And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

I don’t know why you’re framing this as solely a demand problem, or why you think the elasticity of demand won’t extend to negative prices. Negative prices tend to show up only during periods of very high supply, due to a confluence of factors like weather, so supply is part of it (low or even negative prices can induce producers to curtail production). There’s nothing special about the number zero.

And negative prices therefore take the place of disposal: oversupply and the need to expand real resources taking that energy off of the grid in that particular moment. That’s demand, too: incentivizing people to do what needs to be done, and get rid of that excess energy by disposing it or whatever.

you don’t have to pay electricity to f*ck off if you produce too much of it.

It’s not any different than most physical goods. Whatever you can’t sell before it goes bad, you have to pay someone to take off your hands using real resources (dumpsters, trucks, human labor).

Too much electricity in the system is harmful, and if nobody wants to buy it, then you have to pay someone to take it out of the system.

If we were able to adequately shape demand to match available supply, rates would fluctuate, but they would never go negative.

I don’t see why that would follow.

If supply is higher than demand, then getting rid of that excess supply costs money, and the producer might have to pay someone to take it away. It applies to grocery stores that over order inventory of perishable goods, to oil companies that run out of space to store oil, and electricity grids that need to get rid of damaging/dangerous excess power.

Actually, I disagree that DD/MM/YYYY even qualifies as being small to big.

If you actually treat it as a counter from 01/01/2024 onward, note that the first digit that moves is actually the second digit in the 8-digit representation. In terms of significance, the most significant digit is the 5th one in the string, then counting down the significance it’s 6th, then 7th, then 8th, then jumps back to the 3rd, then the 4th, then the 1st, then the 2nd.

Well the convention was to store it as a 32 bit signed integer, so that is any number from -2^31 to (2^31 - 1). Prime numbers are formally defined as a subset of whole numbers, so let’s ignore the negative numbers and the number zero.

Fun fact: the largest signed 32-bit integer is itself a prime. And the wikipedia page lists it as the 105,097,565th prime.

By the time we hit the 2038 problem, there will have been about 105 million seconds since 1970 where the Unix time was a prime number. And it’s a 10-digit number in base 10, where prime frequency is something about 4% of the numbers.

Does that answer your question about prime frequency today? Eh, I’m sure someone else can figure that out. If not, I’ll probably have to wait until I’m in front of a computer.

No, I’m taking back the word “prime” from a company that shouldn’t have exclusive rights to define the term. I’m not going to cede that territory just because I don’t like the company.

If you’re looking for a proof:

Our base 10 system represents numbers by having little multipliers in front of each power of 10. So a number like 1234 is 1 x 10^3 + 2 x 10^2 + 3 x 10^1 + 4 x 10^0 .

Note that 10 is just (3 x 3) + 1. So for any 2 digit number, you’re looking at the first digit times (9 + 1), plus the second digit. Or:

(9 times the first digit) + (the first digit) + (the second digit).

Well we know that 9 times the first digit is definitely divisible by both 3 and 9. And we know that adding two divisible-by-n numbers is also divisible by n.

So we can ignore that first term (9 x first digit), and just look to whether first digit plus second digit is divisible. If it is, then you know that the original big number is divisible.

And when you extend this concept out to 3, 4, or more digit numbers, you see that it holds for every power of 10, and thus, every possible length of number. For both 9 and 3.

It works for 9, too.

ISO 8601 is the only normal date system.

Yes, and recurring dates naturally drop the year, so MM/DD better fits that general rule.

They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.

By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.

On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.

you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

I’m volunteering at an animal hospital.

Animal Hospital?!?

The animals are the patients.

Oh. That makes sense.

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.