I think it is probably a living document that has been updated since.

Yep - I think the best strategy is what Richard Stallman suggested in 2005 - don’t give her money under any circumstances.

I’d suggest not giving the works any form of oxygen; definitely don’t buy the books or watch the movies for money, including on a streaming site that pays royalties, or buy branded merchandise. But also don’t borrow them from a library (libraries use that as a signal to buy more), promote them by talking about them in any kind of positive light, don’t encourage your kids dress up as a character (builds hype and creates demand), use analogies drawn from the books, or otherwise support them.

As far as books about wizards and educational institutions, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is way better anyway - they have more realistic character interactions and social dynamics (despite being a comic fantasy), and it makes for a much better read.

GENEVA CONVENTION relative to the treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949 Article 52 Unless he be a volunteer, no prisoner of war may be employed on labour which is of an unhealthy or dangerous nature. No prisoner of war shall be assigned to labour which would be looked upon as humiliating for a member of the Detaining Power’s own forces. The removal of mines or similar devices shall be considered as dangerous labour.

Sometimes I wonder if they are trying to get a high score by committing every possible war crime.

Possibly “Making History” by Stephen Fry - although at 380 pages it doesn’t quite match as a short story, and the protagonist doesn’t stop himself so much as do something else to reverse the effects of his actions to save Hitler.

“Except for Claims (i) in which a party is attempting to protect its intellectual property rights (such as its patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, anti-circumvention, or moral rights, but not including its privacy or publicity rights) …”

So in other words, the types of matters Nintendo thinks it might have a dispute against users, court and class actions are okay, but for everything that they think users might file against Nintendo, they think arbitration is best.

bootloader unlocking

I used to buy Xiaomi products because of the bootloader unlocking, but in practice it is a dystopian nightmare - they have built it so to unlock the bootloader you need a cryptographic signature from them, and they don’t give that out all that easily.

You have to sign up for an account with them, use a Windows-only tool to request unlocking, and they have a long wait period (deliberately imposed) to unlock, which sometimes randomly restarts. The wait period is different for different models, and can be weeks.

Their support are unwilling to help unlock immediately even for replacement devices where you want to get up and going quickly - if your device breaks (they are not the most durable phones IMO, as you note) and you get a replacement, you’ll have to wait the time again before you can restore a backup of a phone using a custom ROM.

It’s possible they have improved, but because of their attitude around what I can do with my own hardware, I’ve stopped buying Xiaomi gear.

To save on costs, QAs could be paid in exposure.

As an experiment / as a bit of a gag, I tried using Claude 3.7 Sonnet with Cline to write some simple cryptography code in Rust - use ECDHE to establish an ephemeral symmetric key, and then use AES256-GCM (with a counter in the nonce) to encrypt packets from client->server and server->client, using off-the-shelf RustCrypto libraries.

It got the interface right, but it got some details really wrong:

• It stored way more information than it needed in the structure tracking state, some of it very sensitive.
• It repeatedly converted back and forth between byte arrays and the proper types unnecessarily - reducing type safety and making things slower.
• Instead of using type safe enums it defined integer constants for no good reason.
• It logged information about failures as variable length strings, creating a possible timing side channel attack.
• Despite having a 96 bit nonce to work with (-1 bit to identify client->server and server->client), it used a 32 bit integer to represent the sequence number.
• And it “helpfully” used wrapping_add to increment the 32 sequence number! For those who don’t know much Rust and/or much cryptography: the golden rule of using ciphers like GCM is that you must never ever re-use the same nonce for the same key (otherwise you leak the XOR of the two messages). wrapping_add explicitly means when you get up to the maximum number (and remember, it’s only 32 bits, so there’s only about 4.3 billion numbers) it silently wraps back to 0. The secure implementation would be to explicitly fail if you go past the maximum size for the integer before attempting to encrypt / decrypt - and the smart choice would be to use at least 64 bits.
• It also rolled its own bespoke hash-based key extension function instead of using HKDF (which was available right there in the library, and callable with far less code than it generated).

