two-slit interferometer."

Relevant concept: "weak measurement" (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_measurement ).

I don't know enough quantum mechanics to understand it, but I do know enough to know that the Nature summary is hype.

Info I've found so far on rate of water capture:

(MIT, 2011) "In some field tests, fog harvesters have captured one liter of water (roughly a quart) per one square meter of mesh, per day. Chhatre and his colleagues are conducting laboratory tests to improve the water collection ability of existing meshes."

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/fog-harvesting-0421.html

Not in the US it isn't -- a wall socket is typically only rated to provide about 15 A * 120 V = 1800 W peak usage (* 80% = 1440 W long-term), which is less than their 2.5 kW vacuum cleaner. http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/maxload.html

15 A at 240 V could power it, though, if there's a vacuum cleaner that needs that much power.

Machine learning.