How much does that matter with the state legislature firmly in Republican control? The legislature isn't shy about making state laws to stop cities when the cities try to do Democrat things locally.

If the later I'd expect Florida to get a big boost because so many people retire there.

Even when you expand to include all schools instead of just top schools, 6 figure debt is rare. Average is about $27k for public universities, $34k for private non-profit universities, and $40k for private for-profit schools.

If someone has 6 figure debt from school they odds are overwhelming that it is from law school or medical school.

I wonder how many excellent students from non-rich families who could easily get into a top school for low cost or even free don't even bother applying because they have heard that myth of widespread 6 figure debt?

After I watch a movie for the first time I like to check out a few YouTube reaction channels to see their take on it. They sometimes catch interesting things I missed.

I've watched a few such reactions to "Across the Spider-Verse" and one interesting thing that stood out is when after a fight Spider-Women, who is wanted for murder, is out of webs and cannot escape when Captain Stacy, who is leading the effort to capture her, arrives. Captain Stacy does not know that Spider-Woman is his daughter. She reveals her identity to him, says she is innocent, and he is clearly conflicted, but finally starts reading her her rights.

The reactors almost uniformly condemn him for this, some quite adamantly. They think he should have let her go.

Most of the commenters are experienced programmers, and like many experienced programmers have largely lost the ability to think about things in non-binary terms.

You see this on most threads that aren't about a mostly technical subject.

I think I can still think in a non-binary way despite decades of programming but I attribute that to to getting burned out about 10 years into my career and taking a break to go to law school. Looking back at my writing before taking that break I can see that I was thinking in a very binary way.

First year law school does a really good job of breaking that.

I seriously think that some of the things from first year law school should be moved into the standard bachelor's degree program for CS, and maybe for several other STEM degrees, taught exactly the same way they are taught in law school. Maybe contracts and torts. Those are both good at building up your non-binary thinking. Heck, maybe do nearly the whole first year of law school, spread out over the 4 years of your bachelor's degree.

For example in some places a car making a turn that will cross a bike lane is required to merge into the bike lane before the turn (California and Washington for example). On others (Oregon for example) the car must not do so.

School buses are another good example. On a road with lanes in both directions when do you stop for a school bus heading the opposite way that is stopped with its red lights flashing and stop sign extended?

In some place the answer is "always". In others it depends on how many lanes there and whether or not there is a barrier like a median strip between the two directions.

One approach is to not let your self driving system operate in places where you have not explicitly added all the local and regional rules to your system.

Another approach is to try to learn the area with AI. It sees lots of humans making turns from the bike lane, it makes its turns from the bike lane too.

An issue with that approach is that a lot of humans violate traffic laws, so you have the danger that your self driving system learns to violate traffic laws.

Nobody wants to build just one, or even just a handful. Musk has talked about 10000 launches a year for deploying and maintaining data centers.

At that scale pollution becomes a serious issue. It hasn't been a problem so far because we haven't launched a lot of rockets. Cumulatively the world has under about 8000 orbital launches and under 40000 launches that were not orbital but reached the stratosphere.

Orbital rocket emissions have an impact far beyond what you might expect just from looking at the mass of what they emit, because they emit much of it the upper atmosphere. Many things that when emitted near the surface are only a local problem become a global problem if you emit them in the upper atmosphere.

On 2025-12-18 I bought a RPi 5 kit on Amazon from CanaKit that consisted of an 8 GB Pi 5 with the official RPi 5 256 GB SSD, case, fan, 45W power supply, and some cables which came fully assembled.

It was $209.99.

Today it is $339.97.

On 2025-09-02 I bought a Samsung 1 TB EVO Plus M.2 SSD along with along with a Sabrent USB-C M.2/SATA enclosure to use with my RPi 4.

It was $64.99 for the SSD and $22.75 for the enclosure.

Today the SSD is $255.00 (down a little from the $261.08 it reached last month) and the enclosure is $29.95.

