Beldin

As someone who studied privacy in voting, it's horrific that we have a word for this. Cat was out of the bag when the then-minister (of the interior) started pushing this. Somehow, despite the "how are you, fellow kids" vibe, the word became unstoppable.

Too bad no one explained the minister that we'd like to not enable vote buying (nor other forms of boter coercion).

(The official guidelines make a distinction between allowed - no info visible - and illegal stemfies, but no one's doing any enforcement.)

The idea that critical communication infrastructure must be (directly or indirectly) supported by advertising interests is certainly not obvious

I think the problem is more that the trend over the last 5-7 decades has been to privatise things. The EU (for instance) has rules forcing (e.g.,) privatisation of train companies and postal services. This has caused previously government-owned services to be privatised.

In this day and age, I'd be surprised to hear of any successful case where a non-public good was made public in a Western country. (I'll restrict my surprise to there because of insufficient familiarity with other countries to make such sweeping statements.) Whether it'd be web browsers, water treatment facilities, energy-related, healthcare-related, infrastructure-related, etc.: if it's currently privatised, it will emphatically not revert to public; if it's currently public, it might be forced to be privatised.

You might think about "privatised-but-with-strings-attached" variants, like in California with "carrier-of-last-resort", or in EU with public transport concessions requiring also services that operate at a loss to service small population centers / unpopular hours. Typically, these impose restrictions on the market parties on what they must deliver in order to be granted the concession. That seems like a way to guarantee the kind of service a government would deliver, but by market parties. And it is! But once you encode rules, you can start eroding them. Every new concession tender going out, you can try to dilute such conditions. A bit is enough - every step gained can be relied upon in future negotiations ("you're asking for more than last term"). And, of course, every small step can be argued by increasing costs - because cost will always increase anyway.

The TL;DRR (didn't read the rant): the public commons has a tendency to erode in favour of privatisation. There is pressure to do so, and no real counterpressure to reverse, only to not go too fast.

Another hypothesis: being extravert means getting energised by interactions with others; being introvert means that costs energy. (Most people will have experienced both, at different times.)

This is why I don't think that being introvert is caused by fear, nor that courage cause extraverted behaviour. For most people, whether a social situation is providing or draining energy very often depends on more than just you.

Yes, there are exceptions. But don't underestimate yourself -- in either direction. The vast majority of people need both to thrive.

I think the main issue is that regular post has addrrss info of the recipient. So the whole logistics chain is geared towards that. If you remove the need for address info for a (small) subset, you'd have to have two logistics chains somewhat intertwined with each other...

What global players does Russia have any significant influence over?

China, N. Korea, probably Vietnam, India'll listen to them, possibly more in s.e. Asia, and they're expanding their influence in Africa (by supplying mercenary armies).

They play the game differently than the US (at the very least: with other countries), but that does not make them a 2nd rate power.

I mostly agree worth you, except to nuance that it is not about "information that is classified in the US", but about classified US-documents.

Assange is alleged to have released unredacted info that exposed informants in warzones. This while running a service - not an infrastructure, a service - for exposing information.

Arguing that he hasn't personally killed anyone is not a strong rebuke against such allegations.

And you don't think that what happened to some folks that said/did stuff that displeased the US and UK rulers might have a similar effect on their population? Like, for example, what happened to Julian Assange?

Isn't that the definition of a jury trial? That the opinion of the jury decides whether or not the defendant is convicted?

The allegations I've seen floating around is that he deliberately withheld certain types of leaks. Thereby making Wikileaks no longer neutral, but politically-motivated.

Is it not enough that one state committed a crime and he reported it?

It depends on what "it" would be enough for... but if he indeed actively surpressed damaging info leaked to him on par with the stuff he has released, yeah, that makes matters complex.

Another criticism I've seen is that the leaks did not do any redaction whatsoever - even when it clearly pertained to informants in war zones. For that, if the allegations are true, my view is simple: you shouldn't do that. And if you set up an infrastructure for leaking, it is reasonable to assume that you're capable of handling such an important and obviously necessary step.

So "isn't it enough?" - no, it is more complicated than that.

Box plots [...] assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape.

