It’s nice to have ntsync, I’ve been using it for a few weeks. Knowing that the thread sync api is solid means one less thing to worry about when debugging modded skyrim.

Wow, someone even more devoted to blocking ads than I am. Personally I will just never go back to youtube rather than go through that much debugging.

The one time my combination of ublock origin, jshelter, noscript set to allow only the scripts that are actually needed, and custom firefox librewolf settings was insufficient to watch youtube I didn’t go back for a few days. When I did it was mysteriously back to working.

Maybe he still owns the quarry down the road.

Yep. It sends me to fsf.org. If the link goes here or anywhere else and such things bother you, fix your “referer” settings.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

Depends how tall they are.

tl;dr: It’s alarmingly large and rapidly growing.

I wonder where all the money is coming from. It’s got to run out at some point.

the only radical thing a person could be doing right now is ignoring it.

Wait, what? I knew these people didn’t know what “radical” means — but what on earth do they actually think it does mean?

Of course. The very phrase “Just Stop Oil” is a radically extremist expression. Stopping oil is making a big change that addresses the root of the problem, i.e. it’s radical. It’s the extremist version of the more moderate “slow down oil a little” approaches that dominate politics.

Taler does use crypto, aka cryptography, to make sending payments securely anonymous. That is the main point of it.

Target audience: People who want to pay for stuff anonymously through the Internet. It’s a large and underserved market.

It’s a big part of why people got so excited about bitcoin, and why it was so disappointing when it spectacularly failed to be any good at that application.

Well, I got around to reading it although I didn’t look too closely at the actual mathematics of quantum annealing. The sensationalist tone of the headline dominates much of the text as well, unfortunately. But they did factor a 2048 bit number, taken as representative of a class of such numbers which have two factors that differ from each other in only two of their bits. So a space of roughly 2^1000 numbers I guess.

California State University previously factored a 1061 bit number. It’s reference 27, which says “https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/44” where it should be “https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/444.pdf”.

This marks the first successful factorization of RSA-2048 by D-Wave quantum computer, regardless of employing mathematical or quantum techniques, despite dealing with special integers, exceeding 2^1061−1 of California State University.

That’s a lot of California State University. If I’m guessing correctly as to what they’re trying to say it’s an impressive result, but it is not a successful attack on RSA-2048 and it’s made somewhat less plausible by the misleading title.

More importantly, run an operating system you can trust.

Imagine spending four years plotting and scheming about how you’ll do everything better next time, and this is what you come up with.

Only that it wasn’t as good as they expected. I’m going to go ahead and assume it was the 1969 Hall Bartlett movie because that looks intriguing.

I think that most people would indeed “automatically pass out and sleep” long before 11 days went past, unless they used some strong drugs or stimuli designed to keep them awake. Source: I tried to see how long I could go without sleeping, no tricks just sheer force of will, when I was young and healthy. Slightly more than 90 hours.

I like to have something with some thermal mass to it in the freezer at all times. (Currently it’s a lot of frozen spinach.)

It takes a couple days to thaw out when the power goes down, usually long enough to find a source of ice blocks.

Around here the traffic lights stop working right away if the power is out. If you’re in the city traffic will suck for a while, but then it will drop to very little and the buses will be fine.

Stop, you’ve gone too far. Also you’ve gone the wrong way. And your driving is terrible. And you’re drunk on power. Why did I even get in this clown car.