HCIdivision17

Binary operations will do it, like in `True or foo()`, but there's no real lazy evaluation machinery for parameters to a function. (Yet? I bet someone's working on it... at least I haven't tried any packages like lazypy for it.)

I thought, "gosh, that seems at least marginally useless; why wouldn't that short circuit?" and then just tried it. I tried a few variations, and about the only use I can think of is to signal as a side effect for when the dict is made.

Fun trick to learn exists. Though I would really like to know what led up to it, since it seems ... unhelpful.

Edit: Looking at other comments, I did try popping off that entry in the dict, and no, it didn't have anything in it (it doesn't make the dict anything like defaultdict).

What impact does this sort of compromise cause? In context, it seems to be a poorly architected loopback to make an appliance gizmo work. So on the face of it, it sorta seems a bit harmless (well, as much as any internet appliance is harmless...)

I'd imagine that could allow an adversary to compromise DRM for the SKY perhaps? (Based on the domain name.) But there seemed to also be concern that improperly set up cookies for other cisco.com domains may allow this to compromise them; do Cisco devices put sensitive things in cookies where that could happen?

EDIT: I am not in any way, shape, or form a network or security 'guy'. I just read the thread and wasn't horribly alarmed by the discussion; seems like a reasonable but bad exposure on the device.

To be sure - and in fact people seem to debate the idea that the same bridge would even be built at all these days. It was apparently quite the political undertaking.

I didn't have an intuition for this, so I took a shot in the dark as a baseline. Wolfram Alpha suggests that the Golden Gate bridge was about $350M in modern money, and given length and height, I'd say they're pretty comparable. They're both within probably $25M of what you'd sort of expect of each other, with the Golden Gate being a little longer (0.3 miles) and the one you're referencing is much lower (GG is 120m higher).

Now, I'd guess there's some debate if the Golden Gate was worth it, but I think in the long run these sorts of things define regions and become essential.

EDIT: Noting I already did the 1930s money conversion.

It's the barrier point that we can't haul it out of the ground as fast as demand requires. It's sort of like how people were concerned we were going to hit peak food: we very well could, but we need a lot more people to hit that point.

There is also a finite amount of oil in the ground. It's stupendously useful and rich in chemistry. We still don't know where all the reserves are, and there is a lot of oil still in the ground. But that oil comes at a cost: inconvenient, excessively deep, politically untenable. But we'll be able to get oil for a long time (just at ever increasing costs).

There are other methods, I think. At least one guy I back does it based on a per-comic basis. Granted, the comics are big and usually go longer than a month, but it's pretty good, I think. Takes some of the 'gotta-deliver-constantly' off him, and it only charges what is delivered.

Which may just be an open pre-order on my part. Which is sort of the stupidest way to buy anything, I suppose, except for the social trust aspect I have in him.

And it's a shame, because there really isn't a reason not to do both. After all, we are spending millions on both.

I really love the story about Norman Borlaug [0], because it shows how these great advances can be from enormous work from unexpected places. His research and testing - over decades - saved so many lives (he earned the title "The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives", and it may not be an exaggeration).

I vaguely recall the econ nobel a few years ago studied how people starved with food rotting in enormous piles just a few dozen miles away. It's utterly heartbreaking, and the worst is that it was largely bad policy that did it. We already overproduce food enough, but we can't get it where it needs to be.

Now, though, imagine that we find a way to mine asteroids for rare earth minerals. Imagine we can have clean power without the horrific pollution as industrial infrastructure ramps up. How could that change the world, leading to logistics networks that could fix distribution issues?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

EDIT: terminology, and I'd like to disclaim about the strife problem: space can't really fix. But food and money can't either.

I maintain positivity because it's not vaporware, just in feature hell. There's no silver bullet for that, just metric crap-tonnes of lead bullets, as they say.

And expectations are everything. I had endless hours of fun with Privateer as a kid, and had a blast with Freelancer when I was older. That covers a large chunk of my life, so my patience is tempered, a bit. Eve fills the niche while I wait, and I'm very excited to see my old memories come back in HD in a new universe. What's another 5 years out of 25? (And I'm serious - I had fun with Privateer, and in retrospect it was kinda terrible! Pushing past the uncanny valley of VR sim is effort worth waiting for!)

Honestly? Expectations are screwy. Eve has a sophisticated character creation system, and it's essentially to take a 200x200 pixel picture. Just fantastic, and almost as useless. But it really makes the game feel bigger and more real. Eve's taken more than 15 years to get to where it is, and that's sort of where I hold my standard. Time ain't the barrier to me.

I guess I just don't see the stretch goals as bonus wins. They caused the whole game to be rethought and redesigned. They're integral to what the game is expected to be and have driven the ambition to make the game better. And again, even if we look at the components individually, many are still late from the times they were estimated to be released. And I wasn't being disengenous: I'm talking about simply the Carrack, the part I'm most excited about. But CIG's gotten good about not promising dates anymore, a lesson every Kickstarter and development group should learn!

