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untilted

593 karma · joined November 27, 2015

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untilted··on Neomacs: GPU rendered Rust hard fork of Emacs
GPLv3: https://github.com/eval-exec/neomacs/blob/main/COPYING
untilted··on Poker fraud used X-ray tables, high-tech glasses and NBA players
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcoB3G2Gj7w
untilted··on The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin()
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/809/
untilted··on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
Once per ip. Presumably there's ip-based rate limiting implemented on top of this, so it's a barrier for scrapers that aggressively rotate ip's to circumvent rate limits.
untilted··on Emacs 30.1 Released
> The Emacs extensible text editor (among other things) has made a security release to address two vulnerabilities. Emacs 30.1 has fixes for CVE-2025-1244, which is a shell-command-injection flaw in the man.el man page browser and for CVE-2024-53920, which is a code-execution vulnerability in the flymake syntax-checking mode. LWN covered the flymake problems back in December.
untilted··on Traits are a local maximum
> Compare that to, like, lexical scoping or parametric polymorphism, which most languages just have by default at this point. They’re almost mathematical facts.

FWIW emacs lisp (in)famously still defaults to dynamic scoping -- there's been a proposal to change that default earlier this month but interestingly, there's still pushback. See e.g. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-11/msg00...

untilted··on Mathematicians prove Hawking wrong about the most extreme black holes
Just to add to this -- In QM/QFT there is an inverse relationship between energy & distance, meaning small distances (or sizes) correspond to high energy interactions (see e.g. [1]). One consequence is that at small enough scale (the Planck scale), the energy scale gets so large that quantum gravity effects are expected to be non-negligible. Formulating a theory of quantum gravity that fits into the Standard Model of particle physics & agrees with general relativity is an open problem in physics, therefore the Planck scale is at least the smallest distance that can conceivably be modeled given our current knowledge.

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/731971/equivalen...

untilted··on The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
A physical sphere has a finite number of constituents, therefore the theorem does not apply
untilted··on The original magic Emacs garbage collection hack (2019)
It's now the default on the development branch: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=3328c...

It's _not_ the default in any official release, yet. Although plenty of distros have either a separate package enabling it (or have enabled it in the main package)

untilted··on The original magic Emacs garbage collection hack (2019)
Of note, this is a post by Andrea Corallo, the legend who brought native compilation to emacs lisp a few years back
untilted··on Atlas Air Boeing 747-8 from Miami International Airport Catches Fire Mid Air
https://youtu.be/eEwC8GVDbKA?si=Dogsu39-LiJjQDA1
untilted··on British Airways B789 smoke in cabin, phone stuck in seat
Most recent flights I've been on, it was specifically stated it was a fire hazard in the safety announcement
untilted··on Emacs Bedrock: A minimal Emacs starter kit
One of the lead maintainers (Eli Zaretskii) develops mostly on Windows IIRC. I think you'll be fine.
untilted··on GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?
GNU parallel supports bash functions, provided you "export -f" them beforehand
untilted··on UC Berkeley launches SkyPilot to help navigate soaring cloud costs
A lot of Berkeley researchers use the NERSC facilities at the nearby Berkeley National Lab: https://www.nersc.gov/
untilted··on Emacs User Survey (2022)
Here's the discussion for this year: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-05/msg00...

I don't remember any opposition from leadership

untilted··on Emacs User Survey (2022)
Eli Zaretskii, one of the emacs lead maintainers, develops mostly on a windows platform, if I'm not mistaken. As such it may be worth a shot to report windows-specific issues to their bug tracker.
untilted··on Emacs User Survey (2022)
> Looking at the 'view your own result dump' it seems that it didn't record anything past the first page.

