saltcured

I think the tricky part is if they start cranking up the intensity to counter it being scanned sequentially over a larger area...

First, what is the fail-safe in case the scanning mechanism fails? I.e. is the intensity safe if the beam becomes stationary? Or does it guarantee it goes dark when not properly scanning?

Second, what is the safe intensity limit for the brief visits to each target pixel area? As the scanned area increases, you need higher intensity to maintain the same visual brightness with a shorter exposure for any one spot. At some limit, is the pixel to area ratio too low and this intensity too great?

Third, does the optical path through the cornea and lens have any hot-spot where you have to also worry about peak flux with this projection technique?

I think you could use AI for this if you do it properly as a sort of adversarial coding project. Have it build tests to break the code. Don't give it the job of making a test suite that passes.

I think people higher up are warning against a naive mistake, which is asking one agent to write both the product and the test suite. Here, making things up and cheating becomes a problem of quality theater...

I tried to spelunk this thread and couldn't find the topic I want to see explored.

I don't really have the crypto chops to declare a fact here, but I have a speculation or intuition. In this day of supply chain worries, I think a proper signing algorithm should not be signing this tower of hashes, or not just this tower.

It should incorporate a canonical stream of all the actual commit content. It is the integrity of this content from the author's working copy that they can and should attest, not some derived byproduct of the storage scheme. Edit: Of course, I mean a secure hash of this stream, not a signature including a copy of the entire content!

My intuition is that the content-addressable store is used to reconstitute the commit content, but the verification should be over the original content, not the internal addressing of the store.

Wouldn't this make it harder to do these exploits? You would have to find alternate content that simultaneously produces collisions in the internal addressing hashes and for the overall canonical stream hash.

If you also carry size info alongside each hash, would this also make it much more difficult to produce useful collisions?

The statement further up should have qualified it as "scarce commodity". Then it is correct.

To successfully perform dumping, you have to have access to excess supply capable of disrupting that market.

Yes, the SQL syntax is full of misnomers. I agree it should have more hazard tape around it.

The type qualifier "with timezone" doesn't mean it stores a timezone with it! It means the input is interpreted with timezone offset, producing an unambiguous moment on the timeline. You can then compare all such values with a total ordering. But, these stored values do not preserve any offset/locale information. You can't ask "what was the offset of this timestamp when it was input?" That denormalized locale information is stripped when it is interpreted.

The naive type (without timezone) really means that the timezone information is absent and the interpretation is to be deferred. You have to supply timezone information before it can be resolved to the timeline. This is what the implicit coercion is doing in PostgreSQL, mixing in either the session or server timezone offset.

The above is further complicated in that PostgreSQL will supply an implicit (session or server) timezone during interpretation of the input for timestamp with time zone. And conversely, it will ignore timezone or offset even if present in the input for a naive timestamp! I think both of these would be better off handled as type/input errors in a strict mode.

The poorly named "(ts)::timestamptz at time zone 'tz'" construct is the inverse of the input transform that takes a naive timestamp and the given timezone to produce the known moment.

The other sad bit is that all of this is naive about the difference between UTC, TAI, and Unix time standards. There is ambiguity in postulating any future time, since the exact presence of leap seconds is not yet determined.

You'd be surprised how many doctors and scientists would drink, smoke, and use other drugs in spite of being fully versed in what this does to their patients.

Or how many medical professionals continue to be medical professionals while knowing it has an elevated risk of suicide.

Reproduction also causes some pretty intense biophysical changes which may well alter personality. It is silly to act like it is just due to reasoning...

Unless I'm really misunderstanding, this is just "footgun of timestamp without timezone and implicit coercion"?

The only purpose of the naive timestamp is to defer a necessary step of converting a sort of nominal prototype or template to a real moment on the timeline. Until you pin them down, they don't really represent moments.

It's like having a NULL in the timezone slot. I think it should mean "unknown, anything goes on a per-value basis!", rather than treating it like some polymorphic type that gets magically parameterized at runtime.

IMHO, it is a mistake of the standard and PostgreSQL authors to try to enable such sloppy thinking by users and applications. Ordering relations shouldn't even be implemented on naive timestamps. It should be a type error, not a trigger for implicit coercion.

Perhaps it should even be a domain over text or some composite type that represents the partially populated time info. Require explicit mutation to populate the missing bits and allow conversion to a well-defined moment.

I think a sane application should only use the timezone-aware timestamp for storage, and explicitly manage its own "timestamp templates" and conversions before trying to do comparisons on the timeline.

Edit to add: I think you can say the same about timeline versus some timestamp-with-timezone strings. Make it more explicit that the ordered type is normalized moments. Make sure there is a normalizable external representation like ISO timestamps.

