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Willingness to look stupid People frequently1 think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides. I don't know why this one example sticks in my head but, for me, the most memorable example of other people thinking that I'm stupid was from college. I've had numerous instances where more people thought I was stupid and also where people thought the depths of my stupidity was greater, but this one was really memorable for me. Back in college, there was one group of folks that, for whatever reason, stood out to me as people who really didn't understand the class material. When they talked, they said things that didn't make any sense, they were struggling in the classes and barely passing, etc. I don't remember any direct interactions but, one day, a friend of mine who also knew them remarked to me, "did you know [that group] thinks you're really dumb?". I found that really delightful and asked why. It turned out the reason was that I asked really stupid sounding questions. In particular, it's often the case that there's a seemingly obvious but actually incorrect reason something is true, a slightly less obvious reason the thing seems untrue, and then a subtle and complex reason that the thing is actually true2. I would regularly figure out that the seemingly obvious reason was wrong and then ask a question to try to understand the subtler reason, which sounded stupid to someone who thought the seemingly obvious reason was correct or thought that the refutation to the obvious but incorrect reason meant that the thing was untrue. The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I've observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions a
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Foreword # This article is intended to serve as an introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering. This article does not intend to be an exhaustive repository of such information, or as reference material for technical means. Instead it intends to provide an informative introduction to the subject. The intended audience for this article is people with a computer science or similar engineering background who are interested in the technical aspects of synthesisers. Acknowledgements # The debt of gratitude this article owes to the hard work of others is so great that I would be remiss to even risk taking undue credit for their hard work. This article would not have been possible without the work of Acreil, Raph Levien, the Dexed team, and Steffen Ohrendorf. I would also like to thank MadFame for his fantastic research into the DX7’s history, from which he has made an extremely informati
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GIMP 2.99.8 is our new development version, once again coming with a huge set of improvements. “Work in Progress 2” (follow-up of 2.99.6 image) by Aryeom, Creative Commons by-sa 4.0 - GIMP 2.99.8 To get a more complete list of changes, you should refer to the NEWS file or look at the commit history. The Clone, Heal and Perspective Clone tools now work when multiple layers are selected. There are 2 new modes in particular: When sourcing from multiple selected drawables then cloning into a single drawable, the pixel source is the composited render of source layers. This is similar to “Sample Merged”, except that it is limited to a list of drawables and you don’t have to hide the layers that you don’t want to source from. When cloning while multiple drawables are selected, each drawable clones from itself to itself, i.e. every drawable is both its source and target (the layers selected when sourcing do not matter in this case). This can be very useful in particular when you need to heal several layers exactly the same way, for instance when working on textures and various texture mappings. Development of this feature was proposed and financially supported by Creative Shrimp: Gleb Alexandrov and Aidy Burrows, well-known Blender educators. Here’s an excerpt from a new course where multi-layer cloning is already used: Your browser does not support the video tag. Extract of a video course by Creative Shrimp (Gleb Alexandrov and Aidy Burrows) Selection cue fixed on Wayland and macOS¶ Windows drawing logics evolved in recent compositing window managers. In particular, the drawing of image selection (marching ants 🐜 representing your selection boundary) broke on Wayland, as well as on macOS since Big Sur release. The selection tools were still perfectly working but the outlines were simply not visible on the canvas anymore. We fixed this by reimplementing part of how selections were being drawn over the image. We aimed to only fix this for Wayland, but our recent macOS contributor (see below in macOS package section) confirmed it also fixes the issue for Big Sur. Now the next step is to backport this fix to the stable branch (only for the sake of macOS, since the stable GTK2 version uses XWayland and thus doesn’t exhibit the bug). There have been two more Wayland-specific changes. For our Flatpak builds, we will now use the new fallback-x11 permission instead of x11 to prevent unnecessary X11 access while in Wayland, hence improving security step by step. Finally, some people reported huge memory leaks under Wayland only (it was fine on X11). We didn’t do much so we can’t take any credit for this, but this seems to have been fixed, probably in a dependency with Wayland-specific code. Wider coverage of input devices thanks to Windows Ink support¶ Windows Pointer Input Stack (Windows Ink) support was recently added to GTK3 by Luca Bacci, who also made it available in GIMP and added a new option in the Preferences dialog to switch between Wintab (older API) and Windows Ink. You can find this option on the Input Devices page. Pointer input API selection — GIMP 2.99.8 This is a huge milestone for artists using Windows since more graphics tablets or touch devices come with Ink support as a default whereas the legacy Wintab interface requires specific drivers. This is even more the case with Windows 8 and newer, for which most tablets should work out-of-the-box with Windows Ink. Clicking anywhere on the toolbox or on Wilber’s drop area now returns the focus to the canvas (similarly to the Esc shortcut). This allows you to work on canvas with shortcuts more efficiently. For instance, you could pan directly with the Space bar without having to click on canvas (hence activating a tool) when your keyboard focus was previously on some text input widget, by clicking anywhere on toolbox (buttons and dead area alike) first. Dropping thumbnail icon¶ After years of discussions and bug reports, we dropped the thumbnail icon feature. Previously, when images were opened, the application icon in the taskbar would combine a preview of the active image and the actual application icon (Wilber). The icon would then change whenever the active image changed. For many people, this complicated locating GIMP’s window among windows of other running applications. Moreover, due to recent changes in desktop environments’ behavior, this feature was actually working on less and less platforms. So depending on your OS and desktop environment, it either didn’t work at all or actively worked against you. This is why we decided to do away with it. Improved file formats support: JPEG-XL, PSD/PSB, and more¶ JPEG-XL is now optionally supported thanks to Daniel Novomeskỳ who also previously contributed to HEIC/AVIF support. GIMP can load and export JPEG-XL files (.jxl) in grayscale and RGB, with color profiles support. Our exporting code also provides a “lossless” option and several “Effort/Speed” encoding values. JPEG-XL exporting options — GIMP 2.99.8 This plug-in is different from the third-party plug-in that is part of the libjxl library that we use too. It supports GIMP 3 plugin API, reads grayscale images as grayscale, is written in C rather than C++, and exposes several presets for speed/quality tradeoff. We also do not yet expose features that could be considered experimental. If you are interested in JPEG-XL support for GIMP 2.10.x, please use the plug-in from libjxl. We also improved support for Adobe Photoshop project files. GIMP now supports larger-than-4GiB PSD files and loading up to 99 channels (specs say that 56 is the max but some sample PSD files have more channels). Additionally, now you can also load PSB files which are essentially PSD files with support for width and height of up to 300,000 pixels. There have been even more changes to file formats support and plug-ins: 16-bit SGI images are now supported (until now, they were loaded as 8-bit). The WebP plug-in was ported to the GimpSaveProcedureDialog API. Script-Fu now handles GFile and GimpObjectArray types. … Plug-in development¶ Our API for plug-in developers got the following improvements: New gimp_display_present() function to present a specific display at the top of the image display stack. New gimp_export_thumbnail() function to query the user settings (added in “Image Import & Export” page of Preferences in this version) on whether or not a file plug-in should export the image thumbnail. New gimp_procedure_dialog_fill_expander() function to create a GtkExpander in procedure dialogs. All widgets within a same container in a GimpProcedureDialog are added to their own GtkSizeGroup for better aligned generated dialog, yet only within their own level of widgets. Memory leak fixes¶ Several contributors including Andrzej Hunt and Massimo Valentini started chasing small memory leaks with code analyzers, which is a very nice way to spend your downtime. We recommend! 👍 Continuous integration changes¶ Windows¶ Development installer “nightlies”¶ We wrote rules for the continuous integration platform to create installers. This is very useful for users who want to test new unreleased features and bug fixes. Installers are being created once a week because the full process takes ca. 2 hours and we didn’t want to trigger it too often. If you want to test the latest installer for Windows, here is how you can do it: Go to GIMP’s scheduled pipelines listing and click the “Last Pipeline” ID listed next to the Windows installer item. Select the job named “win-installer-nightly” Click the “Browse” button Navigate to the build/windows/installer/_Output/ directory Finally click the gimp-2.99.*-setup.exe file to download and install it. This procedure or any updated version of it is available in the “Automatic development builds” section of the download page. ⚠️ Be warned that a weekly installer is a purely automated build, there is no human verification. It is happening at a semi-random time during the development
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Umami is a simple, fast, website analytics alternative to Google Analytics. Getting started A detailed getting started guide can be found at https://umami.is/docs/ Installing from source Requirements A server with Node.js 12 or newer A database (MySQL or Postgresql) Get the source code and install packages git clone https://github.com/mikecao/umami.git cd umami npm install Create database tables Umami supports MySQL and Postgresql. Create a database for your Umami installation and install the tables with the included scripts. For MySQL: mysql -u username -p databasename < sql/sc
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A lightning talk by Gary Bernhardt from CodeMash 2012 This talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes every other week, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git. If you liked this, you might also like Execute Program: interactive courses on TypeScript, Modern JavaScript, SQL, regular expressions, and more. Each course is made up of hundreds of
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© 2021 Steven Obua July 1st, 2021 Abstract I propose a simple Unicode-based lexical syntax for programming language identifiers using characters from international scripts (currently Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Math). Such cosmopolitan identifiers are designed to achieve much of the simplicity of Fortran identifiers while acknowledging a modern international outlook. This seems particularly advantageous in contexts where such identifiers are not (only) used by professional programmers, but are exposed to normal users, for example through scriptable applications. Introduction The possibly oldest programming language still in use, Fortran [1], has an especially simple lexical syntax for identifiers: They consist of letters A to Z and a to z, digits 0 to 9, and the underscore _. An identifier must start with a letter. Moreover, identifiers are case-insensitive: The identifier Fortran denotes the same thing as the identifier fortran, for example. Especially for users of programming languages who are not professional programmers, such as many scientists and engineers, this syntactical simplicity seems to be a big advantage. Given that Fortran code is used, among other things, to control nuclear power plants, it certainly is a good thing to reduce the potential for confusion and misunderstanding as much as possible. Identifiers are an important concept in computing: They allow to reference and abbreviate things, and to introduce a level of indirection. Computer users who are not programmers are exposed to the concept of identifiers as well, through the filesystem abstraction of their operating system. Attempts to make this abstraction unavailable to the user in Apple’s iOS had to be rolled back in more recent versions via the introduction of a dedicated Files app. Scriptable computer applications like Blender also make some of their internals available to power users for automation purposes via built-in scripting engines. These are of course just programming languages, and therefore heavily reliant on identifiers. Even though artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the interaction between humans and computers, it is my conviction that identifiers will nevertheless gain importance as a concept and become even more mainstream than they already are. In ma
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Surveying has been critical to the development of modern society. Across the centuries, surveying has helped our ancestors map their terrain. It has laid the foundations for our roads and cities. It even played a core role in the legal division of parcels of land. The boundaries of our natural and constructed world are determined by the work of surveyors – and they started working quite a long time ago. On this page, we will take you through an overview of the history of surveying. There are a number of articles on this website that unpack surveying’s history from specific angles. You can find a list them at the end of this page, but first and foremost, this is definitely the place to start learning about how surveying has changed across the years. Back to the beginning, over 5,000 years ago Stonehenge may have involved input from early surveyors In recent years, much of the technology that today’s surveyors employ – including photogammetry and 3D scanners – have been put to use investigating the history of archaelogical sites around the planet. But did you know that one of the world’s most famous archaelogical sites is one of the earliest examples of the work of surveyors? Experts believe that the creation of Stonehenge was set out by the surveyors of the day utilising peg and rope geometry. This was over 5,000 years ago, and one of the earliest known concrete examples of surveying work. Surveying has been around as long as significant structures were being erected. In Ancient Egypt, the pyramids stand as evidence of surveying expertise. More than this though; land boundaries were determined by Ancient Egyptian surveyors, utilised for both taxation purposes and to determin land ownership. Meanwhile, at the Nile River, surveyors were constantly reassessing boundary markers to ensure that overflows of the river could be tracked and buildings and construction projects could be kept safe. The tools of the ancient surveying world The groma As the centuries passed, surveying practices developed. The ancient world still holds a few secrets, however, including fascinating stories such as the Ancient Mesopotamians’ use of mathematics – seen in the 20th century discovery of a clay tablet outlining an approach to measurement quite different from, and perhaps more effective than, ours today. You can read an in-depth breakdown on this here. It was during these ancient times that surveying technology developed beyond rods, ropes and markers. One early surveying instrument was the groma, thought to have originated in Greece or Mesopotamia before making its way to Rome. Formed using a vertical staff with horizontal cross-pieces mounted atop and four weighted ropes, the groma gave its user a greater chance to survey straight lines, right angles and rectangles. Instruments such as this – and the surveyors who used them – would have been integral to Rome’s impressive empire growth in this period. One item the Ancient Greeks were certainly responsible for was the diopter. Similar in effect to the theodolite, set to emerge centuries later, the diopter was more accurate again than the groma. It may have been sophisticated enough to
