monday_

One could cope that this regulation can not apply to Linux or other OSS operating systems. But this is only true unless the bootloaders on consumer devices are mandated to be closed next.

We already have Secure Boot, the infrastructure is in place. It is currently optional, but a law like this can change that.

Tokens are actually a very good RTS resource. If you allocate a fixed amount of tokens per map, a side with more of them would be able to spawn more agent units, or a few smarter hero units (with /think).

I imagine this also works in multiplayer

I really liked the Hotspur font shown here, but can't find it for either download or sale anywhere. Perhaps someone knows if it is at all available?

"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to accept the offer."

".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"

"I understand your concern, I really do. But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!

Consider a gorilla. The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it. breathes heavily

The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.

We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.

Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson. bows "

---

Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news

"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"

"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"

I have been thinking about adding conductive traces a-la PCB to 3D prints in a DIY setting for a while. Obviously, conductive filaments exist - but they are not remotely in the same category as copper.

My initial hope was that doping PLA, PETG or some other material with a conductor and then applying strong variable magnetic field near the print head to force creation of conductive domains while the filament is amorphous and hot. This turned out to be not feasible, as O3 explained to me repeatedly, over hours of chats.

A simpler and surprisingly workable solution appears to be adding a second printing head loaded with tin. Tin is not as good as copper - but it's still leagues ahead of conductive filaments. To offset the poor conductivity you can use thin, but very broad traces.

A speculative approach would work like this:

1. Print PETG layers using a regular filament, but leave "baths" for tin traces. A bath should be an opening at least 2-3 millimeters tall, to account for the surface tension.

2. After N layers, fill the baths from the tin head. Tin melting point is near PETG, but it would cool rapidly and, hopefully, weld to the plastic.

This way you could probably integrate a pcb into a print. I haven't tried that, but i recall people actually trying to print with tin - so that part is at least not a complete fantasy.

Typing this from Moscow, over OpenVPN. I have been around the country over the last year and am yet to experience protocol-level blocks (although there are credible reports this happened, just not in my experience). It seems like the current wave is about blocking popular providers. Folks with own server, like myself, are not a target so far.

I'd expect the government to cool down expansive internet censorship until the "elections" in March, since hitting the preapproved outcome figures will be harder this way.

How do Guix and Nix userbases and contributor resources compare?

I like Guix as a standalone package manager much much more. It has first-class support for single-file environment config, and it's in lisp! But a package manager system ultimately comes down to resources poured into maintaining and supporting packages, it's a bootstrap problem. It's clear that NixOS has substantial support. What about Guix?

The thing with the paid subscription is that the bastards still track you. Paying for the service does not exclude you from surveillance, it supposedly makes it less obtrusive. Ad-blocker is insufficient for anything close to anonymity, and so is everything else. But it does make the tracking harder and it does move you ever so slightly to the tail of every distribution that matters for fingerprinting.

While this can be true, I'd be careful before making any inferences here. For example, there's good research [1] on how FSB uses the fact that Telegram metadata is in the open to run counter-insurgency on occupied territories. This is likely among FSB's highest priorities - but there's no evidence that they have used some level of insider access or control (or at least that they are willing to burn it even on Ukraine).

Second, Telegram not being blocked is hardly an argument. Neither are Signal, WhatsApp or YouTube for example. Are all of these also controlled by the FSB? And the general embrace of z-propagandists is likely due the fact that Telegram is extremely popular all over post-Soviet space. As far as I know, pro-Ukrainian people use Telegram just as much, and just as much as a news source.

None of this is to say that Telegram is a good choice for a reasonably secure messenger or is trustworthy at all (and [1] lists some very convincing reasons for why it is not so). But "may be run by the feds" is a strong claim, and so far it is not supported by evidence.

[1] https://www.pwnallthethings.com/p/russia-is-spying-on-telegr...

Thanks, I will.

Off topic, but is there a way to import existing mechanical designs like we do it in software with libraries? Something like importing a transmission design into CAD and gluing it to the model with API-like slots.

I'm very new to CADs and only have limited experience with FreeCAD, but having to design a latch anew every time you need it seems like a common enough pain point.