Make it clear that other representations are not stable. E.g. any legal timezone that could have its definitions change over time is not a stable concept to use in a representation of a moment. It is also effectively naive unless it includes another version parameter to state which version of the legal definition is intended.

Right up there with responsibility/culpability/liability laundering. These are things being shrugged off and externalized.

And the complement is credit/provenance laundering. These are things being misappropriated.

The grift often does both of these with the same sleight of hand, and this is what gets accelerated with the new tools and cavalier culture around everything.

It pains me to think about the important ones like varying on session cookie and authorization headers, and how badly some middleware can confuse things.

We generate custom content for a given authentication context. We definitely want caching at the user agent, but we want the cache keyed by the authenticated identity. Otherwise something like logging out and logging in as a different identity can produce monstrously confused results when an SPA or similar mixes some cached and some fresh responses into one page.

The hard part is getting an IO card with built-in hardware decelerator

And conventional recon folks on the ground with target-illuminating lasers..?

But if the problem is literally grep (search this file you've never seen before), no index can pre-exist.

If you assume the file arrives ahead of time, can be indexed, and that this is worthwhile because we want to support multiple pattern matched retrievals, then sure it makes sense to consider indexed query schemes and upper/lower bounds. Each query could be faster as an inference if it doesn't have to re-scan the whole file.

But I don't think anybody, in good faith, can pretend that any LLM can digest a file faster than grep can. Particularly, if you admit the vector processing dedicated to doing the convolution kernel(s), you should also admit similar hardware could run a vectorized grep.

One of my worst sunburns was in San Diego on an extremely gray day. I should have known better.

The right thickness marine layer can make the sky seem dim but it's like one massive UV diffuser from horizon to horizon.

As someone who has gotten sunburned in California winters and even around 7-9 PM in Alaska, I can't relate to your closing idea at all!

The other glossed over part is that the above sounds like science.

Engineering often continues until the concepts and theories are developed into safe, practical methods. "If you stay within these parameters, you can confidently expect these results." The reliability can be codified and reproduced without going from first principles on every application of it.

It's not clear to me that the current AI fad is really developing such reproducible, safe methods. "If you stay within these parameters, you might get these results. Or a teapot. Or some subtly misleading fabrication."

You have to do full due diligence to validate every result. There is safe usage where the hard work was done up front so that day to day practice can skip to boring and reliable application.

I also recall that Linux on a PC often beat the performance of Unix equipment I could access in contemporary times. There was a lore around those machines, but my actual experience doing basic FOSS-adjacent dev work (bash, make, gcc, autoconf) was that the Linux PC was faster as well as inexpensive.

The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!

Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)

Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...

You're off by a year or two at best. Linus announced his kernel project on the Minix usenet group in Aug 1991.

It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC.

I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.

If they're talking about production capacity, that is some product of die area and process steps, right? It doesn't have to be 3x die area, just 3x lower factory throughput for the same number of functioning memory bits.

Yeah this is the closest I've found to explaining my own discomfort. Why I've been almost entirely an individual contributor my whole career and why I may opt-out and retire.

I have limited tolerance to take demeaning workload that I know "the boss" could do himself. I think my pride and satisfaction is in my intellectual contribution, not my ability to relay messages nor do repetitive slop work.

But the real revulsion is being a scapegoat. I will not rubber stamp and take responsibility for things not under my control. I have limited capacity to review and sign off work I've delegated to someone else. It is usually easier for me to do it myself and know it inside-out than to delegate and then review enough to have the requisite confidence in the result.

When the new plan is to increase throughput via delegation to these generators, I can't possibly review to my standards. So, I refuse to accept any of it as my work.

It also freaks me out a bit to think of the collective mess that is developing across society, with so many people apparently ready and willing to shovel and rubber-stamp. I think the "move fast and break everything" cult is going too far.

But, primarily, I just need to protect my own sanity and live to my own standards. And hope that I can back away far enough to avoid some of the splash damage when entropy catches up...

It's a crude analogy, but I would say the hindbrain is more like the system management co-processor or controller that tends to low-level hardware features.

The forebrain is the main processor. It does all the stuff you think of from OS to application, and has some ability to monitor and even interfere in the system management co-processor.

Whether either of these things have interesting internal structure and functional decomposition is left unaddressed. This observation about the progenitor cells is a bit like seeing the BOM that says they come from different suppliers.

I think it's also a bit of guesswork to try to reason out the evolutionary history. I.e. was either unit "in the market" longer and useful on its own, versus essentially complementary parts that just happen to have a divided supply chain! Intuition about evolutionary processes and life makes it really easy to assume the hindbrain is an older, legacy system that existed independently or with other long-lost companion units.

