What is the metric of success. Iran wants the US to stay out of the region. Nothing about our response to 9/11 suggests that that is how we would respond to an attack on our soil.

LLMs (at least in their current form) are proper neural networks.

This is where TPMs, measured boot, and remote attestation come in.

You can run whatever kernel you want, but if it is not an approved kernel, you wouldn’t be able to attest to running an approved kernel; allowing whatever DRM scheme the developer put in to active.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

As with all open problems in computer science, we solved these back in the 80s.

I’ve used it a fair amount for memory mapped IO where the hardware defined bitfields. It is also useful when you have a data format with bitfields. I’d say it is also useful when your data does not respect byte boundaries, but the only time I’ve run into that involved the bit order being “backwards”, which means that I still had to bittwidle things back together.

From a performance perspective, a cache line is only 64 bytes. Space in registers, low level memory caches, and memory throughout are all limited as well.

You lost me at return oriented programming. Getting something working out of that is way more difficult than doing it out of vib coding. (Way more impressive though)

I’ve had a couple of issues like this:

• Wireless mouse has a flaky connection. Turns out the issue was the USB port it was plugged into (probably RF interference as other devices worked fine on that port)

• We had a couple of radio receivers in a server rack. The scale of the project had shrunk over the years, so what used to fill up 2 racks now only half filled them (mostly because of upgraded components becoming faster and smaller over the years). Another project needed needed some rackspace, so we reracked everything into a single rack. When we were done, we found that one of our receivers couldn’t get a signal, and another would lose it regularly. Checked over all of our connections and the antennas, but everything seemed normal. Turns out something in the other project was blasting out RF interference.

• We would occasionally need to manually move data on/off a server using a USB2.0 hard drive. This worked fine for years, until one day we had a server that would randomly disconnect from the drive a few seconds into the transfer. Tried different ports, same issue. The drive itself worked with all the others, so we decided the issue must be with the server. We swapped it out for a brand new one with plans to send the old one back for warranty repairs. Except the new one has the exact same issue. Both servers came from a newish batch from the OEM. Turns out that the earlier versions had a hardware “bug” where the USB ports would source more than the 500ma allowed by the spec. Since they fixed that, our drive would trigger the current limit during sustained use and temporarily depower the port. Solution: get a USB Y cable and power provider power from a wall block

• I had a mouse that would double click (or more) when you pushed the button. This was pretty obviously a hardware issue, but I figured I could just tell the computer to ignore double clicks that happened “too fast” and avoid needing a new mouse. In theory that should have worked, but the input stack on Linux turned out to be a giant web that I couldn’t figure out, so I ended up opening the mouse and soldering on a random capacitor I had lieing around.

• We had a laptop with a dead monitor that would mysteriously work at times. It turns out that most of the time, it was sitting on another laptop (of the same type). Those laptops had a magnet latch to hold them shut. It turns out that said magnet also was used as part of a “laptop closed” sensor that would disable the monitor, and the bottom laptop would trigger the sensor in the top one.

Interested to see how this plays out.

Prohibiting Holocaust denial is relatively easy, because we have the benefit of it being history, and we have an ample historical record and a clear consensus among historians. Plus, no one can credibly claim that the legislatures were not thinking of the Holocaust when they wrote the law.

However, how are they planning on applying the law to contemporary international crimes? People make accusations of them all the time. And the other side always denied them. And the actual facts are generally obscured by a massive fog of war that can take years to see through, if ever.

There is also plenty of history where the answer is less clear. Do we really want courts involved in determining if the 15th century conquest of the Canary Islands counts as a genocide. Or if some unnamed mass grave an archeologists unearths was caused by an invading army killing all of a city’s adult males, or simply a burial site for fallen soldiers?

What about the book of Esther. Taken literally, it ends with what is arguably a genocide committed by the Jews against the Persians. However, outside of some Israeli hardliners reinterpreting that ending for contemporary political purposes, it is widely understood that that ending is a literary device, not a literal telling of events. Did my Hebrew school teachers violate this law when they told me we didn’t actually kill 75,000 Persians? [0].

