aprentic

My legs work fine and I want a crab chair!

I was a bit older in the 90's.

Clarence Thomas had been appointed to the Supreme Court after a lengthy investigation into sexual harassment claims by Anita Hill. At the time, SNL seemed to think that the main problem was his lack of game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shkJfRpktGc

A few years later we found out that Clinton had been getting BJs from his interns. This time the Republicans wanted to make a big deal about it so Moveon.org was born. It started as a petition asking Congress to literally "move on" from the Clinton scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoveOn#Opposing_Clinton's_impe...

Neither Anita Hill nor Monica Lewinsky seem to consider either of those investigations remotely successful.

The weird part is that the author actually does want a crab chair. He gushes about how awesome it would be.

His real gripe is that the bleeding edge prototype is too expensive.

Good design recognizes that the user is part of the functional chain.

Bad design forces the human brain to do a lot of the type of processing that it's bad at (eg arbitrary symbolic remapping).

Space exploration is moving forward. It's just being driven by other countries now.

You're right. Blanket rate limits probably aren't a good way to handle the traffic profile of places git services.

Package managers tend to only need a small portion of what's in any given repo; some metadata to figure out what's going on and a single binary package is generally enough. The obvious answer is to separate those out and serve them differently from developers, who are actually monkeying around with the source code.

My first reaction was that I really like this idea.

If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.

My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.

It's kind of insane how much we trust companies to safeguard our personal data when they're so heavily incentivized to use it for their own profit. Theft of customer data is punished so rarely and so leniently that companies aren't even particularly worried about getting caught anymore. We have overwhelming evidence that promises to keep data safe are worthless.

For now, I'm mostly "safe" because I'm too small to be interesting but that safety is quickly eroding.

Going forward, anyone who isn't running inference on their own personal hardware should assume that someone else is keeping a record of everything they do.

This is fairly close to my own soldering journey.

I'm coming at it with a technical software background and minimal hands-on hardware experience or training.

I found a few things that have made my solder joint better (both mechanically and electrically). These three were the purchases that made the most difference.

The FNIRSI soldering station https://www.fnirsi.com/products/dws-200 There are discussion that the tip isn't grounded and it can damage some sensitive components but I haven't run into this and there are online instructions for grounding it. It's very precise. The tip quickly gets to your target temperature and stays there. That means you don't need to hold the iron steady for a long time while it slowly heats up your whole board. The tip on those is also closer to the handle so it's easier to control. There are better irons but for me, this was an upgrade from a Hakko.

Flux. I got some liquid flux and some flux paste. The paste is a bit less messy but the liquid can get into small cracks better. Both of them make it much easier to get the solder to stick to the metal.

Eutectic solder. Lead solder has a lower melting point than lead-free solder. Eutectic solder takes it a step farther and has a specific formulation so the melting and freezing point are the same. That seems like a technical bit of trivia but it means the solder acts much more like how you intuitively expect it to act.

There are a few other things that have helped

I really like the Omnifixo component holder but it's worth getting something to hold your components stead.

Alcohol and a dispenser https://www.amazon.com/JETEHO-Dispenser-Bottle-Methanol-Cont... Precision tip cotton swabs https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BT8VZ3GQ?th=1 and some cotton balls flux is messy and you need to clean it.

Desoldering pumps look easier but their bad. Get a spool of copper desoldering braid. Get the big once and not those dumb little disks.

A silicon matt. They're cheap, protect your work surface, and keep bitsies from rolling around.

I also learned to technique tricks that made a big difference: 1) The soldering iron should always have solder on it. That not only protects the tip against corrosion, it gives the tip better contact with surfaces so the heat transfers better. 2) Touch your soldering iron to the thing you want soldered and let that heat up the solder, instead of melting the solder and dripping it onto wires.

Troubleshooting: If you see a lot of beading, press the iron more on the component or try some more flux. If you regularly fry components before you get a good solder joint, you may need a hotter iron.

Users on the Kagi forum are reporting mixed results. Some US users still see Lake Ontario, some Canadian users see Lake America. They also seem to agree that it should be classified as incorrect behavior.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/11381-lake-ontario-showing-up-wit...

As of this morning I started seeing new results. Now, a search for "Lake Ontario" returns both names.

As a Kagi customer, I find this was just about the worst way to handle it. I pay for a search engine because I want searches to cater to MY need for accurate and unbiased information. If a search engine can decide that someone else' political expedience is more important, there's a fundamental problem.

In case it was remotely in doubt, Kagi just demonstrated that they have the ability to change the labels that Mapbox gives them. It's fine if there was some implementation glitch if it comes with an explanation.

Currently I'm watching Kagi silently change results. If they're doing it for Lake Ontario, how can I be confident they aren't doing it with other search results?

