That also makes them harder on oil as the piston/rings have larger tolerances so they don't expand and bind up during operation. That means greater blow-by at startup and when operating at lower temps which puts a lot more combustion byproducts into the oil. Ultimately you want to run an aircraft engine in the upper part of its range (65% power) continuously and don't let it get too cold.

This is also true because 100LL still contains lead and at lower temps the lead combustion byproducts precipitate out of solution, coating everything in metallic lead, lead oxides, and various other lead compounds all of which are really bad for engines. Converting to unleaded nearly doubled engine life in autos.

Many modern engines have valve rotators and hydraulic lifters. Oil pressure is fed to a lifter that sits between the valves and the cam and automatically takes up for any variation in the system, ensuring valves operate correctly. If you ever wondered why car engines don't need to have their valves adjusted every 20k miles anymore - that's why. In some engines if these leak down after shutdown it can cause trouble starting because the valve timing will be off until oil pressure re-fills the lifter.

Rotators are little spring mechanisms that compress and when uncompressing try to rotate the valve in one direction. This causes the valves to rotate a tiny bit with each cycle. Often there are hot spots and exhaust valves especially often have no good way to shed heat yet are exposed to extremely high temps - so they shed heat when they close and are in contact with the head. If they don't rotate the slightly hotter spots will continuously build up heat eventually destroying the valve. The rotator keeps that from happening. (Some engines use sodium filled valves to help transport heat away from the valve face).

I always found it surprising how tiny variations in wear or even a few degrees of excess heat can end up destroying an engine.

It requires them to bet that:

1. This AI-driven demand cycle is a temporary blip

2. None of their competitors will make massive investments in capacity.

3. No state actors will do so despite evidence to the contrary.

Many in silicon have gone out of business due to the boom-bust cycles so being a bit conservative is appropriate but at some point not expanding production becomes an existential crisis.

Or ya know enough governments with the power get really angry and start forcing price controls, nationalizing, using their state spy agencies to steal your secrets, or use unofficial back channels to make your life extremely difficult.

I sometimes wonder if some design decisions were made on that basis.

Yup, this was also a fun exercise. Use nslookup, find the MX records, then telnet to them and deliver some mail destined for domains that email server handled. At that point you're just a slower version of a mail daemon.

In 2006 when FIOS first rolled out they assigned ARIN IP blocks to anyone who requested a static IP and I hosted my own webserver and email server on the web. So for a long time I had my own netblock and my email server had been around for so very long it was in everyone's legacy trusted list. Even gmail never bounced emails from me, despite not having SPF or DKIM and whatever else. Though I did eventually set those up. Only authed users could send email and that was a limited list so my netblock never actually delivered a spam message.

Funny enough I also setup default routing so all non-registered addresses went into a separate mailbox for me and I used the "companyname@mydomain.net" for everything. For many years I knew about every single data breech before anyone else. Often months or years ahead as spam would arrive out of nowhere to that address.

When I finally moved to the bay area to work in tech for real the entire world had changed. You couldn't just get a netblock assignment anymore. And lord knows even if your ISP wasn't deliberately sabotaging your ability to run a server every other system on the internet would assume you're a scamming spammer. I had to give up self-hosting on-prem.

The realization that (on DOS) "copy con file.txt" as the world's worst text editor or "copy file lpt1:" was treating physical devices as files. Everything on the computer was arbitrary so you could make anything behave like anything else (for some definition of behave like)!

Not a great insight I'll grant but a key one that everyone has to go through to be any good.

Perhaps I am just not well-informed but 30% slowdown in progression translates to sufferers have some mild improvement in cognitive tests and live a few months longer.

Maybe it is simply too early to tell but I would naively expect something much more significant. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that requires much earlier treatment to demonstrate better results.

I'm not saying amyloid beta research should be terminated. Merely that everyone in the field should be willing to entertain other ideas.

I'd say 10GbE has arrived. It is relatively cheap, most of the time works over existing 1GbE cabling, and gracefully degrades to 5/2.5/1Gb based on conditions when it can't reach 10Gb.

Yes to be 100% guaranteed of getting 10Gb even in bundles of 100 cables running over noisy fluorescent ballasts to a full 100m you need Cat6A but in many environments Cat5e or Cat6 is more than sufficient. It works so well if you fail to get the full 10Gb I humbly suggest you re-do the terminations on both ends before considering replacing the cable.

Simple get: GET / HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: text/html User-Agent: l33t hax0rs lol X-Funny-Monkey: farts

For sending a mail message on port 25: HELO mail-from: whoever@whatever.com mail-to: sysadmin@yaya.com Body of the message yay.

POP3 was so long ago I forgot but you could list the mailboxes then get individual messages and so on.

This revelation was the beginning of "there is no magic" for me. The realization that every part of the computer was built by human beings and was at some level understandable if one undertook the effort.

Perhaps most people in the future won't bother. They'll just let agents do it all. I'm sure that will leave some interesting holes in various systems for people willing to actually learn how they work without the filter of a model (or its safety rails).

When the first drugs targeting HIV arrived the results were undeniable. Yes the drugs sucked for various reasons and yes HIV would evolve resistance. But the data demonstrated a very clear link that these drugs suppressed HIV and suppressing HIV made people live longer. Or consider mRNA and COVID, a great success story where the technology was put to good use and the results are obvious.

On the flip side we have certain cancers like certain breast cancers, melanoma, etc that never had a "wow" moment where some miracle turned them from highly fatal into treatable but we have seen decade after decade treatments improve and survival rates march ever upward such that what were once almost guaranteed death sentences are now often very treatable.

These are two disease treatment models worth keeping in mind. Sometimes major leaps are made. Sometimes progress is slow.