I'm complaining that this effort constrains the anti-war movement in Russia - something that might actually stop the war - and does not do much to Putin or his enablers. No, a domain registar refusing service will not single-handedly isolate the entire country from independent media. But it is hobbling the people that try to keep their infra outside of Kremlin's reach - the exact kind of people that try to do things that Kremlin disapproves of. And, ridiculously, this can be done right - just ban commercial accounts.

The "technologically sophisticated people running services inside Russia" that are "living in privileged situations" are the ones with the means to provide ordinary people with alternative news sources and ways of communication - the exact things required for the popular anti-war sentiment to grow. This stupid measure is not making this impossible, but it is making it harder.

Thank you for this thoughtful and illuminating perspective. I'll make sure that my octogenarian life-long liberal grandparents hear about this. It's long past time for people above 75 to rise up and topple one of the most entrenched and well-defended authoritarian regimes on the planet. Maybe they can solve climate change while they're at it.

On a more serious note - this is about the opposition being denied foreign infrastructure. This translates into less effective protests, drives people into censored and controlled social media ponds, and makes disseminating thing like videos of war crimes this much harder.

I would understand if Namecheap were to block accounts related to Russian businesses. But this is virtue signalling at its worst - this decision makes situation worse, while making the people who made feel better.

Pathetic.

I've been setting up infrastructure to do blockade running over the obviously coming great Russian firewall for the last few days and made a mistake of relying on your service. I did expect payment troubles. I did not expect you to help the Kremlin in isolating the Russian populace from uncensored news and communication platforms beyond its reach. Right now my grandparents are going to have greater problem finding news about the war from any other source beyond Putin-controlled bullshit faucets, and so will I. It's likely also the case for antiwar protesters.

Isolating Russian users from foreign internet services is literally the Kremlin's dream, something it could not achieve for a long time even with all the power amassed over the years. It's revolting to see Namecheap and others doing Putin's job for him, while claiming to stand up against his war crimes. And spare me the "tax dollar" spiel. The overwhelming revenue going towards the war comes from oil and gas exports (even more so with the currency crisis), something that is explicitly not being sanctioned - less the Western tech executives are inconvenienced.

If you're going to harm people because of their country of birth to feel better about yourself - say it straight. What you're doing right now will not help a single Ukrainian, and will make Putin more resilient, not less.

Of course it's rigged.

That's not what "Smart voting" is about. The SV works by recommending the candidates that a) are not the ones actively pushed by the Kremlin b) have a shot at winning or credibly pretending they did. These could be some batshit crazy Stalinists, mobsters or whatever - the point is that they aren't the guys that the suits in Kremlin have already secretly anointed.

In short, this will hurt Kremlin's credibility and put an organizational tax on all its future efforts. With the pandemic, an economy in deep crisis and Putin's term ending in 2024 he'd need a lot of political capital and SV hits him where it hurts.

Here's a bit longer explanation. The point is that in autocracies elections are not rigged by altering an Excel column. In Russia we have empirical statistical evidence to this: the presence of poll watchers has a very clear effect on the electoral outcomes, the rigging elasticity is capped by the anti-Putin sentiment etc. This is a consequence of how the elections are organized: the local authorities are handed the required numbers and told to deliver, as a test of their loyalty, capability and popularity. They have limited number of ways for this: they can mobilize their base, force their dependents (state employees, the military etc) to vote or press local polling committees to alter the results. If they overplay their hand, they will face local unrest (this actually happens a lot) and the Kremlin will jettison them without a second thought - so this is a balancing act. The efficiency of all their tools is capped by the popularity of Kremlin and the overtly pro-Kremlin forces, and it is at all-times low and still going down. So to get things done they need to depress the turnout - and this creates an opening for organized opposition. If openly pro-Kremlin candidates are hurt en mass then the president's admin would have to renegotiate with both the winners and the losers, effectively losing a lot of organizational cohesion, and that's on top on very public humiliation. With Putin's popularity near its all-time low and going down and 2 years before a very uncertain end to his current term, that's a lot of damage - although likely far from enough to topple the guy. But we take what we can get and this may be a rather large take.

Thanks!

This is great and way better then the more long-winded textbook explanations. Math is around for a reason and it's good to see it at work by compressing a lot of material into still readable format.

Sure hope there's a similar primer on QFT.

