acdha

I would also note that there were things like the weird restrictions on fabric and clothing which make more sense when understood not as something an omniscient divine being cared about but rather as part of rabbinic politics where the central temple rabbis were saying that their political opponents in the villages dressed wrong. It’s very easy to imagine a trip through the desert being bad, losing people to lack of food or water, but then being magnified in the future to claim divine superiority or strengthen arguments that they had earned land occupied by someone else (similar to how American western settlement sometimes justified ignoring native claims by saying that the suffering and lives lost in some way meant the survives had earned the land they ended up on).

Also some of the free VPN apps support themselves by proxying this kind of traffic:

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/what-is-wrong-with-free-vpn-s...

That was Louis von Ahn’s stated goal when he announced it - i think it was his NIPS (now NeurIPS) talk where he basically outlined the training data paying for the infrastructure as a fair exchange.

You don’t have to look any first than the White House to say that behavior is well-established in American culture, too. From the prosperity gospel to “don’t hate the player”, etc. this is deeply not a Chinese thing.

Is not showing a cancel button quickly better or worse than treating accessibility as a checkbox and producing things which many people struggle to use despite laws requiring you to support them? Shoving unwanted features into a bundle? Encouraging people to use Chrome by introducing dependencies on proprietary features or not testing other browsers? Designing apps with bloated JavaScript frameworks which are borderline unusable on non-flagship phones? Using ad networks which skimp on malware prevention or resell user activity data? Requiring lots of PII and storing it haphazardly? Designing products which depend on servers which are shutoff over the wishes of customers? Working for a company whose products support wars or mass surveillance?

I’m not saying it’s great but … the tech industry has a lot of problems and I can sympathize with someone who isn’t quick to resign when most of the alternatives aren’t clearly better. It’s a lot easier to say someone else should take a moral stance when you personally won’t have to pay their bills.

Keep thinking about the parallel you’re drawing and you might hit the difference: that phrase gained notoriety in the Nuremberg trials for murder but somehow we do not give the same weight to, say, a pushy salesman or a debt collector or a government employee enforcing strict means testing laws. Is it possible that our moral sense can account for things being less severe than murder and draw a distinction between actual Nazis and people doing what they can to survive in an unforgiving country with few supports?

I don’t like it either but blame goes to the top of the org chart. That’s not illegal or, by the standards of the field, flagrantly unethical so it’s a bit extreme to expect someone to resign over.

Yeah, it makes sense as a display of clout, the normal rules not binding them. I would have thought there was more sense of pride but that’s very middle class of me, I suppose.

That was the low-key surprise for me in the Epstein files: so many rich, powerful people wrote at an early grade-school level even in professional contexts. I know that’s not a universal sample but it made me wonder how many unsung admin assistants, grad students, etc. cleaned up everything they wrote for a broader context.

Yes, that’s why I wrote the second sentence. However, it’s quite an exaggeration that it’s super hard to configure a kernel - distributions can do that for you (e.g. Amazon Linux disabled a bunch of drivers for hardware you’ll never have in EC2), modules can easily be disabled (common remediation for those IPsec accelerators earlier this year), and it’s not that hard to build your own kernels and distribute them on most popular distributions.

Hence the second sentence.

I’ve heard a couple people say that Microsoft has patched a record number of bugs internally this year so it might be the case that it’s simply more opaque because it’s initiated internally and doesn’t involve a public Git repo or a third-party researcher.

Linux also has a ton of extra functionality so I think you’d also have to do some adjustment for “as a user would I be at risk?” versus “can I be a user because it supports my needs?” Some of that would be unfavorable for many users (e.g. a Linux user who is exposed due to a network protocol or file system they’ll never use) but that’s certainly not true of every feature.

Of course, the fact that all of your AI code usage is being monitored by the company that provides you the model/harness is also still means they can just steal your product whenever they want

Also anything which isn’t kept private can quickly be cloned. I think it’s going to be hard for a SaaS to stay profitable unless there’s a real-world tie-in to keep someone from pointing a bit at your app and cloning the observable behavior with just enough changes to claim they didn’t.

They didn’t get MLKEM deployed by saying “I’m a professor of computer science at $UNI, do it!” but by working within the community for many years and going through an elaborate review and standardization process with extensive peer review and public comment. That’s not infallible but it’s misleading to talk about it as if it’s the same as the U.S. federal government (a real capital-A authority) mandating it.

