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ableal

4,200 karma · joined March 16, 2009

Antonio B. Leal

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ableal

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ableal··on Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain
> for rare needs of longer range.

Hmm. Supposing we need a 6 hour drive at 20 kWh per hour (eschewing specific speed/distance figures), and a generous "smaller battery pack" can provide 3 hours (60 kWh). Then the generator must supply the missing 60 kWh during the 6 hour interval, i.e. a 10 kW generator.

Google says those cost from 1k to 5k USD, and they seem rather beefy.

(Just doing the math out of curiosity, otherwise agree with you.)

ableal··on High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building
> the harris end

I guess that's the rear (or arse) end, if anyone else is puzzled and doesn't have a couple of spare minutes to chase it down ...

>> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.

Some writers placed Julius Caesar's aristocratic but down at the heel family in the lower floors of a Subura tenement, but apparently it really was a house.

ableal··on They're made out of meat (1991)
Somehow this story isn't as fun today as it was when first printed ...
ableal··on We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
To be fair, he was pointing out that the invisible "credentials in cookies" issue was much harder to get fixed:

The turnstiles were visible. They were expensive. They disrupted everyone's day and made headlines in company-wide emails. Management could point to them and say that we're taking security seriously. Meanwhile, thousands of employees had their Jira credentials stored in cookies. A vulnerability that could expose our entire project management system. But that fix required documentation, vendor approval, a month of convincing people it mattered. A whole lot of begging.

ableal··on Scott Adams has died
Thank you for the several decades of smiles over human foibles.
ableal··on Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time
There was some math joke that zero, one and infinity were OK, but the rest of the natural numbers were weird and hard to justify ...
ableal··on Live most polluted major city ranking
Company also promotes "Community air monitoring"
ableal··on Tesla's ‘Robotaxis' Keep Crashing—Even With Human ‘Safety Monitors' Onboard
> The reasoning, I think, was that humans can drive using sight and a little bit of sound, so an AI should be able to do this too.

If memory serves, a few years ago the official position, on a Karpathy presentation, was that if radar contradicted vision they would have to discard one, so they would stick to vision only.

I could never swallow that argument - seems obvious that a radar failsafe would keep you from making bad vision errors ...

ableal··on The Culture novels as a dystopia
>> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence

Neal Asher did pretty well with his Polity universe. Besides AIs with some capacity for playful violence (Agent Cormac thread, but always there), we also get crablike aliens (the Prador war) and very weird biology (in particular the Spatterjay water world).

ableal··on Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?
I got curious what Trey Harris (the original 500 mile story teller) was up to these days, but Google mostly finds me a football player born around that time (2002).
ableal··on Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated
> Why would a network operator allow caller ID to be so easily spoofed?

Our protocols are descended from the postal system - the sender is a bit of text written on the wrapper.

Certifying that is out of the scope of delivering to the addressee. It would involve back and forth with an authority - e.g. showing someone your id before being allowed to post a letter.

ableal··on Authors hit by bad reviews on Goodreads before review copies are even circulated
Spy Magazine in its time (mid 80s to mid 90s) had an amusing section titled "Logrolling in our time". Usually featuring mutually favorable blurbs by pairs of writers.
ableal··on Being fat is a trap
> There's a huge variety of tastes

And a lot of those are not "tea" (with theine/caffeine), they're herb infusions such as mint, hibiscus, chamomile, etc. You can drink as much as you want without getting the typical caffeine buzz.

I particularly like the Morocco Mint & Spices that Lipton sells.

ableal··on GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world
(Not OP)

I've used LibraryThing for book boxes. Using smallish boxes (30-40 paperbacks each) so that carrying them is not a backbreaker. Scan the ISBN barcodes with phone app, fix old ones/whatever on web app, tag with box number written on at least two sides. No problems found so far.

ableal··on Using obscure graph theory to solve programming languages problems
Only 1/4 [0] of the general public believes that, but marketers get hurt at any loss of customers ...