To be fair, I didn’t really expect it to work well. Some kind of security auditor agent that does a pass over all the output might be able to find some of the issues, and pass it back to another agent to correct - which could make vibe coding more secure (to be proven).

But right now, I’d not put “vibe coded” output into production without someone going over it manually with a fine-toothed comb looking for security and stability issues.

Years of carefully curated anti-intellectualism in every bit of media they consume, because facts didn’t suit the wealthy (smoking is bad for you, fossil fuels are destroying the planet, private prisons drive more recidivism are facts that get in the way of someone making lots of money). Those fighting facts that aren’t on their side have embraced a number of other groups with anti-intellectual elements (white supremecists / neo-nazis / anti-woke, religious, anti-vaxxers, natural health advocates) to create alliances of anti-intellectual thought.

This has driven increasing polarisation in the US; 49% of republicans approved of JFK as president, and 49% of democrats approved of Eisenhower. It went down over time - other party approval was 30% of Carter, 31% of Reagan. There was a break in the pattern (44% for Bush Senior), but back on track to 27% for Clinton, 23% for Bush, 13% for Obama, 7% for Trump (first round), and 6% for Biden. So in other words, Americans are so polarised that they’ll vote for whoever their side puts up, and for one side, being anti-intellectual is actually seen as a strength.

I think many of the people who started the anti-intellectualism ball rolling on purpose are wealthy neoliberals who believe in laissez-faire free trade as a fundamental value, and so there is a certain aspect of ‘leopards ate my face’ to this leading to the anti-intellectualism extending back to rejection of mainstream economics (even though the neoliberals’ preferred theory is notoriously flawed, Trump’s approach to pulling economic levers is wholesale rejection of all theory rather than replacing it with something less flawed).

Traditionally legal tender means that a person / entity has to accept it for the payment of a debt - i.e. they can’t refuse cash and say you didn’t pay them because you didn’t use some other method.

However, in many retail scenarios there is no debt - there is an exchange of payment for goods, and so the traditional common law legal tender rules do not prevent retailers from refusing that exchange (i.e. customer doesn’t get the goods, retailer doesn’t get the money, the transaction just never happens) on the grounds of payment methods.

Some places have additional laws on top of legal tender that might require retailers to accept cash.

I believe nothing in the podman rm family worked because the container was already gone - it was just the IP allocation that was left.

Google released the stable version of Chrome, and funneled significant resources into marketing it. This was the first stage of their strategy - they focused on firstly making a good product, and the squeeze on users only came later (and is probably only just starting in the scheme of things).

The logic chain of the Netanyahu camp is: Keep Netanyahu out of jail -by-> Keeping him in power -by-> Creating a problem and showing he is solving it -by-> Stirring up regional instability and dragging the US into it -by-> Being belligerent and genociding as hard as possible.

Now for this to work, they need to maintain conflict while maintaining the support from the US. About 70% of the US identify as some form of Christian… and some significant percentage of them support Israel in their genocide because they believe it will bring the second coming of Jesus. But if the about 20% of Americans who identify as Catholic actually flip to being anti-genocide because their leader advocates for that, that is under threat - it potentially becomes close to a majority who are anti-genocide, and makes ongoing support from the US less likely.

changed as quickly as throttling gas turbines

Nuclear power plants aim to finely balance the reaction between delayed criticality - a very slow exponential increase in the level of radioactivity, and marginal sub-criticality - i.e. a very slow exponential decrease in the level of radioactivity.

To get faster exponential growth in power output than delayed criticality is physically possible - past delayed criticality is prompt criticality. However, fast exponential growth of radioactive output on time scales so short that machines cannot react is not something you ever want to happen in a civilian nuclear application; only nuclear weapons deliberately go into the prompt critical region, and an explicit aim of nuclear power plant design is to ensure the reaction never goes into the prompt critical region.

This means that slow exponential changes is the best the technology can do (and why plants need active cooling for a period of time even when shutting down - see Fukushima when their reactors were automatically shutting down due to the detection of an earthquake, but their cooling power infrastructure got flooded while they were decreasing their output).

I think the most promising future development will be more renewable capacity coupled with better long-distance transmission and batteries (ideally sodium when the tech is ready).

