AlbertoGP

> The difference is that with the new novel the launch won’t be with any fanfare. I won’t be telling anyone about it unless they ask. I won’t bother with any publicity (other than here and maybe HN where it will get flagged as something dodgy and never seen).

Having it flagged wouldn't be that bad, it would mean that several people noticed it in the new submissions page. Worse would be to get a single downvote with no comment. ;-P

I would ask you for the free epub you mention but in the last years I've found barely any time to read novels. The abstract sounds interesting:

> When her grandfather dies, Alexa Martins simple life is changed immeasurably, going from a humble history scholar to owner of the world’s leading company in AI and energy research and a symbol of hope for millions. The emergence of her company’s sentient AI systems, and science fiction level technologies however do not go unnoticed by world leaders and those behind the scenes pulling their strings, and she and her team find themselves in a race against the corrupt and the powerful to elevate humanity from the sins of its past to a brighter utopian future. However, with this technology and science improving almost daily, there is now another power, infinitely more capable she needs to deal with.

I did not understand how the second head could be stationary as it would only reach one track, but looking at Tandon’s patent I see now that you meant fixed only in the axis normal to the disk:

> Recently, however, the floppy disc industry has started to use both sides of the floppy disc for data transfer operations, the purpose primarily being to increase capacity. Thus only a single relatively low speed accessing mechanism continues to be employed, and the transducers on opposite sides of the element are in a generally opposed relation, with only a slight offset in the head gaps to avoid flux interaction. Because it is thought necessary to account for perturbations in movement of the flexible disc from its principal plane, recording heads and mounts are utilized that are essentially derived from the flying head technology. Specifically, *** a pair of small, identical slider heads are used, each mounted adjacent the end of a long resilient cantilevered head support *** , and mechanically urged together with a total force of approximately 8 grams. The concept is that as the flexible disc deviates from its principal plane, both of the heads tend to follow the actual position of the disc passing between them and permit contact recording without excessive wear or signal degradation. Accepted industry standards for functional specifications are 1,000,000 revolutions without substantial degradation in reproduced signal amplitude, and 3,000,000 revolutions without significant head wear.

> There are, however, *** significant problems and limitations arising from the use of this double, symmetrical and very compliant head mechanism *** . The resilient mounts are relatively complex and must be precisely manufactured, and therefore are costly to manufacture and maintain. Furthermore, they require redesign, by each floppy disc manufacturer, of the carriage, head support mechanisms and associated structure, becase they have volumetric configurations incompatible with current structures. In addition, the head loading force and the mechanical configuration require that special provision be made to insure that the head does not constantly land at the same point and thereby cause undue wear. In addition, the long flexible columns used in the existing type of structure tend to bend in a slight S shape or shift differentially in response to perturbations in the disc surface position. This introduces both a degree of offset relative to the track center, reducing reproduced signal amplitude and tending to limit the positional accuracy which can be obtained, which in turn limits the track density which can be achieved. [...]

> SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION: A device for effecting data recording and reproduction operations with each of the two sides of a pliant, non-rigid magnetic record element employs *** a fixed transducer on one side and a resilient element supporting a movable transducer on the other *** . An asymmetrical system is thus provided in which the record element is deflected by the fixed transducer but confined against the fixed transducer, despite perturbations in its movement, by the movable transducer. The movable transducer may be a smaller slider transducer that is mounted via a short length gimbal adjacent the end of a spring-loaded pivotable support arm. The arm mechanism urges the slider transducer and the intervening record element against the surface of the fixed transducer with a light force, although the fixed transducer is positioned to penetrate slightly into the nominal plane of the record element. The configuration of *** the spring-loaded arm mounting the slider transducer is compatible with the configuration of the mechanism ordinarily supporting a pressure pad, so that the structure is thus directly substitutable in the space avilable in the prior single sided system *** . The spring-loaded support arm has a high damping coefficient and effectively holds the flexible magnetic recording element against the fixed transducer, at a precise radial position, as well as correcting deflections of the record element, although wear is less than in existing double sided systems.

U.S. Patent 4,151,573, Apr. 24, 1979 https://patents.google.com/patent/US4151573

> Recently, I've been trying to improve the sorry state of PHP's heap implementation, [...]. Anyway, one of the low-hanging fruits is to makes parts of the _zend_mm_heap read-only, since it contains function pointers that are often overwritten in public exploits to transform a (limited) read/write primitive into an arbitrary code execution.

> [...]

> Unfortunately, it was rejected on the basis of lowering performances by 0.6% on my local benchmark.

