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mordechai9000on Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar over 'Little Red Dots'

Stellar fusion could also be a factor in a sufficiently large compost heap.

In northern Alaska it can last most of the day in the winter, and most of the night in the summer.

mordechai9000on Convince an AI it's not alive in psychological horror game Prove You're Human

That could be a troubling game for someone with a history of psychological problems like depersonalization or other forms of psychosis.

If it were a film or a story, you could tell it with enough ambiguity that the audience wouldn't be sure, either.

mordechai9000on Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga

I also want to add something. The new pressure cookers, stovetop or electric, are much less risky than the old school version with the rocker switch. Those could get clogged with food and they had no backup relief mechanism, as far as I know, anyway.

The ones used now have a primary valve that controls the cooking pressure, a secondary valve that will release if the primary fails, and the silicon gasket for the lid, which acts as a tertiary pressure release if the first two fail.

I know some people, like my mother-in-law, have stories of pressure cookers failing and spewing soup at high velocity all over the kitchen. I think that was more of a feature of the older version. And probably required some carelessness to achieve even then.

mordechai9000on The Silicon Valley Founder Meat Grinder

I think $1M net worth in the US these days is a nice little nest egg, but not anywhere near financial independence. Unless your needs are simple, you can relocate somewhere to live very cheaply, and you don't have any dependents.

mordechai9000on World-War-Ⅱ-era telephone line still in use in Upper Tanana Valley Alaska (2021)

I'm a little skeptical that any actual wiring from this project is still in use to this day. Conditions are hard on this kind of infrastructure. Alaska has been pushing to modernize telecom infrastructure heavily for the last two decades, and now LEO, GEO, microwave, and fiber are delivering services to pretty much everywhere. On the other hand, I've seen a free public telephone in the middle of a village that has dial-tone, presumably even in the middle of winter at temperatures past -40. I can absolutely believe that if there is a pair of wires that get the job done, they could still be in use for something like that.

20 years ago I stumbled across an abandoned telegraph line that was used to connect Seward to Anchorage. There were poles with intact glass insulators in some places. It wasn't far off the highway, and I encountered someone else at the time who told me it was an unofficial trail used by locals. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone took the insulators for whatever reason in the meantime.

mordechai9000on How we can reduce traffic congestion

> Obviously, huge challenges here

Social credit score? I've seen that Black Mirror episode.

mordechai9000on Maybe you should learn something

The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

- T.H. White, The Once and Future King

mordechai9000on IP Crawl: Living atlas of open webcams discovered on the public internet

I worked for a small, local ISP in the mid 2000s. I don't think I made any stupid mistakes on my part, but I had plenty of coworkers who did. To be fair, people were often actively hostile to security concerns back then. It's not much better now, but at least not everything gets a public IP by default.

mordechai9000on How many of the 170k English words do you know?

It also had "weltschmerz" in the list, but I think I have only ever heard "ennui" used in English. They are both foreign words, but I would not have thought of weltschmerz as a loan word. Then again, maybe I am not reading the right texts.

mordechai9000on How Alberta Eradicated Rats

Depending on where you live, those probably aren't the problematic species known as the German cockroach that typically infests human living quarters.

mordechai9000on El Niño is coming. The last time ocean temp. looked like this, millions died

My concern is that even if it would temporarily alleviate the local drought conditions for some areas, it wouldn't reverse the long term trends towards hotter, drier conditions.

mordechai9000on Learn Harness Engineering

I wonder about failure modes and fault identification. I've heard stories of things like screws or brackets wearing through the insulation and causing an intermittent fault that defies diagnosis. One of those things I think about when I am procrastinating.

mordechai9000on At least 100 deaths reported in Ebola outbreak in DR Congo

A handful get infected from direct exposure to animals. Then it spreads to family and others in the community. Sometimes people travel and bring it to a new location. Sadly, it is often the caregivers who get infected.