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While controls over the Earth's climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.The extent of the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change is of great interest to society. If there remains substantial genuine scientific doubt about whether modern climate change is human-caused, then the case for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is weakened. By contrast, a widely-held consensus view in the peer-reviewed literature invalidates alternative arguments which claim that there is still significant debate in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change (ACC).The question of the cause of observed and predicted global warming and precipitation change is still highly politically salient. A Gallup poll published in April 2021 found that there has been a deepening of the partisan divide in American politics on whether observed increases in the planet's temperature since the Industrial Revolution are primarily caused by humans [1]. Among elected U.S. politicians the divide is similarly stark: according to the Center for American Progress there were 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress (sitting in 2021), including 109 representatives and 30 senators, 'who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change' [2]. In 2016 Pew Research found that only 27% of U.S. adults believed that 'almost all' scientists agreed that climate change is due to human activity [3].Many efforts have been made over the years to quantify the extent of the scientific consensus on ACC [4, 5]. These are comprehensively reviewed in a paper published in 2016 entitled 'Consensus on consensus' [6]. It has additionally been argued that perception of scientific consensus is a 'gateway belief' motivating wider public support for mitigation of climate change [7]. While scientific consensus does not sensu stricto prove a statement about the physical world, science-based anlaysis and hypothesis testing is capable of disproving al
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Munich, Dallas, 21 October 2021 FlixMobility acquires Greyhound Summary + Combination of FlixBus and Greyhound will be able to better serve U.S. intercity bus service passengers  + Addresses significant opportunity from increased U.S. demand for affordable, sustainable, collective mobility   Boilerplate About FlixMobility  FlixMobility is mobility provider, offering new alternatives for convenient, affordable and environmentally friendly travel via the
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In 2018, Alibaba founded T-Head, a fabless semiconductor subsidiary with the intention of designing custom in-house ASICs. T-Head has since introduced a number of custom chips including the Hangu
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Contents of this repository This tutorial illustrates how to write C programs with Gtk4 library. It focuses on beginners so the contents are limited to basic things. The table of contents are shown at the end of this abstract. Section 3 to 21 describes basics and the example is a simple editor tfe (Text File Editor). Section 22 to 24 describes GtkDrawingArea. Section 25 to 28 describes list model and list view (GtkListView, GtkGridView and GtkColumnView). It also describes GtkExpression. The latest version of the tutorial is located at Gtk4-tutorial github repository. You can read it without download. Gtk4 Documentation Please refer to Gtk API Reference and
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Simon OkotieRoyal FamiliesThe death of Ikenwoli Godfrey Emiko – the King (or Olu) of Warri – was announced in the same week as that of Prince Philip. Established in the fifteenth century by the It
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Kelly S Payne et al. J Urol. 2019 Oct. Free PMC article Abstract Purpose: With cannabis consumption on the rise and use prominent among males of reproductive age it is essential to understand the potential impact of cannabis on male fertility. We reviewed the literature regarding the effects of cannabis on male fertility. Materials and methods: We performed a literature search using PubMed®/MEDLINE® to identify relevant studies of the effects of cannabis on male fertility. Relevant studies were identified and reviewed. Results: The strongest evidence of cannabis induced alterations in male fertility is in the category of semen parameters. Research supports a role for cannabis in reducing sperm count and concentration, inducing abnormalities in sperm morphology, reducing sperm motility and viability, and inhibiting capacitation and fertilizing capacity. Animal models demonstrate a role for cannabis in testicular atrophy, and reduced libido and sexual function but to our knowledge these results have not yet been replicated in human studies. Studies of hormonal changes suggest inconclusive effects on testosterone levels, lowered luteinizing hormone levels and unchanged follicle-stimulating hormone levels. Conclusions: Current research suggests that cannabis may negatively impact male fertility. Further studies are needed to validate that robust findings in animal models will carry over into human experience. Clinicians should be aware of
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The plane had just landed when the unmistakable smell of smoke began to waft throughout the fuselage. As the aircraft taxied on the runway of São Luís’s Marechal da Cunha Machado airport, the passengers on LATAM flight 3419 fidgeted in their seats. A minute earlier, they had heard a loud whacking sound, followed by a sudden crack, coming from just outside their windows. A bird had lodged itself within the plane’s turbine during takeoff, impeding the rotation of its fan and cracking its shaft. Within seconds, the entire turbine ceased functioning. From a distance, residents of São Luís took photos; they later recounted the sight of thick smoke flowing out of the plane’s engine. “I saw a vulture fly right into the turbine,” claimed one bystander. “And then it was like, poof, all black smoke!” Modern planes, and push-button pilots, make it possible to glide a compromised fuselage back down to earth, and flight 3419 was no different: the aircraft touched back down on the runway only fifteen minutes or so after it had first embarked for bluer skies. The incident would be registered by Infraero, the body that administers Brazil’s main commercial airports, as an official bird strike. Bird collisions are a near co
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$ Please enter a valid email Email: Please enter a valid email Country: I also wish to receive emails from AAAS/Science and Science advertisers, including information on products, services and special offers which may include but are not limited to news, careers information & upcoming events. Support nonprofit science journalism If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Charitable Disclosures
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AbstractA major goal in human genetics is to use natural variation to understand the phenotypic consequences of altering each protein-coding gene in the genome. Here we used exome sequencing1 to explore protein altering variants and their consequences in 454,787 UK Biobank study participants2. We identified 12 million coding variants, including ~1 million loss-of-function and ~1.8 million deleterious missense variants. When these were tested for association with 3,994 health-related traits, we found 564 genes with trait associations at P≤2.18x10-11. Rare variant associations were enriched in GWAS loci, but most (91%) were independent of common variant signals. We discover several risk-increasing associations with traits related to liver disease, eye disease and cancer, among others, as well as novel risk-lowering associations for hypertension (SLC9A3R2), diabetes (MAP3K15, FAM234A) and asthma (SLC27A3). Six genes were associated with brain imaging phenotypes, including two involved in neural development (GBE1, PLD1). 81% of signals available and powered for replication were confirmed in an independent cohort; furthermore, association signals were generally consistent across European, Asian and African ancestry individuals. We illustrate the ability of exome sequencing to identify novel gene-trait associations, elucidate gene function, and pinpoint effector genes underlying GWAS signals at scale. Author informationAuthor notesThese authors jointly supervised: Jonathan Marchini, Aris Baras, Gonçalo R. Abecasis, Manuel A. FerreiraLists of authors and their affiliations appear in the Supplementary InformationAffiliationsRegeneron Genetics Center, 777 Old Saw Mill River Rd., Tarrytown, NY, 10591, USAJoshua D. Backman, Alexander H. Li, Anthony Marcketta, Dylan Sun, Joelle Mbatchou, Michael D. Kessler, Christian Benner, Daren Liu, Adam E. Locke, Suganthi Balasubramanian, Ashish Yadav, Nilanjana Banerjee, Christopher Gillies, Amy Damask, Simon Liu, Xiaodong Bai, Alicia Hawes, Evan Maxwell
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This script is an lldb helper that just loops through all the comments stored and prints out the comment along with the address corresponding to the comment. For example, I'm crashing in JIT code at address 0x0000000110000168. Using the `lc` helper I can see that it's probably crashing inside the exit back to the interpreter ``` (lldb) bt 5 * thread #1, queue = 'com.apple.main-thread', stop reason = EXC_BAD_ACCESS (code=1, address=0x22220021) frame #0: 0x0000000110000168 * frame #1: 0x00000001002b5ff5 miniruby`invoke_block_from_c_bh [inlined] invoke_block(ec=0x0000000100e05350, iseq=0x0000000100c1ff10, self=0x0000000100c76cc0, captured=, cref=0x0000000000000000, type=, opt_
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Oct 11, 2021 - 11 min readOpenSCAD is an open-source CSG based script-only CAD package. As it’s script-based, it’s fantastic for parametric design and the files can be version controlled just like a software project. It’s popular within the 3D-printing community due to its ability to produce STL files.1Despite being actively developed, broadly used and powerful2; there are many shortcomings which make it difficult or sometimes impossible to use outside of 3D printing.I’ve used OpenSCAD3 to produce a few things that were sent to be manufactured; this article shows how I adapt its output capabilities and how I approach a design. This allows to produce files that can be used for sheet metal cutting, machining and renders – while allowing for complex designs without creating a mess.G
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Doug McIlroy, Tom Van Vleck, Jim Mills, Bob Freiburghouse, Ron Harvey, John Gintell, Paul Green, Tom Linden, Don Wagner ... edited by Tom Van Vleck Corby's talk about PL/I As a Tool for System Programming from Datamation's May 6, 1969 issue, is online thanks to Peter Flass. Bob Freiburghouse's paper, The Multics PL/1 Compiler is a thorough description of the version 1 PL/I compiler, available at this site. PL/I Frequently Asked Questions. The Choice of PL/I [THVV] The supervisor for CTSS, the early 1960s predecessor system to Multics, had been written almost entirely in the 7094 assembly program, FAP. At the time, almost all operating systems were written in assembler, because developers felt that compiled code was not efficient enough. One module of the CTSS supervisor, the scheduler, was written in the MAD language, in order to make repeated experimentation with the scheduling algorithm possible and safe. About half the command programs for CTSS were written in MAD. (See Corby's paper.) [MDM] During my connection with Multics there never was any doubt that we'd use a higher level language. There was no question that it was
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Business|Tesla’s quarterly profit nearly quintuples to $1.6 billion as car sales surge.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/business/tesla-earnings.htmlCredit...Alex Plavevski/EPA, via ShutterstockOct. 20, 2021Updated 5:13 p.m. ETTesla made $1.6 billion in the three months ending in September, the second quarter in a row that its profit has exceeded the billion-dollar mark.The bottom-line figure exceeded the $1.1 billion it made in the second quarter and was nearly five times its profit from the third quarter of 2020.The automaker reported a big jump in revenue, to $13.8 billion from $8.8 billion a year ago, as sales of the Model Y continued to rise in the United States, China and Europe. The company delivered 241,000 cars to customers in the quarter, up from 140,000 a year ago.Electric vehicle “demand continues to go through a structural shift,” the company said in a statement. “We believe the more vehicles we have on the road, the more Tesla owners are able to spread the word about the benefits of E.V.s.”Tesla repeated a previous forecast that sales would grow about 50 percent per year on average for the next few years, but the company cautioned that “semiconductor shortages, congestion at ports and rolling blackouts have been impacting our ability to keep factories running at full speed.”The company said it expected to begin production of the Model Y at new factories near Berlin and Austin, Texas, before the end of the year. “The pace of the respective production ramps will be influenced by the successful introduction of many new product and manufacturing technologies in new locations, ongoing supply chain-related challenges and regional permitting,” Te
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By Alexandra Ulmer | Reuters SAN FRANCISCO – The head of California’s largest union was arrested on Friday, a day after the prominent activist was charged with grand theft and tax fraud. Alma Hernandez, the executive director of SEIU California, and her husband Jose Moscoso were charged on Thursday with allegedly underreporting some $1.4 million of income between the 2014 and 2018 tax years. Another complaint alleged that Hernandez, while working on a political action committee for a Democratic state senate candidate in 2014, approved a $11,700 payment to her husband for services he did not provide. Moscoso also allegedly did not disclose that his air duct-cleaning business had multiple employees, resulting in over $300,000 in unreported wages. Hernandez was being held at The Sacramento County Main Jail was and was ineligible for bail, according to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s website. SEIU California said that Hernandez, a 42-year old who had led the union for 11 years, had resigned. “We are deeply concerned about the allegations against Alma Hernandez,” wrote Bob Schoonover, the president of SEIU California State Council, in a statement. “We have accepted Ms. Hernandez’s resignation, and we have cooperated fully with authorities on this matter and will continue to do so.” Reuters was not immediately able to contact Hernandez, Moscoso, or their lawyers. Hernandez faces two counts of grand theft, one count of perjury and five counts of filing a
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Andrew Huth October 20, 2021 Accessibility isn't fixing a giant backlog of audit bugs. Being accessible is a design and engineering process that identifies and fixes issues in a tight feedback loop. And ideally involves testing with real people. Subscribe below to get future posts from Andrew Huth Or grab the RSS feed
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Enlarge / Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes collects her belongings after going through security at the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building with her defense team on August 31, 2021, in San Jose, California. Ethan Swope | Getty Images There is a saying in the startup world that many companies try to fake it till they make it. From yesterday’s testimony in the criminal trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, it sounds like her company took that saying to heart. Prosecutors questioned Daniel Edlin, a former product manager, about The
