srvmshr

From ACM:

ACM has named Avi Wigderson as recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.

Wigderson is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been a leading figure in areas including computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, combinatorics, and graph theory, as well as connections between theoretical computer science and mathematics and science.

Also of interest, he has won the Abel Prize in 2021, making it a rather unique combination of winning the top honors in both theoretical/abstract math & CS

It may not be the Wifi but something more upstream. If ISPs interlinks have microwave towers, then the physical swaying would have some effect on channel interference. I don't quite understand how (because the general direction remains the same over large distance) - but I have observed this to happen.

I keep Adobe products only on iPad or iPhone, where the app seems sandboxed. In Mac/Windows, Adobe CC (or any product line FWIW) spawns files and folders like cancer in /Library or /System. It's just hallmark bad software engineering.

Windows 8 Metro UI and its flat glyph-inspired iconset (similar to minimalist signage, e.g in EU traffic signs) was such a disaster that 8.1, that soon followed, allowed options to toggle between Metro (for those who preferred) and the classic Windows 7 look & icons. It was called Legacy UI in their options.

Truthfully Haiku/BeOS was closer to Bluecurve and OS/2 pretty much inspired Windows 95 & 98.

Windows 2000 startup screen (as well as the ill-received Windows Me) was very elegant for its time. I think the Windows 7 GUI emulation in 8.1 was also pretty good.

> Then it gets all silky with frosted glass, desaturated colours, and muted gradients, which just does not have the Aqua feel to me

The JonnyIvification of Apple interfaces starting with Mavericks & iOS7. Although it has grown on us, the flat designs were very jarring back then. Our brains were so used to pill shaped buttons & then everything felt flat

I sort of agree with that. That was the peak Linux GUI we saw (at least so far). Sadly after the Gnome GTK2 vs GTK3 forks, none of the child products carried the same finesse as Gnome 2.4/Bluecurve. They were sharp, colorful and vibrant. Windows icons seemed more 'classic' versus the KDE-inspired Bluecurve, Clearlooks which were more playful.

Getting reminded of late 90s & early 2000s design choices, the glassy feel of Bluecurve icon themes of Redhat Linux looked way ahead of their competition [1] Most people didn't have access to Classic Macs OS 8.5~9, which probably had beautiful icon sets too (Aqua?). As a highschooler, this looked so futuristic & colorful as compared to 2000/XP desktop themes & icons.

EDIT: Adding as postscript: Is there anything similar which would come close to Bluecurve today? TIA if there is anything in reader's minds.

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/GNOME_2....

2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Fedora-y...

Japanese bath areas are 99% of the time separate from toilets. And the Toto models don't require a hot water line. Yet its pretty common to have heated jet functions. These models allow these features. Its more to do with economics of widespread availability.

The ones I have used in the last few years all have a small instant warmer unit. Japanese homes don't always have access to hot water tank & even the shower space is serviced by a electronically activated gas heater.

Source: I live here in JP, and my parent company's main revenue stream is from gas heaters OEM, heating appliances and even bespoke plumbing & installations.

Those streams and rivers exist. Look up industrial pollution in China, India or Vietnam. The manufacturing base which got pollution to that point is just geographically shifted.

When running industries, there is unfortunately no free lunch -- someone's paying the consequences. If not you, someone upstream who made the raw materials or any priors.

I am by no means a Modi supporter. All my replies have been scathing and critical of his government.

That said I am amused too, at how you are completely normalizing Trump and Modi -- two autocrats of varying ambitions. But last I checked, only one is a convicted felon from sexual assualt to the theft of strategic security material. US did not give Trump a second term, but he is having enough second chances at anything -- including the presidency -- after these legal hurdles. That says heftily of the public support. Same situation is probably unheard in any country today -- including India. Remember Rajiv Gandhi? He'd have been jailed had he not been assassinated. That is not an opinion but facts. India is poorer but political checks and balances have traditionally worked better. The fourth estate has made people accountable even if they are under fire over time. We have our versions of Fox News but there is difference. Else IndiaTV wouldn't be a butt of jokes even among far right. Speaking of this as someone who has voted against BJP consistently after the Vajpayee era

You have a grudge against my opinion -- feel free to. I started this discussion by saying we have different viewpoints of how social media is influencing people. I lived in both places in the last decade. I see it first place. I am by no means pointing fingers at you. You can be at peace with your world model. "The political shitshow in US is incomparable to anywhere else & a lot of it is voter ignorances" is probably the best tldr I could offer. You can choose to disagree, like I do for your viewpoint.

> The US style of 2 party system of presidential democracy and the role of electroral college are a bit problematic but the average US citizen isn't less political aware than the average Indian.

I don't think I will agree with you there again. But then we all have viewpoints and you can agree to disagree. I could similarly opine that you believe in a simpler, universal model of how political demagoguery works. Different populations respond to different degrees.

