rcyeh

> Players were surprised, for example, by how often it tucked its flag into a corner behind just two bombs, a rarely played setup.

I like Stratego a lot. Next time, I will try this and put three bombs in the other corner to keep the opponent guessing and wasting an expected 4 extra moves.

I speculate a big part of the game is moving your power pieces (1, 2, 3) to places where they can actually attack the opponent safely. Any other placement of the flag and bombs creates a bottleneck for left-right movement on your side.

TIL that MacOS `pwd` has `-P` and `-L` options.

     -L      Display the logical current working directory.
     -P      Display the physical current working directory (all symbolic links resolved).
     If no options are specified, the -L option is assumed.

In your example, using `-P` will show `Cased`.

I thought the title was an homage to François Fleuret's Little Book of Deep Learning.

https://fleuret.org/francois/lbdl.html

Amazing! The 2009 Lincoln & Joyce paper you cited catalyzes one bond per hour on average. (Doubling time = 1 hour, but only one bond between oligonucleotides needed to double.)

OP's Gianni et al 2026 paper connects 45 nucleotides, taking 72 days (1700 hours) to yield 0.2%.

The latter effort is like drawing the whole owl.

That is incredible patience. Without access to the full article, I read only the abstract. I wonder if they used simulations to narrow the candidates?

Agreed!

I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.

I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.

More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.

https://paulgraham.com/power.html

Similarly: "The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook"

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html

https://archive.ph/vQkwl

I'm trying to reconcile your numbers with the Wikipedia "Aviation safety” article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety

which for 2019 describes "0.5 accidents per million departures" and "40 fatalities per trillion revenue passenger kilometers". Considering that many or most passengers fly close to 800-1000 km/h, we're still quite a bit above above 1 fatality per 100 million passenger hours.

Would a factor of 10 be enough? Suppose we go from one major accident per fortnight to one per five months (10 fortnights). Is that higher than what we have seen in the past thirty years?

Since slugs are cold-blooded, I wonder if it was captured by the (presumably backlit) doorbell touch panel because of the panel's warmth.

Not a lawyer, but liability waivers may not apply if there is determined to be gross negligence or recklessness.

Making a reasonably-designed API available, only if connected to an inaccessible network, doesn't sound dangerous, but the goodwill gained might be hard to weigh against a miniscule chance of malware, which would revise everyone's opinion of the degree of negligence or recklessness.

Can confirm. US passport photos want a neutral expression and explicitly say (not in the below page, but elsewhere during the renewal process) not to smile.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...

Yes! Automobile fuel efficiency is now probably the classical example of Jevon's paradox: some cars are more fuel-efficient; and (therefore?) we in the United States are driving 35% more miles each year in 2024 (3.3e12) than in 1994 (2.4e12).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA

Which makes our total gasoline consumption about the same as or higher than the 1990s, within 10% or so:

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=C...

Nice! One nit: if playing an archive game (from a previous date), when opening the calendar, would you show not the current month, but the month of the game? This would make it easier to go back to other dates.

When I subscribed to Kagi, my block/lower/raise/pin lists were very highly correlated with these aggregate ones.

It makes me think that for Kagi customers, search engine rankings optimize for something other than useful sites such as docs.python.org and cppreference.com

Would you say more? Which part is the violation - the recording, transcription, storage, scanning of other data, interpretation, or something else? Does it matter if you are in a one-party or two-party (for consent to recording) state?

If a police officer is using a body camera and you happen to be speaking nearby, is that a violation of your privacy? What about the same situation, but the body camera user is not a police officer?

Just going through the numbers:

363 BB tons / (1 ton / cu m) / (1 BB cu m / cu km) is the mass of a 9-km-diameter ice ball, smaller for rockier materials.

363 BB tons / 10 years = 100 MM tons / day.

By comparison, Mount St Helens (1980) and Eyjafjallajökull (2010) each produced 500 MM tons of ash. So the amount of material is about equivalent to having a similarly-sized volcano eruption every few days for ten years straight.

The Earth's surface area is 500 MM sq km. If we were to distribute 363 BB tons uniformly, that would be an average of 1000 tons per sq km. If the layer had a density of 1 ton per cu m (same as water), the resulting layer would be 1/1000 of a meter thick. This seems to be thinner than the spherule layers described.

Interesting, I initially thought this factor was probably negligible, because the cohort was aged "62.8 ± 7.8 years" (either before or after the 7-year observation period). I still think it's small, but perhaps not negligible.

I estimate that some 2-4% of the group could be heavily involved in caring for grandchildren, sorting themselves into the irregular category. It's well-known that school-aged children pass flu to grandparents [2], and then grandparents die, just in time for the 7-year post-birth observation window. The absolute death rate due to flu is 10^-4 to 10^-3 per year, which would be visible on the paper's mortality time course chart.

Estimation details:

* some 20% are grandparents (and very few are parents) of young children [0] * 20-50% of grandparents care for grandchildren regularly [1]

So maybe 4-10% of the cohort as an upper bound. If the birth rate is 12 per 1000 per year, and babies cause sleep disruption for about two years to two persons, then that's about 4% also, but perhaps mostly not the same age group.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5eeb975b86650...

[1]: https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-news/articles/2017/september...

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00255...

Going to sleep now.

I speculate your comment has been downvoted because you haven’t explained why you’d “like to see generative AI try to reconstruct the full image”.

What would be the purpose of that reconstruction? To help visualize the most likely original scene using a contemporary-biased lens? Why would we want that?

Imagine you found a box of macaron sandwich cookie fragments, and your model only knows about Oreos. Would such a reconstruction have value? Could it also apply inappropriate bias?

