puzzledobserver

About ten years ago, I sent a sample of my saliva to 23andMe.

It was only later that I realized the privacy implications of what I'd done, and asked them to forget my data and deleted my account.

Is there anything more I can do to protect myself at this point?

I've never played on an actual pinball machine, but spent a lot of time playing Space Cadet Pinball when I was a kid.

I think I initially saw it as a random thing with bright shiny lights and funny sounds, but I eventually understood the game. I was never very good at it, but it is most certainly a game of skill.

I like the videos posted by Practical Engineering, but I found this one unsatisfying. Both distillation and reverse osmosis are energy expensive, but this doesn't answer whether this is because these are poor techniques or because desalinating water is fundamentally+physically difficult.

Are there thermodynamic limits to how efficiently water can be desalinated?

Doesn't this feel like a problem where a Carnot-like argument can be made?

Also: Why does / did legal writing prefer the structurally complex multipart sentence in the original article to this simpler two sentence version?

Is there some formal ambiguity in the two-sentence version which the one-sentence version does not have?

The term philosophy is used in the original Greek sense, "love of knowledge". As opposed to, Wikipedia tells me: theology, medicine and law. I guess it also has something to do with philosophy in the early sense of the word, before natural philosophy branched off and became what we today call the sciences.

Does the answer to this question also depend on the order in which the pieces are laid out? I suspect yes.

Is it? Think of a single star during a galactic collision. It wants to collide with every star in the other galaxy. It gets pulled this way and that, so, in sum, it decides to collide with the oncoming galaxy as a whole. Unfortunately, despite having billions or trillions of stars, that other galaxy is mostly empty space. The poor original star that we were tracking was unable to collide with any star at all.

I have always found this refrain about freedom of speech vs freedom from consequences to be grating. I can think of only three categories of things a government can do:

1. Prevent the words from being spoken in the first place. This includes things like gag orders, confiscating computers and internet connections, literally gagging someone, or locking them in jail.

2. Delete the words, once spoken, from the public record.

3. Punish the person for having spoken the words. I.e., the consequences. This includes things like deleting their accounts, placing them in jail, confiscating newspapers, burning books, etc.

When the constitution guarantees freedom of speech, which of these categories of actions do you think it restricts?

IANAL, but my understanding is that the government retains the right to restrict speech through all three categories (for national security, prurient interest, integrity of court trials, etc.), but is broadly restricted from having unabridged power in all of them.

Roof-mounted solar water heaters were very common in South India too. Our childhood home had two solar panels heating a tank of water. Worked very well in summer, and there was a backup electric heater for the winter months. We also got some rebate from the electricity supplier, if I remember correctly.

The entire system was quite simple, and hasn't needed any maintenance in close to 20 years, I think?

What are the benefits of solar electric panels compared to water heating panels?

I'd like to disagree with this. In particular, about [1]: It is a collection of papers in many different topics. There is little technical overlap between Alan Turing's Entscheidungsproblem paper, for instance, and Hoare's paper on axiomatic semantics. Also, the papers are all from the 70s. They're uniformly influential papers, and have shaped the field, but the fields and the vernacular used by working researchers is very different. At best, the papers approximate a four year undergrad curriculum in CS, and at worst, are a recipe to get distracted and overwhelmed. The link to Wikipedia [2] is somewhat better in that the papers appear to be more modern, but suffers even more from the problem of diversity.

A somewhat similar problem arises with test-of-time and best paper awards. To elaborate on my complaint, imagine the exaggerated case of someone trying to understand modern science by intensely focusing on the work of researchers who won the Nobel Prize. Clearly all very important work, but understanding the 1990 Physics Nobel Prize (on electron-proton scattering) is of no use to understanding the work for which 1991 Nobel was awarded (complex systems and polymers).

There are two things that (I'm assuming the OP's field of interest is computing) a CS education provides: At the undergrad and in the early stages of grad school, breadth of topics, and their modern synthesis. You don't spend much time reading papers (at least in an undergraduate education), but you understand the basics, and get a feel for the problems considered and the sensibilities of researchers. In an intermediate-level graduate seminar, you pick a narrow topic, and focus on papers in that topic. The first papers in the area (like Dijkstra's papers on distributed computing), the best / most important papers in the area, and the latest papers on topical interests (like Merkle trees and blockchains). There is thematic and technical continuity from one paper to the next, and you start to understand the the story being told. Then, late in graduate school, and in the rest of one's professional career, one starts reviewing papers that haven't even been published. At this point, you see the story being written: the steps and the missteps, and the memorable and not-so-memorable papers in a field. To truly understand a field, one needs to read not just the great papers, but also the middling ones.

