There's been plenty of times that I catted a binary file and broke my terminal settings. Sometimes fixable by running `clear` (without being able to see what I'm typing), sometimes not.
And I know PuTTY has a setting for what string is returned in response to some control code, that iirc per standard can be set from some other code.
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In general, in-band signaling allows for "fun" tricks.
Who? The infrastructure team that did the move didn't even tell anyone. They were decommissioning old servers, and moving the VMs to new hardware. I'm just a lowly developer that had to troubleshoot why SMSes stopped going out.
Observability and alerting is pretty standard devops. Both the dev and infrastructure teams dropped the ball here. But at least as part of remediating this you added alerting to make sure you’d notice when your twillio connection fails in the future, right?
An apartment inside an apartment complex is still inside the same building. Earth is in the Universe. There's a difference between "in the Universe" and "outside of Earth".
A superset also includes everything in all its subsets.
Now I think of a scifi setting, where rich people use massive ressources to feed their artificial gardens on Merkur with water from comets, so the genetically engineered solar powered green butterflies in their garden can keep flying.
(But there might be more expensive adjustments needed, like rotation speed)
Sure, anything it does can be done better with specialized tooling. If you know that tooling.
The memory thing sounds like an implementation limit rather than something fundamentally unsolvable. Just experiment with different ways of organizing state until something works?
We did this. One balloon with plain air. One with pure hydrogen. One with 50/50 hydrogen and air. The one with pure hydrogen popped closer in magnitude to the pure air than it was to the 50/50 mix.
ETA: I may be misremembering, the more I think about it, the more I recall that we did not use air, we did use pure oxygen. Not like it was hard to get (and we had lots more interesting stuff than that in the lab, this was the 80s...). But the outcome I do remember. The entire point of the experiment was to examine the difference between the individual pure elements and the mix. We expected the pure hydrogen to be far more interesting than it turned out.
Pure hydrogen in a balloon produces a low, loud, very satisfying bang. Completely different from a sound of an air balloon popping. Here is a video from a very good Royal Society of Chemistry demonstration series on various unusual combustion process:
Hydrogen mixed with air or with oxygen produces an ear piercing supersonic detonation, exceedingly loud and unpleasant. Not recommended for demonstrations.
As a kid I took a lot of classes at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, which was paradise for fledgling nerds. On the last day they would have a little closing ceremony with some cute little science experiment. One of my favorites was "Going Out With A Bang".
The instructors would bring out a helium balloon and a candle on a meter stick. The balloon goes pop, huzzah.
Then the twist. "Hey, wanna do it again?" All the kids would be like "meh, I guess?" They would then bring out a balloon full of hydrogen (maybe some oxygen too?). It would look identical to the first one, floating there tethered to the lab bench.
When the candle hit the second one, it made a white flash and a really sharp BANG. It was an order of magnitude louder, and you could hear the transient bouncing off the walls and echoing in the halls. It made an impression.
It's a particular variety of "everyone else is wrong (and maybe a bit stupid)".
Like, sure, sometimes you get popular nonsense like recovered memories or accidental fires can't be as hot as intentional fires or shaken-baby syndrome or bite-mark analysis. But a lot of times, everyone isn't wrong and you've just overlooked something critical or misdefined the problem.
> Like, sure, sometimes you get popular nonsense like recovered memories or accidental fires can't be as hot as intentional fires or shaken-baby syndrome or bite-mark analysis. But a lot of times, everyone isn't wrong and you've just overlooked something critical or misdefined the problem.
The older I get, the more I find that everyone is wrong. It's fucking astounding how much stuff either was never actually checked, or is true only under very select circumstances with those caveats being widely ignored. For example at work right now we have been using a test for 40 years that was developed around the idea that our product absorbed air - chemical variation would lead to extreme differences in results and you can't retest an item for at least 24 hours because it will still be affected. Turns out that none of that was true, all the error we were getting was from temperature change, the items can be retested after 45 seconds. 40 years and no one took 30 minutes to verify this claim which costs us millions of dollars per year. And this is just the example from this past week. I've probably seen several hundred such cases of completely unjustified claims being treated as gospel truth.
I can't speak for the countless things I've never tested, but if nearly everything I do test is wrong, across numerous fields full of very intelligent people, it doesn't give me much confidence about everything else. We live in a world that values simplicity and confidence, not nuance and rigorous verification. I've gotten to the point where I don't trust anything without verification, not even my own past work.
> It's a particular variety of "everyone else is wrong (and maybe a bit stupid)".
Gestures at the current state of the world
Not that adopting rationalist modes of thinking will fix the problem, of course. Teach rationalist principles to an idiot and you will have a slightly more rational idiot, who will reason himself into absurdity. Teach them to a manipulative, amoral psychopath and you will have a more skillful manipulator.
Rationalist principles and methods provide superior tools for thinking through some complex problems, but they say nothing about foundational ethics (other than pointing out possible sources for the many different systems of ethical beliefs). And they cannot be wielded effectively by people who lack the ability to decouple, to think abstractly, or to create extended “chains” of thoughts and keep them in working memory.
One should be suspicious of anyone who claims that rationalism is a panacea, or alternatively that it is somehow a problem per se. It’s a neutral set of tools, a community who wants to improve those tools, and a small group hanging off the edge who have unrealistic and/or harmful views of how those tools should be applied. Unfortunately this third minority is presented by anti-rationalists as the core of rationalism. In reality, they are easily avoided unless you hold the same core values.
(I say this as a long time observer who appreciates their work but does not consider myself a part of the “rationalist” community.)
And I know PuTTY has a setting for what string is returned in response to some control code, that iirc per standard can be set from some other code.
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In general, in-band signaling allows for "fun" tricks.
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