gjm - Network

Mac people!My father has an oldish MBP and an oldish iMac. He is thinking of replacing them with a single new MBP and a monitor (maybe also...

Mac people!

My father has an oldish MBP and an oldish iMac. He is thinking of replacing them with a single new MBP and a monitor (maybe also a dock because the iMac is connected to a bunch of peripherals).

How painful is it to migrate from _two_ Macs to _one_ without losing important data? For the more common one-to-one case you can use the migration assistant and hopefully it Just Works (tm), but presumably in this case some of the job has to be done by hand.

After Mozilla's declaration that "When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive,...

After Mozilla's declaration that "When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox" (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/) ...

Anyone want to guess whether it's _days_ or _weeks_ until they announce that future versions of Firefox will drop support for Manifest v2, thus bringing the number of "mainstream" browsers capable of actually effective ad-blocking from one to zero?

(I've rolled my eyes a bit at past "look! Mozilla has sold out!" complaints, but this really does seem like clear evidence that their "don't be evil" -> "be evil" transition has happened, and so far as I can tell the only thing that will ever keep a company from submitting to the advertising industry is moral backbone. It was nice when Mozilla had one of those.)

I need a new laptop and I'm fed up of Microsoft. I have two questions that I expect some people reading this know something about the...

I need a new laptop and I'm fed up of Microsoft. I have two questions that I expect some people reading this know something about the answer to.

1. (Because I might run Linux on whatever I get.) What's the state of Linux-on-laptops these days? Can I buy a new laptop from a reputable vendor and expect that recent Linux versions will Just Work on it? Or is it still recommended to get a ThinkPad model that's at least a few years old? Are traditional problem areas (wifi? battery life? handoff between integrated and discrete GPU? suspend?) still problematic? Are there specific things I should avoid?

2. (Because I might get a Mac, and Macs can make quite a lot of memory available to the GPU.) Is it currently possible to do anything _genuinely useful_ with LLMs small enough to run within (say) 20GB? 40GB? If so, what, and how well?

In both cases, reports from actual experience are particularly welcome, but "I know someone who did X and here's how it went" is fine too...

Many thanks in advance!

I don't think the problem is that murdering your partners isn't "socially unacceptable".If we made it so that only as many...

I don't think the problem is that murdering your partners isn't "socially unacceptable".

If we made it so that only as many women are murdered by their partners as people are killed by drunk-driving ... then the number would go _up_ by about 3x. (About 100 women per year murdered by partners; about 300 people per year killed in drunk-driving incidents. Both in the UK.)

Estimates are that ~2M adults in the UK experience domestic abuse each year. About 2-3% of drivers admit to commonly driving home from social events after at least two large drinks; that would be ~1M, so same rough ballpark.

Dunno what the answer is (if there is one) but I don't think it's just "make violence against women socially unacceptable like drunk-driving"; it's already about that socially unacceptable. I think that getting the figures much lower might require something that specifically addresses (1) people who aren't much moved by what's socially unacceptable and/or (2) hopefully-smallish _groups_ in which what's unacceptable is radically different from what it is in society at large.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I am _not at all_ saying that ~100 women per year murdered by their partners isn't a horror. Just that "by and large socially unacceptable" can only get you so low, and beyond that you need something more.)

O glorious Mastodon hive-mind!Am I right in thinking that Mastodon filtering has no way to say "please hide posts that meet condition X...

O glorious Mastodon hive-mind!

Am I right in thinking that Mastodon filtering has no way to say "please hide posts that meet condition X _and_ condition Y"?

(The specific cases I have in mind are of the following form: there's a person I follow who's interested in X, sometimes they post a lot of X all at the same time which is perfectly valid but for me is just noise, and so I want to filter out "stuff about X from person Y". I don't want to filter out every mention of X because it's not like I find X itself upsetting, I just don't want to get spammed with it, and the specific problem is that sometimes Person Y, for their own excellent reasons, wants to talk about X a lot.)