I would add a link to the overview of the language you have at https://memelang.net

It is mentioned in passing though, with a link to its website:

> It is widely adopted by various typesetting engines like TeX, SILE[1] and Typst, etc.

> [1] https://sile-typesetter.org/

> This post was inspired by recent discussion here:

> RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42004219

Worth noting that Rust will not prevent that kind of security hole:

> To be fair, this function ignoreSslErrors is not from the authors of qBittorrent, it comes from QT framework. The idea behind the function is that you provide it a small whitelist of errors you wish to ignore, for example in a Dev build you may well want to ignore self-signed errors for your Dev environment. The trouble is, you can call it with no arguments and this means you will ignore every error. This may have been misunderstood by the qBittorrent maintainers, maybe not.

Yes, it would be more interesting with some details. From the file names in the screensot it seems to be AVX512 versus plain C. AVX2 is already 67x, SSSE3 is 40x.

> Tidal tails are thin, elongated regions of stars and interstellar gas extending into space. They are formed as a result of gravitational interactions between galaxies and star clusters. The observations show that some interacting objects have two distinct tails, while other systems have only one tail.

I'm impressed. Many years ago I worked on something like this but this one is a much better result. It even works well on mobile.

The documentation, linked at the top of the page, is excellent.

Big problem with the video: the audio volume is very low, then I raise the volume of the computer to compensate for it and BAM! an advertisement comes up screaming at me!

I’m very interested in this so I’ve downloaded and extracted your presentation adjusting the volume (24dB!) with:

    yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/live/_VF3pISRYRc
    ffmpeg -i "[SPLASH'24] Pasadena - REBASE (Oct 23th) [_VF3pISRYRc].mkv" -filter:a "volume=24dB" -ss "01:21:02" -to "02:06:12" -c:v copy Fil-C_2024_Pasadena.mp4

> Instead, either the client or the “reputation management company” decided to try a new tactic. Following a familiar playbook, they copied my Web3 is Going Great post to a free BlogSpot website, then backdated it by one day.

> The goal was to then abuse the notice and takedown process to claim that I had stolen their work, force my webhost to remove the post, and then hope that I was either intimidated by the legalese or too strapped for time to fight it out with my hosting provider.

Alternative link without jwz's Special HN Surprise:

https://archive.is/FGWOD

> Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today

> 13 days ago

> According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)

> For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.

> These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.

> I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.

> Another reason for the sharp increase early on may be due to the removal of the so-called logic games from the LSAT in August, as people rushed to take the new version of the test, said law school admissions consultant Mike Spivey. Logic games, which involved mind-bending hypotheticals, were considered by many to be the most difficult section of the LSAT, and the council opted to eliminate them following a 2019 settlement with two blind LSAT takers who claimed they violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

> [...] A return to the traditional application opening dates this year means the early numbers could be overstating the growth in the actual applicant pool, Krinsky wrote, because current applicants have had several more weeks to submit their applications than did their counterparts last year. Thus, the current numbers are not an apples-to-apples comparison.

> “Before the impact, there was some, but not much, life in the oceans due to the lack of nutrients and electron donors such as iron in the shallow water,” she said. “The impact released essential nutrients, such as phosphorus, on a global scale. A student aptly called this impact a ‘fertilizer bomb. [...]”

> Drabon and her colleagues conducted fieldwork to search for clues in the rocks of the Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains of South Africa. There, geological evidence of eight impact events, which occurred between 3.6 billion and 3.2 billion years ago, can be found in the rocks and traced through tiny meteorite impact particles called spherules.

> The S2 meteorite was between 23 and 36 miles (37 and 58 kilometers) in diameter as it struck the planet.

> “There are no impact craters preserved on the Earth today that come anywhere near in size to what has been inferred to have produced the rocks studied here,”

> There was no way I would have downloaded the Intuit Dome app if I hadn’t received a bunch of scary emails with subject lines that started with a red exclamation point and said that no one would be allowed into the arena without it. And although I had purchased two tickets, one would have to be transferred to my 15-year-old son’s own Intuit Dome app. We had to show these tickets on the app to get in. I could not move these tickets to my Apple Wallet, use a screenshot or print them out.

I hope this fails loudly because this is the general direction we are going.

> The experienced engineers will be so busy training the AI that they won’t be helping the juniors level up.

Another tap for the Big Guys to keep extracting more and more wealth from everyone else.

> Impossible problem #1: Interoperability is the premise, but doesn’t exist

Same as in so many other areas, those that gain traction try to build a moat by breaking interoperability.

