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Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question:

- They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult

- They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply

- Fish

- They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats

(note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)


It is a recurring phenomenon. Venice, Netherlands, and today Singapore. Small countries without resources and, hence, needing trade. They become open trading hubs and grow.

Sadly, countries with a single easy-to-harvest resource —- like oil, gold, or gems —— are more likely to become closed dictatorships.


> Netherlands

Medieval Netherlands had a single easy-to-harvest resource: sea fish; a very valuable commodity for protein-starved medieval peasantry. They were very lucky to be able pivot from that to trade (the pivot required a war between merchants and nobles, which the merchants won) before the herring and cod started to run out.


Thanks. Ironically, the article started off great with that but clearly it wasn't going to answer the question, so I only read the first paragraph.


Venice is the extreme "tail wagging the dog" situation. Venice is dinky. It's not much bigger than San Francisco. Yet it was a major European power for centuries.


Venice was small by land mass, but controlled the Eastern Mediterranean, and therefore the Black Sea endpoint of the Silk Road, which was immensely profitable.

Consequently, Vasco da Gama rounding Africa in 1498 doomed Venice as a great power.

(All from memory, 100% factuality not guaranteed)


For context, the lowest notes on most pipe organs are typically about 33 or 16 Hz (from a pipe that is 8', 16', or 32' long).


This disappeared a few months ago for me, unfortunately.


Why do you say unfortunately? Are you saying PayPal now doesn’t allow you to pay directly in the foreign currency and let your bank convert?


Correct.


> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body

> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be

Some do. Are teachers the only ones?

> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.

I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.


> Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.


You also can't have double-blind study on something both the participant and teacher know is present or not.... But that doesn't mean the study is invalid, it just means you have to account for it.


That’s interesting, what if they don’t know it is an experiment or that any study is being done?

School A bans them, school B does not. None of the teachers know a study is being done.


Would huge pages help with the mmap case?


Oh man... I'd have look into that. Off the top of my head I don't know how you'd make that happen. Way back when I'd have said no. Now with all the folio updates to the Linux kernel memory handling I'm not sure. I think you'd have to take care to make sure the data gets into to page cache as huge pages. If not then when you tried to madvise() or whatever the buffer to use huge pages it would likely just ignore you. In theory it could aggregate the small pages into huge pages but that would be more latency bound work and it's not clear how that impacts the page cache.

But the arm64 systems with 16K or 64K native pages would have fewer faults.


> I'd have look into that. Off the top of my head I don't know how you'd make that happen.

Pass these flags to your mmap call: (MAP_HUGETLB | MAP_HUGE_1GB)


Would this actually create huge page page cache entries?


It's right in the documentation for mmap() [0]! And, from my experience, using it with an 800GB file provided a significant speed-up, so I do believe the documentation is correct ;)

And, you can poke around in the linux kernel's source code to determine how it works. I had a related issue that I ended up digging around to find the answer to: what happens if you use mremap() to expand the mapping and it fails; is the old mapping still valid or not? Answer: it's still valid. I found that it was actually fairly easy to read linux kernel C code, compared to a lot (!) of other C libraries I've tried to understand.

[0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mmap.2.html


> Would huge pages help with the mmap case?

Yes. Tens- or hundreds- of gigabytes of 4K page table entries take a while for the OS to navigate.


I might be wrong but I think I heard that Firefox and maybe Safari bin that to a couple common values. (Or maybe that's just in the tracking-prevention mode that Tor uses?)


According to MDN Safari clamps it to 4 or 8, but Firefox does not: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/h...

I always found it annoying that CPU information was widely available and precise while memory information was not - it's clamped to 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4 or 8 GB. If you're running something memory-bound in the browser you have to be really conservative to avoid locking up the user's device (or ask them to manually specify how much memory to use). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Device_Memo...


I was thinking of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1984333. Looks like that's only active when certain fingerprinting protection settings are on.


I think one of the third party user.js projects does that.

Maybe https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js


Hmm, is it normal practice to rotate secrets before fixing the vulnerability?


They first disabled rubocop to prevent further exploit, then rotated keys. If they awaited deploying the fix that would mean letting compromised keys remain valid for 9 more hours. According to their response all other tools were already sandboxed.

However their response doesn't remediate putting secrets into environment variables in the first place - that is apparently acceptable to them and sets off a red flag for me.


"According to their response all other tools were already sandboxed."

Everything else was fine, just this one tool chosen by the security researcher out of a dozen of tools was not sandboxed.


Yeah, I thought the same. They were really unlucky, the only analyzer that let you include and run code was the one outside of the sandbox. What were the chances?


> putting secrets into environment variables in the first place - that is apparently acceptable to them and sets off a red flag for me

Isn't that standard? The other options I've seen are .env files (amazing dev experience but not as secure), and AWS Secrets Manager and similar competition like Infisical. Even in the latter, you need keys to authenticate with the secrets manager and I believe it's recommended to store those as env vars.

Edit: Formatting


You can use native authentication methods with Infisical that don't require you to use keys to authenticate with your secrets manager: - https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/identities... - https://infisical.com/docs/documentation/platform/identities...


Duh. Thanks for pointing that out.


Decreasingly so, but even in stuff written in the last hundred years or so you'll sometimes find words capitalized for emphasis or similar.


Most communication from the highest office in the land is indeed now In this Exalted STYLE.


Famously Custer used to capitalize mule and horse and write Indian in lowercase


On Firefox 142 (nightly):

Cropout: After being stuck at 0% for a long while and 1200 network requests, it loads to a menu with a black background and will start a game but only UI elements show up. Seems to have a lot of errors parsing shaders, as well as a few other miscellaneous errors.

Car configurator: Several errors while at 0% (never loads), the first among them being `[223402304]: MessageBox type 0 Caption Message Text Game files required to initialize the global shader and cooked content are most likely missing. Refer to Engine log for details.`

I would concur with others that you should at least test this in Firefox before advertising it here.


Alt + = will put you in the equation editor fairly easily, and from there you can pretty much use LaTeX notation.


Even with a keyboard shortcut, I never found it to be truly satisfying. I cannot quite recall what was annoying, though. Maybe you cannot space back into the formula after closing it? (I certainly recall having the experience of typing a formula, closing it, noticing a mistake, hitting backspace, and deleting the entire formula.) Maybe there was just a slight delay for the formula editor to open? Also, $ is still more pleasant to type than Alt+=.

I would be willing to try again, but I'm not buying Word for the privilege.


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