Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.

For what it’s worth, that particular format war, the format backed by more porn studios (HD-DVD) actually lost to the one with less porn backing (Blu-ray). Personally I think that the PS3 tipped things over the edge.

I’d say the real world doesn’t reward being actually gifted.

More accurately, the real world punishes being below average at any one of like a dozen skillets. You can’t min/max your stats because being 99th percentile at something won’t make up for being 30th percentile at something else. Better to be 75th percentile at both.

The real world requires cross-disciplinary coordination, which means thriving requires both soft skills and multiple hard skills.

They pronounce it “heera”

If you’re going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you’re talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they “knew” a tv show was coming before 2022.

Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5

I’m pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.

It’s been a few days since this comment, but I think now that the review embargo has lifted and the premiere has happened, it seemed to be more of a strategy to take advantage of the positive press to build some momentum. They got good feedback at a few screenings at various festivals, and the reviews have now been revealed to be largely positive. So maybe they wanted to shorten the time between reviews being published and for people to actually watch it.

And they also got the news that California has approved some tax breaks for filming season 2 in California, so it sounds like they’re probably going to officially greenlight the second season soon.

Yeah, Rotten Tomatoes 93%.

I’m 2 episodes in and enjoying it, and I know basically nothing about the games. The exposition has been pretty good at showing non-game-players like me roughly what the different groups of people are about.

It basically varies from chip to chip, and program to program.

Speculative execution is when a program hits some kind of branch (like an if-then statement) and the CPU just goes ahead and calculates as if it’s true, and progresses down that line until it learns “oh wait it was false, just scrub all that work I did so far down this branch.” So it really depends on what that specific chip was doing in that moment, for that specific program.

It’s a very real performance boost for normal operations, but for cryptographic operations you want every function to perform in exactly the same amount of time, so that something outside that program can’t see how long it took and infer secret information.

These timing/side channel attacks generally work like this: imagine you have a program that tests if variable X is a prime number, by testing if every number smaller than X can divide evenly, from 2 on to X. Well, the bigger X is, the longer that particular function will take. So if the function takes a really long time, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what X is. So if you have a separate program that isn’t allowed to read the value of X, but can watch another program operate on X, you might be able to learn bits of information about X.

Patches for these vulnerabilities changes the software to make those programs/function in fixed time, but then you lose all the efficiency gains of being able to finish faster, when you slow the program down to the weakest link, so to speak.

This particular class of vulnerabilities, where modern processors try to predict what operations might come next and perform them before they’re actually needed, has been found in basically all modern CPUs/GPUs. Spectre/Meldown, Downfall, Retbleed, etc., are all a class of hardware vulnerabilities that can leak crypographic secrets. Patching them generally slows down performance considerably, because the actual hardware vulnerability can’t be fixed directly.

It’s not even the first one for the Apple M-series chips. PACMAN was a vulnerability in M1 chips.

Researchers will almost certainly continue to find these, in all major vendors’ CPUs.

Can’t fix the vulnerability, but can mitigate by preventing other code from exploiting the vulnerability in a useful way.

Ah I see you’ve seen me watch professional sports

As the article notes, writers for her show are governed under a separate contract which was not being struck.

No, you’re misunderstanding that portion of the article.

The Actors agreement allows talk shows to continue with SAG/AFTRA members, but the writers strike covered the writers on the show. They tried to restart production without writers (which is possible, Late Night did it in the last writers strike).

So even though the Actors strike is still happening, shows like this can use union actors (like Drew Barrymore) now. And they can use union writers now, too, because the writers strike is over.

The subscription fee was for a gamepass-like access to a catalog of free games, so they didn’t refund that. The subscription fee also wasn’t required for playing purchased games (although it was required for 4K quality).

especially with a controller

I mostly used keyboard and mouse with the service, since the games I like to play tend to work better with keyboard and mouse. I had a dinky underpowered laptop but was playing AAA PC-oriented games through the browser interface. It was great.

I’m on GeForce Now these days but I find that it doesn’t work quite as seamlessly as Stadia did.

All GPUs perform equally well the same at ray tracing when there are no rays to trace

I’ve seen it for keypads that have to send a signal to an actuator located elsewhere, but I think the typical in-door deadbolt (where the keypad is mere millimeters from the motor itself) wouldn’t have the form factor leaving the connection as exposed to a magnet inducing a current that would actually actuate the motor.

Most of LPL’s videos on smart locks just defeat the mechanical backup cylinder, anyway. I’d love to see him take on the specific Yale x Nest model I have, though.

Yup. The backup for battery failure on this model is that the bottom of the plate can accept power from the pins of a 9V battery, held there just long enough to punch in the code.

Things might be different by now, but when I was researching this I decided on the Yale x Nest.

It’s more secure than a keyed lock in the following ways:

• Can’t be picked (no physical keyhole).
• Codes can be revoked or time-gated (for example, you can set the dog walker’s code to work only at the time of day they’re expected to come by).
• Guest codes can be set to provide real-time notifications when used.
• The lock keeps a detailed log of every time it’s used.
• The lock can be set to automatically lock the door after a certain amount of time.

It’s less secure than a physical traditional lock in the following ways:

• Compromise of a keycode isn’t as obvious as losing a key, so you might not change a compromised keycode the same way you might change a lost key.
• People can theoretically see a code being punched in, or intercept compromised communications to use it.
• Compromised app or login could be used to assign new codes or remotely unlock

It’s basically the same level of security in the following ways:

• The deadbolt can still be defeated with the same physical weaknesses that a typical deadbolt has: blunt force, cutting with a saw, etc.
• The windows and doors are probably just generally weak around your house, to where a determined burglar can get in no matter what lock you use.
• Works like normal without power or network connection (just can’t be remotely unlocked or reprogrammed to add/revoke codes if not online)

Overall, I’d say it’s more secure against real-world risk, where the weakest link tends to be the people you share your keys with.

At the highest quality setting, the iPhone 14 Pro captures video footage that is 6 GB per minute. At USB 2.0 speeds, files can be transferred at around 3.6 GB per minute. Typical wifi direct/Airdrop speeds are about 3-5 GB per minute. And thunderbolt speeds are 100 times faster, at 5 GB/s or 300 GB/minute.

For some purposes that USB 2.0 speed would be a significant bottleneck. It’s up to the buyer to decide whether those use cases are likely.

Well it’s obvious that Musk wants X to be a bank, so this isn’t unexpected.