Not sure how to square that with this statement on Wikipedia's page on box plots:

Box plots are non-parametric: they display variation in samples of a statistical population without making any assumptions of the underlying statistical distribution[3]

every talk is a job talk

Absolutely. A subset of the people in the audience are tenured or tenure-track academics. These folks get grants for postdocs. Moreover, they may be on a hiring committee. Even better: if you leave a favorable impression and a colleague of theirs has a job opening, they might recommend you.

Treat (academic) presentations as job talks. Good impressions open doors, not just in the immediate future but also further out than that.

To the best of our knowledge, for any of asteroid belt, Kuiper belt and Van Oort cloud, the trick is hitting, not missing.

Space is vast; matter is (relatively) sparse. Moreover, matter tends to clump together, concentrating what little there is.

HN tends to be highly skeptical of “if you don’t have anything to hide, you wouldn’t mind the lack of privacy” arguments.

Well, those arguments flip the narrative. No one has to justify their privacy; invasion of privacy needs to be justified - and, when warranted, scope needs to be enforced.

In case anyone needs an analogue: when paying, you don't give the seller access to all of your money. They justify a particular amount and if you agree, they get the right to only that.

With money, we tend to call folks who take more than warranted "robbers" or "thieves". I think society would be in a better state of we viewed invasion of privacy as negatively.

As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided,

Two ways to fix that (in general): improve one side, or worsen the other. Some measures do both simultaneously, eg. bus lanes take away asphalt for cars and improve bus infrastructure.

It's fairly easy to make a bus network more convenient than a car in a city. You can easily take measures such as dedicated bus lanes, one way streets, pedestrian areas, narrower streets + wider pavements and cycle lanes, less and more expensive parking.

The current attractiveness of public transport is roughly how attractive cars should have been. But most US cities have focused for decades on making car use more attractive. Congratulations, it worked.

That's a vast oversimplification. Try flipping it to anything outside your personal scope of skills and knowledge to see how wrong this position is.

Example: tap water quality (assuming you live where tap water is safe to drink). Do you know how it works? What steps are being taken? Could you fix that yourself for your house if things break down? And yet, you probably care.

Another example: car safety features. Could you add a crumple zone to an 80s car? A cage construction? Yet you probably care that any car you're in has those properly engineered and no part of your body will be crumpled in case of a collision.

Home batteries are a terrible idea. As a municipality -- or a neighbour -- you don't want 30 houses with 35 different batteries, installed by some nephew who's handy with DIY-stuff.

To just timeshift from daylight to evening/night/morning, you'd need batteries in the 25-35kWh range, 40-50kWh if airco on in the night, another 80kWh if you're driving electric and typically away from home during the day, charge at night. That is a lot of energy to pack, even at the low end. Imagine if everyone finds the cheapest set on AliExpress and DIYs it themselves, and then looks for a new model once current installation no longer matches their needs (capacity loss or use increase)... this must be a fire brigade worst nightmare.

Due to generation being more localised, we also need some form of much more local redistribution and/or storage. But not the nightmare that is one or more poorly installed and poorly maintained batteries of dubious origin per house.

And if you commision an artist to draw a black-leather tight-fit clad red-head superspy in an ad for tour product, it need not look like Black Widow from the MCU.

But if it does look very much like her, it doesn't really matter whether you never intended to.

The point isn't the time line of hiring the voice actor. The question is whether OpenAI was deliberately trying to make the voice sound like Johansson.

Suppose someone asked Dall-e for an image of Black Widow like in the first Avengers movie, promoting their brand. If they then use that in advertising, Johansson's portrait rights would likely be violated. Even (especially) if they never contacted her about doing the ad herself.

This is similar to that, but with voice, not portrait.

Hmmms. While I definitely can see SO's arguments concerning deletion, that letter seems to blatantly contradict GDPR's right to be forgotten, which Wikipedia describes as a more limited "right to data erasure" [1].

To coin a Dutch phrase: I cannot make chocolate out of that. Anyone here have an idea how to bring these two points together? Other than the obvious "wrt. EU inhabitants, SO is lying", that is. Or is it really that simple?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten - under "European Union"

Something like 3% of all astronauts have died 'on the job' making it likely the single most dangerous profession in existence.