Kagi Maps did too.

That's clearly how it turned out but going in, I would have expected the a subscription to be a discount in exchange for a commitment of repeat business.

Lol I see the old /. nerd are still beating on that old joke.

It was supposed to be a Beowulf cluster of Furbies, right?

Chinese idioms can be notoriously difficult to interpret. From what I've seen, they're often an abbreviation of some passage from a famous text. The listener is expected to know the rest of that text and all the major commentaries that go with it.

I absolutely do not have a solid grasp of the full works of Mencius and I have fairly anemic knowledge of the derivative works but I'm fairly sure it's not just a simple euphemism.

My read of the idiom is that Chinese political philosophers claim that the basis of Western political philosophy is the balance of power between hegemons and the basis of Chinese political philosophy is the concept of the righteous rule/mandate of heaven.

His implication seems to be that Western nations are held together primarily by force whereas the CPC primarily maintains power by serving the people.

It depends on what you find interesting. No crazy spy stories but I've been learning Chinese, so I've spent more time looking at things that are only written or said in Chinese.

Project 2025 wasn't really secret but it wasn't in the public consciousness until about a year later https://trends.google.com/explore?q=project%20202&date=today...

China also has a bunch of political philosophy nerds that crank out wonky policy papers. I keep finding references to this one by Wu Bikang, https://www.rmlt.com.cn/2014/0403/253621.shtml

I'm still very bad at Chinese and I don't assume that I understand that paper well, even with translations, but that paper clearly interprets the Thucydides trap very differently from how it's discussed here.

China has some internal documents that address the Thucydides Trap with a Chinese idiom, "There are no just wars in the Spring and Autumn Period."

Sorry. I was trying to keep things brief.

Basically a drone that relies more on the camera and less on the accellerometer and the GPS. Although it still uses both a lot.

Mostly hardware.

A cheap rowing counter. Competitive rowers use a training device that counts their strokes per minute. I figured out that the major parts are really cheap, even as individual purchases, so I wanted to build a budget version. So far it counts strokes fairly accurately and I've just completed initial tests of the display.

Drone experiment. I'm building a image recognition drone from scratch. It's based on a H743 Slim V4, with an RPI5 and a OAK-D Lite. I'm currently trying to figure out why the back left rotor is producing way too little thrust.

Like everyone else, I'm also working on an agent harness. tl;dr I don't trust any agent to not be dumb, but the agents seem to have some success recognizing when the work of an other agent is dumb. In early tests, the back and forth seems to provide more stable and better results.

That seems like a lot of conjecture based on very little evidence. The article doesn't mention why they're against data centers.

The obvious alternative explanation is that people are very worried about the externalities of a project as massive as putting data centers in space.

What's the solution to the heat problem?

Not impossible but I'm still curious how they're planning to deal with heat.

I'd also wonder if the folks who don't want to live within 3 miles of a data center are OK with the data center flying over their head

I believe that China's deep answer to that problem is, "There are no just wars in the Spring and Autumn period. "

There are some internal policy papers to that effect.

I'm curious how he would propose implementing this.

The US could ban connections to foreign AI providers and force US providers to submit to audits. Presumably, Chinese providers would see a rise in VPN traffic.

People can build fairly hefty home inference machines for the price of a small car and those will get better and cheaper. Are they going to try to stop people from downloading the weight files?

It's always about logistics. The Three Kingdoms War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was largely enabled by the invention of the wheelbarrow.

I like Cursor but that valuation is a hard sell.

Their valuation should be very closely tied to how how many tokens it takes to get from Void to Cursor.

If those values diverge by much, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

You're essentially saying that privacy violations are baked into the cores of these systems.

It might not meet some pedantic definition of "Malware (tm)" but, for all intents and purposes, it fits perfectly.

Why not?

It's a software feature designed to benefit Google at the expense of the user.

The obvious answer to behavior like this is warnings that escalate up to a sitewide ban.

When a human is abuses a system, that human normally loses access to the system.

It seems that EVs and ICEs are sufficiently different that traditional car companies don't really enjoy nearly the encumbrancy advantage they once had.

The top EV manufacturer started as a battery company. The second place EV company started as an EV company.

Various ICE manufacturers have spent decades innovating and refining ICEs and building logistics chains optimized for ICEs.

The big problem that the high end ICE manufacturers have is that the things that made them special in the ICE market don't apply as well in the EV market.

You can potentially justify 6 figure price tags if you're in the luxury market. Hire famous designers, pay for premium materials, and leverage your brand name. If you want to sell cars for 6 figures based on performance, they actually need to perform significantly better. There are a bunch of much cheaper EVs that have better performance.

Just jacking up the price and relying on conspicuous consumption is how you get the Fyre Festival.