retrac

There's a synchronous and instantaneous nature you don't find in modern designs.

The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock.

The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While slow phosphor tubes do display a static image, most CRT systems used extremely fast phosphors; they release the majority of the light within a millisecond of the beam hitting them. If you take a really fast exposure of a CRT display (say 1/100,000th of a second) you don't see the whole image on the photograph - only the most recently few drawn lines glow. The image as a whole never exists at the same time. It exists only in the persistence of vision.

ambitions of encyclopedic scope, something like "hoping to cover all the domains of knowledge"; in the context of a photographer, to photograph everything worth photographing

4 MB of SRAM in the '80s would have been the main RAM of a supercomputer.

We still use SRAM today. It's what level-1 cache and registers are implemented with - actual flip-flops, can be toggled with one cycle delay. Supercomputers used to make their entire main memory out of SRAM, effectively the whole thing was L1 cache.

The 486 has an on-chip cache - 8 or 16 KB of SRAM. Very large for the time.

Off-chip access to the DRAM involves wait states. The read or write is stalled until the DRAM enters the appropriate state. The 486 would also do block reads of 16 bytes at a time to fill an entire cache line. This is around the time main memory and the CPU became increasingly decoupled.

Avoiding all the complexity of managing DRAM is why hobbyists use SRAM these days. Basically: to avoid cost. Ironic!

Presence of trade is not necessarily a market in the modern sense.

Not quite the same analysis. The human is better, no surprise. But the NotebookLM output links back to the original book in a very useful way. If you think about it as fuzzy semantic search it's amazing. If you want an essay or even just creativity, yes it's lacking.

I've done similar loose experiments using a 19th century French novel I have read (L'Agonie by Jean Lombard), and which is quite obscure. There is no English translation of the novel published.

Using Gemini Notebooks I've found it passable at summarizing chapters, listing characters, major theme and so on, and it can do this in English.

"What is the symbolism of the Black Stone?"

> In the sources, the Black Stone (referred to as the Pierre-Noire) serves as the central religious icon of the Syrian Sun cult brought to Rome by the Emperor Elagabalus. Its symbolism is multifaceted, ranging from fertility and virility to a mystical pursuit of universal unity.

> It represents the perennity of the Sun, which fertilizes the world, causing "germs to rise" and spreading them through the atmosphere. It is viewed as the "definitive form" of divinity, intended to absorb and replace the "transitory forms" of all other Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian gods, including the Christian "Kreistos". > Virility and Phallic Symbolism > > The sources explicitly characterize the Black Stone as a gigantic sacred phallus. It is described as: • An icon of virility and the "organ of generation" • A "unisexual icon" that materializes the generative force of nature • A representation of "virility in activity," which is why it is often paraded and elevated in an "orgasmic" or "colossal adoration"

> The Androgyne and Universal Unity - Beyond simple fertility, the philosopher Atillius explains a more complex, "mad" metaphysical project associated with the stone. It symbolizes "Life One" (Vie Une) and the return to a unisexual state of perfection. • The Androgyne: Atillius believes that by pursuing "the male sex by the male sex," the cult "inutilizes" the female sex to eventually create the Androgyne—a self-sufficient being containing both sexes • Unity: The stone signifies the fusion of all generative forces into a single Unity, reversing the "separation of the sexes" which is viewed as a state of unhappiness and impotence. • Marriage of Moon and Sun: The ritual marriage of the goddess Astaroth (representing the Moon and the female principle) to the Black Stone (representing the Sun and the male principle) symbolizes the merging of the Orient and Occident into this unified life principle > > Destruction of the Symbol - The Black Stone ultimately becomes a symbol of Oriental pollution and decadence to the Roman populace. During the final rebellion against Elagabalus, the stone is torn from its temple on the Palatine, defiled with filth, and broken into pieces to ensure that its "signification of Life" would never again dominate Rome.

This is all accurate to the book, even teasing out a couple themes that were only subconsciously present to me.

The NotebookLM version gives citations with links to the original text to support all these assertions, which largely are coherent with that purpose.

The input is raw images of a book scan! Imperfect as it is it still blows my mind. Not that long ago any kind of semantic search or analysis was a very hard AI problem.

Since I'm the person who wrote that I can explain what I meant.

