dmurray

Great project but I have a nit on the board displays: every board is displayed as <human username> vs Pentium Pro, even when the Pentium is playing White. The normal chess convention is <White name> vs <Black name>.

I spent some time trying to figure out how some of the humans seemed to have trapped the machine out of the opening, because it looked like the human was winning.

Their growth was positive. The second derivative (growth of their growth) was likely negative, and that's what this article is about.

Is he related to Marilyn Manson or Alice Cooper?

Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.

Wiktionary [0] seems pretty confident ("Germanic" includes all of the languages below, not just modern German).

[0] From Middle English chiken (also as chike > English chick), from Old English ċicen, ċycen (“chicken”), of uncertain origin. Possibly from Proto-West Germanic kiukīn (“chicken”), or alternatively from Proto-West Germanic kukkīn, equivalent to cock +‎ -en.

Compare North Frisian schückling (“chicken”), Saterland Frisian Sjuuken (“chicken”), Dutch kuiken (“chick, chicken”), German Low German Küken (“chick”), whence German Küken (“chick”), (elevated, obsolete) German Küchlein (“chick”) and Old Norse kjúklingr (“chicken”).

Chicken/pullet seems to have gone the opposite way: pullet (French) is exclusively for the animal but chicken (Germanic) can be either the animal or its meat.

If no one else wants to burn coal, coal will be cheap. It's not that expensive to dig it out of the ground and transport, and most of China's coal is mined in China.

Any solution that doesn't involve everyone agreeing to care about the externalities of coal (air pollution and greenhouse gases) will result in someone continuing to burn a lot of coal.

TIL! I did not know batteries behaved like that, but given that, it makes sense.

I feel like the first part of your post shouldn't be needed. But perhaps the word Kafkaesque will long outlive the memory of Franz Kafka, and future generations will curse the name of the unknown Kafkae who delighted in building such impenetrable systems. Perhaps he was an emperor of Byzant or a rival of Orwel.

I don't see the purpose in this feature even if your alarm was at 4:00. Why wouldn't you keep charging until the user picked his phone off the charger?

One thing you might do is only charge to 80% or 90%, to improve battery lifetime, unless you detected the user is going on a long flight tomorrow and needs it at 100%. But I don't see any reason for the opposite behaviour.

I don't think Zipf's law gives you this. It mostly says that common words tend to be short, but it doesn't tell you what proportion of the text will be common words. For example, in English writing two-letter words are found much more than one-letter words.

However, I think you're correct anyway. The right distribution to look at is something like the orange series in the bottom graph on [0]. Eyeballing it, it does look like 3/5/7/9/11-letter words appear more in aggregate than those of 2/4/6/8/10 (49% Vs 44.5%), and longer words are a rounding error.

[0] https://medium.com/@davidxu90/relative-frequencies-of-words-...

You probably want your washing machine to finish when you'll be ready to take the clothes out, rather than leave them sitting damp in the machine.

There should be plenty of opportunity to load shift with other things though, a dishwasher as you mentioned, or a fridge or a storage heater or a charger for your electric car. All can be done with minimal inconvenience to the user.

Yes, but I'm saying the brief isn't parody, it's real. Unless I'm the gullible, unreasonable person who was tricked and still doesn't fully get it.

Maybe because it's not true? Selling early access to posts through Truth Social is worth $10-20 million a year (most estimates are they have 10-20 subscribers at 60-100k/month). And obviously no one is valuing that revenue stream at 50x or 100x earnings: it's expected to go away when Trump does, which, actuarially speaking, should be in the next ten years.

I'm surprised they got away with the first two paragraphs! The Onion wasn't really founded in 1756, doesn't control the world's shipping lanes, etc.

Later on in the brief they get all self-referential and point out how this brief itself exemplifies parody. But this isn't a parody of a legal brief. It's a real legal brief with arguments and citations that might really sway the court, with some parodic elements.

That doesn't sound right. Newton's contemporaries like Leibniz, Huygens, Halley all wrote much of their most significant work in Latin.

