They have BP units that compensate for this. Basically it will take a bunch of readings automatically. The doctor will put the cuff on your arm, have you lie down on the exam bed, then start the machine. He will then leave the room and see other patients.

The machine will over the course of half an hour to an hour, take a reading. It will do it relatively randomly every few minutes. All you have to do is lie there and close your eyes and relax. This will not be the absolute more accurate reading, but it can see what your blood pressure gets to without a doctor present and in a position that should lower it to the lowest possible value (i.e., you're on the threshold of sleeping)

After that the doctor will get a strip of paper that has all the readings it took over the time and can see what you got to. It's just you and the machine in the room. The machine doesn't make any noise other than the usual sounds it makes when it performs a reading, so the anxiety will raise it for the first few readings, then it will fall as you get used to it and likely also wander into a nap.

One other thing I found is exercise - I walk to my cardiologist's office which is a 20 minute walk. By the time I get there all the anxiety I feel has melted away because the exercise has taken the edge off. Give me 10 minutes in the waiting room and my heart has slowed back down to resting rate.

I get the unpleasant impression that we are doing a corporate reenactment of that period in European history where basically everyone was ruled by Habsburgs who were incestuous and incompetent in equal measure.

I currently work hybrid. It reduces my effective pay by around 10%, which is a hell of a cut. It gains me nothing, since all meetings - even when we're all in the same room - are via teams, because company policy.

I see no added value from visiting the office.

Perhaps more troublingly; they'll allow facebook to see what the people you see do.

My good-faith advice to anyone who is considering letting zuck into their refrigerator just to solve the crushing problem of what to cook with available ingredients or whatever would be "probably not worth it"; but that's ultimately a them problem one way or the other.

The trouble is that much of the pitch here is that you are supposed to provide footage as you wander around; merrily making the you problem everyone else's problem as you do so. And, yes, 'no expectation of privacy, etc, etc.' but there's a fairly obvious distinction between "in principle, it wouldn't be illegal to hire a PI to follow you around with a camera while you are in public", which involves a typically prohibitive cost in practice and "you paid them to upload geolocated footage, nice going asshole", where the economics of surveillance change pretty radically.

If people want to outource their thinking to facebook themselves I'd have to be feeling fairly paternalistic to intervene; but given that the normalization of these is, pretty explicitly, about facebook having eyes on everyone I can only hope that 'glasshole' continues to be a genuine social risk to any adopters.

Anyone who puts their money behind wildfire smoke as the leading public health threat of 2050 is just showing their abject lack of faith in the potential of malice and incompetence. Who are these faithless degenerates to tell us that we can't re-introduce enough trivially controllable infectious diseases or deregulate enough toxin smelters to outmatch some trees?

Sorry if I wasn't clear; that's the part I have deep concerns about getting done. My impression has been that(while, in theory, people are supposed to be averse to spending money) it's much easier to get funding for novel or sexy initiatives, especially if they promise to be magic-bullet solutions, than it is to push through money for boring stuff, even if it's low risk and abundantly proven; and the risk these recommendations address seems to sit firmly on the unfavorable side of that.

"We need to do a bunch of fiddly changes to eliminate quirks of build reproducibility, and generally have more eyes on important software" is not a terribly intimidating project in terms of novelty or risk; but "basically, just spend more on reasonably competent, reasonably diligent, software engineers than it seems like you strictly need to, in order to make improvements that outside observers could easily mistake for status quo, forever" is a deeply unsexy project. It's a much better project than "Agentic digital transformation" or something; but that's the sort of likely failure that someone looking to spend company money to look like a thought leader on linkedin will practically trample you in their eagerness to approve.

As best I can tell; most of the complaining about freeloaders is sideshow in the battle over who deserves subsidies, not objections in principle. I'm less clear on whether there's also a positive correlation between whining about the subsidies going to people who aren't you and actively seeking them yourself; or whether the cases of people who do both are disproportionately irksome and so appear more common than a dispassionate analysis of the numbers would reveal them to be.

That Onions seem to have antibiotic properties, are good for cuts, and bacteria does not seem to grow on them. After I cut up onions, I personally don't consider the knife "dirty", so I do a quick rinse and let it dry. I don't think twice about it. I think that it is cool that someone is researching more ways to take advantage of that property of Onions.

It shouldn't be really all that surprising. They're root vegetables, and that nice meaty bulb grows in the dark, where it's constantly under attack by bacteria, fungi and other things trying to get at the stuff within. And also, well, moisture doesn't help matters, since wet soil full of organic matter (fertilizer, for example) automatically brings on the colonies of things.

That plants also can protect against UV isn't unusual as well - when you think about it, plants are stuck outside and during the long hot summer days, they're exposed to relentless sunlight that they don't have much choice of seeking shade. So plants naturally need mechanisms to prevent UV from destroying their DNA and causing the plant equivalent of cancer (especially as lots of plants are long lived).

