exmadscientist

The flip side to this is that when you do come across a forged PDF (and I have!), they can be really, really effective. Nobody expects them. There are usually tells in the metadata, but... there don't have to be.

Conglomerates in general, and especially Japanese ones, are heterogeneous enough that those are basically two different companies. The British "Fujitsu" was an acquisition that I'm certain they now deeply, deeply regret.

(Which in no way excuses their utter evil.)

You don't do these things because they benefit your boss. (They might happen to, but that's not the point.)

You do them because they benefit you.

Not going to benefit you? There's lots of ways to say no to a back-channel request. Not a back-channel request? Then I guess it's not someone else's job!

The other powerful thing about being able to do everyone else's job is that you, personally, gain a lot of leverage, and in a lot of different ways. Someone else needs a favor? You probably know how to deliver. Something's on fire? You probably know what to do next, or at least who to call, no matter what's on fire today. Someone isn't budging on something? You might not have any bigger of a lever than anyone else, but you probably know exactly where to position yours, and exactly what it'll do when you apply a bit of force.

It's useful.

And then there's times like getting to charge your client $300/hour to drop stuff off at FedEx. Because you can do that and you're here and you'll get it done right -- no one needs to explain the idiosyncracies of this particular deadline or package contents; you've got it.

Even if that's not normally a senior consultant's job.

We may or may not have hit the physical point of no return. It doesn't really matter, because we obviously hit the point of political no return a long time ago.

In too much of the world, nobody with any kind of power cares. (My own country included.) It's the prisoner's dilemma yet again: why should any of us who might care cooperate, when everyone else is cheating?

We hit that point a long, long time ago.

The situation isn't hopeless, I think, but this talk of "point of no return" doesn't work because it doesn't acknowledge the reality that, as ever, it's political and some people actively do not want to address it.

Fair point on BS 1363 not being EU, and about UK electricians not being incompetent (I actually didn't know they were careful unlike the continent -- that's just one of those things that once you have to deal with the insanity that is continental Europe, it doesn't really much matter what else is out there).

But my point about electrocution risk is that 240V is not twice as dangerous as 120V. It's actually much, much worse. And 480V is worse still. We used to say that screwing up 120V will hurt you, 240V will kill you, and 480V will kill you, start your corpse on fire, and blind everyone around you. So the design requirements for all 240V class plugs are much more important.

> not falling out of walls ... is up to the manufacturer

This one is a real problem in the US because there is a standard, it is a good standard, parts are made and tested to the standard, and standards-compliant parts work very well. But few people require the damn standard. If you want good receptacles in the US, get stuff that's marked "Federal Specification W-C-596 rated" (aka "Fed Spec"; "Spec Grade" is self-certified to... something... which is... not the same thing... but in practice the manufacturers seem not to abuse that term too much; often lower-volume part numbers seem only to be available as "Spec Grade" presumably due to testing cost). It will perform well.

They're all horrid to step on, so that's not really worth discussing.

The US plug (NEMA 1-15P is the 2-prong version, or 5-15P for the most common 3-prong grounded) is actually pretty decent. They stay in sockets pretty well if the sockets aren't bottom-of-the-barrel garbage products which, sadly, many things in the US are in general.

What many people miss when comparing US and EU plugs are that they're actually doing fairly different jobs. The 120V mains in the US is significantly less trouble than the 240V in Europe, so you can get away with a lot less mechanically on the plug. The US NEMA 6-15P plug design (the 240V version of the standard plug) is, accordingly, kind of shit. But at least it's rare enough that receptacles tend to be of decent quality, which mitigates a lot. The locking versions (L5-15R etc) are actually quite good, and should almost always be used when possible and appropriate. They're good to 480V and even a bit beyond -- not just working but actually good -- and you can't say that about most EU plug designs. You guys have those horribly bulky pin-and-sleeve disasters and we get nice NEMA locking plugs for our three-phase.

One of the other things that European plugs have to deal with, and US plugs don't, is that European electricians have no idea how to separate hot and neutral wires and basically wire them up randomly. This has major consequences in a lot of product design and is really really annoying when you're trying to build something safe. (Namely: in the US you're often (but not always) not allowed to fuse neutral wires. That makes sense, for safety reasons. You have to fuse hot... but in Europe you don't know which one is hot, so you have to fuse them both. Which means you just fused neutral. Design conflict!) That shows up in the plugs, too; with no idea where hot is, you have to be more careful and can't use neutral to help you out.