And one needs to concentrate on a topic. The thing about a forum such as HackerNews is that for every topic of interest, there's likely a person here who's an expert in the area, but it is easy to confuse that observation with the much stronger claim that there's a person here who's an expert on every topic. The last of those people died in the mid-20th century, if they ever existed.

In our own Indian family, family history is mostly an oral tradition. My grandparents and their relatives tell stories of their own relatives, so we know of a mythical great-great-grandfather who was apparently a doctor-on-horseback. My own parents know this history, but to a lesser extent, and given the rise of nuclear families, I am (and I suspect the other relatives of my generation) even less aware of this history.

In any case, written records are mostly unavailable. Our personal family history from the pre-1950 period is fading, and most of our history from before the 20th century is lost. We have our own stories to tell, and they'll eventually be forgotten too. It's sad to see older relatives grow frail, forget things, and die, but I've never felt a sense of historical loss.

Maybe I'm not old enough, and I'm not sure whether it is appropriate to generalize to all Indian families or whether it is only our family which is an oddball, but I've always been curious about the western interest in recording genealogies.

I mostly agree with you, but as a counter-point: How would one precisely draw the lines between search engines and LLMs? One provides mostly airtight attributions, and the other is famous for hallucinating citations. But this doesn't sound like a distinction that can be used as the basis for law?

Or are you less concerned with their design and more concerned with their purpose? Providing citations is fine, but creating content is not?

Basically, regular submarines blow compressed air into the ballast tanks when they need to surface. Because the Trieste goes so deep, compressed air wouldn't work. It uses fine steel shot instead. But at this point, to make it neutrally buoyant, one needs a large amount of material that is only slightly lighter than water. It also has to be mostly incompressible, so aviation gasoline it is. The Trieste effectively becomes an underwater airship. Or a watership, if you will.

"you need a new one." <-- New microwave, I presume?

I wonder whether the allure of migrating out of the country has lessened somewhat among more recent graduates.

Speaking anecdotally, of my group of six friends (we graduated from an IIT about ten years ago), one never expressed any interest in traveling (he subsequently went to an IIM and worked for a FAANG in India), two spent several years in the US but went back, and a fourth has expressed interest in returning to India. All of us who came to the US worked for FAANGs or got Masters / MBAs / PhDs from very well-ranked American universities.

More personally, living in the US has not come across as unambiguously better than living in India. I'm in academia, and I cannot imagine an institute like IISc being substantially more difficult to navigate than where I currently am. Society is more broad-minded, politics is (comparatively) less of a shithole, and a few metrics such as pollution and bureaucratic corruption are somewhat better. On the other hand, I am half the world away from aging family, it is easier to be lonely, I miss the food, and with a FAANG salary, I could live like royalty in India.

Life in India is not for me, but I suspect that the range of opinions is getting more varied than (say) thirty years ago.

Thanks! From the added context:

7. Pirrani's suit relied on Section 11 of the Securities Act. This alleges that the company lied in its registration document.

8. In an IPO, all shares are covered by the registration document. In a direct listing, the current shareholders of the company just start trading their shares on the market one day.

9. Notably, a direct listing makes it unclear which shares are registered (covered by the registration document) and which are unregistered. According to SCOTUS, Pirrani can't tell, so he can't prove standing under Section 11.

10. He should have sued the company under Section 10 of the Securities Act instead. This is the same mechanism used against "mature" companies. Lawyers don't like to sue under Section 10 because of reasons.

Some stuff which is still unclear to me:

1. People speak of owning n shares of a company. I always thought this was simply shorthand for something like: "I own shares #1034852, #1092647, and #2986246".

2. People sometimes own 0.25 shares of a company, but I thought that this was a convenience invented by stock brokers like Fidelity and Robinhood.

3. If each share is associated with a share number, and people only hold whole shares in principle, then isn't the provenance of that share clear? Whether it is registered or not should simply be a matter of following it back in time?

Is it just me, or are newspaper articles surprisingly difficult to read? From what I understand:

1. Instead of a traditional IPO, Slack went public through an alternative process called a direct listing.

2. As part of its direct listing, Slack sold some million "registered" and some million "unregistered" shares.

3. What are registered and unregistered shares? I could not find an explanation on Wikipedia.

4. Fiyyaz Pirrani purchased some number of shares, but later complained that Slack had misrepresented something in its declarations before going public. He filed suit against the company.

