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I read the book by Tsutomu Shimomura, who caught Mitnick's hacking and tracked him down. It's a fascinating read. He was able to locate Mitnick in physical world based on his online activities and his cellular phone usage. In those early days, few people understood the cyber landscape and cellular technologies to exploit them.

That's because they've reclassified unemployment status. Anyone working 1 hour out of N months is not considered unemployed.

"Is anyone still using emacs?"

Of course. Emacs has been my stable editor over many years, handling many languages that came along, surviving many other IDEs that came and gone (the latest being the Cursor sold out).

There're always new enhancements in Emacs, from multiple-cursor editing years ago, to LSP and tree sitter in recent years. Currently I just got into the vertico/marginalia/consult/embark combo packages. Embark with its context based actions seriously is an amazing underrated package.

Up to 40% unemployment or very low employment.

Plus electricity, labor, and maintenance?

The California state budget for 2026-27 is at $248 billions. Life is good for the state politicians.

Facial and gait recognition tech make the pedestrian vs car point moot.

VAT is a regressive tax. It hits everyone along the way, rich or poor. It hits the poor especially hard proportionally.

LoRa is for long range lower power communication. It can achieve a range of approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in practical conditions and up to 330 kilometers (210 miles) in perfect conditions. There are plenty of applications for it.

This is great. Other things needed for a great C development environment are a standardized build process plus build tools and a standardized packaging system.

I actually find music with lyrics helps me concentrate, as long as it’s an old song that I’m familiar. New songs are distracting as I would wander off trying to understand what’s being sung. Old songs have no such problem and they just become familiar background patterns.

Same here. Emacs has been the stable editor for all kinds of language changes, tool changes, and IDE changes. Emacs is great with LLM, as LLM is mostly text related and Emacs is great in capturing and dealing with text.

Yes. Many people set a limit on the maximum payout as doubling goes up very fast. A 8-fan win is $1280 payout, from each player. People usually limit the max to be 9 fan.

Base point is like the minimum payout. All players agree upon a minimum payout (base point) ahead of time. E.g. $10 as the minimum for the first fan. A fan literally means doubling. A 4 fan win means the payout is $10x2x2x2=$80 from each losing party. It can go up very quickly.

Looking from Earth at the stars closer to the center of a galaxy, they are found to be older. Looking from Earth at the stars closer to the edge of a galaxy, they are found to be younger.

I feel there should be a PowerToy applet to turn Segment Heap on or off.

Gen X was the last free range children. They ran wild after school without the tethering cell phones, playing in sand and drinking from garden hoses. The silent generation turned out to be a great generation building most of modern technologies.

If the engine failed due to missing oil change because of the difficulty, the whole car is gone. The waste in cost, material, and environmental impact far outweighs the savings in 2mpg improvement.

Yes. Winget is getting better support on Windows apps. The other day I tried to download the latest version of ImageMagick but all the links on the official site were bad. I tried Winget and it had it!

Thank you!

I'm glad people are interested in art discourse and exploring arts in general. Art is a very personal thing. Different people see arts in different ways. Yet there's some recurrent themes time after time.

I got my insight in art in musics and on why people love them so much. Musics and songs are basically repeatable patterns with slight variations in multiple dimensions, in pitch, in beat, in tone, in rhyme, in lyrics, etc. The human mind is a super pattern processing machine, as part of our evolution survival traits. Pattern brings structure, abstraction, and comfort. But strict repetitive patterns bore the mind. Human love patterns, but with variation and imperfection.

The human mind is very good in filling the missing pieces in a pattern, again from our evolution survival traits. Our ancestors could look at the tail of an animal and filled in the blank that it's a tiger hidden behind a big rock. The filling of missing pieces is by experience and learning. It really is the original generative AI.

I believe the variation and imperfection in patterns trigger the mind's filling the blank function, which triggers the generative function, which can run wild generating wide range of imagination. That's why arts can have different reaction from different people as each has their own life experience and thus different generated result.

I think art is patterns with variation, imperfection, and blanks at the most basic level. Computer generated art thus needs to fulfill that basic requirement at the least to be called art.

That's pretty neat; some of output are beautiful!

Mine is also pixel coloring at the lowest level. I have a shading kernel in GPU doing the low level work, mainly applying colors recursively like fractal. I got sick of writing shader code so I make a high level language supporting math operations in concise expression that are compiled to shader code in GPU. The main thing is it supports functions. That let me reuse code and build up abstractions. E.g once I get the "ring" pattern settled, it's defined as a function and I can use it in other places, combine with other functions, and have it be called by other functions.

One of these days when I get some time, I'll formalize it and publish it.

Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s

The problem is in power transmission. Transmission fee is a big part of the cost. Anything helping for at home generation should be encouraged.

Right now plug in solar is starting to appear. It is big in Germany. Utah has passed a law to cut the red tapes to allow home owners to install plug in solar themselves. More states should follow.

This is huge. Sony is trying to make Cox into law enforcement to do their biddings. The Supreme Court struck that down.

Should have called it A^3I^2 - Arm Agentic Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure.

The last time I built a native Windows app years ago, I used WTL 3.0. It’s a light weight wrapper on the native Win32 API, lighter than MFC. It took out the unpleasantness of working directly on Win32 API and wrapped it in a simple OO framework. It had access to all features of Win32. It could produce runtime binary in dozens of K, instead of MB or GB.

Microsoft released it open source later on. Looking at the repository, looks like it has been kept up and maintained, up to version 10 now.

The autoboxing in a loop case can be handled by the compiler.

Branch prediction works really well on loops. The looping condition is mostly true except for the very last time. The loop body is always predicted to run. If you structure the loop body to have no data dependence between iterations, multiple iterations of the loop can run in parallel. Greatly improve the performance.

It’s not a win win policy. The citizens lose massive amount of their money to government on the bond yield delta. It preys on people not knowing the effect of long term compound interest.

Edit: in fact interest delta is how banks make their huge profits except the government here does it by force.

I was just setting up a new machine and was setting up the Rust environment. The very first thing rustup-init asked was to install Visual Studio before proceeding. It was like 20-30gb of stuff installed before moving forward.

This tool would be a great help if I knew beforehand.