The behaviors that emerge — hysteresis, oscillation, bistable memory — are the same computational primitives you see in biological neural circuits, but they come from constraint satisfaction over conserved quantities instead of simulating neurons. The architecture doesn't model neurons at all. It produces the same outputs through a different mechanism. Whether that still counts as "neuromorphic" is debatable — I use the term because the output behaviors map directly to the same hardware substrates (Loihi, SpiNNaker, etc).
President Trump pressured House Republicans on Wednesday to extend a high-profile warrantless surveillance law without changes, declaring on social media: “I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!”
Mr. Trump urged the G.O.P. to “unify” behind Speaker Mike Johnson for a critical procedural vote that had been scheduled for late Wednesday night. The vote would clear the way for House approval of a bill extending a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The law is set to expire on April 20.
The statute, known as Section 702, permits the government to collect the messages of foreigners abroad without a warrant from American companies like Google — even if the targets are communicating with Americans.
Google's sin here is not in obeying a warrant, it's by pressuring a strategy of extreme concentration of power and intermediation. Google wants to know who you talk to, where you are, where you work, how much money you make, what kind of jobs you are interested in, whether or not you've searched for recipes to make controlled substances, etc. etc. We can be happy that they failed, or at least are only weakly succeeding. They almost completely dominate email services, which were supposed to be distributed and run by whomever. This is hugely anticompetitive practice, right in the middle of our relatively new ubiquitous information infrastructure. One side effect of this is that they are one-stop shop for governments to get extremely detailed profiles of..to be honest, almost of all of us. But that's just one of the unfortunate side effects.
be careful in promoting that strategy. HF is pretty bad, I had a friend go through 3 them in a day because he didn't have one on the job site and HF wasn't too far away.
the next step up is about 2x the price and will last a good year with professional use and maybe more if you can be bothered to replace the brushes.
so I'm glad that's working out for you, but there is more bottom to be found. I bought an attachment that came with a grinder that was so dinky and toy-like that it didn't last 20 minutes of light use.
this thread is covered with discussion about the problem of information asymmetry and rapidly decaying brands. to me the real issue is economic efficiency. the low end tool gets a double economic win, lower material and production costs, and increased frequency of purchase. every one of those purchases involves shipping, potential retail space, people's time spent shopping and returning crap. leading to a lot of outright waste. to me this really undermines the promise of capitalistic efficiency, since it prioritizes local optimization to an extreme over global optimization.
Your friend was heavily using a cheap tool at a job site. After the first one broke, the course of action is to go to home depot and buy the prosumer Milwaukee or Dewalt and return the harbor freight as time allows.
The point is you only need the expensive stuff rarely. You don’t triple down on cheap crap you actually use and abuse.
I’ve yet to see anyone lose money (including accounting for time) with this strategy. Going for stuff that costs 4-12x more right off the bat - unless for professional “mission critical” work - is going to average out to be a poor use of money for the vast majority of tool buyers.
There is of course an absolute floor here. No name brand tools on Amazon are going to perhaps be zero use, but they seem rather trivial to spot to me most of the time. Buying that Gearwrench socket set vs the Snap-on is almost always going to be a win for 99% of people unless you are a professional mechanic that relies on 100% uptime to make a living.
Harbor freight sells three tiers of many of their more popular tools and they're not shy about it. Most of their signage says "ok/better/best" and they're very transparent about what you're buying. I can buy a $9 angle grinder and on the same shelf I an also buy a $85 angle grinder, with the "better" model running ~$25-40. Harbor Freight used to have exclusively cheap junk but their "better" tier stuff is more than adequate for home DIYers
It probably helps that the founder is still the owner. Once that guy or his son dies (he's getting up there) it would not suprise me if the brand spirals into decay.
HF sells levels that aren't level lol. Squares that aren't square.
I love them for junk like zip ties and bungee cords and moving blankets; they sell the same cheap rack shelves as Menards, and honestly their free gift multimeter has served my guitar bench well for all over a decade. But their $20 jigsaw made like five cuts before it stopped cutting straight lol.
I love HF is what I'm saying, i just don't trust every item in the building
you're right about the phrase, its basically an assertion that "we're all cheating scum, so I have no choice but to be a cheating scum myself", which is hugely corrosive. and in this case its the funding system more broadly that's imposing these non-goals from above that are incentivizing bad science.
but why are they imposing these structures? to try to weed out the cheating scum. once you start walking down that path, you're signing up for a distortion of value.
