ansible

Yes. If the PC support folks don't need the manual, just send it along with the monitor to the end user. Why did they need to throw the manuals away so fast?

We're dealing with fundamental limitations of I/O though, which is causing the delays.

I want to write stuff to disk (SSD these days). I can issue a request, then have to wait tens to hundreds of milliseconds (in the average case, the worst case can be far longer) for that request to finish and let me know that my I/O request succeeded or failed. There's no getting around that with present-day technology.

The situation is worse and even less reliable with network I/O. If you are talking to a server in another continent, the speed of light determines the minimum of time I hear back from it, even if it (and all the intermediary network links) are lightly loaded and functioning perfectly.

> later, when I tried to extract some large files from the backup, I saw that they had been replaced with some text files, containing a message that the download of those files failed.

That's a really asinine failure mechanism. At the very least, it should create "filename-FAILED_TO_RESTORE" or something like that.

Something that I was instructed to do nearly 30 years ago when at Motorola was: never overwrite the original files. Standard procedure was to make a directory called "BACKUP" (or "RESTORE"?) and put the files in there instead. The requesting person was then responsible for moving the files back to their original location, so any screwups were on them, not us (IT).

The "spin the entire stack" was an interesting approach to staging as well. It is theoretically very simple and elegant, by just using the existing RCS thrusters for separating. It wasn't clear to me if this also obviates the need for a propellant settling burn on StarShip. I'd think it wouldn't, but I'm not sure. There is still a thin atmosphere at the staging altitude, so if StarShip is pointed in the right direction after separating, it should be de-accelerating slightly in the direction of travel.

The timing for the staging is interesting. On the one hand, you want to light the Starship engines (the 2nd stage) while the SuperHeavy (1st stage) is still accelerating the entire stack. This is to keep the propellants at the bottom of their respective tanks to prevent any bubbles going into the engines. The Starship then needs to be under sufficient thrust to accelerate just as the SH cuts its engines so that the two stages can separate safely.

I'm sure it will be exciting. I just hope sufficient SH engines remain running long enough to try the staging event.

Symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning is a quite interesting field. I think the design choices of projects like wikidata.org and CYC severely limit the application of this though.

For example, on the wikidata help page, they talk about the height of Mount Everest:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:About_data#Structuring_da...

    Earth (Q2) (item) → highest point (P610) (property) → Mount Everest (Q513) (value)

and

    Mount Everest (Q513) (item) → instance of (P31) (property) → mountain (Q8502) (value)

So that's all fine, but it misses a lot of context. These facts might be true for the real world, right now, but they won't always be true. Even in the not-so-distant past, the height of Everest was lower, because of tectonic plate movement. And maybe in the future it will go even higher due to tectonics, or maybe it will go lower due to erosion.

Context awareness gets even more important when talking about facts like "the iPhone is the best selling phone", for example. That might be true right now, but it certainly wasn't true back in 2006, before the phone was released.

Context also comes in many forms, which can be necessary for useful reasoning. For example, consider the question: "What would be the highest mountain in the world, if someone blew up the peak of Everest with a bomb?" This question isn't about the real world, right here and right now, it is about a hypothetical world that doesn't exist.

Going a little further afield, you may want to ask a question like "Who is the best captain of the Enterprise?". This might be about the actual US Navy CVN-64 ship named "Enterprise", the planned CVN-80, or the older ship CV-6 Enterprise which fought in WW2. Or maybe a relevant context to the question was "Star Trek", and we're in one of several fictional worlds instead, which would result in a completely different set of facts.

I think some ability to deal with uncertainly (as with Probabilistic Graphical Models) is also necessary to deal with practical applications of this technology. We may be dealing with a mix of "objective facts" (well, let's not get into a discussion about the philosophy of science) and other facts that we may not be so certain about.

It seems to me that successful symbolic reasoning system will be very, very large and complex. I'm not at all sure even how such knowledge should be represented, never mind the issue of trying to capture it all in digital form.

I bought a Pixel 6a earlier this year, and traded in my Pixel 3a for $150 USD off the $300 sale price. Other than the fingerprint reader being kind of terrible, it was worth it to get a new battery and OS updates for the next few years for $150 (plus tax and shipping).

If you don't want to spend a lot on a phone, you can do that.

The final assembly, while it doesn't cost nothing, isn't that expensive.

What does cost more is final testing, to make sure all the components work together. It is cheaper to do that well at the end of the assembly process before starting packaging, than to deal with a high rate of returns. The testing done throughout the manufacturing process is a significant cost.

I think this is an interesting approach. A child may collectively spend hours looking at toy blocks, to train themselves to understand how what they see maps to an object in three dimensional space. But later on, the child may see a dog for only a few seconds, and be able to construct an internal model for what a dog is. So the child may initially see the dog standing and pointing to the left, but later the child will be able to recognize a dog laying on the floor pointing to the right. And do that without thousands of training examples, because they have constructed an internal mental model of what is a dog. This model is imperfect, and if they child has never seen a cat before, that might be recognized as a dog too.