Looking at the voting bloc supporting DJT which is strongly pro-GOP/MAGA despite the dozens of legal challenges, the attempt to insurrection and felonies - that is unprecedented in any other place. My previous neighbors in NC still believe every one of the legal case is schadenfreude, and cannot understand why J6 actions were illegal and why "elections were not stolen". This is not a single person anecdote. A lot of educated people - working as nurse, technicians, delivery people just don't understand. I don't think this is just about loyalties. There is more at play. They are oblivious to many technicalities of governance and take the campaign email's/sms bulletpoints at face value. These are the target audience for TikTok based political influencing.

If the poor in India scrounging for two meals don't understand political big picture, I can excuse that. How can the recent right-wing tribalism among educated, well to do people in US explainable? I know social awareness cannot be quantified, but this perception is not just mine. The way conservative faction is getting away with its shenanigans despite so many challenges makes people everywhere else wonder why US voter factions for e.g. in Midwest and South are so so gullible & what could be done for awareness

Your experience could vary from mine, but the average boomer in India loves having political discussion on dinner tables, stemming from what they probably read in the papers or from channel switching over the day. TikTok hardly scratches their surface. While I understand Mr. Modi has been pretty influential on media houses, there are plenty of publishers like Indian Express or Dainik Jagran (in Hindi), or TV broadcasters like NDTV, The Wire etc., who don't mind calling Modi's spade a spade. TikTok isn't the main medium of influence in India. Facebook is, and the news & views is primarily still shared there

Let me show the political influencing landscape in brief: I have lived in both the aforementioned countries and I could unequivocally feel that the average Indian is more aware of political current affairs. Even if final choices could be biased on the Hinduist/nationalist leanings (which is unfortunately a relatively new dynamics), they are not blind to what is happening. Many would call Modi a crook but do not want the alternative posed by Congress and still vote for him. Religious minority appeasing and Reservation biases have been abused so badly in last 3 decades by the opposition (which was in power) that people are now blind to the agenda people like Mr. Modi exort. Their responses are mostly reactionary to lost opportunities of work/social mobility. BJP in India has been projecting itself as savior of masses by bringing in measures, which would have been undemocratic 2 decades ago (e.g Article 370 abrogation or CAA recently). This is in stark contrast to people in US growing up leaning Blue or Red all through their lives, because their family or county has always voted that. If you ask why they chose to, the answer is almost always political party loyalty (and not the agenda). Coming November we will see this again when despite of so many legal predicaments, Donald Trump might still competing hard for presidency based on traditional loyalties. TikTok is aimed at the fence-sitters in US with dramatic immigration, crime or socioeconomic shock videos. When you have a crowd that is not in know-how of current political affairs, TikTok is enough to create disruption. If you had to do that in India, probably Facebook is the weapon of choice.

TikTok bans in India and US are very different.

India did it as a kneejerk response to the Doklam border incident of 2020. When you don't intend a full scale war,the other recourse is to hurt China economically. I distinctly remember the wave that followed of boycotting Chinese goods as much as possible. TikTok is the outcome of that.

While it doesn't do much politically, the ban was to hurt Bytedance. When 80-100 million people go dark on a certain social media platform, those numbers don't look good. When Bytedance wants MAU stats to leverage against the next expansion loans or merger (possibly), this could hurt them. Or simply revenue from ads. With the US it is pure political influence on the sly which the government is afraid of. Indians are tough audience to sway that way from my experience.

As far as I understand reading the article (and some Wiki pages around it), it seems to be a consortium of people trying to protect the dark night sky. However, this article hasn't made it clear if the 'sanctuary' implies it has got NPS or State's protection in reaching that objective.

The sanctuary is a term which was introduced in the last decade, and with loose subjective definition

> Sanctuaries are the most remote (and often darkest) places in the world whose conservation state is most fragile.

> In 2015, the IDA introduced the term "Dark Sky Sanctuary" and designated the Elqui Valley of northern Chile as the world's first International Dark Sky Sanctuary.

There are legally protected zones like mentioned in [1], but seem to cover smaller patches of area. But how is a sanctuary protected by legal enforceable measures isn't described in the same spirit. Probably this is something area experts & conservationists know better.

The verbiage is at best a tad confusing IMHO. While places like Central Australia or South NZ is remote, Oregon outback is much more accessible. I'd wager Star valley is on similar league of being pristine and yet more remote being in WY.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark-sky_preserve

Asking as a complete amateur, how do these people databases & privacy companies work? They claim to get personal details, family connections, social media content and even court records etc for not-so-exhorbitant price ($30 per report as ballpark?)

Do they just scam people by compiling whatever is available on search engines? In one or two cases, I have seen them at least giving the house address or family member details right. So there seems to be more at play.

