tithe

> As he had many times before, he showed his four elderly clients how to offer prayers at the shrine, a ritual of bowing, clapping and ringing a bell attached to a thick rope.

I dislike how the article frames this behavior as innocent and acceptable because Sherlock had been able to do this several times before.

The rituals at the shrines and temples are sacred to those in attendance, and Sherlock surely knows this. Appropriating those rituals out of ignorance and fashion, in front of those in attendance, is indeed disrespectful.

Moments of Doubt by David Roberts is also enjoyable.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112066.Moments_of_Doubt

> Something very interesting is going on here.

Agreed.

If we interpret Occam's razor as to "choose the simplest solution with the greatest explaining power," then the "solution" may be to admit that we have an inadequate understanding of how these things physically work.

This doesn't rule out the possibility of a technological origin, but I think Ben's point is that we should explore possiblities that generate more answers than questions first.

OK, I could see that.

> and super lab's auditors promise to check for conflicts of interest

How would this check proceed, then? Accept the self-dealing fact but call it something else, and accept the funding? And just who are these auditors?

(Forgive my naivety regarding human behavior in business as portrayed in books vs real-life!)

Any businessman with sense is going to be thinking about the nth-order effects of their product beyond their immediate industry, and strategically position themselves in/around those adjacent industries so they can benefit.

What is especially interesting is when a connection is made public and it turns out firms that appear to be "in the right place at the right time" were in that place months / years before it paid off. What did they see / understand that everyone else didn't?

> nuclear fusion side hustle

"So what do you do outside of work?"

"I build nuclear fusion power plants."

> They follow the scent to a spot of insecticide injected into wood.

This reminds me of some ant traps I laid out last year: a small container containing a stash of appetizing, slow-release poison attracts the ants, which they pick up and bring back to feed the rest of the colony.

I had a reflective moment where I was thinking of the morality of subverting the ants' sense of appetite to serve my selfish desire for their extermination.

I suppose the philosophically-inclined ants among the colony wrote their version of "Who Moved My Cheese?", and like the original version written by humans, never disclosed how the cheese was put there in the first place. Is the point of the cheese station to keep you tethered, fat, and immobile? Is the point of lack to keep you alert, lean, and on the move?

As for the ants, I'll never know; they never came back.

There's a timely sub-thread about `tmux` going on here that might answer some of your questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40598629

Front-end development is fundamentally about programming a web browser. Make sure you eventually deeply understand that execution environment [0].

Do not ignore the fundamentals: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript have been, and still are, the foundation of front-end development.

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/round-up-of-web-browser-in...

The Play button, immediately leading to another gate asking for the e-mail address, feels like a bait-and-switch (but I suppose that means I made it to stage two in the funnel).

How about combining the two screens into one?

  Design your dream cake,
  We bake and deliver to you!

  [_Email Address_______]

  (  Let's get started!  )

Otherwise, I like the idea for the drag-and-drop designer (and I can imagine a number of "assembled" foods where this model could apply: pizza, sandwiches, etc.).

Will there be a gallery to showcase other peoples' creations so I can order those, myself?

Happy Birthday, by the way!

For insight into Ford's philosophy of business operations, you might find his "Today and Tomorrow" interesting.

Ford, H. (2019). Today and Tomorrow: Commemorative Edition of Ford's 1926 Classic. CRC Press (Taylor & Francis)

https://archive.org/details/todaytomorrow0000ford

I thought the scrollbar was custom and unresponsive, but then I saw this:

> ... style="height: 2.65256e+06px; ...

Are these the references?

- https://web.archive.org/web/20021224053225/http://smi-web.st...

- https://www.genetic-programming.com/jkpdf/tr1314.pdf

Can't you do this via class action seeking to demonstrate negligence?

Left as an exercise to the reader :)

Super 3D Noah's Ark, then?

> But what about when we're told 'This coffee is not hot'? Does that mean we think it's cold?

I think it depends on your training and how you've studied to interpret statements with logical operators such as these.

If I interpret "not" as "anything but", and if the possibility space of "anything" includes more than one state (temperature, in the article's example), then "not hot" should be taken to mean "any temperature but hot".

