the passing grade is 43/50,

They might just be randomly guessing and hoping that they’ll eventually get it, and thinking that their chances are better than they are.

I think that that’d be…let’s see. Say there are four possible answers for each question. So he’s got a 75% chance of failing any individual question.

$ maxima -q
(%i1) load("distrib")$
(%i2) cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75);
(%o2)                       1.8188415357867314E-19

That should give the probability of failing at most 7 answers out of 50 if there’s a 75% chance of failing any one.

So he’s got something like a 0.000000000000000018188% chance of passing the test by randomly guessing.

His chance of failing a single instance of that test:

(%i3) 1-cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75);

(%o3)                                 1.0

Ah. He has such a ludicrously small chance of passing that Maxima can’t represent it with the current floating point precision.

kagis a bit to figure out how to do this

Okay, apparently Maxima has bigfloats, but they default to only 16 digits of precision; not enough for this. This should give us 200 digits of floating point precision with bigfloats.

(%i4) fpprec:200;

(%o4)                                 200
(%i5) 1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75));

(%o5) 9.999999999999999998181158464213268688894671703526026636336767389444876177016785501194817697978578507900238037109375b-1

Okay, so now chance of failing 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:

(%i6) (1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128;

(%o6) 9.9999999999999997671882834192983948674103659072385593201782461674117226992783470289641501110105148249790638571335177402867593272110042747272666144926576839664587182158166580514670324207313719393913737b-1

So then his chance of managing to get at least one success out of 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:

(%i7) 1-(1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128;

(%o7) 2.328117165807016051325896340927614406798217538325882773007216529710358498889894851750209361428664822597132406727889957252727333855073423160335412817841833419485329675792686280606086263120236298536839b-17

So he’s got about a 0.0000000000000023% chance of passing at least once in a 128 random-guess-based series of test attempts (assuming, again, that each question has four multiple choice answers). That is, he could keep doing this for the rest of his life and he’s virtually certain not to pass.

Welcome to the modern day. Everything is stupid, and intentionally designed for you to have a bad time.

To be fair, if you go back to the pre-Internet era, the OED was pretty expensive in print. Your library might have had a copy, but most people wouldn’t.

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

In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes.[1] Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018.[1]

Most people don’t have a 20 volume dictionary floating around the house.

When I was growing up, our house used the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary is a large American dictionary, first published in 1966 as The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: The Unabridged Edition. Edited by Editor-in-chief Jess Stein, it contained 315,000 entries in 2256 pages, as well as 2400 illustrations.

That’s pretty beefy for a single book, but it’s a far smaller and less-costly dictionary than the OED.

Various libraries near me might have had an OED, but I don’t think I ever used it there, either.

My guess is that if you were gonna have a big set of reference books, you’d probably be more likely to have an encyclopedia set, maybe get Encyclopedia Britannica, not the Oxford English Dictionary.

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

The Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for ‘British Encyclopaedia’) is a general-knowledge English-language encyclopaedia. It has been published since 1768, and after several ownership changes is currently owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.[1] Since 2016, it has been published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia at the website Britannica.com.

We used the somewhat-smaller World Book Encyclopedia:

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

The World Book Encyclopedia is an American encyclopedia.[1] World Book was first published in 1917. Since 1925, a new edition of the encyclopedia has been published annually.[1] Although published online in digital form for a number of years, World Book is currently the only American encyclopedia which also still provides a print edition.[2] The encyclopedia is designed to cover major areas of knowledge uniformly, but it shows particular strength in scientific, technical, historical and medical subjects.[3]

World Book, Inc. is based in Chicago, Illinois.[1] According to the company, the latest edition, World Book Encyclopedia 2024, contains more than 14,000 pages distributed along 22 volumes and also contains over 25,000 photographs.[4]

As of 2022, the only official sales outlet for the World Book Encyclopedia is the company’s website; the official list price is $1,199.

I think that the idea of a large, expensive, many-volume print home reference work is probably fading into the past with the Internet, but it used to really be something of a norm.

The OED in print today costs $1,215, and you can still get the thing. So that’s pretty comparable to the pre-Internet past.

They also sell online subscriptions for $100/year. I think that most people with a home set likely didn’t bother to replace their encyclopedia or dictionary and just let it get out of date, so they probably didn’t get an OED set and replace it every 12 years (well, discount the cost of financing there) so online access would cost more…but it’s probably not wildly worse.

$100/year is definitely not worth it for me for OED access, but, then, neither is the print edition, and that’s been the long-run norm for what someone would get if they wanted the OED.