This is specific to Amazon Web Services: if I understand correctly, this essentially consists on passing the bulk of the data not directly form a server in one Availability Zone (data center?) to another, but to store it in S3 and pass only messages about it (metadata) which are tiny in comparison.

Apparently, transmission between any AZ and S3 is flat rate while AZ<->AZ is metered which is where the savings come from.

> Some have theorized that after battling it out with millions of other sperm to penetrate an egg, sperm mitochondria are exhausted and genetically damaged in ways that would be evolutionarily disastrous if passed on to future generations.

> Xue and his team set out to find out what happens when paternal mitochondria do not self-destruct.

> What's more, it could potentially help solve one of mountaineering's biggest mysteries: whether or not the pair succeeded in becoming the first people to summit Everest, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top.

> [...] self-hostable solution that leverages state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision models for segment extraction and OCR, unifying the output through a Rust Actix server. This setup allows you to process PDFs and extract segments at an impressive speed of approximately 5 pages per second on a single NVIDIA L4 instance, offering a cost-effective and scalable solution for high-accuracy bounding box segment extraction and OCR. This solution has models that accommodate for both GPU and CPU environments.

> But nothing is perfect and this technique has a major achilles heel: It requires a special type of hardware, so the current hardware isn't optimized to take full advantage of it.

> Plans for specialized hardware that natively supports L-Mul calculations may be already in motion. “To unlock the full potential of our proposed method, we will implement the L-Mul and L-Matmul kernel algorithms on hardware level [...]"

This excerpt from Torvald's email summarizes the issue:

> I was hoping and expecting that bcachefs being mainlined would actually help development. It has not. You're still basically the only developer, there's no real sign that that will change, and you seem to feel like sending me untested stuff that nobody else has ever seen the day before the next rc release is just fine.

I’m interested in that, do you happen to have a link or reference to that discussion?

From the URL I thought it was one of those posts about graphs of activity (“quantified self”) that I’ve seen before from him, but I’m glad I took a look.

Seeing him taking a walk along the coast with shorts, goofy hat, tablet on hand, made me feel sympathy for him. Most of the things he describes doing at home and traveling are things I’ve either done or would have done if I had the means.

> The ChatGPT explainer that he mentioned[1]

  This should be [3]. Thanks for your detailed post, I stopped paying attention to Wolfram years ago but there are still gems to be found in his work under the piles of boasting.

> So, while Kelvin did not find what he was looking for there, the direction his effort has jump-started may, in fact, fundamentally describe our reality - as we have yet to learn what kind of manifold structure our universe has. And knot

  The second sentence seems to have been cut short.

As I write this there are two comments both saying that nobody seems to use it any more, but just today I used it to discuss a job with one of my customers. This might be a rare occurrence, I do not know.

I think the screenshot shows an MS Windows desktop, that's how disgusted he was with the requirement for a "20-page essay about my life, aspirations, philosophy".

He seems to have concluded that Canonical has lost the plot so much that there is no hope.

The subject is initially Covid 19 medical interventions but later branches out a bit. The video description has a timestampted list of segments: “Why hackers on Discord had to save thousands of lives”, “How politics crippled common sense vaccine distribution”, “Fundraising for VaccinateCA”, “Why tech needs to understand how government works”, “What is crypto good for?”, “How the US government leverages big tech to violate rights”, “Can the US have nice things like Japan?”, “Financial plumbing & money laundering: a how-not-to guide”, “Maximizing your value: why some people negotiate better”, “Are young people too busy playing Factorio to found startups?”, “Thinking well and finding true rigor”, “The need for a post-mortem”.

Transcript of the first minute or so:

> [00:00:00] California had the most desirable object in the history of the world and rather than adopting any sensible strategy for getting it into people’s arms was bickering over who should get it first.

> [00:00:11] We should be outraged about this and we’re mostly not if you Googled vacine near me before a certain day there was no answer. After that day there was an answer. That answer came from us.

> [00:00:19] The successful project plan was made by a bunch of rank amateurs at this topic on Discord in the course of a couple of hours Society should not rely on us as plan a how did this happen. It is enormously to the United States credit that we have a extremely functional extremely capable tech industry. Maybe we shouldn’t treat it like the enemy.

> [00:00:44] Today I’m chatting with Patrick McKenzie. He is known for many things on the internet, he’s known as patio11. Most recently he ran VaccinateCA which probably saved on the order of high four figure number of lives during Covid.

I did not find this interview interesting. My impression is that it’s much more efficient to read some of patio11’s writings (https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/) and posts in HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11) than watching this video.

One way is to use the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240623012818/https://www.jwz.o...

> Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.