azalemeth

I'm still on Mojave (10.14!) and it's just brilliant compared to the more modern MacOS. There's a Firefox fork called Momiji (https://github.com/aobaharuki2005/momiji-web-browser) which backports recent Firefox to very much older macOSes, and basically I still use 32 bit x86 applications sometimes.

My next laptop computer (which is sorely overdue) will be Linux with macOS in a VM.

A pity, because Keynote is great.

I know this is always an unpopular opinion but I just think we as a species should eat far fewer animals. Fish species have been really substantially negatively affected all over the planet by human activity, activities such as bottom trawling and line fishing are hugely destructive (the lines can be tens of km long!) and the whole marine ecosystem is under unique threats from climate change. We don't really know what we are killing and eating, and I am sure we will regret it later on scientifically.

I'm a lifelong plant eater and you can survive very happily, healthily, with lower carbon footprints at all stages of life with it. And if anyone says "protein" or DHA I'll talk all about the pentose phosphate pathway whilst munching linseeds.

I've experienced this so many times over.

"I was wrong" and "the honest truth" are just forever phrases that are now dead to me.

> (how do they know it is a child?)

Everyone is to be a child by default until proven otherwise by "highly effective" age assurance methods.

> It doesn't matter if it is technically feasible or not.

There is a long tradition of legislators not being burdened by such things as mathematical fact [1] or technical feasibility. In fact, in the law, it is quite common that one thing "is deemed to be" another -- famously a guide dog "deemed to be" a cat, for example, in a building where no dogs are allowed.

A senior British politician was on the radio yesterday morning saying words to the effects of 'if they can do AI they can do this' and calling all the privacy concerns overblown.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

Thank you for commenting here and having the guts to face the nerderati!

I'm a Claude Max user. I've never been able to use Fable as my work in medical physics involves both particle physics, biochemistry and biology from Python bivitticus to clinical medicine. I am not a US citizen and work in Europe.

Will Fable 5.1 work on any of my problems? Fable 5 refuses outright. Is there anyone I can ask for a review or adjustment of the safeguards? It doesn't seem so, but with Opus at least I'm pretty sure I can infer lots of your training data from now precise they are. Fable is basically useless infuriatingly. I'm just finishing a proper clinical trial in ovarian cancer and trying to make a simulation environment related to our technology.

I really enjoyed this comment – thank you.

One part of the classical diaspora I think is both under appreciated and undergoing something of a renaissance is that of contemporary choral music. There are many great examples but two I'd like to draw to attention to two of those I have recently sung, and really enjoy:

(1) The works of Ēriks Ešenvalds,[1] a Latvian composer who was a fellow in composition at Trinity College, Cambridge and brought really a large part of the surprisingly rich eastern European singing tradition to the west. I had never heard of the Singing Revolution against the USSR in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – countries with a wonderful, rich choral tradition where music (and choirs) played a really nonzero part in the downfall of the USSR. All absolutely beautiful and a group I sing with has worked with a lot of composers from this part of the world. Amazing soundscapes with harmonies that are never quite as good in equal temperament as outside it and yet always tonal and beautiful.

(2) Desmond Earley and the choral scholars of Trinity College Dublin – who conjures up a rich sound world of very pure, Irish tones that almost sounds synthetic but is made entirely from human voices and traditional instruments. It is simple to sing but difficult to master. I would highlight Dúlamán, [3] a traditional song about the economic importance of seaweed.

[1] https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_HYP202607B – track 6 (the whole lot is free!) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iRfI1ezYjA&list=RD3iRfI1ezY... – this was a sampler from hyperion too and I have the whole lot legally as flac.

If anyone other than me really likes classical music, I thoroughly recommend Hyperion Records. DRM free downloads in your choice of codec, one to two free CDs worth of sampler per month to download (with a jewel case PDF!) and some truly excellent world leading groups and beautiful new music.

I too would love to know the answer to this question. I loved Eve as a teenager / young adult. It was a brilliant burst of nerdery, and the first time I ever met someone who wrote linux kernel modules for a living.

I sometimes think about logging in (I think I ragequit likely in a pod inside a wormhole in the middle of nullsec) and then I realise that way madness (and much sunk time) lies.

Using umatrix or a monkey script and selectively editing what their website does, however, certainly help with privacy.

I _still_ haven't actually been able to _use_ Fable at all. Those safeguards just refuse biology in general.

In true HN haven't RTFA (apparently Cloudfare has banned my IP address from the APS's website for overuse...) but even if the critical surface of Bc / Ic / Tc is similar, there can still be a massive engineering advantage to a new material for other reasons.

One of the major difficulties with manufacturing large magnets out of existing technologies like Nb-Ti or Nb3Sn (which is used for ultrahigh field) is the welds. You need O(100 km) of superconductor with no defects embedded in a copper or bronze matrix (for taking the quench current and mechanical support). As you probably know, these are made by taking a block of copper (or bronze), drilling out holes in it, putting in rods of e.g. ultrapure Nb3Sn in Nb sleeves, and then drawing it under very controlled conditions. The metals have to be pure because work hardening around defects is definitely a thing, and you do not want an unknown break in the wire, ready to become resistive and take O(0.1-1 kA) currents.

