skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox has about 3% market share on desktop and declining each year.

And there are plenty of ad blockers on iOS.
>Yes. This is the entire point of the article. It was an advanced civilisation

Nowhere as back as "the bronze age" though. More like "well into the 14-15th century".

>Then it fell to the point that it could be colonised by its former inferiors.

Not very difficult since they eventually had the looting of the Americas and gunpowder to their advantage. Even with that, they came close to being conquered themselves when the Ottomans went westwards (not to mention the Caliphate of Cordoba).
The coping business
I'm pretty sure that this line is supposed to be tongue in cheek. Everything is god's, some of it is Caesar's.
I have never met an engineer in person who believes this, and without fail any one in my career I have talked to says college is invaluable.

The only place I see this thinking is on Reddit or among people who aren’t engineers. It’s something people want to believe from the outside.

There are probably rare exceptional people who grasped all of the fundamentals without college, but I have never met one.
I can't even hit the paywall. The Economist has blocked me for years.
If you have a scoring system that tells you how "AI-like" a picture is... congrats, you built a loss function that can be used to train AI.
> On the other hand, who can observe the actions of deep sea mining?

It should be trivial to observe drilling and excavation vessels loitering, and ore carriers leaving the site.

Not to mention that mining claims will have to be registered somewhere. (And if you don't, someone else will observe you excavating, and register their own claim on your site, and start digging alongside you. You may get a postcard and a thank-you note for the prospecting legwork you've done for your competitor.)

Mining has an incredible footprint of manpower and machinery. You can't keep it secret.
And you really leave us hanging here with so little information
Maybe I'm being too generous, but I didn't take that to be meant in a literal, historical sense. I mean for the purpose of metaphor, a literary trope is just as good as factually accurate history. The point is that people can relate.
I wonder if one of these coding assistant things could be trained to port autotools to cmake [1]? That is, finally transition away from it.... autotools is cryptic and slow and this cacher is 20 years old and hasn't caught on.

Or alternatively, could the coding assistant be trained to /simplify/ the autotools config to remove all the obsolete tests and make it fast and short?

[1 or meson or whatever the leading alternative is.
> Our own ultra conservatives are too few to get such a permanent headlock on society.

Lifetime judicial appointments in the US have me wondering what we are in, if not a headlock.
Fujifilm is a much smaller company than Kodak was. They also applied a lot of their expertise in emulsions to medical applications.

And, yes, they have some interesting if somewhat niche cameras.
My sister struggled to get basic disability (she was the most socially incapable person I've met in my life, to the point that only my mom and her kids talked to her near the end). My folks spent their meager savings to support her while she appealed over and over. She had addiction issues. So everyone in the court system just saw her as a lazy bum trying to scam the system. My parents had to work longer because of that. She ended up killing herself after a long period of homelessness, finally getting public support after moving to a different state and getting therapy, but it was too late. Some of that is on us, as family members, for having not been able to put up with her and blocking her. But a HUGE portion of the problem was her struggle just to be recognized for her issues.
Meanwhile my mom (truly loving and caring, so it drives me nuts) in the 90s was like "HILLARY CLINTON SHUT DOWN ALL THE MENTAL INSTITUTIONS" (meanwhile she voted for Republicans ever since I was a kid, and the push to close them came during the Reagan Era). She was correct that the Clintons were part of that endeavor, but then just fell hook line and sinker with the partisan propaganda instead of being able to assign blame. And continuing to support politicians who are bound and determined to "cut cut cut". She saw first hand what the system does, and still supported it, because I guess better a fetus not be aborted, than a grown ass adult human stays living.
A crowd is also easy to hide in if it's not actually watching things closely. I expect the actual solution is that we move to sponsored open source, closed contribution projects. No way can we depend on the C equivalent of a random nodejs package for our most important infrastructure.
Islam was birthed with one of the largest conquests of history. [1]

Christianity was birthed with persecution by the Jews and Romans.

Christianity had its whack at that too in later centuries, but the original source materials are different in treatment of believer/unbeliever.

Buddhism is similar (persecution by Hindus).

I'd argue this affected cultural appetite for tolerance, expression, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests
>We humans evolved to be very flexible and naturally use what is in front of us to solve whatever problems we need to solve.

Ha, yeah right. Almost all of us spent the vast majority of our time and energy just making dishonest rich people richer. In a world so full of exploitation, it should be no surprise that so many people are distrustful.
Systemd provides via libsystemd a call sd_notify() that tells systemd the daemon is not only started but ready to accept connections. libsystemd, being a kitchen-sink like everything else systemd, has a bunch of unrelated functionality including one that pulled liblzma as a dependency.