Clever internet people! I have a weird network problem.My local machine is a Linux box. It runs Exim, a mail transport agent. When I send an...

Clever internet people! I have a weird network problem.

My local machine is a Linux box. It runs Exim, a mail transport agent. When I send an email, my mail user agent talks to Exim, and Exim passes the message on via SMTP to one of two remote smarthosts for further delivery.

For one of those two, but not the other, something times out when trying to make the SMTP connection. The message in the Exim logs is "SMTP timeout after initial connection" but I am not certain there has actually been an "initial connection" in any useful sense.

When it's trying to deliver such a message, netstat shows the connection to the relevant server as in state SYN_SENT.

Usually I think this would indicate some rather low-level network problem, like a broken firewall rule.

BUT

1. If I try to make a connection (from the same local machine) to the same server using smtplib in Python, it connects without problems! (And I can successfully send mail that way.)

2. Between the last time this all worked without problems and now, I have not knowingly changed anything in my configuration.

Yes, I have tried turning it off and then on again.

Anyone got any idea what might be happening?

It seems like it needs to be something pretty concise. Perhaps axioms for propositional logic in terms of the Sheffer stroke (NAND)? (You...

It seems like it needs to be something pretty concise. Perhaps axioms for propositional logic in terms of the Sheffer stroke (NAND)? (You need one axiom, though to get it down to just one it has to be kinda ugly, and one simple rule of inference.)

This would make for a long-and-thin tattoo, so maybe on an arm?

Quine's NF (an alternative foundation for set theory, which I rather like) can be presented with one axiom (extensionality) and one axiom schema (comprehension for stratified formulae), but then you need a bunch of _words_ (or something) to express the stratification constraint, bleh.

"May you live in fun times."But, as the saying goes: the best time was 30 years ago, but the second-best time is now.(I am not...

"May you live in fun times."

But, as the saying goes: the best time was 30 years ago, but the second-best time is now.

(I am not claiming that the best time really _was_ 30 years ago. If nothing else, I'm not sure it was exactly _possible_ to "transition to non-binary" 30 years ago; you could maybe transition to "explaining from scratch to every single person you meet that you don't consider yourself either male or female and having them look at you with bemused bafflement" but I suspect the cost-benefit calculus has changed a lot since then.)

ah yes, mullet time, an early innovation by the Wachowskis that somehow never received the acclaim of its later counterpart.

ah yes, mullet time, an early innovation by the Wachowskis that somehow never received the acclaim of its later counterpart.

Possible relevance of WSL2 GUI apps: desktop 2 has several of those running, desktop 3 is empty, desktop 1 has none. If I move one of those...

Possible relevance of WSL2 GUI apps: desktop 2 has several of those running, desktop 3 is empty, desktop 1 has none. If I move one of those apps to desktop 1, then switching to desktop 1 makes the Weird Thing happen if that app is visible and not otherwise. When this happens, I can make the Weird Thing go away by alt-tabbing to any specific window, including the WSL2 GUI one.

On the other hand, desktop 2 has plenty of non-WSL apps and if I make sure that the WSL ones' windows are all covered up it _doesn't_ stop the Weird Thing happening. And the alt-tab thing doesn't do anything useful on desktop 2.

Anyone encountered anything like the following and know how to fix it?I have a laptop running Windows 11. (Alas.) I have two external...

Anyone encountered anything like the following and know how to fix it?

I have a laptop running Windows 11. (Alas.) I have two external monitors. I have three virtual desktops. When I switch to v.d. 2 or 3, everything on one of the external monitors (which is set as my primary monitor; don't know whether that's relevant) is obscured by an almost-full-screen pane that greatly blurs everything behind it.

I can still _interact_ with things behind this: e.g., I can drag windows there around by their title bars, or do things in a text editor and see (very blurrily) those things happening.

If I click on the menubar of one of the windows behind this thing, the resulting menu opens _in front_ of it and is not blurred.