Not sure how relevant this is, but the animal characters in the top image are from a Russian children hit cartoon "The Smesharicks" (literally "The Laughballs").

Kind of obvious that you can't effectively ban this.

The best realistic option here, in my opinion, is to require sensible constraints. E.g. hard-wiring war zones in them - a separate circuit could prevent firing if the drone is outside certain area. You could decrease the attack surface for such system by relying on a Kalman filter getting it's data from a dedicated accelerometer and a compass.

The trouble here is that a lot of institutions and public persons have more or less staked their credibility on dismissing the lab origin hypothesis. They had their reasons - if anything, over the last years their standing and the value of expert opinion was under constant pressure (notice I'm talking about a reason, not a justification).

But this makes any admission of an error and, by extension, any useful reflection on it very, very improbable. I think if the lab origin is true and at some point becomes common knowledge, it will be treated like the Iraq war. The people responsible for botching the response and the message will fail up and treat the pandemic as if it were a tsunami, rather then human error.

If a containment breach of a relatively harmless virus can lead to worldwide catastrophic consequences, you may want to know what procedures were breached and what institutional incentives are required to make sure the risks are constrained.

In software terms, if you have a bug that breaks the production and the response is messy and slow, you absolutely need to spend time and effort to change your response process. But you also need to know how this type of a bug became possible in the first place.

Not everyone here is directly involved in the startup culture and yes, technology and disruption can get shady. But "at least I'm not a lawyer" is a low, low bar to clear.

There is [1] a pure python package for expect. It provides essentially the same interface and is incredibly useful.

[1] https://pexpect.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

I get your sentiment, but creating a minimalist, but compatible alternative to systemd in a safe language is anything but reinventing the wheel. There's a real concern with systemd's feature creep, it's defaults, security and a development culture. rustysd may be a proof of concept, but it addresses real issues.

I wonder if this will impact Debian's current debate [1] on init systems. A minimal systemd-compatible init system seems like a real contender here, and this project shows that there're both interest and capability for developing one.

[1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002#textf

Try Schild's Ladder, but consult your dentist first.

'Permutation city' deserves a top spot on any list that has hard, comp and fi in the title. Although it's less about implementation details and more about theoretical CS. Here's an excerpt [1].

[1] https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Excerpt/PermutationExce...

Thanks for the warning. Fortunately, I'm using it with gcc.

One way popcount is useful not mentioned in the OP is in the graph analysis. For example, you can use the following

std::bitset<N>* graph = new std::bitset<N> [N];

to store the adjacency matrix for a graph with up to N vertices in N^2 bits of memory. The nice thing is that std::bitset::count uses popcount to compute the number of bits set to one. This makes some graph operations extremely fast even for a pretty large N. For example, graph[i].count() will produce a degree of a vertex and (graph[i] & graph[j]).count() will produce a number of vertices adjacent to both i and j.

First of all, the way that people on both sides of the political spectrum decry the federal and government as authoritarian and at the same time want to give it more power, is literally Orwellian. Doublethink, to be precise.

Second, this article argues that the government should have a try at running the internet since the private sector ostensibly failed. The irony is that the situation today is exactly a product of government mismanagement. A vital infrastructure is underdeveloped, overpriced and operated by a duopoly - where exactly was the US Government when this happened? Where was the antitrust authority? Where was a liberal President of eight years, a man deified by the likes of the Daily Dot, who took on health insurance companies? Did the Congress deign to investigate this issue? And did the voters "vote them out" for failing to do that, as the author suggests?

Of course not. People tend to have a job, a life and a hobby - they can only care about a limited set of issues. And an increase in broadband pricing or a change in ISP product set is not one of those. They can get riled up, short term, but probably won't be able to sustain pressure, as is the case with the second amendment or healthcare. This is why the government officials have for so long neglected this issue, and this why the nationalized internet bureaucracy will have the same relationship with third party contractors (that ISPs will become) as FCC does.

I am not an expert on broadband legislation, but it seems like a better solution would be encouraging investment into small scale ISPs. A federal legislation that ensures backbone access, major tax cuts for investors, a lot of red tape for ISPs trying to get above city-wide coverage, things like that. If you have 2-3 ISPs per town and tens of those in a large city the net neutrality issue goes away.

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