mordechai9000on Flock repeatedly flags 76-year old Grandmother for arrest, erroring zero for "O"

I believe, in my state, similar looking characters are considered identical for vanity plates. I assumed this applied to state issued plate IDs as well, but maybe not. It's hard enough trying to read a license plate on the road without throwing in confusion over B vs 8 and O vs 0.

mordechai9000on NetHack 5.0.0

"Slow down. Think clearly." - Izchak

Solid advice, but not easy for me. I made it to the astral planes, once.

mordechai9000on Ti-84 Evo

I programmed a Mandelbrot generator on my TI-81 (if I remember the model correctly) when I should have been paying attention in class. Entering the code was slow and painful - fortunately the algorithm is fairly simple. The batteries lasted forever, until one day I set the bailout to a ridiculously high value, given the limited resolution, and walked away.

mordechai9000on A dot a day keeps the clutter away

> the DS&A nerds among you would call this an LRU cache, I guess

More like a FIFO buffer. But you probably don't strictly enforce the rotation - you might still pick a preferred garment over the one on the end, I am guessing. So kind of like a network queue that might prioritize some packets - er, garments - over others.

mordechai9000on A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support

My guess is they stock it in case someone needs it during the mission. Not that they are sending people who are already taking it.

mordechai9000on Ask HN: Running legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights?

Could you maintain a VM or other environment dedicated to running the client through RDP or Guacamole or something like that? I think that would mitigate the security risk, somewhat, since there would be nothing else on the system to compromise. It might be practical to force the VM to restore a baseline snapshot after the user logs off, or during a scheduled daily downtime.

mordechai9000on iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM

Removing the case and putting it in mineral oil with a circulating pump and a heat exchanger would probably work better

mordechai9000on Starlink Mini as a failover

Are we back to this again? I have a friend who wants to know how to build a blue box.

mordechai9000on The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

Do you really need Turbotax? Just feed it the tax code, your financial data, and the relevant forms and it should be good to go. Now we have freed up the labor of accountants so they can go be productive in another segment of society. /s

mordechai9000on Bourdieu's theory of taste: a grumbling abrégé (2023)

Years ago I was surprised to read a critic that described Branagh's Hamlet as middlebrow. I mean, Henry V, sure - that only even qualifies as middlebrow because it's Shakespeare. I would assume it was lowbrow at the time it was written. I love the prologue, though.

mordechai9000on I baked a pie every day for a year

I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...

mordechai9000on America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

In the US, depositors are insured by the FDIC (Federal Depositors Insurance Fund) up to $250000 per institution. This doesn't apply to investment accounts, but would cover standard checking and savings accounts, even if they pay interest. The interest on those accounts is usually negligible at most banks, anyway - not even close to offsetting inflation.

Edited to add: not my area of expertise, but I did research it a couple years ago when I was acting as executor for the estate of a deceased person. So take what you will from that. I do notice banks usually have a sign up saying they are FDIC insured. I think it's required, but I don't know for sure. I suppose a shady investment firm could try to suggest they are an insured bank without actually saying so.

mordechai9000on Shingles Vaccine Linked to Slower Biological Aging in Older Adults

Just anecdotes, but I know two people who got it in their 40s, and one of them has some minor facial paralysis that he believes is probably permanent. I got the vaccine when I turned 50.

mordechai9000on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

I can only speak for myself, but 2 was a good number for me. This amounts to somewhat less than a replacement rate. My wife and I had enough time and energy to give the kids what they needed, and still have some for ourselves at the end of the day. And if either of the kids needed extra resources or attention, we were able to do it without neglecting the other one.

I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.

Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.

Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.

I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.

(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)

mordechai9000on STFU

If people are uncomfortable, they can predict how often they can turn the table over and get another party in there.

mordechai9000on List of individual trees

I picked three North American trees arbitrarily, and they were all cut down, one by vandals, one by a protester who sounds a bit crazy, and one by a researcher.