Software patents are mostly garbage and unneeded. And I say that having some in my name (I actually tried to get my name off them, but our lawyers said it's not possible).
Show me one useful software patent that (a) is not "obvious to one skilled in the art", and (b) benefits society by being granted a monopoly. Just one!
Software rarely requires expensive research that would be worth protecting.
Rather than enabling a fair market, this takes fairness out of the market.
Software patents are like getting a patent on "Murder story with final revelation of who did it." Maybe add one or two features, like a "detective with hat", etc.
In one fell swoop you would be able to own most murder mysteries.
Software (like books, stories, art, etc) is better handled by Copyright law. May the one who actually has a better product win!
Gray (Gy) - measures energy deposited per kilogram of tissue. Think of it like measuring how many bullets hit a target, not how much damage they do.
Sievert (Sv) - measures biological damage. This accounts for the fact that different types of radiation and different tissues react differently. Think of this as the actual damage done.
The bullet's energy is identical in all cases (same Gy), but the biological damage varies wildly (different Sv).
The same energy deposited (Gy) causes vastly different biological damage (Sv) depending on:
What tissue (bone marrow is like your heart - critical; muscle is more resilient)
What radiation type (alpha particles are like hollow-point bullets - more damaging per energy unit; gamma rays are like full metal jacket - cleaner pass-through)
For most medical purposes (X-rays, gamma rays), 1 Gy is approx 1 Sv, which is why people use them interchangeably and add to confusion.
Location and delivery matter enormously. It's like pouring water. Put 3 liters in your lungs, you drown (dead). Put 3 liters on your hand, your hand gets wet (annoying but harmless).
3 Gy to your whole body at once is potentially fatal. You'll likely die within weeks from bone marrow failure, your blood cells can't regenerate. 3 Gy to a small tumor in your knee is a typical treatment session. The rest of your body gets almost nothing, and your bone marrow keeps working fine. 3 Gy spread over 6 sessions (0.5 Gy each) to a localized area is a very low dose that gives tissue time to repair.
Yes old, but even worse, it is not a well argued review. Yes, Bayesian statistics are slowly gaining an upper hand at higher levels of statistics, but you know what should be taught to first year undergrads in science? Exploratory data analysis! One of the first books I voluntarily read in stats was Mosteller and Tukey’s gem: Data Analysis and Regression. A gem. Another great book is Judea Pearl’s Book of Why.
Yeah. I think most ppl (incl me) lack strong intuition about things at scales outside our human day-to-day. Reminds me of a conversation about wealth, someone said "The difference between a million and a billion is... about a billion."
It's actually quite profound, politically speaking. I understand why Kim Jong Il thought it was a Masterpiece. To get hung up on visuals and call it a knockoff is itself tacky and shows a lack of appreciation for context; which is what art is about. It's an honest take on modern human society and the tradeoffs that are made.
It gives insights into the minds of some modern leaders... The idea that you have to kill the monster which saved you.
The part at the very end where the woman kills the monster and sacrifices herself with it (out of principle) is brilliant. At the end, the soul of the monster joins with the body of the woman and the camera zooms in on her face... You assume that it will bring her back to life but actually, she is not moving and you can't quite tell if her eyes are open or closed (dead or alive)? There's something deep behind the ambiguity.
I suspect Kim Jong Il saw the monster as a metaphor for capitalism or globalization, the woman as a metaphor for a revolutionary leader (maybe Kim himself) and the monster's relentless hunger for metals as a metaphor for greed-driven industrialization but I wonder to what extent did he see it as a metaphor for his own communist movement? The message seems to be that even though she did a bad thing killing their saviour, she did it with sound morals because she was willing to sacrifice herself. She knew it was the right thing to do to contain the monster's relentless greed. But I feel like the part at the very end where the soul of the monster joins her body is a way to show that she is forgiven because it's the intent that counts... Maybe a subtle hint that a good leader is rewarded for having good intentions and conviction but is it purely an ideological reward of being spiritually 'made whole' or also material (she gets to live)?
It makes me wonder if Kim Jong Il may have been tempted to turn North Korea into a capitalist society under the thumb of globalists; keep feeding the beast which had originally (in his view) freed his people from past oppression but instead, he decided to politically 'sacrifice himself' for his people by betraying that globalist monster which had helped him.
There is a statement at the end which essentially amounts to blasphemy in the west: "To keep feeding him, we will have to keep sending him to other countries to wage war. We cannot do this to the world." Ouch.
As unfree and poor as North Korea may be, this is an incredibly blunt, honest take.
This is a very good read on the state of the art when it comes to submarine-launched missile accuracy, which are presently inertially guided with a stellar update during flight.
