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Comment My suspicion (Score 2) 67

At least some of this will be stress. If you're enjoying something, then you won't be stressed. If you're feeling positive and delighting in what you do, then you won't be stressed in unhealthy ways. This looks similar to the Mozart Effect, which turned out to be that if you liked something, your brain functioned better.

Yes, charging around the stage playing rock music isn't exactly gentle, but it IS extremely good exercise for the heart and the rest of the body. Again, that's going to have positive effects.

(We can ignore Keith Richards in this model, as he's older than the universe and only created it as a place to store his guitars.)

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 211

Yeah but I have to drive 1000 miles up hill (both ways) every day for work in temperatures where lithium itself freezes, and I only pee on Sundays.

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 211

Oh, I think the Silverado EV's are adequate. 480+ mile range in best conditions still puts me way over my bladders ability to drive even in the absolute worst conditions of that tow + cold weather. That thing will still be 200'ish miles of towing in cold weather.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 211

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

Comment Re:META is doing this to make them quit (Score 1) 91

That's actually a smart strategy.

It is effective at reducing staff cheaply, but it has a huge downside, shared with most attrition-based schemes for reducing payroll: The best employees are also the ones who find it the easiest to leave. The worst employees are also the ones who will grit their teeth and hold on to the bitter end.

It's harder and more costly (in the short term) to do targeted layoffs which allows the company to target low-performers, or those who are low performers relative to their cost. It's the better choice, though.

But I wonder how many employees will quit in today's job market.

Lots of the top performers will.

Comment Ho hum. (Score 1) 72

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

Comment Re:A city at 7000 ft elevation but sinking (Score 1) 28

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Comment Re: Incredible Foolishness (Score 1) 28

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

Comment Use Argon2id (Score 1) 106

Using a proper password hashing algorithm mostly addresses this concern... and standard cryptographic hashes like MD-5, SHA-1, SHA-256, etc. are not appropriate. They're designed to be as time and space-efficient as possible while still achieving their security goals. Password hashing functions (more precisely, password-based key derivation functions) are designed specifically to be time and space-hungry, efficient enough that you can execute them in half-second or so for user authentication, but slow enough that brute forcing even moderately-good passwords is intractible.

The best widely-available algorithm is Argon2id. The modern algorithms don't focus so much on requiring lots of CPU cycles because GPUs. Instead, they focus on requiring significant amounts of RAM, in ways that provably cannot be reduced. The most-recommended Argon2id configuration requires 2GB RAM. This makes it feasible for most servers to handle fairly easily, as long as they don't have to verify too many passwords in parallel, but it means that GPUs don't help the attacker, and it's also slow enough that while you can get some traction by using a large botnet, it's really not very much. If a PC requires 500ms per attempt, and you have a million-machine botnet, you can still only try 2M passwords per second. If user passwords have, say, 30 bits of entropy, your massive botnet can find one every five minutes on average. If they have 40 bits, your botnet can find a password every ~3 days, on average. That's not nothing, but if you have control of a million machines, you can definitely find better uses for them.

Of course, even better is to use passkeys or similar, but as a practical matter you probably have to have a password to fall back on.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Spitfire is up for sale

https://vintageaviationnews.com/warbirds-news/griffon-powered-supermarine-spitfire-mk-xix-listed-for-sale-by-boschung-global.html

This would be a great way to avoid the rush-hour traffic, although I can see that there might be complaints it takes too many parking spaces.

Comment Re: If the asset tax passes, he'll owe 1.5B (Score 1) 167

Not necessarily true. Pattern day traders are forced to mark to market.

Cite? I'm not a CPA but AFAIK, being a PDT has no direct tax implications, it just invokes brokerage/margin rules.

As I understand it (and I skimmed the law), 475(f) elections are entirely optional. The tricky thing is that you have to make the decision of whether you're going to elect to mark to market by April 15 (e.g. you have to decide by April 15, 2026 if you'll mark to market on December 31, 2026), and you generally cannot change that decision. So if you think it's going to be a bad year, it's a good idea to elect, because it removes the cap on loss deductions. If you expect to make a lot of wash sales and don't want to bother tracking them, that's another reason to elect.

But as far as I can tell, it's purely voluntary. Can you point to evidence to the contrary? Ideally in the law, but a reputable investor information site would be fine. I checked several (e.g. https://www.optionstaxguy.com/...) and they all describe it as a choice. One that is binding once made, but still a choice.

Comment Re:Just... no. (Score 1) 162

You don't know if it's always on. Those details aren't present (that I saw), and it's likely that they would throttle when the grid was under heavy load. A reasonable inference from what the company (who make "smart" electric panels) is saying about power management.

As for cooling, "Span is incorporating technology from Nvidia into its system, including a liquid-cooled, fanless component inside the server. The design helps eliminate the noise typically associated with data centers—a frequent complaint in communities near large facilities."

It's also possible to pair it with a large residential roof solar installation. I installed solar recently (just in time to grab the 30% credit) and my system routinely generates 3X what my home uses in the course of a day (I typically use about 40 kWh per day, and often generate 130+kWh per day). I've been thinking I'd really like to find something to suck up that extra power, because the monthly net billing plan I have means that once I've zeroed out my bill for the month, I get no benefit from additional production.

As deployment of renewables continue, this "problem" of what do do with excess capacity will increase and spread.

However, if power for the mini-datacenter is only intermittently available, the cost of the hardware effectively increases on a per-token (or per FLOP or however you want to measure the system's work) basis... and hardware cost is already going to be a tough problem for this kind of deployment. Even if it could count on 100% utilization, it will struggle to compete with large datacenters for exactly the reason we build large datacenters: Economies of scale. Enclosures (buildings), cooling, maintenance... all of the overheads fall with scale.

Intermittent utilization just makes that problem worse.

On balance, I'm skeptical that this makes sense, unless the cost of the hardware falls significantly. It seems like that's a baseline requirement for a lot of the alternative datacenter ideas, though: orbital datacenters, floating datacenters, etc.

Comment Re: scares me too much ill never do that (Score 1, Insightful) 75

Please remember the APA voted to torture and destroy the minds of people who wore Casio watches, and assisted in that torture program. (All anyone needed to be arrested under the bounty program was to be in a suspicious area or to have a highly accurate clock or watch. No actual evidence of wrongdoing was required.)

Many practitioners had absolutely no problems with abusing their knowledge and ability, not against actual terrorists or even people from the same nation as the terrorists, but against easy targets. The banality of evil, demonstrated to a high degree.

If an organisation can commit acts of utter depravity and evil on whim, then a whim is all that is needed.

This doesn't mean it will happen, but the APA has shown no obvious signs of maturity or rationality, only excuses. And that's not a good position to be in, when the head of state has licensed ICE to gun down people without cause and has promoted the wellbeing of diseases like measles over that of the citizens.

I don't believe forcible injections are likely, but I'm also not going to say that psychiatrists have been earning trust these past 26 years. Personally, I think forcible injections won't happen, but not because psychiatrists have discovered ethics. Rather, because it just isn't practical.

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