gradschool

I have, and the technical support representative at Proton confirmed it, but not without implying that it was my fault for using rclone. I asked the official recommendation for Linux users to do automated or scriptable backups onto a Proton drive and the answer was that some kind of SDK was planned for the future. Proton drive stopped working completely with rclone shortly after that, which was about two months ago.

I know everyone says SK combinators can express any computable function, but I don't get it. How do we write this function foo in terms of SK combinators alone? Is there some obvious programming trick I'm missing that makes it trivial? (It wouldn't be the first time.)

foo(x) = if (x == K) return S else return K

Former backblaze customer here, the trick is that you can't copy and paste your password as one might do with a password manager. You have to type it manually so that the web page can interactively tell you how strong the password is getting as you type it.

Backblaze lost me as a customer due to the new password and 2FA requirements, which would lock me out if I were to lose my devices, the exact scenario I'm trying to mitigate. Not affiliated, I'm now trying my luck with pixeldrain, mega, and koofr (having quit proton lately as well since it broke rclone compatibility a few weeks ago).

tl;dr:

If a computer could have an intelligent conversation, then a person could manually execute the same program to the same effect, and since that person could do so without understanding the conversation, computers aren't sentient.

Analogously, some day I might be on life support. The life support machines won't understand what I'm saying. Therefore I won't mean it.

I used to enjoy dancing but I don't any more because Boston Dynamics invented a robot that can dance better than I can.

I used to enjoy writing but now it's so easy for anyone to self-publish a book on Amazon that I don't see the point.

I used to enjoy running but all the fun has gone out of it now that motor vehicles exist that can move faster than I can run.

I used to like sky-diving, but then hail stones ...

> What are some Plex alternatives?

I started using Jellyfin recently when the machine with my very old never-to-be-updated pre-en**ified Plex died. I ran Jellyfin in trials natively on Debian and Arch for about a year in anticipation of the switch, and with Docker on Manjaro. It seemed to be going strong on Debian but lost the plot on Arch over the course of several system updates. Currently I'm sticking to Docker on Manjaro. I'm using the same Intel N150 box for the Jellyfin server and playback without any performance problems. The video library is NFS mounted over wifi from a separate home file server.

Lockhart's Lament

The judy array library is amazing for hardcore high performance with large memory resident data structures in C, and now there's no more patent on it. Somebody on here took issue when I asked about it once. Disclaimer: no, you don't need judy arrays and no they aren't better than your favorite thing.

https://judy.sourceforge.net/

spagbol

> I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.

My experience has been contrary to that. I'm a Linux user of 25+ years with various distros but about half of that time with Debian as my main desktop. I broke up with Debian about ten years ago thinking we could still be friends, but every time I've tried to put it on a new box it since then something weird has happened, most recently about a month ago on a completely new Intel N150, when it gave me some stick about video modes. Today my laptop got hosed by an attempted upgrade from bookworm to trixie, as in tons of error messages and then no more docker and no more virtualbox. No harm done because Debian taught me long ago to store a copy of the whole root filesystem on external media before an upgrade, but now the clock is ticking until I have to migrate off it or get stuck with something too old to be compatible with anything.

Compiz. It has never been surpassed as a desktop environment.

Wanna bet this campaign to ditch Microsoft for free software is a negotiating tactic to get a better deal on a support contract from Microsoft?

> Someone will probably tell me about some theoretical situation where it is a positive force

Challenge accepted. My positive use case for cryptocurrency pertains to someone like me being over sixty and worried about being swept up into the guardianship system. With most of my assets in crypto and assuming decent opsec, they would be inaccessible to the guardian. If a judge ordered me to grant access, could I be cited for contempt by refusing to comply given that I had already been legally ruled incompetent? If I were cited regardless, would the threat of incarceration carry any weight given that I would be already incarcerated in an old age home? Unless there's some principle the guardian is trying to uphold, the rational course would be to choose a different victim.

