The tiles mentioned are still around 20%, the headline is just misleading.

These rooftiles have major downsides as compared to regular rooftiles. You’d be much better off just installing regular rooftiles and putting solar panels on top of that. Like most people are already doing today. The only reason to go for these kinds of solar rooftiles is because of the esthetic. They make poor rooftiles and poor solar panels at the same time. And they are more expensive than any other solution.

I doubt these will ever become practical, let alone standard on all roofs. And neither should we really want to.

You are repeating marketing. First of all Polymarket isn’t against this, they have openly welcomed insider trading. They claim insiders have they best information and thus make the prediction better. Second, when we actually look at the data, it turns out sites like Polymarket are only marginally better than actual guessing. It has nothing to do with predicting anything, it’s just straight up betting. There have been a couple of outliers, but those turned out to be because of insiders heavily betting. They skewed the results a lot and that’s not prediction, those people knew the outcome. Third, these kinds of companies heavily influence the betting themselves, often “buying the other side of the contract”. This raises the stakes and increases engagement. Having it appear one side is favored, means people tend to pile on.

There’s plenty of good stories and videos about how fucked up these “prediction markets” actually are. John Oliver just did an episode on it. I would personally recommend this Patrick Boyle video for a good overview: https://youtu.be/e0nsou-1Q2k

Tldr: It’s all a huge scam and rigged betting.

Akshually the Moon is basically dark gray / black, it has an albedo of somewhere around 0.12. This means it reflects around 12% of the light that falls onto it. This is comparable to blacktop asphalt as we see on roads in our daily lives.

Of course there are many different kinds of rocks on the Moon, so it would depend on what sort of rock you are looking at.

And as for the colors in this image, that is most likely due to something called chromatic aberration. This is an artifact of the lens used. For astrophotography some people use special lenses that don’t suffer from this effect.

I use Arch BTW.

Like just huge arches instead of windows or even doors, Arch is all you need.

I’ll be honest, I don’t actually know what all the physics in those papers means. That’s not my job and not my expertise.

Well maybe not the right dude to ask then?

My 2 cents: we’ll never get to any sort of practical quantum computer size. As size increases, decoherence becomes a bigger problem. This is currently fixed by having more qubits to compensate. But as the size grows, the amount of qubits needed just to compensate for decoherence grows faster. So there’s a practical limit on how large of a machine is possible. And it isn’t like a smaller machine is just slower, it actually simply can’t do any of the cryptography breaking stuff.

From my understanding decoherence is a fundamental part of reality, which can’t be helped. But who knows, there might be some breakthrough that allows for it to work. It might also be impossible given the laws of nature. And what I gather it’s also impossible to prove it can’t be done.

So that’s why quantum computers have been in this limbo state for years now. They might be just around the corner or they might never exist.

In the security world people are worried stuff is stored today, for it to be decrypted in 20 years time. So there is a push to think about this and take precautions. This seems smart, not because they think quantum computers will exist, but just as a precaution in case it turns out they do.

With stories like this I always wonder about how much guidance the bot was given. They mention a whole bunch of tokens and someone actively guiding the thing “to get it unstuck from dead ends”. What did the bot actually do? Did it do anything? Or was it guided to write an already known script for an already known exploit.

A lot of times it’s presented as telling the bot: “Hack this software” and it does the thing. This one is at least a bit more honest about saying it also took a lot of hours and prompting. I’m not sure the bot actually did anything, it’s just a really really inefficient way of typing.

Very good! Your spidey senses are working perfectly. Hey I want to comment this calculation, why don’t I move it into a function so the name can explain what it does. Good call!

Sometimes the algorithm is inlined for performance, sometimes it’s a class with a bunch of functions that as a whole is primarily based on an algorithm, so comments might make sense in those cases. Most of the times it’s a library, so the name of the library kinda gives it away and hopefully has good documentation as well.

Asking an LLM to add comments is actually pretty much the worst thing you can do. Comments aren’t meant to be documentation and LLMs have a habit of writing documentation in the comments. Documentation is supposed to be in the documentation, not in the code. LLMs are often trained on things like tutorials, where super obvious statements are commented to allow people to learn and follow along. In actual code you absolutely do not do this, obvious statements should be obvious by themselves. At best it’s extra work to read and maintain the comments for obvious statements, at worst they are incorrect and misleading. I’ve worked on systems where the comments and the code weren’t in line with each other and it was a continual guess if the comment is the way it was supposed to work, or if the code is correct and the comment wrong.

