duskwuff

> Is FTP really worse HTTP?

I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it.

Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to pass through firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsing of "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent. Need I continue? :)

> Denying the existence of a major dynasty is like declaring that Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson didn't exist

There's a great difference of scale.

Lincoln died about 150 years ago. There are voluminous primary sources about Lincoln - e.g. photographs of him, original documents that he wrote, firsthand accounts of his actions, etc. We certainly don't know every detail of his life, but we do know a lot of it, and we're quite confident it's true.

The Tang dynasty, by contrast, fell over a thousand years ago. We know of it primarily through second- and third-hand histories and through interpretation of archaeological artifacts - much like our knowledge of Greek and Roman history, for instance. There are a lot of thinly covered areas, and many of the sources are biased; there's a lot more to be uncertain about.

Don't forget that you're flying NYC to SF to "regroup at the SF HQ to debrief and keep building". What, you thought you got the weekend off? Rise and grind.

Good news / bad news: employees are also expected to "co-live in our Warsaw & SF Hacker Houses" (i.e. corporate frat house).

Not quite sure how they get "teams of 20" living in those houses with a total company size of 15, though.

You might be thinking of Nauru. Different island.

> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.

With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.

In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.

> It's entirely possible there are subscribers outside the base

There are none. The native Chagossians were all expelled in the 1960s-70s.

My understanding is that this is analogous to AI use policies within many law firms. Using AI-powered search tools as part of research is usually allowed; using generative AI to draft or rewrite content is usually not.

(Given the importance of confidentiality, law firms also tend to be pretty picky about which tools their staff use.)

The methods in an interface can be implemented by many different types, and it's often hard or impossible to determine which of those types will be passed in to a function. For example, the io.Reader interface is implemented by many different stream-like types, and functions which accept io.Reader arguments generally can't make assumptions about which of those types they'll get.

Both the text and the images of this article appear to be entirely AI-generated. I'm not sure there's any human insight here, just a robotic regurgitation of stock talking points.

(The same appears to be true of everything else on the site. The graphics for the "2000 Dot-Com Bubble Burst" article highlighted in the sidebar are particularly sloppy.)

The setup costs for a pressed CD are substantial - manufacturing many different designs would have been much more expensive, and would have only slowed down crackers marginally. It's unlikely that this would have recovered enough sales to be worth it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that a lot of the outputs were characteristic of an online tool called SpinBot. (The tool no longer seems to work the same way that it did at the time.)

> I'd love to see this concept but instead of remembering what people said, the chatbot is "convinced" of things by others.

I'm not sure this is feasible, given how LLMs work. Context is finite, and it doesn't replace training data.

The phenomenon of tortured phrases in published papers has been going on since at least 2020 - long before LLMs were a significant factor, and certainly before watermarking their output was a consideration.

The general working theory is that these phrases are the result of a "text spinner" tool being applied to a manuscript and blindly replacing random words or phrases using a preset list of synonyms (which are often imprecise and/or inappropriate). https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that many of the commonly observed phrases were characteristic of an online text-spinning tool.

Some more examples of these tortured phrases: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751

A few of my favorites are "counterfeit consciousness" (artificial intelligence), "discourse acknowledgement" (voice recognition), and "arbitrary get right of passage to memory" (random access memory).

The ARM ISAs are not free to implement. ARM holds patents relevant to the ISA.

Given that they're on the audio board, they're almost certainly volume controls.

A common design in compressors is to use LZ as a first step, but to then represent the constant data and/or offset-length pairs from LZ using an entropy coder.

Deflate (as used in gzip) uses a Huffman coder. LZMA (as used by xz) uses a predictive range coder. Zstandard can use either Huffman or FSE. Some high-speed compressors like LZ4 skip the entropy coding stage entirely at the expense of compression ratio.

Bzip2 is an interesting aversion of this pattern - it uses the Burrows-Wheeler transform as a first pass instead of LZ. Unfortunately, this is one of the major reasons why it's so slow.

I have to agree. Even if it hadn't been designated as Fermat's Last Theorem, the problem would likely have ended up in some comparable list of interesting conjectures (e.g. Hilbert's problems, the Erdős problems, the Millennium Prize problems, etc).

A news story from a couple of years ago comes to mind - "Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline’s chatbot". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-cha...

> So if you detect usage of 3-byte encodings, chances are you'll continue encountering only 3-byte encodings, with the odd ASCII or emoji codepoints.

Depends on what kind of text you're processing. Many languages use the ASCII range for spaces/newlines, digits, and punctuation.

Technically true, but the list is mostly nonfunctional - cryptominers are basically extinct in the wild, and most of the domains on the list have expired or no longer serve mining scripts.

Per personal communication, this is precisely why the developer did that.

> Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer.

You may not even need anything as fancy as that - many microchips can be delayered by a skilled operator using mechanical polishing processes.

The original NMOS 6502 also used a lot of rather weird dynamic logic which can't easily be represented as standard digital logic elements. Some details here:

http://www.aholme.co.uk/6502/Main.htm

No, that's misleading. "Immediately available" means parts you already have in stock and can start populating without waiting for another supplier - it doesn't mean things that you could order.

> But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.

This story happens to describe events on Earth, but it's part of the same chronology as the rest of the Martian Chronicles stories. The story The Million-Year Picnic describes the same war from the perspective of a family who escaped to Mars.

As an aside, later editions of the book advanced all the dates by 31 years; those editions put this story in August 2057 instead.

The site is a personal blog. There's no expectation, explicit or implicit, that it be "professional".

It's still used in a couple of specific senses - it's used in the nearly fixed phrases "keen edge" or "keen mind" as a synonym for "sharp", and as "to be keen to -" to mean "eager". But, in my experience, it's rarely used to mean grieving ("to keen over -"), and almost never as a generic term of approval ("that's real keen").

And cryptosporidium (a type of bacteria which causes diarrhea) is also often abbreviated as "crypto". Not that there's much risk of confusion in CVs, but it does lead to some amusing lines like "preventing and controlling crypto", "symptoms of crypto", etc (e.g. at https://www.cdc.gov/cryptosporidium/prevention/preventing-an...).