edgineer

100,000 people in the US alone die of diabetes per year (none of the 7 were in the US). Other reporting shows that 3 million glucose meters are being recalled. Diabetes can be tricky to manage as it is.

One could look at this story case-by-case and what happened to the affected individuals. Did the device directly lead them to harm? Of the wide coverage of this story, I see no testimonials from affected people.

We're left with the statistical perspective. I don't see the math supporting this story. I expect that as many or more people would have been harmed by diabetes during the time period without this bug.

I think it is more harmful to perpetuate the lack of context or analysis that brings crowds to look at statistical noise and agree that something must be done about it.

I'm aware that "what does Salesforce actually do?" is a joke but I also really don't know what they do and this article didn't help. They... have conversations with customers? What does the AI do?

Living in proximity to people who don't care enough to not be annoying to others has a few ways you can look at it. But I suggest you consider upgrading the cabin air filter in your car. There are likely options with activated carbon to help reduce odors. This was actually a factor in my decision to go Tesla: their models S and X have an additional massive HEPA filter, and absolutely no outside smells make it into the car.

I hear this commonly about using the words "male" and "female." I think it's unfair. For one thing, the military uses them frequently, and so would veterans. Another reason is that their meanings are age-agnostic which helps to emphasize the intent of the speaker--to differentiate on sex alone, not sex plus age.

Doctors sometimes prescribe alcohol and in these cases pharmacies do fill these orders.

I'm sure those people exist, I just never happen to see anything they write online nor meet any of them in real life.

Ha, that's like the quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

On the topic of biology specifically, you might like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

He argues/explains how evolutionary forces become dominant, with much more focus on the why. Why it has come to be that living things grow, multiply, and over time changed in ways that out-succeeded the prior ones, down to the level of DNA--and that these driving forces are manifested by individual genes.

There's some neat math that shows how one could send (radio) signals which are undetectable to an observer. Last I read, the research was in specific, purely theoretical scenarios but the idea is that you could send bit impulses which stay within the noise floor. Transmit with a power less than R^2 (in discrete time and ignoring triangulation and you have to pre-coordinate the timing of the transmissions with your partner via pre-shared one time pad and use plenty of error correction) the enemy observer cannot prove that someone is sending signals at all.

Maybe no such techniques could ever apply to the internet, but I'm not sure it's proven impossible. You would need a well defined threat model but if you can show that your enemy is working with noisy data and strictly in the digital space, I don't see why statistical de-anonymization couldn't be foiled.

Sleep is just different from shut down. With an unplugged laptop, after an idle period or by shutting the lid, I'd like the machine to save energy. I haven't always taken the steps to prepare for a shut down, saving open documents. I wouldn't like to wake back up an idle machine to see that my programs had all been closed.

And sometimes I'd like to quickly put a laptop into a bag without waking it up just to shut it down first. If I had a way to transition from sleep to shut down I'd use it, but also... this is where I see that if the sleep state were more perfect (used zero energy, zero unintended wakeups), it would obviate my need to shut down most of the time.

The elephant in the room for me is "microphonics" or the noise piped to your head via the wire any time anything touches it.

You demand higher quality, yet don't care about the loud noise created with every small movement of your body? I have heard this dismissed before as "doesn't bother me" and it's hardly ever mentioned in discussions about good audio vs Bluetooth.

I'm bewildered why wireless audio isn't praised for completely eliminating this source of noise that plagues every wired headphone, earbud, and IEM.

Use a wallet with a divider, and sort your bills. Won't have to flip through until you carry several each of five or more denominations. If you regularly do, then use two dividers.

So it goes: unintentional data leak. Data leak pipeline becomes common knowledge. Then manipulation.

"New CPU in Passmark" news has become so regular, I've long since assumed that they are not leaks at all, but intentional product hype.

EXIF metadata is editable, too. Similar that it could be useful intelligence, but it is very easy to deceive others with it.

There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.

Personalization would be good if it meant recognizing that I dislike blogspam, SEO'd pages, advertisements, and assuming my location.

I would like copyright law in the US to be weakened.

One F-35 costs around $100 million. I count two that perhaps theoretically, with a clever autopilot, could have landed on their own after pilot ejection. At the scale of $200 million I'm not certain that the additional engineering of the already-clever jet would really have cost more than that.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2024/10/pilot-error-blame...

https://simpleflying.com/f35-pilot-troubleshooting-lockheed-...

It doesn't have to a mistake, it could be any other detail that you know would be disagreed with.

Comedy sketch writers would write a throwaway that was too off the wall to air, then include it in their proposal among others to make sure their darlings made it through.

I'm also reminded of the story of the Tetris contract in which a revision of the contract had an important change of a few words, and also an increase of some other fee. This fee change stole the attention and hid the other more insidious revision.

And for the modern era there is Drugslab, a Dutch channel where the hosts describe drugs, take them on camera, and show their experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/@Drugslab

You can buy a new zipper and have a tailor put it on for you. I've upgraded clothing in this way before. Total cost is about $20.

Nvidia also had really cool demo programs you'd run with each generation to show off what your new card could do. [0]

You'll have to use the Internet archive to see them all. [1] Several, like 'Dawn' for example, were quietly removed in 2020.

[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/community/demos/

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/2019/https://www.nvidia.com/en-us...

"Nowadays, video rendering is no longer done with overlays."

Darn, I thought this explained why, after upgrading my GPU, videos playing in Chrome have a thin green stripe on their right edge.

Wiper blades, cabin air filter(s), 12V battery, refrigerant dryer, suspension. Arguably drive unit oil. Very good idea to lubricate moving parts, hinges, apply protection to weather stripping, exposed steel on underbody.

Storage is cheap and upgradeable on all but very very few Windows laptops.

As an aside, "bar exam" and "passing the bar" comes from the bar/railing physically or symbolically separating the public from the legal practitioners in a courtroom.

"Set a high bar" comes from pole vaulting.

I've seen one or two fake capacity disks show up. I check this site every couple weeks, for a couple years now. The more common listing issues are hybrid drives showing up as SSD, or disk bundles showing as a single larger disk, that type of thing. Issues are rare and barely mar how great a site it is.

I'm not reading that Israel released every person of Palestinian descent from their prisons. In another source I see "agreed-upon number of Palestinian security prisoners" which apparently is the 2,000 we heard about today. In another source I see that 9,619 people in Israeli prisons in December 2024 were Palestinian.

It sounds to nme that Israel had freedom to choose who would be released or would stay in prison. That there was a number of people negotiated without specifying individuals, and that the number was about 20% of the total prisoners.

You are suggesting that "leak" is a transitive verb. It is. However, it is also an intransitive verb.

This is just one facet of communities that stays opaque. I mean scientific literature, statistics, and demographics only go so far. Things done privately stay secret unless something severely breaks, or someone speaks up. Slice of life bits like this are good; if only we could have them come in large sample sizes, uniformly distributed.

Only parodies. The original campaign never said "download a car"