saltcured

I would make even stronger advice.

If you want to verify an email, send me a one-time code with several hours expiry that I have to resubmit through my logged in web identity at your site.

It drives me batty that a financial provider (retirement vendor from previous employer) won't seem to let my "paperless" setting remain active. Only because I don't ping their abusive email tracking pixels etc.

To me, paperless means I can log in and download my quarterly PDF statements and related documents, and they won't be left in a mailbox on the street. It doesn't mean I have to subject myself to reading your silly emails with a promiscuous client.

Not sure if this is regional or another sign that I'm old.

When I was in elementary school, we were already taught that we ride a bicycle in the street and follow traffic rules. That included things like traveling in the correct lane for the direction we are going and observing stop signs and traffic lights. Also, as we got older, using things like turn lanes just like a motorcycle should do.

We were also taught tp walk it on the sidewalk/crosswalks as a pedestrian when the conditions were too complex for us to safely ride with traffic.

Even ignoring the peril to actual pedestrians, I have seen so many near-accidents in more recent decades from people violating these rules. Riding on sidewalks and/or against traffic flow (wrong side of the road) so that they "come out of nowhere" into traffic, ignoring traffic control lights, etc. Adding the electric speed boosts has just made these reckless things wildly more dangerous.

I'm in the SF Bay Area and see small kids pre-adolescent or barely adolescent riding e-bikes with insane acceleration and speeds. The kind of performance, that in my youth, would come from a 250cc four-cycle motorcycle or 125cc 2-cycle motocross bike. And they are riding with absolutely no sense of traffic rules nor that they themselves are part of the same traffic. It's a really bad combination.

It doesn't matter what tiers there are when parents are negligently providing their kids with these kinds of "toys". I don't know if they are totally ignorant and think "it's just a bicycle" or if they know exactly what it can do and just can't see that their kid isn't ready for the responsibility.

The shorter connections could lead to faster rise times though, right? I.e. less capacitance or inductance interfering with getting the field gate charged up?

And the main loss with switching transistors is in the intermediate switching states where it has less than its "full" resistance.

Naively, I wonder how much the density of argon gas helps here, in terms of being able to recover and reuse the argon gas in a relatively closed-loop system.

I understand the sentiment, but you assume they are planning to build humanoid robots to walk around the human-oriented space in the factory.

Perhaps they want to put some of the sensing and control features in, so a humanoid-like dexterity or adaptability for the business end of a floor-mounted robot arm?

Finally! The real explanation for why we need 5G mmwave and 120+ Hz phone displays..

Not lifelong, but I've been using Linux since 1993. Through subconscious selective pressure, I only have things lying around that are useful with Linux.

It's kind of liberating, to be able to ignore a huge amount of crap in the market because you can tell it is just some sort of delivery vector for proprietary Windows drivers and their dodgy installers.

Heh. In the early 1990s, I got initiated to the basic Emacs key bindings and editing UI via JOVE for a Scheme programming class. JOVE didn't have elisp behind it, instead being light enough that scores of students could all be running their own editor session and Scheme interpreter processes on the same memory-starved, multi-user server.

I'd already known Common Lisp from a prior class, which mostly used some Mac based REPL. Shortly after, I had real Emacs and various CL and Scheme runtimes on my Linux PC. Scheme was my obsession at the time. A lot of my pathway into CS was puzzling over what it would take to implement a Scheme runtime. But, I felt no desire to get into the bizarre-to-me elisp dialect. It just felt gross.

Probably because of early years using shared terminal server rooms and hosts, I also learned that over-customization just became a pain when I had to move between environments. I ran the Emacs that came bundled with my Linux distro, with the extensions that came packaged along with it. Mostly I just tried to have Xresources to get my preferred color scheme and text fonts.

From all of this, I'm nearly some kind of old school Unix fundamentalist. I've never wanted an IDE. Or rather, my IDE has always been the host OS, shell prompt, filesystem state, and other terminals. I use adjacent shells to run builds, tests, debuggers, version control, etc. Emacs is just my editor. I've never, ever wanted any editor to subsume my OS, window management, and these other tools.

My favorite interface feature is creating several "frames" (separate X windows) viewing into the same buffers. Sometimes several files side by side, and sometimes several editing viewports on the same file. I also use the X based menus to find many esoteric features or session settings for which I would never memorize the command names.

