Also of interest via this blog is this statement from OceanGate about why their subs aren't classed.

innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm.

Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.

If I wanted to can and sell hubris, I know where to source it from now.

Man wasn't wrong. He will be remembered for it.

“We’re listening and we hear you,” Phil Spencer wrote on X earlier this week. “We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”

If I understand corporate speech correctly, this means that XBox is essentially doomed. This is far more damning than anything that he is responding to could possibly have been saying.

I would love to see it. But I'm far more excited for RISC-V desktops, truth be told.

Hey at least we got the CEO of a Saudi oil company heading up the climate talks. I'm sure that he's perfectly willing to set aside his own personal interests and take one for the team and reduce his profits by leaving Saudi oil in the ground, and encouraging (or even requiring???) everyone else to do the same, right? Right?

It's a website that seems to digest other websites and spit them out badly. Here is the original article: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-meteorlake-windows-linux

It is. So not really that great, imo. Just another rent seeking behavior to force a current subscription.

Don't get me wrong, I'm certain it scratches an itch many people have, just the fact they put it in the cloud is a hell of a lot of needless complexity and antiuser.

The Federation is a representative republic, with an elected president as the head of the entire interstellar state. An election is held every four years, and a president may serve for an unlimited number of terms.

Political and direct administrative power is held within the Federation Council, which is composed of one councillor from every Member World. There is no limit as to how many terms a person may serve as councillor. T'Latrek of Vulcan, for instance, served on the Federation Council for nearly a century. Each individual Member determines how its councillors will be determined; the First Minister of Bajor, for instance, nominates that world's councillor and the Chamber of Ministers ratifies him or her, while the electorates of many other Members elect their councillors directly.

The Federation government has several executive departments whose heads form the Presidential Cabinet, who advise the president on their issues of jurisdiction and run their departments on a day-to-day basis. Cabinet members can have strong influence on Federation policy based upon their work with the president and the appropriate members of the Federation Council.

By the late 23rd and 24th century, the capital city of the Federation is Paris, and the capital planet is Earth. The seat of government is the Palais de la Concorde.

• Memory Beta article on The Federation

Honest question, not being catty or anything. Why is this news, exactly? This is a nearly every winter occurrence to get below -50C in Yakutsk, the average winter day is -42C. (It also gets up into the 90s during the summer, Yakutsk is a wild place.)

This would be roughly equivalent to a news article saying Detroit is down to 10F today, i.e. colder than normal, sure, but not really beyond the pale for a December day.

Honestly asking because I'm just wondering if this is the start of the "there can't be global warming because it's cold somewhere" coverage for this winter season, or if this is intended to be a fun TIL article for the lucky 10000.

Support third parties, vote strategically, push for voting reform to bust the first past the post duopoly.

Hi! I'm a nuclear engineer. I just wanted to do a small drive-by clarification/lecture.

There are a lot of feedbacks that are considered when designing a nuclear reactor, it's not just a single void coefficient. There are thermal feedbacks, feedbacks related to the decay of fission products, feedbacks related to the burnup of fuel, the burnup of the neutron poisons, the activation of the water in the primary loop, etc etc. When designing a nuclear reactor, all of these effects must be examined. Generally, this involves finding the transfer function and confirming that all the poles of the transfer function have real part less than 0. (This is where the "negative" part comes in, they're complex numbers in general, but as long as the real part is less than zero this corresponds to a decaying exponential.)

An aside on criticality. We are quite fortunate in that due to a quirk of nuclear physics, fission reactors are possible. We call the time difference between one fission and the next from the neutrons produced a "generation." If we had to react on the timescales of a "generation" based on the simple model where one fission leads directly to another, then we'd have to react in milliseconds, and this just wouldn't be possible to make a reactor safe, even with an extremely well designed system of feedbacks. However, some fission products will decay and release a neutron, these so-called delayed neutrons make controlling a nuclear reactor on human time scales possible (minutes and hours instead of milliseconds), and it makes these feedback loops far more stable. So we aim to keep the criticality below 1 for "prompt" neutrons, and slightly above 1 for delayed neutrons, then we rely on the feedback systems (primarily thermal and fission products) to keep the criticality oscillating very slowly around 1.

