eggy

An informed take on what may or may not have happended:

https://youtu.be/w1r8dl4RqMw?si=BzEnCzbgv7oYNNwe

Only one engine was in reverse, and flaps were not down. The YT video also excerpts manuals and diagrams to good effect for a lay person who is not a pilot. Video of engine failing near airport may have been bird strike. They were in flight 4+ hours, so fuel should have been used to an extent, but don't they dump fuel when they are going to land in an emergency like this? The fireball was big, and they should have shut fuel pumps before flare up of reversing engines on runway.

The 1-foot-thick concrete wall for the atenna array seems to have caused it to impact hard enough to cause the most damage and fireball. The video points out there are lots of these with less robust structures at most airports.

Tell that to the largest company in the world, Nvidia that adopted SPARK for their high-integrity, high-security firmware.

I find Ada/SPARK2014 much easier to learn than Rust, and given its legacy, Ada programmers are of a higher quality for the high-integrity market than Rust at the moment. The fandom of Rust is a positive and attracts a lot of early adopters, but it still does not approach the portfolio of high-integrity software out there in Ada/SPARK2014.

They've been using safe languages like Ada and SPARK2014 for decades, and those are hardly unsafe. In fact they are safer and more mature than Rust and easier to learn IMHO.

I like the Betamax vs. VHS, X vs. Mastodon bit, because technically if you want a safe, high-integrity programming language today, you would choose SPARK2014, the Ada language that has a legacy of mission-critical real-world software projects for decades, proven verification tools and and it is easy to read and write. Rust gained favor with the tech crowd, while SPARK was being used in avionics, aerospace, and other high-assurance software. Why would you choose Rust a relatively new, unproven language (cite some mission critical software that has been running for a decade written in Rust besides a browser) for crypto, aerospace, AWS, and other critical areas? Programming language adoption is just as much about fashion as it is about a true pros/cons in tech.

Turning off camera LEDs and recording video is an old hack and old news. This is for a specific firmware and computer model and attack surface via USB to update the webcam's firmware, so I am assuming that makes it news?

EDIT: I keep a piece of black electric tape over any of my notebook's webcams.

I am looking to create my show control software in SPARK2014/Ada, so I'll have to see if I can have Ironclad run on an AMD or Intel board and interface with my controller. Looks very promising!

It's why we are planning on using Ada/SPARK2014 for our show control automation software and rewriting C drivers on the hardware being used for the show action equipment in SPARK2014. Nothing else is close at the moment. Looking forward to more SHUA!

The law says it is illegal "to use a detection device to search for archaeological objects anywhere within the State or its territorial seas; without the prior written consent of the Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht"

What if you are searching for gold, lost items, underground cables, or other, and you stumble upon an archaeological object? You were not hunting those objects, so I would say you were within the law. What you do with the fortuitous find is another matter (IANAL).

My brother and I were the first to buy a house in our immediate family. My Uncle Vic was the first to say you never really own your house or land. You pay property taxes after you have paid off your house. Your land can be taken with little compensation in some matters, etc. I can see why you would be happy and worried at the same time discovering artifacts whether you were looking for them or not.

I would definitely be up for a new Spore-like game with a dash of Bioshock. There are not enough "wet" games out there vs. hard sci-fi, fps, or space games.

Yes definitely helps me feel clear or on my mental game. That was why I mentioned fuzzy. I now think this is why a steak dinner does sort of the same for me mentally when I just have steak with no carbs, veggies, or sweetened drink.

I still have the two Artificial Life volumes from the Santa Fe Institiute proceedings from 1989. Alien Life looks like you could easily get lost in another world with this simulation. I remember awaiting the game Spore with music by Brian Eno was being created with lots of pre-release press in 2007 / 2008. A lot of cross- disciplined talents were hovering around this field back then and emergent behavior was diffusing into all topics of conversation. Good times.

I only use it when training hard, otherwise, you might as well flush it. Anecdotally, I feel I can squeeze out a bit more and I am not as fuzzy during the activity. I can't speak too much about how I feel during recovery or muscle growth. I do body weight, boxing, and range of motion and coordination drills with kettle bells and medicine balls.