But, when I am forced to run Emacs in text terminal mode, I revert to thinking of it like JOVE. I'd rather open multiple terminals (and SSH connections, when remote) and have each one run its own ephemeral Emacs instance with one buffer for a brief foray into one file. Somehow, I've never had the urge to fire up an Emacs server to share state between these. I just find my way back to a proper graphical Emacs when I want that kind of complex editing session.

The only Emacs modes I use are for syntax highlighting and auto-indentation. I also never wanted Emacs "windowing", i.e. text terminal muxing. For me, learning to kill accidental window splits was roughly the same need as learning how to exit/abort out of accidentally launched vi. Repulsed, I head for the exit!

My favorite editing features are just search, find-replace, and find-replace-regexp. But search is mostly just a fast-scroll to me, jumping forward or back to text I know is there. If I'm really searching, I more likely mouse over to a terminal window and run find and/or grep from a shell. My favorite advanced editing feature is buffer-compare (Ediff), which I use for merging changes between two files in side-by-side frames.

Oh, and I despise the GNU infos-style help system too. I much prefer manpages, or secondarily reading docs in a web browser.

FWIW, I'm no advocate of "lines of code", or really any KPIs at all. All I'm saying is context matters.

Such branches could make sense if the conditions have to do with underlying domain concepts, but you expect the outcomes to be revised. It could just be a moment-in-time accident that they are all returning True right now.

This kind of tension is also where you often see indirection via configuration files or other auxiliary data structures. Or in the old days, things like bit fields instead of booleans, so that merging the conditions would encode different small integers to use as lookup table indices.

Written exactly like that, yours is obviously cleaner.

But, if that original code had comments and traceability of each condition and return to a specific domain scenario, you would be doing a disservice by collapsing it to the one flat boolean expression. In that case, it may be better in its expanded form, and you should let an optimizing compiler do the collapsing.

I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard.

Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.

In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.

I think the backlash is because there are people claiming "I made this!" for what is about as much involvement as pressing the big meal combo touch button on a fast food ordering kiosk.

Ironically, in the arts there are also some patrons who might feel this way when they commissioned some work. With a big enough purchase price, they think their role as a source of funds is creative.

Now with AI, we're speed running this whole experience among people who normally do not have exposure to this broad continuum of contradictory ideas.

This game-theory phase seems to go hand-in-hand with totally myopic grift/gig/hustle thinking too. There is no product but the confidence act needed to win each moment.

Chalk up yet another echo of the 1920s Gilded Age? Between all these economic spasms and the simultaneous tilting towards fascism, I think there is way too much historical rhyming going on right now...

I wonder if it ever does that for the SF Bay Bridge.

"Perform Immelmann turn in 200 feet"

Yes, but the old ways were that the terminal interface itself was in charge of translating this keycode to a signal, based on the line discipline of the terminal. It was a consistent behavior across many apps unless they took effort to modify the current terminal line discipline, i.e. put the terminal into a raw mode. And then many apps tried to do something appropriately signal-like when they decided to handle these input characters without signals.

Yeah, even in Linux we were doing these things with X Windows bit depths.

8 bit psuedo color, so the color palette switched with every focus-follows-mouse window boundary crossing. 16 bit direct color with banding but no more palette psychedlia.

This was equal parts to make it faster and to allow for higher framebuffer resolutions with limited VRAM.

This analogy is ironic to me. For most people, building a dream house and verifying it means hiring someone else who is accountable for it being built to code etc.

This is exactly the naive gap that is happening with AI. There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability. The AI vendor tries to sell it like magic but with a disclaimer that is is merely entertainment. The user tries to pretend they are reviewing, but often is just implicitly trusting the tool to do right by them on things they have no real capacity to evaluate.

I recall slashdot briefly becoming more like a scalable citizen journalist site in the middle of its usual news aggregation and performative memes.

Are these "device chargers" for BEVs like electric submarines or something? ;-)

In the broader SF Bay Area, our recent PG&E bills for a 50 year old single-family home without air-conditioning is under $150/mo, with a couple fridges, electric clothes dryer, and a half-dozen laptop class computers. That's averaging about 8-9 kWh per day (250-280 kWh/month).

Last winter, our bill ramped up to over $400/mo for a few months, due to heating with natural gas.

Asymptotically, every billing system is a stock market and telecom. ;-)

My biggest career horror was realizing how much the medical informatics concepts have been structured around billing and insurance rather than scientific, biomedical requirements.