Heh, in the security world, this shows how your traditional metal key is "something you know" (like a password) because it can be copied and many people can know it at once!

So if we are enforcing MFA requirements and allow this kind of clonable key, then we should really require some other factor that is not clonable.

That's the core silliness of this whole passkey mess, IMHO. So many turns of rhetoric and weird compromises, we have cargo cult security and no real understanding of what security level is in place.

Instead of the best of worlds, we can accidentally have the worst of worlds without realizing until it is too late and we're painted into one of those ugly corners.

There's also a lot of absurd product placement in many of the supposedly ad-free streams.

Clearly, the southern Indian Ocean and a tiny slice of the Antarctic coast are the most anti-(US of) American.

It only involves a swathe of South-East Asia and China once you are inclusive of South America... ;-)

I am far along the aphantasia line and have spatial thoughts. They lack visual qualia.

I can't directly imagine visual features like color or brightness. It's more like being aware of the spatial positions and structures. Often, but not always, in a volumetric stage reachable by my hands.

I too can think of the cube as folded parts, i.e. one forming the top+front+bottom which the problem states are red, and one forming the left+back+right which the problem states would be blue. I don't really fold or unfold them as some sort of imagined movement, but am simultaneously aware of their in situ and flattened forms.

For the cube as a whole, rather than seeing and rotating it, I have a direct sense of the manifold and can attend to the faces one at a time. It is my attention that "moves" around this stage a bit like a 3D cursor, not an object or view being rotated or shifted. The faces don't have color, but I can attend to them in the order of the problem description to count off the "red" faces. I can also count the remaining unlisted faces or just re-count all faces if I need to confirm my tacit knowledge that a cube has 6 faces.

Both those approaches only work well for relatively simple structures like the cube. It is based in tacit knowledge I have about cubes, boxes, and rectilinear structures. If you asked for some arbitrary polyhedron, I could have a more amorphous sense of the shape and the fact it should be faceted, with ambiguity about its actual shape. I could not count nor attend to individual faces. I can't generalize to reason about origami paper/shape correspondences. I would need actual paper models for trial-and-error.

I can also think about dynamic systems with objects moving or even changing shape, but I wouldn't normally use that to "inspect" an object. My attention jumps around the static stage to examine it piecewise. There is no occlusion to avoid nor a viewing angle that improves my access to the topology information. I only think about movement when I am trying to examine a dynamic system's characteristics. And this can flip between thinking of actual animation and something more akin to having a static awareness of the motion vectors or paths.

My partial solution is to have the Android Zoom client on an idle tablet. Even though it is my office VOIP phone too, I power it off when I don't have meetings scheduled.

If someone tries to demand screen sharing, I ask one of my coworkers to drive, since they've joined from their laptop already.

I only launch the Linux Zoom client when I absolutely know I'm going to need to host a meeting and demonstrate software running on my end. I feel equally disgusted about Zoom and the corporate EDR agent. I basically feel like the most likely source of compromise of my laptop is these proprietary tools forced on me from above.

The thing that worries me is SSO for work. I wish there was a completely different identity for all the work-related apps and for my payroll/benefits portal. I.e. if they want to endanger my login that manages my work product, fine, but I don't appreciate them endangering my login that manages my own compensation, tax deductions and retirement transfers, and health insurance...

On the other hand, you likely need more liability insurance with more wealth, at least in the range where this topic of affordable transport comes up.

In an accident, your risk becomes not the cost to restore your ride, but the cost to defend yourself from vampire litigants looking to suck you dry.

Without significant assets, you can just treat bankruptcy as your answer here. With growing assets at middle-class and higher levels, that would be a pretty painful outcome for most.

I suppose, once you are fabulously wealthy, you can wisely be self-insured again, simply trusting that your wealth can defend itself in a sustainable way?

You forget the addicted humans who will do nearly anything to keep the stuff running..?

Until you run into that most stubborn, "my problem is the absence of this solution" type of stakeholder...

Add a slight trailing decay and I think the basic arrow motif could be intuitive for trajectory for any observer who experienced aerodynamics?

Whether it is the evolved shape of a flying creature or an abstract depiction of a meteorite (or even a comet!), there is a kind of intuition about the sharp end and the flaring of air or fluid around it, with some sort of trailing tail from whence it came...

One can imagine many observers who could find our space probes would also have some of these experiences?

Of course, all of this assumes some kind of visual perception and cognition to even recognize the plaque as having markings made with an intent to communicate some abstract ideas...