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A&W Restaurants is releasing a cleverly rebranded 1⁄3 lb. burger to make amends for a decades-old marketing mishap that’s seen renewed interest on social media lately. Just check out this Instagram post. In the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with the immensely popular McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by offering a bigger, juicier 1⁄3 Pound Burger at the same price. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t so great at math. Confused consumers wrongly assumed that 1⁄4 was bigger than 1⁄3 and the whole experiment went down in history as a huge marketing fail. The chain—founded in 1919 and the oldest in America—has spent every waking moment since this embarrassing fiasco crunching the numbers, employing a team of top mat
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1. What is Mathematical Platonism? Mathematical platonism can be defined as the conjunction of the following three theses: Existence. There are mathematical objects. Abstractness. Mathematical objects are abstract. Independence. Mathematical objects are independent of intelligent agents and their language, thought, and practices. Some representative definitions of ‘mathematical platonism’ are listed in the supplement Some Definitions of Platonism and document that the above definition is fairly standard. Platonism in general (as opposed to platonism about mathematics specifically) is any view that arises from the above three claims by replacing the adjective ‘mathematical’ by any other adjective. The first two claims are tolerably cl
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In context: Reports from users trying out Windows 11 are starting to indicate that the anti-cheat software in Riot Games' competitive first-person shooter requires secure boot and Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) when played on Microsoft's upcoming operating system. Valorant's "Vanguard" anti-cheat is already known to be on the stricter side, and now Riot seems to be making use of Windows 11's controversial hardware requirements. Anti-Cheat Police Department, a Twitter account that aggregates reports on cheating in online games, recently collected some forum posts from users having issues running Valorant on Windows 11. They show a "VAN9001" error that seems to occur when trying to play Valorant on Windows 11 without TPM2.0 or secure boot enab
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Shipping containers are unloaded from ships at a container terminal at the Port of Long Beach-Port of Los Angeles complex in Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 7, 2021. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson LOS ANGELES, Oct 19 (Reuters) - Southern California's Los Angeles and Long Beach ports handle the most ocean cargo of any ports in the United States, but are some of the least efficient in the world, according to a ranking by the World Bank and IHS Markit.In a review of 351 container ports around the globe, Los Angeles was ranked 328, behind Tanzania's Dar es Salaam and Alaska's Dutch Harbor. The adjacent port of Long Beach came in even lower, at 333, behind Turkey's Nemrut Bay and Kenya's Mombasa, the groups said in their inaugural Container Port Performance Index published in May.The total number
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As Sylvain Peyronnet already mentioned, logic is an important part of theoretical computer science. However, it is not enough to learn logic from textbooks tailored for pure mathematicians. In other words, it's also important to learn logic from a more "computer science" perspective. Finite Model Theory We want to learn techniques that deal with finite structures. It is well-known that many traditional tools from model theory, e.g., compactness and Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, are not applicable to finite models. This leads us to the study of Finite Model Theory. For this area, I recommend the following excellent books: Leonid Libkin, Elements of Finite Model Theory. (textbook) Grädel et al., Finite Model Theory and Its Applications. (survey articles and applications) A
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ClickHouse is the workhorse of many services at Yandex and several other large Internet firms in Russia. These companies serve an audience of 258 million Russian speakers worldwide and have some of the greatest demands for distributed OLAP systems in Europe. This year has seen good progress in ClickHouse's development and stability. Support has been added for HDFS, ZFS and Btrfs for both reading datasets and storing table data, a T64 codec which can significantly improve ZStandard compression, faster LZ4 performance and tiered storage. Anyone uncomfortable with the number of moving parts in a typical Hadoop setup might find assurances in ClickHouse as being a single piece of software rather than a loose collection of several different projects. For anyone unwilling to pay for
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Pornhub seems like the last place on earth you’d find a 50-minute, fully clothed calc lesson, but this Taiwanese teacher is the tube site’s newest star In the depths of Pornhub, buried beneath a mountain of hardcore erotica, a 34-year-old Taiwanese man named Changhsu (張旭) taps away at a green chalkboard while speaking a steady stream of Mandarin. In nearly all of his 226 videos, he wears a gray hoodie and black-rimmed glasses, and he never once does anything even remotely pornographic — no blow jobs, no 69s, no anal. He’s on Pornhub for a different reason: To teach calculus. Changhsu has a master’s degree in mathematics, and he’s been teaching online and in Taiwanese cram schools — which provide supplementary learning classes for determined studen
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Supporting imagery Model Motherboard Diagram A quick introduction In 2006, Sony unveiled the long-awaited ‘next generation’ video-game console, a shiny (albeit heavy) machine whose underlying hardware architecture continues the teachings of the Emotion Engine, that is, focus on vector processing to achieve power, even at the cost of complexity. Meanwhile, their new ‘super processor’, the Cell Broadband Engine, is conceived during a crisis of innovation and will have to keep up as trends for multimedia services evolve. This write-up takes a deep look at Sony, IBM, Toshiba and Nvidia’s joint project, along with its execution and effect on the industry. On the article’s length I’m afraid this article is not the typical ‘lunchtime’ one that I usually write for other co
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AbstractTransatlantic exploration took place centuries before the crossing of Columbus. Physical evidence for early European presence in the Americas can be found in Newfoundland, Canada1,2. However, it has thus far not been possible to determine when this activity took place3,4,5. Here we provide evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in ad 1021. We overcome the imprecision of previous age estimates by making use of the cosmic-ray-induced upsurge in atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations in ad 993 (ref. 6). Our new date lays down a marker for European cognisance of the Americas, and represents the first known point at which humans encircled the globe. It also provides a definitive tie point for future research into the initial consequences of transatlant
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The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has released an interim final rule, establishing controls on the export, reexport, or transfer (in-country) of certain items that can be used for malicious cyber activities.  The rule also creates a new License Exception Authorized Cybersecurity Exports (ACE) and requests public comments on the projected impact of the proposed controls on U.S. industry and the cybersecurity community.  License Exception ACE would allow the export, reexport and transfer (in-country) of ‘cybersecurity items’ to most destinations, while retaining a license requirement for exports to countries of national security or weapons of mass destruction concern.  In addition, countries subject to a U.S. arms embargo will require a license. While
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Why Code Install Use Jobs Cache vs MySQL Replication Blockchain Multizone Chat Contact Bedrock is a simple, modular, WAN-replicated, Blockchain-based data foundation for global-scale applications. Taking each of those in turn: Bedrock is simple. This means it exposes the fewest knobs necessary, with appropriate defaults at every layer. Bedrock is modular. This means its functionality is packaged into separate “plugins” that are decoupled and independently maintainable. Bedrock is WAN-replicated. This means it is designed to endure the myriad real-world problems that oc
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This is the analysis for our gigantic icon map. Send feedback to help AT gurge.com. this is only 20,000 favicons Websites crawled: 100,000 Favicons downloaded: 425,909 The humble favicon was messily birthed with the pernicious IE5 release. Since that fateful day, browsers have slowly expanded favicon technology to encompass many wildly differing and lightly documented use cases. Here in 2021 favicons are found primarily in browser tabs, home screens, and Google search results, but they continue to pop up in the strangest places. Recently my team was tasked with building a favicon fetcher. As a warmup, I looked to see how Chrome handles favicon loading. Do you know that the favicon loader in Chrome is many thousands of lines of code? Why is it so complicated? We realized
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Members of a team at the Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines lab in Cape Town, South Africa. The World Health Organization has enlisted the company to replicate Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. Tommy Trenchard for NPR hide caption toggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR Members of a team at the Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines lab in Cape Town, South Africa. The World Health Organization has enlisted the company to replicate Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine. Tommy Trenchard for NPR Fans of the television series The Great British Bake Off have long marveled at the skill contestants show during the dreaded "technical challenge" — for which they are given a basket with all the ingredients needed to make a highly unusual dish but a set of instructions that are often as vague as, "Bake until ready." Now a team of scientists at a pharmaceutical startup in South Africa is essentially confronting the same type of test — except the stakes are life and death. The World Health Organization has hired the company, called Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, as part of a $100 million plan to figure out how to make an mRNA vaccine against COVID that is as close as possible to the version produced by Moderna. Until recently, Afrigen specializ
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SpawnFest is an annual 48 hour online contest where teams try to build the best BEAM-based application, as determined by the judges based on certain criteria. In this blog post I am going to introduce the new tool I created during SpawnFest.eFlambé is a tool for rapidly profiling Erlang and Elixir code. It is intended to be one of the first tools you reach for when debugging a performance issue in your Elixir or Erlang application. With a single command you can visualize your code’s performance as an interactive flame graph in your flame graph viewer of choice. It’s written in Erlang and published to hex.pm.eFlambé flame graph viewed in speedscopeThere are no new ideas behind eFlambé. Brendan Gregg introduced flame graphs nearly a decade ago and there have been several Erlang projects that have made it possible to generate flame graphs of Elixir and Erlang call stacks. By far the most popular has been Vlad Ki’s eflame. While eflame works well it has two disadvantages:Generating a SVG flame graph is a multi-step process.Code that needs to be profiled must be invoked by the eflame:apply/3 directly. Sometimes you want to profile a function call as it is made by code inside of your running application. With eflame you must wrap the function call in an eflame:apply/3 call and re-compile and restart your application.eFlambé improves upon eflame by making flame graph generation a single step process, and making it possible to profile any function inside a running application without having to recompile code or run more than one command.Using eFlambé is easy. Simply add it as a dependency to your project.For Elixir projects, add the following line to your mix.exs file
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Peter Thiel. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for New York Times Tech billionaire Peter Thiel said bitcoin's surge to $60,000 underscores his view that the US political system is unsustainable, according to The Information. Thiel railed against President Biden, the Obama administration and central banks, the report said. Bitcoin's price surged Wednesday to mark a new all-time high above $66,000. The US political system is not sustainable and the skyrocketing price of the decentralized cryptocurrency bitcoin underscores that point, says tech billionaire Peter Thiel, according to a report from The Information. "I don't know that you should put all your money into bitcoin at $60,000 a bitcoin right now," Thiel said at a Monday night gathering of the Federalist Society, a conservative law group. "But surely the fact that it is at $60,000 is an extremely hopeful sign. It's the canary in the coal mine. It's the most honest market we have in the country, and it's telling us that this decrepit… regime is just about to blow up," he said. The venture capitalist made his comments before bitcoin blasted higher Wednesday to a new all-time record high of $66,812.68 on the back of Tuesday's trading debut of ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, the first bitcoin-futures exchange-traded fund. The price of the world's most-traded digital coin overtook the previous all-time high of $64,804.72 logged in April, around the time when crypto exchange Coinbase went public. Thiel has made crypto-industry investments through VC firms he's helped establish, including the Founders Fund. He is a backer of 1confirmation, along with Marc Andreessen and Mark Cuban. Speaking at Monday's conference hosted by the Stanford Law School chapter of the Federalist Society, Thiel suggested eliminating environmental and immigration laws to balance the US government's budget, the Information said, adding that in one semi-digression, Thiel called President Joe Biden a "catastrophe." He also spoke against "the Clinton-Obama retreads rearranging the deck chairs and mopping the floors" of the Titanic, and against the world's central banks, saying the US Federal Reserve is a "center-left insti
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During our Apport research we exploited Ubuntu’s crash handler, and following that, we decided to once again audit the coredump creation code. But this time, we chose to focus on a more general different target, rather than a specific crash handler. In this post, we will explore how the Linux kernel itself behaves when a process crash happens. We will show bugs we found in the Linux kernel that allow unprivileged users to create root-owned core files, and how we were able to use them to get an LPE through the sudo program on machines that have been configured by administrators to allow running a single innocent command. On Linux, a coredump will be generated for a process upon receiving several signals. The signals that result in a core dump are listed here (taken from “man signal”): Signal Standard Action Comment ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── SIGABRT P1990 Core Abort signal from abort(3) SIGBUS P2001 Core Bus error (bad memory access) SIGFPE P1990 Core Floating-point exception SIGILL P1990 Core Illegal Instruction SIGIOT
