It seems like it would be so much easier to ship the tzdb algorithm as a single C library that could do arbitrary computation.

Instead, the authors prefer to use their own domain language — source files with a compiler to a binary format with a reference parser implementation. The thrust of this article is that’s mostly good enough but their domain language doesn’t include lunar information.

The downside would be size and runtime efficiency. I’m guessing tzdata is built the way it is so that it can be extremely small and efficient rather than large and, computationally speaking, comprehensive. You can run it on an Arm M0 as well as an Apple M2.

A lot of people appreciate the fact that whenever some random government decides to change of rule of their timezone (such as announcing DST changes), they only get a file update where the file is not powerful enough to be Turing complete instead of a C library update.

That’s a great point. For me though, these updates come via the same OS vendor channels that provided updated binaries too, so it’s not like I’m dodging a recompile.

See also: monads.

Some things you just have to understand on your own terms, in your own time, and no amount of coaching can move you any faster towards enlightenment than your brain will allow.

I too thought that immediately but I’d encourage you to read on (if you haven’t already) as the rest of the article — a list of bolded statements about good engineers with further explanation in each paragraph — is pretty solid in my opinion.

Not that it helps you but the vomit smell is the butyric acid coming from the smooth, soft-touch plastic coating. I’ve seen the same problem with Kindle bodies and power tool handles.

Idea: achieve massive power provision by transmitting energy from a base station to the spacecraft using space lightning.

Transmitting power is not a new idea: lasers are the go-to example for this. Powering the craft with solar energy is another theoretical way of doing it.

My idea on the other hand is different. Imagine spooling a long wire behind the space ship and just transmit electricity to it the same way you transmit power to your hoover. Except instead of sending power up a wire, send it up as bolts of lighting through the ionised gas trail your ship is trailing behind it.

Unless you have two beams, it would have to AC. You'd have to keep the series capacitance low enough that a significant amount of power is conducted (which might kill it). Remember that free space impedance is 377ohms sqrt(mu0/eps0) so non-photonic power likes to become Lambertian radiation.

I don’t think it leaves behind a trail of ionized gas. The positive and negative ions get recombined.

Key your locks alike, then you only need one key! I actually had to find something to put on my house-keyring because it felt so empty being a single key.

The downside to this is if your locks are cheapo pin tumbler locks then if an attacker steals the lock itself it is trivial for them to take your lock apart and reverse engineer a key that works in all your other locks (think crazy ex or wacko, rather than burglar.)

If you key your mailbox padlock and your front door alike and the wacko steals the padlock, they can take it home and figure out the code to your house.

My home has three entry points, one with a porch, and all four doors have keyed alike locks. It’s great!

> Key your locks alike, then you only need one key!

Seconded!

If you aren't up to rekeying locks yourself it is an easy job for a locksmith and shouldn't be too expensive.

If rekeying isn't sufficient because your locks use different shaped keys and so you'll have to get at least some new locks to put everything on a common key, and you are up to doing lock replacements yourself (which unless you've got unusual locks is usually one of the easiest DIY projects), I'd consider using Kwikset SmartKey for the new locks.

Despite what the name suggests these are not electronic locks. They are entirely mechanical, using a normal key. They came out in 2007 before "Smart" had become associated with shoving microprocessors into places they don't belong.

If you want to rekey a SmartKey lock you simply take the current key, insert it, rotate 90° clockwise, insert a tool Kwikset provides through a little hole in the front to press a button, and that releases the key so you can remove it without having to rotate the cylinder back to 0°. Then you can put in a different key, rotate the cylinder 180° counter-clockwise, then back to 0° and remove that key.

The lock is now rekeyed to that second key.

So, just buy your news locks from Home Depot or Lowe's without having to worry about getting locks that are keyed to the same key, install them, look at all the keys they came with and pick which one you want to be the common key, and then go around and rekey them all to that using the procedure described above.

Keep the other keys. They can be useful if you have a guest stay over (assuming you have more than one door to your house). Rekey one of the doors to one of those other keys and give that to the guest. When they leave you can rekey back to your common key.

