colmmacc

The "Steve Jobs" movie features a made-up subplot about Jobs insisting that the Fire Exit Safety signs be turned off to achieve "absolute blackout" in a theater. They very reasonably point out that no fire Marshall would approve it. I'm surprised for that reason, especially in midtown Manhattan. I've seen a fire marshall do a full inspection of a Broadway show and they were very thorough. This store is just a few blocks from there.

Wow this brings back memories. Over twenty years ago I added Vary support to various mod_cache submodules for Apache 2.0, and it was way too high a pain to reward ratio. It just uncovered so many user agent bugs and crazy backends. I remember arguments about being able to cache variable based on non-literal virtual headers (e.g. a geo location header), and a crazy request to Vary based on "Date:" ... which makes absolutely no sense. The whole thing was just too clever for its own good. It's no surprise that language selection ended up in URLs (/en-US/..) rather than "Vary: Accept-Lang" features.

I think the article is wrong on this but it's more subtle than that. Probability distributions have a peak; there is still a token with a peak probability. What's interesting about these techniques is that token by token it can actually make the peak token even more probable. A distribution doesn't have to be "flattened" to leave a watermark - it can be "amplified" and made "more peaky".

I was at ANSSI headquarters last year doing a technical presentation and several of their questions were about Post-Quantum Cryptography, "Q day" (when a practical Quantum Computer is expected) and other related things. They keep a close eye on this stuff and it's to their credit. Similarly the BSI in Germany have been promoting Post-Quantum security for some time now.

I work at AWS, where we have been deploying Post-Quantum Cryptography for quite some time and have experts. We're making easier than ever, but the sudden changes in deadlines do make me wonder how many companies are going to have to spend more time than they'd planned on migrations and settings. The "context switch" of working on PQ can be quite expensive. Most tech people have no idea what ML-KEM, ML-DSA, or HQC are, or how to not worry about SHA, HMAC, or AES. It's going to be a ride!

You're right but in my experience in Washington state - Park rangers, forest fire marshals, and reservation police will all rigorously enforce the bans in places that are prone to wild fires. The local community won't have much sympathy either. People get how dumb that is. You also see bans enforced in very well off communities that basically have their own police force too. It's fascinating how these micro-cultures all self-regulate.

32-bits are great for recording too because they do an incredible job of capturing the dynamic range without having to be precise on the preamp settings. It removes an entire job from the recording workflow.

192 for mixing and mastering can be useful especially if you're doing a lot of effects, especially anything that pitch shifts. But I've seen low quality phone-microphone recordings make it to the master; if you capture lightning in a bottle, it hardly matters what the settings were, what the microphone was, or anything else.

Unless it is very specific to a proprietary product, craftspeople take their jigs with them from job to job, building up a personal library over a career. As a software developer I've always had a well-tuned IDE and shell config in a safe place.

Something I think about a lot is what is the equivalent for the software builders of today using AI tools? how do make these harnesses exportable and portable? You might think employers would be against this; make it more costly to leave. But I actually think most will favor this because it makes people more productive more quickly. But we have to find ways to normalize it and show that there are no security leaks in the process (like might make it in to a set of personal steering prompts).

Reed-Solomon is an Erasure code, and I definitely wouldn't look to that for Secret Splitting. Those leakage models are gnarly. But if you want something else that is more general - there are Monotone Span Programs. Seriously underused.

The four essential freedoms of the Free Software movement are ...

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish 2. The freedom to study how it works and modify it (which requires access to source code) 3. The freedom to redistribute copies to help others 4. The freedom to distribute modified versions, so the whole community benefits from your improvements

To my mind ... GenAI coding make all of these far more realizable, especially for "normal people", than CopyLeft ever has. Let's go through them ...

Want to run a program as you wish? Great! It's easier than ever to build a replacement. Proprietary or non-free software is just as vulnerable to reimplementation as Copyleft is.

Want to study a how a program works and to modify it? This is now much more achievable.

Want the freedom to redistribute copies to help others? Build your own version! It may not even be copyrightable if it's 100% generated (IANAL).

Want to distribute modified versions? yes! see previous.

I dunno; seems like generative coding can be as much a liberator as any kind of problem.

EC only works if parents are the sole carers, and every success story I've heard had one main parent doing 90% of the care-taking. No daycare would do it, and if you can find a nanny, au-pair, grand-parent or other carer who is up for it ... small kids still just behave differently around different people. If they have a different level of comfort, anxiety, or reluctance with a person it breaks down.

Our two year old is potty training right now, and this was definitely a factor for us. We had to wait until it could be explained. Another factor is that diapers are now so absorbent that the kid feels no real discomfort from a pee or a poop. His main motivation is peer pressure and to be a bigger kid; concepts he's only recently caught.