I have never had to deal with a giant cat stalking me and being unable to hear it. I do routinely have to deal with intercom systems which I cannot hear, though.

The world most humans inhabit is human-made. And the human-made environment can be remade.

> x86_64 v4 UNIX port

What compiler are you using?

I'm learning ASL. That led me to learn about Deaf culture in North America. The stories that the Deaf have told each other, and have passed down. A world where everyone is deaf is one of the first stories you'll learn about; I'm not even sure when I first encountered it, but it was in that context.

One common modern version of the fable is told with an astronaut who finds that they've landed on a parallel Earth where everyone is Deaf and sign language is the norm.

The book A Study of American Deaf Folklore by Susan D Rutherford is a bit dated now but interesting in exploring the functions and roles of myths here.

Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities.

I am reminded that the Deaf have their own mythology. American Sign Language is distinct; it's not English. Accordingly it has its own culture, including its own myths. Many of them are fables and stories from the western tradition slightly adapted. But some are original.

One common theme in American Deaf mythology (but I'd bet it's told elsewhere too) is stories about a world which is visually oriented. There's an ASL word for this world but English doesn't have one. Sometimes it's translated as Eyeth a.k.a. "Eye-Earth".

It's more than just a world where everyone is deaf or where everyone communicates in ASL. It has something like spiritual meaning to some of those who tell stories about it; in that world the Deaf are not disabled, not in the social way that matters.

You're cheating with your world knowledge to guide the parsing.

eat man lion. lion man eat. man eat lion. eat lion man.

Who is eating who? When formed according to English grammar it doesn't leave any ambiguity even if the phrase is improbable: "The biscuit has eaten the girl."

Linguistic topology is the study of patterns in languages according to structure. It's a niche topic which is unfortunate because certain patterns hint at something about the structure of human thought.

Such as with word order. Verb in the middle or at the start or at the end? Subject before verb or after verb? Object before verb or after verb? Every permutation does exist in some language.

But object before subject and verb is extremely rare. And in the few languages which do it that way they do not do consistently with it often only occurring in certain moods or certain conditions of syntactic alignment.

To the mind not natural Yoda's speech is.

The GBP/USD currency pair is still known just as "the cable".

Aside from all its other uses: the telegraph gave a way to synchronize clocks. And accurate time is accurate measurement of distance.

> [...] The latest determination in 1892 is due to the cooperation of the McGill College Observatory at Montreal, Canada, with the Greenwich Observatory. [...] The final value for the longitude of the Harvard Observatory at Cambridge, as adjusted in June, 1897, is 4h 44m 31s.046 ±0s.048.

-- https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S

71.12936 W; give or take about 2 metres: https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=42.38148%7E-71.12936&style...

Perhaps a mixing issue on your end? Multi-channel audio has the dialog track separated. So you can increase the volume of the dialog if you want. Unfortunately I think there is variability in hardware (and software players) in how to down-mix, which sometimes results in background music in the surround channels drowning out the dialog in the centre channel.

> a rare case of rabies in a dog within the City of Chicago. This is the first rabies-positive dog identified in Cook County since before 1964

Rabies is quite rare in dogs in the USA. And breakthrough rabies in a previously vaccinated animal is exceptional.

Unusual behaviour from infectious diseases often gets attention on HN.

It's unfortunately true in southern Ontario, too. Indigenous people make up about 3% of Ontario's population, and they make up 20% of the population in provincial jails. The large disparity is also seen in Toronto, but since indigenous people are less than 1% of the population of Toronto, it doesn't show up so much in absolute terms.

Well, since you've opened Pandora's box: the highest rate of homicide (by perpetrator) among major ethnic groups in Canada is indigenous. (Also as victims: the child who died in Toronto was indigenous.) There's definitely something going on there with that statistic, but it's not because of immigration.

We do have a fair amount of gun homicide here in Canada; well above the average in many European countries and about 1/3rd the rate in the United States. But historically this was mostly crimes of passion, and organized crime. Someone would get real angry and kill their lover or business partner, or it would arise out of a dispute over criminal property. We've had spree killings, too.

What happened in Toronto with the death of that boy from a stray bullet in his mother's arms in his own home, is rather novel to Canadians. And I'm not sure what the ultimate effect will be. I'm not sure that gun control can get much more stricter domestically; while most people can buy a handgun in practice, they are heavily regulated such that lawfully licensed ones are only very rarely used in crimes.