Now if we consider amyloid beta therapies: we have treatments that target amyloid beta with varying degrees of success but at least some show definite reductions in amyloid beta plaques. To the best of my knowledge that has not shown to improve outcomes in Alzheimer's patients to any meaningful degree.

That concerns me and I think justifies some skepticism of the amyloid hypothesis. The data is messy but if amyloid beta were a symptom not a cause that could certainly fit the results we are seeing. That doesn't mean the amyloid beta hypothesis is wrong but I think skepticism of the "state of the art" in the field is warranted given the pathetically ineffective progress made to date.

If currency doesn't devalue then stuffing it under a mattress looks like a reasonable alternative to investing. If we hit deflation you can receive gains for "free" and borrowed money becomes more expensive over time. Neither of which our economic system is setup to handle.

We punish people who hoard cash by devaluing it thus encouraging them to put the money to work.

More like they didn't see the need and didn't invest in early computing and so lagged behind. Something the US very nearly almost did as post-war a lot of people didn't see the point. Software engineers (though they weren't called that) were seen as unimportant secretaries who just typed letters into the computer. Grace Hopper's Navy computing unit famously had to raid other offices at night for resources.

> I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.

Computing advanced so quickly it showed the Soviet-style communist system for the lumbering boondoggle it was. By the time the central committee deigned to allocate resources for computing they were a generation behind and that only got worse. They stole western design and software because they didn't have the economic leeway to do it themselves.

You need to remember: by the 60s/70s the western economies were taking off in says Warsaw countries were never able to match. They simply did less and did it less efficiently across almost all sectors of the economy. No one had to cheat them or restrict them. They shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.

There were no startups. You had to petition the central government for permission to build more computers. They would assign you a quota. You built that many computers. In the mean time 12 new startups were founded in the US and two of them came up with new chip designs and shipped them to customers. Doesn't take a genius to understand why the soviet sphere was a compete non-entity in computing.

Thanks, I completely forgot they weren't called prototypes originally.

The agents tend to produce working code but the larger the scope the bigger the mess they tend to make. They will happily evolve toward a local maxima but leave world-destroying bugs lurking in the implementation.

The other issue is that claude regularly ignores explicit instructions in CLAUDE.md or in prompts. It will "helpfully" decide to just start doing whatever it wants or reinterpret instructions completely differently than it did the last 100 times.

It has nothing to do with losing control or trust. LLMs are not conscious. They have no executive function. They aren't even thinking. They're just models predicting the next word in the script. They are very useful tools but that's all they are: tools.

The language B was evolved in-place by adding new features, then editing the compiler source to make use of those new features, then repeating. They simply started calling it "New B". At some point the language had evolved sufficiently that they decided to call it C.

The semantics of arrays were inherited from B and simply never changed. Part of me suspects this was also because it was seen as "clever" at the time. Look ma, we let arrays turn into pointers! Isn't that clever?

When you look at pre-ANSI C function prototypes you wonder "where are the parameter types?" because there are none. The compiler didn't bother to check. Part of that was perhaps for implementation reasons but a big part of that was the feeling or culture inherited from B: in that language you just had words of memory. You were free to interpret any word of memory as any data type you liked. So duh of course it is up to you to decide how many parameters your function received and of what type. If the caller supplied a different number or different types? Don't do that.

If you are coming from that sort of world clever tricks like arrays decaying to pointers or automatically converting between data types and sizes seems perfectly natural. Anything C offers above and beyond that is an improvement from B after all.

So much for efficient free markets.

Anyone can get much better at using their non-dominant hand (if they have one) with just a bit of practice. The effect is much much stronger when you do so as a child.

A CSPRNG is just an algorithm that uses some entropy as a key and feeds back on itself to generate a stream of random bytes. It is a way of expanding a small bit of entropy into a much larger sequence of random values.

From that you can derive the underlying objection here: estimating entropy, blocking /dev/random, and all the other noise is equivalent to saying "cryptography doesn't work". It is both wrong and pointless.

The only place it matters is at boot when there is no hardware source of randomness _which excludes pretty much all PCs which have hardware generators_. You need a true random key to start the CSPRNG but that's it. If you don't have a hardware unit you use time of arrival of the next network packet. Or the frequency of keystrokes on the keyboard.

Now you might ask: why bother seeing the entropy pool at all? The answer is Perfect Forward Secrecy. By mixing in new randomness you are effectively slowly swapping out the key used for the encrypted stream. Thus even if someone is able to compromise something based on guessing the random number sequence your CSPRNG generated their guesses will get more and more wrong as new entropy enters the pool eventually becoming useless. This is a defense-in-depth policy though, not a practical attack mechanism.

On linux it is unfortunate that /dev/urandom has the property of silently vending non-random bytes on hardware without an RNG just after boot and that /dev/random was designed to block when the magical fairies say so but of the two failure modes /dev/urandom is the least bad because practically most hardware (even embedded hardware these days) simply can't encounter its failure mode.

There are some ways to get this off the ground much quicker. One or more companies could buy an existing non-leading-edge fab like GlobalFoundaries. That buys a lot of expertise so you're not starting from zero.

DRAM also benefits from being very regular and relatively simple. It used to be what you bring up on a new process node to help prove things out.

It also isn't impossible to reduce reliance on ASML if you're willing to throw money at it. That's definitely a super-long-game move but it could be done.

I'm not going to argue that someone is going to do any of this but if demand is sustained it is possible.

Yet as far as I can tell none of them offer anything in this area except at the extremely high end. Even Ubiquiti's UPS offerings are garbage simulated sine wave with lead acid batteries.

Are UPSes such a niche product there's no money in it? Are they really content to just give up the whole "power station" market to upstart competitors?

Even aviation jump packs (that connect to aircraft ground power ports) offer lithium versions and that's an industry that moves like sloths toward new technology!