Thank you! That's definitely a great way to look at it. Complacency and habit breed accidents. Although not the the Boeing/mechanical issues. Still worried about the ghost in the machine or gremlins!

Yeah, you should have more concern over human error and Boeing than this. But, boy, the more I have flown and the older I am, the more I get anxious during turbulence when I fly.

[1] "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the prevalence of food allergies has increased by 50 percent since the 1990s, making it a serious public health concern."

The labeling and laws around them seem to be tricky business, however, it should be time to treat the disease and not just the symptoms. The above quote from the CDC tells me that medical advice to new parents and/or diet has created a monster, and it's time to undo the harm. I have 5 children from age 5 to 27 from two different women, and not one has food allergies. I realize it is anecdotal data, but I also don't recall there being so many people with various allergies growing up, and parents I have spoken to that seem to have done the same with doctors and dietary choices for their children don't have children with allergies. So, does this mean in my youth, either kids with allergies died, didn't have allergies, or avoided whatever allergens were out there and were such a small percentage it didn't register? Personally, we didn't give our children antibiotics every time they had cold-like symptoms, or go to the doctor often, and we introduced solids at a very early age along with nuts (in paste form - peanut butter, tahini when they were very young), and a diverse diet. There were families around us that had one of their kids on antibiotics once or more a year for years, and they wouldn't question it, and they were early on the gluten thing before it became a thing.

I think it would be horrific to have a life-threatening allergy to even being exposed to the trace amount of anything. On the other side, I am so tired of not being able to find "normal" food without warnings, and the trend-of-the-day nutrients overcrowding the shelves and displacing other choices. It seems in the US at least, if you say something is good for you, it winds up everywhere in massive quantities. Remember the initial Quinoa boom? Quinoa cereals, buns, drinks, tablets, in pasta, salads, etc. I know it's a grain like wheat is omnipresent, but one day the supermarket shelves get loaded with it until the next health trend comes along - Acai this, Acai that, Avocado this, that, Olive oil, Matcha, Gingko, Ginseng (80s!), Almonds (to the point of overcultivation), etc... Nothing in moderation or common sense, but marketing overload, and the public literally eats it up. I can't even find full-fat yogurt that easy now. My local ShopRite has almost 95% low-fat, no-fat, yogurts on the shelves with 5% or full-fat yogurt, and supposedly fat is good again, it's sugar that's the main culprit for obesity and diabetes and other related diseases in the US.

PS: Imagine trying to run a business in a litigious society where now 50% more people have food allergies to so many things that you need a mass spectrometer or other instrument to make bread to ensure it has what seems to be an undefined trace of one of many related food elements. Life has gotten ridiculous.

[1] https://irp.nih.gov/blog/post/2023/05/digging-up-the-roots-o...

Bloomberg Terminal is a hardware/software dynamic duo! Reuters and Dow Jones have competitive packages too.

Other software in finance:

kdb, for time-series analytics [0].

AmiBroker - amazing tech analysis package, and AmiBroker Formula Language (AFL - found this because I like J and APL), an array-based PL with debugger built-in to the AmiBroker platform. Fast [1].

I have been programming since 1978 starting on a Commodore PET 2001, but I saw computers and programming as tools. I was studying neural nets and genetic algorithms in the early 90s. I gravitated to lean, simple and easy software, but somehow every software I use just seems so bloated, in-your-face, inefficient, that I have chosen simple tools to use now. I keep a J interpreter open on my desktop along with Frink as more-than-desktop calculators. I use a Home edition of Mathematica, the orginal notebook interface, that has so much curated data and built-in functions that what was once complicated is now a great ecosystem to do math, analysis, reports, engineering, etc. And, yes, Excel, no matter how much it is disparaged by programmers. I gave up Inventor and other CAD programs for Alibre Design (yes, I have SolveSpace on my toolbar for fun!). I am so glad I steered clear of IT/SW engineering/etc. after speaking to many in all parts of the industry. The tool is their job, not the thing the tool does.

PS: I have run hundred-million-dollar construction jobs in SE Asia and MENA using WhatsApp in the field from my Samsung Note to annotate drawings, photos, etc. even though Slack and high-end PM programs were back in the office.

[0] https://kx.com/products/kdb/

[1] https://www.amibroker.com/

Internet muscles.

