ISL

Hopefully it won't be at all. Seems pretty relevant to the tech-industry if entire departments of competent tech-industry folks are getting laid off by the federal government.

While it might be political, it is also economic and directly relevant to the hacker/startup ecosystem.

"But we came to the government to fix things. And we’re not done with this work yet."

Thank you, 18F.

TikTok can still serve data to the US, it just can't list its apps in US app stores.

It didn't recognize essentially any photographer I suggested.

Finally got something joyful when asked to create a chess-set inspired by "rooks". Least-playable chess-set ever :).

They're different enough that they are worth trying out.

There is nothing I'm aware of that converts from handwriting to LaTeX

My general impression is that you'll still have the most-contrasty screen with black-and-white eInk. Color is just getting awesome, while black and white is already there.

The minimalism claims are real. The existence of Boox shows that reMarkable is deliberate in their minimalism. An rM2 is a for-real linux system and it does have a browser under the hood -- they could make that user-facing if they wanted to do so. In practice, the minimalist use-case can be powerful. rM's interface is conducive to entering flow and reviewing electronic documents in a way that is far less distracting than a fully-featured iOS/Android tablet. That said, that choice can also be troublesome. The lack of a real email client and for-real Google Docs integration (or JIRA) is a major impediment to certain forms of collaborative productivity. If you need to spend a long time with a document, or really think things through, though, the rM interface is helpful.

If you're eInk-curious, go demo some. Best Buy usually has displays of more than one eInk device. Doing so helped me to shape my decisions in the arena.

It is highly discouraged for good reason. Experimental treatment is generally dangerous and humans are often overconfident.

That said, there are stories like Helicobacter pylori that have moved humanity forward.

To learn something about primes.

Perhaps there is a pattern or a way to more-accurately predict which numbers will be prime.

Also, it is cool.

Those would need to be very low-energy cats. You wouldn't be able to look at them for a very, very long time.

If my quick math is correct, for the de Broglie wavelength of a cat to be comparable to its width, it would need to be travelling no faster than about 10^-33 m/s.

To point out to the public how much this sort of defense costs.

With the verdict in-hand, Sable was probably voluntold by Cloudflare.

If Cloudflare thought they had a shot at recovering costs, $225k and a patent-portfolio could be substantially less than whatever Cloudflare (or their insurance) had paid in defense-costs.

Has Cloudflare stated anywhere how much their defense cost them (or their insurance)?

That's only an initial condition -- that requirement states only that the total energy is negative.

We are gravitationally bound to Earth, but the Voyagers have left the solar system.

The high sharp corners are indeed intimidating when Cybertrucks pass near cyclists.

Paradoxically for a vehicle that's surely received oodles of aerodynamic attention, it at least doesn't seem like a design that might push a pedestrian to the side or lift them up onto a hood, but rather knock them forward (and then under the vehicle).

A Cybertruck crossed in front of me at a traffic light this weekend in my first Cybertruck encounter as a cyclist. I was surprised by my lizard-brain's involuntary concern as the hood's corner passed by.

Edit to add: it seems like a wide vehicle, too, which adds to the effect.

Agreed. One must be rather careful when determining the Cybertruck's "direct rivals".

It's got a lot of properties of a "truck", yet it is difficult to imagine utilizing it, especially given the price, in many of the environments for which trucks were originally designed.

No need to simulate. It is generally straightforward to compute the odds directly from the rules.

Unless you're buying a meaningful fraction of tickets, the EV/ticket will be similar to uncorrelated tickets.

If you're buying all the tickets, well, the math is real easy. (and occasionally profitable, see 1992 in Virginia)

The aether originally suggested a preferred reference frame -- something thoroughly debunked by tests of special relativity.

The universe could still have various preferred/interesting frames (the CMB's rest-frame sure is interesting), but it won't have much, if anything, to do with the movement of particles or light.

Final two paragraphs:

Thanks to the hard work and efficient collaboration of all the teams involved, Gaia was recently returned to routine operations.

In fact, the engineers took the opportunity of this unscheduled disturbance to refocus the optics of Gaia’s twin telescopes for the final time. As a result, Gaia is now producing some of the best quality data that it ever has.

Yep. Chatting with other practitioners is a powerful way to learn how things actually work. There are tons of things that "everyone" knows that are not well documented, and therefore unavailable to people outside the network.

This is a more-consequential example of the things you can learn by chatting with others; it is an extreme example of, "Hey, are you guys using components from Widget Inc.? Their datasheets are good, but sometimes we get a bad batch."

Those little things can save you a ton of time. In this case, it may have prevented mission-failure.

Part of the blame falls to NASA, too. If the outcome is your responsibility, then open-loop trust of a vendor for a known failure-mode may not be acceptable. Integration rad-hard testing may be requisite.

In the spacecraft environment, qualifying components is very difficult -- there's a good chance that NASA has these MOSFETs on an approved list because they've worked well before and have had few (or known) faults. They're probably not on that list anymore.

Here's a vote for a black bar.

With only a few minutes thought on the subject, it seems like Congress could explicitly amend the APA to state that the interpretation in Chevron is correct.

They might not do that, but from my initial non-expert read of today's opinion, the Court only looked to the APA, not the Constitution in generating its ruling.

I'm looking forward very much to the day a manufacturer begins selling eink handsets and tablets with up-to-date OS/security (Android 14 in this context), GPL compliance, and telemetry compliant with US law/privacy concerns.

The Boox devices get a lot of things right, including the Palma. I wound up with a reMarkable due to the above concerns, but it feels like we are on the cusp of seeing tentative eink products from Google or Apple.

That's really unfortunate.

It's been a while, but with a little bit of solder and a slightly-janky connector, you don't need the proprietary dongle to connect to a serial connection (at least with a Vantage Vue from ~2010).

The Vantage Vue hardware is solid; much better than the cheaper kits out there.

It has gotten better. I, perhaps erroneously, attribute it to better communication between flights/ATC, improved understanding of wind shear, and better forecast models.

Some things never change, though. Front Range of Colorado on a summer afternoon? Gonna be at least a few bumps.

By 'upper bound' here, I meant for the insured.

Above the deductible (and premium payments), the insured's exposure is largely lost time and headaches, the remaining financial burden is borne by the insurer. If anything, the presence of insurance might increase the amount of compensation an aggrieved party might be able to reap.

Agreed that there are plenty of places in the world where car-insurance is non-existent. In those places, accident victims may not receive proper compensation for their injuries/destroyed property or the recompense may not be monetary in nature.

The coverage terms, and any exceptions, matter -- at a quick glance, I don't see coverage there for "disease enters a hive and the government forces you to burn all your hives".

One could make the same argument against car insurance, and most kinds of insurance.

I'm pretty sure that if car insurance were somehow banned, especially medical-liability, fewer people would own and operate motor vehicles.

Insurance exists to put an upper bound on risk; the bad thing will hurt or be inconvenient, but with insurance it won't kill you. Perverse incentives appear in the case where the insurance payout is greater than the inconvenience/pain of the insured event. Until that threshold is breached, however, I don't think there's a case against insurance (and insurers that inadvertently pay people to have accidents rapidly go out of business).

There are some situations where the business owners are correct, especially if their competitors are permitted to tack on extra fees at checkout. Sometimes it is necessary to establish a global rule to prevent prisoner's-dilemma defections.