On the other hand, the right models can be critical. Look at how researchers created an image of black holes. [0] This is a reconstruction, and it is an average, and it relies on physics models; but those assumptions are in some ways more transparent than generative AI.

[0]: https://youtu.be/Ol_SB5Zfv-Y?si=O6CL-kjDcgBB0bWm , 4-minute overview

This is exactly the right argument. Accepting the lawsuit would give precedent to an insidious combination: Matthew+chilling effect

Interesting! To translate to the language of stock and bond offerings:

TicketMaster ~ bookrunner/sponsor; scalper ~ underwriter;

The general population cannot participate in IPOs, just like we cannot buy primary-market tickets to popular shows.

Agreed, the presentation of summarized statistics in the web page seems intended to shock, and it’s hard to reconcile some numbers:

According to the Census 2020 Current Population Survey[1]:

* There are 44.9 MM foreign-born in the US, of which 95.9% are age 15 or more. Of the 39.5 MM (88% of foreign-born) age 25 and over: 13.6% do not have/86.4% have at least 8th-grade education; 75% have at least high-school diploma. * Total population of US is 331.45 MM, of which 81.4% are age 15-and-older, so foreign-born is 13.5% of total, or 16% of 15-and-older.

If we believe that 21% of 15-and-older lack literacy proficiency, and 34% of those are foreign-born, then we multiply to get: 7% of 15-and-older are both foreign-born and lack literacy proficiency.

But then comparing with the CPS, 7% of 15-and-older is nearly half of the 16% foreign-born fraction of 15-and-older, and seems inconsistent with the CPS statistic that more than 69% of 15-and-older foreign-born (75% of 25-and-older, which represent 88% of all foreign-born) have at least high school education.

There are some basis risk problems (literacy statistics vs educational attainment; 2024 data vs 2020 data); but I would think those are probably rounding errors. I suspect the top-line 21% number is inflated.

[1]: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/foreign-born/cp... , particularly tables 2.1 and 2.5

We can do this passively with corner cubes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector

GE no longer owns or operates the GE Appliances business. Haier bought GE Appliances in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Appliances

This story describes Pajaro, an agricultural community in California with a local water-management agency, the origins of that agency, and how other communities, facing water shortages, are looking to that model.

Farmers in Pajaro will pay $500 per acre-ft (3.3e5 gal) of non-potable recycled water in 2024. By contrast, a New York City resident paid $5,000 for the same volume of potable water and attached sewer charges in 2023.

Estimating irrigation requirements at 1.5 inches per week for 24 weeks, if I add 3 acre-ft of water for $1,500 to a 2014 report on the economics of strawberry production in Oregon (https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/oaeb/pdf/A...), the costs of growing (dominated by labor for picking (60-70%), followed by land preparation and planting (20-25%)) would increase by 7%.

Elsewhere, some estimates show as few as 12 weeks to grow strawberries, or that California acres have 5x the yield of Oregon acres. For strawberries (yield $25,000 per Oregon acre with plasticulture), it seems easy to absorb the $1,500 cost of water. Other crops (TIL: alfalfa, wheat, corn, soy, oat, rice: yield up to $1,000 per acre, need 2-5 acre-ft of water per acre) and other locales will have a different calculation.

Ultimately, farmers in different places will face different economic landscapes considering: sun/land, air, water, labor, market access. Where land and water are expensive, only high-value (possibly high-labor) crops make sense; where land and water are cheap, lower-value (and low-labor) crops and scale may make more sense.

Echoing several of the comments here about learning by doing, I think Ben Horowitz’s “Hard thing about hard things” may recommend that too. See section (and blog post) “If you’ve never done the job, how do you hire somebody good?” with pitfalls:

https://a16z.com/hiring-executives-if-youve-never-done-the-j...

“The very best way to know what you want is to act in the role. ... In addition, ... bring in domain experts.”

Thanks for posting this. At the dealer last year, I thought it strange when, after I refused the Starlink Security Plus subscription with fee, they offered it “for free”. Starlink Safety Plus is already included for the first three years.

Looking at the MySubaru app, it looks like I can cancel any subscription. There is also this opt-out setting to “Send Vehicle Location at Ignition-Off”:

  Vehicle Location

  If you choose to opt out of this service, MySubaru will not collect your vehicle location when you turn your ignition off. You will still be able to locate your vehicle by sending a remote command through the MySubaru app.

Taking the driver’s license should happen already through the points system (3+ points upon conviction for red light or speeding; 11 points in 18 months to license suspension)[0], but perhaps it’s not enough?

I looked up the license plate of a car that hit me and saw 18 speeding violations, 4 school bus violations, 1 red light violations over the past six years. In the year before it hit me, there were 8 speeding violations. [1]

[0] https://dmv.ny.gov/tickets/about-nys-driver-point-system

[1] https://www.howsmydrivingny.nyc/

Wow! I was about to comment: when there are so many unheeded “noise” warnings, it can be easy to miss rare ones and new ones.

I remember a codebase with thousands of warnings, and hiding among them were a few with the word “intend”, like:

“if (condition); statement;”

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/error-messages/compile...

“variable == value;”

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/error-messages/compile...

tl;dr: 51 days is the wraparound point of a signed 6-byte counter running at 33 MHz, used to invalidate stale data from instruments.

phi = protected health information

pii = personally identifiable information

In particular, publishing executive salary information has been blamed for fueling an arms race in executive pay [0], and by inference, inequality.

As a thought experiment, if we were to add everyone else's information, it's not clear to me that everyone would come out as a winner.

[0]: https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/more-transparency-mo...