Excellent.

I propose we inscribe the Doom and Quake source onto twin golden platters[0] and send them into outer space with the next interstellar probe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Here's a bunch that are on the bookshelf at the moment:

- Information Rules - Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian

- Normal Accidents - Charles Perrow

- Why Buildings Stand Up: The Strength of Architecture - Mario Salvadori

- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson

- The Power Broker - Robert Caro

- Political Order and Political Decay - Francis Fukuyama

- The Creators - Daniel Boorstin

- The Square and the Tower - Niall Ferguson

Maybe we should be checking those CVE databases directly as well.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_National_Vulnerability...

- h t t p s://www.cnnvd.org.cn/

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Security_Threats_Database

- h t t p s://bdu.fstec.ru/ (NOTE: TLS certificate validity warning)

I just hit the "threads" link in the menu bar at the top.

Otherwise, I don't think there is a built-in notification mechanism.

True, but in this case (equipment / structural issues), it's better to be safe than sorry.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Accident

> hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases.

Excuse my ignorance, but what minerals are of value on the moon?

EDIT: Wikipedia provides! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources

> How can I find a problem I want to solve...

What pisses you off? X or Y exists...or maybe doesn't exist. "Why the hell is it 2024 and I'm still doing X?" "Why the hell is it 2024 and there isn't a way to do Y?" Questions like these could be a good start to finding a problem that you're passionate about and motivated to solve.

> ...and what are the indicators it's even worth pursuing?

Would fixing that problem save people time? Maximize people's comfort? Minimize people's labor? Someone might pay for such a solution.

> I don't want to waste years of my life...

Here's an exercise I use for prioritization amidst dozens of journals that are filled with scribbles of ideas:

Imagine you're on your death bed, and you've been supremely lazy, and didn't do anything with your life. You've had ideas, but you did nothing with them. What are the things that you would have liked to know whether they would have been successful or not?

"Photography was interesting, and I was good at it...but success or failure wouldn't have meant that much to me. But my piano compositions...man, I would have liked to know how that would have turned out!"

This tells me "Double down on your piano. Photography is cool too, but it shouldn't be the priority."

Claimed compression ratio of 1187.47 through their proprietary appliance.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5hsQ6zbKIo

Has anyone heard of this firm, Central Spiral LLC? I'm unable to find their business entity filing, nor their patent (although it's not unusual to assign IP to a separate entity).

Fun fact: Kazaa's inventors (and their P2P architecture) would later go on to build "Sky peer-to-peer" AKA Skype.

There used to be legal precedent against third parties scraping data, but that doesn't apply when the host platform itself is complicit ("data sharing agreements", etc.) [0]

It does feel like a breach of trust in one sense when this happens, but you are handing over your data to another party based on their terms (although this shouldn't excuse players acting in bad faith, for example, using intentionally vague terms of service that give them the opportunity to do this sort of thing in the future).

Zuckerberg's comment is just as relevent today as it was then [1]; I suppose the loss of that innocence is one of the consequences (tragedies?) of the modern web.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

It's not difficult to imagine a world where Spotify actually cared about the long-term success of a "hardware version of the app", and what that might look like. What is difficult, is given the feature set, how they might think such a device would ever compete with a smart phone with the Spotify app installed.

It's possible they wanted their own small, self-contained "infotainment system" (like the Sirius XM satellite radio streaming devices from the 2000's which were self-contained) without the pesky UI locks the vehicle applies while in motion. But since you must pair this device with Bluetooth anyway (something my car absurdly doesn't allow while in motion), as the article states, why not just use the phone with the app?

And "Car Thing"...is that name the best they could do?

...anything you plug into your Roku TV.

> some of UniSuper's backups on Google Cloud's servers and elsewhere were salvageable, and the fund was able to recover its data, teaching us all a lesson about having multiple redundancies.

> UniSuper had backups in place with an additional service provider. [0]

What strikes me is that the backups didn't come from the provider who was directly responsible for losing the data.

[0] https://www.unisuper.com.au/about-us/media-centre/2024/a-joi...