So they've evolved lots of mechanisms - photosynthesis is but one of them (which requires stuff on the redder end of the visible spectrum - plants have mechanisms to convert UV and blue-green light to red light for photosynthesis, but you're wasting most of the energy since it's converting a photon to another photon at lower energy). This is why photosynthesis efficiency is rather low (around 6% or so) - most of the light needs to be downconverted from green-blue-UV to red and the process wastes the energy. Which is fine, as most plants get more than enough sunlight that there was no need to be more efficient.

They also have protective mechanisms around DNA repair because well, those chloroplasts (the things that do photosynthesis in the cell) don't cover everything so UV will still hit DNA and alter it.

It would not surprise me that plants also evolved coatings that protect on UV - root plants may be surprisingly close to the surface, so the bulb could get exposed to sunlight as well, and you don't want those to burn or you could kill the plant. So evolving something to block it at the skin of the bulb seems advantageous.

Wine runs in user space. I don't see how Wine could ever run drivers, such as peripheral drivers required by things like the iPhone sync functionality of iTunes or kernel-level anti-cheat required by major online games supporting pickup matches with strangers.

People who use software that requires Windows are "forced" to buy Windows along with a new PC. An OEM Windows 10 license that came with a PC is locked to that PC. A new PC purchased to replace a PC that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 will come with a new Windows license.

Start with stage0 (whose binary seed is about 1 KiB) and GNU Mes. Use mescc to build tinycc, then GCC 2.95, then GCC 4.7, then fairly modern GCC, and then use mrustc to build some version of Rust. The time-consuming part is that each version of the Rust toolchain uses fairly new features in the Rust language, so yes, you'll probably have to build the world a couple dozen times starting with the most recent version supported by mrustc.

If I had to guess, we let this happen by the USA electing George W. Bush in 2000. His incoming Attorney General settled United States v. Microsoft Corp., 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), with a wrist slap instead of a Windows division breakup.

You probably guessed correctly: equitable relief in the form of an injunction against Disney bringing a trademark lawsuit. I haven't read the complaint, but I'd be surprised if it didn't cite Kellogg and Dastar.

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided a few cases about the interaction between the Lanham Act, which inclues trademark law, and exclusive rights pursuant to the Copyright Clause. Key cases includes Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938), and Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003). In both cases, the Court ruled that the Lanham Act cannot be used to extend the effective term of exclusive rights in an invention whose patent has expired or a work whose copyright has expired. Disney's legal counsel ought to be familiar with the latter case, seeing as it involved a company that is now a subsidiary of Disney.

From the article:

The Go project recently arranged for Go itself to be completely reproducible given only the source code, meaning that although a build needs some computer running some operating system and some earlier Go toolchain, none of those choices matters."

[...]

The Multics review is famous for pointing out the possibility of adding a back door to a compiler to insert back doors in critical system programs during compilation [...]. Reading the report inspired Ken Thompson to implement exactly that attack on an early Unix system, probably in early 1975. He later explained the attack in his 1983 Turing Award lecture, published in Communications as "Reflections on Trusting Trust."

David A. Wheeler described a defense against a back door that propagates through the compiler in a 2009 PhD dissertation titled Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling . Diverse double-compiling (DDC) involves choosing two or more other independently developed compilers A and B for a language, bootstrapping compiler C from source code through each of them (building C with A or B and then building C with itself), and ensuring that the output is byte-identical. This relies on previous effort to make builds reproducible.

However, DDC also relies on having more than one implementation of a particular language. Go and Rust each have only one widely used implementation. This means someone trying to wrangle a supply chain has to do one of three things: trust a particular old version of a compiler not to have a back door, compile every version since the dawn of the language (such as when Rust was prototyped in OCaml), or implement a usable subset of the language in a more widely implemented language. This is why mrustc is so important, as it's a way to skip forward by several years' worth of versions when bootstrapping a Rust compiler.

From the article: "The only problem left is key distribution: The verifier must know who should have signed the code. [...] To the extent that questions of identity can be solved, having authors sign their software can provide even stronger guarantees." It goes on to describe how Debian and Go package repositories include the expected hash value of a package, so that package downloading tools can reject a package that has been replaced.

However, the approach used by Debian to verify developers' identity, that of new developers physically meeting existing trusted developers at key signing parties to exchange OpenPGP public keys, doesn't scale very well. A lot of contributors are disconnected from the strongly connected set of the web of trust because they cannot travel to key signing parties. This can be because of cost, work or child care scheduling, regulatory restrictions related to geopolitics, or regulatory restrictions related to public health (most recently during 2020-2021). These disconnected contributors must forever rely on the bottleneck of "sponsors" (trusted developers who forward packages from the maintainer to the distribution) to get their work into a distribution.

And sponsors are indeed a bottleneck. From the article: "And then you need to be ready to update to a fixed version of that dependency." When a package's upstream maintainer releases an updated version of a package, the package's sponsor in a particular distribution may be too busy with other tasks to handle it the same day. This can mean that there is no available labor to forward the update to the rolling distribution and backport the fix to the version of the package in a stable distribution.