Honestly…considers I don’t think that I actually even have a print dictionary. I used to have a little vest-pocket dictionary that was floating around somewhere, but not a standard bookshelf reference. Just too many freely-available online ones. If I bought one, I probably would not buy the OED.

I do think that the paywall will make the OED less-relevant relative to other dictionaries.

But I don’t think that the world is worse off now than it was when one had to go buy a large print book (or a 20-volume set of books, if that’s how you swung) and then go haul it off the bookshelf when you wanted to reference it.

Merriam-Webster isn’t paywalled.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/

Looks like there’s a new definitive standard for the English language!

Strong words for a man who travels by personal aircraft even when he’s not President and whose priority in holding patterns is up to the discretion of air traffic controllers.

Harper’s Pub

All of the parties involved in the argument were said to have been drinking.

For God’s sake, the British developed technology to deal with this some time back. The Guinness Book of World Records was originally designed to resolve disputes between bar patrons. Just put one in the bar instead of resolving them via homicide.

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/70781-most-prolific-chicken

Most prolific chicken

White Leghorn (No. 2988)

United States

The highest authenticated rate of egg-laying is 371 in 364 days, laid by a White Leghorn (No. 2988) in an official test conducted by Prof. Harold V. Biellier ending on 29 August 1979 at the College of Agriculture, University of Missouri, USA.

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

Guinness World Records, known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as The Guinness Book of Records and in previous United States editions as The Guinness Book of World Records, is a British reference book published annually, listing world records both of human achievements and the extremes of the natural world. Sir Hugh Beaver created the concept in order to settle arguments debated in pubs, and twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter co-founded the book in London in August 1955.[3]

https://gwrstore.com/en-us/collections/guinness-world-records-books

$21 per copy from their own store.

https://www.amazon.com/Guinness-World-Records-2025/dp/1913484564

$23 on Amazon.

Eventually, I expect that advanced AI will. The same is true for many human professions. But I’m dubious that pure LLMs will be the route this takes. Too many limitations.

It’s possible that such an advanced AI might make use of or incorporate LLMs.

Ground level parking isn’t really all that expensive, not unless you have very high land values. It does cost far more if you want to put up a multistory parking garage; from past reading, that’s maybe $30k-$50k per spot (though I’d still personally favor a parking mandate in that case, as otherwise you get people turning the street into a parking lot, which is awful for everyone, and parking illegally all over).

In the picture shown, though, it looks like townhouse-type stuff, two stories, not high density housing, so the land value probably isn’t that insane, and they can do ground level parking instead of multistory parking.

At a meeting in April, xAI staff lawyer Lily Lim told employees that they would need to submit their biometric data to train the AI companion to be more human-like in its interactions with customers, according to a recording of the meeting review by the Journal.

Employees that were assigned as AI tutors were instructed to sign release forms granting xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use, reproduce, and distribute their faces and voices, as part of a confidential program code-named “Project Skippy.” The data would be used to train Ani, as well as Grok’s other AI companions.

Huh.

I wonder if xAI has transexual employees, and if so, how socially-conservative users feel about conversing with a composite AI incorporating said data sources.

when I started using vim mode in zsh.

I’m an emacs user myself, but if you’re not aware, readline — which handles a considerable portion of the “prompt for text” stuff in many terminal programs, like input for bash and such — can be put into vi mode.

https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rluserman.html#Readline-vi-Mode

In order to switch interactively between emacs and vi editing modes, use the command M-C-j (bound to emacs-editing-mode when in vi mode and to vi-editing-mode in emacs mode). The Readline default is emacs mode.

When you enter a line in vi mode, you are already placed in ‘insertion’ mode, as if you had typed an ‘i’. Pressing ESC switches you into ‘command’ mode, where you can edit the text of the line with the standard vi movement keys, move to previous history lines with ‘k’ and subsequent lines with ‘j’, and so forth.

Or, in ~/.inputrc:

set editing-mode vi

To set the default.

he has not played Kerbel Space Program.

“Kerbal”

deleted by creator

It’s not really a new idea.

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

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/perfect-storm-of-demand-and-supply-driving-up-storage-costs

OpenAI’s “Stargate” project has recently signed an agreement with Samsung and SK hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month. That figure alone would account for close to 40% of global DRAM output.

High-density NAND products are effectively sold out months in advance. Samsung’s next-generation V9 NAND is already nearly booked before it’s even launched. Micron has presold almost all of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) output through 2026. Contracts that once covered a quarter now span years, with hyperscalers buying directly at the source.

If China’s going to compete on AI, it’s going to be doing so with a limited supply of memory, I expect.

“We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry,” he wrote.

In a follow-up post, he added, “Have I mentioned my repeated call for civic education.”

