scotchmi_st

No idea. Do you think it was pitched like that before the conflict began?

Well sure, but everything short of committing the whole country to total war will always come down to “we could do it, it’s just too politically expensive”. Even in authoritarian countries, there is a limit to what you can get away with.

That “we could do it, we just don’t want to” argument will face its acid test later in the year when the midterms are closer, but certainly if I were in charge of Iran I’d be feeling pretty good about the current situation.

One of the better tech investments I’ve made is in a 20 metre Thunderbolt cable from Corning. It’s surprisingly useful- if you have a monitor that takes TB input then your computer can be stored in a small closet next to your router/switch, where you can’t hear it. Alternatively if you just need a quick 10Gb Ethernet link between two computers with USB4 or TB3/4 that it would be complicated to have next to each other, you can use it for that as well.

I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.

They spend plenty of time adding "pro" features and apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which they wouldn't do unless they wanted people to use them.

I'm willing to bet it's as simple as that no Apple SWEs or anyone who has to edit video or sound uses an ipad for work. As soon as Apple forced some to use one, they'd fix all of the UI problems that make them a nightmare.

The military base there is small, and the number of troops trained in Alaska is also comparatively small. It also has little dedicated cold-weather gear, and logistical pipelines (especially if Canada refuses to let them in their airspace/waters) with be very hard to set up.

The US may have some understanding of the cold, but the nordic countries have far more, and are far better prepared.

Sure the US could para a few soldiers in and raise the flag, but then what? US equipment and training isn’t designed for a country where the average temperature is above freezing for only 3 months of the year. When it’s minus 30 Celsius, lubricants gum up, batteries die and you need ice-breaker ships to resupply forces (which the US doesn’t have many of). Denmark and the other Nordic countries do have equipment and training designed for those conditions, and they know the (vast) landscape well, since they train there.

Imagine Afghanistan but against a modern, professional army and with the weather trying to kill you.

Which isn’t to say that it would be impossible, but certainly it would cost more in terms of casualties and money than most Americans realise.

Interestingly there are discussions about moving back to having the majority of the power from IC engines as soon as the end of the decade, with synthetic fuels. Personally I can’t wait.

This is an interesting article if you read it like a howto for constructing a neural network for performing a practical task. But if you take it at face-value, and follow a similar method the next time you need to parse some input, then, well, I don't know what to say really.

The author takes a hard problem (parsing arbitrary input for loosely-defined patterns), and correctly argues that this is likely to produce hard-to-read 'spaghetti' code.

They then suggest replacing that with code that is so hard to read that there is still active research into how it works, (i.e a neural net).

Don't over-index something that's inscrutable versus something that you can understand but is 'ugly'. Sometimes, _maybe_, a ML model is what you want for a task. But a lot of the time, something that you can read and see why it's doing what it's doing, even if that takes some effort, is better than something that's impossible.

My wife had her phone stolen recently, in Highbury and Islington tube station. Nothing to be done, by the time she noticed it gone, it was too late. However since then, she's been getting messages from the perps that appears like a message from Apple, with a link that takes you to a surprisingly convincing site, that then asks you to enter your pin. It's clear that not everyone falls for this sort of ploy, but enough do to make it worth the thief's time to steal it, and sell it for parts otherwise.

There are a lot of moving parts to this sort of crime- Apple don't make it easy for you to profit from a locked iPhone, and Android probably don't either. Someone able to write and maintain a convincing-looking website and forward recorded data, someone to take the phone, someone to manage the operation etc etc. Finding out who is stealing the phones would be very helpful in stopping this sort of thing from happening, by cracking the organisations involved.

I get the privacy arguments, but if this does actually help stop thieves, on balance I'm in favour.

I mean, there’s plenty of evidence for the Big Bang, and if that’s the case then the most likely shape that falls out of the maths is a hypersphere, like inflating a balloon as others have said.

The universe isn’t thought to be infinite in that sense- it’s finite but unbounded. There is a finite amount of space that did, we think, originate from an infinitesimal point.

Imagine getting in a spaceship and setting off in a direction, close to the speed of light- if you travelled for long enough you’d arrive back where you started. Like someone walking on the surface of the earth.

Any current cosmologists can correct me, but I believe the consensus is that the shape of the universe is a hyper-spheroid, I.e a 4D sphere.