My point is that lateness isn't the sin people make it out to be. A well polished and expansive game can come late, and so long as the medium still does it justice it'll be great. All the gnashing of teeth and whining will be forgotten as people play fun. Setting expectations for deliverables is far better than expectation for delivery times, since you can miss deadlines while still delivering (leaving you with a lose-win pattern). And it's better to set expectations realistically rather than disappoint, because then at best you can deliver disappointment on time. SC has some damn good pedigree, so I think it's easy to believe they'll deliver on quality and expectation, and that overrides everything else.

I was thrilled about NMS (and had a blast with it), and I think it panned a bit because it rushed. There was some noise that warped expectations, and yet the game became just what it set out to be. Further updeates made it even more fun to play, and to quote Day9 "I will play the shit out of No Man's Sky 2." Heck, we even have celebrated failures like VoxelQuest, which is one of my favorite KickStarter epics. Obduction was just what I expected from Cyan. And I'm honestly kinda excited to see if Hiveswap manages to deliver despite hype. Broken Age was a bit bizzare, since it actually probably would have been better if it stopped in the middle (but still a lot of fun). We live in such a golden age of choice it's possible that Dual Universe will be good!

Imagine having NMS, SC, and DU all with their own take on a large persistent universe - pick the style you like! I'll happily wait years to see that, and we can usually play them before they're done, which takes the sting out of waiting I think.

I think if we're going to be fair, it's more accurate to say it's totally, unequivocally overdue. Large chucks are flat out late. But! That is fine. We can forgive a late game if it's good, and it looks to be awesome. Optimism invariably takes over at the start of project, and we all knew it was going to be a long haul.

And I say that as a person with a few ships awaiting release, too. While I really want my Carrack, it's far more important that they make it good. The estimated release times have moved back a few time, but that's the expense of great work in the rest of the game. Backers seem to largely accept this as the cost of buying into an in-progress development: priorities must be fluid, and we have to make do.

The trick to Kickstarter is to only invest what you can lose (like anything!) and then be patient. Starcitizen is stupendously ambitious, and is going to cost a fortune to develop. They successfully made the transistion to being nearly self-sustained, basically using Kickstarter to kickstart their development process.

I think it's facinating that we are likely moving to cars with limited speed (driverless controls), and that we have tried banning booze.

At least banning alchohol as a constitutional ammendment was rather ineffective and led to some wild crime and an eventual repeal. On the face of it, though, it's an interesting social experiement whose outcome probably wasn't very obvious at the time. At least to the proponents.

The guns though? I'm not at all sure how America could even try banning that. Perhaps we just need to look to another country to see how that affected society. It also has that awkward bootstrapping problem: how do you take the guns from the people? They're by definition armed, after all...

I had never looked it up, and it seems the CDC (unsurprisingly) is involved in applying these laws.

https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

From that site, it seems that isolation and quarantine is largely done at borders between states and country. It's also very serious, and it's not something the CDC takes lightly: the last major enforcement of the rule was in 1918 for the Spanish Flu (though it cites there were other minor applications - the ebola scare last year may be one small instance of that).

In context of this, I would imagine that measles would need to be added to the list of diseases quarantine is enforced (I haven't spotted this list yet).

EDIT: found the important list, and it mentions specifically measels are NOT on the list:

  The list of quarantinable diseases is contained in an 
  Executive Order of the President and includes cholera, 
  diphtheria, infectious tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, 
  yellow fever, viral hemorrhagic fevers (such as Marburg, 
  Ebola, and Congo-Crimean), and severe acute respiratory 
  syndromes.
  
  Many other illnesses of public health signficance, such as 
  measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox, are not 
  contained in the list of quarantinable illnesses, but 
  continue to pose a health risk to the public. Quarantine 
  Station personnel respond to reports of ill travelers 
  aboard airplanes, ships, and at land border crossings to 
  make an assessment of the public health risk and initiate 
  an appropriate response.

One of the executive orders is linked in that list: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2003-04-09/pdf/03-8832.pdf

I think this is sorta on the nose, but I would rephrase it as "Do we have a right to not be subjected to medical procedures?"

And the answer to that seems to be fairly strongly in the affirmative. I imagine we will be approaching a more nuanced legal view of such things in the near future as we battle to understand where rights really stand. (Much like many of our rights, there are exceptional situations - like the oft quoted yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater - and perhaps vaccinations should be treated similarly.)

EDIT - I was pointed to some interesting CDC info below, and there is an interesting scenario possible: make measels a quarantinable disease. This would become a choice with teeth. Choose to vaccinate, or risk isolation. Thankfully, the CDC seems like a fairly serious outfit, and I'm not worried about abuse of power in this way, but it does rephrase the topic a bit.

