New Zealand.

Our laws make carrying anything with the intent to use it as a weapon (in self defence or not) a crime - whether it’s a gun, sword, pepper spray, cricket bat, screwdriver, or lollipop stick. This makes sure that when someone robs a corner store the owner gets jailed for having a baseball bat behind the counter. It’s absurd.

The law not only doesn’t equalise your chances, it actively forces you to be at a disadvantage when defending yourself, and by the time any police arrive the assailant is long gone. Most criminals don’t have guns (except for the multiple armed gangs of course), but plenty of them bring bladed weapons, there have been multiple cases of machete attacks.

I’m all for gun ownership for the purpose of property defence. Including strong legal defences for home and store owners repelling assailants.

I don’t think just anyone should be able to go and purchase a gun no questions asked, it should probably be tied to some kind of mandatory formal training, e.g. participation in army reserves. It should definitely be more difficult than getting a driver’s licence (but I also think a driver’s licence should be harder to get than it is now. The idea that you can go and sit a written test and then legally pilot a two ton steel box in areas constantly surrounded by very squishy people is kind of absurd to me).

It’s pretty standard practise these days to have some form of secure enclave on an SoC - Arm’s TrustZone, Intel’s SGX, AMD’s SME/SEV. This wouldn’t be any different. Many camera ICs are already using an Arm CPU internally already.

As with everything, trust is required eventually. It’s more about reducing the amount of trust required than removing it entirely. It’s the same with HTTPS - website certificates only work if you trust the root certificate authorities, for example. Root manufacturer keys may only be certified if they have passed some level of trust with the root authority/authorities. Proving that trust is well-founded is more a physical issue than an algorithmic one. As it is with root CAs it may involve physical cybersecurity audits, etc.

This is just standard public key cryptography, we already do this for website certificates. Your browser puts a little lock icon next to the URL if it’s legit, or provides you with a big, full-page warning if something’s wrong with the cert.

You, the end user, don’t have access to your camera’s private key. Only the camera IC does. When your phone / SD card first receives the image/video it’s already been signed by the hardware.

Video evidence is relatively easy to fix, you just need camera ICs to cryptographically sign their outputs. If the image/video is tampered with (or even re-encoded) the signature won’t match. As the private key is (hopefully!) stored securely in the hardware IC taking the photo/video, any generated images or videos can’t be signed by such a private key.

Under the Dewey Decimal System, books on wood carving and river systems would not be placed together, nor would books on conflict resolution and gardening.

It’s almost like they’d be placed with books on related topics instead. This Maori traditional system is… not good. Imagine a system where the books are sorted by which Catholic patron saint they fall under, or which greek god they best represent. The librarians even admit in the article that it’s only practical if you’re already well aware of Maori mythos, everyone else gets ‘an opportunity to learn’ (i.e. be completely lost).

Call me cynical, but I firmly believe that ES6 is more useful to Bethesda as a perpetual ‘carrot on a stick’ than anything they would get from actually releasing it. The people that made Morrowind, Oblivion, and even Skyrim what they are no longer work at Bethesda, but the goodwill of the series remains in people’s minds, and they associate that with Bethesda, even if a majority of their modern releases have been dumpster fires for one reason or another.

There’s a reason we’ve gone almost 15 years without a mainline elder scrolls game, and I’m pretty sure it’s because even Bethesda knows that they likely can’t capture that magic again.

Rust has support for many embedded targets. I can personally vouch for the MSP430. Rust compiles down to an intermediate language which can then use the same compilers and linkers as C. For instance when compiling Rust for the MSP430, GCC-MSP430 is actually part of the toolchain.

Not really. While working at the OS-level can typically require ‘unsafe’ operations a core tenet of writing Rust is making safe abstractions around unsafe operations. Rust’s ‘unsafe’ mode doesn’t disable all safety checks either - there are still many invariants that the Rust compiler enforces that a C compiler won’t, even in an ‘unsafe’ block.

And even ignoring all of that, if 10% of the code needs to be written in Rust’s ‘unsafe’ mode that means the other 90% is automatically error-checked for you, compared with 0% if you’re writing C.

Here’s the generation statistics of the BN-800 reactor I mentioned before: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=451 It’s been operating at about 70% of it’s rated capacity basically since it was first turned on, that’s large scale power generation. Breeder reactors have been in commercial use for decades (see also: Phenix and Superphenix).