To quote Du Mu’s commentary on Sun Tzu’s Art of War: “If our force happens to be superior to the enemy’s, weakness may be simulated in order to lure him on; but if inferior, he must be led to believe that we are strong, in order that he may keep off”.

So the fact they are switching from simulating weakness to pleading strength is not necessarily a good sign. That said, they may be hoping that the enemy will see it as a sign of weakness, and launch an attack that they actually are well prepared to win.

Now if they could automate LineageOS installation and getting it to pass Play Integrity to the Strong level, that would actually be useful!

Seriously great question at this point. In 2016 it was commonly accepted knowledge that if Putin released a video of Trump getting pissed on by a woman in a Moscow hotel, that would be the end of his political career.

Since then, he’s been found to be a rapist in court, has attempted to overthrow the government, and has been found guilty of about 3 dozen felonies with more charges pending - which doesn’t matter any way since Trump’s judges have granted him legal immunity to anything he wants to do. And he was just convincingly reelected with his party winning both the House and Senate.

He is not going to run for president again ever in a free and fair election in accordance with the US constitution; that would require changing the constitution in ways that the Republicans don’t have the numbers for, or at least interpreting the existing constitution in a way that is so contorted I don’t think even the most conservative supreme court judges could support it.

So in other words, he does not need anything from the American public anymore. He has no reason to care if part of his base opens their eyes to what he really is (at least, as long as at least 1/12th of the public will vote not to convict on any jury - but he can also self-pardon for anything except impeachment).

I therefore don’t think the kompromat theory holds much water today.

More likely, the Russians calculate that this is an opportunity to sow division in the US - they’d hope for a civil war as the best case. Supporting Trump, as a divisive president, was a start, but they wouldn’t want too many people happy with Trump either, so they want to make the haters hate him even more than is rational, and the sycophants continue to love him more.

Of course, the risk for them is that they make Trump want to support Ukraine to a greater extent than the US currently is, instead of the opposite. They probably calculate he is incompetent and nothing much will change for them either way. Trump is certainly installing yes-men who will be loyal to him but likely not the most competent leaders; this is an effective way to disrupt a government, but it is likely that a declining narcissist who has structured things to remove all dissent will not be at all effective in achieving outcomes that require complex strategy and coordinated execution. So I think they probably consider this risk to be acceptable.

Russia already had an agreement with Ukraine to respect the 1994 boundaries of Ukraine - the Budapest Memorandum.

It’s like if someone promised not to burgle your house. Then they burgle your house anyway - but promise they’ll stop burgling for real if you promise to let them keep the stuff they already took, and throw in some more, and promise to never to lock your doors.

54 kg of fentanyl is an insane amount to have all in one place.

Just to put it in perspective:

• Assuming the lethal dose (LD50) of fentanyl in humans is similar to in mice (probably a good assumption), it is 7 mg / kg of body weight by injection. Assuming an average body weight of 70 kg, 54 kg is enough to kill 110,204 people.
• Apparently for opiate tolerant people (e.g. addicts), the therapeutic dose for strong pain relief is 12 μg / h, so in a month, an addict wanting to stay dosed up the whole time might use 8.64 mg total. 54 kg is enough to supply 6.25 million addicts for a month.
• According to a UNODC estime, in 2023, there were about 60.3 million opioid (including opiate) users worldwide, including prescription drug users. So that one stockpile could supply 1/10th of the world’s opioid users for a month. It almost certainly isn’t for supplying prescription drug users, and many opioid addicts likely try to avoid fentanyl, and there are other competing sources - so 1/10th is a lot.

I’m not sure why they’d stockpile so much in one place, given they apparently have the capacity to manufacture more - unless they were planning to use it to kill people (see: they also had a weapons cache and explosives) instead of to sell as a drug. Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.

TIOBE is meaningless - it is just search engine result numbers, which for many search engines are likely a wildly inaccurate estimate of how many results match in their index. Many of those matches will not be about the relevant language, and the numbers probably have very little correlation to who uses it (especially for languages that are single letter, include punctuation in the name, or are a common English word).