Ehh…you could establish a residence in New York City and also in Kentucky and switch your domicile back and forth based on which place you want to vote in a given year.

EDIT: It looks like the bar for both is whether you spend at least 183 days a year, with part days counting. So technically, if you spend about half the year in each place, so some of those days are partly in each, you probably could just choose, since you could meet the bar for domicile in both places concurrently (though you can’t actually have domicile in both places simultaneously). I don’t know how frequently you can switch, though, like whether there’s a delay in voter registration taking effect or whatever.

Aw, thanks. Glad you like it!

From what I have read, he’s still likely to be able to line up enough votes to get his $1 trillion pay package (and the associated voting rights), despite a lot of major institutional investors being in opposition. But we’ll see when the vote goes though.

I think that Tesla can probably get a more-effective CEO for less money, personally. Even if he leaves as CEO, he still owns 15% of Tesla and is fabulously wealthy as a result. I don’t feel like he’s getting a bad deal.

I do think that there are some arguments that the SEC should pass some regulation to help ensure board-CEO independence; part of the issue is that the board, which is supposed to oversee Musk, has been considered to be acting on his behalf by quite a few people. I don’t think that it will happen under the present administration, though.

Oh, okay, I didn’t realize that you were trying to just ask people here about their search engine, rather than link to an article about Orion.

Well, I use Kagi’s search engine. They basically do what I wish Google and YouTube and suchlike would do — just make their money by charging a fee and providing a service, rather than trying to harvest data and show ads. I use search more than any other service online, and there isn’t really a realistic way for me to run my own Web-spanning search engine and getting reasonable, private results. I don’t really make use of most of their add-on features other than their “Fediverse Forums” thing that can search all Threadiverse hosts, which is helpful, and occasionally their Usenet search functionality. My principal interest in them is from a privacy standpoint, and I’m happy with them on that front; they don’t log or data-mine.

EDIT: They do have some sort of way to issue searches without telling Kagi which user at Kagi you are, if you’re worried about them secretly retaining your search results anyway, which I think is technically interesting, but I really don’t care that much. If a wide range of websites adopted the system, that’d be interesting, maybe.

EDIT2: Privacy Pass. Might be the protocol of the same name that CloudFlare uses. I’ve never really dug into it.

EDIT3: Some of their functionality (user-customizable search bangs, for example) can also be done browser-side, if your browser supports it and you rig it up that way. Like, I had Firefox set up to make "!gm <query>" do a Google Maps search before Kagi did, and chuckled when I realized that they defaulted to the same convention that I had.

EDIT4: Oh, their images search does let you view a proxied view of the image (so that the site with the result doesn’t know that you’re viewing the image) and lets one save the image. IIRC, Google Images used to do something like that, though I don’t believe they do now, so places like pinterest that try to make saving an image a pain are obnoxious. Firefox on the desktop still lets one save any image visible on a webpage (click the lock icon in the URL bar, click “Connection Secure”, click “More Information”, click “Media”, and then scroll through the list until you find the image in question), but I’d just as soon not jump through the hoops, and Kagi just eliminates the whole headache.

EDIT5: They try to identify and flag paywalled sites in their results, unlike Google. For example, if you kagi for “the economist American policy is splitting, state by state, into two blocs”, you’ll get a result with a little dollar sign icon. This can be helpful, though archive.today will let one effectively bypass many paywalls, which somewhat reduces the obnoxiousness of getting paywalled results just mixed in with non-paywalled results on Google.

I think that you submitted the wrong URL. The submitted URL just points to Kagi’s home page (https://kagi.com/), not to an article talking about the Orion browser.

I didn’t have any problem with the guy in the first picture either, but I would be willing to bet that many of us are viewing this thread using very different display brightness/contrast settings.

I’m currently looking at it on a laptop. My laptop has no light sensor with automatic brightness adjustment, and I use the laptop in a wide range of environments, so I need to use brightnessctl on Linux to fiddle the brightness, usually between about 10% and 60%. It’s not like there’s one single “correct brightness” when I’m in a ton of different environments.

My desktop’s monitor doesn’t have a light sensor with automatic brightness adjustment either.

There’s probably some way to go get a brightness sensor and a daemon to auto-fiddle the thing on the desktop — webcams, which often have automatic brightness adjustment themselves, aren’t great for this. But, well, I never got around to it.

Your display likely has some sort of brightness/contrast setting.

If you’re playing this movie on a computing device, the video player software likely also has adjustment settings at the software level. I use mpv on Linux to watch most video, and there, by default, 1 and 2 are contrast, 3 and 4 brightness, and 5 and 6 gamma.