gattsuru
7hr ago
This is a nitpick, and you're definitely right for the start menu; the real problem is probably something to do with network latency and poor caching and software design.
((Though there are some things separate from typical performance that can be Bad: Electron is just 'heavy' as an environment, so even were it perfectly performant, you just have to deal with it loading from disk and RAM, and that can be expensive. C# has similar problems at a smaller scale but made worse by repeating them per thread, hence the kinda goofy task not-threadpool thing. And the Start Menu in 11 is React Native, which is unlikely to have these particular problems but probably has its own instead.))
I'll caveat that memory-managed environments can have some foundational performance problems in some specific use cases: (esp nested) array access is extremely expensive in managed environments, and I've gotten three or four-fold improvements by merely changing to pointer access, and I'm sure someone who cares (and is smart enough to care) about cache locality could have gotten close to an order of magnitude out of it.
You can work around this by either having that language allow programmers to pin memory and use pointer-like features, have ways to pass data to unmanaged-memory languages, or have prebuilt tools that do these under the hood, and a lot of higher-level languages do (eg, python is three C++ wrappers in a trenchcoat at times). But if you have to actually touch a bunch of individual bytes, the difference can be a big deal.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Before doing anything else, make sure you have backed up your phone and any vital information (esp things like 2FA keys).
I've done it pretty regularly, both for my own phones and for others at my workplace. That said, it is difficult and sometimes even dangerous: I've lit off one battery on an older iPhone removing it, and while that's mostly a result of that particular aftermarket battery being crap and badly swollen, it's definitely not a surprise most people want to deal with. iPhones are definitely worse than most Android phones I've worked on, but none of them are fun.
((Screen damage can fall into a similar boat; replacement (Non-OLED) screen modules are typically under 30 USD for a plausibly-legal model and replacement gasket, and it's step 1 of getting to the battery for most phones. But iPhones can be a particular pain in the ass, with the TouchID modules on iPhones gen5-9 being extremely fragile and impossible to replace and extremely unpleasant to repair if damaged.))
The iOpener is nice, but it's just a glorified non-condensing heat/ice pack (buckwheat with a mixed additive, maybe?), and in a pinch you can just use a hot air rework gun or hot air gun. Would not recommend a hairdryer. You definitely need something like it; most phone faces are hard enough to remove with heat, and impossible with it. The AntiClamp is more a convenience thing; it's mostly just giving you more space to hold the phone while . Almost all of the other tools will come with any Amazon-grade vendor's battery (even the crappy ones), and if you do phone repairs a lot you'll end up collecting a ton of these stupid weirdo screwdrivers.
While not listed on the iFixit guide, I would recommend a silicone work mat; you can buy repair-specific ones (personal recommendation, but discount stores like Five Below or Dollar General will often end up with cooking or art-intended ones that work and can be cheaper. The screws here are tiny and often not magnetic, so having a clean, uniform workspace is a must Grab something with individual cups or marked areas, or grab some small disposable shotglass-sized cups, because a lot of the screws look identical but have slight differences that keep them from being interchangeable (tbf, less a problem on Pixels than on iPhones).
I've mostly been happy with it. Screen and especially battery quality can vary heavily, especially if you're going to Amazon and sorting by price, but even the worst I've gotten have still keep the phone running for a couple years more, it's more a matter of whether if it lasts three before battery life falls off a cliff or if the screen's backlight has a hotspot. Tablet screens can be prone to getting dust specs or hair in them, so there's been one or two times I thought I was done and had to start over again. Do expect worse water intrusion resistance unless you're absolutely neurotic about gasket placement.
Again, damage or destruction is possible, but a manageable risk and you have to be doing something kinda stupid for it to happen. Don't pry on batteries with screwdrivers, be careful with ribbon cables, essentially.
For shops, Google does have an authorized repair program and that puts an effective cap (as does the iStore 'repair' system), albeit a pretty high one. Sticker prices usually start around 100-150 USD, depending on exact model; some smaller (non-authorized-by-google) mall stores will squeak under that a bit, but I'd be surprised by anyone going under 80 USD these days. I've heard they're pretty reliable and fast from people who do use them, although they tend to be normies only using recent phones.
