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Sounds like the author needs to read Worse Is Better (https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html).

If the micromort was sold as an expected number of deaths, then I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. (My major problem is that you can't die more than once, so probability seems to be more of a concern than expected number.) The article calls it "a one-in-a-million chance of dying", though.

For example, playing Russian Roulette once is about 166667 micromorts. Playing it 6 times is 1 mort of risk, but the probability of dying after 6 plays is not 1. (It's 1 - (5/6)6, or about 2/3.)

The problem with a "unit" of risk like this is that probabilities don't simply sum like this.

Assuming the probability of dying in each activity is independent, planning to do a 7000-micromort activity A and then (after appropriate recovery time) an 8000-micromort activity B is not an overall activity with 15000 micromorts of risk. (The math is close enough when talking about single-digit micromorts, but it doesn't work in general.)

Pr(dying when doing A followed by B) = Pr({doing A and dying} or {doing A and surviving and then doing B and dying}) = Pr(doing A and dying) + PR(doing A and surviving and then doing B and dying) = 7000 / 1000000 + (1 - 7000 / 1000000) * 8000 / 1000000 = 14944 / 1000000

The larger the risks or the longer the series of events, the less accurate the assumption of linearity. This also doesn't take into account the fact that dying in extreme activities is not independent; by failing to die in A, you've demonstrated some small amount of survival fitness.

> every single one of those cost growth curves is a close match for the early part of the exponential growth curves

The early part of a logistic growth curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function) also looks exponential.

The article doesn't say: what government is doing the charging? I thought the arrests were D.C. police, not Feds.

Related reading: Fooled By Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

> the theoretically infinite lifespan of an AI

Infinite? Why isn't AI subject to the heat death of the universe?

> If a decision heuristic often leads to the correct conclusion, then it's a good heuristic (if you are under time constraints, which we are).

So, is it a good heuristic to conclude that since crime is related to poverty and minorities tend to be poor, minorities qua minorities ought to be shunned?

I feel like I've seen a lot of articles about people who can't find jobs or who are worried about their increasingly-outdated jobs going away in the short term. This article says we also have a lot of jobs that can't find people. What's the missing piece? Re-training? What does that actually look like for a 30- or 40-year-old person who has a family to support and doesn't much care for government handouts?

A text editor will always be with you, no matter what you're working on. IDEs tend to be for a specific host platform, language, and sometimes target platform. For example, Xcode only runs on a Mac, understands a limited set of languages, and is best used for building Mac and iOS apps. MS Visual Studio only runs on Windows, understands more but different languages, and is best used for building for Microsoft platforms. Android Studio is best used for Android things. IntelliJ and Eclipse are best used for Java.

If anyone has heard of your programming language, there is probably an Emacs mode for it.

It's not built into the ROM. iMessage got a huge update with iOS 10. If it was built into the ROM, that wouldn't be possible, because the old version would be, well, read-only.

salary or salary + bonus target + equity?

> An equivalent but faster variant that the compiler generates is "xor r9d, r9d".

Can you explain why this is faster? I assumed the ALU would be 64 bits wide, and 32-bit operations would just leave half of it unused.

It's not mentioned in the article, so I'll note that the code presented is Windows-specific. Windows uses a different calling convention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions#Micros...) from the one used on Mac and Linux systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_calling_conventions#System...), so if you want to see the assembly you get from clang on Mac, you'll want to annotate sortRoutine with __attribute__((ms_abi)).

I would like to see in the article a discussion of the assembly the compiler produces, how it differs from the assembly the author wrote, and perhaps why the differences are worse.

> get down to the platform's assembly language layer which for IOS is ObjectiveC

The assembly language layer for iOS is assembly language.

probably an outdated heuristic for distinguishing a "real computer" from a "calculator".

As a cheap extra layer of protection, you could install the version of Linux Mint you've got installed on your real machine in a VM and then run the exploit in the VM. You could also do it from a VirtualBox installation on EC2 to get extra security: if things go south (or as a matter of good hygiene), you can disable the EC2 instance from the EC2 dashboard after you're done.

sizeof(char) has to be 1, but char doesn't have to be 1 byte in size. It's more correct to say that sizeof(foo) returns a result relative to sizeof(char).

Really? do they all use the same CPU socket? no updates required to motherboard? EFI? Apple's custom SMC firmware? power management? kernel work? etc.

Even Unix signals are delivered as Mach exceptions first. If the process doesn't have a Mach exception handler set up, the kernel's exception handler converts them to Unix signals and tries delivery that way: https://github.com/opensource-apple/xnu/blob/27ffc00f33925b5... and https://github.com/opensource-apple/xnu/blob/27ffc00f33925b5...

Why would you pay to carpool to/from work instead of arranging carpool with a coworker, paying for your share of gas directly, and cutting out 1) the (future) middleman 2) the tax man?

However, running a consumer-facing actively managed fund and taking a percentage fee becomes less profitable if demand shifts from that product to index funds, because there is less money to take a percentage fee out of.

The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. Then again, maybe this is why I'm an engineer, not a businessperson.

> But when we exec a child, the kernel resets any signal not set to `SIG_IGN` to `SIG_DFL`, so all our children, atomically, get their `SIGCHLD` handlers set to `SIG_DFL` at the moment of creation. Consequently, when either our process or the kernel sends `SIGHUP` to our process group, all our children die.

Vuze (formerly known as Azureus) has (or at least had a prototype of) p2p search.

I wrote a paper on building a torrent search index quickly using the DHT records that this feature emitted at the time. [link redacted]

You could argue that autoconf sucks and clearly everyone should use your favorite build system, but you need something to do the job. Not even two systems running the same release of the same distribution are going to have all the same packages installed. I might have put a newer version of X in /usr/local. I might want to cross-compile. Even considering all Linuxes the same, I might want to build for x86, x86_64, MIPS (routers), ARM, PowerPC, or some more esoteric chip. Android has its own special problems, including a different libc. I might want to ship on BSD (which one?), OS X, iOS, cygwin, mingw, or that newfangled Windows subsystem.

> The only reason to delay selling for tax reasons

What about if you live in a state with high income tax and no capital gains relief from said rate, and you think that maybe at some point in the future you might leave that state for one with a lower income tax? For example, moving from California to anywhere else.

> don't force them to build-out to neighborhoods where people can't pay $70+ per month. That...won't fly in San Francisco.

https://fiber.google.com/cities/sanfrancisco/ Google Fiber is coming to parts of SF using existing fiber infrastructure.