BTW, if you are looking for an RPi it looks like you can't rely on the prices shown on rpilocator.com.

Right now for example it lists RPi 5 8 GB in stock in the US for $80 (Digi-Key), $175 (Pishop), and $200 (Adafruit). Similar for 4 GB ($60, $110, $130 at those three sellers, in the same order). Same pattern for RPi 4. 8 GB from the same three sellers in the same order: $75, $165, $190. 4 GB $55, $100, $120.

Clicking the links reveals all the Digi-Key entries are wrong. Their actual price is the same as Pishop (whose rpilocator.com entries seem to be correct).

1/10th the population of Mississippi does not have health insurance.

55% of adults in Mississippi over 65 have lost 6 or more teeth. In the UK it is about 45%.

Household #1 uses 7 kWh of electricity per day. They install a solar + battery system that produces 7 kWh per day, covering 100% of their use. This costs them $C, and the reduction in the amount of electricity they use from the grid will save them enough to break even in 5 years.

Household #2 uses 14 kWh of electricity per day. They also install a solar + battery system that produces 7 kWh per day, which covers 50% of their use. This costs them $C, and reduces the amount of electricity they use from the grid by 7 kWh per day, just like household #1. Therefore it should take them 5 years to break even, just like household #1.

Breakeven time is a function of cost and the amount your grid usage goes down. How much electricity from the grid you use if your solar system cannot supply 100% of your usage should be irrelevant to the payback time.

Apple is building a system that is more private than EU law requires. If they tell say Facebook that Facebook can integrate in but first must meet the same more than is legally required standard Apple is aiming for wouldn't that be anti-competitive?

Consider using Shamir secret sharing to share a secret, D, among several people with two people required to recover the secret. D is a positive integer, such as a randomly generated 128 bit AES key you are using to encrypt your launch codes or credit card database.

For anyone not familiar with Shamir secret sharing what you do is pick a prime number, p, that is larger than D and another random positive integer A, that is less than p. Then give each person a pair of numbers, (i, (Ai + D) % p), where each person gets a different i (which should be a positive integer less than p...it is OK to simply use 1, 2, 3, ...). Let's let Di = (Ai + D) % p.

(This is for the case where you want any two people to be able to launch your missiles or decrypt your database. If you wanted 3 required instead of giving out (i, (Ai + D) % p) you would give out (i, (Bi^2 + Ai + D) % p) where B is a randomly chosen positive integer less than p. For 4 required add on a Ci^3 term, and so on).

Given (i, Di) and (j, Dj) and p it is possible to recover A and D.

Here's what that looks like in a language where the big int library uses an accumulator style, i.e., operations are of the form X = X op Y, where the ops are methods on the big int objects. Assume Bi and Bj are big int objects initialized from i and j, and Di and Dj are already big into objects, as is p. This particular example is using Perl. (This is very old code. Since 2002 you can add a "use bigint" pragma to Perl code and then it would look a lot more like the second Python example below).

  my $A = $Dj->copy()->bsub($Di);  # Dj-Di
  $Di->bmul($Bj);                  # j*Di
  $Dj->bmul($Bi);                  # i*Dj
  $Di->bsub($Dj);                  # j*Di-i*Dj
  $Bj->bsub($Bi);                  # j-i
  $Bj->bmodinv($p);                # (j-i)'
  $Di->bmul($Bj);                  # (j*Di-i*Dj)*(j-i)'
  $Di->bmod($p);                   # (j*Di-i*Dj)*(j-i)'  mod p
  $A->bmul($Bj);                   # (Dj-Di)*(j-i)'
  $A->bmod($P);                    # (Dj-Di)*(j-i)'  mod p

Here's what it looks like in a language with the ops as function calls taking the big int objects as arguments. This example is Python without using operator overloading.