[0] https://mises.org/mises-wire/87-statistics-are-made

ableal··on UK creating 'murder prediction' tool to identify people most likely to kill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-crime
ableal··on AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'
You need a PLL somewhere, because the audio signal is encoded in the frequency shift of the carrier (e.g. 98 MHz +/- 150 kHz).

Or maybe you were getting a leak from the audio signal before modulation, e.g. via power lines or something.

ableal··on Intel's Death and Potential Revival
> Dylan Patel comes to essentially the same conclusions (and this is a better post I think): https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-de...

Thanks, good reading. Sharp retrospective and analysis, hopeful blueprint for the future:

"""

Intel Foundry won’t be laden with Intel’s lagging product team, Mobileye, or Altera. Intel Foundry will have one clear function, and it’s vital to national security and the future of America and the West.

Who should lead the charge here? Maybe a “Chip Czar” charged with restoring American logic prowess. We know someone with a great CV who has just become freed up for new opportunities…

"""

ableal··on The heartbreak behind Dorothy Parker's wit
In case anyone else is curious about the photo not shown in the article, the paperback edition mentioned is probably this: https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Dorothy-Parker/dp/0140150749
ableal··on Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more
Try this: https://send.djazz.se/

Minimal work if you configure the site as the homepage in the Kobo web browser.

ableal··on Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)
Way back someone observed that the problem was not computers thinking like people, but people thinking like computers.

I believe we've been getting a bit of the latter.

ableal··on Show HN: Vomitorium – all of your project in 1 text file
> someone just reinvented tar

Or "shell archives", .shar files - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar - they used to be kicked around in comp.sources.

ableal··on A free tool to quickly detect counterfeit flash (2017)
> had tons of reviews with OK crystaldisk performance screenshots

Select the 1-star reviews. Usually someone helpfully posts proof of the scam.

ableal··on Why is Chile so long?
"""

Peru & Bolivia went to war with Chile for that region, but they lost in the War of the Pacific.

Why fight? Natural resources: guano and saltpeter.

Back then, guano was the world’s main fertilizer (and this area had most of the world's guano, thanks to the climate).

"""

That fertilizer produced iconic advertising in mid XX Century Portugal and Spain: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR22G9/nitrato-de-chile-advertisin...

ableal··on French court issues damages award for violation of GPL
Don't miss collecting the coupons for a free Butlerian Jihad (e.g. https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad )
ableal··on The things nobody wants to pay for
I'd make two notes on this.

First, I've taken to looking at the economics as shared infrastructure costs - companies look at the volunteer built pot and make a self-interested decision on participating.

Second, this observation - "commoditize your complements" - seems still as apposite as when it was published in 2002: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

ableal··on PCW Plus "Langford" Columns, 1987
"If we lived in the world of cyberpunk, we'd just plug into the system, scan the manual and think the information into the computer. Come on, Amstrad, there's a whole new market waiting here."
ableal··on Altman Z-Score: What It Is, Formula, How to Interpret Results
Summary: developed by Edward Altman in 1967, Z-score, a variation of the traditional z-score in statistics, is based on five financial ratios that can be calculated from data found on a company's annual 10-K report. It uses profitability, leverage, liquidity, solvency, and activity to predict whether a company has a high probability of becoming insolvent.
ableal··on How to install Windows 11 on a device that does not meet Windows 11 requirements
There is a page with the title used: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/installing-windo...

Or close enough: "Installing Windows 11 on devices that don't meet minimum system requirements", it is linked in submitted page, it also contains the caution.

ableal··on Sorry, but a new prompt for GPT-4 is not a paper
Hey, can't a blind pig find an acorn? Is it less of an acorn because it was found by a pig?

Myself, I appreciate Schopenhauer a lot more, and we know what he thought of Hegel, but I'm not fanatical about it. If a hack hits on a good line, I'll nab it.

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