gradschool

I haven't tried this myself, but long ago someone on here in your position had a stroke of genius, which was to contact google's data protection office (the one in Ireland) requesting the complete archive of all the information google had on him. If you reach that level of this game, there will be one final test of your valor, when the google data protection officers ask if you want your account restored. Many before you have been kicked to the curb at that point by answering in the affirmative, only to be told to their chagrin that restoring people's accounts isn't the data protection officers' department. The correct answer is "I would like you to provide me with the complete archive of all information google has about me. One way of fulfilling this legal obligation would be to restore my account, but the way you do it is up to you." Shortly thereafter, the commenter was sent an email with a link that got him back into his account.

The Five Gospels, by Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, the original 1993 hardbound print edition [1]. It has the full annotated texts of the four canonical gospels and the gospel of Thomas in the best available modern English translations, with each passage color coded based on a vote by the reviewers about how close to the original sources they think it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar

From https://proton.me/blog/proton-drive-cli :

"Sign-in happens through your browser — no password on the command line."

which I can confirm having tried it myself. It's hard to imagine what the proton devs were thinking. Did the case of using a command line tool on a headless or remote server never occur to them?

I do a weekly full back of the root filesystems of my Linux desktop and wife's laptop machines (while booted from rescue media) to zfs snapshots on a home file server running freebsd using rsync. The server holds snapshots for the most recent five weeks. A script on the server watches for changes and synchronizes its copy of my desktop home directory and paperless-ngx archive with a luks encrypted filesystem backed by a regular file, splits the image file into 1MB chunks, and uploads the changed chunks since the previous week to a cheap vps using rsync (typically 2 to 4 GB out of 400 total). The image file is on an external SSD connected to the server in case I have to grab it and run. (I prefer luks and ext4 for external media to the bsd equivalents so the server uses an Arch Linux vm with raw drive passthrough.) A script on the vps synchronizes it with redundant copies on three independent cloud storage providers using rclone, one of which stores monthly snapshots for the most recent seven months. I've memorized the passwords for the cloud providers and can access them without 2FA. A script on my laptop watches the cloud storage providers for changes and synchronizes one of them using rclone to a local copy on a rotating basis, reconstructs the luks filesystem image, and checks the SHA1 sum. My laptop also dumps a copy of the image to an old-timey slow-ass external usb hard drive once per quarter that holds the most recent four quarters. Once a year I back up the paperless archive and selected important files to DVD.

Little Bird

Wonder Man

The Penguin

Andor

Blue Eyed Samurai

The Patient

Say Nothing

It's tempting to go down the rabbit hole of getting creative with memory management as the author does, and maybe worthwhile for educational purposes, but has anyone here observed any noticeable performance gain from it? My impression is that libraries like mimalloc and tcmalloc are painstakingly optimized by specialists and unlikely to benefit from any casual embellishments beyond using the supported malloc and free functions for everything. What does the HN braintrust recommend?

I use a distinct key for each remote account. Although it's meant to be infeasible to infer a private key from a public key, distinct keys give me another layer of defence in depth in case an attacker ever finds a way to do it. Another advantage is that I can use passphrases selectively. For example, if I have an unpriviledged remote account with shell access disabled because it's used only for proxy tunnelling, it's less important to have a passphrase protecting its key than it would be for a remote root account, and not having one could be more convenient.

A great science fiction premise could be that a technologically advanced adversary genetically engineers mirror life people to work as spies and saboteurs at wiping out the rest of the population so they can have the world for themselves, but they get rumbled by dogs specially trained to sniff them out or various other means that might surprise and delight the reader. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the difference between the smell of an orange and a lemon is down to the chirality of a single molecule.

I'm assuming a finite alphabet and a finitely axiomatizable proof system per convention. I can't think of an uncountable set of propositions in which each can be written as a finite string of symbols, so that's what I was missing. Thank you for clearing this up for me.

I'm aware that very smart people have thought carefully about all this, but I still can't help thinking that this argument is unnecessarily complicated. It seems to me that a proof is something that can be written down as a finite string of symbols, so any proof system admits only countably many proofs. On the other hand, it's easy to make up an example of an uncountable set of propositions. That's too many for each of them to have a proof, so some of them must be unprovable. What am I missing?

Being obtuse comes effortlessly to me, I'm afraid. My comment pertains specifically to the kind mathematics that has no applications as a rebuttal to what I read as the author's main claim it will inevitably decline as a human endeavor. Saying that, I believe that AI has great potential to advance engineering.

I don't move in these circles but the way I picture it is that higher mathematics in its purest form has no applications but is rather a medium of creative expression among a select few. How is AI generating voluminous opaque proofs of esoteric results so different from generating millions of hours of music nobody likes or has time to hear that we think the former is world-changing while the latter is just slop?

I got a UGREEN DXP6800 about two weeks ago on which I installed FreeBSD, and was just noticing today how slow the USB is when I saw this article mentioning a possible explanation (like ten times slower than when I plug the same external SSD into another machine). Have you noticed USB bandwidth issues in your setup or is it likely just some misconfiguration on my part?

