I'm pretty sure I did not get to keep my shoes on through TSA in 2004. It may not have been mandatory nation-wide until ~2006, but the origin is a 2001 incident.
Yes I think the author is mixing it up with the liquids ban. And in my limited experience, at major airports with new scanners, people care much less about both of these now.
At the expense that you have to do human observed naked scans. Pre 2001 US would freak the fuck out about that. It's 2026 normal, but like most things it is pre 2001 very very not normal.
I've worked in too many large codebases where no one can point to any _single file or class_ and label it "correct," ("the right way") yet management is amazed when the lack of a "North Star" means the codebase is full of overlapping, piecemeal patterns that are lucky to work together at all.
That's why the team needs someone with "taste" to dictate the idiomatic way to do it and why LLMs (when used this way) can raise the floor of quality and baseline of consistency.
It does amaze me when colleagues refuse to read what I (personally, deliberately) wrote (they ask AI to summarize), but then tell AI to write their response and it's absolutely bloated and full of misconceptions around my original document.
If they aren't willing to read what I put effort into, why should I be expected to read the ill-conceived and verbose response? I really don't want to get into a match of my AI arguing with your AI, but that's what they've told me I should be doing...
I've been having ongoing issues with a manager who responds in the form of Claude guided PRs. Undoubtedly driven from confused prompts. Always full of issues, never actually solving the problem, always adding HEAPS of additional nonsense in the process.
There's an asymmetry of effort in the above, and when combined with the power asymmetry - that's a really bad combo, and I don't think I'm alone.
I'm glad to see the appreciation of the enormous costs of complexity on this forum, but I don't think that has ascended to the managerial level.
> ...a manager who responds in the form of Claude guided PRs
I think the job of a dev in this coming era is to produce the systems by which non-engineers can build competently and not break prod or produce unmaintainable code.
In my current role, I have shifted from lead IC to building the system that is used by other IC's and non-IC's.
From my perspective, if I can provide the right guardrails to the agent, then anyone using any agent will produce code that is going to coalesce around a higher baseline of quality. Most of my IC work now is aligned on this directionality.
Yeah, this happened to me recently and the advice could have caused data corruption (yay old systems). I only caught it because they asked before making changes and I had a vague memory of it from having investigated the same thing almost a decade ago (and found the note and explanation with a link to a bugtracker in my personal wiki).
I also found the statement bizarre. They don’t seem to have any argument for compensation of any kind unless the books were under a restrictive license that required derived works to also be open source.
No, even under such a restrictive license (which I think the GFDL is?) there's no argument.
Their copyright was not violated by anthropic downloading the books, because anthropic had a license to do that.
And their copyright was not violated by anthropic training on the books, because the court found that no ones copyright was violated by doing this. Antrhopic didn't need a license to do this. So the restrictive terms of the license can't prevent it.
I mean they might have an argument for compensation based on "well the settlement Anthropic agreed to didn't exclude us even though they didn't violate our copyright"... but just for the compensation outlined in the settlement.
But some of Apple or Spotify Premium's recent moves Re: advertising show that even those who _are paying_ end up getting the ad experience eventually.
The old "If you aren't paying for a product, you're the product." adage doesn't apply anymore when even if you're paying, you're _still_ being productized.
The real problem is increasing concentration of _everything_ into ever-fewer (viable) players.
Doctorow's book "Enshittification" goes into way more examples of this phenomenon (though I'm far less optimistic than he is about the ability to reverse this trend).
Amazon Prime is the same way. Thanks for paying, please watch ads for first two season of The Boys. Also look at this catalog of movies you can rent for an additional fee.
Building floor numbers in at least a few countries I’m aware of start from zero or “G” ( or the local language equivalent for “ground“) with 1 being the first story above the ground.
I think you’re just biased to think that starting must “naturally” begin with 1.
Zero is just a good a place to start and some people do start counting from zero.
The floor number case arises so because traditionally it is the count of "built" floors. So, ground is technically not a floor in that sense. Also, if the floor indicates a separation (cut) between the living spaces, ground floor can be numbered as zero, just like the start point of a measuring tape is numbered as zero.
A crude explanation might be like this - if you look at graphs of sin and cos, you'd instantly recognize their symmetries, but what if you're given the graph of a linear combination of them, and asked to decipher the coefficients?
Naively, you'd evaluate the functions at every point by trial & error until they much the shape of the given graph. Or use the symmetry of sin & cos to combine them constructively and destructively (peaks and valley) and to match the given shape.
FT & QFT are "shortcuts" that help to decipher the correct combination of basis functions.
I think it would be hard to explain the details to a math undergraduate.
The high level point is that many algorithms for which quantum speedups are possible can be reduced to the Hidden Subgroup Problem, which requires a few weeks of a group theory course to understand.
No it wouldn't? "Given f that hides a subgroup, and an oracle for f, determine the subgroup".
The Wikipedia phrases it backwards (as do you): "quantum computers" don't solve the hidden subgroup problem, the quantum fourier transform, which "measures" f in parallel, can be used to solve the hidden subgroup problem efficiently. The QFT is the fundamental thing, not the HSP, and it's the building block for basically any/all useful quantum algorithms.
Very late, but I meant it would be hard to summarize the details of the blog post (e.g. QFT implementation) even to the typical math undergraduate.
It's not hard to explain the problem, as most math undergraduates will have taken some group theory course. But even "subgroup" means nothing to most computer scientists (speaking from personal experience interacting with computer scientist academics).
The Hidden Subgroup Problem (HSP) is the mathematical framework that explains why quantum computers are so good at breaking encryption. Famous quantum algorithms like Shor's (for factoring numbers) and Simon's are all just different versions of solving the same underlying pattern-finding problem. The quantum "superpower" comes from using the Quantum Fourier Transform to reveal hidden mathematical patterns that classical computers can't efficiently find.
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