  import operator as op
  def recover(i, j, Di, Dj, p):
    j_i_inv = pow(op.sub(j, i), -1, p)
    A = op.mod(op.mul(op.sub(Dj, Di), j_i_inv), p)
    D = op.mod(op.mul(op.sub(mul(j, Di), op.mul(i, Dj)), j_i_inv), p)
    return A, D

  def recover(i, j, Di, Dj, p):
    j_i_inv = pow(j-i, -1, p)
    A = ((Dj - Di) * j-i_inv ) % p
    D = ((j*Di - i*Dj) * j_i_inv) % p
    return A, D

OT: this reminds me of something I started to do once but never finished. I was going to write for each language we used at work that had a big int library but that did not support operator overloading a class that implemented a big int RPN calculator. Java, for example. Then recover would look something like this:

    calc = new BigRPNCalc();
    calc.do(j, i, "-", p, "modinv dup");
    calc.do(Dj, Di, "- *", p, "mod swap");
    calc.do(j, Di, "*", i, Dj. "* - *", p, "mod");
    D = calc.pop();
    A = calc.pop();

I mostly listen to the radio, with an occasional trip where I instead listen to a podcast or music via CarPlay.

What I've found greatly helps is when I finish a trip where I've used CarPlay after I park but before turning the car off I open my phone, open control center, tap the now playing widget, tap the symbol on that for output selection, and make sure it is set to iPhone Speaker. I then hit the Media button in the car and select FM. That starts the radio playing. Then I stop the radio and shut off the car.

Next time I use the car CarPlay connects normally but does NOT take over the media playback. If I hit the play button in the car it starts playing the radio.

This works fine for me because as I said I mostly listen to radio. It is not that big of a deal the once a week or so that I listen via CarPlay to do those extra steps at the end of a trip.

It would probably be a lot more annoying if I was frequently switching between radio and CarPlay.

In either case I would definitely like a setting somewhere that makes it so the play button in the car plays whatever source was playing the last time you turned off playback.

Consider common consumer wireless indoor/outdoor thermometers which have a temperature sensor you place outside and a display you place inside. Most of these use a much simpler radio protocol than WiFi or Bluetooth, and have nowhere near the compute power or memory resources to come anywhere near running Linux.

On the transmit side they typically have a fixed frequency oscillator (commonly near 433 MHz or a little over 900 MHz) connected to an antenna through a transistor. They send data by turning that transistor on and off. There are a variety of ways they might do this. Some might do it as pulses with different widths for 1 and 0. Some might do it by having have say 200 us on followed by 200 us off mean 1 and 200 us off followed by 200 us on mean 0. There are many more.

For home built stuff you can by cheap transmit modules to help with this, such as this one [1]. I'm linking to Sparkfun because they have good documentation, but you can find these all over the place.

On the receive side they use a simple receiver tuned to the same frequency (but with enough tolerance that it isn't a problem that both sides are probably using cheap oscillators that aren't very stable or accurate). Here a receiver module for home built stuff [2].

From what I've read the ways these work is that they automatically adjust the gain to have a constant high output level, but there is some lag in that. If there is nobody transmitting the output is just amplified background noise.

Then when someone starts transmitting the gain gets turned down so it is just enough for their signal to have max output. Let's say they are sending 1s as a pulse of 200 us on, 100 us off and 0s as 100 us on, 200 us off. With the gain set so the on level is at maximum output the off level will be quite a bit below that. As long as the gain adjustment is slow enough that it doesn't turn up the gain too much during that up to 200 us off, the next on will still be readily distinguished.

In that example the transmitter is sending 1 bit every 300 us. The firmware in the receiver can look for high/low and low/high transitions in the radio output, looking for the pattern of several consecutive 300 us intervals with 100 us on/200 us off or 200 us on/100 us off. Interpret that is a bit string, and make sure when you design your protocol your transmissions start with some kind of signature so you can tell you are actually listening to the right sender, and it should work. If you designed the radio protocol reasonably you should be able to do the recognition with some kind of efficient state machine.

[1] https://www.sparkfun.com/rf-link-transmitter-434mhz.html

[2] https://www.sparkfun.com/rf-link-receiver-4800bps-434mhz.htm...

> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?

Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?

For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.