I don't think it's a dangerous precedent, in the sense that precedent happened a long, long time ago. These sorts of diseases are horrific, and quarantine is usually applied with extreme predjudice. Quarantine is no joke, and is a last line of defense.

That said, quarantine might be overkill. But isolation really is a valid solution. It's just awful. But refusing vaccination is also awful, since it can lead to far more brutal suffering than the inconvenience of uprooting one's home.

Honestly it's just a crap situation, where each solution that isn't vaccination is just a measure of weighing the ultimate amount of suffering and choosing the least bad.

Awesome. Note that this isn't merely a fine, but also comes with the stipulation that they "prominently disclose and obtain affirmative express consent for its data collection and sharing practices, and prohibits misrepresentations about the privacy, security, or confidentiality of consumer information they collect". And they need to destroy the data collected before March, last year.

That's pretty good! At the very least, this will make it so people are more aware of the constant telemetry. Some find that sort of feature useful, and others find it chilling, but at least this is a step in the direction of making it obvious.

I'll second that, except I liked the first interface. It was horrific to get used to, especially as there were basically no docs and I had no idea how to do this 3D stuff, but once I got used to "one hand on keyboard and one hand on mouse" it was great. And by great I mean I had fun.

Then I didn't touch it for a few years, came back, and realized I had no idea how to use it again. But this time there were docs and the interface made sense. There's a lot to even like about it now!

I'm not sure, but I think pg314 is making reference to the hand crank that could be used to power the laptop. I don't think it was initially included in the design (I may be wrong on that). I also heard rumor it wasn't a smashing success as a power supply, but it was so long ago that I don't remember the details terribly well.

I'm actually far more optimistic these days about tech in difficult areas. The computing power (and screens!) we can get out of just a small battery is phenomenal compared to OLPC's time.

Don't underestimate the power of a simple(r) solution. A cheap and reliable solution, readily accesible, is powerful when access to so many luxuries we would consider basic necessities don't exist. These scientists have done a lot of work to show that a simple, effective solution can help people now. Not some time later when the next generation has enough to be able to use it.

This is something like a mosquito net. Cheap, easy to distribute, and shockingly effective against malaria. Personally, I like the laser solution more, but you can't deny helping people now for a more ideal solution later.

The trick, as always, is to also get the better solution later. And things like this centrifuge help! People have access to more advanced medical techniques and data than they had before. They'll get diagnosed sooner and more accurately. The next generation will be healthier, more energetic, and more optimistic about their chances at a longer life. They'll have more strength and will for the hard task of building up their home and country, and in a generation or two will be on their way to things like reliable power grids, communication infrastructure, transport, and more.

But they'll need things to help bootstrap them first. Iodine for clean water and paper centrifuges for diagnostics are just a few of the first steps for people who have so little modern riches are useless to them. It only took us a few generations to get here, and I bet they bootstrap faster and harder than anything we've seen, like so much of the Asian peoples.

Thanks a lot for the summary. It's so hard to look at simple things and see how difficult it is to make them a product, and even harder to see the edge cases that prevent it from being used in healthcare.

I really like that there's a comparison to commercial centrifuges, since that shows the quality of medical care isn't going down simply to be cheap. Overall it looks like a well thought out design.

Those expensive medical machines require a lot of infrastructure to operate properly. You could get a machine there, but you likely couldn't provide it clean and reliable power without additional equipment and technicians to maintain it. Bootstrapping infrastructure is stupendously hard and expensive (and is a huge measure of a country's wealth - a lot of the US wealth is tied up in structural infrastructure like power lines, roads, plants, etc). It's a generational process taking decades to bootstrap.

All the while that is getting built people need help now, and this clever adaptation of a toy fills that niche. Eventually they'll have access to the more advanced modern wonders, but for now this can help people almost immediately.

The phrase "believes this is just a byproduct of neural activity" taken at face value is just a strange thing to say.

I feel like the author is playing a trick on me, and feels like when Feynman cracked the joke about a French curve "The French curve is made so that the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is always horizontal." [0] Neat! ... wait. Oh. Right. Of course.

[0] https://todayinsci.com/F/Feynman_Richard/FeynmanRichard-Fren...

See, I can't use the OSX interface. It makes me feel like a complete imbecile and I consistently do the wrong or useless thing. It's why I can't say good or bad things about Macs - haven't successfully used one since 2003 (thank goodness iOS apps can be compiled via Jenkins or the like!). People I respect seem to love their machines, but I turn into a cussing idiot when in front of one. Like can't-click-on-things stupid. If it didn't have a command line I'd never get anything done. Sure I could learn, but it comes up so rarely for me that I just settle for living in mild fear of having to help the secretary connect to the printer or something.

