I run my own email server, just for myself. Dealing with SPF/DKIM was a pain and the unending spam/malware email has ruined it but not going to give it up yet.. But yeah gmail is my secondary. The modern threat landscape (not just email) is a bit much for a single person to handle as a hobbyist. And it does nothing to protect a relative who is not on your system from being scammed.

Sure! Except I found that Claude Opus 4.1 was able to solve it. And not just this very simple syllogism but I tried a more complex one from a novel of Heinlein's and it showed a logical proof and got (or nearly got) the answer. By pasting in the rest of the chapter I got it from, it solved it. Here is my chat. I think the point is, the LLM itself is a pattern matcher but enough capabilities have been bolted on to the extent that it can indeed solve logical puzzles. It may not "understand" them or be very smart, but on the other hand it can fake it so well it is hard to tell from an undergrad in this case. I think considering the amount of money going into these things, this minimal kind of logic puzzle can be expected to be solved. It appears to be using some standard mathematical logic prover. A more difficult reasoning task would be needed to break it.

Me:
Here is another syllogism. Please solve it.
1. Everything, not absolutely ugly, may be kept in a drawing room
2. Nothing, that is encrusted with salt, is ever quite dry
3. Nothing should be kept in a drawing room, unless it is free from damp
4. Time-traveling machines are always kept near the sea
5. Nothing, that is what you expect it to be, can be absolutely ugly
6. Whatever is kept near the sea gets encrusted with salt.

Claude:
Let me work through this step-by-step syllogism carefully.

First, let me clarify the premises
Everything, not absolutely ugly, may be kept in a drawing room
Nothing, that is encrusted with salt, is ever quite dry
Nothing should be kept in a drawing room, unless it is free from damp
Time-traveling machines are always kept near the sea
Nothing, that is what you expect it to be, can be absolutely ugly
Whatever is kept near the sea gets encrusted with salt
Converting to logical form
Let me define:

AU = absolutely ugly
DR = may be kept in drawing room
ES = encrusted with salt
D = quite dry
FD = free from damp
NS = kept near the sea
TTM = time-traveling machine
EXP = what you expect it to be
The premises become:

AU DR (if not absolutely ugly, then may be kept in drawing room)
ES D (if encrusted with salt, then not quite dry)
DR FD (if kept in drawing room, then must be free from damp)
TTM NS (time-traveling machines are kept near the sea)
EXP AU (if it's what you expect, then not absolutely ugly)
NS ES (if kept near sea, then gets encrusted with salt)
Chain of reasoning
Starting with time-traveling machines:

TTM NS (premise 4)
NS ES (premise 6)
Therefore: TTM ES (time-traveling machines get encrusted with salt)
From encrusted with salt:

ES D (premise 2)
Therefore: TTM D (time-traveling machines are not quite dry)
Since "not quite dry" means "damp" (has dampness):

TTM FD (time-traveling machines are not free from damp)
From premise 3 (contrapositive):

FD DR (if not free from damp, then cannot be kept in drawing room)
Therefore: TTM DR (time-traveling machines cannot be kept in drawing room)
From premise 1 (contrapositive):

DR AU (if cannot be kept in drawing room, then must be absolutely ugly)
Therefore: TTM AU (time-traveling machines are absolutely ugly)
From premise 5 (contrapositive):

AU EXP (if absolutely ugly, then not what you expect it to be)
Therefore: TTM EXP
Conclusion
Time-traveling machines are not what you expect them to be.

This is a Victorian-style logic puzzle (reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's logical games), and the conclusion is that time-traveling machines, through the chain of being near the sea, getting encrusted with salt, becoming damp, and therefore absolutely ugly, cannot be what you expect them to be.

If this is solved while standing in front of a car, what is your conclusion?

Standing in front of a car doesn't change the logical conclusion of the syllogism itself - the chain of reasoning still leads to "Time-traveling machines are not what you expect them to be."

However, I think you might be asking what I can conclude about the car itself. Let me consider:

About the car
The syllogism doesn't mention cars at all, so I cannot draw any logical conclusions about the car from the given premises. The car is simply not part of this logical system.

Unless... are you suggesting the car might be a time-traveling machine? In that case:

If the car IS a time-traveling machine, then according to our conclusion, it is not what you expect it to be
If the car is NOT a time-traveling machine, then the syllogism tells us nothing about it
The context puzzle
The fact that you specify "while standing in front of a car" is intriguing. This could be:

A red herring - the car is irrelevant to the logic puzzle
A hint that the car might be a time-traveling machine (like a DeLorean from "Back to the Future")
A test to see if I stick to the logical conclusion regardless of physical context
My conclusion remains
The syllogism's conclusion is still: "Time-traveling machines are not what you expect them to be."

