femto

Nice! Thanks too for putting the work into this library.

I got caught out by my Australianism!

"How do you find the speed of the Rust version of your FEC vs, the C version?"

translates from "Australian" to "English" as:

"What is the speed of the Rust version of your FEC vs, the C version?

Though it was interesting to know how you do it. I'm interested in the speed, as I once looked into using Rust for a signal processing project, but ultimately went with C++ because the team wasn't familiar with Rust. At the time, it seemed to me that Rust had the potential to go faster.

How do you find the speed of the Rust version of your FEC vs, the C version?

I'm beginning to think that my '96 Toyota Starlet is "peak ICE". It has EFI, no infotainment, no power windows, no power steering, no automatic transmission. It is basically an engine, gearbox and wheels. An electric Starlet would be Nirvana.

Edit: Just read that Toyota is toying with the idea of an electric Starlet. It'll probably have an infotainment system and power "everything" though.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/2026-toyota-starlet-rumours/

MMR vaccines would be a net positive to the US economy, to the tune of $3.5B in direct savings (14x benefit/cost) and $7.6 billion (26x benefit/cost) in wider societal benefits [1]. Those are 2004 figures, so the dollar amount savings would be even bigger now.

To a point made further up the chain: The US's woes aren't driven by AI investment, but the self-interest of a select group. Compare it to a thief who causes $20,000 damage to steal a $100 stereo from a car.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15106102/

A big chunk of that 72% are legitimately labeled "Made in China" or niche brands. The brands that failed, plus the products that are actually labeled "Made in China", dominate Australia's four supermarkets with the majority of the market share. I've just done my weekly shop, so trawled their web sites looking for alternatives.

Summarising the Australian situation, taking the 4corners results into account, the following non-Chinese tomato pastes are available:

Coles (29% market share): 1 x 140g premium product in a tube (expensive with reduced market share) out of about 20 products.

Woolworths (38% market share): 1 x 140g premium product (Mutti) in a tube (expensive with reduced market share) out of about 20 products.

Aldi (10% market share): None out of about 4 products

IGA (7% market share): 5 of 16 products, being the same premium brands that Coles and Woolworths sell.

Maybe qualify my comment with "by market share and availability". The effect is that if you stand in front of an Australian supermarket shelf, every product, bar one or two in the corner, come from China. China is a proxy for Xianjing, in that sources say 80%-90% of tomato paste from China comes from Xinjiang.

Hence the assertion I made.

Market share data: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/supermarkets-inquiry_1....

Xianjing percentages: https://tomatonews.com/countries/china/

It's about trust.

Thanks for that informative link. I looked to see if there was any data beyond the ABC article and didn't find it. Some of the truthful brands listed in the BBC article are available where I live. Kudos to the US that their labels match their contents.

Check their tomato paste. It turns out that nearly every tomato paste in Australia comes from Xinjiang in China, including those marked as Australian or Italian. Simplot (Leggos), the big US company, was the worst offender, so it's possible that tomato paste in Costco's US stores has been produced in Xinjiang using slave labour, irrespective of what the label says.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-27/australian-tomatoes-l...

Best I heard was someone who taught their "friend's" young child to screech like a cockatoo [1]. You can take a drum kit away, but you can't take a cockatoo screech away. The recording doesn't give true justice to the volume.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAJ75uECWHw

Okay. I should have interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't the full answer". I interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't part of the answer".

I think reducing the "saturation" of guns is important, as it is a big driver of people's mindset, whereby they see a gun as an answer. By "saturation, I mean the number owned, their availability, their visibility, their promotion and so on. The US is a standout in ownership, in that it has almost twice as many civilian firearms per person than the next closest country [1]. I suspect the US is also a standout in the other areas: availability (Walmart, but less than before), visibility (open carry), promotion (NRA).

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

> So clearly that isn't the answer.

Quite an assertion.

What Australia is doing works by one measure that matters: number of people killed by a gun. In 2024 the gun murder rates were:

US: 4.5 per 100,000

AU: 0.09 per 100,000

Ratio: 50

Source: https://www.ussc.edu.au/by-the-numbers-stark-contrast-in-aus...

Australia didn't confiscate vast numbers of guns by violence. It introduced a buyback scheme, which a lot of gun owners took up. The buyback was "an offer they couldn't refuse" for classes of firearms that were banned, but once it was done it meant it was more tractable to keep firearms in check. The big thing is did was reduce the number of households that contained a firearm even if some of the remaining (paranoid?) license holders increased their number of guns.

Source: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/04/28/new-g...

Probably no compensation. Under "English" law (Canada is a Commonwealth country), the wrongful conviction will probably to taken to be without malice and reasonable given the information the US provided, so tough luck.

