macksd

I have a System76 Serval and I highly recommend it, especially for your use case.

Let's hope that, like irresponsible nuclear weapons tests, we also experience a societal change that eventually returns things back to a better way.

I've seen good QA teams who own and develop common infrastructure, and can pursue testing initiatives that just don't fit with engineering teams. When developing a new feature, the team developing it will write new tests to cover the functionality of the feature, and will own any failures in those tests moving forward. But while they're doing that, the QA team is operating a database of test failures, performance metrics, etc. that can provide insight into trends, hot spots needing more attention, etc. They're improving the test harnesses and test frameworks so it's easier for the engineering teams to develop new tests quickly and robustly. While the engineering team probably owns all of the unit tests and some integration tests - a dedicated QA team focuses on end-to-end tests, and tests that more accurately recreate real world scenarios. Sometimes there are features that are hard to test well because of non-deterministic behavior, lots of externalities, etc., and I think QA should be seen as an engineering specialty - sometimes they should collaborate with the feature teams to help them do that part of their job better and teach them new testing techniques that may be appropriate that perhaps aren't obvious or common.

I would also second another comment that pointed out that good QA folks often know the real surface area of the product better than anyone. And good QA folks also need to be seen as good QA folks. If you have a corporate culture that treats QA folks like secondary or lesser engineers, that will quickly be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The good ones will leave all the ones who fit your stereotype behind by transitioning into dev roles or finding a new team.

As I understand it, the law is that they're not allowed to trade while in possession of material, non-public information, but beyond that most of the practices are there to just entirely avoid the suspicion or appearance of foul play. Sometimes executives are allowed to trade during windows immediately after announcing results, etc. The law would still dictate that they do not trade if they know about upcoming acquisitions or changes, etc. but someone would still have to prove that, and it's a risk that is removed if the executive just follows a preset schedule.

Same here! But I'm gonna bookmark this and try it another day. Kudos for sharing this - love to see younger folks hacking. This is a cool idea.

I think sidelining the lead researcher and giving the project to another group is accurately described at "gutting a team". No, they didn't end the project, but the series of events described seems to be insinuating that she could have led the project if she was willing to have her work funded by Facebook, listen to one of their former people, etc. So if that was their goal, and they just got someone else to do the work, is that any better?

I don't think a 12-year-old should be eating deep fried French fries as a regular part of a school lunch either... Nothing wrong with a sandwich.

I have no idea what the process was for gathering the signatures, but one way to solve this problem is a mutual confidentiality pact that goes away with enough momentum. Ask people if they're willing to sign, but if you can't get 50% of the people to sign the document and all the signatures go away.

Similar things are done when doing anonymous 360 surveys in the workplace. If not enough people in a certain pool respond, the feedback doesn't get shared.

That gets tough with transitive dependencies and the frequent CVEs.

Where else is this approach being used?

How would you propose using generative AI to detect ETI, exactly?

If you were given $200M and SETI's goal, what would you be investing in?

What's your argument here? That corrupt police who run protection rackets are worth it because they will, in the end, actually protect your family from gangs of 100+ people?

"Session" is a good way to think of it. If it's inactive for too long, it can be closed and forgotten, etc. But "connection" is the correct terminology. You just sometimes need to be clear that you're talking about a TCP connection and not a physical connection, or even the logical connection that makes IP packets routable. It's one more layer above that.

But yes - both sides maintain state about the connection. Senders will re-send packets if they go too long without being acknowledged. They will slow down large batches of sending if lots of messages are being dropped (essentially throttling in case the network is being overwhelmed and they're making it worse). And receivers will acknowledge packets as they're received and assemble messages back in the right order if packets arrive out-of-order, or bits in the middle are missing.

I actually remember being a bit confused by this too. Hopefully I can help:

These refer to 2 different protocols at the same layer: UDP, and TCP. Below these protocols there are layers that route little messages around local networks (like Ethernet) and that route little messages across the Internet (like IP), and UDP and TCP are another layer of abstraction on top of that.

TCP adds information about the ordering of messages, it has a mechanism for acknowledging receipt of a message, it has logic for resending a message, etc. UDP does not include these concepts, so if a message gets lost somewhere in the network, an application using UDP might not even notice.

The "connection" in this case, really refers to the state about these messages that is kept. It's a virtual / logical connection, not a physical connection.

No, it's based on a statistical model that incorporates biases, like many statistical models.

That's because they are actually struggling to admit deeper problems with the company culture and processes that they don't know how to solve, and so they're trying RTO to see if it fixes things.

