skottk

To paraphrase someone on Bluesky, why should I read a book that no one could be bothered to write?

Parameterized SQL is your friend here.

Either just by having developed their brains in a way that word facts just stick, or by constantly seeking out new word facts because that's what they love doing.

I believe that the gentleman in this case instantly saw the word 'cinematographer' hiding in 'megachiropteran' because his brain is a highly trained anagramming machine, and knew that it wasn't allowed because he knew all of the allowed 15-letter words, just in case he might get the opportunity to play one.

High-level players memorize staggering numbers of words. All 2- and 3- letter words is entry-level. All X-J-Q-Z, all Q-without-U, all words you ending in -MAN, all 70+ 7-letter words of the form SATINE+... top-level players know the 4000 4-letter words, the 5000 5's, and way, way more.

This (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/scrabble-records-highest-sco...) lists cases in which 15-letter words were played by adding prefixes or suffixes to other words.

No?

In a book release event for Stefan Fatsis's book on tournament Scrabble players, Word Freak, the host posed the "megachiropteran" anagram as a trivia question for a book giveaway.

One of the top players in my club _instantly_ replied "cinematographer," and added, "but megachiropteran isn't in the OSPD [Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary], so it doesn't really count."

Had to start researching this when a family member was recently diagnosed.

Parkinson's has many forms and many causes. There's a big divide between Parkinson's _disease_ (idiopathic Parkinson's) and Parkinsonism from a variety of sources - stroke, drug-induced, and so on. There are also other conditions, like progressive supranuclear palsy, that are considered either to masquerade as Parkinsonism or to constitute another cause of Parkinsonism.

Recommended treatments differ by the root cause of the symptoms. Some of the treatments that are recommended for one form may be contraindicated for other forms, or for different stages. For example, the recommended dopamine agonists are also the primary cause of Parkinson's hallucinations, so you have to trade back some strength and mobility if those start.

Something like 80% of Parkinsonism derives from idiopathic Parkinson's Disease.

Overall, it feels like we're really just getting started on these conditions. For decades, it's been thought to be primarily a motor disorder, but it turns out that there are scads of cognitive symptoms that develop years earlier than motor symptoms.

Wow, that was a long time to wait before finding out what the site is trying to show me.

Many employers effectively force exempt employees to work 12 hour days.

If the ROI was measured in terms of "someone got to hang out with Matthew McConaughey a certain number of times annually", I'm sure you're correct.

They're often extremely impressive people. Sometimes you don't find out what they're really working on for a long time, sometimes you never do.

Sometimes you find out after it's too late.

And that in some cases they assume familiarity with a large body of knowledge of _other_ people's commentaries on the works, and in fact, those second-hand sources are what they're really responding to.

The greatest weakness of the school is that the list of works was compiled in 1922 and has changed only incrementally since. It's also a great _strength_ of the school, but you could enter the world in 1988 from SJC knowing absolutely nothing about it. I'm sure that that's still true now.

Talking about them in a small class of people who read the same thing at the same time, led by 1 or 2 professors who are practiced in _not_ acting like more than advanced students, is _really_ different from just reading the book.

I'd read _Pride and Prejudice_ many times before the seminar on it, and I could not have predicted what other people saw in the book and wanted to talk about with a pile of postit notes, a ball of red yarn, and ten hours in front of a big wall.

That's what you do literally every day in math - take turns going to the board and working through proofs. Ptolemy is Waterloo for anyone who has trouble drawing big circles.

We actually read some Descartes in math-- some of the papers from which we get the term "Cartesian coordinates." What he does in those papers fascinating, but has very little to do with the way that we learn and use Cartesian coordinates.

Class of '87 here. Most valuable takeaway is that you can read almost _anything_ directly or in translation. You don't need to read a summary of Hegel, you can read Hegel. You don't need to read an article about a Supreme Court case like Marbury v. Madison, you can read the case itself.

When you go into technology, you're then willing to dive into the guts of the actual docs instead of waiting for a book or blog post about it. Another way it prepares you for tech-- understanding philosophy is the skill of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Designing software is also the skill of drawing incredibly fine distinctions between things. Having years of experience in arguing these incredibly fine distinctions was a huge leg up fr me when I was getting started, and remains useful to this day.

I think that the careers of my graduating class are primarily in software, law, academia, and medicine.

Funny things about it - there are a lot of places where your undergrad experience just doesn't overlap with that of people who didn't go there. Everyone studies the same thing at SJC, so if I meet a Johnny who went there years after me or years before, I can tell them what I did for my senior thesis and they'll have a similar reaction - why the hell did you do that? It's also _extremely_ small, so if they went there during the same years I did, I almost certainly know them.

The original-works thing works gangbusters on philosophy, science, and literature, and breaks down a little in math. You spend a frustrating amount of time doing Ptolemaic astronomy, because it's an excellent classical treatment of trigonometry. You study Newton for calculus, but you don't actually learn anything that the modern world thinks of as calculus from Newton, so you study supplemental materials that teach you derivatives and integrals over algebraic expressions.

It's culturally pretty liberal on the inside, although it's bizarrely worshipped by some right-wingers who didn't go there because of the curriculum's focus on works from the European tradition.

Save the Cat specifies page numbers because scripts are formatted to one page/minute of screen time, and movies have ideal lengths.