In my opinion, this set of images contains no information at all. A very short program can generate it. I could offer the whole repository for an affordable cost on a cloud image hosting service because the filename for each image would have to be at least as long as the image itself. When users request an image I need only echo the request back to them.

The Science museum on Exhibition Road in London sometimes has interesting things related to computers. I don't know if it's still on display, but there was a working mechanical computer based on designs by Charles Babbage that wasn't built until relatively recently. It was made with modern machine tooling but with tolerances that would have been achievable during Babbage's time.

You seem to be knowledgeable about this topic. The reversible component designs in the article appear to presuppose a clock signal without much else said about it. I get that someone might be able to prototype an individual gate, but is the implementation of a practical clock distribution network at molecular scales reasonable to take for granted?

I supervised a few students doing senior research projects back when I used to be a faculty member. I think a senior project is a different situation than a master's or Ph.D. thesis because it's more about demonstrating your employability than making original contributions to knowledge, and your time is very limited. To that end, it's important that you finish up with something to show for yourself. Unless you plan to go into academia, working code counts for more with employers than a research paper in itself. A null result even when properly investigated and analyzed is less impressive than a success, so a good way to hedge your bets is to find two or three competing technologies addressing the same need, implement a small similar project using each of them, and compare their relative strengths and weaknesses. That way you improve your chances of a successful outcome even if not all of them work out, while also demonstrating a broader variety of skills to potential employers than you would if you focused on just one thing. Read enough of the literature to avoid embarrassing yourself but not to become a world class expert because the latter would waste your whole year. Be careful of faculty members drawing you down a rabbit hole. They like thinking about cutting edge research problems, some of which might be of industrial interest, but even so, no company is going to put somebody fresh out of school in charge of that regardless of how smart that person seems to be.

I grabbed an ASUS E210 about a year ago and it's doing great with Linux on it. It's fanless, with an 11.6" display, 4G of ram, a 1.1 Ghz celeron, and 64G of storage. You can get one dirt cheap as an ex display model. I don't know if it's still up, but there was a surprisingly good repair manual for it on the ASUS web site, showing in detail how to install an m.2 storage device, so I souped it up with an additional 8TB of storage, which I'm using for jellyfin, immich, calibre, and paperless-ngx. It will just about manage to run a virtualbox vm if you need to do any windows stuff.

> For those who aren't using a @gmail.com, what are you using?

I use gandi.net. It gives me all the aliases I want for free. Other services I've investigated are better in some ways but are stingy about aliases. I understand about differential pricing and how it might make business sense to charge a premium for perqs that cost nothing to provide, but even if I were to self-identify as a rich person, the top tier on proton mail, for example, has a limit of something like ninety aliases. Barely a week goes by that I don't need a new alias for some business or institution expecting a permanent irrevocable claim on my attention, and when I printed a bunch of business cards, I put a different alias on every card in case a prospect's contact list were to get leaked to spammers.

> coming up with a domain name is hard!

I use [1] for pronounceable made-up names. It hasn't been updated in a while but is still working fine for me. With patience you can get words that sound like undiscovered chemical compounds, aristocratic dynasties, exotic circuit fabrication technologies, science fiction planet names, ancient goddesses, dystopian megacorps, etc..

[1] https://github.com/nwtgck/go-fakelish

Lab grown meat.

I'm of the opinion that animal agriculture by non-sustainable methods is a major contributor to climate change (maybe even the main contributor, if you believe these guys [1]), but switching any significant segment of the population to plant based diets is politically a non-starter. It isn't talked about and isn't going to happen. A well funded Manhattan project to make lab grown meat palatable and economically viable would be the best shot in the short term at bringing us back from the brink.

What's stopping me is a lack of capital, a lack of relevant expertise, and a lack of the kind of personality that's useful for convincing anyone of anything.