You are likely aware of the English language's feature of multiple adjectives (that are modifying the same noun) needing to appear in a certain order to sound "correct". So for example "yellow big balloon" sounds wrong but "big yellow balloon" sounds right. This is because SIZE is supposed to come before COLOR in standard English phrases.
In this case, "robotic" and "private" could be similar enough in category to be confusing. In the Order of Adjectives[0], "robotic" is in the TYPE category, near the bottom of the list, and "private" seems to fit in that same category at first glance. By that interpretation, either "robotic private" or "private robotic" works.
What if instead of "private" it said "Californian"? That would make it an ORIGIN, and "Californian robotic spacecraft" becomes the obvious choice — otherwise, you'd think they were talking about a spacecraft belonging to robots from California. ;)
So if we interpret "private" as an ORIGIN, your "private robotic spacecraft" sounds better. That would have been my choice as well.
Fussell’s Class (1983) covers some of this. His upper-middle (in class—income tends to track with these social classes, but not always) are accustomed to very free lifestyles relative to, especially, the middle class (or the lower two tiers of his multifaceted “prole” class—the upper tier of that class does stuff like own successful plumbing or welding businesses, not work at Wal Mart or whatever)
A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests.
(The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all)
You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.
I personally think getting into organised crime kind of mirrors the process where corps pick up fresh grads. Someone who fits the profile of being suitable for organised crime is someone without legal opportunities due to a lack of education, illegal immigration status, prior convictions, etc. In similar ways they are "headhunted" in a process that is more about convenience than key skills in a resume. If you're one of these people you'll end up floating around spaces where the "headhunting" happens.
I remember when I was young and unemployed being plucked from the street when I was looking at job cards in the window of a job centre by members of an MLM. They tried to rope me into their ugly embrace selling door to door on commission only deals that were dubious in nature.
What's kind of spooky to me is how thin those lines can be, it only takes one mistake, lapse in judgement in youth or rolling your birth into an unstable family to end up on the wrong side of that line. This is why I personally find it quite distasteful when people who travelled the happy path turn up their nose at people who fell off onto the darker one. In some cases some kids excel in their black market roles and would have applied the same gusto to a white market profession if they'd had that opportunity.
I recently learned about a similar use of animals for assisting humans:
In about 1915, he tried a more natural approach to control the street lighting in Brightwater – chicken power. They didn't have time switches in those days, so he connected a switch to the perches in his chicken house. When the chickens started to roost at night the weight would turn the lighting on and in the morning when they got down off their perches, the spring switch would turn the generator and lighting off.
I'm about a year into a mid-effort level job search. I work in a somewhat specialized technical field and am fairly senior (I think in FAANG-ese I'd be an maybe an L7 if I understand their levels correctly). So this means I'm looking for management, director, deputy CTO or CTO positions depending on the company. I have a track record making my company lots of money, and opening up new opportunities worth many multiples of that. So the deck is already stacked against me as most positions are for jr or mid engineers, but I have a proven track record of growing responsibilities and (in my market) fairly recognizable success stories.
The search has been absolutely atrocious. Unlike anything I've ever seen before in 30 years of working in tech.
* I used to be able to simply pull on my network and get a position within 2 or 3 tries. Total job hunt time, under a month.
* The last time I had to go through this was pre-COVID, and I used a mix of my network and cold applications (around 50). I only heard back from 2 of the cold submissions and my network pulled me in to where I am today. Total job hunt time, around 4 months.
* I'm almost exactly 1 year in now, over 700 applications, people in my network can't even get responses for referrals. I've made it to 4 interview funnels, including stupidly exhausting FAANGs, for positions ranging from CTO to consultant filling a contract slot. 2 solid offers, both at least 40-60% below my current market rate. One executive recruiter ghosted me after we started discussing Total Compensation Packages.
I even had a friend post a position at their company, using my resume as the hiring template. Then they personally referred me to that position. I never received a call, and they never received any candidates.
It feels like being personally blacklisted, but it's affecting everybody I know.
The furthest I've gotten has been by hunting down corporate and executive recruiters directly, but I've had two recruiters get laid off halfway through the matching process. One FAANG recruiter has even contacted me hoping I could help them find a position.
Something is broken somewhere. Companies are starving for talent, and talent is starving for companies. The online applications sites are clearly filtering out people, but there appears to be massive churn in the recruiting side as well.
/r/recruitinghell is very representative of things I've seen.
I did notice that hiring activity has picked up since the rollover of the FY. Several 6-7 month old applications stirred somebody to contact me in the last month or so with a "great fit" that turned out to have nothing to do with my skillset.
My story is finally drawing to a close however, I've just negotiated a good position at a new firm and am setting a start date.
- Marketing Junk Food, Candy and Sodas directly to children
- Tobacco
- Boeing
- Finance
- Pharmaceutical Opiates
- Oral Phenylepherin to replace pseudoephedrine despite knowing a) it wasn’t effective, and b) posed a risk to people with common medical conditions.
