tal

https://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

A Story About ‘Magic'

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

“If I could vote, I would have voted for Trump,” he says. “He’s the strongest president when it comes to Cuba.”

To be fair, that's probably accurate; my guess is that Trump probably takes a harder line on Cuba than Harris would. If someone has strongly anti-Cuban-government positions, then, yeah, I can see why that'd be an concern for them.

kagis

This is from prior to the general election, comparing Cuba positions:

https://www.firstpost.com/world/harris-trump-offer-little-hope-for-us-cuba-detente-as-election-looms-13829936.html

For decades, the United States has enforced a trade embargo against the island that complicates Cuba’s global financial transactions. Trump’s designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism and reinstatement of other restrictions during his 2017-2021 presidency snuffed out an historic rapprochement under former President Barack Obama, under whom President Joe Biden served as vice president.

Both candidates said in brief statements they would continue to draw a hard line on Cuba.

“Cuba is not prepared, nor will it be prepared to resist any more pressure (from the United States),” said Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat who is now an independent political analyst.

Alzugaray said a second Trump presidency “does not bode well.” He had more hope for a Harris presidency, which he said could ease sanctions to avoid another potential international conflict so close to US shores.

But he said there were no guarantees.

Yeah.

The point the article makes, that Trump is taking an unfriendly position towards political refugees from Cuba, is also valid, though. If you're someone who is opposed to the Cuban government and wants pressure on it...but also someone who fled to the US, you're going to have to be balancing those positions.

They seem to be adapting to modern society pretty well.

Based on the article, it lets her ask them things that she doesn't want to ask her parents, though I'm not sure that if I were 9 years old that I'd suddenly want to discover that my parents have a list of everything I've asked it and are reading through it, much less that Amazon has a database.

In 2023, 60% of UK households had a smart speaker, up from 22% before the pandemic.

Jesus Christ. I had no idea so many people were buying these things. That's astounding.

If you'd asked me to guess what percentage of households had one, I'd have guessed single digits.

how is me renting a car and fueling it less expensive than a train seat for the literal same route?

Car rental companies operate in a competitive market, as do gas stations. Competitive markets are pretty good at driving prices down.

Trains tend not to.

https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/business_economics/natural_monopolies.html/

Railways as a natural monopoly

Railways are often considered a typical example of a natural monopoly. The very high costs of laying track and building a network, as well as the costs of buying or leasing the trains, would prohibit, or deter, the entry of a competitor.

To society, the costs associated with building and running a rival network would be wasteful.

I can see and feel the headcrab like it's actually there.

Stories have a lower cost of production, which also permits for a wider variety of topics to be covered.

Thr lower the cost of production, the better you can do a better job of covering the long tail, providing smaller quantities of stuff that's more niche or specialized, and have a smaller pool of people who are interested in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the "long tail")—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the "head"). 

Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]

At some point in humanity's future, I assume that it will be a thing and be widespread. Just too many potential benefits to having high-bandwidth links to the brain not to eventually do it.

But it's a path with a lot of hurdles along the way, and risks.

The Valve Deckard was a little more ambitious than had been originally anticipated.

I think that this is okay, because this lemmy instance isn't a commercial operation.

I guess that places like PinkNews and similar commercial media outlets might be open to lawsuits, though.

Note that under the Kansas bill, it appears that depictions of homosexuality qualify as also needing to be locked behind an age gate. Like, not "homosexual sex", but homosexuality.

https://kansasreflector.com/2024/04/03/dont-look-kids-according-to-kansas-lawmakers-this-is-pornography/

Don’t look, kids! According to Kansas lawmakers, this is pornography.

Images and text depicting gay affection could be swept up by age-verification bill

A same-sex couple exchanges rings at a marriage ceremony. You might think it's a sweet moment. But should we be protecting children from seeing it? (Getty Images)

Take a good look at the photo just above these words. You should see two men exchanging rings at a same-sex marriage ceremony.

You’re also seeing, according to the Kansas Legislature, the kind of pornographic content that should be walled off from those under age 18 with age-verification software. That was the consequence — intended or not — of passing Senate Bill 394. All 40 state senators voted for the legislation, including 11 Democrats. In the House, nine Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill, 92-31.

Max Kautsch, a Lawrence media lawyer, outlined some of the problems.

“The online age-verification bill expressly incorporates the definition of ‘harmful to minors’ that already exists in Kansas statutes, a phrase defined to mean ‘any description, exhibition, presentation or representation, in whatever form, of … acts of … homosexuality,’ ” he told me. “The term ‘homosexuality’ is undefined in the law, but it could include a wide swath of conduct between two persons of the same sex, including kissing, hand-holding, and other activities that would be considered ‘public displays of affection.’ ”

A couple of gentlemen exchanging rings, as shown above, would certainly qualify.

I encourage everyone to study the actual bill. From my perspective, it not only invokes a double standard against the brave Kansas LGBGTQ+ community but actively seeks to chill free expression. The proposed law applies to “any commercial entity” that shares content online, which means it could sweep up individuals trying to make money from a travel blog or small businesses that take wedding photos of same-sex couples. (As a nonprofit, Kansas Reflector appears exempt, which comes as a relief given my columns.)