throwaway2037

Next time there are other available units in your building on different sides or floors, ask an agent to show you the apt. You check if the sound is present in other units.

The AT&T Long Lines building[1] where this event occurred makes for an interesting read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

I agree with a lot of what you say, except the bit about "cargo ships can all be electrified". It is more likely that they will use ammonia or hydrogen that are fully produced using only electricity (and some air/water).

I don't think it is such a big deal to ship old batteries from rich countries to low income countries for recycling. As long as those low income countries are (long term) friendly with the rich countries. Example: The US could ship old batteries to numerous countries in Central America that would probably be happy to have a factory with good jobs. Also: Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, etc. To be clear: I am not suggesting that rich countries use low income countries to "export their pollution". Rather, I say low income countries because the ROI for battery recycling will probably be low.

    > 100 meter borehole into the ground

I have heard from a couple of different Swedes talking about when this was installed in their childhood/high school years. It must be reasonably common at this point in Sweden. Are there special machines that pull up to your home and bore a deep hole? That seems like very specialised work for the average contractor! Also, does the gov't offer subsidies from this (presumably) expensive home improvement?

Cool post. I would like to learn more details!

Real question: As I understand, good insulation in your home helps two ways: Keep the heat inside in the winter, and keep the cold inside in the summer. Do I have that right? If yes, I understand there are lots of places in Australia with very light winters (or none at all), so they are mostly focused on cooling with A/C. Are you saying that installing significantly better insulation is not economically efficient for many Australia homes?

You raise an interesting point here. To use digital Suica/PASMO/whatever in Japan, your mobile phone needs to have NFC hardware called (Sony) "FeliCa (Osaifu-Keitai)". Few Android phones sold outside of Japan have this hardware. However, Apple is a bit special -- I think all modern iPhones sold globally support it. (Please correct me if wrong.)

Google also tells me:

    > Samsung confirmed it's working with JR East to bring Suica and FeliCa support to Galaxy phones sold outside Japan starting in 2027.

    > Google Maps doesn't have all the operators

Can you give an example?

Regarding booking train tickets, I normally recommend that people use a major, domestic tourist agency, such as JTB. The majors will have English language support. For a small fee, they can print the tickets and mail them to you, or you can pickup at an office upon arrival in Japan. For obvious reasons, they can also accept foreign credit cards.

The researcher is based in Hongkong, where Anthropic is geo-blocked.

100% agree. That makes this commented code so incredibly impressive to me!

Thank you to share!

Also on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2hQgVUyHUjox67XgkmVbRX

How would that work for hit detection algorithms in the code?

Wow, the source 6502 assembly with comments is incredible: https://github.com/vermiceli/nes-contra-us/blob/main/src/ban...

The whole thing (all banks) is more than 10,000 lines of assembly code. When I wrote assembly code for a university computer science course, it was hard to manage even 200 lines. I cannot imagine writing and managing 10,000 lines!

I can reliably say that Wiki has had the digital fiefdom issue for more than 10 years. It is not recent.

I was also a heavy user of SO for many years. At the end, I noticed things started to get really weird. I would ask a carefully researched question, get multiple answers, and get zero upvotes on the question. The Win32 community got so weird that people would only post comments under your question, but zero answers would be posted.

Maybe we will look back at mid-life SO (its golden period) as something like bulletin boards in the 1990s. Once the Internet arrived, BBSes were wiped out.

The author's homepage: https://jiahao-shao1.github.io/

... says:

    > My research aims to build a general-purpose agent that can understand, reason, and act in the physical world — at the intersection of multimodal learning, generative modeling, and embodied AI.

His tweet says:

    > got tagged for "training a competitor,"

I don't get it. To me, it sounds like he is training a competitor. Do I misunderstand? Is there a Chinese equivalent LLM that he can use instead?

Also, give the national security sensitivity around AI/LLMs, I can understand why Anthropic wants to be especially cautious with mainland Chinese researchers, including those from blocked regions (Hongkong, in this case).