The backdoored liblzma relies on a misfeature of glibc called ifuncs, where a library can override a function by calling a special init function in the library. This is so for instance if you have a version of a function optimized for AVX512, one ofor AVX2 and one not optimized for those at all, the init function would check which features the CPU supports and picks the best one. Seemingly ifuncs doesn't check the function being overriden is in the same library, and it was replacing OpenSSH's RSA auth function.

OpenSSH added a clean-room libsystemd-free implementation of sd_notify() after this fiasco, in the hope Linux distros will stop linking against libsystemd, this will appear in OpenSSH 9.8:

https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2641
> Nowhere as back as "the bronze age" though

The Hittites. (The Sea Peoples?) The Parthians. The Romans. You're talking about a fertile patch near the birth of civilisation, of course it's going to have had an old and violent history.

> since they eventually had the looting of the Americas and gunpowder to their advantage

Gunpowder was invented in China. The Arab world had vastly superior maritime capabilities in its heyday. (To the extent that it single handedly enabled Europe's blue-ocean capabilities.) Its empires were also colonising powers, so it's not like in an alternate timeline they wouldn't have expanded across the Atlantic.

And in case it needs to be stated, the Arabs were successful colonisers and conquerors [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayyubid_dynasty
I think Christianity had the fight with science during Copernicus and Galileo. Islam never had that fight. And since Islam claimed to be the last and final word of god, it became really hard to change it.
Very simple: the Arab world has been battling with Western colonialism cancer for the past couple of centuries, they haven't got any time left to spend on scientific matters or improve.

Ready, set, go! Start downvoting
Isn't there a free starter deck you can get from game stores?
I doubt that would have helped. Customers didn't love Irix as an OS. They tolerated it in order to use SGI's superior hardware and specialized applications.

Competitors such as Sun did port their proprietary Unix flavors to the x86 PC platform but never achieved traction. It was impossible to compete with free Linux, and lack of device drivers was always an obstacle.
I used to work for a defense contractor.

There was a 3 month period where I had nothing to do.

I was supposed write firmware for a piece of hardware, but the hardware was broken and wouldn’t even turn on. I was told to wait for the electrical engineers to fix it.

I sat in the lab all day, for 8 hours a day, with no internet access (it was forbidden), pretending to write firmware that I couldn’t test, with no direction on what I should be doing. There was no simulator, no tests, no guidance.

In that time, I would practice my own Leetcode problems in preparation for other jobs. All day long.

About two weeks before I left the company, I received my security clearance. That’s when I realized… they were just killing time until I had my clearance.

All of a sudden, the flood gates were opened, and I learned about a really interesting project. Not interesting enough to keep me though ;)

Six years later, I’ve 3x’d my compensation. And I love my job now (web development).
Please. The International Seabed Authority has been almost entirely captured by the same mining interests that are trying to perversely argue that only by destroying the last effective carbon sink on the planet can can we save the planet. After all, the only reason we had to kill almost every whale in the world in the nineteenth century was because we needed all that oil for lamps forever, since there was no prospect of a better lighting technology ever being developed. We will manage to find or replace these metals without hoovering the deep ocean.
> In other words, Islamic civilization did not have a culture hospitable to the advancement of science, while medieval Europe did.

That's a quote from the article, not me, to further the parent's point.
> Parts of everywhere have fundamentalist nutters

Well, in Lohia's case it was proto-Maoism.

And I think it matters in the sense it's a good example of how we can't really generalize a "culture" or "civilization" because such grand visions are basically marketing for all intents and purposes.

Like during the Islamic Golden Age, was there truly a difference between Byzantine Damascus or Arab Damascus? Can't you argue that al-Khwarizmi is actually a descendent of Persian High Culture, as he was from Khiva in Central Asia before it was Turkified. If it's based on Arabic as a language, then you can argue that most of Indian civilization in the 1st millennium was actually Persian due to Farsi-Dari being the lingua Franca of the educated (eg. My great-grandfather and grandfather both learned Farsi-Dari at the village school).

> Come on, the Levant has probably seen the highest frequency of violent redrawings of boundaries and governments per square mile in human history

I can say the same about Punjab, with the multiple Afghan, Turkic, Maratha, British, and indigenous invasions.

Or Southern China which was only pacified in the 1700s before collapsing into clan wars, a messianic revolution, and then the collapse of the Qing empire so around 150-200 years of war.