If we are to develop understandable AGI, I think that some kind of (mathematically correct) probabilistic reasoning based on a symbolic knowledge base is the way to go. You would probably need to have some version of a Neural Net on the front end to make it useful though.

So you'd use the NN to recognize that the thing in front of the camera is a cat, and that would be fed into the symbolic knowledge base for further reasoning.

The knowledge base will contain facts like the cat is likely to "meow" at some point, especially if it wants attention. Based on the relevant context, the knowledge base would also know that the cat is unlikely to be able to talk, unless it is a cat in a work of fiction, for example.

On some monitors (more typically the older ones), the EDID is just stored in an I2C EEPROM. So it may be possible to just re-program it. I don't know what they do on newer monitors, it could just be something listening to the I2C in the HDMI connector and pretending to be an EEPROM.

I've been listening to the Aubrey / Maturin book series by Patrick O'Brian, narrated by Patrick Tull. To my untrained ear he seems to do a good job with the various UK accents of the different characters, as well as various other Europeans.

If I wanted to use my stove, microwave or dishwasher (all flat buttons), I might try to put a little Sugru on the surface to outline the important ones like the +30 seconds button.

Yes, Chandrayaan-3 definitely did not performance a hoverslam, the landing was much more conservative than that. With a hoverslam, everything has to go exactly right. A valve that is slightly sticky can be enough to wreak everything.

> Can we please not value people's life in money?

It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions.

Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention?

Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons.

If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY):

https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...

> rehabilitation ... That's politically pretty unappealing

Here in the USA, yes. Some EU countries take this quite a bit more seriously, to good effect.

It helps a lot that the Moon's gravity is about 1/6th of Earth's.

Yes, it was a very conservative landing trajectory. But it is very, very difficult to get a hoverslam right the first time, or the second, or the third...

I did like seeing the live images captured during descent, I also hope those get made into a video and posted online.

Looking forward to the rover deployment too.

Link to the Scott Manley video - The Real Reason Why Chandrayaan 2 Crashed on the Moon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ngVl6iO94c

Yep. But the LDS Church is apparently being very systematic and crafting the mission for a specific intent that is not what it purports to be.

I recently read an interesting and very cynical take on the LDS Church's proselyting missions, which actually implies the opposite of assimilation into the larger society.

The goal is for these young people, naive and hopeful, to go out into the world and be rejected by it. The elders want these kids to repeatedly face rudeness and rejection. They want to instill the belief in the kids on mission the idea that the LDS Church alone is the moral beacon, the guiding light of the world. The only true and holy path.

The elders don't actually expect that the kids on mission are going to get a statistically significant number of converts just going door-to-door in some other part of the country. They see that the key to increasing their power, and increasing membership in the LDS Church is to retain within the religion as many kids as possible.

Sure, they'll lose some kids, but maybe those would have been disruptive anyway. If the church has done a good job of indoctrination on these kids since birth, then most of the kids will stay. And if the greater world rejects them, then the kids may think that the church is their only true home.

The GP would need to see if they have ever used any Transunion service. There is probably a click-wrap agreement that you can't sue for basically any reason. Maybe it will go to arbitration, where they won't do squat for regular people.

Many consoles had quite a learning curve for developers. And you see some drastic improvement in quality between early titles in the console lifetime and the last major exclusives for them. (There are more than a few examples of poor quality ports from one platform to another though.)

While most of the major consoles for the 9th generation are basically just locked-down PCs, there are still interesting innovations going on.

One of the interesting tradeoffs with AR/VR systems is that there is less emphasis on just frames-per-second, and more emphasis on consistent latency and low lag between user input and photons coming out of the screen. This may continue to drive a divergence between dedicated AR/VR systems and "normal" game consoles & PCs. The input requirements for AR/VR are also much higher than a game pad sampled at high frequency.

Almond milk or oat milk?

I assume this issue is the same with almond milk? I'm almost always buying oatmilk, though.

What's the overall Scheme community look like these days? How much are new libraries targeting the specifications (like R6RS) vs. just targeting a specific implementation like Racket, Guile or Chicken Scheme?

What forces are keeping the various implementations aligned and moving in the same direction? What is driving them apart? What does the future look like?

Yes. If you need to do some text manipulation in a shell script, `sed` or something like that is what I'd reach for first. (I haven't used `awk` or Perl for quite a while.) I'd think even `ed` would be a more straightforward choice than `vi`.

I've never used those features, and instead rely on GNU screen (or `term`) to manage my terminal windows. Sometimes I also use horizontal / vertical splits with GNU screen, but it is a bit clunky.

In that vein, you are probably fine with whatever version of Vim is installed by your distro. But if you want LSP support for more cutting-edge stuff (like Rust), you probably need to install the latest release of Neovim by hand, not using the OS packaging system. Because stuff is changing too fast.