For specifically Chernobyl, there is a more broad idea that we concentrate on in reactor design, that of overmoderation vs undermoderation. Reactivity has a relative peak at a particular amount of moderation, and we want to design the reactor in such a way that it can never get more moderated than that peak, because that would give a positive feedback loop if increasing the power led to a concomitant decrease in moderation (which is normal, the density of liquid water decreases with increasing temperature). Because Chernobyl was graphite moderated and steam cooled, we had an especially bad case of this where the core flooded and was massively overmoderated, and in order to get the water out of the core they attempted to turn the reactor all of the way up and boil it out, but in doing so this caused the reactivity to go massively supercritical as the moderation was reduced from absolutely smothering the reaction to just right. It was so supercritical that it was supercritical only with the prompt neutrons, so-called prompt supercriticality, which is why you read things like the power went up 1000x in a second.

The United States does not, and did not even at the time, allow certification of designs where it is possible for this to occur. All reactors must have negative reaction coefficients for all major feedbacks in all operating scenarios, and, in fact, due to this stringent process there are only 4 reactor types that the NRC has currently certified for new nuclear reactors (with 3 more currently under review), (and each design has to be certified jointly with the location where it will be built, so something like Fukushima, where the backup generators are in the basement in a flood zone, would not pass certification review in the US.)

Anyway, I hope this was interesting and educational.

most of these problems aren't of any parctical importance.

Well sure, but one of them is extremely important. Factoring integers rapidly is very useful, even if it completely destroys one of the most important encryption algorithms.

Not that this computer does, or could. RSA is still safe.

We know you're a gigantic money-hungry corp. You all don't have to lie and pretend to care about safety. We're not a bunch of idiots.

Alas, as long as there is doubt, there are a large number of suckers who are willing to give the benefit of the doubt. We are a bunch of idiots, collectively. That's why shit like this works.

I'm not going to weigh in on the specifics of Flatpak vs AppImage, because I don't know enough about the particulars.

However, I think the "user choice" argument is often deployed in situations where it probably shouldn't be.

For instance, in this case, it's not the user's choice at all, but a developer's choice, as a normal user would not be packaging their own software. They would be merely downloading one of a number of options of precompiled packages. And this is the thrust of the argument. If we take the GitHub rant at face value, some developers seem to be distributing software using AppImage, to the exclusion of other options. And then listing ways in which this is problematic.

I, for one, would be rather annoyed if my only option were either AppImage or Flatpak, as I typically prefer use software packaged for my package manager. That is user choice, give me the option to package it myself; hopefully it's already been done for me.

There are some good things to be said about trust and verification, and I'm generally receptive to those arguments way more than "user choice."

Even if it seems to be common sense to those inside the community, there is something to be said about getting actual data on the subject so that those outside the community at least have a touchstone for the reality those on the inside experience, because propagandists are working very hard to muddy the waters on this point and points like this one in particular. It might be a "no shit Sherlock" moment to you, but to people like my Fox News watching extended family, this study is something that contradicts their current mental model of the situation, and something that I am glad I have in my quiver when they start talking about the subject to me.

I don't know whether or not feminist demonization of sex workers is widespread. I have heard of feminists who demonize sex work, because it can be exploitative and not everyone who engages in sex work is necessarily doing so completely of their own volition, in ways both similar and not so similar to regular work.

If I'm understanding this correctly, it's not even copying. It's apparently just a wrapper for the built-in runas command that's been there since Windows 2000.

For the record, the rate at which the power increases and decreased on the reactor is more or less accurate to the simulation, but the simulation has been speed up by about 100x. Mentioning this just in case the game leaves you with the impression that managing a nuclear reactor is a twitchfest.

Put a shell script in your PATH named inkscape with the following content:

#!/bin/sh

flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape

Note that you can use a local folder in your home directory to house small executables and scripts like this, so you don't have to touch your system config. I generally recommend using something like ~/.local/bin and add it to your PATH via your Shell's RC file.

"Early in the Reticulum -- thousands of years ago -- it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information," Sammann said.

"Crap, you once called it," I reminded him.

"Yes -- a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap."

"What is good crap?" Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.

"Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It's a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors -- swapping one name for another, say. But it didn't really take off until the military got interested."

"As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millenium A.R."

"Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was sort of a Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand."

"So, are Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies?" asked Arsibalt, utterly fascinated.