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Author: Chloé LourseyreEditor: Peter Fordham Context Header guards Every C++ developer has been taught header guards. Header guards are a way to prevent a header being included multiple times which would be problematic because it would mean that the variables, function and classes in that header would be defined several times, leading to a compilation error. Example of a header guard: #ifndef HEADER_FOOBAR #define HEADER_FOOBAR class FooBar { // ... }; #endif // HEADER_FOOBAR For those who are not familiar with it, here is how it works: the first time the file is included, the macro HEADER_FOOBAR is not defined. Thus, we enter into the #ifndef control directive. In there, we defined HEADER_FOOBAR and the class FooBar. Later, if we include the file again, since HEADER_FOOBAR is defined, we don’t enter into the #ifndef again, so the class FooBar is not defined a second time. #pragma once #pragma is a preprocessor directive providing additional information to the compiler, beyond what is conveyed in the language itself. Any compiler is free to interpret pragma directive as it wishes. However, over the years, some pragma directives have acquired significant popularity and are now almost-standard (such as #pragma once, which is the topic of this article, or #pragma pack). #pragma once is a directive that indicates to the compiler to include the file only once. The compiler manages itself how it remembers which files are already included or not. So, instinctively, we can think that the #pragma once directive does the job of a header guard, but with only one line and without having to think of a macro name. Today? In the past, the #pragma once directive was not implemented for every compiler, so it was less portable than header guards. But today, in C++, I did not find a single instance of compiler that does not implement this directive. So why bother using header guards anymore? Answer: because of the issue I’m about to describe. A strange issues with #pragma once There is actually one kind of issue that can occur with #pragma once that cannot occur with header guards. Say, for instance, that you
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Looking at our AWS bills, there was one particular line that stood out like a sore thumb. Data transfer. It seemed way out of proportion. “Doh!” I hear you bemoan, “everyone knows that the AWS data transfer bill is always larger than you expect.” However, this wasn’t our production account which actually does have significant usage and the cost is all in line with what we expected. This was on QA and DEV environments. So we have this setup in which there’s these two services that communicate a lot between them, but they happen to be in different execution units (pods in Kubernetes parlance). This means they might get spun up in different Availability Zones (which are different data centers in an AWS region), which in turn means they are subject to the data transfer charging for cross-AZ traffic. The reasons as to why they are communicating a lot and why they are separate execution units is another story and not relevant to this one. There are good and bad reasons for all of this, but nothing that justifies a complete rewrite currently. But anyhow The data transfer between AZs costs real money. Not awfully lot, but enough that if you do silly things you easily get an opportunity to optimize the costs. In this case, all I needed is one pretty straight-forward algebraic calculation to justify spending couple of hours of cutting the excessive data transfer. Add to that the fact that this particular data transfer is basically unnecessary. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of the data transfer rate between these two components gave the hunch that the excessive babbling between these two deployments could be the cause of the data transfer cost. Yes, I know, that was the first mistake. Of course, you need to make sure that this is actually the case. Luckily, AWS has a nice UI to explore the costs. Yes, it is called the AWS Cost Explorer. And yes, it is easy to plot the costs of data transfer as the function of time. In this case I didn’t need to be a regular Sherlock to figure out that those spikes do in fact coincide with the days that there were the comprehensive load testing going on. It was actually the load tests that generated
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October 20, 2021 by Chris Dias, @chrisdias Back in 2019, when the .dev top-level domain opened, we picked up vscode.dev and quickly parked it, pointing at our website code.visualstudio.com (or, if you are from the Boston area like me, we "pahked it"). Like a lot of people who buy a .dev domain, we had no idea what we were going to do with it. And we certainly didn't anticipate that it would end up being the fulfillment of a mission over a decade in the making. Bringing VS Code to the browser Fast forward to today. Now when you go to https://vscode.dev, you'll be presented with a
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Image: NORBERT MILLAUER/DDP/AFP via Getty ImagesA consortium of museums in Vienna have created an OnlyFans account to post nude artworks as part of a “new wave of prudishness” on social media platforms. The so-called “Vienna Laid Bare” initiative was launched by Vienna’s tourism board late last week along with its OnlyFans account. As of writing subscribers can receive a complimentary Vienna City Card, or a ticket for one of the museums featured on the account.  Helena Hartlauer, a spokesperson for the Vienna Tourism Board, told Motherboard that the museums launched the initiativ
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I’ve been wanting to publicly comment on Lenovo’s statement on Linux support for a while, as there’s much to say about it, and my failing attempt at finding a suitable replacement for my venerable T510 gave me an excuse to document my love-hate relationship with Lenovo all at once.This is of course my own personal views and ideas, and does not reflect the Haiku project’s position on the topic, nor that of Haiku, Inc. But I feel they deserve to be brought here due to history and the direct and indirect effect it might have had on the project, including previous failed attempts at commercial applications using it.While Lenovo is still above many other manufacturers on some aspects, and on others domains, well, nobody does any better anyway, they purport to perpetuating the IBM legacy, so I think (sic) they should be held up to the standard they claim to follow. Yet the discussion about repair and documentation pertains to almost every vendor.Also, it’s a long read, an hour or so, so make yourself comfortable, get a coffee, or tea and biscuits.Skip to the middle for the more political views on Right to repair, schematics and specifications, but you’d really be missing some history and facts for the subsequent discussion, and rants about the T510 and nvidia. If you just want to see me complain about current hardware just go further down.Time travelI had several computers before ThinkPads, not all of which were good, so I’ll go through them for context. It’s also of historical interest to BeOS and Haiku fans I suppose. That’s only the ones I actually used for coding and daily tasks, not those I try not to collect because my flat is already full.ORIC AtmosThe ORIC Atmos had a MOS 6502 CPU and 64KB of RAM. We had three of them at the back of the class in 1989, and I managed to get my mum to buy me one.It’s still working, the user manual has all the register descriptions to program it in assembly language, and I have the full schematics in case I need to fix it. And I still write software and make hardware for it.Some hardware limitations but still respectable specs with regards to contemporary machines.And it’s black and red. 😎And it’s beautiful. 🤩And it has a real keyboard.FIC 386 laptopI was given this FIC laptop. I used Windows 3.0 in real mode on it for a while, until one day I opened it, and counted the RAM chips, and wondered why
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Windows is a platform for creators Windows is the most open platform on the planet for creators. Part of living our commitment to openness is welcoming partner technologies and content that deliver powerful experiences. And what makes Windows, well, Windows is the variety of apps available. So, with Windows 11, we announced a new Microsoft Store to showcase the best experiences from developers, a flexible and transparent commerce model, and the introduction of Android™ apps. Today, we are announcing the first preview of our Android apps experience into the Windows Insider Program. We are proud to deliver this experience with our partners – Amazon and Intel – to Beta Channel users in the United States on eligible devices running Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm platforms. Experience Android apps on Windows for the first time To dive in, open the new Microsoft Store and find a selection of mobile experiences that were not available on Windows before. These Android apps and games join our broader catalog, which has everything you are looking for – from core to casual games, sophisticated productivity suites to social experiences, creativity tools to niche hobbyist apps, and developer tools to entire virtualized environments. Our new Microsoft Store search experience delivers the best results available, regardless of the technology used to build an app, because we are committed to offering you choice when more than one option is available. And when you’re ready to download an Android app, the Amazon Appstore will guide you through the rest of the flow and get you on your way. Running Android apps and games on Windows 11 will feel familiar, effo
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Picture one of America’s wealthiest people – say, Warren Buffet, Sergey Brin or Larry Ellison – and you’re more likely to regard their enormous riches as fairly earned and deserved, the product of hard work, talent and ingenuity. But if you consider “the superwealthy,” “the 1%” or “the economic elite,” rather than individuals, you’re more likely to attribute vast wealth to systemic advantages that have contributed to decades of widening income inequality in the United States, and to feel more troubled by it. That finding, reported in new psychology research by collaborators from Cornell and the Ohio State University, suggests our tolerance for inequality – and support for redistributive policies intended to reduce it – may depend on who people are led to think about at the top of the economic ladder. “When you think about ‘the wealthy’ or ‘the 1%,’ the mind goes to situational attributions much more readily,” said Thomas Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “You think about the system being rigged, the privileges they have, and therefore you’re much more willing to support, for example, an inheritance tax to deal with growing income inequality.” Gilovich is a co-author with Jesse Walker, M.A. ’17, Ph.D. ’19, assistant professor of marketing at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, and Stephanie Tepper, M.A. ’21, a doctoral student in t
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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction in February, 2016, for oil and gas drilling rights near Arches National Park was unremarkable. The high bidder, Tempest Exploration Co. LLC, paid $2,500 for the 1,120 acre lease by credit card and began paying annual rental fees. What soon did prove remarkable, though, was the revelation that the company had been created by the environmentalist, Terry Tempest Williams. She intended to keep the oil in the ground. BLM promptly canceled the lease. This extractive bias against conservation is legally mandated for most of America’s public resources. When our public lands laws were written almost a century ago, the goal was to put the lands to productive use as quickly as possible. If you found valuable minerals and staked a claim, it was yours. If you diverted surface waters and put them to a beneficial use, they were yours. This practice has largely continued to the present day, where there is a “use it or lose it” requirement for bidding on access to public lands. If you want to keep the trees standing, the oil in the ground, or the range free from grazing, you’re not allowed to bid at all.In a piece published today in the journal Science, Allow “nonuse rights” to conserve natural resources, my co-authors and I argue that it is well past time to end this practiceThe focus on extraction activities on public lands may have made sense when the nation actively sought to promote the productive use of its natural resources and settle the West. Such rules, however, are outdated today. Preventing conservation interests from participating in resource markets betrays current values and foments controversy. When conservation advocates are unable to participate in markets, they are forced to pursue what are often less effective and less efficient strategies such as litigation or lobbying for regulation. These battles pit resource-dependent communities against conservation organizations, resulting in controversy and outcomes that are vulnerable to shifts in political influence.Current examples are easy to find. Near the end of its term, the Trump administration finalized plans to allow logging in areas of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, lease oil and gas in parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and expand livestock grazing in national monuments that had previously been deemed off limits to such activities. While environmentalists vehemently opposed these policies, they had few options other than litigation because such groups lacked rights to these resources or even the ability to acquire them. The Biden administration is attempting to undo some or all of these policy changes, but nothing prevents a future administration from reversing course yet again, as has happened in the past. Rejecting outdated legal shackles, conservationists’ exercise of non-use rights should hold the same status as extractive interests in acquiring public resource rights. This approach will allow market mechanisms to reveal unmet demands for additional conservation of publicly managed resources currently subject to political decision-making and create more durable conservation outcomes. There is good reason to th
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19th October 2021 - Language design , Nim , Programming This is a question that has come up time and time again in the IRC channel, when talking to people in person, and in the comment section pretty much every time Nim has an article on Hackernews or one of the bigger programming subreddits. It’s also a question that has been answered a lot of times, both with a short and efficient “no”, but also in longer form. This article will go into some detail about why the answer is “no” and can hopefully serve as a reference the next time this question gets asked. What is a compiler anyways? Those who ask the question “is Nim a transpiler?” usually means “as opposed to a compiler”, so to understand why the answer is “no” we need to understand the difference between a compiler and a transpiler. While these words are sometimes used interchangeably there is a subtle yet important distinction in their meaning. But before we get into that, what exactly is a compiler? Compilers have existed almost as long as computers have been in use. The first ones started to crop up in the early ’50s as computers became more and more capable. The job of a compiler is to take a program written in an abstract language, and convert it into something more concrete. Many compilers will compile from your language of choice directly into binary code, like GCC, or into a particular VM bytecode format, like the Java Compiler. Other compilers will take a language of higher abstraction, and simply compile it into a more concrete implementation in a different language. An example of this is TypeScript, which compiles its code into JavaScript, running all the static type checks and such before outputting only valid JavaScript code. But I thought a transpiler just converted between languages? This seems to be the misconception that leads to people asking the question which titles this article. While it is true that a transpiler converts from one language to another language the distinction lies in levels of abstraction. By compiling C to assembly you’re essentially using information in the C language to make decisions about what assembly code to generate, discard the information in the process. A transpiler on the other hand is a tool that converts between two languages while keeping the same level of abstraction. A theoretical perfect transpilation is therefore a two-way process where you could go back and forth between languages. This is typically not the case however because of structural changes and the assumptions required to transpile between two different languages. Examples of transpilers include JSweet which converts from Java to TypeScript, f2c which transpiles Fortran 77 to C, or J2ObjC which converts from Java to Objective-C, or even the tool c2nim which ships with Nim and compiles from C to Nim. Transpilers are typically used when you want to use code from one language which is on the same level of abstraction and use it in a language of the same or higher abstraction. And even this list is using the term a bit lo
