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endgameon Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

>> Can we use AI to get a cure for cancer yet?

Yes-ish. Custom mRNA treatment used to reverse the progress of a dog's cancer.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/tech-bo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COYSRbF1F-Y

endgameon Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture

The talk page about the conjecture clarifies WP:RSSELF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Sel...

> Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications.

endgameon Order a burned CD of your own public GitHub repo

How do we know this is real? Most online form providers will host all forms on their own domain, so it could just be a great way to get some data harvesting going on the .microsoft gTLD.

endgameon AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

Yes.

endgameon Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot

Ashley is the canonical list of knots, so it's good for people who haven't heard of ABOK to hear about it since we're talking knots today.

Probably time to drop another coin in Ian's tip jar too.

endgameon Childhood Computing

Yeah, I spent more time than I cared to admit fiddling with DEVICE(HIGH) lines, tweaking FILES= and BUFFERS=, running MEMMAKER.EXE over and over as if that would do something, but it was never the real thing. The real thing is making the machine do something I wanted instead of what the manufacturer wanted. For a kid of this generation, I'd look for games with reasonable modding APIs, perhaps something like Lua, and ideally something where playing multiplayer lets him show his creations off to his friends.

From there, look to packages like LÖVE which still use Lua but give full control over the whole game, and help him explore and wrangle the things he needs to understand to make his programming real. And if the lower levels interest him, help him dig deeper. But I think modding and scripting is probably the best place to start.

endgameon Do_not_track

No. It shouldn't be an opt-out, and it is bad practice to write conditional settings in the negative.

endgameon A new spam policy for “back button hijacking”

I cannot even reliably press [Space] any more to page down through sites that are meant to be all about content!

endgameon Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed

Why is a C++ project being distributed on PyPi at all?

endgameon An unstoppable mushroom is tearing through North American forests

The verb I've most commonly heard for this activity in English is "forage". What's the equivalent German word?

endgameon MAUI Is Coming to Linux

Making each one implement input handling was also a dazzlingly bizarre design choice.

endgameon Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)

The Australians have some incredible anti-war music. Redgum's /I was only 19/ is brutal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UYDKxxQ50o

endgameon The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

And the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security definitely gave the literal thousands of submissions due consultation before recommending the original, un-split bill pass.

endgameon Another GitHub outage in the same day

Nobody. Nobody at all could have seen it. Microsoft is cool now, haven't you seen VSCode? They do Open Source, they run Linux, they've joined the fold, the tiger shed its stripes.

endgameon Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

You might have some luck applying isohybrid(1) to the period-correct .iso image, making it bootable by other means: https://manpages.debian.org/stretch/syslinux-utils/isohybrid...

endgameon Ian's Shoelace Site

So are your guides, by the way. Thank you for writing them.

endgameon Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

That's not the intention, but how do you stop it from being the effect?

endgameon TI-99/4A: Leaning more on the firmware

The command to load a program in TI BASIC was actually "OLD <DEVICE>". Probably because they already had "NEW".

https://www.ninerpedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A_system_usage#Loadin...

endgameon Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

Yes. Here's a 2014 BBC article about that:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-26487418

The article quotes one Mr Richard Mawrey QC:

> "Postal voting on demand, however many safeguards you build into it, is wide open to fraud… on a scale that will make election rigging a possibility and indeed in some areas a probability."

> "Now I know that there is a very strong political desire to keep the present system. What I'm saying is that if you keep the present system, then however many safeguards you create, fraud and serious fraud is inevitably going to continue because that is built into the system."

endgameon Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

There are some really clever systems that let you prove that you voted without leaking how you voted.

Unfortunately, explaining them to Joe Q. Public in such a way that he's going to trust your election is a very tough sell, whereas counting paper is a much easier process to explain.

And that's before you begin worrying that the developer of your whizz-bang mathematically-provable voting system is a) going to win the bid to build it for the government, b) implements it correctly, and c) isn't subverted while doing so.

endgameon TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB

The best-designed website on the internet.

endgameon The gift card accountability sink

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

This guy purchased a gift card which turned out to be dodgy, and Apple locked his entire account. So there's definitely some kind of shenanigans possible with the current supply chain.

endgameon The Going Dark initiative or ProtectEU is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt

Which other VPN providers support the range of payment methods that Mullvad does?

endgameon Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

That's not an argument when the Mozilla Foundation makes it structurally impossible to fund Firefox.

endgameon Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban

Of course they aren't. If they were actually helping kids, they would be going after algorithmic feeds in general and the most predatory platforms like Roblox (especially given its recent scandals), doing something about kids being exposed to gambling advertising, etc.

The bill was put up for public comment for less than one business day before being rammed through Parliament. Australia is just sending out one of the horsemen of the infocalypse so that other countries have an excuse to follow suit. Like how our "Assistance And Access" Act was a test run of the UK's "snooper's charter".

This law will just lead to:

1. kids pretending to be adults so they sneak through these filters

2. platforms winding back their (meagre) child safety efforts since "children are banned anyway"

3. everyone being forced to prove their age via e.g. uploading ID (which will inevitably get leaked)

endgameon Zig's new plan for asynchronous programs

So it's the reader monad, then? ;-)

endgameon NixOS 25.11 released

I've used Nix for at least seven years, and I firmly believe that the language is a large part of the problem. Yes, the Nix language is "just another lazily-evaluated pure FP language in the ML tradition" and "it's like a lazily-evaluated JSON", but it has several large footguns. The biggest one is that spaces are use to separate elements in list literals as well as for function application. The second is the lack of a usable type system, in the sense that the programmer cannot assert the types of values in a useful way. Instead, you have to rely on comments and convention to know what a function's arguments are.

These two design warts also interact with each other really badly: If you try to put a function application into a list and forget to enclose it in parentheses, you instead insert the function as one element in the list and its arguments as successive elements. The usual result is "expected an X but got a function" error in some completely unrelated part of the code.

endgameon [dead]

Do you care about people _now_, even though their existence is finite and at some point anything you may or may not have done to affect them will cease mattering?

endgameon NixOS 25.11 released

This article and video might be good for you, but they are more about a conceptual overview of what the fundamental parts of Nix are and how they interact.

https://shopify.engineering/shipit-presents-how-shopify-uses...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iVXaqUfHi4

Flakes are a dependency-pinning and hermetic evaluation feature baked into the Nix tool itself.

Overlays are an idiom that uses lazy evaluation to build up larger attribute sets in a modular and composable way (e.g., package collections for a particular programming language).

endgameon [dead]

> Why would it matter if there is no life after this one? If there is no life after this one, maybe you should just "get over it".

Because for as long as we are capable of caring, we should care that other people have to live with the consequences of our actions.