lambdaone

Perhaps this could be solved by having the planes run at ground level, using some sort of guideway, and using either the guideway itself or overhead wires to transmit the power by direct contact?

Their product search is... interesting. I used to think that it was programmed by idiots, and wondered how Amazon, with the ability to hire all the expertise in the world, couldn't do better. Then I realised its function is not to give you what you are looking for, it's to maximize Amazon's profits, which it clearly does fantastically well. I would imagine that a lot of heavy-duty machine learning goes into Amazon's product search to make this happen.

The same thing will likely be true of raw files, as we get better (and probably machine-learning based) algorithms for decoding those into standard image formats. I wonder what fraction of projects currently preserve their raw files?

Can you quantify your claim, or provide sources to back it up, or are you just guessing? I'm not saying your claim is necessarily wrong -- it would actually be very interesting if true -- but I think the burden of proof lies on you to provide evidence for this.

It is, however, in principle possible to prove that a processor implements the spec and only the spec; seach for "formal verification risc v" to find out more.

Of course if someone can sneak a backdoor into the spec, all bets are off.

At this point, if you are in the graphic design area, Adobe basically own you. There is really nothing that will substitute for Photoshop without a massive drop in productivity.

GIMP is better that it was, but not yet good enough to replace Photoshop in the same way that Blender replaces Maya etc; perhaps this will drive support for GIMP to get better, but I'm not optimistic.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points for a thorough treatment of this topic, with citations to the published literature.

That sounds really interesting, but web searching mostly brings up very old research. Do you have a link for any of the up-to-date work on automating the base?

I see the page has been vandalized; here is a link to the original:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=browse;id=EmacsStorie...

Given that all Wikipedia editors have explicitly consented to their content being released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License, they don't get a choice about their content being used for any purpose.

Redistribution of content is an entirely different matter, and the legal status of copyrighted material in relation to LLM training is an open issue that is currently the subject of litigation.

I think the best analogy here might be WHATWG and HTML5. Instead of creating an entire new and expanded 'second system' (as the W3C was trying to do with XHTML), the existing major players in that field created something that was a much more strictly defined standard that was carefully to be forwards and backwards compatible with the existing mess, with well-defined behaviour for non-conformant content, and then started building on that new standard.

The big players in email are now in the same situation as the big browser vendors. If they defined a strict subset of the existing body of de-facto email standards, critically with well-defined behaviour for non-conformant content, and then blessed that as email 2.0, they would then have something well-defined and workable to build on.

This might include mandating a restricted subset of HTML5 for HTML content, a canonical transformation of that content to plain text for interoperability, mandating plain-text email as acceptable (perhaps with a canonical transformation to HTML) the use of SPF, DKIM etc with specified defaults, SMTP with specified features enabled, etc, etc.

Then what is effetively a well-defined profile of traditional email becomes the new (forwards and largely backwards) well-defined email system, and we can all move forward from there.

But to do that, there would need to be the will to create an email equivalent of WHATWG.

Consider the set of functions that that map the reals onto other reals. Almost all of these functions are truly random, with no way of expressing them that does not require the storage of an infinite number of infinite strings.

Not only is there no practical way of creating such a thing, most formulations of physics preclude any possibility of making one by placing finite limits of the amount of space or time accessible to us.

(Not to mention that almost all reals are [Turing] uncomputable in their own right, but that's a more complex thing to demonstrate.)

I think the interesting question here is whether Penrose is claiming that the things of which the brain is capable (most notably the production of consciousness) are inherently non-computable by _any_ kind of artificial device, which is effectively a form of vitalism, or whether he is claiming that they _might_ be computable, but only with a quantum computer.

I'd be interested in learning more about the flight computers, and in particular the very lowest-level systems used to reset or debug the main systems.

Given the tiny amount of storage, there's presumably no scope for rolling back changes after an error, so are they at risk of bricking the spacecraft every time the flight engineers (and just for once, I think the term "software engineer" is truly justified) make a change?

This one-upmanship is very much part of climbing culture. From the top down, the hierarchy is: free soloists (climbing at height without any protection), trad climbers (carry the rope up with them, set their own protection), sports lead climbers (carry the rope up with them, bolts are set into the wall), top rope climbers (rope already there dangling from the top). Right down the bottom, you have aid climbing, when you use equipment to haul yourself up on a rope.