If you have cared for someone with dementia, this isn't so surprising.

It isn't a monotonic decline with memories disappearing forever. It is like wave upon wave of changing capacity at different time scales. The general trend is deterioration, but there are frequent periods that can almost seem like remission.

There is a well known daily cycle referred to as "sundowning", where the sufferer tends to come unraveled later in the day. The next morning, they'll be more functional.

Later in the progression, you can see much higher frequency variations. Like periods of disorientation and confusion interspersed with periods of lucidity all within a single sitting or conversation.

In those periods of greater lucidity, recall of the past can be more accurate. General listening comprehension, speaking, and logical thought also seem more normal.

Edit to add: I sometimes wonder if the belief in terminal lucidity is one of those logical fallacies which support lots of superstitions. Are we just fixating on the final wave in this chaotic wave train, and forgetting all the other waves that happened before it? Or is it that more caretakers are engaged and observing these waves towards the end, e.g. because the patient is known to be in the terminal phase..?

It's an even more basic Unix affordance, that terminals had a key-binding that generated the interrupt signal, and programs could define useful behaviors that commenced upon receipt of interrupt.

It made sense that interrupt in Emacs could get into a controlled state of receiving the next command. It's a little bit like the SAK (secure attention key) concept, as seen with Windows use of ctrl-alt-del.

Edit: Ironically, as a long-term emacs user, I don't really remember any commands that start with ctrl-c! For me, the most common sequences start with ctrl-X or meta-X. Or the prefix search commands ctrl-S and ctrl-R.

My solution for your concerns is twofold:

1. Use a password-based encryption method (not tied to hardware identity) if you prioritize moving the disk around. Then it is just as readable in a spare machine.

2. Use an easy to remember password/passphrase and write it down somewhere you keep paper documents, if you prioritize recovery.

This still provides meaningful protection when you need to discard the drive. The random downstream recipient of the hardware will not know your password, even if you skip the step where you "crypto-shred" the drive by setting a new random password.

DROP DATABASE, for when a bunch of calls to DROP TABLE seems like too much overhead...

Do they end up determining that every weird piece of code they find must have been used for religious or ritualistic purposes?

I posit that there are people who get a sense of accomplishment from operating their laundry machine.

And people who get a sense of accomplishment from hitting the jackpot on a slot machine.

Operating an LLM is a strange combination of the two.

I agree, in practice.

In theory, they could be made to strictly compartmentalize their "memories" and exercise some kind of robot-client privilege. There could even be built-in, task-appropriate data-retention limits and anonymization algorithms to reduce the risk of leaks.

But instead, we should assume they will be made to remember too much and to send abusive levels of reconnaissance and other telemetry back to their parent companies. Because anything less is "leaving money on the table" and that has become the greatest sin of all... :-(

I think this is an interesting analogy. If AI is really progressing as rapidly as some describe, should we expect a robotics renaissance with automated-chef appliances etc?

In other words, when will we really see a transition from "yet another token generator" to something that appears to coherently observe, perceive, form intent, plan, and act in a way that is compatible with an existing, long-running human context?

(And, also, do this with enough determinism to be a viable product and not some gaping liability...)

Right, I agree it is fuzzy. I just think, from an ethical standpoint, it is better to think of them as mines that have more mobility. Reasoning from the other end as projectiles which are slower or have more guidance seems to invite too much optimistic thinking about the level of control. That the victims will be as intended rather than quite indiscriminate and unpredictable.

I realize there is a full, multidimensional continuum here.

On one end are directly-aimed weapons that do their damage while still being aimed by the operator. Their risks include collateral damage limited to things like aiming errors, effect radius, or continuing down-range beyond the target.

Further out are messy things with more active guidance that can turn and seek the target and potentially go off course. But their time to target is still quite limited and more or less being observed by the one who fired it. The risk expands with its potential "cone of maneuvering" and travel range.

Then you get into these things with long dwell times and autonomy where the eventual targeting event happens without supervision and is greatly affected by things happening in the environment which the operator cannot have really predicted nor controlled for. The longer time in operation increases the risk not only from wandering/guidance but from how much the environment can change before it performs its final targeting event.

Another example in this category could be chemical and biological weapons. There is a lot more uncertainty in the targeting effects due to the way it disperses in the environment.