This is "specialised" to put it mildly and joining a broken wire is somewhere on a scale from impossible to bloody difficult -- traditionally think lovely solutions like Piranha or HF, and words like "cold welding". Only recently have people started to get TIG like hot welding techniques to work -- but then you have a difficult problem anyway because it is analogous to joining something like a 28 core cable where one dodgy connection can cause what is effectively a controlled explosion.

I suspect Fable refuses to talk about anything biology whatsoever (so much so that I can't use it) -- and Welch's test, i.e. an unequal variance t test, is beloved by biologists. Stupid, but there ya go...

From TFA:

> Some other funny ideas I saw: [...] > "Palantir for tech teams". "A real-time security guardian sitting silently on every dev's machine, scanning their screen, code, and communications to proactively prevent vulnerabilities."

Jesus hell, people – normal people, okay those who code at presumably _some_ sort of high level like you and I – think that is not only a good idea but a novel idea and one worthy of funding.

I realise HN is not Reddit, but I do think this comic rather fits the bill... https://i.redd.it/kyoumnqngzih1.png

This belongs in a dystopian cyberpunk RPG, not reality.

I've often wondered what would happen if you took some near IR, eye safe, ultra bright LEDs and strobed them at 60 Hz from your headgear in an omnidirectional fashion, pointing away from your body and avoiding nearby floor reflections. You'd stick out like a sore thumb (which I wouldn't mind, as I'm not a criminal nor doing anything wrong!) but it would be enough to likely "opt out" of facial recognition via dint of blinding the camera in the vicinity of your face.

Britain has all sorts of laws like "attempting to pervert the course of justice", so you'd have to be very careful to not accidentally cover for a "real criminal", but just to preserve privacy it might work (especially if more than one person did so).

I've never had the guts to do it, but I do really hate facial recognition and all of this surveillance capitalism.

I imagine hydrodynamic drag (and engine inefficiencies after that). Water is a thousand times more dense and about 50 times more viscous than air.

I'm surprised this isn't already "a thing" though, as the interaction of wind and waves have been known about for centuries and clearly a big blocky ship is going to be very much not finessed aerodynamically. The hydrodynamic Reynolds number is very large and I suspect dominated design considerations of efficiency with a limited time (and computational) budget.

> What causes this obfuscated writing style?

Claude without an editor having worked too long on its own project.

This is already the case for Master's degrees and above in Denmark. I've been the opponent examining students. We ask Master's students to give US instruction on a topic (drawn randomly on a card in front of them, from a list they know a few days in advance). They do a chalk and talk on a topic for about fifteen minutes with three to five professors being "dumb students". It works fantastically and at the end it's very apparent to both student and teachers how well a topic is understood. Marks are rarely contested and in my experience most students think the process is fair.

Of course, woe betide those with social phobias....

Alas, the android VM will fail safetynet by not passing bootloader attestation.

I really hate modern Google.

> I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.

For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history.

You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management!

Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally').

> I don't claim this is something to be proud of, but from that scandal to this day, I buy nothing from Sony, and neither does my company. Trust counts.

I also haven't bought anything from Sony since then. I used to have a walkman, stereo etc from them. Customer lost and I've gone out of my way to steer others away from them. This scandal really showed what Sony thought of their customers, and it holds true to this day.

http://philo.gay/linecam/gallery.html -- it's linked within the middle of the talk.

I still think that EME were a mistake for web standards to implement. I disable them by default and yet see widevine requests as part of analytics, the occasional bot captcha, and other inappropriate locations all the time. I really just wish the whole thing would bog off - its anti consumer and approving the standard was I think a really foolish mistake. At least Firefox has an "off" button. Would that it was off by default.

Most clusters I use are architected assuming you use vim and look at graphics locally. I do. I also use img-cat. I've never liked VSCode anything.

For me it's more metroid prime than FF. Just needs the coloured doors!

I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.

I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)

If I see the phrase "The honest take: I was wrong" again I will scream...

A nanosecond? The speed of sound at sea level in dry air is approximately 330m/s. So at say 3.3 kHz, the rough logarithmic middle of the audible spectrum, K=2π/lambda is 2π/0.1 m=20 π rad/m. A phase difference from a source difference k. ∆r would therefore likely be far more easily resolved than that for many physical ∆rs then, no?

I'm a medical physicist. I literally haven't been able to get Fable to answer a question I have written -- all of my work is verboten. I have however asked Claude Code (opus 4.8) to ultracode "a Fable oracle that <deals with the high level difficult problems> in a digraphed, clean content, isolated environment with a minimally scoped working codebase. Ask the model at the start and the end to report exactly what its version string is. If it is not claude-fable-5, stop the agent and refine the prompt until this changes"

It burns through tokens like anything but apparently Claude is much better at prompting Claude than I am.

Would I pay for it? God no. I'm still smarter than I am and it just will not work on my actual problems.

I still haven't been able to use Fable. I'm a medical physicist -- it just balks at anything I do and gives me an AUP / safeguard error. Applies even if I docstrip out all the comments in my C code!