evgen

Which country has a better average living standard depends on if we are talking about mean, median, or mode. The American mean is higher and since most of the HN crowed works in higher-paying jobs in urban centers they tend to look at their own experiences to think that the US is a high standard of living country. If you look at the median or mode of living standards across a country then places like Europe are where you find more people experiencing a higher standard of living.

Oh, best of luck convincing Americans that paying twice as much for shitty health insurance than you pay in 'high' general tax levels is somehow a bad deal for them. Until they actually live the experience they just cannot comprehend the second and third order benefits of a real social system.

The EU has no real reliance on US military might. Russia has been shown to be a paper tiger and the EU can use Ukraine as a proxy to cripple Russia while keeping their hands relatively clean.

This is the way if you need speed. It costs a little bit in smarts, but compare the MTPLX option listed above with the oQ4e-mtp quant using oMLX. The good cacheing layer in oMLX will help things feel faster for some classes of tasks in my experience.

There is also a good Behind the Bastards episode about this case. Truly bizarre obsession on the part of the CEO and a completely off the rails security org doing his bidding.

Bay-area folk may be familiar with Roaring Camp Railroads up in Felton, which has a Shay engine pulling the train along the scenic tour. Fun stuff if you have any kids who like trains.

I can run qwen3.6-27b on a four year-old Macbook Pro that dominates ChatGPT-4o (the frontier model from 2 years ago) and is competetitve against early ChatGPT-5 versions. We are also getting a lot smarter about using and deploying these local models. Your entire AI stack from two years ago would be absolutely crushed by a todays local LLM models and a high-end local inference system when combined with a good modern coding agent.

Sure you did. We can't see the project, of course, because she lives in Canada...

I am amused that you think IT is going to respond to an unmanaged LLM tool that operates outside of the LLM policies all serious enterprises have set up by now and say 'wow, that is cool and maybe we should buy in to this!'

What is going to happen is that the emplyee who tries to sneak OpenAI into our org is going to have two meetings set up by the end of the day, one with IT to ensure the whatever tool they installed is burned out with fire and one with HR to ensure they know the company policy and acknowledge that another fuck-up like this is a firing offense.

Phone jammers are illegal because they are broadcasting into regulated spectrum. There is no such spectrum regulation around audio transmissions. I will not say one way or another if this device actually works as adertised, but particularly if the signal is outside the range normally audible to people there should be nothing illegal about this device.

Gelatine melts at a lower temperature and has a much better mouthfeel for most of these traditional recipes. It is creamy and adds body to a stock or sauce. Agar is brittle and requires a higher temperature to set. Agar would be a good choice for something where you want it to stay in a particular shape, but it is much more of a one-trick pony when it comes to cooking. Each can act as a poor man's version of the other, but neither really hits the same features as the other.

Agar is great for a gel, especially one you want to stand up to a bit of heat and remain stable at room temp, and I would always reach for it instead of gelatine when doing most desserts or pastry work. OTOH I would only use it in a sauce if I needed to accommodate a vegan guest.

Sherman, set the wayback machine....

Definitely a blast from the past. One of the things that made PipeNet very interesting compared to its contemporary peers (e.g. onion routing) was that it used fixed size pipes with constant traffic. An observer would be unable to know when traffic was being sent down the pipe so correlation attacks become significantly more difficult. Pair it with some probabilistic encryption like Blum-Blum-Shub and you can party like a late 90s cypherpunk.

That 'ugly' required indentation and whitespace also made Python easier to read, especially for newbies and casual coders. A standard visual structure and a syntax that is pretty close to executable pseudo-code lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of people and made Python feel 'approachable'. This perception that it was easy to use helped increase the network effects other have noted.

For simple yes/no questions ("Is over 18?", "Is US resident?") then you should look back to David Chaum's blind signatures and the work that came out of that back in the 90s. The math is super-simple to understand and there are a ton of even easier metaphors with envelopes and carbon paper that you can use to explain to your grandmother. Once you get someone to grok blind signatures it is easy to lead them to zero-knowledge proofs.

I loved my Ricochet modems so damn much. Sitting in a coffeeshop in Palo Alto with an Apple Powerbook and a second generation Ricochet modem rocking web browsing and ssh sessions at 56k when wifi was unknown to the general public. I still have a couple in a box somewhere and I am tempted to see if I can get them into star mode.

This dataset disappeared. Did it move or get pulled for some reason? (glanced at it when you noted this and went back today to check it out and found a 404...)

Pretty close, but the musical takes place in the fictional town of River City, Iowa and Henry Hill claims to be an alumnus of the Gary Conservatory (class of '05), which is the hook used to launch the song in question.

