ignirtoq

He’s a bit early for hurricane season.

My first question would have been “is the fifth grader boss the entire fifth wave, so after 40 first graders, or the end of the fifth wave, so after 50 first graders?” Followed by “how much time do I get to prepare?”

Not OP, but I personally would like to see a mesh-based low-bandwidth HTTP alternative, like Gemini. A tool set for sharing things more persistent than text messaging (or ideally building other digital services with) while being compatible with the underlying lower performance hardware and wireless medium.

The article discusses that IP-based limiting doesn’t work as well as it used to. Because of NATs, proxies, etc., IP addresses are a lot more ephemeral and flexible, so they’ve seen the same big perpetrators adapt and change IPs when rate-limited. I expect we will start to see support for anonymous downloads go away in the next several months in many major OSS registries.

705,809 births and about 1.61 million deaths, leading to a net population decrease of 899,845. Wikipedia says the total population is about 123.4 million, so they lost about 0.73%.

This looks like someone took regular expressions, expanded them to a full programming language, and used Unicode to deal with the explosion of required symbols. I have a hard enough time reading my own regular expressions. I can’t imagine writing full programs like this.

This and putting lightning in rocks to do math.

The result of all this may be catastrophic. Should a worst-case scenario ever occur — a cyberattack, a natural disaster, an internet outage — there may be no human workers left with the skills that once kept food on the shelves.

Very nerdy of me, but this reminds me of a Stargate SG-1 episode “the Sentinel.” The team travels to a planet whose civilization relies on fully automated technology. The people don’t have to operate or maintain it (normally), so their society has completely forgotten how. In the episode, one set of antagonists comes in and sabotages their defense system, and another set sees the opportunity and invades. The protagonists have to then figure out the defense system and fix it.

We don’t live in a TV series. There aren’t benevolent outsiders who will swoop down and save our systems in the nick of time when they break down. We’re headed in a bad direction.

Change the problem from 3 doors to a million. Kids pick a door, and the host opens 999,998 doors, leaving theirs and one other door closed. One of the closed doors is the winner. Do they want to switch now?

I didn’t want to be a buzz kill, but if that’s supposed to be the top of the vase around its neck, that would mean it climbed into the vase and got its head stuck trying to get out?

That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.

Determinism means performing the same way every time it is run with the same inputs. It doesn’t mean it follows your mental model of how it should run. The article you cite talks about aggressive compiler optimizing causing unexpected crashes. Unexpected, not unpredictable. The author found the root cause and addressed it. Nothing there was nondeterministic. It was just not what the developer expected, or personally thought was an appropriate implementation, but it performed the same way every time. I think you keyed on the word “randomly” and missed “seemed to,” which completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

LLMs often act truly nondeterministically. You can create a fresh session and feed it exactly the same prompt and it will produce a different output. This unpredictability is poison for producing a quality product that is maintainable with dynamic LLM code generation in the pipeline.

It’s a lot harder to perpetuate historical knowledge when you don’t get support from the educational system. The government sets educational standards and subject matter, so it’s not surprising they de-emphasize the record of their own actions against the public they are teaching.

Universities are more independent (but definitely not completely, and they come with their own set of problems), so students there tend to be more exposed to topics like this. But then you get political movements villianizing universities.

Bluesky is one, single platform. It stores the complete data for any given user post in its databases and provides that through its data stream and APIs. This means every different client someone writes has access to all the same data as every other client, because they’re all going through Bluesky. This also means if Bluesky doesn’t support some feature, no clients can either.

The architecture of the Fediverse is different. Forgetting ActivityPub for a moment, Mastodon is one platform and Pixelfed is another. This means each one has its own data model, internal storage architecture, and streams/APIs. Because they were built for different purposes, they support different features. I don’t use either, but I expect there are image-related features in Pixelfed that are just not possible in a Mastodon client, not because someone hasn’t written a client capable of it, but because Mastodon doesn’t have the internal data storage nor API to support it in any client.

Where ActivityPub comes in is a unified stream language. When a post pops up on a platform, that platform has the complete data and translates as much as it can into an ActivityPub message to send to other platforms. Some platforms haven’t figured out yet how to pack all of their relevant data into an ActivityPub message, so some data may be lost in the sending. And different platforms may not support storing all the data in a given ActivityPub message they receive, especially if it’s from a feature they don’t provide, so some data may be lost in the receiving.

Ultimately this means even with ActivityPub linking things together, the data flow isn’t perfect/complete. So different data is available to any even theoretical Mastodon client compared to a Pixelfed client because the backend platforms are different. Their APIs expose different data in different, often incompatible ways, so even if someone wrote an image-focused client for Mastodon, it wouldn’t be possible to do everything an image-focused client for Pixelfed could do, because the backend platforms focus on different things.

I think she’s saying she could have allocated the GPUs to Azure to game the metrics, but Microsoft chose to allocate them to internal projects, which is a form of self-investment. She’s not saying they made the wrong decision, she’s saying their decision in this longer-term investment makes the short-term metrics worse.

The walled garden (micro services in an isolated network) is the first line of defense. In case a malicious actor finds a way into that network, the second line of defense would be to authenticate the service-service traffic, so the micro services reject direct requests from clients they aren’t expecting.

Yeah, I can understand that. I’m not in that space, so I wasn’t aware. A similar craze happened for removing gluten from one’s diet about 10-15 years ago, and after the hype died down a lot of the new options it spawned stuck around, which was great for people with celiac disease. Hopefully there will be a similar silver lining once this hype passes.

I want to start by saying I generally agree with the theme of the article that the average American already gets enough protein without needing to specifically target it in fast food. However, I think this is not entirely accurate:

Overall recommendations have consistently hovered between 50-70 grams [of protein] per day, depending on weight.

That sounds low to me. I’ve seen nutritionist recommended minimums in the 50-70 range depending on weight, height, gender, and age, but recommended targets are higher. Especially for older men who are at higher risk of muscle loss with age, these recommended targets can be above 90 grams.

Edit: Getting several down votes, so let’s add some sources.

0.8g per kg of weight, which comes out to about 55g per day for a 150 lb person, is a minimum, not an average: https://doi.org/10.3945/an.116.013821

Aging men may need to consume as much as 2g per kg of weight, which comes out to about 135g for a 150 lb man: https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10030360

Oh good, then the federal government can turn over any evidence the Minnesota state investigators ask for since they don’t need it, right? Right?

The code block I wrote is a statement followed by an if. What I meant be “backwards” was the order of conditions, not that the statement came after the if. It’s exactly what you asked for.