Really? I thought they were trite and not particularly engaged with the source matter. Why did you like them?

The one at the beginning was far more interesting.

> (I'm guessing)

Please don't do this. It's not helpful.

One of the most basic safeguards -- necessary, not sufficient -- for AI and even general technology in healthcare should be transparency. Keep the model a black box (if you really must), but every single input, output, and decision should be logged and available to the patient on demand, no questions asked.

That makes it a lot easier to deal with things like the bad AI transcriptions going around. Get burned by AI that can't hear what you're saying? It's in your file, what it heard and then what it screwed up. Providers don't like everything being on the record like that? Maybe they shouldn't be trusting that tool.

Want to know what the useless AI saw when it sent you to group therapy for acute mania? It's in your file. Providers don't like everything being on the record like that? Maybe they shouldn't be trusting that tool.

> bipolar

I think this is more relevant than people give it credit for. While bipolar depression and unipolar (major) depression might generally be functionally indistinguishable from the outside, they seem to have genuinely different origins within the body and brain.

And the drugs seem to be far more powerful for people with bipolar.

That's both good and bad. Good, because between mood stabilizers and very careful use of antidepressants, many people with bipolar can genuinely achieve complete treatment, or close enough to pass as complete. Which is wonderful! Bad because antidepressants and (hypo)mania are a dangerous combination, and the antidepressants can have more kick than one would normally expect. They'll often cause a patient's first manic episode, which can be very bad on its own but might get things on the right treatment course. (Of course, they often still do nothing much at all.

I think the tapering may be related as well. I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar II and I've never really had to taper off anything that didn't have a black-box warning about tapers (either intrinsically or due to blood-pressure effects, which are worth taking seriously). I've stopped some things cold which one really shouldn't stop cold. I didn't really notice much other than the bad side effects causing the stop going away.

> I do have "extra money" and am able to pay extremely qualified and expensive doctors

I don't really have "extra money" but I still do this anyway. My psychiatrist is $500 an hour, out of pocket, no insurance accepted period. He actually listens. It's worth it.

The nice thing about "ranking" stuff for yourself and not for anyone else is that some years can have three "best of the year" and some can have none. Embrace the fuzziness inherent in the system.

Because, man, some years really were just that good.

That's part of why I like the fuzziness. And why it's a really great system looking back retrospectively. I don't keep a reading journal, but if I glance over physical books in my house or reading history on my ereader, rankings of past things read get really clear really fast.

As you said it can be kind of surprising!

I'm not sure if you're just choosing not to engage fully with what I wrote or if you're trying to make some other point, but for what it's worth I do not and did not write any of my comments here with AI.

So that wasn't really a consideration for me.

Oh, that's great! I'm going to have to remember that!

> Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?

The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!

(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)

> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”

That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well.

(Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)

Exactly.

And if an appellate court got involved and somehow found a judge outsourced their judging to an AI, it's hard to imagine them accepting that. A "polite suggestion" that the relevant bar or judicial association look in to something, coming from a federal Circuit Court of Appeals, is neither polite nor a suggestion, and will receive the due gravity of a "polite suggestion" coming from one of the most powerful bodies in the country.

Are you trying to get to a working simulator, a working core in HDL/FPGA, a thoroughly debugged and validated core in HDL, a fast core in HDL, a validated fast core in HDL, or functioning silicon in hand?

I'd guess low six figures for the beginning of that list and mid eight figures for the end. Real silicon also needs all the uncore stuff, which is easy if you don't care how it performs and very very hard if you do.

Very true... but I can't help but note that basically every person I've ever met with significant experience with multiple architectures at this level, and not connected in some way to RISC-V, utterly hates the thing.

That feels like a "don't release yet" flag to me!

But I hear you.

I said "me" and "four weeks" because laying out an ISA is a pretty straightforward job for one person in one month.

The deliverable would be a (theoretically) complete specification PDF like RISC-V's.

I have little doubt that I or Adrian could do it, or plenty of others. It might not reach the quality of something like AArch64 with that level of resources, but it's not hard to beat RISC-V.

It is the easy part. Four weeks is plenty of time.

That's why it's so bizarre that the RISC-V design is so awful.

The hard part is the software support side (though, as comments elsewhere in the thread point out, AI is pretty helpful there) and then those lovely pieces like specifying the precise behavior of interrupts.

