I am guessing that it’s different because they spend weeks and months on the ship. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too keen to enlist in the navy if it required not having my personal phone for months on end. They gotta make some concessions in policy to keep everyone sane.

Or maybe they’re banned but people sneak them in anyway.

Edit: then again, if they just snuck them in, they wouldn’t have any connection. They need wifi. So it’s probably allowed.

(not a real answer) corporate art / art by committee

If I’m near an open window, I might have an intrusive thought of “what if I accidentally chuck my phone out the window?”

I have no idea how anything like that could happen accidentally. I grip my phone tighter.

I recommend this video by Sixty Symbols, the same production of Numberphile and Computerphile in case you’ve heard of them.

But basically, when atoms are close enough to each other they attract each other (van der Waals force), which can cause things to stick to each other even without chemical bonds.

Lol, awesome.

Annoyingly I noticed that the status page only shows the past 22 minutes to 1 hour for the primary services. I have no idea why, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to look further back. But the badge says 99.45% uptime over the last 14 days, so that’s probably right.

Meanwhile, over at Codeberg: https://status.codeberg.org/

They achieve all of this using 100% open-source infrastructure. If I remember correctly, it’s all running on Codeberg-owned hardware as well, not some rented servers.

https://codeberg.org/about

I’m not from the US. And I think the way they’re trying to tackle it is stupid, roughly for the reasons you say. But on a surface level it’s good that there is some action taken on this matter.

The country does matter. It allows oversight and regulation to a greater extent. And if it turns out that there’s a backdoor in a router, if it’s made locally there will be someone to criminally charge, whereas if it’s made in China or wherever, that would be impossible.

Then again, it’s the US, so they’d probably charge some random worker instead of the CEO who demanded the back door be implemented.

To be honest, this is probably justified. My knee-jerk reaction was “oh look, USA in antagonizing everyone else again”, but consumer routers are a really significant security junction which historically has always been somewhat neglected. I only read a few sentences before the paywall stopped me, but sounds like they’ll whitelist any foreign manufacturers that are legitimate.

Yes, it’s gonna have corruption and bribes all over it… But on paper, it’s justified.

Running… For now.

I think what you’re seeing is that the OP of the post is rendered differently from everyone else. But what OP is referring to is how that one specific user that they replied to has his username in purple, instead of the white everyone else has.

It appears that we have been graced with the presence of the lead developer of Voyager himself! I wonder how many times he gets this question and if he regrets giving his user a special color :P

Okay, don’t get me wrong I’m impressed and I also enjoy macgyvering things like that… But if it’s for a work thing, surely it can’t be that hard to go out and buy a new cable from any old shop nearby? I would think the cable is common enough to still be in stock in a lot of places, even if it’s ancient.

So, uhh, are you good and comfortable at using the mouse with your right hand? If so you have no reason to use your left. I have a left-handed friend who has always exclusivity used his right for the mouse. Ain’t no law saying your mouse hand must be your writing hand. Not to mention the benefits: it’s the default setting on any system, and there are lots of great quality asymmetric mouses that only fit the right hand.

I’m not trying to change you, by all means if you like the trackpad more power to you. Just curious why you’d try to mouse with your left if you’ve already learned to use it with your right.

I think it’s an excellent compromise for being a portable PC. If I’m going to university, to a study space or a lecture, a laptop is freaking fantastic.

Also all laptops universally have one killer feature that nearly no desktop PC has: a built-in UPS. If power goes out, the laptop just keeps chugging along on battery power, giving you an extra few hours of work.

It’s not my workstation of choice by any means, but I wouldn’t call it miserable. It’s fine.

TIL, thank you. Still not gonna say it like that.

Hebrew and English. I have tried once or twice to learn a third language but I just don’t have the discipline for it.

Hebrew is my native tongue, and English I speak pretty much at a native level simply by lots and lots of being online and watching TV from a young age, and often chatting with my sister in English for no real reason. I’ve even got a pretty convincing American accent. In hindsight I would have preferred most British accents, but I can’t seem to change it now (refer to the aforementioned discipline issue).

I still regularly talk to two of my friends in English, still for no apparent reason. We just switch between Hebrew and English arbitrarily.

Yeah, of course. I think I was misunderstood, which is probably why I got so many downvotes.

Most tasks are possible (and often trivial, given access to the right library) with traditional programming. If it’s possible to do them this way, this is by far the best approach.

Of the things that are not reasonably doable this way, like determining whether a photo is of a bird as in the comic, quite a lot of them are possible nowadays with machine learning (AKA “AI”), and often trivial given access to the right pre-trained model. And in this realm, I would say success rates are very often higher than that. Image recognition is insanely good.

What I’m asking is, what’s a task that’s virtually impossible both with programming and with machine learning?

“Mission critical” tasks which require very high and provable reliability, such as autonomous driving cars, technically fit this question but I think it’s ignoring the point of the question.

And if you were going to mention counterexamples where specially crafted images get mislabeled by AI: this is akin to attacking vulnerabilities in traditional software, which have always existed. If you’re making a low-stakes app or a game, this doesn’t matter.

It’s more logical than Linux’s version numbering system:

Does the major version number (4.x vs 5.x) mean anything?

No. The major version number is incremented when the number after the dot starts looking “too big.” There is literally no other reason.

https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

What would be a “nearly impossible” task in this post-AI world? Short of the provably impossible tasks like the busy beaver problem (and even then, you would be able to make an algorithm that covers a subset of the problem space), I really can’t think of anything.

This is the pedantry I came here for. 5/5