Well, yes, the farther north, the more important DST is, but also, where you line up in your time zone.

This map is pretty insightful but not for the sun rise time: https://www.washingtonpost.com...

What it does show is that the more north-east and south-west in a time zone you are, the more DST makes daylight more "normal". So all the east coast cities (NY, Philadelphia, Boston) and Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis in central TZ end up with earlier sunrises in the winter with DST/Normal time. If you make DST permanent, two of the big population centers (and voting blocks) in the US are now not seeing daylight until late in the mornings in winter.

Most of the states below Kentucky don't get affected too much, so Houston and LA won't care. But when you annoy easily 1/2 of the US population, this won't last too long...

One of the defining papers in this field is 2013 "Intriguing properties of neural networks" by Szegedy et al. In their own words from the abstract, "we find that deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extent"

I'm using the word "continuous" in the same sense as them. (Perhaps it does indeed mean what I think it means...)

In image processing like this article is talking about, the classic example of a harmful response is that your car's camera sees "speed limit 30" sign, but a small sticker it makes the image processor believe it saw a "speed limit 70" sign.

(this is an actual demonstrated attack. It means that pranksters could cripple self driving.)

The thing about these image classifiers is that they're not "continuous". You can make it see a stop sign as a right-of-way sign, or a green light.

My main AGENTS.md has ten lines about the most important coding principles:

The instruction on "meaning" ended up carrying a lot of weight to the AI. It adopted the habit of putting a comment on every single field and function that starts with the word "// Meaning: " and they're honestly, genuinely good ones! Single-line sentences on fields that carry a lot of good weight.

Separately, I have a LEARNINGS.md file which I have the AI auto-update every time it gets course corrected by me. Over the first two weeks there were a lot of course corrections, but now there are only a few a day. The file ended up carrying my senior engineer wisdom, more or less, the kind of things I normally mentor to junior developers on the team over several years. Here's an extract: https://gist.github.com/ljw100...

My CS degree had a lot of theorem proofs in it, invariants, that kind of thing. I've always had the habit of aiming to prove my code correct under all possible circumstances. Usually not a formal proof, but using the same skeleton as a formal proof would.

It got me a job on the C# language design team (when I tried to prove an algorithm correct, couldn't, discovered a counter-proof that the runtime had a flaw).

As I mentor junior devs and review their code, I'm always telling them to reason about their invariants better and document them.

Now in the age of AI, I find that invariant-heavy and proof-heavy guidance to the AI ends up getting its work done quicker and higher quality. OpenAI mentioned the same thing in a blog post in February.

Sure, there are many paths to professional success and engineering excellence that don't involve this kind of CS heavy approach. But, there are many that do...

I think a tool that lets one person do the work of 20 will result in 17 people being laid off, as the company triples its rate of work. (I can see triple being feasible and achievable in the software industry, but maybe not more)

Oh, and a "train" is a bit like 100 cars back to back.

"this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: 'Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.'"

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfo...

"We ... show that [the Shareholder Primacy Norm] is not a legal requirement, at least under the guise of shareholder value maximization. This is in contrast to the common assertion that managers are legally constrained from addressing corporate social responsibility issues if doing so would be inconsistent with the economic interests of shareholders."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p...

> Am I the only one that can't imagine any possible value an AI assistant would bring to a game?

I use AI assistants lots when playing games!

At the moment it's Minecraft. I want to figure how to build something, e.g. a golem farm. I look for tutorials online but (1) they're all videos which I hate watching, (2) they're all hyper-specific and concrete, "place this block here then that block there", but what I want to understand are the foundational principles so I can know how to adapt the golem farm to my own purposes -- what are the mechanics, how do they spawn, how does water flow, what is the SOLUTION SPACE of possibilities.

Gemini AI has been really good at this kind of thing.

The other time is when I get stuck, or want advice on how to make a character build to achieve a certain end. Once again the online advice is typically in the form of "walkthroughs", do step 1 then step 2 then step 3, in other words just one possible way to play the game, and it's too easy to accidentally read too far and spoil the rest of it. I don't want that. I like the feeling of openness and possibilities. I again ask Gemini, and it gives me advice on just the particular bit I'm stuck on, and is better at showing for me the available options.

Lua remains the commonest choice today for games to offer scripting/modding. It's pretty much the industry standard. (Outside C# for Unity).

