vintagedave

I oversee and contribute to compilers / toolchains, and I have sometimes had worries about what 'my' compiler could contribute to. I am of course not responsible, but it's not a nice feeling to know a path towards some unpleasant end had steps that involved you.

It reminds me of that version of Linux that was used for automated gun targeting and firing, perhaps in the early 2000s. Authors gave away their code as open source, and then that open source was used for what many felt was an evil purpose. A path to something many disliked or opposed now included them and their actions, despite their good intentions.

That would have been due to V for Vendetta, which was heavily inspired by the story of Guy Fawkes.

> Deeply political in its origins, [Bonfire Night] was born of a specific moment of national crisis in the 17th century. Does it still resonate today, when the narratives of our national history are ever more contested?

It's a mildly horrific celebration, with its tradition of burning an effigy (Guy Fawkes.) The man himself was not executed by fire, but in the end by hanging, I think. Wikipedia has some unpleasant details of what was planned for him.

Yet today, effigies of other people are placed on the fire. I feel it is a relevant festival, in that unlike Halloween (spooky ghosts, commercial) it's a deeply political festival, the result of failed revolution. It's a celebration of the establishment winning, and yet somehow people see it more as a celebration of the attempt.

> repurposes the high-speed commercial processor inside the Ingenuity Helicopter Base Station ... This radiation can induce “transient bit flips” in memory the software needs to function, and the team developed an effective software-based approach to radiation hardening

Anyone know what they're doing?

It sounds like a single processor, so no best-of-three or similar systems. Software solution only, possibly running on the same bitflipping CPU that's being checked. I'd be very interested to know how it's solved.

I love that two small mice were found in a jar. Sad for the mice, but it's such a normal slice of life.

At home I sometimes find a dead spider fallen and trapped in a drinking glass. Since moving to the countryside, mice in winter have become a reality. Recently for kitchen repairs, I found several dead ones that had fallen into the cavity around our range hood, which was built apparently once, not made to be opened. Here I am, two thousand years later, experiencing in my kitchen something similar to those Romans in their wardrobe.

This is how an AI-assisted article should be: they used AI to decompile, find things out (with some very interesting techniques listed at the top of the article) but the article itself is human-written. It shows they used AI to help themselves understand, not used AI to do everything.

For someone like me who doesn't really understand this area, what does it mean for those big VC-backed or private equity-backed firms that have bought others, and have debt?

Are they forced to sell? To raise new capital? To increase value somehow (?) to show the debt can be met? I don't know enough to even know what questions to ask. Are they in trouble, I guess, as in, suppose they had to sell to cover debt, in this market, would anyone be around to buy?

Naive question from someone who's never written this sort of compatibility layer: couldn't a VDM map handles? They are opaque values. Change the value, basically, keep a 16-bit table mapping to the host OS's 32/64-bit real handles?

Edit: the readme has something very similar:

    wine based Win16->Win32 conversion codes:
    BOOL16 WINAPI DestroyWindow16( HWND16 hwnd )
    {
        return DestroyWindow( WIN_Handle32(hwnd) );
    }

I would guess that's what the WIN_Handle32 method/macro is doing.

We know Grok was trained, openly, for a specific political leaning.

OpenAI, in theory, tries for GPT to be neutral. And, 'reality has a well-known liberal bias', as Colbert said.

Like others, I agree this is very cool.

I live somewhere pretty remote, and every article it suggests is an entry for a nearby village, which is usually a sentence long. There are other interesting things nearby: could it have some kind of variance function, so it looks specifically for a variety of content?

Here I am, seeing something cool and immediately asking for changes. Spirit of the internet ;) Genuinely, it is a wonderful idea, and I admire the concept and that you did it.

I do understand prioritising customers, if there is some difficulty in re-enabling deployment. Right now though I don't how what that is. It could be as simple as resources: perhaps with available CPUs if everyone redeployed at the same time they would be DDOS-ing themselves and making then situation worse.

I think if redeploying was not possible, I would have preferred they automatically hid or revoked keys, or the sites or services were automatically turned offline. I suppose this may not be everyone's preference. I know for my site, a simple 'This is hosted by Railway and we have an outage' (and for our service tier, all REST service requests 500-ing, or 404-ing, or...) would be far preferable to the site being online, appearing to work, and functionality just failing for people due to the keys being revoked. Something clear is preferable to something hidden. I worry that to our users, who don't know our host, when the service is down but we cannot change the deployment, it makes us look like we're unreliable or flaky.

I like Railway but have been burned a little by them. FWIW, while not using them for one service where I felt really let down, one other service remained and just a week ago I recommended them again... ouch!

I feel they've grown fast but may not have the infrastructure fully fleshed out. A mass 'disable all services' button probably would not exist until the day they need one.

> A large language model is trained to predict the next word of a piece of text. … simply asking a model to “think step by step” makes its answers better.

I thought both these statements were no longer held to be broadly true? At least in big lab or frontier models.