yayachiken

Also the rest of the remainder-case definition looks like a typical mathematical "Fallunterscheidung" in German.

Fall a1): Es gilt ... falls x < 0,

Fall a2): Es gilt ... falls x = 0,

Fall a3): Es gilt ... sonst.

Definitely have seen it written like that in mathematical proofs, you can even leave "Es gilt" and just write your proposition. On paper I would probably have placed a Halmos after sonst due to muscle memory lol.

Also if you threaten somebody with an "or else..." it works the same in German "sonst..."

Amazing post, I loved this game as a kid.

Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.

And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.

Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D

OK, then we seem to agree.

I was only talking about the case that your funds can get lots if you lose your device. Because the tokens work like cash and cannot be revoked and reimbursed. Not about redemption from token back to euros.

I would strongly assume that the EMI license is about something different and does not enforce that your digital cash needs to be re-imbursable if you lost it.

There is already precedent of cash cards like GeldKarte which also were non-reimbursable if you lost the physical card, so at least BaFin would allow something like that, but I don't know if that predated the EMI rules.

Are you sure they didn't just mean the requirement that they have to keep the capital around (at least in significant parts) to cash out any tokens they emit?

I am just offering personal opinion and looking into my crystal ball.

You are correct on the facts. The idea is precisely to have a digital cash equivalent, in fact it will even be tracked as part of M1.

I just don't think that people will treat it like tangible cash, and instead assume it to have the same standards of loss prevention that they have with other digital payment methods. You don't lose your bank account if you lose your phone or your debit card, and people will act surprised when they find out that for the D€ this does not apply.

I predict there will be some sentimental news stories about those "victims" of the D€ quickly after the introduction, and it will take quite some time until there is some trust in the public, if ever. And then you get the chicken-egg problem, if nobody wants to use it, nobody will establish the infrastructure, so nobody will even be able to use it.

You don't have to trust anyone with GNU Taler as it is only a free software technology and your country of choice can choose to deploy it.

I guess it doesn't make a lot of sense to become a customer of the German GNU Taler association if you don't live in Germany or at least the EU. And if you already live in Germany you implicitly have to trust German governance somewhat because that is how being part of a society works.

That's the point of the new payment technologies, if you pay with a Visa card you have to trust an American company to provide the service continuously and as the US sanctions against the ICJ justices showed, this is not a theoretical threat scenario anymore.

These are two different use cases.

The Digital Euro is intentionally designed to be as close to cash as possible. This is also why GNU Taler was not a viable candidate from the start (lacks offline transactions). You can also acquire and have Digital Euros without having a bank account.

Wero is explicitly a system backed by the private banking system, if you do not have a bank account, you cannot participate.

I suspect that it will lose out against the Digital Euro.

I do think that GNU Taler is the better technical solution as the blind signatures and online model require less trust in the platform, while the Digital Euro requires untamperable hardware enclaves. So in an ideal world we would all standardize on GNU Taler and be happy.

Unfortunately, anything related to money is probably the place where trust paranoia is the least useful. In fact, widespread use of the Digital Euro will probably be the best proof for the security of the available hardware enclaves, similar to how Bitcoin is proof that SHA-2 is currently secure. Otherwise, somebody would make bank from counterfeiting in the few moments before the system crashes down.

The digital Euro has the real benefit to allow offline transactions. Both Digital Euro and GNU Taler have the psychological burden that you have to exchange "real money" for some kind of digital "monopoly money" which can get lost with no way to re-imburse you. (Which is the same as would happen with literal cash, but nobody will care about that.)

(Which is why I actually think both "digital cash" solutions will die out, with GNU Taler fading into obscurity, and Digital Euro being kept on life support as it is literally legal tender. And we will eventually all just be using Wero, which is just SEPA wire transfers in a trench coat)

> Math that isn't communicated is valueless - by definition.

That is quite a bold claim.

Math can always be used as a tool just to achieve results. This can include even novel math. Due to the maturity of the field it is just becoming more and more unlikely that somebody will come up with something novel without realizing the significance.

One example: Quicksort was almost not published because Tony Hoare initially considered the idea behind the algorithm trivial. In the end, all he wanted to do was to sort some numbers.

Maybe there is a polynomial time SAT solver running somewhere just because some overworked engineer implemented it for a completely different problem. And he was just annoyed that all existing libraries were so slow and he doesn't realize that he is sitting on a proof that P=NP. Who knows.

Probably you both really mean the same thing.

Every gram of body weight needs energy to stay alive. If you are in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight until your energy expenditure matches the caloric intake. If you stay in "caloric deficit" forever you will actually starve by definition.