The handguns used to murder almost all come from over the border. The way this intersects with the border and US foreign and trade policy re: Canada is hard to avoid. Free exchange with the USA increasingly is seen as a vulnerability.

> Would be interesting to see what Tolkien would think of modern urbanism movements. Feels very aligned with his values.

Still much too dense.

There was a movement, broadly contemporary with Tolkien, that somewhat reflect his views on this topic. The push at end of the late 19th century in the UK to create "garden cities". They were the first modern planned cities. Supposed to be communities of several tens of thousands, fully walkable, with industry and large ugly infrastructure hidden out of sight behind greenbelts.

They wouldn't really be built in that manner until after World War II and by then were much more car-centric.

I anticipate some skepticism on Tolkien's part about the basically progressive nature of the whole scheme. I think Tolkien was skeptical about the basic concept of social progress. His whole generation was. The War sort of ruined any hope of progress. He hated industrialization for a much deeper reason than just the automobile. The influence of the war on his anti-industrial and social views is hard to overstate:

> Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about,

That is surely from his memory, lifted directly from the Western Front.

Exposing large amounts of skin to the sun has other health risks when it is freezing outside. :)

Vitamin D deficiency is very common in Canada particularly during winter. The government recommends that everyone intentionally seek out vitamin D rich foods, or to take a supplement.

I won't try to defend Chomsky. (Not really a big fan even before this.) But if the mere mention of him is sus to you then I advise you to not study either linguistics or computer science because it's Chomsky normal forms and Chomsky hierarchies all the way down. There's even still people clinging to some iteration of the universal grammar despite the beating it has taken lately.

He's also one of the most prominent political thinkers on the American hard left for the last half century.

There's a joke going around for a while now that you either know Chomsky for his politics, or for his work in linguistics and discrete mathematics, and you are shocked to discover his other work. I guess we can extend that to a third category of fame, or infamy.

The leaked US National Security Strategy docs outline a plan to break up the EU:

> However, a longer, unpublished draft of the document was circulated prior to the official, public strategy. It reportedly goes into more detail about the plans the US has in store for Europe. According to the Washington-based digital media platform Defense One, which claims to have seen the draft, it lists Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary as countries that the US should "work more with … with the goal of pulling them away" from the European Union.The White House has denied the existence of any such draft.

https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...

Despite the WH claims it seems to have been generally accepted as true already in Europe; Germany's chancellor has commented publicly on it.

In the phonetic alphabet it's /e:/ vs. /ei/ and /o:/ vs. /ou/.

If you're an English speaker, you can be forgiven for a very stereotypical trait of the English accent. English speakers have a real hard time with the /e/ or /e:/ sounds as well as the /o/ and /o:/ sounds. Most English dialects don't have either a monophthong /e/ or /o/. Both the long and short tend to get heard as /eɪ/ and /oʊ/.

French enchanté /ɑ̃ ʃɑ̃ te/ is heard and borrowed as /ɑn.ʃɑn.teɪ/. German gehen /ge:n/ is heard as "gain" /geɪn/. And Japanese /o:/ and /ou/ both get heard as /oʊ/.

It's arguably a minimal pair in Japanese: 負う /ou/ (to carry), 王 /o:/ (king).

The old official system arguably makes more sense from a Japanese perspective.

If you look at the kana, the Japanese syllabic writing system, they have this ordering: ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te to, etc. If you follow the regularity where there should be a "ti" sound there is no "ti" sound and it happens to be pronounced "chi".

One common analysis holds that the underlying phonemes really are: ta ti tu te to. Traditional Japanese grammarians usually analyzed it this way. And they were historically pronounced that way: it has arisen out of relatively recent sound change. Somewhat like how some British speakers pronounce "Tuesday" such that it sounds much like "Chews-day" to speakers of other dialects. Affrication in a fixed context. The t phoneme triggers that kind of affrication obligatorily in Japanese, before the i vowel or y glide.

Some disagree with this as overly theoretic and based excessively on historical linguistics, and they insist that sh and f and ch are distinct phonemes in Japanese. But the Japanese writing system itself treats it as if they were not.

If you are learning Japanese it makes sense to pick a system that reflects the internal logic of kana spelling. If you want to just approximately pronounce Japanese words in English then you want something that reflects the logic of English spelling.