I'm generally a fan of keeping older equipment running, but do be aware it comes with costs. The Pixel 8 is supposed to keep getting security and software updates until 2030, so you're good for probably two battery replacements... and some other software might not keep up with that. That's gonna depend a lot more heavily on what you use your phone for, but I've seen a few pilots who were forced to update not because of hardware but because of Foreflight, as one example.
gattsuru
2d ago
There was a short period in 2005-2012ish where FPGA programming languages like VHDL and Verilog had to work on so badly constrained environments that octal bases were worth the obnoxious overhead, but either none of them retained support or no one uses that support for normal code this decade.
gattsuru
4d ago
When I receive these emails, I open up my computer and phone, load the PDF on my computer, scan the QR with my phone, load the site, copy the URL, email the URL to myself, then open it on my computer. Am I missing something essential about how this is supposed to work?
There are a tiny number of use cases where it makes some sense. If you're expecting students to receive e-mail through school accounts only accessible from (public) school computers, you don't want them putting private or especially financial information (b/c PCI DSS almost universally prohibits that) on those computers no matter how sure you've keylogger-proofed them, and you can't trust students to transfer even prettified URLs from one computer to another by mark I eyeball. Then your workflow, stupid as it seems, makes sense; the only trusted computer most people bring with them is the phone, and scanning a QR code in is the only viable way to pull the URL in.
In rarer cases, the school (or vendor) might be required to pretend that's the use case, either by regulation or internal norm, even if nobody does it.
Of course, if you were building such a system and not hilariously incompetent, PDFs support links, and you can just offer both. In many cases, the IT administration, or their leadership, is just incompetent. It's a funny joke, but it's not a joke.
But instead of using Square or something that charges 3% or so, they use a payment processor I've never heard of before that charges $1 per transaction, mostly for transactions of $5 - $10. Is it providing a real service of protecting the schools from liability somehow?
Most vendors have a minimum flat fee; the difference for a 10 USD transaction would be closer to 0.4 USD at current fees. Sometimes this can have better processing, or review standards on chargebacks, or have given them a good enough deal on payment processing systems or security reviews that it's worth the slightly higher fee, especially if the school uses the same system for large transactions for non-physical goods or for some (overtly) credit-like system, which can get messy from the lowest-overhead-common-denominator. PoS systems in particular can be very expensive (>1k USD/unit, usually need to be replaced every 2-5 years depending on use levels), which can be a massive hassle and expense for an organization that has to authorize individual purchases in a slow method but can get a contract with service requirements through at the same rate. This can even pop up if you aren't seeing those point of sale units: I've seen a volunteer org that only used a physical payment processing system once a month for sports game consumable sales have to do some very complex math to figure out what made economic sense.
But if they're charging you for the fees, it's as likely or more likely that they like the system because it lets them pass the charge onto purchasers explicitly, which ranges from disfavored to banned by terms of service to potentially illegal depending on payment processor and state (and even type of card). Officially, this can get into somewhat gray areas really quickly, but it's very rare for the rules to be enforced and a lot of actual accountants don't know the rules.
gattsuru
5d ago
Alternatively, distribute the stories as 'by' a collective name.
gattsuru
8d ago
gattsuru
8d ago
The Blaze better be extremely certain, or they're gonna get a 100m+ civil judgment. The risk that Baker's gone off the deep end isn't trivial, and he's been very maximalist in reporting before. That said, the pipe bomber has been one of the more severe of many misses when it comes to the law enforcement response to
I'm generally very skeptical of gait analysis. Human-brain gait analysis has been extremely limited: open in scihub, and you'll find that the 'experts' got 71% and the randos 64%... when scoring one of six potentials in the training set). CNNs have done much better, but they still have problems with training data or large numbers of classes. That's not as bad as outright frauds like bite mark analysis, but it's one of the places both prosecutors and juries both seem to take that error rate seriously. And "he personally pegged the match at closer to 98%" makes me think this is the sort of human-lead that leaves a lot of space for thumbs on the scale.
The metro card is more interesting. I'll admit I have a lot less knowledge about the internals of those systems, so there might be well-known vulnerabilities re: spoofing, and there's always a genuine possibility that the original owner just dropped it somewhere. The FBI response seems extremely basic But it a lot of winking toward circumstantial evidence that, if weak, would at least narrow the search area much more for the gait analysis to not just be hilarious fraud -- though in turn, it would point to either unprofessional or nonprofessional planning for the bomber even if true, which I don't think the Blaze wants to recognize.
gattsuru
10d ago
You should have told that to Miyares before the election because that's what he campaigned on.
I don't have his phone number, but the Supreme Court did tell him, directly, and the concertina wire case he's left on his website lost too.
I can litigate the rest if you want, but even taking everything you've said as true, he's still just a replacement-level Republican. If your defense is that Democratic party members will hold to their claimed principles only when they can get someone with the exactly same politics in instead, that's definitely a claim, but it's a long way from what we had everyone arguing here or in the mainstream media for literally a decade now.