If it had a snowball's chance in hell of going in to any kind of production anywhere, I'd have no problem spending the next month laying out an ISA. But, again, as this thread makes very, very clear: ISA really just doesn't matter.

> You don't need to probe what hardware you're running on because you know being the manufacturer. The code is bespoke for your solution and nothing more. No foreign code is going to run on it.

In practice, this is not the case. The scenarios mentioned in the article involving binary blobs are pretty common, as well as other similar scenarios.

Really, I'm going to go out and say it bluntly: it is just completely freaking stupid to make an architecture where everything is optional but you have no way to query what's present. If you're going to go the optional-pieces route, you have to have a query mechanism of some sort. As the article explains, you cannot even trap instructions on RISC-V to figure out what your core supports, because bad instructions might belong to some other option. Complete. Idiocy.

> After being asked for the Nth time to explain, I decided to put it all down in one place so that I could simply link to it when asked next.

Bookmarked, because I've needed the same.

The worst part of all this is that they really should have known better by now. In 1980 you could make these kinds of mistakes, because this was pretty new territory. In 2020, doing this just makes you stupid. Or ignorant. Or both.

I haven't served in the military, but I have been onsite in awful places at someone else's schedule and whim.

Getting extended arbitrarily is horrible. The only thing worse is when they let someone else go home early, and force you to stay for no real reason. (Not even drawing straws or similar.) That genuinely broke me. Doing this to people is cruel, full stop.

(Fortunately, for as bad as it was for me, it did at least make it impossible to ignore my mental health, and was the beginning of a long, long road of treatment.)

There's massive differences between "my site isn't hugely popular, but I get some readers", "my site is up and findable but genuinely no one visits except scraping bots" and "it's available, people would visit if they knew it existed, but they're not being offered it, they're being offered bot distillations with no reference back".

The last one is the worry.

The middle is... where we all start.

The first is not a bad place to be, all things considered!

It knows you, but it doesn't know me. Perhaps you are legitimately noteworthy enough to not worry about this!

My experience being on the searching end is that these things are terrible about attribution of where they find anything. Which has bad consequences not just for authorship, but for correctness (which is the usual reason I'm poking at them -- they're being wrong again). This makes a lot of sense when you consider the massive, massive compression that's got to occur during training, but it's still frustrating.

The danger that's concerning people (rightly or wrongly) isn't that LLMs are going to be an intermediary to your website. It's that they'll be the only thing reading it. No one will ever read your post or know what you wrote. The only consumers will be LLMs, they'll train on a version that strips out you as the author (probably more due to expedience than any sort of malice; it's not like you're famous, are you?), and your idea might get embedded into a set of model weights somewhere. No human will see a byte of it.

Are you actually saying you'd be OK with that?

The problem is that (we have every reason to believe) models like Claude were trained on existing translations. Now they're being used to generate things that are direct replacements for those translations in the marketplace.

This is basically an anti-AI author or lawyer's dream case.

And, seeing this uncanny-valley-of-slop output, I kind of hope they go for it.

That shield is a drain wire combined with either a woven braid (most effective at lower frequencies) or a solid aluminized mylar foil (most effective at higher frequencies), or, for the best cables, both together.

A USB-C cable really should be shielded. Here's a cross-section I took of a nice full-featured USB-C cable: https://ibb.co/svR5Yvyr . You can see the VBUS/GND (fat red/black), the SS pairs (white plus red/blue/yellow/brown, each one foil shielded on this cable), the USB 1/2 pair (white/green), and then the CC and SBU stuff is the remaining wiring. Notice how not just the whole thing is braid+foil shielded, but the SS pairs are individually shielded; that's really important at these speeds, and what you want to see on a good cable.

Compare with two USB 2.0 cables: https://ibb.co/BHz4v1mx and https://ibb.co/GfpJmgbx ; the first one has the shield braid, as it should, but everything else is nicer on the second one. Cables!

We had good results testing Cable Matters stuff here at work, but that was for non-critical use so I didn't go too hard on the tests. (Actually, I didn't go too hard on any of it since it was mostly make-work from a manager trying to cause trouble, but still....)

I was quite impressed by GlobTek (available at Digi-Key) and have been buying those when I need something nice. Their USB-C line are some of the best I've seen, not that I'm a connoisseur.