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The Atari 2600, branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized the use of microprocessor-based hardware and of games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, a format first used with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. On this page I have the most recent additions you can navigate though the games via the game(s) title or see all additions so far in the View All Section. This is what I know exists, but always, looking for people to contirbute more information. Feel free to drop any information just conta
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Every week at the Browser we conduct edifying interviews with interesting figures. Today we speak to Jon Ingold, game designer and founder of Inkle Studios — developers of interactive
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VCS history versus large open source development October 19, 2021 I recently read Fossil's Rebase Considered Harmful (via), which is another rerun of the great rebase versus everything else debate. This time around, one of the things that occurred to me is that rebasing and an array of similar things allow maintainers of large, public open source repositories to draw a clean line between how people develop changes in private and what appears in the immutable public history of the project. Any open source project can benefit from clean public history, partly because clean history makes it easy to use bisection to locate bugs, but a large project especially benefits because it has so many co
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It can be challenging to test your FPGA or ASIC graphics designs. You can perform low-level behavioural simulations and examine waveforms, but you also need to verify how the video output will
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Facebook is paying a $4.75 million fine and up to $9.5 million to eligible victims in a settlement announced Tuesday to resolve the allegations that it discriminated against U.S. workers in favor of foreigners with special visas to fill high-paying jobs. Richard Drew/AP hide caption toggle caption Richard Drew/AP Facebook is paying a $4.75 million fine and up to $9.5 million to eligible victims in a settlement announced Tuesday to resolve the allegations that it discriminated against U.S. workers in favor of foreigners with special visas to fill high-paying jobs. Richard Drew/AP WASHINGTON — Facebook is paying a $4.75 million fine and up to $9.5 million to eligible victims to resolve the Justice Department's allegations that it discriminated against U.S. workers in favor of foreigners with special visas to fill high-paying jobs.Facebook also agreed in the settlement announced Tuesday to train its employees in anti-discrimination rules and to conduct more widespread advertising and recruitment for job opportunities in its permanent labor certification program. The department's civil rights division said the social network giant "routinely refused" to recruit, consider or hire U.S. workers, a group that includes U.S. citizens and nationals, people granted asylum, refugees and lawful permanent residents, for positions it had reserved for temporary visa holders. Facebook sponsored the visa holders for "green cards" authorizing them to work permanently. The so-called H-1B visas are a staple of Silicon Valley, widely used by software programmers and other employees of major U.S. technology companies.Critics of the practice contend that the foreign nationals will work for lower wages than U.S. citizens. The tech companies maintain that's not the case, that they turn to foreign nationals because they have trouble finding qualified programmers and other engineers who are U.S. citizens. "In principle, Facebook is doing a good thing by applying for green cards for its workers, but it has also learned how to game the system to avoid hiring U.S. tech workers," said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. "Facebook started lobbying to change the system more to its liking starting back in 2013 when the comprehensive immigration bill that passed the Senate was being negotiated."The settlement terms announced Tuesday are the largest civil penalty and back-pay award ever recovered by the civil rights division in the 35-year history of enforcing anti-discrimination rul
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Sendable and @Sendable are part of the concurrency changes that arrived in Swift 5.5 and address a challenging problem of type checking values passed between structured concurrency constructs and actor messages. Before diving into the topic of sendables, I encourage you to read up on my articles around async/await, actors, and actor isolation. These articles cover the basics of the new concurrency changes, which directly connect to the techniques explained in this article.Raycast is the Swiss Army knife for your Mac. Create GitHub pull requests, clear derived data, reset SPM, and so
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2021-10-19As you know, Rust does not support optional function arguments nor keyword arguments, nor function overloading. To overcome this limitation rust developers frequently apply builder pattern. It requires some extra coding, but from the API ergonomics perspective, gives a similar effect as keyword arguments and optional arguments. Introduction to problem Consider the following rust structure: struct User { email: Option<String>, first_name: Option<String>, last_name: Option<String> } In Ruby, a class that holds the same data can be defined as: class User
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Walter Bright (Photo courtesy Walter Bright)I recently posted an article about resurrecting old code, and went into some detail about how I brought a program for the TRS-80 I wrote in 1982 back to life. This post had some interesting discussion on Hacker News, and among these comments was one from a reader who mentioned that his oldest code was from 1978, and is still available on GitHub. The author of this response was none other than Walter Bright, compiler expert and creator of the D programming language, as well the author of the very famous program that he had referred to in his Hacker News reply. That program was Empire, written in 1978 for the DECsystem-10 mainframe and is one of the earliest examples of a computer wargame. Empire contained then-groundbreaking features we still know and love today, including maps featuring cities, water and complex landmasses, fog-of-war mechanics, and a formidable computer AI that plays by the same rules you do.I encountered Empire while taking classes at the University of Hartford in 1981, where it was installed on their brand-new VAX 11/780 computer. It was the first time I ever played a computer wargame, and I was instantly hooked, spending valuable time on the system’s VT100 terminals conquering cities rather than doing my data structures homework. I did pass that course, but no thanks to Walter. Forty years later, I was very surprised to have run across him in this way. I asked him if he would be willing to discuss the development of Empire with The Mad Ned Memo, a request to which he graciously agreed. I am delighted to share it with you now!An early VAX/VMS text-map version of EmpireMNM: Hi Walter, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with The Mad Ned Memo about your work, and the development of Empire. I’ll start with an observation. Looking through your long list of accomplishments, Empire seems to be a bit of an outlier in your work, which has more of a focus on programming language, compiler design, and related computer science topics.  What are your thoughts about that?WB: A perennial problem I had with Empire is the computers of the time simply were not powerful enough. It ran slowly, and games where the computer played itself lasted several hours. (Today, a second or two!) This meant I became more and more focused on optimizing the code, and so became more and more interested in compilers and languages. I figured I could do better than the existing ones!MNM: Which would bring us to talking about the D programming language, something I want to touch on in a bit. But you just answered a question I was going to ask, about whether the game was the consequence of some computer science project, or the other way around. Sounds like the game came first. What was the inspiration?WB: I actually invented Empire when I was 11. I built a game board out of a large sheet of plywood, painted it, made game pieces, etc. But, it turned out to be far too tedious to play. (I knew nothing of the paper wargames that were popular later.) So it got shelved. When I finally was able to use a computer, I realized it could remove the tedium and leave the fun part. A computer also relieved one o
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Nearly two years into the coronavirus pandemic, there's some truth in a joke circulating among frustrated ICU nurses: They ask their hospitals to appropriately pay them for the hazards they've endured. And the nurses are rewarded with a pizza party instead.That's what happened at Theresa Adams' hospital in Ohio. The facility across town was offering bonuses to keep its nurses from leaving. But not hers. They got ... a pizza party. "I heard a lot of noise about 'Well, this is what you signed up for.' No, I did not sign up for this," she says of the unparalleled stress brought on by the pandemic.Adams is an ICU nurse who helped build and staff COVID-19 units in one of Ohio's largest hospitals. She recently left for a lucrative stint of travel nursing in California. Travel nurses take on temporary assignments in hospitals or other health care facilities that have staffing shortages. The contracts typically last a few months, and though the assignments pay more than staff positions, there can be trade-offs, such as predictable benefits or stable professional relationships.Adams hopes to return to her home hospital eventually, though she's a little irritated at management at the moment."I did not sign up for the facility taking advantage of the fact that I have a calling," she says. "There is a difference between knowing my calling and knowing my worth."In parts of the U.S. where hospitals are full of COVID-19 patients, the only thing keeping intensive care units fully staffed is a rotating cast of traveling nurses. And hospitals are having to pay them so much that those hospitals' staff nurses may be tempted to hit the road too. A reckoning may be on its way as hospitals try to stabilize a worn-out workforce.Reliance on travel nurses creates a vicious cycle of turnoverThe use of traveling nurses took off in the 1980s in response to nursing shortages. Although they've always been paid more for their flexibility, some traveling ICU nurses can now pull in as much as $10,000 a week, which can be several times more than what staff nurses earn.And while some hospitals have been offering retention bonuses and upping pay for staff nurses, they say it doesn't compare with the financial bonanza of traveling.But hospital managers now find themselves trapped in a vicious hiring cycle — especially for the most highly trained critical-care nurses who can monitor COVID-19 patients on the advanced life support machines known as ECMO, for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation."Our turnover for ECMO nurses is incredible, because they're the most seasoned nurses. And this is what all my colleagues are facing too," says Jonathan Emling, a nurse and the ECMO director at Ascension Saint Thomas in Nashville.The shortage of ECMO nurses has prevented the hospital from admitting additional COVID-19 patients who need their blood oxygenated outside their body, he says. There are no more staff nurses with enough experience to start the training."We will train these people, and then six months later they will be gone and traveling," Emling says. "So it's hard to invest so much in them training-wise and time-wise to see them leave."And when they leave, hospitals are
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A recent post by Hillel Wayne about influential dead languages (well, mostly dead, he notes) has reminded me that there is a lot about APL that people do not know, and with the obscurity of APL in the wide world of programming, one must be forgiven for thinking of APL in terms of a dead (mostly) language. But this question comes up so much that I think it is worthwhile to examine APL in this light and clarify the understanding of APL in the modern world. Let us examine this question in three parts:What makes a language dead?Why isn't APL dead, and why might it appear dead to some people?What makes APL not just "not dead," but also uniquely alive?What makes for a dead language? In short, lack of life. But how does this apply to programming languages? The proxy measures of popularity and userbase can help us, because popular languages are never dead. The reason for this is that the languages with many developers and users are almost always evolving and inventing new features, code, and interfaces. They maintain their connection to modern devices and interfaces. Nonetheless, popularity is not everything. After all, Haskell spent years in obscurity before becoming at least reasonably well known, even if its popularity has never topped the global charts. Life is creation and movement and potential. A language dies when it ceases to provide value in these dimensions. In other words, when a language no longer has anything to contribute, when it is no longer suitable for creating new ideas, when it no longer keeps pace with the needs of the user, it dies. Languages that maintain usability while embedding unique or innovative models of thinking and problem solving are much more resilient to losses in popularity. Indeed, most new languages rise from obscurity precisely because of a unique combination of usability and newness/innovation in some way that matters. But languages like APL are a great example of how even great languages may lapse into obscurity due to market forces and failures to deliver value in the right niche. What is the maxim? Change is the only constant. But let's not forget that history repeats itself. Often, a new language may die relatively quickly, as newness wears off and its essence is absorbed into other languages. The less fundamental uniqueness and value in a language, the faster a language can die. That's why we see so many languages that might be legacy still kicking in certain niches: their value is insanely high, or perceived to be so in those areas. The truth is, APL very nearly did die.APL thrived in the 70's and 80's as an ultra-high productivity language for solving a problem rapidly and accurately. It gave access to the mainframes that others could not. Universities' Computer Science departments actually found it too easy, and many departments embracing the software engineering model or formal methods model a la Dijkstra ran a heavy campaign against APL.During the 90's, the wave of Software Engineering, Personal Computers, and Object-oriented Programming (tm), swallowed up any alternatives. The APL vendors did not adequately respond and the fashio
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This is a Project Profile issue of The Trick Revealed - the newsletter from Jabari Bell, which you can read more about here. If you enjoy it and would like more in your inbox, consider subscribing.The YCombinator sign. It is common for people to take pictures in front of it when visiting.My wife and I sat nervously across from several VCs and Michael Seibel, CEO of YCombinator and founder of Twitch. We were 8 minutes into the infamous YC 10-minute interview and we were bombing it.YCombinator is the early stage startup accelerator that gave rise to the likes of Airbnb and Dropbox. It accepts a cohort of startups several times a year into its accelerator program, where the startups get invest
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Kalev Järvik stands on a bald patch of land in the heart of Estonia’s Haanja nature reserve and remembers when he could walk straight from one side of the reserve to the other under a canopy of tre
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Hiring TA for One Month (part-time)Do you want to be a teacher's assistant (TA) at One Month? Tell us a bit about yourself and why you'd like to contribute. One Month hires TAs on a rolling basis. TA-ing is a wonderful chance for you to get some real-world experience for your resume. The responsibilities include: * Grade student assignments * Make screencasts for students (only of your desktop, and voice)* Help motivate students to complete the course To see upcoming One Month courses check out: http://onemonth.com
