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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • venv nonsense

    I mean, the fact that it isn’t more end-user invisible to me is annoying, and I wish that it could also include a version of Python, but I think that venv is pretty reasonable. It handles non-systemwide library versioning in what I’d call a reasonably straightforward way. Once you know how to do it, works the same way for each Python program.

    Honestly, if there were just a frontend on venv that set up any missing environment and activated the venv, I’d be fine with it.

    And I don’t do much Python development, so this isn’t from a “Python awesome” standpoint.


  • If a nuclear missile is launched at the United States the President has just 6 minutes to come to terms with that and decide to launch a counter attack or not.

    US nuclear deterrence in 2024 doesn’t rely on launch-on-warning, but on the expectation that no hostile power has the ability to locate and destroy the US ballistic missile submarine fleet prior to them performing their counterlaunches.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_strike

    In nuclear strategy, a retaliatory strike or second-strike capability is a country’s assured ability to respond to a nuclear attack with powerful nuclear retaliation against the attacker. To have such an ability (and to convince an opponent of its viability) is considered vital in nuclear deterrence, as otherwise the other side might attempt to try to win a nuclear war in one massive first strike against its opponent’s own nuclear forces.

    Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are the traditional, but very expensive, method of providing a second strike capability, though they need to be supported by a reliable method of identifying who the attacker is.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning

    Launch on warning (LOW), or fire on warning, is a strategy of nuclear weapon retaliation where a retaliatory strike is launched upon warning of enemy nuclear attack and while its missiles are still in the air, before detonation occurs.

    In 1997, a US official stated that the US had the technical capability for launch on warning but did not intend to use a launch on warning posture and that the position had not changed in the 1997 presidential decision directive on nuclear weapon doctrine.

    This non-reliance on launch-on-warning is also true of the French and British nuclear deterrents – the British don’t even maintain a nuclear arsenal other than on subs, so they haven’t even bothered with maintaining the option to do so, and the French only use tactical ALCMs in addition to the strategic sub-launched weapons; those weapons probably would be poorly-suited for such a role.

    The Brits rather famously have the “letter of last resort”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

    The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the prime minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines and stored on board of each. They contain orders on what action to take if an enemy nuclear strike has both destroyed the British government and has also killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and their designated “second person” of responsibility, typically a high-ranking member of the Cabinet such as the deputy prime minister or the first secretary of state. If the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of His Majesty’s Government.

    If the letters are not used during the term of the prime minister who wrote them, they are destroyed unopened after that person leaves office, so that their content remains unknown to anyone except the issuer.

    Process

    A new prime minister writes a set of letters immediately after taking office and being told by the Chief of the Defence Staff “precisely what damage a Trident missile could cause”. The documents are then delivered to the submarines in sealed envelopes, and the previous prime minister’s letters are destroyed without being opened.

    In the event of the deaths of both the prime minister and the designated alternative decision-maker as a result of a nuclear strike, the commander(s) of any nuclear submarine(s) on patrol at the time would use a series of checks to ascertain whether the letters of last resort must be opened.

    According to Peter Hennessy’s book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, the process by which a Vanguard-class submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting.

    In 1983, the procedure for Polaris submarines was to open the envelopes if there was an evident nuclear attack, or if all UK naval broadcasts had ceased for four hours.

    Options

    While the contents of these letters are secret, according to the December 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary The Human Button, there were four known options given to the prime minister to include in the letters. The prime minister might instruct the submarine commander to:

    • retaliate with nuclear weapons;

    • not retaliate;

    • use their own judgement; or,

    • place the submarine under an allied country’s command, if possible. The documentary mentions Australia and the United States.

    The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: “Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there”, “Go to Australia”, “Retaliate”, or “Use your own judgement”. The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.



  • The feature list of the language is so long at this point that it is pretty much impossible for anyone new to learn C++ and grok the design decisions anymore.

    Even if it is possible, it’s a high bar. The height of that bar matters in bringing new people in.

    I have seen decades of would-be “C++ killers” come and go. I think that in the end, it is C++ that kills C++. The language has just become unusably large. And that’s one thing that cannot be fixed by extending the language.


  • I tend to manually strip out anything random hash-looking from URLs. Not so much because I’m worried about identity being exposed, but because it just encourages data-mining and figuring out what causes people to post links places.

    There’s some open-source app I recall on Android in F-Droid that will do this for a set of known sites, “Link Cleaner” or something.

    kagis

    “Leon – URL Cleaner”. I assume that this is an allusion to the movie.

    https://github.com/svenjacobs/leon

    I also strip off the extension that the Wikipedia app adds to indicate that Wikipedia links are from the app.

    I also strip off “m.” leading URLs, like “m.wikipedia.org”, since that, by convention, forces desktop users to see a mobile version of a site, which is not normally what they want, whereas a non-.m link will still show the mobile site to mobile users.



  • I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You

    I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.

    But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.

    Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

    But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.

    I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.

    But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.

    If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.

    I did like Sim City a fair bit.





  • Tales-like

    I’ve been kind of out of the RPG loop for a while, probably not the best person to suggest, and haven’t played the series, but I’m thinking that if you could expand a bit on that, it might help provide suggestions…I mean, not clear to me what you’re looking for that’s specific to that relative to other RPGs. Similar setting? A long-running RPG series with many entries? The combat system (absent the real-time aspect)?

    You mention “depth of story”, so maybe something with a similar level of storytelling?



  • I don’t know whether Altman or the board is better from a leadership standpoint, but I don’t think that it makes sense to rely on boards to avoid existential dangers for humanity. A board runs one company. If that board takes action that is a good move in terms of an existential risk for humanity but disadvantageous to the company, they’ll tend to be outcompeted by and replaced by those who do not. Anyone doing that has to be in a position to span multiple companies. I doubt that market regulators in a single market could do it, even – that’s getting into international treaty territory.

    The only way in which a board is going to be able to effectively do that is if one company, theirs, effectively has a monopoly on all AI development that could pose a risk.






  • using an admin portal’s default credentials on an IBM AIX server.

    I think that there are two ways to solve that.

    The first is to have the admins actually complete setups.

    But, humans being humans, maybe the second is a better approach:

    When creating a computer system, don’t let a system be used, at all, until all default credentials have been replaced with real ones. If you do, someone is invariably gonna screw it up.

    Your directions may say “Before pulling lever 2, pull lever 1 so that machine does not explode”. And maybe you feel that as the manufacturer, that’s covered your hind end; you can say that the user ignored your setup instructions if they get into trouble. But instead of doing that, maybe it’s better to not permit for a situation where the machine explodes in the first place; have pulling lever 2 also trigger lever 1.