muxl

The show makes reference to "Midnight in Chernobyl" in its epilogue, I think it's safe to say it was one of the main sources of information for the show (though of course they took liberties because it was a historical drama).

I agree there are some claims in this article that should be further scrutinized but it's true that the levels of radiation were not as high as one might assume. The direction of the wind during and immediately following the disaster slowed the spread of radioactive material over Pripyat (this is also why southern Belarus was hit so hard). The prevailing winds in that region are north east and the Chernobyl power plant was on the north side of the city. By the time of the May day parade the winds had shifted such that Kiev was downwind from Chernobyl.

The KGB did their best to contain information about the disaster in general and the USSR wanted the May day parade to go on as-planned to make it look like things were fine. Even those with enough power or connections to be aware of the danger were pressured to participate. The May day parade was later often referred to in infamy by the Ukrainian independence movement following the disaster.

Most of my information comes from what I remember of reading "Midnight in Chernobyl" and "Chernobyl the History of a Nuclear Disaster"

It seems that in practice no it's not possible based on what I've read from people much closer to programming language design and compiler work.

"In practice, the challenge of programming language design is not one of expanding a well-defined frontier, it is grappling with a neverending list of fundamental tradeoffs between mutually incompatible features.

Subtyping is tantalizingly useful but makes complete type inference incredibly difficult (and in general, provably impossible). Structural typing drastically reduces the burden of assigning a name to every uninteresting intermediate form but more or less precludes taking advantage of Haskell-style typeclasses or Rust-style traits. Dynamic dispatch substantially assists decoupling of software components but can come with a significant performance cost without a JIT. Just-in-time compilation can use runtime information to optimize code in ways that permit more flexible coding patterns, but JIT performance can be unpredictable, and the overhead of an optimizing JIT is substantial. Sophisticated metaprogramming systems can radically cut down on boilerplate and improve program concision and even readability, but they can have substantial runtime or compile-time overhead and tend to thwart automated tooling. The list goes on and on."

From https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2025/05/29/a-break-from-p...

It is truly risk free. You always buy the call using the customer's money but you only give them the call if every part of the parlay is correct. Assuming they charge a commission in addition to the asset price to cover transaction processing they shouldn't lose money

Edit: I don't really know how pricing these things usually works but I could see taking some risk on to price these attractively

It was chosen to be implemented as a generic type in this design because the way that uncertainty "pollutes" underlying values maps well onto monads which were expressed through generics in this case.

The desktop background reminds me of some screens that MEPIS OS used [0] back when I was first getting into Linux in high school and the idea of live distributions blew my mind. I assume it's a coincidence people just like pyramids I guess.

[0] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mepis.png

I don't agree with the conclusion put forward in the article. I'm reminded of my time trying to get into Urbit many years ago or DAPs. That certainly require me to think differently about things but that didn't make me, or many other people, want them. It might be a necessary pre-condition for stickiness but it certainly isn't equivalent. Barriers to adoption lock people out and, once they have been overcome, lock people in.

I've done a number of text-based slide presentations with `marp` and I've been pleased with the results. Mostly it's just plain markdown slides but if you want to get into the weeds with HTML and have a 2-column slide or something you can do it. https://marp.app/

If I'm understanding the parent comment correctly: a fact may have political implications but it doesn't depend on politics. In other words reality is independent of our interpretation of it (i.e. philosophical realism). The rub of course being that coming to know facts about most things is a highly social process filtered through interpretation and biases. Everything can be political if it needs to be decided upon by a group.

EDIT: I have avoided using "truth" here because it's a more general term than "fact" which has the connotation of being in reference to something concrete.

I'm glad to see more sites giving visibility to long-lasting products. This reminds me of https://buymeonce.com/ but I like the community driven aspect of this. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

2FA isn't double checking to make sure you meant to log in. It's verifying that you are the person logging in. Alert fatigue is a real issue as you point out and we need to make sure to not overwhelm users which is one major benefit of federated authentication.

The problem with taking an "undo" philosophy here is that it's very hard (impossible?) to undo the transfer of information which is what attackers are after in many breaches.

One of the issues ignored here is the nature of cascading failures that happen during a breach due to password reuse. If a user is compromised through an active credential forwarding attack like the one described the user's account could be compromised on that service. Afterward, however, when the user's credentials are re-used by the attacker to access other accounts that attack is made significantly nosier and ineffective as the user would get an SMS for other services using 2FA.

TL;DR getting a text message every time someone logs in as you is going mean you're much more aware of what's happening with your accounts. Having that text message contain credentials means if it wasn't you logging in (and hence you weren't expecting an SMS) then the login fails.

EDIT: Password managers are great and I'm all for promoting them probably more than 2FA even. The difference between a password manager and 2FA is that a password manager does literally nothing given that your password is known. In that same situation 2FA still does do something and so this appears to be a false dichotomy.

The core message of this article is that it's possible for even large groups of people to be wrong about things and that those people won't think they're wrong (they're wrong about being wrong). The author summarizes this mechanism as: these people are so accustomed to being "right" by appealing to consensus that they can't imagine being wrong.

This argument seems to generalize not just to large groups but also to small ones. The problem I see is that in the case of large groups the author calls this "privilege" and in the case of small groups he doesn't. Since the size of the group doesn't really effect the nature of group orthodoxy and adherence the argument seems to collapse to "large groups are privileged."

I agree that large groups are privileged but to claim that part of privilege is not being able to conceive of your group as being wrong seems tangential and potentially just incorrect.

Perhaps the author is assuming that people in small groups more frequently encounter other groups which (1) they disagree with (2) they eventually determine are right

but it isn't obvious to me that (2) would be more likely to occur in a small group than in a large group. There have been fanatical large groups and small ones which do not tolerate deviation on certain points.

Reading about this I was reminded of this blog post by Backblaze when they announced they were raising their prices.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-computer-backup-pri...

Backblaze does do more than "just store data" but that is their core business and operational concern. Just glancing through this it's easy to see that just retaining data at scale is difficult and expensive.

> By making this decision [to raise prices] now, we are ensuring we can continue to offer unlimited backup and keep improving our Computer Backup service.

I'm doubtful that this organization could generate enough passive income through an endowment to sustain itself. They do have a chart on endowment growth relative to storage growth. I wonder if they've hit the point where the endowment return is greater than their total expenses yet.

A one-time-payment like this would seem more possible if there were any restrictions on who's data to back up and how much. You can't just look at the interest of a one-time payment and say "yup that pays for storage on those bytes indefinitely" because for every byte of storage someone paid for there might be many more that are used for free.