I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing.

I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).

I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.

I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

NASA is neither a public or private company, but rather a government agency. Congress is an employee of the US taxpayer. I think that makes them more of a manager of NASA and we should hold Congress accountable.

I was one of the original donors in June 2202, iirc, for Ton to buy Blender and start the Blender Foundation. I used birthday money and sent I think, $50, that's why I remember it to this day. I still use Blender, but I was using it back then to generate 3D reliefs to carve on my self-built 4x8 foot CNC router table. I wrote a script based on a shape-from-shading algorithm originally developed by NASA to get more out of all of the single-lens B&W satellite photos they had. My company was The Wooden Image. To the other poster: you could do procedural stuff in Blender early on using Python scripting, although I was using POV-Ray very early on.

Geometric mean in Numpy vs. J:

(Copied from some forum, since I don't use Python much)

  import numpy as np

  def geo_mean_overflow(iterable):
      return

  np.exp(np.log(iterable).mean())

Or,

  from statistics import.
  geometric_mean

  geometric_mean([1.0, 0.00001, 10000000000.]) # 46.415888336127786

In J, since I don't know K:

  gm=:#%:*/

Even shorter than Python whether it's a canned lib routine or created from composing simple functions.

And I don't need to format code on HN in J because it's so short anyway, besides I don't know how!

There are a few articles of using J or APL for ANNs and CNNs out there. Here's one:

  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.05234

And Pandas was inspired by J per a quote in an article I once read about Wes McKinney, but I cant seem to find it online any longer.

Try J or APL, K, BQN, or April, and be prepared to rethink how you implement solutions to problems you've tackled in other PLs. I am an array language user and fan. I have been playing with April and I use J regularly at home and sometimes for work when I can.

From the April github site: "April compiles a subset of the APL programming language into Common Lisp. Leveraging Lisp's powerful macros and numeric processing faculties, it brings APL's expressive potential to bear for Lisp developers. Replace hundreds of lines of number-crunching code with a single line of APL."

  https://github.com/phantomics/april

Most people I know who actually learn an array language like k or j usually grow to appreciate the expressiveness and cleverness of these languages. Typically, people have your reaction who have only looked at it and tried it very briefly. I'm surprised. Why did you have to learn it? Where?

>>>However, due to its relatively short lifespan, industry adaption in safety-critical environments is still lacking. This work provides a set of recommendations for the development of safety-critical space systems in Rust.

Why wouldn't they use Ada/SPARK2014? They have a published language standard, verification tools, and 25 years of applied use for mission-critical, high-integrity software.

The current state of Rust is a moving target for such tools and design methods. Publish a formal language standard first.

https://www.adacore.com/about-spark

Will Eisner's, Comics and Sequential Art, book is great for graphic storytelling and the history of the artform.

I'd like to hear her raw voice compared to the polished product. Listen to famous singers' acoustic vs. heavily audio-engineered final cuts. Big difference. I think if you played this OpenAI "Sky" voice to a sample population and said it was a famous person's voice, SA would come up frequently.

Scarlett Johansson will forever be associated with this voice named, "Sky", the official voice of "Skynet" that will wipe us all off the face of the earth! In comparison, the unfolding of "her" the movie would be like a walk in the park compared to armies of Terminators.

It sounds too close to Scarlett for me to believe this was not the goal whether they hired somebody else or not, and if they try and prove beyond a doubt no audio post processing was done. Just listen to famous musicians doing acoustic or no processing versions of their songs to see how much you can craft a voice or sound.

[Edit]

  1. A movie that features an AI voice of a female voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

  2. A real-life AI company, OpenAI, is trying to put a distinct voice to their AI product vs. a canned voice.

  3. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, contacting SJ to ask her to be the AI voice.

  4. SJ refuses.

  5. CEO of OpenAI tweets "her" the title of the movie in #1 above.

Audio processing with DSP methods and current audio engineering craft or training AI to make it sound like SJ would be the thing to prove. Get raw audio of actress and finished sound and compare how they steered it to the final product and compare a spectrograph of SJ if you can get the same words.

My common sense and the above facts says OpenAI did whatever they did to get close enough to SJ's voice. SA pursued it a few times, no? It definitely sounds like her enough to me.