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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated on bug trackers by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.

    However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.




  • Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.

    “We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.

    As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.

    The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:

    • It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.

    • But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. Nor does having written something on the paper. I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.

    This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unusual about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the right to compel searching a landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.

    I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives, however.




  • Had not heard of this.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Anying

    In June 1950, Mao requested to join the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) as an officer in the Korean War. PVA commander Peng Dehuai and other high-ranking officers, fearing Mao Zedong’s reaction if his favorite son was to be killed in combat, had long opposed allowing Mao to join the PVA and tried to prevent him from entering. Mao Zedong overrode Peng, who allegedly shouted, “He is Mao Zedong’s son. Why should it be anything else?” Peng instead had Mao assigned to himself as his secretary and Russian translator, under the pseudonym “Secretary Liu” at the PVA headquarters, located in caves near an old gold mining settlement in Tongchang County. This location offered excellent protection from United Nations (UN) air attacks and was far from the front lines of the war.[4][6] However, the safety was an illusion, as the US Air Force completely controlled the airspace.[7]

    On the evening of 24 November, two UN aircraft, P-61s on a photo reconnaissance mission, were seen overhead.[8] According to multiple Chinese eyewitnesses, sometime between 10:00 am and noon on 25 November, four Douglas B-26 Invaders dropped napalm bombs in the area.[9][10] One of the bombs destroyed a makeshift building near the caves, killing Mao and another officer, Gao Ruixin. Several conflicting reasons have been given as to why Mao was in the building, including suggestions that he was cooking food during daylight, in violation of Chinese Army regulations,[1][8][11] fetching documents, or sleeping late due to night duties,[9] which had led to him missing breakfast.[12] Another reason given was that due to the high amount of communications, being the PVA headquarters, the Americans were able to combine aerial reconnaissance with the direction of radio waves, to identify its location.[13]

    Peng witnessed the explosion nearby and, realizing Mao was in danger, tried to run towards him but was physically restrained by his guards. Peng screamed, “if you don’t let go, I’ll kill you!” to which the guard responded, “if you kill me, I still won’t let go”.[14] Mao’s body was reportedly burnt beyond recognition and was only identifiable through a Soviet watch given to him by Joseph Stalin. Peng immediately reported Mao’s death to the Central Military Commission, but Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Yang Shangkun ordered the CMC and Politburo not to inform Mao Zedong. Only in January 1951, when Mao Zedong asked his personal secretary Ye Zilong to have Mao transferred back to China, Ye informed him of the news.[citation needed] Mao was buried in Pyongyang, in the Cemetery for the Heroes of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army.

    Some Chinese citizens and groups who oppose Mao Zedong commemorate the anniversary of Mao Anying’s death by eating egg fried rice. According to some sources, on the morning of 25 November 1950, Mao Anying, alongside staff officers Gao Ruixun and Cheng Pu, cooked egg fried rice for breakfast in the office of Peng Dehuai, despite orders only to cook at night for fear of American air raids. It is alleged that their preparation of that meal drew the attention of American bombers, contributing to the deaths of Mao and Gao.[15][16]

    The fried rice story of Anying’s death has never been confirmed. The Chinese Academy of History, a state-run historical research institute set up in 2019, had denounced the story as rumors spread by those who aimed to disrespect Mao Anying’s sacrifice to his country. The academy, citing declassified documents, stated Mao’s position was compromised when the camp’s radio transmissions were being intercepted.[17][18]

    “Egg fried rice protests” are a form of internet protest used by Chinese users occurring yearly around 24 October, Anying’s birthday, or around 25 November, the date of his death. Posting recipes for egg fried rice is meant to mock the death of Anying; such posts are usually blocked or taken down by Chinese officials and can lead to sanctions against those involved.[15]


  • If you’re interested in home automation, I think that there’s a reasonable argument for running it on separate hardware. Not much by way of hardware requirements, but you don’t want to take it down, especially if it’s doing things like lighting control.

    Same sort of idea for some data-logging systems, like weather stations or ADS-B receivers.

    Other than that, though, I’d probably avoid running an extra system just because I have hardware. More power usage, heat, and maintenance.

    EDIT: Maybe hook it up to a power management device, if you don’t have that set up, so that you can power-cycle your other hardware remotely.







  • investigates

    Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

    reads further

    It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

    https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

    You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.




  • This was the fourth night in a row when Russian “shahids” flew into Belarus en masse and for the first time in these days the Belarusian Air Force’s duty aircraft was raised. The fighter from Baranovichi took off at about 07:40 in the morning and returned to the base at 08:45.

    What’s the navigation system on those UAVs?

    kagis

    https://www.kyivpost.com/post/25204

    The Shahed “kamikaze drone,” known also by its Russian nomenclature as the Geran-2, is more properly classified as a one-way attack unmanned aerial vehicle (OWA UAV).

    The original Shaheds employed inertial navigation blocks, manufactured in Canada, that relied on commercially available GPS systems for navigation with a limited CEP accuracy of around 10 to 15 meters. The Russian variants use the “Komet” navigation system, which incorporates GLONASS, Russia’s version of GPS for guidance. This is almost the only component of Russian production in these drones.

    Sounds like that system is vulnerable to some form of electronic attack.

    EDIT: Unless the idea is that it’s intentional, to try to come from an unexpected direction. If those tracks in the image represent the actual tracks, though, I’m not sure how useful they are. Doesn’t look very effective.




  • Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

    You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.