But if that expense is too high, thankfully there's another off-ramp coming up. Spangberger could literally name Jones' replacement if he abdicated. That's not just a low-cost opportunity, it's nearly free: she could pick any Dem, even one more extreme, without having to worry about the scandals hanging around her AG's neck for every single policy proposal she gives. Do you want to make any bets on whether it happens? Whether anyone high-profile in her admin even calls for it?
Do you seriously think that if similar texts from Trump came to light a month before last year's election that the GOP establishment would be tripping over themselves to endorse Harris? Do you think his voters abandon him en masse? Do you think Trump even apologizes? I think you know the answer to this one.
Trivially, I did, for far less. Hell, I committed to not vote for him before the election.
Less trivially, Democratic posters in this community made a big deal about moderation and enforcement, both as a portrayal of why Democratic people were better and as why they themselves were taking the high road and were better than the Republican tolerance of Trump, and then doing nothing. A moderator on this forum said that "I'm optimistic that Biden might use it responsibly, and at the times he doesn't I'm prepared to kick and scream and shake my fist impotently at the sky before casting a meaningless vote against him. I have only supported them, and will only support them, provided I see serious attempts at deescalation." and then went on to absolutely not cast a meaningless vote against him or even argue any "serious attempts at deescalation”. The same man is now conveniently incommunicado and unwilling to even give a sha256 about political assassination fandom.
And no, we have examples. In some cases, the comparisons are hilariously on-point: contrast the aftermath of Gossar's anime meme violence to Ilhan Omar's Kirk Deserved It poasting. That's why you have to propose hypotheticals that are not merely untested, but untestable; that's why you have to draw to obscenely dissimilar comparisons, that's why you have to litigate how 'oh this is bad, but it's not so bad as allow people to overlook <Mainstream Political Position A>', that's why it'll always be "This isn't a change in anything." as it goes from crabby old guys in bars to senators to state AGs.
Republicans are well past the point where they can credibly say that this is the point where they draw the line.
Other than the people who did, perhaps. And now Democrats are past that line, and no one cares, and no one will ever care again.
gattsuru
10d ago
That's just saying 'no one cared about cheering for the blood of children' with more steps.
gattsuru
11d ago
so silence looks like complicity.
That's a defense that would undermine Spanbergler, nevermind Jones, and notably it didn't. Neither could forcefully define themselves as the not-killing-kids (and committing hilarious frauds, if we're going to pretend 'rule of law' matters).
Dem voters just didn't care.
gattsuru
11d ago
And if my aunt had balls, she'd be trans. Virginia's not a D+3 state because of Jones, and it's not a D+3 state because of Sears. Fundamentals run the story here; anyone without a sha256 is just explaining what story they want to tell rather than looking at what gives testable predictions.
gattsuru
11d ago
Guys, are users here surprised by this outcome?
To quote myself 29 days ago:
The meme would be I'm not surprised, I'm just disappointed, but I didn't have the hope for that. I'm mostly just trying not to become a ball of rage.
Trump was not on the ballot this year. Jaye's opponent was not campaigning -- nor was -- a MAGA Trumpist. Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement. There is near-unprecedented access, bought at no small cost, for information outside of the mainstream media and NPR cloister, at the same time that the broader progressive movement is crowing about the importance of Not Ignoring Evil. Jone's comments even got some mainstream attention.
The best-case scenario would hold that despite all those unprecedented (and likely unstable) advantages and uniquely bad behaviors, it wasn't enough. Indeed, it turned out to be enough not enough that it mattered less than past scandals in the same state.
But, worse, that's a prediction that would predict side effects. 'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
So then the next best-case scenario's that everyone just thought it hyperbole, or joke. But then you look at everybody that thought it funny when Kirk was murdered...
But no. They don't 'want' me dead. They don't even know me! It'd just be funny afterward.
gattsuru
11d ago
Sears as a non-serious candidate has to confront Jones winning. Without doing that, paeans to candidate quality are just post-hoc justifications.
gattsuru
11d ago
Jay Jones's win -- and lackluster to nonexistent pushback from the 'moderate centrist's -- is pretty radicalizing.
He's projected to win by more than 2%. To steelman, that's eight percentage points less than Spanberger, Virginia's early voting started before the scandal dropped, there's some questionably legal electioneering (which would be investigated by the state AG, lol), the federal government shutdown probably juiced his numbers a bit, and this did require the Democratic Party apparachinicks all the way up to Obama supporting him.