5. SCOTUS says that because Fiyyaz Pirrani could not tell which of his shares were registered and which were unregistered, he could not prove standing(?)

6. This problem would not have arisen with an IPO (because?). On the other hand, similar doubts will arise with all future direct listings, making investors hesitant to purchase shares in the corresponding companies.

Is this an accurate assessment? What are registered and unregistered shares?

Indeed, by "lightweight VM", I meant a container of the kind provided by Podman and Docker.

I wonder how Distrobox compares to nix shell.

If I understand correctly, Distrobox makes it convenient to launch (and destroy) lightweight VMs on demand, while nix shell makes it convenient to drop into a shell with some package installed. The documentation around nix has unfortunately been unapproachable in my experience.

Of course, Flatpaks+Podman will be a learning curve, but I'm eager to try Silverblue+Distrobox on one of my computers.

What about limited liability? It seems to me to be an enormous concession to corporations and their shareholders, and which never seems to be questioned in popular consciousness.

May I add "scheming" to your list of programming activities?

At the macro level, this would be system design. Making sure that the architecture is extensible, transparent to failures, and easy to understand and develop for.

At the micro level, this would involve coming up with clever algorithms to solve specific problems. In ways that are simple or efficient or parsimonious.

In any case, this scheming activity, which would slot in between the specifying and translating that you speak of, would involve deeply understanding both the specification (and how it might evolve) and computing substrate (its APIs, what is efficient and what is not, etc.). I might even call it some combination of wisdom and deviousness?

I had previously heard of EA, and knew about paperclip maximizers, trolley problems, unintended consequences, and other risks associated with unregulated AI. But I wasn't aware of the connections between the two communities / families of ideas until recently.

Because I don't consider myself sufficiently educated in these matters, I default to using GiveWell and their mosquito net recommendations as an effective low-effort approach to making monthly contributions to charity.

Overall, is there anything about this approach which is objectionable? How do philosophers go from something like GiveWell to something like fending off the AI apocalypse? Is this ideological expansion inevitable?

I skimmed the article, and admittedly didn't understand much. Action principles and path integrals are unfortunately one step above where my knowledge of physics stops.

But seeing a headline that reads, "Our reality may be a sum of all possible realities", I wonder whether the point is to (a) explain new experiments, (b) develop simpler mathematics, (c) close the gap between intuition and theory, or (d) whether this is all unfalsifiable speculation.

A charitable interpretation might be (c), but a skeptic within me thinks that this might be (d).

But isn't this exactly the mindset that the original comment in this thread was criticizing?

It might be fair to say, as a sibling comment does, that one needs younger politicians so they can better represent one's constituents.

But to dismiss them just because they're old amounts to shutting off an economically productive segment of the population. More importantly, by discriminating against individuals because of their class membership rather than because of their abilities amounts to prejudice, no?

CuriousMarc uploaded a video to Youtube showing the startup procedure for an HP 5061A cesium clock [0]. They switch on the clock and compare it to a GPS reference. Seeing the abstract description realized in concrete terms through hot cesium tubes, phase locked loops, and Lissajous curves was really fascinating.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOti3kKWX-c

The original computer assisted proof of the four colour theorem was written in IBM 370 assembler [0]. This was naturally susceptible to programming errors such as those discussed above. Gonthier's subsequent certified proof requires trust in a much smaller body of code and hardware [1].

[0] https://projecteuclid.org/journals/illinois-journal-of-mathe...

[1] https://www.ams.org/notices/200811/tx081101382p.pdf

I might be misunderstanding Graeber, but I thought his point was that by viewing play through the calculus of evolution and survival probabilities, scientists have not paid as much attention to the fact that play is fun.

How did animals come to play? Because it allows them to explore their environment and increases their evolutionary fitness. Why do animals continue to play? Because they enjoy it.

To install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account involves bringing up a command prompt in the middle of the installation process and typing some magic incantations. It's clearly not what Microsoft wants users to be doing.

I agree. The American reluctance to metric units is strange and I appreciate the mathematical elegance of ISO paper sizes, but letter paper just feels more pleasant on the eyes than A4.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to resolve the paradox:

1. Reject the intuitive definition of "interesting"ness as being ill-formed. We need an objective definition non-self-referential definition of the word interesting.

2. Accept that there are interesting or uninteresting numbers, but their status as objects of interest is tied to a specific time. For example, 1729 might have been an uninteresting number until the conversation between Ramanujan and Hardy. Several of the examples on the Wikipedia page have such temporal limits on when they were / were not interesting.