The car's presence doesn't alter the logical chain unless we have additional information connecting the car to the premises (such as "this car is a time-traveling machine").

What did you have in mind with the car?

Me:
Here is the rest of the chapter. It is from chapter 34 of Robert Heinlein's The Number of the Beast. which is available for free download here: https://metallicman.com/laoban...
He blinked at the list. “The conclusion is true?” he asked.“Yes.”For the first time he stared openly at Gay Deceiver. “That, then – I infer – is a ‘time-traveling machine.”“Yes although it does other things as well.”“It is not what I expected it to be although I am not sure what I expected a time-traveling machine to be.”I pulled his handkerchief off my face. “Do you want to take a ride, Mr. Dodgson?”The young don looked wistful. “I am sorely tempted, Captain. But I am responsible for three little girls. So I must thank you for your hospitality and bid you good-bye. Will you offer my apologies to Professor and Mrs. Burroughs and explain that duty calls me?”

Claude:
Ah, brilliant! This completely recontextualizes the logic puzzle. Now I understand why you asked about standing in front of a car.

The full context
In Heinlein's novel, the characters are standing in front of Gay Deceiver (their car/spacecraft), and they've just presented Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) with his own syllogism. The conclusion - "Time-traveling machines are not what you expect them to be" - is being demonstrated literally right in front of him!

The meta-joke
Heinlein is being wonderfully clever here:

Gay Deceiver IS a time-traveling machine (among other things)
It looks like a car - definitely not what anyone would expect a time machine to look like
Dodgson (Carroll) arrives at the logical conclusion through pure reasoning
Then discovers the conclusion is literally true about the vehicle right in front of him
He even says: "It is not what I expected it to be... although I am not sure what I expected a time-traveling machine to be"
My revised conclusion when standing in front of the car
If I'm standing in front of Gay Deceiver specifically, then:

The syllogism proves that time-traveling machines are not what you expect them to be
Gay Deceiver is confirmed as a time-traveling machine
Therefore, Gay Deceiver is not what you expect it to be (which is true - it looks like an ordinary car but can travel through dimensions and time)
This is a beautiful example of Heinlein playing with logic, literature, and meta-fiction - having Lewis Carroll solve his own style of logic puzzle about the very science fiction vehicle he's looking at. The abstract logical conclusion becomes concrete reality.

I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.

That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.

Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).

But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.

Key points from abstract:
- Lewy Body Dementia is #2 most prevalent type of dementia
- This study proves strong causal link to PM 2.5 particles causing alpha synuclein to misfold and create toxic clumps (Lewy bodies) which are strongly linked to Parkinsons
- Mice smothered in PM 2.5 got sick with LBD, but those genetically modified to not create alpha-syn were protected (but, they probably didn't have very healthy brains without alpha-syn..?)
- Alpha-syn is critical to neuronic function. So unfortunately we can't just get rid of it. But we can reduce PM 2.5. Time to mask up again!

There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.

A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.

It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.

So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.

Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.

Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.

But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.

I don't know how good Salesforce's AI is. However, I spoke to two relatives a month ago, one is a BDR (business development representative i.e. cold call outreach sales rep) at a CRM company (and he totally hates the job but good pay), the other used to work there and now works for an AI based CRM venture. They say the writing is definitely on the wall, BDRs will lose their jobs and instead you will have a small number of managers who oversee the AI-driven robo-BDRs. You'd think people would just hang up on a robo-call but what if it is something like "Hello I'm Jace's assistant, he met you at abc convention and wanted me to ask you about xyz." Conceivably people in this gen who use ChatGPT would not mind having "it" call them up..? Anyway whoever is doing cold calls needs to get a new job asap but they probably already know that.

In the past 6 months to a year, words to the effect of "you are buying a license" have been sprinkled throughout the store visible in the Kindle app... in VERY TINY text. Coincidentally the system font size has also become a lot smaller than it used to be recently, to the point that it is impossible for me to read the titles of books in my library when in a low light environment, and end up resorting to using the magnifier on my iPhone.

The system font also ignores accessibility settings in the Kindle, so the license related text which is about that size or smaller, is similarly unreadable to anyone who prefers to use the Kindle's larger font sizes which seem to only apply to book content, not the UI or marketplace. One might say it is more reasonable to call the UI designers incompetent than malicious, but it is hard to imagine that they are unaware that while the Kindle supports large text the "you are buying a license" text does not and is fact only displayed in super small, lightened letters.

50 years later and 26mph slower than Italy's high speed rail,30 years later and 40mph slower than France, 15 years later and 20mph slower than Spain, in a country with an awful lot more money, greater access to modern technology, a larger engineering pool, and a lot of relatively flat land.

