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Self-dosed chlorinated water isn’t the worst option, but I wouldn’t call alternatives a luxury. Only people I’m familiar with that still use that technique frequently are PCT through-hikers, who are pretty desperate to cut any weight possible.

Price gouging does cause users to associate the site with high prices. Particularly when third party sellers aren’t transparent about MSRP. Amazon risks losing customers to physical shops if they become known for being 3x+ as expensive.

Amazon could start posting “surge price” ratios ala early Uber, so users can realize what’s going on, but realistically we are in a fairly unusual circumstance at the moment.

Most gouging hasn’t lasted long for staples. There’s a bunch of off brand hand sanitizers/masks that have popped up in Seattle. The market has adjusted, and I’m not convinced gouging would have gotten us here faster. The toilet paper I bought is labelled in Korean, which is wacky, but it’s still TP.

Producers can read through the lines, and ramp up production. If it was worth doing fewer at a particular price, it’s almost certainly worth doing 2x more at that same price (or, even better, with small reasonable multiplier). If a producer starts charging too much, other brands will eventually pop up to eat their lunch, so I suspect they won’t get too greedy during a short term spike.

With long enough time horizon and some limited exceptions, I’m not certain this is controversial.

The moment you add a specific date, I suspect this does become polarizing. Many would like gas cars to be gone in 10 years, others 50 years, and others whenever it becomes cost effective.

I had expected this to be a story of pure fraud. Instead it was... something else entirely?

I’m curious precisely which laws Goudreau violated. Article specifically mentions arms trafficking, but that honestly seems like a far cry from the obvious conspiracies to murder/kidnap/etc. I’ve never really had to consider the question of “what American law are you violating if you are conspiring to overthrow someone else’s government on American soil?” If the US lacks an extradition treaty with the target, the target’s laws aren’t relevant in practice.

Wait, why is this trimming controversial? The original paper is a little mediocre (would be down for generic criticism of relying on it), but this trimming seems to match the main drive of it.

Just read the paper, and the association is pretty clear there: fewer hours of sleep means more injuries. P = ~0.006 rr=.8 per hour of additional sleep. That’s not a huge effect size, but I find that pretty believable from my lived experience. Lol, yes, p values, but does anyone think less sleep makes them more coordinated? I don’t allow myself to drive long distances on less than 6h sleep based on my prior experience having tried.

For a lay audience explaining the data for the left most point would be hard. Why is 5h of sleep less injurious than 6h? Could be random chance (only 160 students in the study). Could be that those players are worse (coach pulls sleepy kid off the field).

I doubt the most uncharitable interpretation of Walker’s trimming is correct (people who sleep 5h/night are better at sports and less likely to be injured).

This particular criticism rings hollow to me.

This is no different that standard text books. There is a lot of filler. You can skim if the primary concept already makes sense, or you can read the extra details if you are confused.

It’s a popsci book, not big Rudin.

Did you ever get the low temp vantablack working as expected? I’m guessing oxygen is passivating the aluminum surface somewhere in the process, and the paper doesn’t document how careful they were. I’d personally want to do this under a nitrogen atmosphere, but I’ve never sonicated under a controlled atmosphere.

I’d bet the reason you can sort of get aluminum to blacken over the heated beaker has something to do either with the fact that the beaker is effectively positive pressure and pushing out everything but water vapor, or that the condensed watervapor on the surface of the aluminum is consistently oxygen free.

I find the former somewhat less believable than the latter, but it’s been a while since I’ve worked on things like this.

A lot of people treat nature as "inherent". Noise has the implication that it is external.

Obviously, the case mentioned in the article is that there is an inherent property of the crawfish that modulates the effect of noise, which blurs this line.

Probably the mix of

1) Ubiquitous government funding

2) Student-teacher power asymmetry

3) Strength of tenure

From the article, it does not sound like much needs to change to prevent abuse of this level. Requirements of at least one non-anonymous source would do it.

Dismantlement seems pretty unnecessary.

Often this type of action is not the government spending that level of money with nothing in return. Generally it is buying an asset it intends to sell later (often at a profit).

meant for [2] to be https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/insigh....

Depending on your risk tolerance, mostly yes:

1) You can disable kPTI without opening the door to Meltdown (which let you directly read kernel memory as usermode).

2) You can re-enable hyperthreading while allowing virtualization (VMs) without obvious issues (l1tf used to allow users to read kernel memory through VMs). I don't know which, if any, distros do this, but it's the prudent thing to do if you care deeply about security. (Linux may have the scheduling fixes by now that also fix this, but I honestly haven't followed them, and they didn't have them in like November when I last checked.)

Others:

1) I'm honestly unsure if you can recompile kernels without "retpoline", but it's not a super big perf impact anyway, at least not compared to those two mitigations.

2) I'm not super familiar with the "MDS" vulnerabilities, so I don't know how bad the perf impact of their mitigations are, or how bad their impact is.

3) There's some TSX issues, which I'm also unfamiliar with, also probably don't matter much perf wise.

If you are paranoid, or have a multi-tenant machine, I'd still leave these on (and I'd particularly leave hyper-threading off, even on AMD), since we haven't stopped seeing new side channels. Hyper-threading is basically asking for problems on multi-tenant machines.

Honestly, if your machine is not multi-tenant, and you can tolerate some risk (e.g. you don't care if anyone sitting at your machine can read all of RAM, including potential malware), I'd just disable all this stuff. Unless you've run into particular hiccups (you compile linux kernels all day and you need the extra cores), I wouldn't do it.

Intel continues to get beaten up by their decision to defer access checks in speculation. Meltdown, L1TF, and now LVI-stale-data are all rooted in one mistake. Fortunately, the silicon fix for Meltdown appears to mitigate these issues ("RDCL_NO"). But it also introduces LVI-NULL (which is admittedly more restricted, but still problematic).