That was reported a few times in other places. According to the maintainer, there's a bug with the display/exporting, but the whole data still gets correctly recorded.

c.f. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-10/msg01...

untilted··on Debian votes to include proprietary firmware, amends social contract
One issue with that strategy is accessibility; e.g. a case that was actually cited at the onset of the discussion that lead to the vote are blind users that need specific firmware to use their audio interface, without which they simply cannot use the installer
untilted··on Dark Matter Doesn't Exist
(Disclaimer: am particle physicist, but not a cosmologist) For a bit of context, see Sec. III.6 of https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05208 ("Challenges for ΛCDM: An update", where ΛCDM is the "standard model of cosmology"). The linked article refers to _known_ problems that this model has describing small scale structures. That dark matter doesn't exists seems like a non-sequitur to me.
untilted··on Black holes finally proven mathematically stable
check for yourself: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.14808.pdf
untilted··on Emacs’s Builtin Elisp Cheat Sheet
Elisp now supports "shorthands", a kind of cheap namespace system. It's very recent so virtually unused in the wild.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Sh...

untilted··on Attribution-Based Explanations That Provide Recourse Cannot Be Robust
Abstract: "Different users of machine learning methods require different explanations, depending on their goals. To make machine learning accountable to society, one important goal is to get actionable options for recourse, which allow an affected user to change the decision f(x) of a machine learning system by making limited changes to its input x. We formalize this by providing a general definition of recourse sensitivity, which needs to be instantiated with a utility function that describes which changes to the decisions are relevant to the user. This definition applies to local attribution methods, which attribute an importance weight to each input feature. It is often argued that such local attributions should be robust, in the sense that a small change in the input x that is being explained, should not cause a large change in the feature weights. However, we prove formally that it is in general impossible for any single attribution method to be both recourse sensitive and robust at the same time. It follows that there must always exist counterexamples to at least one of these properties. We provide such counterexamples for several popular attribution methods, including LIME, SHAP, Integrated Gradients and SmoothGrad. Our results also cover counterfactual explanations, which may be viewed as attributions that describe a perturbation of x. We further discuss possible ways to work around our impossibility result, for instance by allowing the output to consist of sets with multiple attributions. Finally, we strengthen our impossibility result for the restricted case where users are only able to change a single attribute of x, by providing an exact characterization of the functions f to which impossibility applies."
untilted··on What’s new in Emacs 28.1?
Agreed, the Sculpt coupled with an vertical mouse has been a game changer for me
untilted··on What’s new in Emacs 28.1?
my .02$: get an ergonomic keyboard (I use the MS Sculpt keyboard nowadays), and learn to type like a pianist (use both hands, don't be afraid to move them to minimise strain).
untilted··on The AN-225: How the Cold War created the world's largest airplane
Another factor that was mentioned when it flew medical supplies to Montreal is that the An-225 always flies with all the crew it needs, including replacements, and so it was feasible for the plane to wait for a few hours while the logistics were being sorted out (e.g. cash-and-carry deals right on the tarmac, the situation was reportedly crazy in march/april). With another plane/airline, the time slot may be too tight because of crew schedules, etc.
untilted··on MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
https://xkcd.com/1831/
untilted··on How does the coronavirus kill?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_X
untilted··on Emacs 25.3 released
> This is an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in Emacs.

> Enriched Text mode has its support for decoding 'x-display' disabled. This feature allows saving 'display' properties as part of text. Emacs 'display' properties support evaluation of arbitrary Lisp forms as part of instantiating the property, so decoding 'x-display' is vulnerable to executing arbitrary malicious Lisp code included in the text (e.g., sent as part of an email message).

> This vulnerability was introduced in Emacs 19.29. To work around that in Emacs versions before 25.3, append the following to your ~/.emacs init file:

  (eval-after-load "enriched"
    '(defun enriched-decode-display-prop (start end &optional param)
       (list start end)))
> Gnus no longer supports "richtext" and "enriched" inline MIME objects. This support was disabled to avoid evaluation of arbitrary Lisp code contained in email messages and news articles.
untilted··on Why Feynman Diagrams Are So Important
Just to add to this: The part that comes this initial gluon emission (hadronization) is not very well understood since at this length scale the perturbative (i.e., feynman diagram) approach to QCD breaks down. See e.g. http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2010/12/11/when-feynman-diagra...
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