All history was bloody and brutal, and the Levant was fairly stable under Ottoman rule, which was around 500 years in those regions. Compared to the multiple Warring States periods in China and India, that's pretty stable.

Also, why are you getting downvoted?!? Nothing you said deserves a downvote.
One time I phone screened a blind engineer. I had no idea he was blind at the time. He did the coding exercise with no problems, and I forwarded him to the onsite. The only thing that was unusual, was that all his code was flush left. It was perfectly fine code, just formatted oddly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Nothing autoformat couldn’t fix.

When someone else interviewed him at the onsite and saw my comment in the packet, they told me. We guessed it was some artifact of using a braille display or something.

If anyone is familiar with this technology, I’d be curious to know if my hypothesis is correct.
This comment thread is amusing in both its argumentativeness and extreme misunderstanding.
I feel the same above technology in general.

E.g. many professionals jump from technology to technology, rather than mastering how get stuff done with one so they end up being mediocre their whole career.
Hardly, the point is to allow people to take some risks without risking all their assets. That’s it, that’s the entire point when they were created as people had been pooling assets long before corporations exited.

IMO, like bankruptcy laws in general it’s a generally a good idea. Where the nuances exists is what debts can’t be discharged in bankruptcy and at what point you pierce the corporate veil because several things remove the protections offered by creating a company.

One of the things we get wrong IMO is I think a corporation should be unable to shield itself from risk by creating another corporation. That creates all kinds of terrible incentives without any real upside.
> And this is exactly a problem of collapse of knowledge: you can't ask an LM to code you a problem it hasn't seen several dozen of times during training. You just cannot, you will not get a satisfying answer.

I think that's more a function of the coding ability of the model you are using, and obviously they are going to do much better on languages better represented in the training set.

What the paper is referring to as "knowledge collapse" isn't inability to do something, but rather getting a mid response since by definition that's going to dominate any normal (pardon the pun!) distribution.

Here's what he said:

"While large language models are trained on vast amounts of diverse data, they naturally generate output towards the 'center' of the distribution."

But, you can generally prompt around this sort of thing by asking the model to adopt a preferred context such as "you're an expert xxx", providing of course that is did see such expert-tagged material in the training set.
> While they claim E2E encryption, I seriously doubt they would offer this service entirely for free with having some backdoor or potential MITM breach that they likely tucked away in the ToS given the wide use of it it most of the World who pay for SMS/text messages: it just seems so incredibly unlikely

You don't have to trust Metas self-regulation, but you best believe the EU does not fuck around on such issues. Self-preservation is a hell of a motivator.
I would have thought that lots of folks had watched the "The Durrells in Corfu" TV series (PBS Masterpiece Theatre) and then did some research on the family.

I don't know whether this is available online, but I can recommend it as a pleasant programme, with lovely scenery, interesting storylines, and engaging actors.
There is some protection to be had in using non-mainstream platforms (in my case, Alpine Linux, OpenBSD and Illumos, though I do have some Ubuntu or Pop-OS! laptops).
M 4.0 – 7 km SW of Gladstone, New Jersey
I have the same irrational fear about my bathtub.
I commute for 20 hours a week on public transport, so a lot gets done there. I also read every night as a way to wind down before bed. Sometimes I will read continuously on a weekend if the book/series is engaging enough and can finish a couple of thousand pages that way.

Honestly, its not a target it is just what happens when you read a lot - you get through books.

As for YouTube or Netflix, I dont really watch that much and can't really understand how people spend that much time on them. Given that though, I read instead and lots of people dont understand that. Each to their own, happiness is different for everyone etc
If it is not real good smart glasses, I have a hard time seeing anything else disrupting the phone. Basically because you have to display information and images.

Anything else can be a much cheaper peripheral that will be trivial to clone if it becomes popular.

Unless they are talking about a robot, which (1) rumor has it Apple is now and (2) a lot of companies want to build Rosie from Jetsons
Wish this had a web ui.
I’ve been emulating DS games on my iPhone for a while with a web app pinned to my home screen. It warns to backup saves (and I have) but I haven’t had any issues yet. It lags a bit if my phone is in battery saving mode, but otherwise works flawlessly. Crazy that “old” but also relatively recent systems can just run in a web browser now.

https://ds.44670.org/
Do you really think that market prices are going to reflect such a popular adage because a picture really is worth 1000 words? Does this kind of pricing differential get reflected in the salaries of journalists vs photographers? No? Then as someone else said it's a new market with an artificially "for lolz" initial price that competitors are blindly copying to avoid having to do their own price discovery. I'd expect this to shift & correct slowly over time unless it's a cute joke that everyone appreciates & the true price is close enough that no one cares enough to differentiate in that way.
You're an engineer, not a journalist. If you were a journalist and don't know how to write about something, learn. That would literally be your job.
I'd assume buried lines would be HVDC rather than AC which effectively eliminates the loses from burying.
There actually are tornados in the PNW. Both Washington and Oregon get about 1.7 per year. Here are maps of the tornados here since 1950 for Washington [1] and Oregon [2].