The Intel deep dive [0] is a pretty solid addition to the original paper [1].

It looks like Ice Lake processors are going to be the first ones that are not affected [2]. Based on the deep dive, it sounds like these still aren't perfect (they don't completely avoid forwarding values to dependent instructions from faulting loads). They instead exhibit some behavior they call "zero-at-ret", which Intel says is not expoitable in practice.

Intel does not explicitly say Ice Lake is zero-at-ret, but reading between the lines this seems to be the case ("parts generally exhibiting Zero-at-ret behavior... will be documented as 'not affected'.") Only Ice Lake is listed as not affected, so they likely would not put this caveat in there if this did not apply to Ice Lake.

[0] https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/insigh... [1] https://lviattack.eu/lvi.pdf [2] https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/insigh...

This seems non-sequitor? The main infection route is airborne droplets. Sure, washing your hands reduces risk, but it does not solve the problem. Showering is a good idea, but not relevant.

Huh? I’m pretty confused by this attitude. This seems pretty callous.

Obviously, media hype train is in full swing, but this is fairly infectious and fairly dangerous for those over 80 and those with other risk factors. That’s narrow, but it is not nothing.

Personal risk is pretty low for me (at my age/health status), but I’m still not super interested in getting knocked on my ass for a week. Particularly since coronavirus immunity is not believed to last for a particularly long period if time. I definitely don’t want it twice!

This is a massive accidental experiment on the effectiveness of fully remote teams. Most of these companies are fairly reticent to have even a few workers remote, let alone entire teams/orgs.

It'll be interesting to see if teams push for something closer to full remote wherever it worked well (or if some employees will want it, having not realized what it was like).

Plausibly teams that it works well for will have greater ammunition to push for it, since they have the past experience with it.

Wow, it's not even in the SDM. Only docs I can find are: https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/insigh...

Glad it's possible to do this in virt now: used to be impossible to disable TSX (you could avoid advertising it via cpuid, but you couldn't actually prevent usage of the instructions).

How do you disable TSX? I don't see a control register flag or an MSR.

Knots getting stuck is super annoying (and potentially life threatening) on rappel.

I couldn’t remember them until I started needing them. Figure eight, clovehitch, barrel knot, overhand, and fisherman’s are my daily drivers for climbing. Prussiks are useful, but there are more efficient ways of doing progress capture.

Bowlines can be used instead of figure eights, but they can shake open if you aren’t careful, which is obviously bad.

I came here to tell this exact tale. Our stories were so similar I checked your profile: we work in the exactly same office. I have to say our employer’s strategy worked.

I lived 3 miles away (typically a 13 min bike ride for me plus probably 15 min of parking/showering), but I still almost always drove.

To fix my commute I just moved, and my life is a lot nicer with this newfound 10min walking commute.

Even with the new fee ($12 to park vs $7 of benefit), I would still drive before I moved. I have after work hobbies that require me to drive. Biking 45min in the rain/dark to the climbing gym would have just killed that for me.

A lot of people were quite angry about the new system. But I think that it was necessary to fix the parking constraints we were running into (frequent stock outs for parking at like 9am). I have a “there is no free lunch” view for commuting policy.

I’ve tried (and abandoned) a similar question suite for Security SWEs. Giving people sample code riddled with security flaws and asking them to explain what was wrong.

I found it difficult in the security domain since so much of it is context dependent (what’s the interface? Is this code in the kernel? Are you concerned about speculative side channels?). I also found it difficult to calibrate.

There’s probably a good question space in there if I were to spend time testing the questions more, but there are enough other questions in the neighborhood that I’ve moved on.

Really? I’ve seen coworkers reading, but it’s rare. I occasionally encourage people to read at work. People tend to not follow through, since it’s often hard to find good books on niche subjects.

At one point I was in a reading group on Quantum Computing (we were working through some classic text book). I eventually stopped since I was bad at making time to do the exercises.

"After carefully reviewing the CPU voltage setting modification, Intel is mitigating the issue in two parts, a BIOS patch to disable the overclocking mailbox interface configuration. Secondly, a microcode update will be released that reflects the mailbox enablement status as part of SGX TCB [Trusted Computing Base] attestation. The Intel Attestation Service (IAS) and the Platform Certificate Retrieval Service will be updated with new keys in due course. The IAS users will receive a ‘CONFIGURATION NEEDED’ message from platforms that do not disable the overclocking mailbox interface.”

Seems like you should be able to just avoid applying the bios patch. That said, you won't be able to keep your BIOS up to date.

Anyone know what conditions are required? The advisory is sparse on details.

The errata lists the same vague info: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

There's a pretty cool "journal" called JOMI [0], which is basically peer-reviewed videos of doctors performing common procedures. I actually watched one of the videos there to assuage my fear of a fairly routine arthroscopic procdure.

I suspect this is the type of thing most doctors are interested in seeing people rely upon, rather than youtube. It's been vetted for quality. There are obviously downsides (getting procedures to appear on this is more complicated than just uploading a video to youtube), but it seems much harder to question the quality.

[0] https://jomi.com/

I’ve been giving friends small (rubber) cobras as part of their thesis defenses for the past few years. They really need to work on their bibliographies.

While that might be true in practice, I do think not knowing when you transition between those two indicates a failing by your coworkers/mentors.

I encourage people I work with to read many of the books in this book series. I particularly encourage them to read “Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization”, since it’s basically a book on their job.

Most engineers don't write code with hard performance constraints. Game devs probably need to be fighting to get every frame.

For the bulk of the eng I work with the concept of StoreLoad reordering on x86 would be an academic distraction.