As I said to the parent poster, that's not what it means at all. It means that you should look at the system's incentives, not the behavior of individuals as the root cause of any issues.
You don't need to be a "cheating scum" to succeed, but there are not enough checks in place to prevent that from being a successful strategy for someone who wouldn't succeed otherwise.
The people who need to change the most are the nameless "they" who issue funding because they have the most control over these systems, along with the publishing cartel which has almost no redeeming value in today's environment.
Nobody says the phrase when they are calling people to look at a system's incentives. They use the phrase as a response to personal criticism excusing and rationalizing their own bad behavior.
It is a deflection of personal responsibility, full stop.
Agreed. Accountability matters, but changing the game usually scales better than hoping for better individual behaviour under the same pressures. Academia needs systems that reward transparency, verification, and contribution more directly. That is part of what we are building with Liberata if of interest: https://liberata.info/beta-signup
Some unsolicited feedback from someone who was at one point part of your target audience for this product:
* You need to put some text on the pages on your site describing what this actually is and who is working on it. No one is taking the time to watch videos (especially one that is 9 minutes long!??!?!?!)
* The problems listed don't give me the impression that the team has much experience with publishing in academia and are generally unfocused
* Related to the item above, you're both making this way more complicated than it needs to be, and completely ignoring or glossing over the primary issues at hand (the network effect of the existing publisher cartel and the tension between the requirements for obtaining funding and producing reproducible research findings)
I don't think you're in a position to have much impact on the major issues, making any impact on the more minor ones kind of irrelevant, but if I'm wrong: I would focus on making it easy for academic communities to start their own open access journals (e.g. the Journal of Machine Learning Research) and provide a tool to automate citation checking to start, with steps towards content management for the content that would allow an external party to reproduce the results from the paper).
Recruiting people who can break away from the current model to build a new one is the only real chance of success, and your role would presumably be to make it easy for them to make that change. This is not a novel concept, and many platforms already exist to enable open access journal publication, yet their adoption is not widespread.
The question I think you should address on your website (in text form) is: What are you doing differently that will cause a different outcome?
you need tight tolerances for modern ammo, a shotgun, or muzzle loader is more forgiveing. reloading materials are not federally regulated as firearms, you just dont want to have more than 2lbs at a time, or that could bring trouble.
you want to be able to KNOW and SEE the difference between a blackpowder, and a smokeless powder, and what not to put it in.
one thing that would add a lot of friction is if the primers are regulated.
thats the funny thing, felons cant possess firearms or ammo, however you can possess reloading materials, and be fine there until you start actually reloading, then you are in possession of ammo.
People would probably use smuggled primers if arms were outlawed. The rest of the chemistry is easy enough to work with and the primers are small enough they'd likely flow along with fentanyl with the cartels anyway.
> if you can make a gun, you can certainly make ammunition
theoretically true but having re-sleeved ammunition, the chances of injury is tremendously different. That said, a lot of people in California are having to resort to re-sleeving ammunition, not out of choice but because for all practical purposes, California has made buying ammunition impossible.
While you can crawl and bite your way through getting a horribly castrated gun in California, the real struggle begins buying affordable ammunition.
For regular people to own a gun that you can actually use in California, (not LEOs or certain other people), you either needed to have inherited them or bought them from the cartels. Otherwise you own something of limited use that insanely expensive to operate.
Can't you make a blunderbuss pretty easily with some rocks and scrap? I wonder how straight shooting a musket you could make? Probably pretty straight if you happened on something manufactured that already happens to fit pretty precise into your cylinder I'm guessing. You could probably get pretty far with airguns too. I mean a pellet gun is already enough to kill a bird or squirrel outright and pretty damn accurate. I probably wouldn't want to take one of those to the neck or soft part of the head.
pellet guns use the "diablo" profile to the pellets.
pellet guns have low spin per inch, and use drag to add extra stability.
and keep velocity below that trans-sonic shock range.
if you went to a reloading shop, and purchased some .177, or .22 projectiles, trimmed them down, or core them to about half wieght, and it will perform like a small rifle.