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This month’s challenge for me is getting used to my “in-
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Log in to a live flight-track website and follow BFL168 as it climbs to 6,000ft and cruises at 155 mph (250 kph) just south of the Arctic Circle. This is a scheduled flight from Yellowknife to Hay River in the Northwest Territories of Canada. You will see that the 45-minute trip, operated by Buffalo Airways, is nearly always on time. What might surprise you is the type of aircraft that makes this daily journey in what can be decidedly harsh conditions. No, not some smart new jet equipped with every latest safety device and digital gizmo, but a 28-seat Douglas DC-3 (twin-piston).What this means is that the very youngest of the aircraft operated by Buffalo Airways on flight 168 are two years shy of their 70th birthday. And, if all goes to plan, the legendary DC-3 will be the first airliner to fly into its second century.Altogether about 16,000 American, Russian and Japanese-built Douglas DC-3s, and also C-47 Skytrains, ‘Dakotas’, Lisunov Li-2s, and Showa and Nakajima L2Ds – the near identical military versions built in the 1940s – took to the air from December 1935. Around 2,000 fly today. Some of these sleek, stressed-metal aircraft are used for fire−fighting and crop spraying, some for rescue work, research and exploration, and others for freight, films, and joy flights.I am lucky enough to have co-piloted a DC-3 in India. It was not, but could easily have been, one of the ‘Dakotas’ my father and his RAF colleagues protected in 1944, as each of these hugely capable aircraft dropped two tons of supplies and equipment for British and Commonwealth troops fighting the Battle of Kohima. This was a turning point in the War in the East, when the Japanese – attempting to invade India across the Naga Hills – were beaten to a standstill, and ignominious retreat.DC-3s were also among the heroes of the Berlin Airlift of 1948-9 when Allied aircraft fed Berlin as Stalin tried to starve the city into Soviet submission. If ever an airliner deserved a medal, it was the Douglas DC-3.Revolutionising aviationDesigned and built in California by the Douglas Aircraft Company, the DC-3 had originally been designed as a luxury airliner for American Airlines flying 14-b
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M3O is an open source public cloud platform.We are building an AWS alternative for the next generation of developers. Overview AWS was a first generation public cloud provider started in 2006. It’s infrastructure services and pay as go pricing model made it an incredibly compelling choice for a previous generation of developers. But what about the future? M3O is an attempt to build a new public cloud platform with higher level building blocks for the next generation of developers. M3O is powered by the open source Micro platform and programmable real world Micro Services. Features 🔥 Dev UX - The developer experience is first priority. A slick new UX for the next generation of developers. ☝️ One Token - Use one Micro API token to fulfill all your API needs. Access multiple public APIs with a single token. ⚡ Fast Access - Using a new API is easy - no need to learn yet another API, it’s all the same Micro developer experience. 🆓 Free to start - It’s a simple pay as you go model and everything is priced per request. Top up your account and start making calls. 🚫 Anti AWS Billing - Don’t get lost in a sea of infinite cloud billing. We show you exactly what you use and d
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It surprises me that when people think of "software that brings about the singularity" they think of text models, or of RL agents. But they sneer at decision tree boosting and the like as boring algorithms for boring problems. To me, this seems counter-intuitive, and the fact that most people researching ML are interested in subjects like vision and language is flabbergasting. For one, because getting anywhere productive in these fields is really hard, for another, because their usefulness seems relatively minimal. I've said it before and I'll say it again, human brains are very good at the stuff they've been doing for a long time. This ranges from things like controlling a human-like body to things like writing prose and poetry. Seneca was as good of a philosophy writer as any modern, Shakespear as good of a playwright as any contemporary. That is not to say that new works and diversity in literature isn't useful, both from the perspective of diversity and of updating to language and zeitgeist, but it's not game-changing. Human brains are shit at certain tasks, things like finding the strongest correlation with some variables in an n-million times n-million valued matrix. Or heck, even finding the most productive categories to quantify a spreadsheet with a few dozen categorical columns and a few thousand rows. That's not to mention things like optimizing 3d structures under complex constraints or figuring out probabilistic periodicity in a multi-dimensional timeseries. The later sort of problem is where machine learning has found the most amount of practical usage, problems that look "silly" to a researcher but implacable to a human mind. On the contrary, 10 years in, computer vision is still struggling to find any meaningfully large market fits outside of self-driving. There are a few interesting applications, but they have limited impact and a low market cap. The most interesting applications, related to bioimaging, happen to be things people are quite bad at; They are very divergent from the objective of creating human-like vision capabilities, since the results you want are anything but human-like. Even worst, there's the problem that human-like "
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Milestones, with their plaque citations, are listed below in chronological order of the achievement. When the dates of the milestone are a range and overlap, our convention is to list them by the start date of the work, e.g. 1961-1972 comes before 1962, which comes before 1962-1965, which comes before 1964, etc. To make it easier for people to visit the sites of IEEE Milestones we have also made a page with addresses, maps, and satellite images. Looking to submit a IEEE Milestone? Here are the Milestone Program Guidelines and submit a proposal here. List of Milestones according to year dedicated List of Milestones by Region IEEE Milestones Status Report to see Milestones currently in the approval process List of Achievements Suitable for Milestones but which have not been proposed yet Gallery of selfies at IEEE Milestone plaques submitted by users Prior to 1800 Book “Experiments and Observations on Electricity” by Benjamin Franklin, 1751 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., Dedicated 7 August 2009 - IEEE Philadelphia Section In April 1751 the Royal Society published Benjamin Franklin's book, "Experiments and Observations on Electricity: Made in Philadelphia in America." A collection of letters to London's Peter Collinson, it described Franklin's ideas about the nature of electricity and how electrical devices worked, and new experiments to investigate lightning. This book led to a better understanding of charges, stimulated Franklin's work on lightning rods, and made him an internationally known figure. Benjamin Franklin's work in London, 1757-1775 London, England, Dedicated 31 March 2003 - IEEE United Kingdom and Ireland Section Benjamin Franklin, American electrician, printer, and diplomat, spent many years on Craven Street. He lived at No. 7 between 1772 and 1775 and at No. 36 from 1757-1762 and again from 1764-1772. During these years, Franklin popularized the study of electricity, performed experiments, and served as an advisor on lightning conductors. Volta's Electrical Battery Invention, 1799 Como, Italy, Dedicated 15 September 1999 - IEEE Italy Section In 1799, Alessandro Volta developed the first electrical battery. This battery
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View Release Notes for G4.0.0Today marks the soft release of the 4th Generation of Waterfox. After enough time has elapsed, the automatic update will be seeded out to all users.New WebsiteYou may have noticed a new website - much more information, with a more practical structure. This website also allows us to add documentation, support documents and better ways to convey information. We will be optimising the website over the next few weeks as well as setting up redirects for any old pages that have been missed.New BrowserWaterfox has returned to its roots with performance at the forefront. We have aggressively optimised Waterfox for as much performance as possible. Unfortunately this means we have to leave older systems behind - but any computer from the last decade should work.ARM build
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Similar to tomnomnom/gron but in Awk. Features true JSON parser in pure Awk. Reasonably fast with Gawk/Mawk even on large-ish files. Slow with BWK on big JSON files (100K+). Developed in xonixx/intellij-awk. Incubated from xonixx/awk_lab. Usage Gron: $ echo '{"a":[1,2,3]}' | ./gron.awk json={} json.a=[] json.a[0]=1 json.a[1]=2 json.a[2]=3 Un-Gron: $ echo '{"a":[1,2,3]}' | ./gron.awk | ./gron.awk - -u { "a": [ 1, 2, 3 ] } Filter part of JSON: $ curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/xonixx/gron.awk/commits?per_page=1" \ | ./gron.awk | grep "commit.author" | ./gron.awk - -u [ { "commit": { "author": { "date": "2021-10-19T11:31:34Z", "email": "[email protected]", "name": "xonix" } } } ] JSON structure: $ curl -
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Hello everybody! I bring good news! GCC with Ada support has been updated in NetBSD! Now versions 10 and 11 should work on x86 and x86_64 NetBSD machines! You can find them in pkgsrc-wip (gcc10-aux) [1] and Ravenports (gcc11) [http://www.ravenports.com/]! First things first, the acknowledgements: a big thank you goes to J. Marino who did the original gcc-aux packages and who provided most if not all the work when it came to fixing the threads and symbols. Another big thank you goes to tobiasu who correctly picked up that the pthread structure wrappers were not correct and had to be remade. Another big thank you goes to Jay Patelani for his help with pkgsrc. So, long story short. Most of the work that had been done up until a few weeks ago was done correctly, but the failing tests (most related to tasking) were failing in very strange ways. It happened that the pthread structure memory that the Ada wrapper was using was incorrect, so we were getting completely erratic behaviour. Once that got fixed, pretty much all tests passed. J. Marino also took the time and effort to create __gnat_* function wrappers to all the symbols that the NetBSD people have renamed. This
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portfolio Collection of real world database schemas from open-source packages and real-world apps that you can use as inspiration when architecting your app. Featured Popular New All diagrams #Tags Open-source
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You would expect this to work, no? bash% echo $(( .1 + .2 )) bash: .1 + .2 : syntax error: operand expected (error token is ".1 + .2 ") Well, bash says no, but zsh just works: zsh% echo $(( .1 + .2 )) 0.30000000000000004 There is simply no way you can do calculations with fractions in bash without relying on bc, dc, or some hacks. Compared to simply being able to use a + b it’s ugly, slow, and difficult. There are other pretty frustrating omissions in bash; NUL bytes is another fun one: zsh% x=$(printf 'N\x00L'); printf $x | xxd -g1 -c3 00000000: 4e 00 4c N.L bash% x=$(printf 'N\x00L'); printf $x | xxd -g1 -c3 bash: warning: command substitution: ignored null byte in input 00000000: 4e 4c NL It looks like bash added a warning recently-ish (4.4-patch 2); this one bit me pretty hard a few years ago; back then it would just get silently discarded without warning; I guess a warning is an “improvement” of sorts (fixing it, however, would be an actual improvement[1]). NUL bytes aren’t that uncommon, think of e.g. find -print0, xargs -0, etc. That all works grand, right up to the point you try to assign it to a variable. You can use NUL bytes for array assignments though, if you evoke the right incantation: bash% read -rad arr < <(find . -print0) There are all sorts of edge-cases where you need to resort to read or readarray rather than being able to just assign in. In zsh it’s just arr=($(find . -print0)). Don’t even thin
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authorBaptiste Daroussin 2021-10-19 06:46:12 +0000 committerBaptiste Daroussin 2021-10-20 07:34:05 +0000 commitd410b585b6f00a26c2de7724d6576a3ea7d548b7 (patch) treecaa69cf6c229e93127ed7df91709158475d255c2 parentef0d94a3d34c880bd9f86cd842ee01b6075bc1d8 (diff)downloadsrc-d410b585b6f00a26c2de7724d6576a3ea7d548b7.tar.gzsrc-d410b585b6f00a26c2de7724d6576a3ea7d548b7.zip sh(1): make it the default shell for the root userIn the recent history sh(1) has gain the missing features for it to become a usable interractive shell: - command completion - persistent history support - improvements on the default
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- To nie było podejście człowieka do człowieka – twierdzi pracownik Amazona, który był świadkiem zdarzenia z 6 września. – Ten mężczyzna miał problem ze złapaniem oddechu. Lider kazał mu przejść spory dystans o własnych siłach. To karygodny błąd. Potraktowali człowieka jak śmiecia, jak typowy odpad. W magazynie Amazona w Sadach pod Poznaniem pracuje Grzegorz (imię zmienione), który zgodził się anonimowo opowiedzieć o zdarzeniach z początku września. – Pamiętam, że dzień wcześniej, 5 września, ten mężczyzna prosił lidera o przydzielenie kogoś do pomoc
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Natural language processing (NLP) increasingly popularInvestors seek edge in world of 'unstructured data'But CEOs are cottoning on, with more speech scriptedLONDON, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Executives, beware! You could become your own worst enemy.CEOs and other managers are increasingly under the microscope as some investors use artificial intelligence to learn and analyse their language patterns and tone, opening up a new frontier of opportunities to slip up.In late 2020, according to language pattern software specialist Evan Schnidman, some executives in the IT industry were playing down the poss
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I grew up with Release Early, Release Often [0] mantra, first as way to take part of the FLOSS community, but also to try to gather feedback to grow my skills. The latter is mostly unsuccessful, I used to mostly receive indirect feedback e.g. other projects picking up the same ideas, and more recently direct feedback in the form of private or public e-mails, conversations on IRC, mailing lists or forums (: e.g. https://lobste.rs/ :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#Lessons_for_creating_good_open_source_software There is many ways to release a project, from sharing a roadmap, to a binary that is ready to use, or a mere toot. How do you balance a) reaching users, contributors, and receive feedback, and b) avoiding too much communication that may be d
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Latest specification is a work in progressLeading browser vendors are putting the finishing touches to a set of APIs that make it easier for developers to protect their web applications against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.Many websites rely on dynamically generated content in the browser. Often, the generated markup includes content provided by outside sources, such as user-provided input, which can include malicious JavaScript code.Sanitizing dynamic markup and making sure it does not contain harmful code is one of the most serious challenges of web security.Native sanitization supportCurrently, web developers rely on third-party libraries such as DOMPurify to sanitize HTML content and prevent XSS attacks.The Sanitzer API, which was first p
