For folks not willing to make the full leap away from QWERTY, there’s also Colemak that preserves the common key combos, such as Ctrl C and Ctrl V.

Also, a word of advice: all the keyboard formats which minimize finger reach compared to QWERTY (which essentially maximized finger reach to accommodate mechanical typewriters) will cause poor word prediction on Swype-style virtual keyboards on mobile phones. This is because optimized keyboard formats try to keep words as close to the home row as possible, so many words using Swype will just be sliding your finger left and right over the home row, which destroys accurate prediction. This is why I’m QWERTY on mobile but Colemak on desktop.

Humans that successfully visit would be honored as a Discman.

IIRC, the IAU’s definition of planet – infamously applied so that Pluto fell off the list of Solar System planets – requires that a candidate planet be large enough that its own gravity is strong enough to force it into a rough sphere, whatever it might be made of.

So a disc-shaped planet could not ever meet this criteria, because if it were made of something strong enough to remain a disk, then it’s too small to be a planet. And if it did exceed the critical size for gravity to make a sphere, then it wouldn’t be disc shaped anymore.

But setting that definitional quibble aside, we will focus on sizes and materials that allow a disk shape object to exist and be large enough for humans (or Mario) to visit. So no Wensleydale cheese. If we say that this object is mostly uniform in its mass distribution, then it would have to be the case that for any disc shape (including cylindrical), different points along the surface will be farther or closer to the center of gravity. Thus, inhabitants would experience gravity differently depending on where they are.

Note that we haven’t even considered whether the disc is rotating. If it is, then there’s a chance that the centrifugal acceleration at some points will completely negate the gravitational acceleration. At such points, one could hop up and off the surface, linger for a bit, and then get pulled back down once the disc has rotated to a position where there’s a net force upon you again. Or if the centrifugal acceleration is too strong, it might repel visitors on the surface altogether.

Alternatively, there would be a danger of playing on a trampoline that accidentally crosses into a net-zero gravity region. Here, a double bounce could send someone very high up, only to then plummet back down to their death when re-entering a downward gravity zone.

I have almost no citations for the above, but I thank you for posing an interesting question.

Is the Linux kernel a project of the Linux Foundation though? I understood that Linus Torvalds still maintains the kernel under his original authority, and the Foundation’s projects are all the ancillary specifications that the kernel should follow and related distros that make use of the kernel.

I agree that RPM isn’t the primary quality to assess here, but I think angular momentum doesn’t really matter either. As a quantity, momentum describes a conserved capacity to store kinetic energy. As in, it could tell us how long the fan would stay in motion when the wind stops blowing. But that’s not the objective for a wind turbine, which is supposed to convert lift from the wind to do some work.

At bottom, none of these quantities are the useful metric for what makes a good wind turbine. And that’s expected, because we have few details about the fan itself: the blade pitch, stall speed, and fan diameter, to list a few parameters. The only firm detail we can see is the blade count from the picture.

Having conducted technical interviews after managers have screened the candidates’ resumes, I second this. Businesses absolutely look at example works, precisely because it’s what they care about: it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination that if someone has churned out excellent work for hire, that they can do it again once hired on.

It’s a bit harder for prospective employers to take someone at their word without works that they can point to, or can succinctly describe said works in sufficient detail.

I’m more in the software side of things, but have worked with hardware engineers that use formal verification before committing to a design. How I understand the point of formal verification is to answer the question: does this implementation satisfy the given specification?

With that in mind, I’m having trouble squaring away my definition with your passage:

I can imagine a scenario where you no longer review the code but a simulation of all the behaviours of the system, perhaps before any code has been written, and then you can trust the output will have accordingly …?

The whole point, I think, of formal verification is to verify a specific, concrete thing. Simulation doesn’t seem to be remotely relevant at all, because it is not the thing itself. C’est nest pas une pipe. Likewise, formal verification isn’t about stress testing either, such as hardware shock and vibration testing. At bottom, formal is about reducing the thing to its most basic assumptions, and checking those.

If those assumptions turn out to violate the specification, then that answers the question posed earlier. If however the formal process proves that a specific signal within an FPGA will never take longer than 47 ns and another signal always takes longer than 68 ns, then it’s provable that those two signals will not cause a race condition when they come together. And this too answers the question.

Given that formal verification is rooted in mathematical proofs, I don’t see how LLMs can help there. In terms if making formal easier to use regarding inputs and outputs, LLMs are still a poor fit. To trust an LLM to write or even audit the specification that will be inputted to formal verification, that’s adding a very weak link at the very start of a very robust process, essentially negating all the guarantees of formal verification.

As for the output side, I’m not seeing how a yes/no answer from formal could somehow benefit from the mis-confident elaborations of an LLM. Perhaps in the case of a failure result, an LLM can hone in on the exact hardware or software component that the spec violation is occurring. But my understanding is that formal verification software already does that, because that’s the obvious thing to identify once an implementation is proven as faulty.

What practical limits of formal verification are there for this?