The blurring pane thing is a rectangle with slightly rounded corners. It is inset from the top, left and right edges of the monitor, and from the taskbar at the bottom, by something on the order of 10px.

If I change to a different virtual desktop, the blurring pane thing disappears for a moment, showing everything clearly, then the desktop change happens, and then if I am landing on v.d. 2 or 3 the blurring pane thing reappears after a moment.

I can alt-tab between windows behind the blurring thing and it works but they remain behind it. If I do win-tab instead then everything looks normal.

I am also using some GUI apps in WSL2; I _suspect_ this is relevant and will elaborate on why in a reply.

An obvious approach, as always with Windows, is to reboot and hope. But I have a bunch of things open and would rather not.

PSA for people on Unix-like systems who use "rg" for searching: if you have, say, a directory containing Python code and a lot of...

PSA for people on Unix-like systems who use "rg" for searching: if you have, say, a directory containing Python code and a lot of large irrelevant data files, do not type things like "rg variable_name *.py"; say "rg variable_name -tpy" instead; that skips the irrelevant files efficiently enough.

(I was doing the former and my idiot fingers are more used to typing "rm" than "rg", and the obvious thing happened. Twice.)

I abandoned Evernote in favour of Obsidian, one of the key reasons being that Obsidian stores its notes as plain ordinary files in plain...

I abandoned Evernote in favour of Obsidian, one of the key reasons being that Obsidian stores its notes as plain ordinary files in plain ordinary Markdown format.

It's free for personal use. They want you to pay $50/year if you use it commercially. You also pay $8/month (no, I don't know why they quote that per month and the other thing per year) if you want to use their sync service, but you can also use Syncthing or Dropbox or whatever for that.

There's an Electron-based app for desktop platforms. There are iOS and Android apps, which neither cost money nor show you ads.

I haven't tried Joplin, Logseq or Anytype so unfortunately can't compare against those.

I just discovered that a jokey comment I posted in Another Place was screenshotted and posted with the serial numbers filed off by someone...

I just discovered that a jokey comment I posted in Another Place was screenshotted and posted with the serial numbers filed off by someone else on Twitter, where it got (what so far as I know are) a lot of likes and views.

The weird thing is that the way I discovered it is by getting an email _from the person who plagiarized it_ with subject "fyi your hn spinal tap joke went viral on twitter" and a link.

This is the kind of thing I would normally very much expect to know and remember, but ... I have no idea. Enlighten us?

This is the kind of thing I would normally very much expect to know and remember, but ... I have no idea. Enlighten us?

I wonder whether the intention is more improper than it may at first appear: if it's _literally_ "au mesme lieu" then...

I wonder whether the intention is more improper than it may at first appear: if it's _literally_ "au mesme lieu" then there's only one candidate for the woman in question...

(I think probably not.)

I agree with all the people who've said that it depends on context: _whom_ are you teaching about quadratic equations and _what_ about...

I agree with all the people who've said that it depends on context: _whom_ are you teaching about quadratic equations and _what_ about quadratic equations are you teaching them?

If you're introducing quadratics to schoolchildren who've never seen anything of the kind before: there can be no roots, one root, or two roots. Maybe say _in passing_ something like "there is a sense in which that one root is actually one root _twice_, but don't worry if that doesn't make any sense to you; it might make more sense later on".

With unusually bright schoolchildren, or on a later occasion when they've had a bit of a chance to get used to how things work, or maybe (as someone else said) when looking at polynomials of higher degree: make more of a deal of it, point out that the polynomials (x-2) and (𝑥−2)² are not the same, think about a thing with a double root as a limit of nearby things with two roots (but, note, it's _also_ a limit of nearby things with no real roots, so be careful what you say!), etc.

At university level: Fundamental theorem of algebra, an nth-degree polynomial over the complex numbers has exactly n roots counted by multiplicity, etc. And, later on, for those who take the appropriate courses, higher-brow algebraic geometry, etc.