So when do you actually add comments? That’s actually very hard, something people argue about all the time and a bit of an art form to get right. For example if I have some sort of complex calculation, but it’s based on a well known algorithm, I might comment the name of that algorithm. That way I can recognize it myself right away and someone that doesn’t know it can look it up right away. Another good indicator for comments are magic numbers. It’s often smart to put these in constants, so you can at least name them, but a small little comment to indicate why it’s there and the source can be nice. Or when there is a calculation and there’s a +1 for example in there somewhere, one might ask why the +1, then a little comment is nice to explain why.

Comments should also serve like a spidey sense for developers. Whenever you are writing comments or have the urge to add some comments somewhere, it might be an indicator the code is messy and needs to be refactored. Comments should be short and to the point, whenever you start writing sentences, either start writing documentation or look at the code why it’s required to explain so much and how to fix that.

Another good use for comments is to warn away instincts for future devs. For example in a system I worked on there is a large amount of code that seems like it’s duplicate. So a new dev might look at it and see a good place to start refactoring and remove the duplicated code. However the duplication was intentional for performance reasons, so a little comment saying the dupe is intentional is a good idea.

I’ve also seen comments used to describe function signatures, although most modern languages have official ways of doing that these days. These also might border on documentation, so I’d be careful with that.

LLMs also have a habit of writing down responses to prompts in the comments. For example the LLM might have written some code, you say: Hey that’s wrong, we shouldn’t set x to y, we should set it to z. And the LLM writes a comment like // X now set to Z as requested. These kinds of comments make no sense to people reading the code in the future.

Keep in mind comments are there to make it easier for the next guy to work on the code, and often that next guy is you. So getting it right is important and hard, but very much worth while. What I like to do is write code one day and then go back and read it the next day or a few days later. And not the commit, with the diff and the description, the actual files beginning to end. When I think something is weird or stands out, I’ll go back and edit the code and perhaps add comments.

IMHO LLMs are terrible at writing code, it’s often full of mistakes and oversights, but one of the worst parts is the comments. I can tell code was AI generated right away by the comments and those comments being present are a good indicator the “dev” didn’t bother to actually read and correct the code.

The ol’ heckeroonies

The thing about a games store like Steam or Epic isn’t the software itself. Steam has shown having a good client is a large part of it, but it isn’t the most important part. The most important part is the negotiations with the publishers and game developers to have them publish the games on that store. There is a whole lot of legal and pricing stuff involved. Another important part is a large CDN around the world to deliver the data to customers at speed.

Many large companies have tried pouring millions into this and haven’t had a lot of success. There is so much involved and large market forces to contend with.

As for just having something to manage the games on your system there is Lutris. It allows you to easily manage different game libraries and individual games. Plus tools like emulators and such to run older games for example. It’s fully open source and an initiative well worth sponsering.

This meme is brought to you by math nerds! “I swear we have a sense of humor”

keeps pushing AI into anything and everything realizes this fucks up their business model MFW

Thank you!

It’s a boomer world, you are just living in it. And as you know the boomers are the main characters, you are just an NPC

I started out Linux with Suse 5 and when version 6 rolled around I bought it. For several 5 and 6 versions I had the physical box set with a thick book and a bunch of cd’s. Plus of course the boot floppy, because booting from CDs was only a thing in dreams. I didn’t have very much internet at the time, so physical media ruled supreme.

When version 6 was released it included KDE 1.0 and I was very much interested. Unfortunately hardware support was lacking and software was incomplete at best. So I spent months trying to get X Windows running at all and then running without crashing. When I finally got that black and white checkerboard pattern with the familiar X mouse cursor some tears were shed. I could move my serial grey ball mouse and the cursor would move, and it didn’t even crash.

I started with some small utilities and the basics were working. But without a window manager like KDE it’s not much fun. Unfortunately that also didn’t work. But I knew C, C++, multiple forms of assembly and a bunch of other programming languages. My sneakernet version of Ralph Brown’s Interrupt List was my holy bible, hacking all sorts of stuff together on my machine. The Suse distro came with everything needed to develop software and the sources were included on the CDs. So I started hacking and sunk so much time into it.

We didn’t have internet beyond expensive and slow dial-up. But I did have a treasure trove of books, a lot from my grandpa, some from my dad and my own collection was coming along nicely as well. With a lot of hacks and persistence I got KDE somewhat working. Not long after that I switched over to Debian and used Gnome on that. I got into QT software development for a while. These days I use Arch btw and use KDE, absolutely love it!

I often think back fondly of all of those nights and weekends I spent on my little machine. Getting stuff running just for the fun of it. These days the world moves so fast (or I’m just old). I wouldn’t mind slowing everything down and spending some years getting KDE 1.0 to work on my old machine.

Service guarantees citizenship

Fuck you, I’ll be shitty for at least 2 years more than this guy, give me the 10M!

Wait what do I do with my hands? No idea, I just let them hang awkwardly and lean forward like this.