If it weren’t for fucking Gödel, we’d be there already.

Just write the standard model as a few lines of lambda calculus and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

I know you’re playing devil’s advocate, but to play devil:

In a theoretical world where you can manage to perfectly beamform the entire 20-20k Hz frequency range into a single node (or pair of nodes around the ears)… you’re still just re-condensing the original reference signal at the site of your beam target.

And if your idea of peak quality is to hear the reference signal loud and clear, it might be marginally easier to set up some well-tuned speakers in an arrangement relatively free of resonance hotspots and then crank up the volume.

So, how do you “crank up the volume” for that? Glad you asked; simple really: we need to apply a gain filter. To do this, we set up an array of batteries, and then connect only the positive side of the batteries to our audio cable. Positive electricity is bigger than negative electricity, so adding positive electricity to the cable means the speaker sound gets bigger.

In short, all you need to match the quality of a hi-fi beamforming speaker system can be replaced with a few 9V batteries connected to your tuner with a paperclip. Thanks for coming to my audio engineering TED talk.

You’ll probably have to enable it in settings first, but the usual trick across distributions is Ctrl + Alt + Bksp to drop down to console.

…is this a Shaft III announcement?

In high school, we used to play a game colloquially called Spoons/Assassins/Spoon Assassin/Marker tag. Long story short, everyone playing gets assigned another player as a target. You tag your target on the back of the neck with a spoon or marker to “kill” them + take over their assignment. Rinse and repeat until only the winner is standing.

Major catch here is that for the game to work properly, the targets have to be chained in a loop, so there usually has to be a trusted individual running the game who can validate the assignment list.

So I scraped the online school directory to pull names, emails, and school photos of everyone. Then I built a Java Swing app to track a list of who was playing, and the app would shuffle a random list and email everyone their assignments blindly, photos included. Flash forward a few months, and eventually we had a full roster of ~80 people playing across grades, which was ~10% of the student body.

Unfortunately, a group of freshmen started their own take on the game, which devolved into mauling one another with Crayola markers and Sharpies. The principal catches word that I’ve been running a ring, and brings me into his office to tell me to shut it down.

Uncharacteristically for my teenage years, I went all-in on diplomacy. I plead my case, tell him I’m not involved with the freshmen, hear out his concerns, volunteer to modify the game rules, and point out that our group been playing for months without issues. No dice; the dude was a jackass with a chip on his shoulder. So we come to an impasse, staring at one another in silence.

Eventually, to break the silence, he asks about a stray bandage I have sticking out the top of my shirt. I’d had a small melanoma removed from my collarbone that week, which was caught as early as possible and removed without issue. Seizing the opportunity, I tell the principal “I have cancer”, and immediately walk out before he could formulate a response. Poor dude went white as a sheet. Good times.

Bit of a lame ending for the app, but building it taught me the skills I used to jump-start my career, and drove home the point that software isn’t an end unto itself — it’s the way people use it to come together that makes things great.

Best General-ed goes to A History of the Popes by O’Malley. It’s a great throughline that touches on a massive swath of western history and adds depth to common narratives of the church. (You can probably skip it though if you’re the type who already has strong opinions on the Council of Calcedon or papal investiture.)

Best Prose goes to The Power Broker by Caro. Too much ink spilled on that one for me to do it justice, but suffice it to say it’s a widely-cited nominee for greatest all-time nonfiction works.

Best Insight goes to Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire. I don’t have enough praise for this one: It’s the story of the Comanches from ~1600-1900, but has wider insights that tie into empire and culture on a global level. Highly recommend as a paired reading with McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

If you haven’t boofed toad, you haven’t lived.

Now get off my Lemmiwinks fan club site.

¡Soy loco por los cornballs!

Dangling commits are unlinked objects, and happen pretty frequently if you’re using hard resets instead of explicit git reverts.

Not arguing that it’s good practice but it’s very common.

Great answer on the whole, but worth noting that both Git’s standard CLI client and most hosted git services do run periodic GC to prune dangling commits.

I second the suggestion to take periodic snapshots of your mirror. Because the majority of file contents will not be changing over time, you can make these snapshots very disk-space efficient by taking binary diffs of the tar’d repo using rdiff or the like.

Cornographic af

Probably not what GP was referring to, but Discord works totally fine in-browser without a client.

Less potential for vulns, telemetry, regressions, etc.

Check if you have hardware acceleration enabled for Firefox. It’s usually disabled OOTB for some reason.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings

Yeah, top two photos are oysters, and the bottom two are chants.

Based on the time of year and their appearance, I think the oysters were a native oyster variety, but your point still stands in the general case :).

Gz king!

What’s next on your roadmap?

A lack of eyes disqualifies a man as eastern Roman Emperor. It’s understandable that many women would find that a dealbreaker.

To train eye strength, I recommend looking at things. Reading picture books can help stimulate hypertrophy as well.

From an engineering perspective, tying the backup camera to the CAN (and by extension, telemetry units) dramatically increases the possible modalities of failure.

The two are absolutely connected.

The second-order effects are not the fault of the regulators trying to make cars safer

This is where you’re losing me. The second-order effects are within the purview of those regulators and should have been addressed in-hand with the mandate.

Why would the automakers be willing to comply with safety regulation but disregard telemetry regulation?

Hell yeah, thanks for fighting the good fight.

Another pitch that I think has a lot of potential is to ask long-form creators to let paid supporters get videos through a non-Youtube distributor. It encourages people to talk with their dollars and diversifies the creator’s revenue stream, so there are benefits to all parties involved.

A niche academic history podcaster that I’ve listened to for many years was able to move off of Youtube long-term after branching towards Patreon (+ maybe Nebula?), and seems to be doing well with it. Shameless plug: https://www.shadowsofutopia.com/

In a vacuum, sure.

In practice, the government has moved from speed cameras (benign monitoring) to ALPRs (pervasive surveillance) without the public blinking. In practice, many auto manufacturers (Telsa, Hyundai, GM brands) have made it a matter of regular policy to ship home audio and video data from drivers’ cars to use for marketing and surveillance.

Backup cameras are a small drop in the bucket compared to other transportation design choices if you’re serious about a Vision* Zero endgame, and in my book, the potential for abuse makes them a liability rather than an asset towards that end.