- Social Media engagement maximization
- Data Brokerage
- Mining Safety
- Construction site safety
- Styrofoam Food and Bev Containers
- ITC terminal in Deerfield Park (read about the decades of them spewing thousands of pounds benzene into the air before the whole fucking thing blew up, using their influence to avoid addressing any of it, and how they didn’t have automatic valves, spill detection, fire detection, sprinklers… in 2019.)
- Grocery store and restaurant chains disallowing cashiers from wearing masks during the first pandemic wave, well after we knew the necessity, because it made customers uncomfortable.
- Boar’s Head Liverwurst
And, you know, plenty more. As someone that grew up playing in an unmarked, illegal, not-access-controlled toxic waste dump in a residential area owned by a huge international chemical conglomerate— and just had some cancer taken out of me last year— I’m pretty familiar with various ways corporations are willing to sacrifice health and safety to bump up their profit margin. I guess ignoring that kids were obviously playing in a swamp of toluene, PCBs, waste firefighting chemicals, and all sorts of other things on a plot not even within sight of the factory in the middle of a bunch of small farms was just the cost of doing business. As was my friend who, when he was in vocational high school, was welding a metal ladder above storage tank in a chemical factory across the state. The plant manager assured the school the tanks were empty, triple rinsed and dry, but they exploded, blowing the roof off the factory taking my friend with it. They were apparently full of waste chemicals and IIRC, the manager admitted to knowing that in court. He said he remembers waking up briefly in the factory parking lot where he landed, and then the next thing he remembers was waking up in extreme pain wearing the compression gear he’d have to wear into his mid twenties to keep his grafted skin on. Briefly looking into the topic will show how common this sort of malfeasance is in manufacturing.
The burden of proof is on people saying that they won’t act like the rest of American industry tasked with safety.
This is incredible. In April I used the standard GPT-4 model via ChatGPT to help me reverse engineer the binary bluetooth protocol used by my kitchen fan to integrate it into Home Assistant.
It was helpful in a rubber duck way, but could not determine the pattern used to transmit the remaining runtime of the fan in a certain mode. Initial prompt here [0]
I pasted the same prompt into o1-preview and o1-mini and both correctly understood and decoded the pattern using a slightly different method than I devised in April. Asking the models to determine if my code is equivalent to what they reverse engineered resulted in a nuanced and thorough examination, and eventual conclusion that it is equivalent. [1]
Testing the same prompt with gpt4o leads to the same result as April's GPT-4 (via ChatGPT) model.
You should check out Frink, a delightful unit-preserving calculator and language optimized for (but not limited to) back-of-the-envelope calculation.
Yes, it has implicit multiplication! :) It also offers exact rational fractions, transparent bigint conversion, and plus/minus intervals that automatically tracks error bars through all arithmetic operations.
Interesting timing for me! Just a couple of days ago I discovered the work of biologist Olivier Hamant who has been raising exactly this issue. His main thesis is that very high performance (which he defines as efficacy towards a known goal plus efficiency) and very high robustness (the ability to withstand large fluctuations in the system) are physically incompatible. Examples abound in nature. Contrary to common perception evolution does not optimise for high performance but high robustness. Giving priority to performance may have made sense in a world of abundant resources, but we are now facing a very different period where instability is the norm. We must (and will be forced to) backtrack on performance in order to become robust. It’s the freshest and most interesting take on the poly-crisis that I’ve seen in a long time.
What a beautiful obituary. The world is full of people whose everyday work makes the world just a bit more lovely to be in, and they don't get the recognition they deserve. To the destroyers of drab, thank you.
As an alternative to using additional framework layers, I'd recommend spending an afternoon familiarizing yourself with AspNetCore middleware - and HttpContext in particular. Getting at the raw primitives can allow for you to throw away a lot of confusing boilerplate.
Once you learn that everything that happens in the most complicated corners of web apps is ultimately dancing on top of HttpContext, you can dramatically simplify your life. Even things like web sockets and 3rd party auth are just a handful of lines on top.
These abstractions are not scary to use. The Microsoft documentation is really poor with regard to guiding developers towards these simpler approaches. It's fairly obvious that they want you deep in the Azure complexity matrix. The only exception I have found to this perception is noted below [0].
Mastery here means you can avoid pulling down vendors' interpretations of how your entire application should be written. You can write whatever middleware per their specifications and make it fit your patterns perfectly. I recall what it was like allowing my auth vendor's ham-fisted libraries drive much of how my web app and DI had to be structured.
In space, a thin sheet of lead is not radiation shielding but a radiation amplifier.