>pellet guns have low spin per inch, and use drag to add extra stability. and keep velocity below that trans-sonic shock range.
They are strong enough to embed the pellets into wooden fence boards already though. I think that is plenty enough velocity to blow out your trachea, enter your brain through your eye socket, and probably also penetrate the soft part of the skull.
> For regular people to own a gun that you can actually use in California, (not LEOs or certain other people), you either needed to have inherited them or bought them from the cartels.
or, you can just break these stupid, unenforceable laws and buy out of state or just "uncastrate" it yourself.
no idea why so many people get their panties in a twist everytime California passes an unenforceable law. they're unenforceable.
I just spent some time with the s3 protocol and I agree completely. What should have been able to leverage the simplifying assumptions turned into another hodgepodge. It’s not like nfs is a real shining example of simplicity either. I’ve never worked with p9, but potentially that aside I think we really failed to come up with a decent distributed file model,
If all the "popular" solutions are complex, it means the problem domain is complex.
You either are doomed to reimplement and rediscover the complexity on your own, or you change your requirements to fit a narrower problem domain to avoid (some of) the complexity.
I'm working on a distributed S3 cache that supports just two functions, pread style contents of a file and all the elements in a directory. I've worked on other systems that represents this entire structure as RDF triples, which leaves you with just query and insert. To come at it from another direction EFS only implements about 2/3 of NFSv4, and S3 was perfectly functional before they larded it up with all this policy stuff.
I'm not saying that there weren't reasons to add these functions to the protocol, but if your aim is minimalism, then you can do _much_ better, and I think there is a real benefit in having a bare bones protocol that anyone could implement in many contexts.
Simpler than it is now, but the authentication system was never simple. You can't just put a bearer token in the authorization header, you have to follow a complicated algorithm to sign the request. That made some sense 20 years ago when s3 didn't use tls to protect against a mitm that changed the changed the request. It is less valuable now when you use tls.
Isn't the whole signed request part a hard requirement for 3rd party access? S3 was originally designed for web use, which means giving not-fully-trusted browsers some access to your storage bucket.
You can't exactly do "this client is allowed to download this one specific file for the next 24 hours (but not use it like their personal CDN and share the link with everyone)" or "this client is allowed to upload a single image file up to 10MB (but not upload a 100GB copy of Friends)" with basic bearer tokens.
Aside from the fact that you can do this statelessly (you could stuff a JWT or moral equivalent in the header as a Bearer token), if you were okay with server-side state, you can have the token be related to a principal or have permissions in of itself.
There are lots of benefits to this over the bearer token approach that many take. Binding the authentication to the specific request is valuable regardless of TLS.
there was almost certainly a demand issue with graduates of technical schools. Also increased privatization leading to some really awful scammy institutions. I personally went to college and washed out, and would have been much better served by getting schooled in the trades, but I think this is really a pretty bad multi-dimensional corner we've backed ourselves into (primary, secondary, and post-graduate schooling, employment).
Discussions and concerns we simply dont have in Europe. There are costs, but nothing significant from public schools themselves, rather just accommodation, food, travel etc. Some folks still go to private ones, but those are mostly not for extra prestige but rather different focus, or those who are not that great students themselves.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
> Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
In the US there've historically been great work and wealth-generating opportunities that weren't as readily available in Europe. That seems to come at the price of less safety net if something goes wrong e:g health problems, disability, job loss. In recent times Europe has become more like the US in the sense of cutting safety nets while being more entrepreneurial. I think this'll lead to less people choosing to move to the US from Europe, compounded by US now having possibly less opportunities and an administration that makes even well qualified legal immigrants feel unsafe. Which will become self-fulfilling, the opportunities of the future will increasingly be outside the US. As to why more Americans haven't historically moved to Europe, my guess would be its simply unawareness of how actually for a lot of people it'd give a better quality of life.
I disagree. I worked at a protocol designer and implementor for years before people settled on the message queue as the universal abstraction. at the bottom end dumping serialized objects into tcp connections gets you most of the way. and at the top end there is so much leverage around locality, addressing, and transport that we are leaving a lot on the table.
message queues arent at all bad, but they come with additional complexity (most of it operational), and come with a set of limiting assumptions. so my frustration is that they are now the default answer for everything, and we're ignoring this lovely design space, one that becomes increasingly important when talking about scale.
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