Plus 4K screens make me squinty (the SP4 has a lovely screen, but Win10 often gets confused on scaling and does horrific things to Java subwindows... and it's small). I'm pretty much a 30 year old curmudgeon now.

Oh and I used to use |-| with two 1080s on the sides of an IBM 2560x1600 monitor. Gosh you could spreadsheet the hell out of things on that 30" screen. Kinda miss it.

I think you got my feelings upsidedown. Like, I am of the strict opinion that you can't solve these issues via standardization. It's not reasonable, and does miss the point of automation. I also don't like daylight savings time, but not because it makes timekeeping hard, since timekeeping is always a horrid mess even without it (hardly makes it worse).

But it's hardly technodeterminism to say that it's a bloodydamn hard problem to solve, and may not even be solvable (which is why I contend with the 'weakness of will' part). That's sort of my point: if they can't consistently solve the calendar by hand, I can't imagine getting a computer to do it. It would have to be something wildly complex, like a social networking system that bases your calendar on your own web of trust. Someday that may be reasonable someday, but we're probably only barely hitting the point where we can get Lady of Mazes-style masks of the world metadata [0].

So you have deeply complex richness in language and culture, but computers took decades to be smart enough to capture it in it's plodding bin-packing way. Either these cultures could miss out on years of work integrating in with the enormous advantages and progress computers provide, or they can wait and fall behind. I'd choose to be an optimist and hope that we can now bend to the complex needs of these cultures now instead of first resorting to poor approximations. Just as we can now do better than all-caps ASCII, we can try harder to meet the demands of these complex calendar systems. Woe be unto the programmer who has to code those horrific systems, but ... well, that's the job :)

Re automobiles, I think there's a long, complex history at play there. A town I used to live in would have the residents complain often of the train that would cut through at the most inconvenient times of the day, right across a crowded main street. They often complained of the audacity of the train company's scheduling, forgetting that the train predated the town. And, in fact, the town was there because of the train. But it's a mess, and what can you do. The train was there first, but the town's noisier. Hilariously the train company also doesn't care, I think, and frankly you always give right of way to the bigger vehicle (a lesson I learned from working in plants rather than social justice).

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lady-Mazes-Karl-Schroeder/dp/07653507... I'm a huge fan of this book. While I think it's probably not great literature, it has some well articulated ideas about how technology and society interact. A central conceit of the story is the protagonist lives in an area managed by tech locks. These restrict technology to match the society (it is explained somewhat late in the story, and how it came to exist is pretty interesting). You're not restricted from moving between worlds, so to speak, but it puts at the forefront how much even the subtle demands of technology can shape a society (from music-based tribes to singularity-tech ringworlds).

Monitors are a sort of special arena of contention among our types, but I gotta recommend the Dell Ultrasharp U2415 24 inch model. Native 1920x1200 at a DPI I feel comfortable with. The trick here is that it has the DisplayPort inputs and outputs needed to properly daisy chain the monitors. Then you just need to get a high data rate DP cable (Rankie DP 4K Resolution cables are legit and cheap). The crazy that follows from bad standards and misleading specs caused me all sorts of heartache.

Oh I know. That's the normal counter argument, and the answer is simply that sometimes I have to work off-site, sometimes in places with questionable power. And thus more battery is better, and a 10 pound brick is probably going to devote a lot of that heft to power. (But it's rare. My coworkers sometimes need to work in the middle of nowhere, though.)

I have long held that there aren't any good solutions to the date/time issue (like naming things and cache invalidation :), other than just find some way to hitch to UTC, but you've shown me a case that just... wow. I can't imagine trying to make a computer system integrate with that style of timekeeping. Is there any hope? Or is it actually the solution to give up and switch to something a bit easier like the Gregorian calendar (or whatever)?

i7 - I conceded disk space in exchange for more ram and the higher end cpu. It works great, since I have tons of external drive space. It won't be the best for someone who has intense disk usage needs (like running multiple VMs at once), but I don't. I usually have a dozen apps running (like JVMs, SSMS, too many Firefox windows, a few Chrome, Excel, etc; the usual stuff). I really like that it spreads across monitors well. Just don't expect to run movies in HD 60fps (though Excel doesn't really need 60fps, right? You're not doing something silly like that. RIGHT?. Sure.)

I had no idea there was that sort of requirement - I guess I had just assumed it was systemized. It sounds fascinating - are there ever conflicts that need to be resolved?

Because my Surface Pro 4 can run 3 1920x1200 monitors just fine (I'm partial to a -|- setup (dontjudgeme)). The dock really makes it, no question. My monitors stands stay bolted to the desk and everything's cabled together, but I'm personally not tethered.

Best of both worlds, to me at least. (Except for when I need to do something irresponsibly inefficient like run three VMs and full screen video at once... which will work, but not be great.)