Properly defining what you mean (comparatively low caloric intake without defining it via the current weight) is actually quite tricky, as your height, body composition and physical activities are all inputs to what counts as a "normal" caloric intake.

IPv6 mostly (RFC 8925) is a rather nice migration option.

Modern operating systems will gladly do CLAT, and old operating systems (or fussy users) can still get their IPv4 by just ignoring the new DHCPv4 option. But admins can finally stop keeping an IPv4 around for every potential client as most applications and users really don't care.

One of the main arguments for tabs over spaces was always that people wanted to configure how much space a level of indentation makes up on screen.

With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.

So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("

We have studies since ages ago that consistency in code style is one of the most important requirements for code quality.

This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.

Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.

My favorite anecdote for an astroturfing suspicion I had was in German subreddits.

Whenever somebody was talking about rolled oats, without fail, somebody would chime in that Kölln brand rolled outs were strictly superior and they would gladly pay the 4x markup for them.

It is hilarious because rolled outs are probably one of the most fungible goods out there. Also the comments eventually just... stopped.

Human perception is weird like that so even identical oats may taste better if the packaging is different, and also it might have been a memetic thing, but I am still somewhat convinced that it was a marketing campaign.

Not really something you can control, but RC always feels "unauthentic" whenever people write about it.

It is often portrayed like an old-school hackerspace or makerspace but it's definitely not. It has an explicit corporate background, and it always feels like that is somehow hidden. In these comments there is a comment that claims that RC is not for business builders and networking, then immediately gets disproven by a quote from its very website. This shows that you have an actual image/brand problem.

It is similar to how the term "hackathon" evolved. In the old times it was people coming together who worked on shared goals (like a FLOSS project) but only communicated via mailing lists and probably would never met in person otherwise. A hackathon was often an emotional thing, involving poor people travelling to the other side of the planet to meet their online friends to drink beer and finally have a whiteboard to communicate some complex ideas. Then corporations came and organized soulless "hackathons" and turned it into an idea farm and talent recruitment. The term "hackathon" is pretty much burnt completely nowadays.

So anything that feels like it gets subtly used by corporatism just naturally gives techies the ick. It is not the first time this bait-and-switch happens, so people are fair to assume intent.

I say you cannot control it, as obviously the public image comes from those blog posts of RC "Alumni" (Another great example: that term alone gives me the creeps). And those people have the right to feel excited about a nice experience that it probably was for them.

But Recurse Center should probably be proud of the corporate background and actively counteract the impression of being a hobbyist makerspace that just has better inventory and manpower.

At the very least, AI can review all the code you have written. You can still reject every suggestion, but in the worst it will just slow you down. No citation needed for that. If an AI were to truly confuse you sufficiently to accept a wrong suggestion based on phony logic, then it just shows you didn't grok the logic deeply in the first place. (Which is a helpful finding for the second iteration.)

You didn't say if you did, but just in case if you truly never had a serious look at LLM tools, you really need to step up. Never even trying something like Claude Code borders on negligence nowadays.

AI is still a bubble, but pretty much every software developer having a hard-dependency on these companies nowadays, is was sustains it. It sucks, but currently there is no realistic way around it.

Exceptions apply for data protection reasons, obviously don't upload all your personal data and business-critical intellectual property into some 3rd-party AI tool.

Not sure if it's the same in Canada, but where I am from the problem is the oil (lubricant and fuel) from the car and at car washes the runoff gets treated by letting it go through an oil trap.

The trapped oil gets disposed of separately, the treated oil-free water goes to the sewer.

It's actually hilarious sometimes. The business models that generate most scorn and incredulity on HN are the straightforward ones. They convert labor pretty much directly to a very basic product with a clear demand by society, that can't possibly be profitable, are we sure it's not actually a front for Real Estate or AI or Tax Evasion?

You cannot treat light as particles in that scenario. The primary wave gets absolutely and completely delayed, with no part getting ahead. It's not some photons doing something with a certain probability and then causing a macroscopic effect once the probability goes towards 1 once you passed sufficient matter.

What Feynman does (where this confusion comes from) is that you can look at discrete wave packets (i.e. photons) and the math comes out the right way for the primary wave if you assume that only some of these wave packets get phase-shifted, and add all elementary waves together afterwards.

But still, it's photons as "wave packets" that influence the whole system, not photons as independent particles that either bounce on something or don't.

I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom.

But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.

The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.

For me the colonialisation update fixed that. But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?

People often say that but does the cost for handling cash really scale (even approximately) proportionally with the number of transactions or revenue?

Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all? If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.