Wait till you hear about a truly deadly job: president of the USA. 8 of the 46 presidents have died while in office, i.e., over 17%.

none of the Geneva Conventions should apply to them.

The Geneva Convention is (currently) humanity's best attempt at codifying ethical aspects of war. Unfortunately, it is not some lofty goal to aspire to. Oh no. It is the result of discussion and compromise. In other words, it literally is the lowest possible ethical standard we agreed to hold each other to. We should strive to do better, not worse.

Therefore: all of the Geneva Convention applies, always, to everyone.

While i won't aim to provide a full and perfect definition: a phone is a computing device with a generic interface and the goal of being a platform for a wide variety of software aimed at many different goals: 1-on-1 communication (calling), messaging, social networks, document exchange, note taking, web browsing, photography & photo editing, video & video editing, inventory, physical access control, ... Consoles have a game-targeted interface and a singular focus on games.

I don't know if everything that has been labeled a console matches this description. Some "consoles" have indeed been stretching any meaningful distinction to or even past the breaking point.

But I will unashamedly go "no true Scotsman" on those: If a machine has a secondary (tertiary, quadrutionary, ...) specific focus with dedicated interface, it might still be a console. Illustration: a console that also can play dvd's ia a dedicated dvd interface. However, if the interface is generic and just waiting for the right app, not so much.

The point is not "can it do general-purpose computing" - a lot of devices can be made to run some linux. The pertinent question: is it made to support general-purpose computing out of the box? Things that I would call game consoles aren't - they're platforms for gaming.

I dunno. I've been using Thunderbird for years with exchange - first onprem and now O365. I might've missed it in the article or misremember the difficulty of setting it up (low), but errrrr.... it just works?

This is a very good reminder that we don't know for various problems whether there is an efficient algorithm. For problems studied for decades (eg travelling salesman) we feel fairly confident that there is no polynomial-time algorithm - but even then, we don't know for sure.

As far as I know, the problems underpinning post-quantum cryptography have not yet enjoyed such extensive scrutiny / search for efficient (regular or quantum) algorithms.

In other words: stuff that is hoped to be post-quantum might turn out to be quantum -- or even in a feasible non-quantum class. The latter seems unlikely barring p=np-alike breakthroughs, but even these cannot fully be ruled out.

Interesting! Similarly, I remember an employee at water facilities telling us (~30ish years ago) that they could tell breaks in soccer games of the national team due to increased water consumption (everyone having a loo break).

How it's different...

"They" use software to create many slightly tweaked copies under seemingly different author names. So the low effort of one cobbled together book takes the space of 20 or 30 books. I.e. anyone not playing this game is quickly drowned out by the ones who do.

Who should be ultimate censor of what books must be released an what books shouldn't?

The issue isn't censorship - or actually, it kind of is, but then by the fraudsters "censoring" non-fraudster books by swamping the market.

If you can get a copy of "100 money-saving tax tips" for $1.99, and the preview already sounds promising, wouldn't you? Even one good tip would easily save you the price of the book.

(Also: to me, blaming demand is a bit victim blaming - these scams are deliberately set up to entice as many readers as possible.)

Nevertheless, spam ebooks do deserve a separate category. There is an actual industry around spam ebooks that offers aspiring fraudsters the tools to quickly cobble together junk with enough stolen content that readers are getting their $0.99 worth. (That latter part helps raise the bar against refund requests.) Moreover, this industry has developed tools and mechanisms to SEO and spam your fraudulent book. Why launch it as ine book, instead of 20 by 20 different authors, with slight variations on the title?

Some of these tricks may be used for physical products as well, but at least they need to deliver a physical product. In the case of spam ebooks, this pipeline takes care of everything. You click around for a few hours, launch the software: bam, 20 junk books with just enough content to not warrant refunds and SEO'd titles to get at least a few dozen sales.

I looked into this well over a decade ago; back then, you could buy a set of DVDs that would teach (and, perhaps, assist) you in perpetrating this. I get the appeal: back then a popular category was tax tip books. Scrape some tips from here and there, slap on a dozen titles and author names, and sell for low enough that people don't mind taking a chance on your crap. Pity Amazon still hasn't made any successful steps against this.

Alternatively, his attention being elsewhere has removed the reality-distortion field around Tesla and they are now being treated as other companies would.