Are you perhaps confusing ClickHouse, with ClickHouse Keeper (one of ClickHouse's components?) Sounds to me like ClickHouse is the database, and ClickHouse Keeper is the ZK drop-in replacement. A bit like HBase being a database, and ZooKeeper being a service it is heavily dependent on.

If they could just pay the dollar and never have to worry about it again, sure. But the point is for them to have confidence that the math is unimpeachable and identical to whatever auditor or tax official would compute at every step of the way so you don't just have to guess at correctness with some waving of hands.

When you're doing floating point arithmetic on a computer, it will approximate and round certain values in ways that don't match the way humans do it when they're, e.g. doing accounting.

So you need to run a massive physics simulation really fast? Yes, floats are great.

You need to calculate taxes on a massive corporation's fiscal year? Bad idea.

Some libraries advertise "arbitrary precision", many computer systems have a "decimal" type intended for currency, etc. and then they won't make all the same mistakes, but as the OP said you still need to control rounding rules and make sure they match the law.

The top comment here is very reasonable, but I still think the application of HIPAA has been a giant mess, reflecting a disdain toward patients similar to everything else in the US healthcare system.

I've ranted on here plenty about how often I've dealt with incorrect bills, and HIPAA plays into that as well. My private information can be shared to "traveling doctors", it can be shared with woefully incompetent contractors who handle billing (or, pretend to), and I received a notice last year that my information had been involved in a data breach and I'm not expecting any compensation. When I had to get a very private and sensitive part of my body imaged, they'll gladly announce to the waiting room my name and what procedure I'm there for, even though it's a rather private and sensitive part of my body - very similar to the shared room concern. I don't care that the people in that room aren't likely to misuse my healthcare information, I don't want them knowing where I found a lump anyway.

And yet HIPAA is often cited to me over the phone as the reason why we can't seem to get incorrect bills figured out for my dependents. It doesn't seem to me that HIPAA actually does much to protect my privacy, but it sure gets used to obfuscate things when there's a problem.

I don't think so either. But I also know people who still think Trump is playing some 4D chess game and has the corrupt politicians and media right where he wants them. Any day now he's gonna win.

I don't think so. Isotopes can influence mass and other nuclear characteristics, but it's really the electron configuration that determines the molecular possibilities.

The funny thing is that in most ham radio usage, the "high frequency bands" are actually about as low a frequency as most people will ever use. I don't think I've come across anything about low and medium frequencies except in reference materials. People generally use "high frequency", "very high frequency", or "ultra high frequency".

There isn't even a law preventing direct military usage of that library as far as I understand, because they're not violating copyright law by just downloading something, which by the way is hosted using federal funds. But the absurdity of high energy physics / national nuclear research labs saying you can't use the software for military applications, and then this mainly comes up in civilian applications with nervous lawyers? Yeah it's missing the point more than you seem to be implying.

Interesting - do you mean because of the "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed" clause? I wonder.

Yes my question was, itself, tongue-in-cheek. I've been told that a customer insisted the packages in question be removed because although they did nothing military-related, they did happen to have a customer that is well-known for being a contractor on military projects and they didn't want to be getting in trouble just because their civilian service was used by a civilian company that did military-adjacent work.

And even if LBL isn't developing nuclear weapons they seem a mite closer to it than that.

There's nothing compelling the author, no, except for in the situation outlined above they're really doing nothing to prevent military use, but they are hampering adoption among companies scrupulous or careful enough to not run afoul of a poorly defined legal term. Seems counter-productive to the apparent motives.

While this is funny, it does highlight that you should probably have an actual legal opinion if you decide to write your own license. A less tongue-in-cheek example that I've run into is https://dst.lbl.gov/ACSSoftware/colt/license.html. "any usage related to military applications is expressly forbidden", which is still poorly defined enough that it makes lots of corporate lawyers nervous and you end up having to remove those packages even for stuff that isn't really a military application just because it's not clear how military-adjacent something is allowed to be. It's especially ironic since it's being distributed by a Department of Energy national lab. I wonder if DOE national labs ever have military applications...

It's also not clear to me that this does actually make it illegal for the military to just use it directly, even if they cared about following the letter of the law. If copyright is the real power behind the enforcement of open-source licenses, I'm not sure usage is something the license grantor gets to dictate as long as you're not redistributing something.

You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh explores this idea a lot. To the extent you consider Buddhist philosophy religious, it is still religious, but it is not the Bible. However the philisophy is similar enough that the author actually references both in harmony. That said it's also a very well received book among secular audiences so if you're intrigued by the idea and don't care much for the Bible, I think you'd like it.