These two goals are always in tension. Mandarin pinyin, for example, was designed to reflect the logic of Mandarin phonology in a consistent way. It's not meant to be easily pronounceable by English speakers. It's to enable Mandarin speakers to look up words in a dictionary or for students of the language to study Mandarin. Though it has ended up used as a pronunciation guide for English speakers. And that often doesn't go well; a lot of English speakers don't know what to do with the q's and x's.

Ah! Perhaps it's only words like to counsel (counseled) or to libel (libeled); up in Canada here people usually write counselled or libelled.

It's not a line that's crossed. It's just the standard in Canada.

In Britain, aeroplanes are made of aluminium and they have tyres. The Ministry of Defence sends them out on manoeuvres in theatres of combat, where the pilots have generally excelled due to regular practice.

In America, airplanes are made of aluminum and they have tires. The Department of Defense sends them out on maneuvers in theaters of combat, where the pilots have generally exceled due to regular practise.

In Canada, airplanes are made of aluminum and they have tires. The Department of National Defence sends them out on manoeuvres in theatres of combat, where the pilots have generally excelled due to regular practice.

In my experience used games were often traded or passed around as bare cartridges. And that's how I got most of my games.

I've written a little bit before about KeyKOS/GNOSIS, which is the capability operating system used by Tymshare to host their timesharing language services on IBM mainframes, in the 70s and 80s. From a comment 3 years ago I'll just repost the relevant part:

> KeyKOS (developed by Tymshare for their commercial computing services in the 1970s) - A capability operating system. If everything in UNIX was a file, then everything in KeyKOS was a memory page and capabilities (keys) to access those pages. The kernel has no state that isn't calculated from values in the virtual memory storage. The system snapshots the virtual memory state regularly. There are subtle consequences from this. Executing processes are effectively memory-mapped files that constantly rewrite themselves, with only the snapshots being written out. Snapshotting the virtual memory state of the system snapshots everything -- including the state of running processes. There's no need for a file system, just a means to map names to sets of pages, which is done by an ordinary process. After a crash, processes and their state are internally consistent, and continue running from their last snapshot. For those who are intrigued, there's a good introduction, written in 1979, by the system's designers available here: http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/upenn/Gnosis/Gnosis.html (It was GNOSIS before being renamed KeyKOS.) And a later document written in the 90s aimed at UNIX users making the case: http://cap-lore.com/CapTheory/upenn/NanoKernel/NanoKernel.ht... Some work on capability systems continues, but it seems the lessons learned have largely been forgotten.

The core abstraction is simpler than the Unix process model or that of many other operating systems. Processes have keys which access virtual memory pages. All of storage including persistent secondary storage is just one big pool of virtual memory pages. These can be shared between processes. That's all that's necessary to implement things like filesystems and networking which are often thought to require special handling. A filesystem is just names and addresses of pages in storage. Give a process a capability to do shared memory with a process that maintains such a structure. I find the emphasis on minimizing process and kernel state, such that processes can be snapshot and frozen at any time and are inherently persistent, handled as the set of the relevant pages, to be genius. Though the architecture does have the classic microkernel/nanokernel performance penalties, as have been long debated.

They aren't the only ones. Quite a few nuclear sources have been lost.

The Soviet Union used radiodecay thermoelectric generators with breathtaking liberalness. Radio relay links, lighthouses, nav beacons, remote weather sensors. Approximately a thousand nuclear batteries were made and deployed. The budget for their maintenance fell with the USSR. While a lot of them have been collected, there's still hundreds still out there.

In 2001 a group of men in rural Georgia [0] stumbled across one; unaware of the nature of what they found, they took benefit from the warmth of it on a cold night. Three were sickened and one died of radiation poisoning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

Not for the data path; the 68000 operates on 32 bit values 16 bits at a time, both through its external 16 bit bus and internal 16 bit ALU. Most 32 bit operations take more cycles. But yes, it has a 32 bit programming model.

Rust has two parents; it got its looks from C, but much of its character was inherited from its other, less commonly mentioned parent -- ML. Rust has a variation of the Hindley-Milner type system, quite similar to ML (or Haskell). Rust's enum and struct are algebraic data types, also known as sum or product records or types. The type system and pattern matching enable declarative and functional styles of programming that are much less natural to express in C.