Kwikset also makes SmartKey padlocks if you want to go all in on the one key thing.

Kwikset SmartKey locks are trivial to force open with a flat screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

That was generation 1. I think they fixed that in generation 2 or 3. Current generation is 5.

The Kwikset "SmartKey" lock sets are easily re-keyed by just using an existing and a new key, and a little poker tool. The first generation of them had some problems, but the second generation is reasonably secure, as far as any 5 pin entry set goes.

Why would they need to steal the lock? I don't think it's uncommon knowledge that most locks are pretty easy to pick quickly :/

You’re right in that the only reason to offline decode the lock is to either create a legitimate key (or DoS your opponent’s wallet by forcing them to re-key the remaining N-1 locks.)

It is left as an exercise to the imagination as to when it an attacker might find advantage in:

  t_steal_mailbox +
  t_decode_lock +
  t_keyed_front_door_entry

being less than:

  t_pick_front_door

as well as solving a similar inequality for the probability of being caught in both scenarios.

It’s a good question. I would ask…

(1) Sure, it can tell you how to write new code in response to a prompt about your current local problem, but

(2) can it reason about an entire code base of known and unknown problems, and use that basis to figure out solutions to the unknowns such that you delete code and collapse complexity.

The software equivalent of realising that if you subtract xy from this:

  x2 + 3xy + y2

You can turn it into a much neater version:

  (x + y)2 + xy

…but doing that with 100k tokens of code instead of a handful of algebra tokens.

A fun thing I like to do every so often is to try to break away from the natural notion that space has a horizon and that instead force myself to feel that it continues equally in all directions.

We’re naturally inclined to be ok with giant distances on the horizon. It’s natural to put more emphasis on that part of the world. Hold up your thumb to the horizon and notice how many things fit alongside it compared to your thumb help downwards against the ground.

On the surface of our planet the up direction isn’t usually interesting and the down direction isn’t even there. It is therefore quite horrifying (“fun”) to imagine space going down forever.

Yes. I like to look at the moon and think of it as being "down" and I'm the one at an angle. Rather than "there's nothing under me, just the ground" it's "there's nothing under me, just nothing forever."

Many years ago I read some sci-fi novel, and in it was a sub-plot of a warring alien species that started destroying anything and everything they came across in their travels.

The story went that their local system was in some sort of a dust cloud, so they had no stars visible from their planet. At some point, that cloud somehow dissipated. On the planet, one of the inhabitants bothered to look up one night, and it hated everything it saw. So the race developed a space program to go out there and destroy it all.

For some reason I think it was Adams' H2G2, but the tone of my recollection does not quite feel on-brand for those stories. Not sure.

The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.

History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.

"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

Yes!! Thank you for the quote. My memory was clearly a bit off, but I got the gist of it right.

You are right, it is from h2g2.

It's the planet Krikkit, which is a major part of Life, The Universe and Everything, the third book in the series.

What is the probability that two raindrops land at the same time?

It is pitch dark. Could one raindrop survive long enough to at least hear the sound of another landing before it disintegrates?

Is the time between the drop striking the plane and the drop smashing apart so short that no drop ever hears another, or even sees evidence that any drop other than itself ever existed?

We should have some sort of time constrained form of assessment in a controlled environment, free from access to machines, so we can put these students under some kind of thorough examination.

(“Thorough examination” as a term is too long though — let’s just call them “thors”.)

—

In seriousness the above only really applies at University level, where you have adults who are there with the intention to learn and then receive a final certification that they did indeed learn. Who cares if some of them cheat on their homework? They’ll fail their finals and more fool them.

With children though, there’s a much bigger responsibility on teachers to raise them as moral beings who will achieve their full potential. I can see why high schools get very anxious about raising kids to be something other than prompt engineers.

>there’s a much bigger responsibility on teachers to raise them as moral beings who will achieve their full potential.

There's nothing moral about busywork for busywork's sake. If their entire adult life they'll have access to AI, then school will prepare them much better for life if it lets them use AI and teaches them how to use it best and how to do the things AI can't do.