The simple reason why breeder reactors aren’t the default is because most reactors don’t need to be breeders. The two main upsides of a breeder reactor is a) breeding of nuclear material, which as I said before was only ever a concern in the very early days of nuclear power. We have thousands of years’ worth of fuel available now. b) The reuse of nuclear waste for additional power generation. Of course you have to have nuclear waste to reuse first, which necessitates many other, non-breeder reactors already being in use, so breeder reactors are usually restricted to countries that already have significant investment into nuclear power, like France, Russia, China, etc… If you don’t need to breed more nuclear fuel, and you don’t have waste to reprocess you might as well keep it simple and build a regular LWR reactor.

The Wikipedia page for breeder reactors has a whole list you can even sort by output capacity. For example, the BN-800.

There have been plenty. For example, the CANDU series of reactors developed in the 1950s and 60s. Breeder reactors were quite popular during the early days of nuclear power, as it was initially thought that there was maybe only 100 years’ worth of (easily accessible) nuclear material on earth, rather than the thousands (or tens of thousands) of years’ worth we know of now, due to both more reserves being discovered and also easier methods of fuel enrichment being developed. The fact that breeder reactors have fallen out of favour due to abundant fuel reserves certainly says something.

Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume.

Not many people know the history of the treaty. It basically was signed under duress. Prior to the meeting where it was signed all but one of the Maori tribal leaders were against signing the treaty, even the Maori version. What was said at the signing was purposely never recorded, but considering the existential threat of the New Zealand Company (NZC) on the horizon (the primary reason a treaty was even being discussed), it is believed that the Maori leaders were basically given the choice of ‘sign this treaty and be a part of the British empire, or don’t and have no legal rights against the whims of the New Zealand Company’.

The New Zealand Company was a private British company with the goal of obtaining as much land as possible at any cost, and the Maori would have had zero legal protections unless they were part of the British empire. Without a treaty the NZC would have been able to push out the Maori entirely with no repercussions. The British people who brought the treaty to the Maori leaders knew this was coming, and wanted to avoid it.

Signing the treaty was a quick and dirty solution to the quickly approaching NZC and was responsible for preventing the worst of the damage, but it is a very flawed document. The translations were rushed, and vague. Basically everyone was against signing it, but they knew it was the least worst option available. It was never designed to be the core document underpinning a nation, merely a speed bump to stall the private annexation of New Zealand.

The MSP430 is just the chip I happen to use at work, if you’re not convinced you could try looking for an actual ultra low power chip, I found the STM32U0 at 70uA/MHz and the STM32U5 at 16uA/MHz in the first result.

Even ignoring selecting a more efficient micro, a smattering of tiny ceramic caps will buy you a few hundred microjoules for bursts. If you’re already operating at 2V you can get a 6V rated 100uF cap in a 1210 package - and that’s after considering the capacitance drop with DC biasing. Each one of those would buy you 200 microjoules, even just one ought to be plenty to wake up for a few tens of milliseconds every second to get a reading from some onboard peripheral (as an example) then go to sleep again.

For sure, you’re not going to be doing any heavy lifting and external peripherals could be tricky, but there are certainly embedded sensor use cases where this could be sufficient.

It’s more than you think. I work with the MSP430 microcontroller, which is capable of a sleep current of 40nA @ 2V, full active mode at 140uA/MHz with all onboard peripherals turned on. With this you could achieve almost a 20% on-off ratio with a 1MHz clock, or keep it in active mode all the time at ~150kHz, which is sufficient for many embedded sensor applications.

GTA online took ages to load, like 10+ minutes on some machines. One guy got really annoyed and investigated. It turned out to be loading a single 10MB JSON file in an incredibly inefficient manner. The JSON file contains about 60,000 items and they need to extract each item from it, but every time they look for the next item they start from the beginning of the file again, despite already knowing where they found the previous item! All the entries in the JSON list are unique, but the code also checks for any duplicate entries, of course it’s also done in the least efficient way possible requiring 1,984,531,500 comparisons for something that has no effect. Not only did this one person find these problems but he also implemented a fix that reduced load times by 70% as a result, shaving off more than 7 minutes of load times for some machines. The fact that Rockstar didn’t notice this is frankly shocking and speaks to the fact that they really just don’t care.

https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

Nitpick: The relationship between vehicle weight and road damage is a quartic (e.g. x to the power of 4), not an exponential

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