And then there's indoors vs. outdoors, with some dedicated outdoor climbers regarding anything done in a climbing gym as "not real climbing".

Most people don't take this literally, and it's generally considered to be a standing joke in climbing. Sadly, though, some people take it very seriously.

There are lots more variables to consider, particularly in lead climbing, even when you have a bolted route. And trad climbing is even more complex than that.

I'm sceptical about the usefulness of this for a number of reasons, including the points raised by others about hold recognition etc.

It's also difficult to see how the system would work out the 3D arrangement of holds. It can clearly try to infer 3D relationships from video of an existing climb, but it would be hard for it to work out the 3D position or orientation of any holds not used by the climber in the video.

These two put together make solving the climbing problem even more difficult, because appropriate body positions and moves are often very sensitive to even tiny differences in shape, relative position, and orientation of holds; and occluding volumes, arêtes, cracks and so can make the problem even harder.

But as a simplified demo, this is cool, and I salute it.

This sounds risky: is the goal truly 100% uptime? Real 24/7 is difficult, even in safety-critical fields. When would you ever push out fixes or do live testing?

This is magnificent reverse engineering. I wonder why retrocomputing is so fascinating? Is it an attempt (by older people) to rediscover their youth, or is it a search for a golden age of computing where people still had some autonomy over their hardware? Or something else?

There are a vast number of problems that all can be summarized as "this is a really stupid thing to do, unless you really know what you are doing". This is one of them.

Yes. Micromouse was exactly what I was thinking of.

That is quite spectacular, but perhaps not for the reasons the organizers intended. This is pretty much the minimal toy problem for self-driving, with a well-defined course with clear markings, with the only real difference being that the car in question is a full-size racing car instead of a toy car with an Arduino on top.

Of course, the physics of dealing with a real high-speed vehicle is substantially more complex (and more high consequence) compared with that of a toy car moving at a few centimeters a second, but it's not, to coin a phrase, rocket science; the physical principles are well-known, and automotive engineering is a whole industry in itself.

I'd be interested in knowing what actual physical testing was carried out before the race, and how much time the teams had to prepare.

I was about to be outraged about this until I RTFA and saw that this is a 20 year old CPU feature. Just for once I think it's worth cutting Microsoft some slack on this.

This article is two years old. I don't think things as as dire as they seem, just a bit more boring than people might like.

I can't see any sign that long-term IPv6 growth has stopped, it's just ceased to accelerate. Looking at Google's IPv6 traffic graph (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html), this is entirely consistent with being the first half of a classic logistic curve, with growth now linear as it approaches the 50% point after 15 years. If this is actually a logistic growth curve, we will presumably see the end of IPv4 sometime around 2040. Even if we take a more optimistic view and assume linear growth continues, it will still take until about 2035.

And that's fine. Old technlogies tend to wither away, not go out with a bang.

Worse than that, having a gun doesn't make you safer; it increases the risk to everyone in your household. But I can absolutely understand why fear drives people to own guns -- it's a vicious circle as increased gun ownership drives fear, which in turn drives even more gun purchases...

London's homicide rate is (roughly, depending on which source you use and year you take) about one-fifth of the average US homicide rate; you are safer in London than in almost anywhere in the US.

The homicide rate in Australia is particularly low. But in terms of overall homicide rate the United States is higher than the vast majority of other developed countries, and indeed most developing countries.

Most of the world sees the United States as a dangerous country.

For example, using the source you've just given, the US homicide rate is over 5 times the homicide rate of the United Kingdom, France and Germany, and over 10 times that of Norway.

Granted, you're more likely to die in a car accident than to be murdered in the US, but that's no reassurance; this is partly because the vehicle accident mortality rate is so high in the US, at over four times the rate in the UK. And your comment about dying in a plane crash is completely wrong: the air travel mortality rate is very close to zero, with under 200 deaths for over 800 annual million air travellers; a rate of less than 0.025 per 100,000 per annum.

I presume the value is in the associated open source software. You could obviously build your own for less in hardware costs, but once you've put in the effort of doing so, you will have spent far more of your time on the project than the cost of the ready-made product. You're paying for the bundling and the convenience.

Ross Anderson was indeed a giant, not just in computer science, but also in his work on the politics and ethics of the influence of computing in our lives. The world is lessened by his passing, but his work lives on in those he has inspired.

Kudos to the ACM for doing this. The way to open access is slow; one journal, one publisher at a time. But the world is moving in the right direction.