> Imagine if border guards seize money willy-nilly.

no need to imagine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

> This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures.

Peripheral to your comment, there is an argument against AI generated CSAM that no one seems to be making so allow me. AI will do the same for CSAM as it has already done for copyright laundering. That is, it will enable its distributors to train their models on real CSAM while obscuring the training material. A legal regime that permits unrestricted distribution of AI generated CSAM incentivizes actual abuse as a source of training material. If one opposes legal prohibitions on free speech grounds, then at a minimum there should be an audit requirement incumbent on AI generated CSAM distributors to document their process in sufficient detail as to establish that they haven't used actual CSAM for training, similarly to the way porn distributors are required to document that their models are of legal age.

The problem as stated seems ill posed to me. If Santa wakes up when either quorum is ready, then it's never true that both are waiting unless they arrive simultaneously. Either that's a zero probability event that can be safely ignored, or it needs to be handled by arbitration in some form. Attempting to resolve contention by giving preference to one or the other shifts the problem to that of determining whether they're close enough to be considered simultaneous, with edge cases needing to be resolved by arbitration, and so on.

Learning stuff can be done on your own any time. The best use of your time in college is to cultivate professional contacts. Keep an eye out for professors who appear to be in charge of research projects with outside funding and volunteer to help out by doing whatever nobody wants to do, even if it's unpaid and even if it cuts into your study time. Be the first person that comes to mind when the professor's high flying industry friends tell him they wish they could find some bright highly motivated intern. If you don't think you need to try this hard this soon to find a job I hope you're independently wealthy.

Not to be alarmist, but suppose a galactic federation judges that humans in their current state of development will pose a danger to other civilizations when they imminently attain warp capability, so as a safety precaution they need to be confined to their planet for at least a millennium. An agent of the federation posing as human manipulates the population into allowing 100,000 satellites to be deployed. With that done, federation scientists solve the many-body problem for the exact necessary speed and trajectory of a small meteor to shatter one of the satellites such that some of its fragments precisely target its neighboring satellites, and so on, while the rest get kicked up into higher orbits. Life goes on but any enterprise that depends on penetrating the debris field becomes infeasible.

I blame it all on one guy. What if that plonker who broke ranks on the English side during the battle of Hastings after the English had successfully held the high ground against the French all day stayed in bed that morning, and William the Conqueror just had to bugger off back where he came from? The British Isles turn away from Europe and develop stronger ties with Scandinavian countries over the ensuing centuries. A kingdom of the north eventually extends to encompass Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, and the Iroquois confederation well before Columbus. With first contact happening at a time when neither side has any technological advantage, the relationship becomes more of an alliance than a colonization. I don't know how to extrapolate further except to imagine that the world looks very different.

Story time. In college 40+ years ago my housemate wanted to impress this girl by inviting her to write an important paper of hers with a looming deadline on his computer with WordStar instead of her usual methodology involving a typewriter. She was using WordStar comfortably in less than five minutes but being completely new to it was unaware of the practice of periodically saving one's work. Around three in the morning it crashed and took all of her work with it. I was told she burst into tears and had left when I woke up the next morning to find my housemate busily trying to retype it from her handwritten notes.

Inform them that you've put the answer key to their upcoming final exam on a poorly secured EC2 instance or s3 bucket. This technique serves a variety of students in different ways. Those who have no idea what you mean get a valuable introduction to independent study. Those who have the chops might up their game enough to crack it. Those who are rich enough to hire a smart kid to do it for them impart a valuable lesson to the group on the nature of privilege. Those who are neither smart nor rich are incentivized to stay in school. To top it off, make the final exam consist of thought provoking essay questions whose answer key takes the form of detailed notes and citations.

A small leak can sink a ship. The fake dollars weren't knowingly accepted. If public confidence in the value of money is lost, we're all in big trouble. The Secret Service was right to pursue the case zealously.

I don't know about y'all, but this paradox was resolved to my complete satisfaction in a blog post some years ago, I believe by Scott Aaronson, though I can't find the link. If the predictor has such a good success rate, then it must be simulating people's brains, but since it's not always right, the simulation isn't perfect. The best strategy for playing this game therefore is to look for indications as to whether I'm the real me or the simulation when the question is posed to me, and choose accordingly. Am I floating in a sensory deprivation tank being asked my choice by a disembodied voice with no recollection of how I got there and no memory of my childhood? In that case maybe I'm the simulation, so my answer is that I'll choose just one box. Is it an ordinary day of my life and a plausible setting with all of my faculties and recollections intact? Then I'll assume simulated me had my back and take both boxes.

inspired by a recent thread on here, a usability testing service for apps and websites where the testers are old people

Take it to a charity shop or thrift store near you that accepts donations of electronics so that it finds its way to some smart kid who wants to teach himself or herself about computers.

For another example of betrayal, one of the cronies in Katherine the Great's court always gave a dog to his girlfriends whenever he started a new relationship. Then if the dog ever greeted some other guy familiarly, he inferred he was falling out of favor. He probably learned that trick when someone did it to him, because he would let the other guy know how he was rumbled before graciously bowing out.