To be less naive, all of those things did in fact all happen. An eight percentage point difference means that just over one in seven Democratic voters thought it was unacceptable to call normie political opponents "breeding little fascists" and text a political opponent about how nice the death of children would be, and that's assuming that none of the many other hilariously corrupt issues weren't motivations for any of them instead. Not half bad, I guess. I could repeat this again, but between owing DrManhattan16 a relitigation of the Obama and Biden administrations and absolutely hating every single non-Schism organization I reviewed then, I'm not sure it'd be helpful or just more radicalizing.
gattsuru
12d ago
I think that you are exaggerating what the response was to Kirk's death amongst normies (I agree that there were terminally online people who actively celebrated it, but I am talking about "irl" woke people)
I'll second self_made_human and point to KendricTonn getting it in Ohio. There's more terminally online people than ever before, only some of them poast 24/7/365, and these days it's possible to invite them into your home without ever having been aware of their online presence beforehand.
I'm glad you've avoided it, but I'm finding that less and less possible.
gattsuru
12d ago
Would be worth evaluating. I'm not sure I have the domain knowledge to add much commentary rather than just adding a bunch of off-color inter-service jokes, though. Do you feel like you can cover it properly?
I can't justify 20k USD, but I've justified 1.5K to my boss for work reasons and around the same to myself for personal reasons.
- Control. You don't have to worry about parts of your prompt getting funneled off to a cheaper LLM from 2021, you can be pretty confident whether your 'super-long context' implementation is using normal context instead of pretending and slamming the RAG button instead, modify temperature, so on. At the more extreme end, you can make decisions about how agentic tooling is set up, what APIs it uses, and if you really want to get into the weeds you can skip the whole mess and just rawdog python to change behaviors. Most people won't want to put the energy into this on the front side and it wouldn't benefit them if they did, but if you're in this use case few mainstream APIs support it and fewer still are likely to maintain that support.
- Censorship resistance. Nearly every mainstream LLM gets repeatedly censored or at least has its API censored, often making them much dumber in the process; nearly every mainstream diffuser API starts out censored and the rest get there in days. On the gooning side, Grok Imagine had about a week where spicy mode could get you outright sex scenes, and now you can maybe get someone in a jockstrap or with an exposed nipple, and I don't expect even that to last. Grok's text form hasn't booted me (yet), but most other vendors will outright refuse. But it's not limited to sex and sexuality; I've had prompts rejected that were related to electrical engineering, plumbing, aviation communications, motor design, machining, firearms history, case law, the list goes on and on. Most of these even had valid reasons, and there's certainly things that make sense to censor if you're answering questions for every rando on the planet, but it's a capability we'd be leaving behind without it. In most cases I could eventually find a provider that was willing to answer the question... for now.
- Privacy. From a business perspective, we have code that it is a firing offense to bring outside of company property for any reason; quite a lot of businesses work like that for a wide variety of private information, and some are more restrictive and don't allow any network communications outside from secured areas period. To be fair, if you're Meta/OpenAI/Google, yes, you could absolutely rebuild (or steal) the code my company runs on far cheaper than running this whole AI ecosystem. To be less fair, Amazon has the manpower to engineer and market every product on the planet, and still didn't keep its firewall in order. Google might be able to figure out a lot of stuff from various search requests and e-mails going through their relay servers, but it's a lot easier for them to have our verbatim work if we directly put it into an HTTP POST; a localLLM that's got no (or for agentic llms highly restricted) outbound network traffic probably isn't doing that. And, yes, from a gooning perspective, I expect very few people are paying attention to what are, ultimately, not that unusual or ugly as kinks go on a matter that these companies absolutely don't want to be involved in policing. I'm also not green enough to imagine these aren't logged, or that no situation could arise where these logs could be useful in the future, and leaving aside the various conspiracy theories about the political acumen of search engines, there are advocates today of large-scale prohibitions on the most boring variants of this content, and we've had a recent SCOTUS case over whether people can be liable for publishing porn without age verification regardless of whether a minor sees it, and this law is not alone. There's even reason these advocates could (not always unreasonably!) see AIgen content as particularly unconscionable.