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What is gLapse? gLapse stands for Gnome Time lapse, is a simple GTK tool that allows you to take lots of screenshots at fixed intervals. Then you can glue them together to produce a time lapse video. It was conceived to be used at Ludum Dare 48h game development competition by Linux people but you can also try it! It doesn't have a huge variety of options but it's pretty easy to use. Features Take .png screenshots with custom interval and quality. Make video using saved screenshots with custom FPS. Multilanguage: English, Spanish, German, French and Japanese. Downloads gLapse 0.3 Debian gLapse 0.3 other distros Show your work! Do you want everybody to know how you've worked in your last project? Start taking desktop screenshots at a fix time interval and let the party begi
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Last time we have become familiar with the very basics of category theory, and even had a look at some scala code covering isomorphisms. It is time for looking at products, coproducts and the algebra of types. Universal construction Universal construction is common in category theory, it is used to define objects in terms of their relationships to other objects. First, we find a pattern, a shape consisting of objects and morphisms, then look at all its occurrences. There might be many, so we have to find a way to rank those so we can pick the best possible candidate, the one that could be considered the best fit, the more authentic, if you like. Let’s meet some of these universal constructions! Product The pattern is like this: So we say an object is good candidate for being
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The value of high-quality code can be difficult to communicate. Some managers see it as a boondoggle, an expensive hobby for overly fastidious programmers, since investing in code quality can slow development over the short term and doesn’t appear to alter the user experience. But nothing could be further from the truth.  It’s true that tech companies with a poor organizational understanding of code quality can launch quickly and see success in the short term. But in doing so they incur an invisible debt that grows every time the code is altered. This debt does not stay intangible for long. Once the product exceeds a very low threshold of complexity, the debt comes due, gradually consuming the productivity of their development team and the usability of their software. When we
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Some terms: The Fast Fourier Transform is an algorithm optimization of the DFT—Discrete Fourier Transform. The “discrete” part just means that it’s an adaptation of the Fourier Transform, a continuous process for the analog world, to make it suitable for the sampled digital world. Most of the discussion here addresses the Fourier Transform and its adaptation to the DFT. When it’s time for you to implement the transform in a program, you’ll use the FFT for efficiency. The results of the FFT are the same as with the DFT; the only difference is that the algorithm is optimized to remove redundant calculations. In general, the FFT can make these optimizations when the number of samples to be transformed is an exact power of two, for which it can eliminate many unnecessar
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October 19, 2021, 10:14pm #1 The original KiCad domain name (kicad-pcb.org) was recently sold to an unnamed third party that is not affiliated with the KiCad Project or members of the KiCad Development Team. This sale was unexpected and may pose a risk to KiCad users. The new owners may simply post advertisements or (worst-case scenario) they may host malicious versions of the KiCad software for download. How did this happen? The domain name was originally registered in 2012 by the then project lead Dick Hollenbeck. As KiCad did not have a formal entity at the time, he registered it in his own name through his co
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LocalizationThe technology that powers Continuous Localization at CanvaBy Minh Cung and Simon HammondAt Canva, part of our commitment to inclusivity is building a global design product that’s accessible to everyone in the world. Our vision is to empower the world to design, so one of our crazy big goals is to be available in every language. With over 7,000 languages in the world, that’s a work in progress, but at the time of this post, Canva is available in 104 languages across the globe.Localization matters to us, not just because it helps fulfil our mission to be truly accessible to everyone in the world, but also because it fuels our growth. The majority of our users today work in a language other than English, and as we continue to grow, a larger and larger proportion of our users
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Brave also debuts its opt-in Web Discovery Project to anonymously crowdsource improvements to Brave Search Starting today, new Brave users will have the search functionality in the Brave browser powered by Brave Search, giving them the privacy and independence of a search/browser alternative to Big Tech. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks. Privacy-preserving Brave Search now replaces Google as the default search engine used in the address bar for new Brave users in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; Brave Search as default also replaces Qwant in France, and DuckDuckGo in Germany, with more geographies to be added in the next several months. Existing Brave users wil
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A dog lies on the ash-covered earth surrounded by volcanic lava following an eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano, in the area of Todoque on the Canary Island of La Palma, Spain in this undated screen grab taken from a handout video. Handout via Reuters hide caption toggle caption Handout via Reuters A dog lies on the ash-covered earth surrounded by volcanic lava following an eruption of the Cumb
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LONDON, Oct 18 (Reuters) - Five members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee wrote to Amazon.com Inc's chief executive Sunday, and accused the company's top executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, of either misleading Congress or possibly lying to it about Amazon's business practices.The letter also states that the committee is considering "whether a referral of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate."Addressed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the letter followed a Reuters investigation last week that showed that the company had conducted a systematic campaign of copying products and rigging search results in India to boost sales of its own brands - practices Amazon has denied engaging in. Jassy, a longtime Amazon executive, succeeded Bezos in July.
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This blog post describes the optimizations enabled by -ffast-math when compiling C or C++ code with GCC 11 for x86_64 Linux (other languages/operating systems/CPU architectures may enable slightly different optimizations). Most of the “fast math” optimizations can be enabled/disabled individually, and -ffast-math enables all of them:1 -ffinite-math-only -fno-signed-zeros -fno-trapping-math -fassociative-math -fno-math-errno -freciprocal-math -fun-safe-math-optimizations -fcx-limited-range When compiling standard C (that is, when using -std=c99 etc. instead of the default “GNU C” dialect), -ffast-math also enables -ffp-contract=fast, allowing the compiler to combine multiplication and addition instructions with an FMA instruction (godbolt). C++ and GNU C a
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Micro X-rays mark the spot(s) — Painting was likely altered to appease growing French anti-aristocratic sentiment. The French 18th-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier is a complicated historical figure. Scientifically, of course, he is an undisputed giant, helping usher in the chemical revolution as the field shifted from a qualitative to a quantitative approach, among many other achievements. He was also a wealthy nobleman and tax collector for the Ferme Generale, one of the most hated bodies of the Ancien regime as the French Revolution gained momentum. Those activities added to his fortune, which he used to fund his (and others') scientific research and to foster public education. But it's also why he ran afoul of the revolutionaries in power during the infamous Reign of Terror; they beheaded both Lavoisier and his father-in-law on the same day in 1794 as "enemies of the people." Something of that complexity is evident in a new scientific analysis of the famous 1788 portrait, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, of Lavoisier and his wife, Marie-Anne, by the Neoclassical painter Jaques-Louis David. The painting shows husband and wife posing with a collection of small scientific instruments—a tribute to their intellectual endeavors. But cutting-edge analysis techniques have revealed that David originally painted a different version, without the scientific accoutrements, depicting the couple as more typical French aristocrats. He cleverly obscured the underpainting in the final po
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One of the world’s great tourist attractions is the Imperial Observatory in Beijing. Source: Top 12 Best Places to go visiting Beijing The man, who rebuilt it in its current impressive form was the seventeenth century Jesuit mathematician, astronomer, and engineer Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688). Ferdinand Verbiest artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons I have no idea how many Jesuits took part in the Chines mission in the seventeenth century[1]. A mission that is historically important because of the amount of cultural, scientific, and technological information that flowed between Europe and China in both directions. But Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s print of the Jesuit Mission to China only shows the three most important missionaries, Matteo Ricci Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Ferdinand Verbiest. Jesuit Mission to China, left to right  Matteo Ricci, Johann Adam Schall von Bell, Ferdinand Verbiest Source: Wikimedia I have already written blog posts about Ricci and Schall von Bell and here, I complete the trilogy with a sketch of the life story of Ferdinand Verbiest and how, as the title states, he came to build his own monument in the form of one of the most splendid, surviving, seventeenth-century observatories.  Ferdinand Verbiest was born 9 October 1623 in Pittem, a village about 25 km south of Bruges in the Spanish Netherlands, the fourth of seven children of the bailiff and tax collector, Judocus Verbiest and his wife Ann van Hecke. Initially educated in the village school, in 1635 was sent to school in Bruges. In 1636 he moved onto the Jesuit College in Kortrijk. In 1641 he matriculated in Lily College of the University of Leuven,
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At Zeus Living, we believe housing shouldn’t constrain how, where, and when you want to live. At the center of everything we do are our people—our customers, partners, and the Zeus team. That’s what our founders knew when they started Zeus Living in 2015, setting out to make renting a home easier. The goal then—and now—is to create a new, modern mode of housing, making it easy to live well—reliably, safely, comfortably, even stylishly—wherever, whenever.We’ve grown and learned a great deal since we started. Today we’re a hardworking team of creators, problem-solvers, and strategists committed to our vision and values. Based in San Francisco and backed by Airbnb, Comcast, Bowery, and Initialized Capital, we’ve raised $90M in funding.The Role Zeus Living is seeking an Executive Assistant (to the CEO) who has a natural passion for problem solving and excels in a dynamic and fast paced environment. This is a high impact role that requires strong organizational skills, ability to work autonomously and collaboratively, and the ability to successfully manage multiple projects and priorities. Our ideal EA has a bias for action, a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude, outstanding attention to detail, and can communicate complex information across all levels of the business.What You'll Do -Manage the CEO’s professional calendar, prioritizing inquiries while troubleshooting conflicts, and making recommendations to ensure smooth day-to-day engagements -Organize and orchestrate, team meetings/offsites, and other group events. This includes meeting set up, travel arrangements, lodging, meals, expense reports, and more -Team with other leaders and employees on key company wide initiatives -Develop an understanding of the team and partners and prioritize requests from all contacts, making a point to be available and approachable -Ghostwrite email responses and draft communications -Additional administrative work as requiredWho You Are -2+ years of experience as an Executive Assistant, Administrative Business Partner, or similar -Strong communication skills and ability to connect distributed teams in a remote environment -Extraordinary organizational skills, and a
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IN SEPTEMBER 2011, I stood on a river overlook with children from my daughter’s elementary school, all of us transfixed by a giant jackhammer pounding cement to rubble. Below us, a waterfall raged through the first notch carved in the Lower Elwha Dam, as dust rose in the September sunshine, drifting over Douglas fir and cedar crowns. Trees were the only spectators old enough to remember when the Elwha River ran free, a century earlier. The rest of us stood in awe, watching the world’s largest dam removal to date, feeling time start to spin in reverse. I’ve spent a decade bearing witness to an unprecedented restoration experiment in Washington State. That September day committed me to unraveling the river’s story, while dam removal raised enough questions to keep scientists engaged for years to come. Photo: Jessica Plumb  The Elwha River begins in the Olympic Mountains, a rugged range encircled by ocean on three sides. Rivers radiate from the center of the Olympic Peninsula, short and steep, born from deep snowpack at the heart of the range. The Elwha River tumbles over four thousand feet in forty-five miles, from alpine meadows into rock canyons and flood plains, until it meets the sea in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When the first dam rose in 1911, it blocked th
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A new optical switch is, at 1 trillion operations per second, between 100 and 1,000 times faster than today's leading commercial electronic transistors, research that may one day help lead to a new generation of computers based on light instead of electricity, say scientists in Russia and at IBM.Computers typically represent data as ones and zeroes by switching transistors between one electric state and the other. Optical computers that replace conventional transistors with optical switches could theoretically operate more quickly than regular computers, as photons travel at the speed of light, while electrons, typically, don’t.The new device relies on a 35-nanometer-wide organic semiconductor polymer film sandwiched between two highly reflective mirrors. The result is a microscopic cavity designed to keep incoming light trapped inside for as long as possible to help it couple with the cavity's material.Two lasers help operate the device—a bright pump laser and a very weak seed laser. When the pump laser shines on the microcavity, its photons can couple strongly with excitons (electrons bound to their positively charged counterparts, holes) within the cavity's material. This can give rise to short-lived quasiparticles known as exciton-polaritons.The cluster of exciton-polaritons can form so-called Bose-Einstein condensates, collections of particles that each behave like a single atom. The light from the seed beam could switch this condensate between two measurable states that serve as zero and one.The new device not only can operate extraordinarily quickly, but it can switch using as little as one photon of input on average. In contrast, transistors generally needs dozens of times more energy to switch, while those that switch using single electrons are much slower."The most surprising finding was that we could trigger the optical switch with the smallest amount of light, a single photon," says study senior author Pavlos Lagoudakis, a physicist at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow.Electronic transistors that are comparably switchable with just single electrons usually require bulky cooling equipment, which in turn consumes power and
