Every gram of body weight needs energy to stay alive. If you are in a caloric deficit, you will lose weight until your energy expenditure matches the caloric intake. If you stay in "caloric deficit" forever you will actually starve by definition.

Properly defining what you mean (comparatively low caloric intake without defining it via the current weight) is actually quite tricky, as your height, body composition and physical activities are all inputs to what counts as a "normal" caloric intake.

Modern operating systems will gladly do CLAT, and old operating systems (or fussy users) can still get their IPv4 by just ignoring the new DHCPv4 option. But admins can finally stop keeping an IPv4 around for every potential client as most applications and users really don't care.

With tabs pretty much every editor except something like notepad.exe could do it since ancient times, with spaces the editor needs to do a bit more processing, so you were a bit more restricted in editor choice, if you really were bothered so much by the indents chosen in the project.

So it is actually quite similar to the ligature discussion. It would be good if the code looked the same for everybody but now instead of saying "But 8-space indents waste so much space on the screen :(" some people now go "But I don't like seeing things like != or -> instead of modern Unicode symbols :("

This goes down to the details like that you should either use spaces over tabs OR prescribe editor config such that the code looks similar on each machine.

Of course this doesn't automatically mean that code ligatures are harmful, but I would be quite wary of using them. At the very least it introduces some friction, not sure if the arguably lower mental load of using real mathematical symbols instead of the ASCII symbols makes up for it.

Whenever somebody was talking about rolled oats, without fail, somebody would chime in that Kölln brand rolled outs were strictly superior and they would gladly pay the 4x markup for them.

It is hilarious because rolled outs are probably one of the most fungible goods out there. Also the comments eventually just... stopped.

Human perception is weird like that so even identical oats may taste better if the packaging is different, and also it might have been a memetic thing, but I am still somewhat convinced that it was a marketing campaign.

It is often portrayed like an old-school hackerspace or makerspace but it's definitely not. It has an explicit corporate background, and it always feels like that is somehow hidden. In these comments there is a comment that claims that RC is not for business builders and networking, then immediately gets disproven by a quote from its very website. This shows that you have an actual image/brand problem.

It is similar to how the term "hackathon" evolved. In the old times it was people coming together who worked on shared goals (like a FLOSS project) but only communicated via mailing lists and probably would never met in person otherwise. A hackathon was often an emotional thing, involving poor people travelling to the other side of the planet to meet their online friends to drink beer and finally have a whiteboard to communicate some complex ideas. Then corporations came and organized soulless "hackathons" and turned it into an idea farm and talent recruitment. The term "hackathon" is pretty much burnt completely nowadays.

So anything that feels like it gets subtly used by corporatism just naturally gives techies the ick. It is not the first time this bait-and-switch happens, so people are fair to assume intent.

I say you cannot control it, as obviously the public image comes from those blog posts of RC "Alumni" (Another great example: that term alone gives me the creeps). And those people have the right to feel excited about a nice experience that it probably was for them.

But Recurse Center should probably be proud of the corporate background and actively counteract the impression of being a hobbyist makerspace that just has better inventory and manpower.

You didn't say if you did, but just in case if you truly never had a serious look at LLM tools, you really need to step up. Never even trying something like Claude Code borders on negligence nowadays.

AI is still a bubble, but pretty much every software developer having a hard-dependency on these companies nowadays, is was sustains it. It sucks, but currently there is no realistic way around it.

Exceptions apply for data protection reasons, obviously don't upload all your personal data and business-critical intellectual property into some 3rd-party AI tool.

The trapped oil gets disposed of separately, the treated oil-free water goes to the sewer.

What Feynman does (where this confusion comes from) is that you can look at discrete wave packets (i.e. photons) and the math comes out the right way for the primary wave if you assume that only some of these wave packets get phase-shifted, and add all elementary waves together afterwards.

But still, it's photons as "wave packets" that influence the whole system, not photons as independent particles that either bounce on something or don't.

But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.

The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.

For me the colonialisation update fixed that. But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?

Or is it more binary that you have to decide, you either handle any cash and have the cost associated with it, or you refuse to take cash at all? If the latter is the case, then avoiding cash altogether seems somewhat unrealistic where I am from. And if it doesn't scale then it makes a lot of sense cost-wise to try to do as many of your transactions with cash as possible.