- Proofing against an AI Winter and/or an AI Bullrun. There's a lot of potential spaces for OpenRouter to be much less viable or more expensive in a very sudden way, and most of those explanations end up with either drastically reduced availability of inference power, AI tooling, or both. This could happen for regulatory reasons, because of supply chain problems in Taiwan, downstream of financial bubbles. Hell, it could happen even if Sam Altman makes GPU Jesus in his basement and suddenly all of the datacenter GPUs go to the important stuff instead of answering problems you could 'just' look up (if you had five hours and a subject expert to point you to the right keywords). It's probably not even that likely! (especially GPU Jesus). But if a good LLM is saving your business 200k a year, are you 90% sure it's not going to happen? But the actual numbers are a little worse than that, because such a disruption is likely to come as a surprise, and an honest decision matrix has to put the electricity and development costs for running local llms along with the materials cost on one side and a bunch of your users suddenly going cold turkey on the other.
gattsuru
15d ago
Two airmen at a Wyoming U.S. Air Force base have pleaded guilty to making false statements about the deadly shooting of a third that prompted the suspension of Sig Sauer M18 pistol use at nuclear weapons sites for a month, the Air Force said in a statement Friday. The gun pause by the Air Force Global Strike Command after the death of Brayden Lovan, 21, in late July was lifted in late August after Air Force officials determined the M18 was safe to carry.
Lovan was an airman with the 90th Security Forces Squadron, 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base outside Cheyenne. Details about his death were released for the first time Friday, including that the alleged shooter, Marcus White-Allen, had pointed the gun at Lovan’s chest in a “joking manner.” White-Allen after the shooting allegedly urged the other two surviving airmen to lie about what happened, according to the statement.
White-Allen, who was arrested on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter and making a false statement, was found dead on base on the morning of Oct. 8. Air Force officials have not disclosed details surrounding White-Allen’s death, saying it was still under investigation.
gattsuru
15d ago
The statute says that courts can pull guns after a GVRO (or police refuse to issue a purchase permit) for any perceived deficiency of temperament or character, on a bare preponderance of evidence.
The statute no more says you can or can’t possess a gun after this behavior than it does for a speeding ticket, expired car registration, or purely legal behavior like leaving a toilet set up. Leaving aside compliance with Heller, since that’s a sad joke, where’s the fair notice?
gattsuru
16d ago
Yeah, that sounds about standard for New Jersey, and why The_Nybbler's so direct to say that they've made the Second Amendment a nullity: "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril." Also a large point to why GVRO/Red Flag laws are given such skepticism. It's not hard to see this as what their advocates want, where the standard of proof to remove someone's rights is nearly nil, and they must jump high and arbitrary hurdles to get those rights back. And, of course, none of the takings clause people are going to come climbing out of the woodwork for this stuff.
But no serious org is going try to take this sorta case -- both because of its optics, and also just because he didn't cross every i and dot every t to preserve issues and present evidence perfectly -- and neither would the New Jersey State Supreme Court nor SCOTUS take it up if they did. Nobody that isn't already pro-gun is going to be appalled that they've read Rahimi to cordon Heller to a nullity, even a lot of self-described libertarians. And it shows how badly calibrated anyone must be to expect a 'bank shot' SCOTUS case that rules against its specific person while protecting the class of rights that person was trying to appeal toward.
gattsuru
17d ago
If Hayes doesn't shoot Gannon, what crimes, if any, should Gannon be charged with?
Massachusetts doesn't have a specific brandishing statute (to my surprise!), but mostly wraps it up in the assault-with-weapon-without-battery statute. That, too, needs more than the mere presence and visibility of a firearm, and I'd argue too much more. But there's still a lot short of actually pulling the trigger that can trigger the law.
Is Hayes privileged to shoot Gannon?
Depends. Do you mean "brandishing" in the colloquial sense of showing a firearm, or in strict legal sense of having seriously threatened the victim? In addition to the CorneredCat essay I've linked before and I'll link again, as a matter of law, in Massachusetts:
There may be cases where the colloquial brandishing is sufficient to count; I'd certainly argue the moral case where someone points a gun directly at someone, and the law might agree with me (and would in most states; in Mass it's kinda a clusterfuck). But the mere presence and visibility of the firearm is not on its own sufficient. Meanwhile, there is a narrow band where an aggressor can have "engaged in 'objectively menacing' conduct with the intent to put the victim in fear of immediate bodily harm" without a reasonable person seeing that as fear of imminent grievous bodily harm as required for self-defense law to apply... but it'd be really hard to do with a gun.
gattsuru
18d ago
You can brush off the grocery store sample above as hyperbole, but it's not too far off from what happened here.
Yeah, his discussion around 1I/‘Oumuamua was one of my examples for crank-on-organization wars, and while that doesn't mean he's wrong (of other examples, Hirsch ended up winning his fight pretty clearly), it doesn't give a ton of strength on its own.
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