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Wanna be an independent full-service escort in the US? Not sure if it’s for you? Included is tips on getting started, marketing, how to increase your income, male sexual psychology and getting them to hire you again, networking, branding, dealing with the emotional burden, safety, and more!My credentials: I escorted from 2018-2020. I charged $1200/hr (with discounts for multi-hour sessions), and earned 50k on my highest-earning month. Escorting is more difficult to develop widely applicable strategies for because the business is invisible. With online sex work, successful techniques spread fast and get adopted as new defaults because everything is clearly visible. With in-person sex work, all you know is what you do. I also worked primarily as high end (initially charging $800/hr for the first month or two before raising it over time to $1200), which means I am not experienced with lower-rate, higher-volume work; two elements that strongly impact the kind of experience you’ll have. I also am speaking to the US market, which has many differences from other markets around the world, primarily legally. I conducted two surveys, of 165 escorts and 411 clients, and I’ll be referring to findings from these surveys throughout this article. The survey is not meant to represent all sex workers and clients; I gathered responses from my social media, in sex worker forums, and on fetlife, so it’s more a reflection of “people from the western world who follow me or sex-friendly social forums”. But hopefully this is the kind of person you are, so it might be good data for you! I’m also experimenting with likelihood ratios (“LR”), instead of p-values. The program I’m using to calculate them is new and there might be some errors, and though I’m doing my best to double check, keep this in mind! Also be aware I checked a lot of correlations, and didn’t do anything to control for the… likelihood ratio equivalent of p-hacking (be kind with me I’m still learning). (Likelihood ratios basically are how much more likely the given correlation is compared to no correlation at all. For example, “r=0.3, LR=100” means that the m
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Xorshift is a simple, fast pseudorandom number generator developed by George Marsaglia. The generator combines three xorshift operations where a number is exclusive-ored with a shifted copy of itself: /* 16-bit xorshift PRNG */ unsigned xs = 1; unsigned xorshift( ) { xs ^= xs << 7; xs ^= xs >> 9; xs ^= xs << 8; return xs; } There are 60 shift triplets with the maximum period 216-1. Four triplets pass a series of lightweight randomness tests including randomly plotting various n × n matrices using the high bits, low bits, reversed bits, etc. These are: 6, 7, 13; 7, 9, 8;
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https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/19/single-sign-on-what-we-learned-during-our-identity-alpha/ GDS is building a single sign-on and identity solution, with help and support from colleagues right across government. This is the third mission of the GDS strategy for 2021-2024: “A simple digital identity solution that works for everyone”. We recently passed a service assessment for our alpha on identity checking, so we thought we’d share some of our learnings. Prototyping was our fastest route to learning In pre-discovery we reviewed over 100 rounds of research from GOV.UK Verify and spent
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On September 30, 2021, Google released version 94.0.4606.71 of Chrome. The release note specified that two of the fixed vulnerabilities, CVE-2021-37975 and CVE-2021-37976, are being exploited in the wild. In this post, I’ll analyse CVE-2021-37975 (reported by an anonymous researcher), which is a logic bug in the implementation of the garbage collector (GC) in v8 (the JavaScript interpreter of Chrome). This bug allows reachable JavaScript objects to be collected by the garbage collector, which then leads to a use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability for arbitrary objects in v8. In this post, I’ll go through the root cause analysis and exploit development for the bug. As usual, the disclaimer here is that, as I don’t have access to any information about the bug that isn’t public and I didn’t report the bug, the analysis is purely technical and offers my personal perspective. It is likely that my analysis will be very different from how the bug is actually exploited in the wild. As the bug has been patched for some time, I believe it’s now safe to publish an analysis of it. I’m hoping that the technical analysis will help provide some insight into the potential impact of garbage collector bugs in v8 and help prevent variants of similar bugs in the future. The garbage collector is one of the v8 components that I dread most. It’s a fairly complex component that requires a relatively large time investment to study. The garbage collector also runs every time a JavaScript file is executed, so it has probably been run more than any other component in v8. On top of that, it introduces a great deal of uncertainty in the heap layout. Every time the garbage collector runs, it moves objects around and changes the heap layout completely, and it’s difficult to predict when it is going to run. There’s also concurrent garbage collection, which adds even more uncertainty to the mix. I assumed that the chance of having a bug in the garbage collector that has not been caught by a fuzzer would be quite small and only looked at it when I had to. But when CVE-2021-37975 came out, I decided to take a deeper look into the internal workings of the garbage collector. I’m very glad I did this, because this bug has proven me wrong on so many levels and I’ve learned a lot from analysing it. The garbage collector in v8 A very good and concise refere
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Some time ago, I wrote a Twitter thread about one of the unseen hard problems in software development—access to the common knowledge. Since then, a few things happened to me, one of the most important being the inception of the new project trying to attack those problems, named WikipediaQL (that had already attracted some positive attention even in the early stages it is). I am still working on that project and plan a series of articles on the problems of common sense knowledge extraction and practical approaches to it. As a prelude for this series and linkable justification of various aspects of my work, the current article is the (more orderly) republishing of the Twitter thread above. Here goes. The problem Some of the hardest problems to bring in the software development ecosystem are those that “intuitively” have an easy answer. (They are hard because before starting to discuss possible solutions, you need to persuade people it is something non-trivial and worth thinking of. And after they understand, they become sad and don’t want to think about it either. I saw it discussing the spellcheckers.) My favorite one is about common sense knowledge. Anyways, about the common-sense data/knowledge. How many people live in Albania? What’s the title of Game of Thrones S05E07? What books had Tove Jansson written? When was Google incepted? How’d one answer those today? Yeah, I know! You google it (or you duckduckgo it), you look into Wikipedia, you ask Siri. But how’d you answered these questions if you are a developer and need to use the data in your code? And here the “hard problem that seems easy” starts. While discussing this matter, I am
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The source and binary releases v2.9 are available for clone and download. The official v2.9 of AsmBB has been released. Here is a link to the release commits in the repository: https://asm32.info/fossil/asmbb/timeline?t=v2.9&n=200 The important changes One new responsive theme has been created, named "Urban Sunrise". This is an attempt to really improve the forum appearance. ( feedback is welcome ). Also, this theme contains really improved post editors with embedded extended help for the post formatting. In addition it supports Unicode Emoji characters in really native way, both in the post editor and the real-time chat: 😃 🤖 🏆 🥇 "Urban Sunrise" supports source code syntax highlighting (through the JS library). The real-time chat now accepts multi-row posts, including source code. Of course, all reported bugs has been fixed as well, both in AsmBB engine and in FreshLib library. What is AsmBB? AsmBB is very fast and lightweight web forum engine. (You are reading this article on AsmBB demo forum). AsmBB is fully written in assembly language and uses SQLite as a database back-end. That is why it can work on really weak hosting and in the same time serve huge amount of visitors without lags and delays. AsmBB is very secure web application, because of the internal design and the reduced dependencies. But it also supports encrypted databases, for even higher security. In addition, AsmBB has very few requirements to the running e
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Litigation is historic in nature due to its focus on consumer rights, filing as third-party beneficiary FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE IRVINE, Calif. (Oct. 19, 2021) Software Freedom Conservancy announced today it has filed a lawsuit against Vizio Inc. for what it calls repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL). The lawsuit alleges that Vizio’s TV products, built on its SmartCast system, contain software that Vizio unfairly appropriated from a community of developers who intended consumers to have very specific rights to modify, improve, share, and reinstall modified versions of the software. The GPL is a copyleft license that ensures end users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software. Copyleft is a kind of software licensing that leverages the restrictions of copyright, but with the intent to promote sharing (using copyright licensing to freely use and repair software). Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology, is filing the lawsuit as the purchaser of a product which has copylefted code. This approach makes it the first legal case that focuses on the rights of individual consumers as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL. “That’s what makes this litigation unique and historic in terms of defending consumer rights,” says Karen M. Sandler, the organization’s executive director. According to the lawsuit, a consumer of a product such as this has the right to access the source code so that it can be modified, studied, and redistributed (under the appropriate license conditions). “We are asking the court to require Vizio to make good on its obligations under copyleft compliance requirements,” says Sandler. She explains that in past litigation, the plaintiffs have always been copyright holders of the specific GPL code. In this case, Software Freedom Conservancy hopes to demonstrate that it's not just the copyright holders, but also the receivers of the licensed code who are entitled to rights. The lawsuit suit seeks no monetary damages, but instead seeks access to the technical information that the copyleft licenses require Vizio to provide to all customers who purchase its TVs (specifically, the plaintiff is asking for the technical information via “specific performance” rather than “damages”). “Software Freedom Conservancy is standing up for customers who are alienated and exploited by the technology on which they increasingly rely,” says Sandler, adding that the lawsuit also aims to help educate consumers about their right to repair their devices as well as show policy makers that there are mechanisms for corporate accountability already in place that can be leveraged through purchasing power and collective action. Copyleft licensing was designed as an ideological alternative to the classic corporate software model because it: allows people who receive the software to fix their devices, improve them and control them; entitles people to curtail surveillance and ads; and helps people continue to use their devices for a much longer time (i
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Contributor license agreements (or CLAs for short) have gained a lot of visibility in recent years as some prominent open source projects have opted to adopt them. If all the cool kids are doing it, should your open source project? Probably not. Here’s why: TL;DR: Contributor license agreements (a “nice to have” for many corporate-backed open source projects) create a contribution-hostile developer experience, require significant administrative overhead, shift legal blame to the party least equipped to defend against it, and are unnecessary given modern development tools. What is a CLA? If you’re new to concepts like copyright, patents, and licensing, this primer on everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing may provide some helpful background. In short, you can think of a CLA as somewhat of a “reverse open source license”. Whereas open source licenses are a copyright grant for users to use the project, a contributor license agreement, at its core, is the right for the project to incorporate a contributor’s code. Contributors may also be required to attest that they have the right to submit the code, or the CLA may include an explicit patent grant. Some CLAs go so far as to actually assign the developers copyright to the project. Unlike licenses, however, contributor license agreements, or CLAs, are not standardized, meaning if you’re a contributor, you’ll have to read each CLA to determine what legal rights you’re giving away, before contributing (and hope you can parse what’s often dense legalese if you’re not yourself a lawyer). Why projects adopt a CLA I suspect that projects that adopt a CLA often do so because they don’t consider (or underestimate) the impact that it will have on potential contributors (and thus the likelihood that they will contribute), or purposely choose to prioritize minimizing legal risk over maximizing the project’s potential community. There’s not a lot published in support of CLAs, but Julien Ponge, a CS professor writes: Requiring a contributor license agreement is a sign that you intend to sustain your project in the long run with responsible practices regarding intellectual property management. Responsible open source developers aren’t afraid of signing contributor license agreements: they simply understand the legal implications of sharing source code with the rest of the world. I’d push back on the assertion that “responsible” open source developers appreciate CLAs (or that “fear” should be the bar for adoption), as well the implication that projects should only cater to established developers. Much of open source is about growing communities around code, and a big part of that is inspiring the next generation of software developers, especially those from non-formal backgrounds. CLAs are generally a form of CYA, to prevent maintainers (or the project or its corporate backer) from landing in hot water due to the community contributions it accepts. They are one way to manage a maintainer’s exposure to intellectual property liability, especially if that maintainer is a for-profit business. Specifically, it makes ownership o
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Michael Crichton coined the term Gell-Mann Amnesia effect to describe forgetting how unreliable a source is in one area when you trust it in another area. In Crichton’s words: Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exa
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Full Disclosure mailing list archives Defense in depth -- the Microsoft way (part 78): completely outdated, vulnerable open source component(s) shipped with Windows 10&11 From: "
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NEW YORK, NY — Hindenburg Research, a forensic financial research firm, today announces it is launching the Hindenburg Tether Bounty Program (the “Program”) – a reward of up to $1,000,000 for information leading to previously undisclosed details about cryptocurrency “stablecoin” Tether’s backing. Tether is a key underpinning of the multi-trillion-dollar crypto market. Yet despite its repeated claims of transparency, its disclosures around its holdings have been opaque. The company claims to hold a significant portion of its reserves in commercial paper yet has disclosed virtually nothing about its counterparties. Hindenburg has doubts about the
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Michael Tomczyk is a futurist, technology pioneer and a leading authority on best practices and strategies for developing/launching radical/disruptive innovations. He is a popular author, speaker,
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