Here is the sample code from the article:

    > MISSING = sentinel("MISSING")

    > def update_email(user_id: int, email: str | None | MISSING = MISSING) -> None:
    >     if email is MISSING:
    >         return  # nothing to update
    >     elif email is None:
    >         db.delete_email(user_id)
    >     else:
    >         db.set_email(user_id, email.lower())  # narrowed to str

I see this style frequently from long time Python programmers. The language is so dynamic that people begin to think this is a good way to program. Hot take: It is not. Why not two different functions called delete_email() and set_email()? That would be more clear.

Jesus, what do they spend 12B USD per year on expenses?

More likely Apple factors this used return rate into the pricing. They must have lots of data when new products are released, including with radical changes.

I think Samsung is on their eighth generation of foldable phone. That would quite a corporate vanity project if unprofitable!

    > to using the larger screen instead of Mac

I wonder if the Apple product development team considered this canabalisation risk.

    > Screen ratios make reels-like addictive content less appealing which is great for me

This is interesting feedback! Can share more? Is it not possible to rotate the double screen vertically?

I think this interpretation is needlessly judgemental/negative. The author probably intended it is a post-purchase review. This is very common for non-professional tech reviews.

I agree. I have never once done it my life. This behavior is wasteful.

What a weird post. No Face ID would be a pre-purchase "no go" for many people.

What happens to these returned phones?

Thanks for the helpful reply!

    > lots of tools ship their own CA bundle.

Can you give an example for Homebrew? And did the package maintainer explain why?

With the exception of Java, on a modern enterprise Linux box, all packages use the same CA cert pack.

His final solution is so tricky. I needed to re-read it a few times to understand the trick of using post decrement in the for loop condition. Personally, I would never write code like that. I would always find a way to use ssize_t.

This part was an interesting requirement:

    > ssize_t is a POSIX thing so you'd have to define it yourself on windows.

That seems like a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid this very simple macro:

    > #if defined(_WIN32) && !defined(ssize_t)
    > #define ssize_t SSIZE_T
    > #endif

Read about the Win32 macro SSIZE_T here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winprog/wind...

To me, this solution is more readable and maintainable:

    > for (ssize_t i = count - 1; i >= 0; i--)
    > {
    >     if (haystack[i] == needle)
    >     {
    >         *where = i;
    >         return 1;
    >     }
    > }
    > return 0;

Alternatively, you can use a while loop where the condition appears at the end of the loop:

    > size_t i = count - 1;
    > while (1)  // true
    > {
    >     if (haystack[i] == needle)
    >     {
    >         *where = i;
    >         return 1;
    >     }
    >     if (0 == i)
    >     {
    >         return 0;
    >     }
    >     --i;
    > }

Nerd Catnip Alert! Can you share the X.com account that "specializes in CNC sculpting of Renaissance quality marble statues"?

I would to love to learn more about the metals used in their drill bits. I think about oil/gas drilling and tunnel boring machines. They are facing some of the harshest conditions possible. (Imagine a tunnel boring machine trying to carve through granite rock in Manhattan or Swiss Alps. It is tough!) These CNC machines are doing similar on a "micro-scale". How often do they need to sharpen or replace these drill bits? And what is the cost?

    > Homebrew ships its own CA bundle

No trolling by this question: Can you explain your decision? I can see some pros and cons of this decision. Was it simply removing dependency upon Apple if there was a disagreement on which CA certs to trust? (You can act without permission from Apple to add/remove CA certs?) Also: How does Homebrew decide which CA certs to include/exclude? Do you get a CA cert pack from Oracle/Mozilla/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple?

Outside of an enterprise environment, I never thought about having multiple "golden sources" of CA certs on a single host. (I have no experience working outside of classic enterprise environments, so please do not read my surprise as immediate dismissal of this idea!) For those unaware, in enterprise environments, it is very common to use a common CA cert pack from Oracle/Mozilla/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple, but add 2-5 CA certs from your own company that act as trust roots.

I did some Googling on this matter. It looks like the "Big Four" of CA cert packs are: Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. (I guess there is one or two in China also, be leave that alone for the moment.) What happens if they are in disagreement? This is a complex problem! If anyone is involved in this process, I would like to learn more.