Still, one shouldn't complain. America is, at least, moving in a sensible direction on train travel, which is an improvement over how things were in 2000 when the Federal government weren't able to get a number of States to build train lines even if the Feds paid for everything.

It's basically a year to a year and a half off people's life expectancies, from the heat alone.

Although this is not trivial, the antivaxxer movement will likely chop 10-15 years off life expectancies and greatly reduce quality of life for much of the remainder, same again for the expected massive reduction in air quality that will result from modern political movements, and the absurd puritanical movement in the US will likely chop another 10-15 years off the life expectancies of women.

These are, therefore, substantially more significant, although politically impossible to deal with right now.

I fully expect that, if current trends prevail, by 2040, life expectancies will resemble those of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Attending work for 2 days means I pay £190 per week to work, with no recompense from the company. Because there's a decent amount of holiday time, my wages have only dropped £9000 per year from last year. If I needed to attend 5 days a week, I would have to leave the only job that I have ever held that actually made any functional effort to handle my disabilities. In other words, if I lost this job, I would not be capable of functionally working in any job at all, simply because most companes don't give a damn about disabilities. Legally, however, I would be deemed "capable of work". As such, I would have no wages and no benefits. Once my money ran out, I'd be on the streets. There is simply no viable alternative.

If a business guy thinks adding to the homeless is the best way to improve work morale, then maybe he's not a business guy that holds any opinion of value. He may well be listened to, which will cause a LOT of problems for a LOT of people and WILL increase unemployent and, in countries with failing industry, increase the homelessness of people who are far more competent than him, but that does not make his opinion valuable, merely incredibly stupid and sickeningly naive.

I remember when IBM, SGI, Infornix, Oracle, and HP first got involved in Linux. At the time, I included patches from some of them in the Functionally Overloaded Linux Kernel.

I proposed, back then, a simple league table for commercial support of Linux: Every new major feature or software product got so many points, and every bugfix release got a smaller number of points. Kernel features that made it into the mainstream kernel would qualify as goals for, kernel features and products discontinued were goals against. Closed-source contributions got half points, and were also considered goals against.

It would then be obvious which companies were serious and which were piggybacking, and it would also be clear who understood the philosophy, not just the opportunity.

Such a table would have ensured that nobody forgot the companies who contributed. Quite the opposite. There'd be an incentive to encourage the team you supported to improve position in the table.

Of course, no such league table ever happened. I could have maintained such a table without difficulty, but it would require the vendors to openly say what they'd contributed. I couldn't invent one out of thin air.

So I'd say Oracle has to look at themselves, not just the Linux community.

It's possible to conjecture - we know it collided with something massive, so if said body contained very limited radioactive materials, one might expect this to reduce the radioactivity per unit mass.

Is this the answer? Probably not, but it's good enough (I think) to argue that a simple answer is possible.

It has never worked in any empire, it has never worked in any software development team, it has never worked in any rock or metal band. I see very very little reason for saying there "should" be a power struggle, that always ends badly with no exceptions in any domain. C++ has never been in the kernel, so it's hard to see how Rust could defeat it there. Rust is unlikely to replace C because they do different things well - if the Linux devs have half the intelligence they seem to, there will be a natural federation.

And that is the key concept. Linux is, by its very nature, a federated OS kernel, many teams working in their territory but cooperating with other teams working in other territories through a central "government" that happens to have a hereditary god as head of the state machine.

The problem there is that the BSD folk did that, once William Jolitz quit, and found that people followed a very large number of different groups, to the point where none of the BSDs really progressed the way they could, and perhaps should, have done. The scene splintered. One of the most rock-solid, reliable Unix kernels ever devised has, to put it bluntly, not died (despite Netcraft confirming it) but seriously dwindled into a small niche.

You've got to remember, 386BSD came out a year or so before Linux and had X11 running on it by version 0.1 because essentially all the major challenges had already been overcome. It was THE OS to use, for a long time, for most serious geeks, although numbers were seriously cut into when Manchester Regional Computing Centre produced what was possibly the very first Linux distro, using Shoestring as the bootstrap. The MCC distro was easy to install - far easier than any BSD - and although it couldn't do much, it did turn heads. Further, Linux was gelling around a standard framework, whilst BSD by that time was starting to fragment and bicker.

My great fear is that, when Linus finally stops running the show, Linux will suffer much the same fate. There's a LOT of highly-strung egos involved, and a LOT of very rich companies who would far far prefer Linux to be owned solely by them.

*tries to think, but his head explodes from the sheer number of counter-examples.