Formal verification definitely has limits, and one of the greatest limiting factors for its use in the software domain is the fact that compatible software (meaning it can target many platforms, OS, phones, etc) is an utter mindfield to prove correctness for. Just look at memory ordering: x86 and ARM, in the desktop and mobile spaces respectively, behave very different, yet an ideal formal verification would tell us if a race condition could ever arise. We don’t have that today, because the test matrix to verify is outside the limits of our computational power, for any nontrivial example.

Adding AI in any current form – and maybe any future form too – will not change this gap in what can be achieved by raw logic and induction. Formal is simply unbothered by LLMs, neither helped nor hindered.

BCP 177 consists of: RFC 6540 : IPv6 Support Required for All IP-Capable Nodes

Given that FOSS licenses are premised on copyright, yes, the same ails would still exist: 1) AI washing of licenses (including transforming one license into another), and 2) the vagueness of whether LLM outputs can be copyright, which threatens the validity of a FOSS license upon that output.

The first ail can be seen even without LLMs: the BSD variants have gone through great pains to remove GPL-licensed code from their base repositories. This basically involves reimplementing utilities and functionality from scratch, using only the ideas that are in common with the equivalent GPL code, but never copying that code directly. This is properly considered a reimplementation, which can then be licensed permissively (eg MIT license).

If an LLM were to train on GPL code but the output were licensed with MIT, then that could be a GPL violation because GPL mandates that remixes continue to keep the GPL license.

Maybe you could avoid this fate by limiting the LLM to only train on permissively licensed code. So that it would be permissive licenses going in, and permissive licenses coming out. No GPL problems here. But that brings us to ail #2.

Some jurisdictions have rules against granting copyright for computer-generated works, in the same vein as works generated by non-humans (eg a macaque). If this LLM fell into this situation, then the output is not copyrightable. And if there is no copyright, a license like MIT or GPL simply cannot apply, because its terms couldn’t be enforced.

Well, to be clear, the copyright parts of those licenses would be unenforceable. Some parts of the license may still be enforced under a contracts claim. But in any case, the things we refer to as “FOSS licenses” cannot attach to uncopyrightable works (with the possible exception of the CC0 license, which is essentially the absence of any license whatsoever).

EDIT: you did say “consenting projects” and consent is key. If such consent came in the form of a license grant, then yes, that would be enthusiastic consent for the LLM to generate output, which solves ail #1. But for most multi-person projects, getting consent from everyone is difficult or impossible. The Linux kernel is one such example, having so many contributors that some of them are already dead. Death means they cannot consent, but their copyright grant lives on. And so practically speaking, obtaining enthusiastic consent for whole projects is a challenge, which drastically limits the prospects for such an LLM from the very beginning.

There’s a fascinating piece of banking history embedded here, since for a fairly long time, the economics of USA banking meant that long-term banking relationships generated the most revenue for the bank. So they would go out of their way to establish new relationships that would hopefully endure for decades, thus keeping the bank in business. This applies even if a small percentage of those attempts would be losses, because the average was still mostly upsides.

Today, the banking landscape is much more transactional, where lots of people have no qualms jumping ship to an online bank. Sure, not everyone will go through that inconvenience, but enough will that it upsets the prior calculus that prioritized long-term relationships to achieve long-term value. That of course means that there’s less upside to extending a $1k unprotected credit line and all the same downsides. Hence, credit issuers are more stingy now than in the past.

The obvious problem that this exacerbates is that people who never had access to banking have poorer chances of ever getting served once they do need banking services, because that first account needs to meet strict credit approval requirements or whatever. The very fact that a steady 4.5% of American households can’t meet the bank minimum balance requirements, while “non bank” services like payday loans and buy-now-pay-later are on the rise, is a reminder that opportunities from yesteryear are disappearing rapidly, concentrating to those that already have plenty of opportunity.

Past institutions and past people did what made sense at the time, but it’s quite clear that in the present, the situation is not serving the people’s needs. The corporate desire to grow bank market share or shareholder value is precisely the opposite of what sustainable banks should be doing: right-sizing their scope to match what their clientele can afford. If a bank can only stay in business by having a $1500 minimum monthly balance, then they should close and a smaller, nimbler bank or credit union that only needs $400 to be sustainable should take their place. Banks grew to match the needs of the public. If the public’s needs have changed, so must they.

IIRC, there’s a difference between entries expiring from a credit report, and whether a debt is still legally collectable. If the holder of a debt can prove the debt is still outstanding, or has it ratified as a court judgement (and renewals the judgement, as local rules may require), then it may still be pursued once someone returns to the personal jurisdiction of the court.

The thing is, though, since the original creditor will have wanted to get something rather than nothing, they may choose to sell the debt to a debt collection service, conveying the legal rights to pursue the debt. In return, the original creditor gets a fraction of their money back. But even the most prodigious debt collectors may give up and sell the debt to someone else, for pennies on the dollar. As the value of the debt keeps shrinking, those fixed costs to keep the debt collectable (eg maintaining paperwork, renewing a judgement) become disproportionate and thus skipped.