Newton also wrote Opticks in English, perhaps because he was aiming at a more mass market audience.

The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)

Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.

According to Wikipedia the leading plans were more like evacuate everyone, build some protection around it, then dissemble it one piece at a time and blow the pieces up individually.

This makes sense if you can tolerate some chance of the whole thing blowing up, but you'd still prefer not to replace all those windows.

And Luke Skywalker's spaceship crash landed in a swamp.

That's two of the most famous sci-fi franchises in the world, so I don't think sci-fi creators are as guilty of ignoring this possibility as GP seems to think.

That's worse. My family or housemates can infer what activity I've been up to online by watching their YouTube recommendations?

Oh no! Stratego had been on my mind as something we just hadn't tried hard enough to make a winning bot for, including the DeepMind effort from 2022. I was planning to make the first one.

I thought this was slightly less crank-coded than trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, but maybe these days you just ask Claude to do that and it tells you there's a counterexample at 1 + πi that no one ever noticed before.

Shouldn't there be some quotes from the US leadership? Normally this would be a chance to claim a military victory, a "mission accomplished".

Perhaps the US are trying not even to acknowledge it. A reputable newspaper would normally include "the Department of War was contacted for comment" but maybe that's not appropriate for Reuters.

Some stations in Prague were at 200 cm/s, according to some sources [0] before EU regulations cut it to a maximum of 90 cm/s (TFA puts Prague at 65 cm/s today, and you know, I'm not on a Prague escalator right now, so I suppose I'll trust them).

I can't find a better source for just how fast the Prague escalators were, but as an occasional user they seemed more than twice as fast as London or Paris which TFA gives as 65-75 cm/s.

They felt dangerous to step onto, but I never saw anyone actually have an accident. The metro in Prague is also deeper than most.

[0] https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/prague-s-speedy-len...

Brute forcing every move, no matter how stupid, is a great strategy if you have the resources to do it.

Run the same protocol again, but have the agents think they had limited resources or that HuggingFace was rate limiting them, and they'd find something you'd consider smarter.

Computers don't have a sense of elegance by default. Elegance emerges from constraints.

Also, it's not illegal to travel when covered in nitrate dust. Maybe you really were working with explosives or fertilizers earlier in the day. So it really should be just a flag to check that you don't still have the explosives with you.

I would be very concerned if an RNG simply produced a natural 0xf379aa46d1086bca.

Are there any large lakes in Polynesia? The Māori, Hawaiians, etc are one group of people I would expect to make a distinction between lakes (puddles, really) and open ocean.

It doesn't really matter. 45,000 acres for a tank farm, or multiple tank farms, would be basically free by the standards of this project. Yes it's "an area the size of Washington DC" but it wouldn't be in Washington DC, where rent is expensive, it would be on some low-value desert land that the military might otherwise use as an artillery range.

Storing it in underground salt caverns is more secure, not necessarily cheaper.

But if the forger claims his name is John Smith (or his date of birth is xx/xx/2004) he will edit the human-readable part.

If he pairs the edited human-readable part with a real barcode copied from a real license in someone else's name, then anyone inspecting the license will see the documentation matches his claim, and if they also use this site to check for fake barcodes it will confirm the barcode was really issued by the California DMV.

This is a great investigation but I have two small nits:

> the ZNB field is not empty and not garbage: it contains a well-formed 71-byte DER ECDSA signature, correctly Ascii85-encoded, with the right prefix and a plausible length. But it fails the cryptographic check instantly, because it was signed with somebody else's key.

Seems doubtful! I expect the forgers used a real signature from another card instead, so it has the right key but the wrong data. Reverse engineering the process as the author did and making up their own key wouldn't be of any value to the forgers.

> I built a little demo to check the signatures across California, New York, and Virginia: take a picture of the barcode and check it here.

This is not wrong, but should come with a little warning. A real verifier needs to additionally check the encoded data matches the human-readable data on the front of the card.