danielheath

> No human can go edit a brain to become better at math

That profession is called “teacher”.

I regularly edit my own brain, and those of others, to improve their skills.

If you're saving 100k per annum and getting a 10% ROI, 20 years brings you to 6.3m.

Obviously even in SV "most people" have not already finished doing this.

Also, it wouldn't have made sense to squeeze the bookshop for a bigger share of the margins, because they'd have moved our books to the back corner of the store and put something higher-margin in the highly-visible shelves, and then our volumes would have been poorer.

Most bookshops had a sizeable space dedicated to our books.

I worked at a publisher back around 2010.

The unit cost for the publisher to put a $20 AUD book on a shelf in a book shop was about $2 AUD.

The bookstore kept quite a bit of that margin - $10 or so - but they had to pay rent & staff a store. If they were only selling $500 worth of books per day, it wouldn't have mattered if their margin was 100%, the fixed overheads would eat it all. If they could keep stock turning over quickly, the profits were impressive.

"Found no evidence" doesn't mean it didn't happen, it means the incident response firm didn't find it.

Knowing what TV you own, what phone models are used in your house, and what other devices you own tells advertisers about your spending patterns and income.

Meanwhile in Australia, it’s illegal (misleading trading) to display a price lower than the customer pays, and has been for a long time. It’s fine; fees etc are disclosed up front.

VB6 the language was a hostile mess. The form builder approach was also in Delphi, and it was equally great there while having a far better language behind it.

Form builders don’t work for responsive design. That’s it, that’s the entire reason they got dropped by industry.

Long before then (Millenia earlier), the voting public can adjust civil timezones to accommodate the drift.

Radiant Star (the new Ann Leckie book, in the “Ancillary Justice” series). Not as good as her earlier books in the series, but very worthwhile if you enjoyed them.

Close enough - if they’re using Claude for anything, the DOD can’t trust that staff didn’t also use it in product development, so they’d have to keep track of everything downstream of that component to ensure it was never used for target selection.

It could also be as simple as "anything tainted by the Claude non-targeting-conditions can't be used in target selection, and we don't want to leak classified information about which components we use in target selection by requiring specific items to be developed without Claude, so we can't allow it anywhere".

Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population.

If you have pens in the building, and staff need a pen, they will use the pen that is available, even if there’s a sign saying “not for purpose x”. If you want to stop that happening, you need to not have limited pens available to your staff at all.

Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.

The two challenges there are firstly - that analog design has been a separate electrical engineering school for most of a century, so there are few who could design it - and secondly - that every single chip will have subtle variations in its computations, necessitating some sort of model finetuning per chip. Possibly the chip could be characterised at the factory, and ship with the characterisation data burned into a controller rom or something, but if that doesn’t pan out the whole thing is likely a non-starter.

If it could be made to work, you could run a fable-grade model in tens of watts.

Arguing in court over whether the details in question were functional or copyright is time-consuming (thus expensive), and risky.

Once it's established that person A has given _any_ details to person B, the upper bound on "expected cost of an effective defense" is dramatically higher.

Functional details can’t be copyrighted, but once you’ve seen a copyrighted implementation, it’s an argument in court over similarity and function.

A clean room implementation by people who haven’t seen the original work means there can be no discussion of copying, which makes it much cheaper and more reliable to fight an infringement claim.

Person A has failed to secure private material, and person B can hardly claim their implementation is “clean room” if they based it on other work.

> what if person a and person b are unrelated and person b found it on their own

That's what's referred to as a "clean room implementation" further up the thread.

However, this specific thread is about the scenario where an employee has inside knowledge and is passing that knowledge on to the implementer.

Legally speaking, a clean room implementation has much better defenses from claims of copyright violation.

> NDAs apply to all of humanity

The NDA doesn't apply to people who haven't signed it, but copyright law does. If you know the material you're receiving is under copyright (eg proprietary source code), and you publish work based on that copyright material, the fact that it's now widely available is not an effective defense against claims of copyright violation.

Person B in this scenario hasn't violated the NDA, but they could be sued for copyright infringement.

"Person A was under NDA, so we got them to pass their knowledge to person B, then had person B do the work - that's clean-room, right?"

Judges, as far as I know, do not generally take kindly to such arguments.

I'm seeing people who _used to be_ like that losing that understanding without realizing it's happening - they have a superficial idea of what the code is doing, enough to feel like they understand it, but the change is apparent when watching them handle something unexpected.

If you're going to put the graphics and NIC into separate VMs, surely the secure screen can be another of those semi-privileged VMs rather than part of dom0

Apps built with a toolkit which ships its own filepicker will immediately attempt to enumerate directories in `/`, `/home`, and probably a few other places.

Apps with a config file will often try to read `~/.config/myapp` and also `~/.myapp/config` and maybe one or two other places.

How many permission prompts will users tolerate?

I did some quick testing with `cjxl --progressive`, different quality levels, and https://google.github.io/attention-center/

A 1536w / 2048h jpg selfie: 244kb

Progressive JXL at quality=70: 151kb

Loaded 7kb of that file: looked okay up to approx 130px wide.

The first 18kb of that file was a suitable thumbnail up to approx 210px wide.

The first 50kb looked okay up to 300px wide.

The first 75kb looked okay up to 600px wide.

Maybe I need to do a lot more testing, but this seems to work alright?

Does that prove you didn't photograph a display showing the digital image?

One particularly interesting (to me, at least) approach using progressive decoding was described by Jake Archibald ( https://jakearchibald.com/2025/present-and-future-of-progres... ).

If browsers extended `srcset` with support for HTTP Range requests, we could use a progressive-encoded jpg (xl or not) file as the source for multiple detail levels.

A device with a small screen would request the first 10kb of the image, while one with a medium screen might fetch 40kb.

The big advantage of that - for sites with many images - is a much better cache hit-rate for a given CDN spend.

Additionally, if you've already fetched a small version of an image and then want to view a bigger version, you've already got partial content downloaded & can fetch only the rest of the file.

Most useful code comment I have encountered read:

“”” After you give up on trying to refactor this code, increment the following line accordingly. HOURS_WASTED_HERE=26 “””

Loneliness is hard. Maybe believing that it was real was the only thing keeping him going.

They may well have used suppressors.