The problem being that high-energy cosmic rays are unlikely to interact with the lightly built spacecraft, going right through it. But if you add a thin layer of a good radiation shielding material, then there is substantially increased chance that they will interact with that material, and produce a very large spray of secondary particles. And those secondary particles will also be going fast enough that when they hit more shielding material, they will also result in more particles.
Then some of those secondary particles will be neutrons, which will easily penetrate the thin shielding (lead half thickness for 4MeV neutrons is 68mm), and irradiate the surroundings.
This has been very clearly demonstrated on the ISS, any metal tool has substantially higher radiation levels around it.
Spent some time around Linotype machines in the 70s, my Dad left school to operate them at 15 (to support his family in the 30s), they were still in use at the local paper until the 80s when everything was computerised. So give some love to the Lino machines too! While they were not suitable for typesetting math they were perfectly good for doing a newspaper - and could be driven from paper tape. Fixing mistakes was easy, just retype a line.
Mechanically they were also brilliant, a mechanical type sorter, and mechanical analog justification (spaces were wedged shape, once a line was typed the mechanism would press on the wedges and jam the type into a line width hole pushing the words equally apart).
Finally: the brass type blanks were readable (forwards), the cast lines of type backwards (my Dad could read them), they were set into full pages by the subeditors who would add headlines/pics, a full page paper matrix was cast over them (forwards, correct way around, readable), and that would be pulled into a half circle and a reversed metal curved plate would be cast into that (backwards), finally 2 plates would be bolted to either side of a roller in the press and once all the pages were there they would run the press producing readable (forwards) text on paper
In those days the (evening) paper would have multiple editions, what it really meant was that they redid a few of the rollers on the press and kept the rest (classifieds etc) the same, sports edition added a few more rollers/pages - evening papers died thanks to TV news
Trying to understand consumer privacy behaviors outside the prevalent social contract that the vast majority of people operate under is bound to missinterpret what is happening and why.
We live in a regulated "supermarket" economy. What surfaces on a screen is entirely analogous to what surfaces on a shelf: People check the price and make their choices based on taste, budget etc. They are not idiots, they operate under a simplifying assumption that makes life in a complex world possible.
The implicit assumption central to this way of organising the economy is that anything legally on sale is "safe". That it has been checked and approved by experts that know what they are doing and have the consumer interest as top priority.
People will not rush back home to their chemistry labs to check what is in their purchased food, whether it corresponds to the label (assuming that such a label even exists) and what might be the short or long term health effects. They dont have the knowledge, resources and time to do that for all the stuff they get exposed to.
What has drifted in the digital economy is not consumer standards, it is regulatory standards. Surfacing digital products with questionable short and long term implications for individuals and society has become a lucrative business, has captured its regulatory environment and will keep exploiting opportunities and blind spots until there is pushback.
Ultimately regulators only derive legitimacy from serving their constituencies, but that feedback loop can be very slow and it gets tangled with myriad other unrelated political issues.
You gained $20 worth of assets, so the counterpart of the $20 leaving your bank account is countered by your assets-account gaining $20
Now each year your book loses 1/5th of its value, due to wear and tear (4$ disappearing from your assets-account), this is countered by your depreciation-account (4$ tax write off, every year!)
After 5 years, it is worth $0 according to your books, but you manage to sell it again for $10: your bank account gets debited for $10, while your capital-gains-account gets credited for $10
The K6 has a USB-C port for charging. Of course, they bungled it and it doesn't have the CC resistors to trigger PD chargers, so you need an A-to-C cable, or some soldering skillz. Other than that, they are reported to be identical hardware.
If we're going to visit the circles of hell, let's do it properly:
Step -1: Get it under source control and backed up.
Step -2: Find out if the source code corresponds to the executable. Which of the 7 variants of the source code (if any).
Step -3: Do dark rituals over a weekend with cdparanioa to scrape the source code from the bunch of scratched cd's found in someone's bottom drawer. Bonus point if said person died last week, and other eldritch horrors lurk in that bottom drawer. Build a VM clone of the one machine still capable of compiling it.
1. AI becomes so good that I will be out of a job as a software dev
2. AI becomes really good and I will 10x my productivity
3. AI hits a hard ceiling and it might only make me 2x more productive
Based on those 3 possibilities, I invest my portfolio like this:
1. 40% goes to the main layer of the AI revolution which are chip manufacturers which is mostly TSMC & Nvidia. I throw some money at Intel as well because geopolitics. If AI is ubiquitous, then we need a lot more silicon.
2. 30% goes to the next layer which is mostly Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. These are the companies close to consumers. I don't know which one will win out so I spread it across.
3. 30% goes to S&P 500 because productivity increase will benefit all industries. Also, if AI hits the ceiling fast, at least I will have 30% of my money in S&P 500 and not AI bubble companies.
I basically invest like I'm going to lose my job. If I don't lose my job, great. If I lose my job, that means my stocks will have to pay for my food.