But has it been passed by the State congress as a law/regulation? Curious to learn more. The article does not tell more than this snippet

> The designation was given by DarkSky International, an organization dedicated to protecting the nighttime environment and preserving dark skies through environmentally responsible outdoor lighting. The project is the work of the Oregon Dark Sky Network, an ad-hoc group of state, local and federal officials, private individuals, business owners and tourism agencies.

If only a nonprofit is claiming it, unless they purchased the land, this isn't legally enforceable without a heavy-handed backing of state government. Such protections have to get cemented by some legislation as the next step.

Unless I am missing the distinction, Oregon outback us being protected as a sanctuary whereas Central Australia, Kazakhstan plains, Hokkaido in Japan etc. are larger but without any guarantees of dark sky protection (?). Please correct me if this understanding is wrong, because I saw some other HNers raising this point.

I have an active Instagram account. Today, coincidentally was the first time I thought of promoting my best few posts as an ad to improve reach to fellow photographers. Bad luck! The app now seems to be back online but my ads which were supposed to run for 48-72 hours, show <Disabled>. And there is a new "Pay Now" link, even though it was paid for and seems ad-spend is already showing it used some of that payment.

As an individual, this is pretty confusing. I don't have much to lose. I am glad I spent 10-15 bucks on favorite 2-3 posts only. I can imagine many others to be more affected. What is normally to be expected for SME users? Does Meta resume the ads automatically? Do they make good for the lost time since the clock seems to be ticking -- although no one saw any impression.

Edit: I submitted a ticket to Instagram Help and they responded by asking for a screencast video. The first time I sent, the video bounced. I have re-sent this by trimming the video.

Out of curiosity I want to know firsthand how Meta handles the small customers.

This part is so true. Adobe under-the-hood SWE feels so shoddy. It feels as if their products, although delivering the good, is strung up by different patchworks. And it spawns files & folders all over your system

China Eastern 5735 was suspected to have gone down due to pilot suicide, but the media rarely talks anything about it even after a year. Maybe future report might tell.

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

To have this kind of perfect reproduction, 3 poses need to be in 3 separate global shutter readouts (at best) within space of 0.12~0.15s i.e a burst at about 8-10 fps.

iPhone sensor still raster-reads so I would have expected more motion between these three poses in that time span. I feel by the pose and image quality, there was more time in between

Rolling shutter doesn't produce such clean discrete artifacts, but more of how rotors are bent for helicopters when readout between motion isn't fast enough. This image is as if global shutter took 3 separate shots of 3 separate poses within a space of 0.12~0.15s each

Probably need to have iOS beta enabled explicitly or have a TestFlight account to actually access such feature. I too feel this photograph was stage managed somehow

Hi Francois, will there be breaking changes between 2.0 & 3.0 API

My advisor used to say:

"One of the CS bestsellers which is seldom read. That puts it right next to Bible"

From the practical element, mostly No. People won't use this as a first book - or the second or third. But if you wanted a reference on something deeper, which missed any of the standard textbooks, this is the book for you.

As an illustrative layman example, lets say you are modeling server usage with a mathematical model, most textbooks will tell you "hey, the pings and handshakes closely follow Poisson distribution". You pick from there and build on that information or mental model. But why Poisson model happens to be that way, why not something else - and how closely the server model cross-correlates will be realm of where TAOCP starts building the problem. It goes a layer or two deeper of yak shaving IMHO

> are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using the experience you gained working for a company ?

No but adding implementations to competiting company's product based on the innovations seen in the first falls squarely under IP misuse (At the least, bypassing patent licensing etc.)

Software domain would see acrimonious litigations cases based on mundane things like the rubber band scrolling (Apple vs. Samsung). Adding readout specific databus improves acquisition speeds by order of 2 or 3x - and that is not a trivial change which can be disregarded. Most times they've been misused since they were minor trade secrets not patents. There was no way to attempt litigation in this one without opening up certain parts of software ecosystem to legal scrutiny/comparison (which probably exposes more IP).

In the case which I referred to being personally privy, a high-speed data bus of a rapid imaging system (which was a crowning advantage for the first) was 'adapted' over in a slightly different form. Personally, you could say "as long as they didn't Ctrl-C/V it is fine", but then implanting a winning feature to the competition product is a red flag to me. That databus didn't exist previously as a feature - and its addition was a innovation in rapidity.

This happened in 1999-2001, so it isn't recent & won't affect any outcomes. But it goes on to say it can blunt a prior client company's competitive advantage.

Without sounding controversial and having peers in Infosys/TCS since college days, I can attest that leaking design & implementation decisions between projects is very common in consultancies. I have personally privy to one such story where choices made in one healthcare giant's systems were "modified/adapted" to another. IP issues galore, these should be red flags but sneak under the radar being a consultancy