What about the ongoing genocide against white Afrikaners going on in South Africa today? Am I violating the law when I say that genocide is not real, and just something the rightwing in the US invented for domestic political purposes. If the US has such a law, could Trump use it to jail his political opponents who criticized his recent stunt of accepting 60 Afrikaner refugees?

Do we defer to an international body like the ICC or ICJ? In that case, you have just outlawed disagreeing with those bodies.

The UN has repeatedly found it to be a massive human rights violation. Does disagreeing with those findings violate this new law?

[0] As an aside, secular historians generally consider all of Esther to be fiction.

According to the bill, denial of the Holocaust or other serious international crimes, such as those defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court, would be punishable by a fine or a prison sentence of up to two years.

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/26868-finland-moves-to-ban-holocaust-denial-under-new-criminal-law.html

I still burn DVDs. Ever since USB storage was deemed “not secure”, they are the easiest way to get data into and out of sensitive networks.

I think the image assumes that the viewer is familiar with merge sort, which is something you will learn in basically every undegraduate CS program, then never use.

To answer your first question, it helps to have something to compare it against. I think the most obvious way of sorting a list would be “insertion sort”, where you look through the unsorted list, find the smallest element, put that in the sorted list, then repeat for the second smallest element. If the list has N elements, this requires you to loop through it N times. Since every loop involves looking at N elements, this means you end up taking N * N time to sort the list.

With merge sort, the critical observation is that if you have 2 sublists that are sorted you know the smallest element is at the start of one of the two input lists, so you can skip the inner loop where you would search for the smallest element. The means that each layer in merge sort takes only about N operations. However, each layer halves the number of lists, so you only need about log_2(N) layers, so the entire sort can be done in around N * log(N) time.

Since NlogN is smaller then N^2, this makes merge sort theoretically better.

So, your mom is OK with gay sex, and recognizes trans people as being their chosen gender? How progressive!

The owners of Twitter made him go through with it, using the courts as the enforcement mechanism.

Be sure to check state law before doing this.

In Ohia V Miller (2024), Miller was found guilty of operating a vehicle under the influence after he drunkenly drove a horse drawn buggy. This finding was upheld my the appelete court.

In State v Blowers (1986), the Utah Supreme Court found that riding a horse while intoxicated did not qualify as DUI. This finding had 2 parts: A) A horse is not a vehicle and

B) The provision:

Every person riding an animal or driving any animal-drawn vehicle upon a roadway is subject to this chapter, except those provisions which by their nature can have no application.

Is unconstitutionally vague.

In the case of Mythbusters v Drunk Driving, the Mybuster found that it is illegal to operate a vehicle while drunk, even on a closed course. However, it is legal for a blind man to operate a vehicle under the direction of a drunk man.

No they aren’t. Marrying a US citizen makes it easier to get a green card, but you still need to apply and go through the process. Even then, there is no legal guarantee that your application will be granted.

I was shopping for a new vacuum cleaner when a saw a portable carpet cleaner. Basically a vacuum with a precision nozel bolted to a water sprayer. It has been a complete game danger for cleaning up the mess my cats would sometimes leave. Although it is still not as effective as the course of dewormer their vet prescribed.

Legally yes. Practically, the people handling the FOIA request do not know about it and do not have access to it, so they will not look at it when responding to a FOIA request. Also practically, if you submit a FOIA request for operational details of military action, the response will be no, and every judge you stand before to challenge that no will side with the government.

India has a population of 1.4 billion people. There being 3 horrific stories within a day does not say much. You seeing 3 such stories says more about your media than India.

Didn’t have anyone representing Hamas or Israel.

I guess Biden has started to be a bit more careful about how he phrases things now, after the “Israeli” deal he announced a while back, that was immediately rejected by Netenyahu.

Mostly potassium salt, although with some other recipe changes to account for the different flavor.

The good news is that potassium is well understood nutritionally. Most Americans do not get enough of it. To a first approximation, it is anti-sodium health wise, so it is a double win in that it both reduces sodium intake, and counters the effect of a still high sodium intake.