"The ROBE evolved into something totally different early in the Second Millennium," Sammann said dismissively.

"What did it evolve into?" Jesry asked.

"No one is sure," Sammann said. "We only get hints when it finds ways to physically instantiate itself, which, fortunately, does not happen that often. But we digress. The functionality of Artificial Inanity still exists. You might say that those Ita who brought the Ret out of the Dark Age could only defeat it by co-opting it. So, to make a long story short, for every legitimate document floating around on the Reticulum, there are hundreds or thousands of bogus version -- bogons, as we call them."

Excerpt from Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Welcome to the brave new bogon world.

I really don't like how science communication is typically done, which is all of the math is stripped out, and all the ideas are told as if they were thought experiements, and it makes it easy to get the impression that what scientists do all day is just think abstractly about stuff.

So that's why I linked the preprint directly. Just note that this is a preprint, and it hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, and, of course, not all of the work is shown in any article, even a scientific one.

So like, it's really easy to armchair and just say that they should ignore the haters and so on, but having been on the opposite end of a small Internet hate mob, even if you only have like a dozen people telling you that you're a crook, or a piece of shit, or your stupid or dishonest, or whatever, it doesn't really matter how accurate any of that is, it really does start to get to you, no matter who you are.

The only healthy option is to log out at that point.

Here's your code example in the editor. I don't personally think the difference between the 'm's is super noticable. But what did strike me a lot more is the difference in height between the two 'i's in the first line. I think that difference is pretty bad.

easily improve ... C++

I assure you that there is absolutely nothing easy about the C++ standardization process, lol.

This is a cool idea. There are other programming languages that have libraries that expose similar behavior. For instance, Rust has the uom crate, Haskell has the units package, and C++ has the header only library SI.

But there is something to be said about it being built in.

You may be surprised to learn that they didn't all run out until 2013. UEFI had been around for 7 years by this time, and Microsoft was doing patent enforcement actions against Tom Tom during this time period.

Sure, they're expired now, but not at the time. It was supposed to be an open standard at the time.

Use ffmeg, here's how to do the image part: https://superuser.com/questions/1429256/producing-lossless-video-from-set-of-png-images-using-ffmpeg

To do the audio use the copy option. See here for an example usage: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21567029/ffmpeg-to-duplicate-an-audio-stream-and-encode-this-new-stream

Amazon Link

2 AA batteries required. (included)

They forgot to change the batteries before sending the sub out 💀

Yup

You're da bes <3

Which is why when I made a game once upon a time I released checksums for the official files. I wish Running With Scissors would consider doing so as well.

It seemed obvious to me as well, but studies like this are important, so that I have something to point to other than vibes.

If you need to pass flags you can use

flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape "$@"

To forward all of the arguments to the script. Note that this might be a bashism, so you might need to change your hash bang to /bin/bash as well. Double check though.

(An easy way to check if something is working as you assume is just prepend the line with echo.)

Rereading the article, I honestly don't really consider SWERFs or TERFs to be feminists, and not even just in a rhetorical way. I didn't even mentally place them in the category of "people who could potentially be seen by others as feminists" when I read the article, which is why I was somewhat confused about the response. My bad.

I like wasabi.

I think the study is probably irreproducible bullshit, but at least I like wasabi.

I mean, Snowden is, as I understand it, a libertarian idiot, but I think what he uncovered was extremely important, and the fact that he sold other secrets to the Russians in exchange for asylum, while certainly not great, is understandable considering that the alternative for him was rotting in solidarity confinement in an awful a federal hellhole prison.

Change to Haskell formatted commas and the problem goes away :D

{ "a": 1
, "b": 2
, "c":
    [ 3
    , 6
    , 9
    ]
}

I mean, I think he's evil. But I also remember Microsoft in the 90s: the EEE strategy, the monopolistic bullshit with web browsers, the FUD against competitors, the Strong arming of computer manufacturers to not offer alternatives, etc.

Be careful, the small partitions might be UEFI partitions (/boot and /boot/efi) and are required for booting your computer.

In 24th century Starfleet, calculus was taught to children around age ten or older. On the USS Enterprise-D, Harry Bernard hated calculus, despite the fact that his father told him everyone needed a basic understanding of it. (TNG: "When The Bough Breaks")

• Memory Alpha page on Calculus