If you actually read how GUIX (what they talk about in section 7.3) is calling a "full source bootstrap", they have brought down the compiler seed to less than 200 bytes, but also they rely on an execution environment that still has 25 Megabytes of unaudited(-able) binary.

GUIX is unconfortable about that, but as they name the current process "full source bootstrap" implicitly consider this unaudited execution environment out-of-scope and more of an academic blemish, rather than a real problem: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

After all you rebuild it together with the world immediately after compiler bootstrap is done. And the utilities in your execution environment do not process the compiler source, so this dependency cannot be a problem, right?

The paper precisely addresses this. You cannot handwave away your shell or ELF utilities. They can sustain an attack just like the compiler.

> "[For demonstration purposes], I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode."

This is precisely the problem that most people dealing with OPSEC have.

If you get "paranoid enough", your threat model always collapses into an unactionable mess where everything is just toast and your only solution is to quit computing and start doing woodwork or something.

If everything is potentially compromised then of course the results from the paper become obvious. If your environment is compromised, don't trust its output, duh!

If you want to quantify though, under which assumptions, "how much" your environment can be broken without compromising its output, the paper has value. And it seems like real attempts of bootstrapping binaries actually missed a spot.

The paper is not about implementing a general attack that works on all trusting-trust mitigations.

It is precisely about showing that you can still propagate backdoored code if the compromised binary in your seed is NOT the compiler.

But to be fair, at least paper disposal is truly free because paper recycling generally turns a profit for the municipalities.

Note that the fork()/execve() semantics of Linux pretty much depend on memory overcommit. You may get weird OOM crashes when there is seemingly no memory pressure, if you turn overcommit off.

In the short time between fork() and execve(), the new process duplicates the entire virtual memory of the old one. None of this is physically allocated due to copy-on-write, but still all counts as virtual memory.

Read up on the Koch method. To be exact: Koch method with Farnsworth timing. You'll have to keep the letters in a certain speed so your brain does not have enough time to decode dots and dashes. So only the length between the letters is extended to lower the difficulty. The idea is that the lowest unit of comprehension are letters. After training you'll hear a -.- and don't even think of it as dots and dashes, it's just a K obviously.

You start just distinguishing two letters (usually K and M). I would recommend using a trainer app that gives you a string of letters by sound, and to write them down on paper. Then you can check how many you got correct. Do not try to replay letters multiple times, just skip it and move on. If your result is better than 95% or so you can continue and introduce a third letter, and so on.

There is a certain order of letters considered more or less canonical for use in the Koch method which you can look up.

Edit: Back then I learnt it with https://lcwo.net/, it's distraction-free and quite nice.

HAM was a nice rabbit hole to fall into, but unfortunately I couldn't muster enough interest to actually get good enough to go "on air".

Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:

Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.

On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)

One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)

People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.

One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)

The normalization of the age variable still looks problematic, as it requires that there is a linear dependency between age and incidence.

Both the scatter plot and also the probability graph seem to be curving upwards w.r.t age, i.e. the incidence of dementia cases seems to accelerate with age. Which at least makes a lot of intuitive sense, and would forbid just plotting in a regression line.

Having a more or less circumstantial point to arbitrarily cut your regression line in half also just begs for introducing Simpson's Paradox.

I think when thinking about progress as a society, people need to internalize better that we all without exception are on this world for the first time.

We may have collectively filled libraries full of books, and created yottabytes of digital data, but in the end to create something novel somebody has to read and understand all of this stuff. Obviously this is not possible. Read one book per day from birth to death and you still only get to consume like 80*365=29200 books in the best case, from the millions upon millions of books that have been written.

So these "few tricks" are the accumulation of a lifetime of mathematical training, the culmination of the slice of knowledge that the respective mathematician immersed themselves into. To discover new math and become famous you need both the talent and skill to apply your knowledge in novel ways, but also be lucky that you picked a field of math that has novel things with interesting applications to discover plus you picked up the right tools and right mental model that allows you to discover these things.

This does not go for math only, but also for pretty much all other non-trivial fields. There is a reason why history repeats.

And it's actually a compelling argument why AI is still a big deal even though it's at its core a parrot. It's a parrot yes, but compared to a human, it actually was able to ingest the entirety of human knowledge.

Yes, that is plausible indeed, but the problem is that there are many explanations which are plausible, but there doesn't seem to be a smoking gun.

Strange about that explanation for example is that the time correlation is backwards. First the solar generation started to drop out and only then central generator stations tripped. Also the on-going frequency oscillations had already stabilized. If it was related to frequency issues, the solar inverters would either have shut down 15 minutes earlier (while the frequency oscillations were at the peak) OR 1-2 minutes later (when power stations tripped and frequency would have dipped)