GUIX is unconfortable about that, but as they name the current process "full source bootstrap" implicitly consider this unaudited execution environment out-of-scope and more of an academic blemish, rather than a real problem: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

After all you rebuild it together with the world immediately after compiler bootstrap is done. And the utilities in your execution environment do not process the compiler source, so this dependency cannot be a problem, right?

The paper precisely addresses this. You cannot handwave away your shell or ELF utilities. They can sustain an attack just like the compiler.

> "[For demonstration purposes], I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode."

This is precisely the problem that most people dealing with OPSEC have.

If you get "paranoid enough", your threat model always collapses into an unactionable mess where everything is just toast and your only solution is to quit computing and start doing woodwork or something.

If everything is potentially compromised then of course the results from the paper become obvious. If your environment is compromised, don't trust its output, duh!

If you want to quantify though, under which assumptions, "how much" your environment can be broken without compromising its output, the paper has value. And it seems like real attempts of bootstrapping binaries actually missed a spot.

It is precisely about showing that you can still propagate backdoored code if the compromised binary in your seed is NOT the compiler.

In the short time between fork() and execve(), the new process duplicates the entire virtual memory of the old one. None of this is physically allocated due to copy-on-write, but still all counts as virtual memory.

You start just distinguishing two letters (usually K and M). I would recommend using a trainer app that gives you a string of letters by sound, and to write them down on paper. Then you can check how many you got correct. Do not try to replay letters multiple times, just skip it and move on. If your result is better than 95% or so you can continue and introduce a third letter, and so on.

There is a certain order of letters considered more or less canonical for use in the Koch method which you can look up.

Edit: Back then I learnt it with https://lcwo.net/, it's distraction-free and quite nice.

Some other things that surprised me and may be interesting for other people:

Learning Morse code is like learning a new language. The unit of understanding is not dots and dashes but rather every letter is a unit that one (in modern training) learns to recognize intuitively as such before doing anything else.

On top of that, telegraphy has these three letter Q-Codes where one would assume that these abbreviations are for line efficiency, but also it's because three letters is a nice length that still decodes intuitively as a "word". (Also Q was probably chosen because it so seldomly comes up in "normal" words, so it's like a little attention signal? But that is my speculation.)

One can see in conversation that these three-letter codes often only have to be transmitted once, whereas free text (e.g. proper names) are often sent with redundancy so it's easier to transcribe them as you have to fall back to decoding individual letters. (My ears still sometimes perk up suddenly when hearing Morse code from movies because suddenly I pick up something like CQ without even paying attention.)

People therefore use terms like "musicality" (at least in my language, not sure if that translates to English) to refer to the quality of one's transmission. There is a certain art to it.

One funny exception to the three letter codes that gets used in Germany. If somebody signs off for a lunch break, they'll key ESSEN (translates to "eating"/"food") which would be considered "too long" to decode intuitively but it has a nice drumroll to it so it still works :)

Both the scatter plot and also the probability graph seem to be curving upwards w.r.t age, i.e. the incidence of dementia cases seems to accelerate with age. Which at least makes a lot of intuitive sense, and would forbid just plotting in a regression line.

Having a more or less circumstantial point to arbitrarily cut your regression line in half also just begs for introducing Simpson's Paradox.

We may have collectively filled libraries full of books, and created yottabytes of digital data, but in the end to create something novel somebody has to read and understand all of this stuff. Obviously this is not possible. Read one book per day from birth to death and you still only get to consume like 80*365=29200 books in the best case, from the millions upon millions of books that have been written.

So these "few tricks" are the accumulation of a lifetime of mathematical training, the culmination of the slice of knowledge that the respective mathematician immersed themselves into. To discover new math and become famous you need both the talent and skill to apply your knowledge in novel ways, but also be lucky that you picked a field of math that has novel things with interesting applications to discover plus you picked up the right tools and right mental model that allows you to discover these things.

This does not go for math only, but also for pretty much all other non-trivial fields. There is a reason why history repeats.

And it's actually a compelling argument why AI is still a big deal even though it's at its core a parrot. It's a parrot yes, but compared to a human, it actually was able to ingest the entirety of human knowledge.