For Washington, in the 134 tornados since 1950 there were 6 fatalities, 303 direct injuries, and $31 million in damages. However most of that was from a single bad year, 1972, which had 4 tornados and all 6 of those fatalities, along with 301 of the 303 injuries. $25 million of the damages were from that year, too.

For Oregon it was 130 tornados since 1950, with 0 fatalities and 5 injuries. $32 million in damages. Like Washington most of the damage came from one year, 1968, with $25 million in damages.

Even though they are rare it turns out that we do have a functioning tornado warning system here. I found this out a few years when my iPhone started blaring a very loud alarm--louder than anything I'd ever heard from it before.

[1] https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/tornado-archive/

[2] https://data.statesmanjournal.com/tornado-archive/
> Christianity had the fight with science during Copernicus and Galileo. Islam never had that fight.

The article literally describes that fight in the backlash to Al-Mamum's oppressive secularism.
Blind leading the sighted
You are oversimplifying the Enlightenment. One needs only to look at Galileo, and the current unnecessary shenanigans of American Christians over evolution to know that Christianity does have a problem with science.
I don't think Jesus was huge on the division between church and state. That line in particular was interpreted by his audience to mean they should render no tax to Caesar in Luke.
From what I remember a few projects attempted this.

Papillio [1] is one I remember in particular but that is partly because I backed the kickstarter for the Papillio Duo. Still have it and never had any time to really sit down and do stuff with it.
I also worked with a company that made a few of the "wings" for it early on.

[1] https://papilio.cc/
> I think Christianity had the fight with science during Copernicus and Galileo.

You are aware that Copernicus was a Catholic priest, right?
Theft, yes, how serious? Not very. Basically a rounding error for the power company. They likely see higher loses from things like fence lines installed near power lines.
This was a loooooong time ago. I have no clue.
I have most of it on my kindle so there is a purchase history there.

Recently its been a lot of LitRPG stuff. Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Primal Hunter and so on. I also read most of the Hugo and Nebula lists too. Lots of SciFi in the past couple of years.
Glad it’s not just me.
Medieval Europe changed its posture towards science through movements such as Scholasticism.

Where does Scholasticism come from? If you trace its origins you will get to Islamic Spain and other Islamic territories.

Saint Thomas Aquinas studied under Saint Albert the Great, who was someone who studied translations of books from Islamic libraries produced in Toledo, Spain, as well as works from Jewish scholars such as Maimonides (who also lived in Islamic Spain).

Even after these reforms, scientists like Galileo Galilei were prosecuted so the tolerance of science was only up to the point in which it caused discomfort to the Church.
I guess an interesting question would be whether Nvidia is SGI in the late 90s or Intel of 80s.
> Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor
--
Been there, got the T-shirt. Had the "sysadmin" job title and everything. And then the Board of Directors announced they had bought a complete data backup "solution", and I was to implement it forthwith.

Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.

Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.
Ha, sounds like you've been working on this pointless thing for what, 4-6 weeks?

When I worked for my country's defence organisation, I was the "primary development resource" on a project to rebuild the login page for their online services portal. I was allocated to this task full time for 14 months. I got some designs from the UI people, did a real shit job of turning it into a functioning page in angular in about a month (I'm not a frontend dev, they never asked me if I even knew what angular was, the job just landed on my desk one day), copied some npm magic to make it all render out to a single HTML file that could be installed in their fancy super security authentication system. For the remaining time I just attended a few hours of meetings a week and answered a handful of emails each week, maybe 2-3hrs of work a week, while a bunch of shit went on in the background to approve and document the work (stuff I didn't have the right title to do).

I left that job three years ago, the login page for the online portal is still the one that was built in 2003.

I'm fairly sure the entire point of the massive overallocation was for $CORP I was employed by to extract more money from $GOV, at the cost of a fraction of that paying my salary.
If you’re concerned, another alternative is to use WebRTC for peer to peer connections. Bypass the server entirely and use it only for signaling.

https://github.com/dmotz/trystero