> Uber and Lyft are sitting pretty for the moment.

The two completely replaceable components of this project are 'sitting pretty'? They should be scared to death because this is in fact the death knell for both companies. If the market decides that they are going to be nothing more than 'fleet management' companies for waymo then their share price will crater.

OpenWebUI seems to be the standard. Easy to spin it up in a docker container pointed to 127.0.0.1:1234/v1 and away you go.

> I've never understood what people mean when they say public transportation is "dirty".

They are forced to share air with obviously poor and non-white people and that is simply intolerable...

One of the biggest adjustments I went through in moving from SF to London was accepting that busses were a viable mode of transit for any time of day. In SF I would crawl over broken glass to avoid having to take a Muni bus while in London my wife and I have taken a bus in dinner jacket and couture dress to an event at a club. There will doubtless be people to chime in with examples of bus systems that are better, but TfL busses are not 'awful and unreliable and slow and dirty and just terrible' by any possible metric.

The article text explicitly refutes the bullshit title. Governments can get access to metadata, not the contents of comms. They can demands whatever they want from Meta, but it appears that thethe only thing they are getting is the same metadata everyone has always known is not protected by E2E.

There was never any requirement for sharing anything between the two vehicles and they were made by completely different contractors. Grumman made the LEM and North American Aviation made the command module. There was also a significant redesign of the command module after the Apollo 1 fire which completely changed the cabin environment. Sort of how you probably cannot take a chunk of equipment out of the cockpit of an Airbus 320 and expect to slot it in to a similar role in a Boeing 737.

> I want them to know it was their lack of care and their negligence, I want them to take personal responsibility for that and for future work they do. But I also would want such a person to know it isn't a personal attack, just a very serious area of improvement and a mistake that can't be repeated.

You are an asshole. Your lack of care and negligence in your interactions with your peers has a detrimental effect upon your team's productivity and internal communication. Please take responsibility for this failure in intra-personal skills and acknowledge the impact your lack of empathy will have on your future work. This is not personal, I am just directing your attention to an area you need to improve and where future mistakes like this should not be repeated.

This is one of those subtle clues that the LLM does not actually 'know' anything. It is providing you the best consensus answer to your prompt using the data upon which the weights rest, is that data was input primarily as english then you are going to get better results asking in english. It is still Searle's Chinese Room except you need to first go to the 'Language X -> English' room and then deliver its output to the general query room before delivering the next result to the 'English -> Language X' room.

Can you provide an example of this? There are a few inventions-via-serendipity (e.g. Teflon) where someone got lucky, but few that i can think of where the specific person who got lucky mattered. Kary Mullis and PCR maybe?

A significant part of the economy perhaps, but 'national security threat' is a somewhat higher bar IMHO. LHR has a role of convenience, but not necessity. If JFK was shut down for a day or two and had limited operations for another week it would be inconvenient but would barely register in the national economic stats. I am on a flight heading out of Heathrow on Sunday for work travel and have booked an alternative out of Gatwick just in case. Inconvenient, but not a massive problem.

What will be telling here is how quickly things adapt to the disruption. I expect to feel more impact from the loss of power to businesses in the surrounding area that are involved in air shipment than in the flight disruptions (e.g. cold chain logistics and inventory management for just-in-time processes that warehouse near the airport.)

Few people actually include necessary infrastructure into their threat model and almost no one is willing to pay the cost of building effective redundancy into the system. I could probably shut down any airport in the world with a few late-night firebombs tossed into the right substation.

And no, it is not a national security issue. There are three other airports in the London region, plus RAF Norholt and RAF Kenly inside the M25 ring.

> it's disconcerting that places like Canada and the UK allow people to own such creatures

Just for reference, the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act in the UK imposes strict liability (including criminal liability) for dangerous dogs and maintains a list of breeds that are banned. Recently 'XL Bully' dogs were put on that list, but there is controversy regarding the breed-specific limits. It is always easy to look back and say 'that dog and its owner were the source of a series of problems and should have been detained' but turns out that preventing future problems is harder than you would think...

As if engineers actually get to make decisions about software, firmware, or hardware. Ha! That is truly hilarious.

I would rather have a bunch of mildly responsive legislators setting the boundaries of what is acceptable than a bunch of middle-managers trying to justify their salary to their private equity overlords.

Did you mean a bum bag?

I can confirm it also goes the other way. Posted a remote job where we needed applicant to be only one or two time zones away from UTC and 80% of the 500+ applicants in the first 24 hours were from the US. I guess it makes sense as the cost for ignoring the clear notice in the job description regarding location is borne by the hiring side, but very annoying.