He also called them mûmakil in elvish. In my mind, when the Hobbits call them oliphaunts it is because a long time ago someone talked about elephants, and over the years the correct pronunciation was lost.

Does life suck, or not?

Yeah that’s what I thought too. The horrors are described well, they just typically don’t get described through their physical form. As you say, because the human mind cannot comprehend it. There is a lot more focus on impressions, comparisons, and effects, rather than on a real physical description. Personally I thought it was quite neat!

AI is a field of research in computer science, and LLM are definitely part of that field. In that sense, LLM are AI. On the other hand, you’re right that there is definitely no real intelligence in an LLM.

Yeah a zero-day would be very unlikely, but a months-old, publically known and patched vulnerability could always be attempted. One of the reasons why the hypervisor should definitely be kept up-to-date. There is always someone who forgets to patch their software, why not give it a try? We’re talking about a Windows XP scenario after all!

According to the article she did update the car before. She just used to have it done at night, and this is the first time she was in the car during an update.

40 minutes is a hell of a long time for a software update though.

Is it bad that I kinda do want to get high and have my fridge come over to me to fulfill the munchies without ever having to get up?

It’s pure speculation, but I assume you’ll need

1. Enough access to the guest OS so that you can interact directly with the virtual hardware. That would probably require root access, so you’ll probably need to exploit some bug in the guest OS to get there.
2. To break out of the vm, you’ll then need to exploit a bug in the virtual hardware. You would want to get the hypervisor to execute arbitrary code.
3. If you want to infect the host OS, then you’ll need sufficient access on the host. If the hypervisor doesn’t run with sufficient privileges, you’ll have to exploit a bug in the host as well to perform a privilege escalation. But I’m guessing the hypervisor will usually have sufficient privileges, so exploiting the host is probably not necessary.

Sounds like quite a bit of work, but I don’t see why malware couldn’t automate it. An up-to-date hypervisor should help reduce the risk though.

That’s a good tip, but I assume he meant he drinks juice of burned beans, rather than burned juice of beans. After all, coffee beans do need to be roasted (burned) before you use them!

You couldn’t really do that with beer, because beer is typically carbonated and thus you’ll need a very strong bag inside of the box. So strong that you’ll end up with a can or bottle.

It would also be very hard to compete with products that are this mature. Linux, Windows, and macOS have been under development for a long time, with a lot of people. If you create a new OS, people will inevitably compare your new immature product with those mature products. If you had the same resources and time, then maybe your new OS would beat them, but you don’t. So at launch you will have less optimizations, features, security audits, compatibility, etc., and few people would actually consider using your OS.

The function should be cubic, so you should be able to write it in the form “f(x) = ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d”. You could work out the entire thing to put it in that form, but you don’t need to.

Since there are no weird operations, roots, divisions by x, or anything like that, you can just count how many times x might get multiplied with itself. At the top of each division, there are 3 terms with x, so you can quite easily see that the maximum will be x^3.

It’s useful to know what the values x_i and x_y are though. They describe the 3 points through which the function should go: (x_1, y_1) to (x_3, y_3).

That also makes the second part of the statement ready to check. Take (x_1, y_1) for example. You want to be sure that f(x_1) = y_1. If you replace all of the “x” in the formula by x_1, you’ll see that everything starts cancelling each other out. Eventually you’ll get “1 * y_1 + 0 * y_2 + 0 * y_3”, thus f(x_1) is indeed y_1.

They could have explained this a bit better in the book, it also took me a little while to figure it out.

LLM don’t have logic, they are just statistical language models.

That is true, but from a human perspective it can still seem non-deterministic! The behaviour of the program as a whole will be deterministic, if all inputs are always the same, in the same order, and without multithreading. On the other hand, a specific function call that is executed multiple times with the same input may occasionally give a different result.

Most programs also have input that changes between executions. Hence you may get the same input record, but at a different place in the execution. Thus you can get a different result for the same record as well.

That exact version will end up making “true” false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.

During the compilation, “true” would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, “__LINE__” would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.

In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.

The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result… Unless you change any line and recompile.

The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can’t make it too high or it will never be triggered.

One downside compared to the original version is that the value of “true” can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since “1 == true” would not always be true.

A slightly more consistent version would be

((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)

They are very busy charging an arm and a leg for crappy software with shit support.

I’m in IT in the financial industry. There is indeed still a ton of COBOL around.

Makes sense, you clearly thought about this! From a world-building perspective I do have a follow-up question: 86.4k seconds is our definition of a second, but it is essentially a convention and there is no reason for it. In a society that throws out the hours and minutes, why did they keep our second? It seems like it would have made sense for them to define the day as 100k of some new (slightly smaller) unit. That could have given them 10 “hours” of 100 “minutes” of 100 “seconds”.

Why split the day into 8?

You definitely have a point with base-12 though. If base-10 wasn’t so ingrained already, base-12 would be a very logical choice. You can even count to 12 easily on one hand, using your thumb to keep track of where you are and counting on the segments of each of your 4 other fingers.

According to this article, an average smartphone uses 2W when in use. That number will largely be dependent on the screen and SOC, which can be turned off or be placed in a lower power state when the phone isn’t actively being used. (The 5W - 20W figure is for charging a phone.)

With 8 of these cells, you’ll have 800μW, or 0.0008W, and you need 2W. You will need to add a few more batteries… About 19,992 more. If 8 of these batteries are about the same size as a regular smartphone battery, you will need the equivalent of 2,500 smartphone batteries to power just one phone.

Too bad they don’t say how much the new batteries weigh! It would have been fun to see…

If we ballpark it and assume something the size of a regular smartphone battery is 50g (1.7 oz), then our stack of 20,000 of these new batteries could be about 125kg (275 lbs).

I won’t be replacing any of my batteries just yet.