skissane

> This is hilarious and harmless. Who cares?

Our daughter is 8. As her father, I’d rather she not be exposed to pornography, and I know my wife would agree with me on that. Of course, she’s sure to somehow be introduced to it eventually, but I hope not until she’s significantly older.

I think this is something about the incentive structure of the US legal system.

Here in Australia, a member of my family was involved in a fatal accident with a pedestrian, around 20 years ago. They put him on trial even though the case was weak, and then the prosecutor moved for dismissal part way through the trial. But, what people told us, is prosecutors are encouraged to take weak cases to trial because dropping the case part way through the trial is more politically palatable than refusing to bring it to court to begin with.

The big problem with these permission dialogs, is their lack of technical detail about what the app is actually trying to do which triggers them.

How do I know whether to say "Allow" or "Disallow" when it gives me no idea what either option actually means in concrete?

Well, if someone found a quasipolynomial time algorithm – O(n^log(n)) – for an NP-complete problem, that would technically be compatible with P!=NP, but might have quite significant practical implications.

I think a proof of P=NP via a galactic algorithm is far more likely than a proof of P=NP via an efficient algorithm.

I mean if someone develops an O(n^100) algorithm for solving an NP-complete problem, that would prove P=NP, but pose no immediate threat to cryptography.

It increases risk, in that a galactic algorithm increases the odds that an efficient algorithm exists waiting to be found, but it is entirely (epistemically) possible that the galactic algorithm exists but the efficient algorithm doesn't.

> So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy.

I'm sceptical of this alleged Australian connection. As far as I'm aware, the term started in England, spread to the US, and it is in the US that its usage really took off. In Australia, "guy"/"guys" as a term for a male or gender-neutral person was imported from the US in the second half of the 20th century.

Well, it turns out they actually are bothering – while in DDR thru DDR4, the mode registers are write-only, LPDDR2 onwards have an MRR (Mode Register Read) command, which the CPU/chipset can use to inspect the manufacturer and capacity; and DDR5 has copied the same facility from LPDDR.

> RAM sticks have a little tag chip that tells a PC "how much RAM this stick has", but RAM chips themselves don't - so the device has to infer its RAM capacity from elsewhere

I'm surprised that in 2026 this is still true.

You could easily fit a little microcontroller on the die of each RAM chip which reports its make/model/manufacturing date, capacity and capabilities, can be triggered to run self-tests, etc. If they aren't doing that yet, I'm surprised that they aren't.

Well, one option Quad9 could consider, is moving to Liechtenstein - it is part of the EEA (unlike Switzerland which isn’t, although its bilateral agreements with the EU/EFTA partially approximate EEA membership), but unlike Switzerland, it isn’t party to the Lugano Convention

However, I don’t know whether the other aspects of Liechtenstein’s legal and political system would make that viable or not.

As some other comments on this post have mentioned, there is a a treaty known as the "Lugano Convention", whose parties are the EU (as a whole), Denmark [0], Iceland, Norway and Switzerland; post-Brexit, the UK wanted to join in its own right, but the EU refused. Under the Lugano Convention, if you get a judgement in a French court, you can then apply under the convention to have a Swiss court enforce it; however, there are exceptions which the Swiss court could rely on to refuse to do so – but I have no idea what are the odds that a Swiss court would decide any of those exceptions apply.

[0] Denmark has an opt-out from this area of EU law, which is why it is the only EU member state which needs to be directly party to the treaty; it applies to the others indirectly through the EU as a whole being a party to it

> They're trained on all of human history,

Not really… their training datasets strongly skew towards the contemporary West; LLM training data isn’t representative of the contemporary global average, let alone the historical global average.

As well as the skew of the raw training data, RLHF further skews it—a lot of the beliefs of the average 2026 human being (who belongs to the global South) are likely unsafe/misinformation/etc when judged by the standards of the AI vendors.

The MOS 6509 has bank switching hardware built into the CPU, instead of being on an external MMU chip such as the MOS 8722.

What makes the CBM-II's 6509 fundamentally different from the C128's 8502+8722 combo? And what makes either fundamentally different from the segmentation scheme of the 8086/8088?

> The 6502 can't actually address more than that.

Unless you use bank switching, which historically a lot of 6502 machines did use (e.g. Apple III/IIe/IIc, BBC Master 128, Commodore 128, Commodore CBM-II, etc)

> Developers work with certificates a bit too seldom to aquire proficiency with conversions. Being able to use PEM directly will ease a lot of pain.

While I certainly welcome this in the JDK, in practice it hasn't been a huge issue since a lot of people just use Bouncycastle to get that support.