The alternative to auto stop/start is simple.

Reduce the amount of time cars spend idling.

Just replace all stop lights with smart sensors that detect when an intersection is empty and allow the approaching car to continue through without stopping and idling. It's a simple fix.

It just would cost a ton of infrastructure money. It would meet the goal of reducing idling.

Would this ever get implemented? Hell, no. It's much simpler and cost-effective to push it onto the car manufacturers and slowly address the problem, rather than address the problem for all cars. And the tech for this is as hard as the lines of autonomous vehicle tech and pedestrian detection. Lots of wonderful law suits the for the times the lights let a car proceed, and a pedestrian gets hit.

Of course, this is a silly solution and much more expensive than the auto start/start that is currently in play. But hey, why not?

Fox News is just about always truthful. You just have to watch out for the tricks they use (on 95%+ of their stories)...

(1) non-representative selection. Headline "illegal immigrant murders local mother", which is true in this case, but they don't report the other 99 murders that went by immigrants, and don't report a general trend of immigrants causing less crime overall per capita. (I made up this specific example to illustrate their trick)

(2) report quotes: headline "Biden's senility was covered up, says person". They are 100% factually reporting that the person did indeed say this.

In both cases the reader is left with an untrue impression despite the stories containing only truth. It's because it's not the whole truth.

William Shatner is a classically trained Shakespearean actor who appeared in festivals and on Broadway prior to switching from stage to television. His TOS enunciation and emphasis is due mostly to his experience with radio performances (which were over the top verbally) combined with directors on TOS constantly telling him to increase the astonishment. And in reality, wasn't anywhere near as pervasive or dramatic as the pop culture version that pokes fun at Kirk.

I think the only Premium TVs left are the business TVs that give you meaningful mechanisms to not have intrusive "Smart" features.

Is there a meaningful difference between a Sony TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features, and a Wal-mart TV that harvests data and won't let you opt-out of "smart" features?

I guess I am blessed to not be an audiophile and not have flawless supervision :)

FWIW, I have:
- a 20 yo 720p dumb 42" plasma
- a 20 yo 1080P dumb 50" plasma
- a 1yo 4k Samsung 65" TheFrame TV

That last one was a splurge I wanted because the "Art Mode" is just too beautiful, and at the time, Samsung really had the only coherent offering. (I guess there are now "off brand" ArtTV attempts from HiSense and others.. i have no experience with them.)

On the ArtTV, we watch youtube or DVDs or XBox on it a little of the time, and all that stuff looks fine to me on the 65" Samsung. But the TV is otherwise displaying pretty artwork almost all of the time, and whatever Samsung has done with the screen, dimming control, bezel, etc, really does work and really is lovely. And you don't need a service or an app to get the experience - just stick a USB full of public domain masterpieces into the TV.

Even so, the Samsung ecosystem is pretty annoying. I can have it show my images in ArtMode, but i cannot have the "real" experience you'd get with a subscription - with Art XML metadata and stuff (artist, date, etc). We don't always remember what a piece is or who painted it when it comes up..

Anyway, AFAIK, the only way to get TVs that aren't enshittified spyware is a business SKU, right?

In my house, we use Steam to play "windows-only" games on:
- Devuan with XFCE
- Devuan with Cinnamon
- Arch with hyprland
- bone stock Ubuntu 24
- ubuntu 25 laptop w/ second GPU

From my POV, there's not much need to port games to Linux. With the heroic efforts of Valve, most Windows games now just work. Win32, DX, D3D, and whatever else windows game devs have been using seems to have become the defacto reference gaming API on Linux.

Steam makes it work on every linux distro we've tried.

In writing this, it occurs to me: The F/OSS ecosystem does a very good job of re-implementing someone else's API/products (WINE, Proton, LibreOffice, etc)

The F/OSS ecosystem does a comparatively poor job at independently developing its own technology and then standardizing/universalizing those choices. E.g. the transition from X11 to Wayland; the systemd "situation(s)", desktop environments... gui greeters, audio muxers...

I think Valve has done the right thing. They made existing games work on Steam; they made Steam work on most linux distros.

Making everyone use a reference linux platform seems to be a total non-starter.

We already have a reference gaming platform: Windows 7 thru 10. And what we learned in 2025 is that Steam on nearly _any_ Linux often implements that windows reference gaming platform better than Windows 11 does.