Orthogonal just means at right angles.

The way this is defined if you’re a mathematician is two directions are orthogonal to each other if you can move as much as you like in one direction without changing the location with respect to the other direction.

So it’s like North and East. You can walk east as much as you like without changing how far north you are. But if you have a direction like South East or North West, when you walk that way you will change how far north you are.

We can make this 3d by adding a new direction that is orthogonal to both North and East. This direction would be up or down. Because you can move up and down without changing how far north or east you are.

Mathematicians measure orthogonality of directions using an inner product. If you represent the directions as vector then the inner product between them is zero if they are orthogonal.

Perpendicular means orthogonal, the opposite is parallel.

Null is more confusing. To define this we need to talk about linear functions. A linear function is something that would e.g. create a map from the 3d world, by throwing away up and down information and shrinking everything down so you have a scaled representation of where things are in terms of North and East.

The null space is all the information that is destroyed. For linear functions this is a linear subspace(a space that goes through zero and is described by a collection of directions) that is orthogonal to the space of all information which is kept.

You can look up what Adobe are doing in this space.

Long-term it’s going to be something like every secure device comes with its own inbuilt unit for cryptographically signing the raw files. These signatures can then be matched against manufacturers databases of approved signatures.

This doesn’t guarantee that nothing has been tampered with, but it does provide a link back to the original device allowing you to inspect it.

There are huge privacy concerns as well, anything that’s used to indicate authenticity can be used to track.

It’s interesting. There’s a lot of talk about how chatgpt makes people lazy, but honestly I think Google killed the “read the manual” ethos.

Back in the day when you couldn’t just search for everything, you needed enough understanding of the manual to find anything in the index.

So a key part of figuring anything out was reading at least the start of the manual.

Now, fuck it, you just type into Google and try to guess enough context to understand what’s going on.

Depends.

You can argue that it’s basically art/political speech. You’ve done it to draw attention to flaws in the approach and to highlight how ineffectual the current system is, and that if you actually wanted to do make fake IDs you’d take a much less high-profile approach. As such, there’s no actual criminal intent required.

Don’t know if a judge would buy it though.

Ok, but one of the most important use cases is non-local access.

If I’m at home I can just go to the door.

Go on, drop a rocket on Zuck’s Bond villain hideout.

Let’s see what happens.

You absolutely can’t use LLMs for anything big unless you learn to code.

Think of an LLM as a particularly shit builder. You give them a small job and maybe 70% of the time they’ll give you something that works. But it’s often not up to spec, so even if it kinda works you’ll have to tell them to correct it or fix it yourself.

The bigger the job is and the more complex the more ways they have to fuck it up. This means in order to use them, you have to break the problem down into small sub tasks, and check that the code is good enough for each one.

Can they be useful? Sometimes yes, it’s quicker to have an AI write code than for you to do it yourself, and if you want something very standard it will probably get it right or almost right.

But you can’t just say ‘write me an app’ and expect it to be useable.

Follow the money.

In Elon’s case, it’s all about losing money that was going directly to him. Particularly, the loss of ev subsidies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-01/trump-takes-aim-at-musk-over-ev-mandate-and-subsidies

Musk will not rest until there is a free Tesla for everyone, paid for by the American government.

Privatize profits and socialize losses. It’s the American way.

Wow, I wonder if that’s the same billionaire Bill Ackerman who’s hedge fund owns forty percent of the New York property firm Seaport Entertainment Group?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-ackmans-strategic-acquisition-seaport-230404410.html

How many millions do you think a rent freeze would cost him personally?

Commercial versions of these systems exist in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/06/shopper-facewatch-watchlist-39p-paracetamol-london

The Gdpr makes these things harder to do, but not automatically illegal.

Surely you have noticed that there is a lot of criticism of the GDPR and EU tech regulation.

Yeah, and some of it is even true.

America doesn’t have a mainstream left party.

It has a status quo party (Democrats) and a fascist party (Republicans).

Clearly the status quo sucks for most Americans, so they’re more tempted by fascist alternatives.

You know open-source doesn’t mean publicly available. It means the person, or in this case the US government, that brought the software should have free access to the source code to edit and distribute it as they like.

So yes, the military should use something functional equivalent to open source to prevent vender lock in and to allow for external audits. They probably shouldn’t give it to Russia or make it freely available online though.

It’s actually worse than you’re making it sound.

Supplements are not just less regulated than drugs, they’re less regulated than food.

BMI works quite well for typical people.

Either you do so much more exercise than everyone around you that it’s not a good fit for you, or you should take it as a warning sign.

If you think it’s muscle and not fat, there’s another test that you might like to try instead which is the waist to hip ratio. https://www.healthline.com/health/waist-to-hip-ratio

But if you want an honest appraisal of your fitness, just do a fun run. The shortish runs round a park with a bunch of normal people. Either you can keep up without killing yourself and everything is fine, or you’re not as fit as you think.

If LLMs just copied stack overflow they’d respond to every question with “Closed as duplicate. Question already answered.”

What is a game that wouldn’t be solvable if you removed most of the pieces and positions?

I mean, yes. Any game with only a small number of possible moves can be solved with brute force trial and error.

All unsolved games must have a “sufficient amount of positions” that brute force isn’t an option, and enough complexity that there’s not a cute maths trick to solve it despite the number of moves.

Chess is one of these unsolved games.

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Just to remind everyone that this is always what the supreme court does.

They pick the most fascist outcome, and then search for any legal argument that will give them the outcome they want.

They put that in vice city as a set of missions.