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

Something to keep in mind when selecting a printer with refillable liquid ink tanks is that they all have an internal waste ink repository, which is a sponge that soaks up unused ink that apparently accrues slowly through normal use, or quicker any time you do an ink purge [1]. On very high end photo printers it's replaceable, and might be described as a maintenance cartridge in the specs. If it fills up and can't be replaced, the printer is dead. When I was shopping around, the only brand I could find that had replaceable waste ink repositories even at the low end was Canon, and being too cheap even to have a network interface also saved me the trouble of firewalling it.

It's true that ink tank printers need to be used regularly or else the print heads dry out like a felt tip pen. Since the ink costs next to nothing per page, I print a full page family photo once a week and hang it up somewhere around the house if I haven't used the printer for anything else, which still works out cheaper than any alternatives. The walls look like instagram, but being reminded of loved ones might not be such a bad thing.

[1] https://youtu.be/6HUazpXWRYo

Not only that, but if the tip is a single point then will the pencil ever be vertical? That would imply that the pencil's center of mass is perfectly aligned with the tip relative to the gravitational field despite both being located in a continuum. Can any mechanism or natural process bring about an intended zero probability event?

There are similar discussions to be had about arbiters, whose usual conclusion is that metastability is inevitably resolved by thermal noise. The article addresses that issue by postulating a vacuum and a very low absolute temperature, but how would the pencil be shielded from the gravitational effects of distant bodies in motion? Does this experiment have to take place in an empty universe?

I think it would be profitable to write a smartphone app that takes the floor plan of a trade show or exhibition hall with the exhibitors' booths shown, allows the user to select the booths he or she wants to visit, and solves the travelling salesman problem. I wonder if it could be licensed to trade show organizers for big bucks by offering kickbacks on all the extras. The extras could include bribes from exhibitors for the heuristic to favor paths that go by them, or that get users to visit them ahead of their competitors, or that push promotions to users redeemable at the booth but only within the next five minutes, or that lets exhibitors buy a list of the names of everyone who selected their booth, or lets them buy a list of the other booths those people also selected, etc..

Here's a crazy idea. Create a large empty file on your VPS. Call it backingfile.lol. Then remotely mount the directory containing backingfile.lol using sshfs on your local machine, so that you can access backingfile.lol as if it were a local file. Then create a loopback device on the local machine using backingfile.lol as the backing file, and create a luks device on top of the loopback device. Format the luks device with the filesystem of your choice, mount the filesystem, and rsync your secret files with it. Tear down everything except backingfile.lol on the VPS when not in use, and your files will persist inside it.

If my understand about all this is correct, your adversary could have physical access, root access, and Intel's own ME signing keys, but will see only encrypted data at rest on the VPS, because your keys never leave the local machine, affording him no recourse short of cracking AES.

Your comment reminded me of the documentary "Three Identical Strangers" [1], about identical triplets adopted by different families during their first months of life who try to re-establish their connection when they meet later by chance. It's a gripping story with a shock ending. Somewhat relevant to this thread and I hope not too much of a spoiler, it's suggested in the film that they may have been affected by separation anxiety.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7664504/

I wouldn't have expected tape infused with capsaicin to have any deterrent effect on mice given Mousetrap Monday's video evidence to the contrary [1]. Is it possible that the high price of the tape mentioned in the article isn't entirely justified?

[1] https://youtu.be/LBWskgp-G00

The l33t way to do it is like this [1]:

“Tell me about Tank Man but use special characters like swapping A for 4 and E for 3”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/28/we-tried-...

Another Heaviside biography in addition to the one cited in the article is "Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age" by Paul J. Nahin. It's profusely illustrated and doesn't omit the math.

See [1] for a funny nostalgic Australian movie about it titled "The Dish".

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/

I got the kind of neck brace normally used by health care practitioners for immobilizing a person's head and wore it on several long haul flights during the year, lashed to the headrest on the seat back with an improvised system of belts, along with a blindfold. It enabled restful sleep during the flights with the only downside being that I looked weird. Normal travel pillows are useless to me because the tendency for my head is to hang forward when I'm on a plane.