At the very end of the chain are debt collectors with such a huge catalog of bad, uncollectable debt, but they’re hoping they can schmooze or bamboozle the debtors into paying one day. As with all debt collectors, they have no right to add renewed entries to someone’s credit report, so the debt is essentially in limbo: unenforceable yet still on paper.

TIL shelf foundation. I’ve not seen these here in California, since we don’t tend to have basement spaces in general.

But wow, you’ve moved literal tons of earth as a home improvement project. As the other comments remarked, this must have been quite the workout.

Help me understand what the starting condition was. This is a single story, freestanding home and that was constructed with <6 ft ceilings (<1.8 meters). So you ripped out the floor, then dug down through 2+ ft of dirt, so that without moving the ceiling, the new floor is be 8 ft (2.4 meters) from floor to ceiling. Do I have this right?

Does this mean all your windows are now 2 ft taller than they were? Being 1922, I presume the walls were supported by footings, but did they footings remain as-is and you dug around them? Are the footings still below the new floor level?

Your profile bio mentions Arch, Thinkpad, and SDRs. Just from that, you can likely expand your skills section to spell out the operating systems that you’re familiar* with (including others like Windows or Mac OS, if you’ve used those), possibly with inclusion of anything related to coreboot on Thinkpad (if you’ve done that), and can include radio technologies in its own section under either skills or interests.

Don’t sell yourself short, because if a job posting is upfront that they’re not looking for hard skills as a prerequisite, then the assignment is to present yourself as a candidate with depth. They’re clearly looking for candidates in a non-conventional manner, so you should showcase all your non-conventional aspects. Don’t be afraid of including “niche” details like RTL-SDR, because they can easily do a web search to figure out what that is. But do contextualize it as a tech interest, because if maybe the job requires working with complex, one of a kind tech, then they might value the candidate that self-learned.

Regarding “familiarity” on a resume, to be “familiar” with XYZ just means that you at least know what it is and have probably used it. Listing out some skills on a resume means, at least to me, that you’re familiar with all of those skills. It’s different if you’re actually an expert or fairly accomplished with something, in which case you’d describe that skill in detail, usually giving an example that you’ve worked on. I recommend including everything you can think of, even the mundane stuff like Microsoft Word; you’d be surprised how many people don’t know how to use Word or Excel.

accoutrements

Upvoted, because this is a great word and I like seeing it used.

I’m also poised to agree: setting the output air regulator to a low value does not change the reserve pressure in the tank. I suspect maybe Peppycito thought OP was talking about the governor, which is what controls when the pump turns on and off.

But even then, the most common design of governor only adjusts the peak reserve pressure (aka when the pump turns off) but the minimum reserve pressure (aka when the pump turns on) is usually a fixed value subtracted from the peak reserve. Usually the control for this is inside a box and turned by a screwdriver, because of how rare it is to adjust the reserve pressure.

That said, there is genuine merit in reducing the reserve pressure, if there’s an explicit objective to prolong the life of the pump as much as possible and the air loads are not very significant. But this usually isn’t the case for small residential air compressors, because those pumps tend to be built very small and thus oversubscribed.

I skimmed this article, but I’ll revisit it later because MPU protections have always intrigued me, in terms of being a much smaller subset of the protections afforded by an MMU. That said, for work projects, I’ve only ever been able to make use of MPU regions for coarse-grain protection (eg prevent the DMA-dedicated regions from being accessible by everything) and not for per-task protection. So I’m always interested in ways that more isolation can be applied, precisely because it keeps code honest, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s no different than having software asserts.

IANAL. If a bank signs the copy they receive back from the counterparty, then generally yeah, it would be enforceable. Contract law demands that result, because otherwise there’d be no point to the words on the document. Working in the other party’s favor would be any lack of notice shortly after the bank signs the contract, because the longer the bank takes to notice a problem, the easiest it is to prove that they did not exercise the appropriate care when signing, incurring all consequences as a result. Missing more and more opportunities to recast or renegotiate the contract, that’s a poor position to defend.

That said, the other party must not have made any implied or explicit statements that the bank could have relied upon. Returning the modified contract to the bank in an email with the words “please find the signed contract attached” (my emphasis) could ambiguously imply that the original contract has been unmodified except that it has gained the other party’s signature.

Whereas the words “please find my signed proposal attached” would dispell any and all ambiguity, because it would clearly be a proposed contract by the other party, not the bank’s original proposal. Alternatively, a blank email with just the attachment is no statement at all, implied or explicit.

To be clear, a bank would almost certainly contest the contract, even if they don’t have a leg to stand on. And the usual reason for this – besides litigiousness – is that it’s the only way for the bank’s business insurance to pay out. Or at the very least, an attempt to slightly lower the damages by opening settlement talks.

This looks amazing. That said, you may want to have a look at rules 7 and 8 for this community.

Contributors: Claude

Please kindly see Rule 8 of this community and its associated post.