He might be able to negotiate an ex gratia payment, but this will be entirely at the whim of a politician, who will be looking to avoid being criticised for giving away government money

A complete USB voltmeter/ammeter costs $1.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/MX17-Current-and-Volt...

Ignore the case and connector, on the basis that the circuit will be integrated into a larger scanner, and the cost will be substantially less. Most USB controllers already monitor current, so even the <$1 circuit probably would not be needed. The main cost would be the manufacturer putting together a database of power consumption figures to allow a pass/fail test.

Law enforcement, airports and so on already boxes to scan USB devices. They don't use them for every USB drive, just those that they decide they have cause to scan.

If I was building a black box to detect hidden data on a USB stick, I'd include a feature whereby it measures power consumption and flags USB drives that don't consume the expected power for that type of drive.

Conventional wisdom is to use a bound notebook, as a court will discount reliability if pages can be removed without leaving a trace.

Where I live, it was front page news four weeks ago.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/nsw-bureau-of-meterol...

Not that it lead to any particular action or recognition.

Online retailers are also responsible under the law, as the laws apply to all retailers.

In practical terms, if it's an online business with no Australian presence it makes it hard to apply the law. Overseas online companies with an Australian presence, such as Amazon, have been successfully prosecuted [1,2,3]. The ACCC is still working through responsibility for third-party sellers, but it seems to be the case that if it is fulfilled by Amazon then it is responsible.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/amazon-in-court-for-in...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/accc-sues-amazon-butt...

[3] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-issues-takedown-r...

[4] https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...

I'd encourage Australians not to muck around in this regard. Fair Trading gives explicit instructions:

1) Contact the organisation

2) Suggest a resolution

3) give them a reasonable time to respond (ie. not forever)

4) Be polite

5) Lodge a complaint with Fair Trading

The more people that do this, the less sellers will try to do people over.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/legal-and-justice/consumer-rights-and...

If an LLM was a person, it would be known as a "bullshit artist". I've worked with bullshit artists (people) before, and its exhausting trying to separate fact from fiction. It's a reason to avoid working with such people.

A good coworker will admit not knowing something, or if unsure give their best guess but discuss its limitations and why they might be wrong.

Question: Has anyone experimented with using voice to directly prompt an LLM, without doing speech-to-text? If an LLM can pick up on the skeptical nuances in a person's response, it might be prompted not to be overconfident in its subsequent output.

I did something like that for my local area (in about 2012). It turned into a hobby, whereby I spent a couple of years on foot exploring the local bush in minute detail and used OSM to document what I found. There are features on OSM that exist on no other map, especially off-road. I know other people do this too, as similar obscure tracks have appeared in neighbouring areas.

I've been on a number of orienteering or rogaining events where the maps look familiar, and it turns out they have used my OSM data. It's been great to see something lasting come from that mapping effort. (It's also a nice bonus in such events to be that familiar with the map and its covered area!) I suspect some local bush fire brigade members might also be looking at OSM, as a number of the fire trails I mapped seem to have had names added.

I used to use OrganicMaps. When coMaps forked, I changed to it. From my perspective there were no negatives. If anything, coMaps looked to be under more active development.

Yep. That topology is called a gyrator. Often used in IC's where it is hard to make an inductor.

A problem with metric-imperial conversion in the article? Based on having seen them in the bush, wombat poo is a 4 centimetre cube not a 4 inch cube. That would be a Diprotodon sized wombat. Lucky we're only talking about wombat poo, and not something important like a space craft...

An Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing fax machine!

Source code: https://github.com/populationgenomics/talos

Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.19.25327921v...

My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.

The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.

I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.

Something like that exists with the RECCO system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RECCO

Not quite an arbitrary Personal Locator Beacon, but it can help rescuers home in from a distance. It's cheap because the tag is just an antenna and a diode.

I'm thinking passive, as in using only acoustic energy that is already present. Partly it's about minimising irradiation, which you are saying is not a concern.

The more interesting aspect to me is whether the ambient emissions carry useful information. I recall a paper from a few years ago about yeast emitting sounds (mechanical vibrations) in the kHz range. I guess the question I am interested in is "what does life sound like at the cellular level?" Maybe it is silent, but my gut says it's probably making some sound, even if it's very weak. The questions are then along the lines of "What does a healthy cell sound like?", "Do different cells make different sounds?", "Do sick cells make different sounds to healthy cells?". It's absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it would be fascinating to know.

My background is radio communications (with some acoustics) and radio comms has a history of things that used to be considered random noise turning out to be useful signal as processing has developed to the point where signals can be resolved. For example, multipath reflections used to be considered just random interference until the invention of MIMO, at which point they became useful signals and comms systems took a leap forward.