I can't fit this into any of the four available options.

This may possibly be the finest bit of (phonetic) nominative determinism I have ever seen:...

This may possibly be the finest bit of (phonetic) nominative determinism I have ever seen: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/quantum/people/dr-toby-cubitt

[EDITED to add:] For the benefit of anyone who doesn't feel like following the link, this is a professor of _quantum information_ who is literally called Qubit (though, alas, not spelled that way).

Solution (with no φs at all...)We'll use complex numbers.First of all, let's draw the diagram at the wrong size: inscribe the...

Solution (with no φs at all...)

We'll use complex numbers.

First of all, let's draw the diagram at the wrong size: inscribe the pentagon in a unit circle, with the "a end" of that line at 1. Call the vertices adjacent to 1 𝑢 and 𝑣; then (as complex numbers) we have 𝑢𝑣=1. The other two vertices are 𝑢² and 𝑣². We have 𝑢⁵=𝑣⁵=1 and we can then easily see e.g. that 𝑢⁴=𝑣, 𝑣⁴=𝑢, 𝑢³=𝑣², 𝑣³=𝑢².

Then 2𝑎=2−(𝑢+𝑣) and 2𝑏=(𝑢+𝑣)−(𝑢²+𝑣²). So

4(𝑎²+𝑏²)=4+(𝑢+𝑣)²−4(𝑢+𝑣)+(𝑢+𝑣)²+(𝑢²+𝑣²)²−2(𝑢+𝑣)(𝑢²+𝑣²)

and expanding everything out and using the relations listed above this equals

4+2𝑢²+2𝑣²+4−4𝑢−4𝑣+𝑢+𝑣+2−2(𝑢²+𝑣²+𝑢+𝑣)

which simplifies to

10−5(u+v).

So far, so good. But what we've just computed is the value of 4(𝑎²+𝑏²) for a pentagon of the wrong size. To get the value of 𝑎²+𝑏² for a pentagon of side length 2, we need to take that, divide by 4, divide by _our_ pentagon's side length squared, and multiply by 2². Or, more simply, we need to divide by our pentagon's side length squared.

Well, one side (as a complex number) is 1−𝑢 and another is 1−𝑣, so the side length squared has the same modulus as (1−𝑢)(1−𝑣)=2−(𝑢+𝑣). That's a positive real number, so in fact it _is_ the side length squared.

So the final value of 𝑎²+𝑏² is (10−5(𝑢+𝑣))/(2−(𝑢+𝑣)) which is, in fact, obviously 5.

O glorious Mastodon hive-mind:Suppose (as is in fact the case) that I ...1. want to buy one or more new light bulbs;2. am in the UK;3. want...

O glorious Mastodon hive-mind:

Suppose (as is in fact the case) that I ...

1. want to buy one or more new light bulbs;
2. am in the UK;
3. want to choose on the basis of things like CRI/CQS, colour temperature, output in lumens, power consumption, etc.;
4. actually care about those values being correct;
5. prefer to shop online.

What options, if any, do I have?

Non-example: Amazon. They provide 1,2,5 but not 3,4. (They have some options for constraining a search (3) but they're weirdly inconsistent and generally useless, especially as they fail spectacularly on (4); e.g. I just looked at a bulb whose Amazon page claims all of the following: it consumes 10W; it consumes 11W; it's equivalent to a 100W incandescent (luminous flux ~1700lm); it puts out 1521lm; it's in energy class G (< 85 lm/W). No three of those five claims can be true at once.

Ideally I would also prefer not to have to buy bulbs in packs of 10, not to have to buy things from computer-generated pseudobrand dropshippers with names like AXMOGQ, and to have a reasonable range of products available. But for now I'll settle for 1-5.

(Specific product recommendations also welcome; right now I'm looking for B22 base, 3000K-ish, 1500-2000lm, higher CRI/CQS preferred. Ideally I would like the thing to last for at least 10% of the 15000 hours usually claimed.)