Wife’s birthday tomorrow, and she wants rid of the Tories as a present. Fortunately, that’s what I was going to get her anyway.

Think you’re understating it there. Network call takes milliseconds at best. Function call, if the CPU has correctly predicted the indirect branch, is basically free, but even if it hasn’t then you’re talking nanoseconds. It’s slower by millions of times.

I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?

Fine advice generally, but I don’t know that many Panams or Reginas…

Well now. A few things, here:

• there are not 9 × 9 × 9 × 9 × … possible ways to play. After the first move, 8 squares remain, and so on, so there’s at most 9 × 8 × 7 × … = 9! = 362880 ways that the game can be played, ignoring the fact that most of those can be eliminated as reflections and rotations, or as win positions before you fill the whole board.

• we don’t care how we got there. Each square can either be blank, a cross, or a nought, so 3^9 combos = 19683, and most of those are illegal, as only the boards where there’s (one or zero) more crosses than noughts are good. And you don’t need to store ‘the computer’s move’, just jump directly to letting the player go again. Let’s guess we need at most a quarter of that.

• we could have created a single web page with 5k anchor elements on it back in the HTML 1.0 days, ignoring the fact that it would have taken a while to download on our 28.8K modems. That wouldn’t have been 170 Mb of unnecessary tagging, even with the ‘lay it out with tables’ style we had at the time.

Google do seem to have a predilection for reinventing the past, poorly. I hear that their bonuses are based on inventing ‘new’ things, though, so it’s in their interest to pass it off?

Speaking as someone who has to use Google Cloud Platform most days; they also do some horrific stuff, and their documentation and support are miles behind the AWS and Azure equivalents. And having worse documentation than Azure is quite the achievement.

Was making a joke with you, about how much the Russian army loses in corruption and how their prices are not to be believed. Wasn’t having a go at you. Try to be a bit more chill?

By the time £3.999m has been siphoned off on bribes and corruption necessary overheads, you should be happy with the coathanger and a car battery, comrade.

No-one takes a bribe quite like FIFA.

Remove the update manager? Remove the bootloader and all kernels if you want to - you might if you’re preparing a container image, it won’t stop you. Remove glibc and init? Fine, if that’s what you want - might have no need for those if you’re prepping it up for embedded.

The price of having a computer that does exactly what it’s told is that you have to know what to tell it. But that’s well worth while.

Yeah - pure functions and immutable data aren’t always the right answer, but appreciating that they’re damn good most of the time is a good first step. Writing obvious code that does exactly what it appears to do at first glance and not one thing more? Your colleagues will thank you when they have to work with your stuff.

The side channel resistance includes such matters as ensuring that the cypher takes the same amount of time, regardless of the key, but also such super-sneaky insights as the amount of power used to run the cypher, which can be measured from the CPU temperature. Every bit of the cypher that you can be sure of makes it easier to guess the rest. And even if you coded this algorithm in assembly, the CPU will interpret it as microcode and run that, potentially leaving you vulnerable - this is not straightforward stuff.

Like vzq says, implementing this properly is for a cross-disciplinary team of experts in their fields.

Don’t think so in this case - we were all expecting him to be assassinated somehow, and the old ‘sushi dinner with a nice cup of tea after’ wasn’t very likely. Should have had a sweepstake on his life expectancy - guessing 60 days would have been pretty impressive.

Doesn’t matter what the question is, this is always the correct answer.

“We squeezed rocks and filled them with lightning, so that they can think incredibly fast but with no imagination at all.”

Yeah - early measurements of the magnetic moment of a muon aren’t coming out as per theory. Could be the setup, could be a fifth fundamental force, could be that someone’s fucked the sums on the four that we know about, could be invisible gremlins loading up the particles with slightly charged nothingburgers to foul up the experiment.

Only good answer, really - can only answer in the terms of other senses, however, since colour is meaningless too: “It’s like being able to hear the texture of things, even at a great distance.”

Could also be that the Bluetooth kernel module is a loadable one, and if you’ve updated the kernel (which will usually take place pretty soon after a first install) then you won’t have the matching folder of modules to load up until you restart. Arch is a bugger for this - I’ve an external mouse that works fine if you keep it plugged in during a kernel update, but it won’t be recognised after an update until you restart again. Not a big deal - you can choose when to update.

I think it’s also very interesting from a ‘pure science’ background. Superconductivity isn’t ‘perfect conductivity’ - it isn’t that we’ve found ways of making normal resistance less and less until eventually we made it to zero. Instead, there’s certain materials that, as the temperature falls / pressure rises, that all of a sudden the resistance just disappears completely. The electrons pair up in a different way from usual, and we see different properties, like completely ejecting all magnetic fields.

They tend to have a ‘breakdown current’ above which they stop superconducting, so it’s not like they’re the instant answer to all of our power distribution woes. They could help in places, but they also tend to be amazingly expensive to manufacture, so they’re no magic bullet. Their magnetic properties might enable us to make things like rotating hard disks with truly absurd storage capacities - you wouldn’t need much superconducting material for each one.

We’ve had superconductors that operate at liquid-nitrogen temperatures for quite a while, which makes them easy enough to study in a laboratory. Having room-temperature ones makes it even easier, and might let us understand them even better. This one sounds a bit impractical for wide-scale use (it’s a powder) but might let us develop more useful ones.

I don’t quite understand where this money is going, either. Does Australia not have existing swimming pools and athletics tracks with grandstand seating, near to some existing large hotels? It seems like any large sporting event (see also, the world cup and the Olympics) demands that everything be built brand spanking new for a one-off tournament. Completely pissing money away, couldn’t agree more with cancelling it.

I’d consider a sample size of 170 to be pretty large, if the sample was drawn with perfect randomness from the population. But this one wasn’t, it was self-selected. Also wasn’t a clinical trial, and while they seem to know what they’re doing with setting up the questionnaire, I would assume it would result in larger measurement error, which would need more samples to be able to correct for.

Completely agree with you though - the conclusions that it seems reasonable to draw from this are ‘not much, really’. Seems to disagree with the results of a larger study by many of the same authors, too, which say that companion animals did result in a smaller decline in mental health during lockdown.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0239397