If you can't turn to the exact center page and find the climax, the script is either formatted wrong (wasting your time) or written wrong (wasting your money).

Overall, when someone says _my favorite movie X_ doesn't fit this pattern or _legendary novel_ Y doesn't do this at all -- well, sometimes they might be right about that, but many, many non-linear movies and books still hit the beats Save the Cat describes.

Petal pounds sites. Ignores 429, hits the same pages repeatedly Easy block for us. Behavior is so similar to bad actors, I was surprised to find that it had documentation.

I assume at this point that this library has been audited many, many times by skilled professionals, none of whom thought to abuse the template + JNDI + LDAP chain in this way.

It's just not as simple as "security audit finds all the vulnerabilities, then you fix them." You invest X in the review, you get the results that X/(hourly rate) finds. This is a lot of software with a ton of configurability-- that's a lot of variations to review and test.

Now that someone found the first lump of gold and gave it away, there are thousands of eyes searching for the next one. These recent findings are all abuses of this same chain of functionality, just along different sets of settings. In another month we might have half-a dozen more of varying severity and scope. That _still_ won't prove that the overall library is then safe, but we will probably have a a little more confidence in this particular bit of crazy template formatting flexibility. Maybe not as much as we had had three weeks ago, but more than we do now.

The comparison of AWS WAF to Sophos could not be more misleading. It’s an engine for building a limited set of HTTP exploit detections, and has nothing to do with endpoint protection whatsoever.

Possibly, in all history, the major author who wrote the most words about how he hated it when people spelled his name wrong.

And _then_ breaks?

I stopped using it when it became a cryptocurrency client.

Not a lawyer, software guy working in licensing & copyright for 20+ years. Was paid for a few years to talk about this stuff with tech and publishing people.

They're requesting the takedown under 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201] It's a few paragraphs of the actual law at stake here. There's no much to it.

Essentially, they're arguing that Youtube's normal stream distribution technology is "effectively control[ling] access to a work." Given 3A & B from the link above, that will take a fair amount of arguing - there's no encryption, there's nothing that requires information under the authority of the copyright holder (like a key) to descramble the information.

Unless the repo has code that's breaking browser-based DRM, in which all bets are off - breaking DRM is by definition circumventing a technical protection. Doesn't matter if it was easy to break-- you break encryption, there's no more argument over whether you're circumventing. Decryption is right there in the text of the law.

Github agreed to the takedown because they don't want to be distributing a circumvention tool, and they don't feel like going to court over whether this is a circumvention tool or not. There are a lot of repos out there, you can't go to court over every single one. I'd be surprised if it stayed up on GitLab for much more than a New York minute, either.

The EFF might fight this, because there's a pretty good argument around the noninfringing uses; however, they also might not, because there's not much of an argument around whether it violates the Google Terms.

Some us are mentioning that there are use cases for this software that don't infringe copyright. That goes back to Sony v Universal, the VCR/Betamax case, which permitted the production and sale of technologies with "substantial noninfringing uses." In the case of the VCR, the particular noninfringing use was time-shifting of broadcast television, taping shows to watch later. The noninfringing uses here are around downloading works that are in the public domain or Creative Commons, and definitely around offline use. Easily a colorable argument.

The file sharing cases of the early 2000's have drawn some lines around the noninfringing use defense, though. Napster and Grokster both claimed, in court, to support noninfringing uses. However, both products promoted their products as offering free access to copyright-protected works, and the courts took notice of that in both cases-- I believe that the Grokster opinion may have noted that Grokster had never mentioned a noninfringing use outside the trial.

IOW, if you're providing a dual-use technology for noninfringing use that is also capable of infringing use, you absolutely cannot promote the infringing uses to the exclusion of others. Not only do you draw unwanted attention to yourself, you may actually (as in Napster and Grokster) invalidate the most important defense that you have for your activities.

And here I thought that my years fighting with UML modeling tools would go completely wasted.

More than intelligence, performance on tests is affected by training.

Nope - it's the unlicensed transmission that this decision covers. The opinion actually states that a cable company (with its licenses) would be able to offer the DVR portion of the service. The DVR thing was covered in the Second Circuit's Cartoon Network/Cablevision decision. It's what gave Aereo the idea to try the many-antennas approach. The biggest difference is that Cablevision has broadcast licenses.

Aereo was banking on partially-relevant case law - not the statute itself - from the Second Circuit which was contradicted elsewhere in the US.

The user involvement bit is addressing the Cartoon Network case regarding Cablevision's remote DVR architecture that Aereo is based on.

Cablevision designed a remote DVR system that made transient, user-specific copies based on the user's pressing a button on their set-top-box remote. In their defense against Cartoon Network et al., Cablevision made the "volitional conduct" defense that Scalia talks about in the dissent here- essentially, that the user who pressed the button was responsible for making the copy. Cablevision won at trial and on appeal in the Second Circuit.

The biggest difference between the Cablevision case and the Aereo case is that Cablevision has and pays for the broadcast licenses that Aereo was trying to avoid having to obtain.

Your points about the way law works are exactly where technical people often run into trouble when they reason about the law.

Given that the TV broadcasters are paying for the right to broadcast (often gigantic amounts of money), I don't see a problem with preventing an Aereo from free-riding on that privilege. YMMV.