This matters because academic reputation is so important in the field: none of these people can force even their own universities to adopt something and if you say they pushed something through covertly you’re making a really serious claim about a core professional trait which reflects not only on them but also many of their colleagues who reviewed and supported that proposal, and that should have evidence that this was bulled through rather than simply asserting it.

You’re being rude, which wouldn’t be good even if you weren’t wrong on all three counts. This is not contriving positively.

(Consider the difference between extensive peer-review and “appeal to authority”, not to mention the IETF’s dual role encouraging research along with mainstream deployments)

I think that’ll rebalance over time but one of the biggest questions I’d have is how to use all of the batteries people are driving around. A buddy shifted his car charging to work because they have a convenient setup with a bunch of solar panels and that seems like a good path to encourage going forward: let sunny day over production shift vehicle charging off of times where load would need to come from grid batteries, fossil, or wind.

It’s pure gold for contractors trying to snow clients. The people who used to struggle to produce a good looking document can now quickly produce something without visible tells that they have no idea what they’re talking about, even though they still have no idea.

Yeah, I can understand putting solar on things when it lets them become standalone off-the-grid setups but for something like railroad track it’s just not that much space and the costs are so much higher. Except on the tightest urban lines, just putting rows of normal panels next to the tracks should be significantly more space with much easier engineering.

Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what this discussion is about.

The U.S. lost billions of dollars in expensive military hardware, proved incapable of defending Gulf allies, and had to abandon all of the stated goals for starting the war—note Trump’s eagerness to sign a treaty so bad even Congressional Republicans were willing to publicly criticize it—despite a massive disparity in the size of their respective military budgets. It’s hard to see that as the game not changing in key ways.

Yes, the correct way to approach this is to make good versions of both and respect the user’s preference. Font size is similar: you’ll never make everyone happy with a single choice so you should respect the user’s ability to know what they need.

My pet theory is that the best thing any city could do is having a strict vacancy tax in the downtown core, especially on retail space. Nothing makes a place feel dead like seeing boarded up restaurants or shops, and since the pandemic those have been lasting for years because the landlords don’t want to lower rates. There should be some grace period followed by tax rates ramping up so sharply that, say, they’d pay a food truck operator to use a storefront just to have something going on at every place on the block.

One of the things which helped the early web startup scene was that the amount of startup capital was a lot lower when you could get an old loft for an order of magnitude less than top-tier office space. Cheap money for most of the century skewed towards huge companies (or dreams of becoming one) but cities tend to benefit more from many small to medium sized businesses which aren’t trying to become Google.

Does it? My understanding was that it’s less helpful for anything which isn’t in low-earth orbit because the commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads.

I just went through this yesterday. My wife and I both have Apple Watches with LTE and I was rolling them over: both phones and my watch ported easily but the second watch wouldn’t show up on the account at all with no explanation. The first support person couldn’t see a problem with the details they were able to see, the second level one could see a fraud hold for non-specific reasons and forwarded us to a fraud team who verified my identity and back to a third person who solved the problem by deleting and recreating the line on our account. Every one of the people I talked to was clearly trying to help but their billing system sounds like it’s someone’s old house primarily consisting of duct tape and stucco.

This is a disappointing contrast to their actual network which is clearly run by people who take running a reliable network seriously with good coverage and latency.

30% of New Yorkers spend > 50% of their income on rent.

My point was that’s a bit less than the median suburbanite here spends on housing and cars combined. That doesn’t mean either option can’t be improved but that these comparisons should compare the whole lifestyle cost. Otherwise you’re making the same mistake Americans do saying they pay much less in taxes than Europeans without including the additional spending we make for healthcare, college, childcare, etc.

Totally, but it’s interesting how basically everyone I know who moved to the suburbs to save money pays roughly as much for housing (things like lawn care services add up) plus an order of magnitude more on cars.

This is complicated, though, by the question of how you get there: suburbs may have lower land prices but everyone buys more of it and needs the expense of having a private car (usually one per adult). In the region where I live, 20-35% of household income is spent on cars and that doesn’t include the expense of the land devoted to them or road maintenance.

If you live in a dense environment where you don’t need a car because walking and transit cover your normal life, recouping that much money often more than pays for the higher cost per square foot of building space.

It’s not just performance but also quality. There are a ton of things which you get out of a native app which Electron developers who aren’t the VSC team never do. It’s almost always obvious who cared about UX more than portability, but the cost differential usually wins out.

Theoretically AI could help with this by making it easier to support multiple interfaces for the same backend functionality but it would run into the challenge of measuring good taste. A good Mac app has lots of interactive aspects which you notice while using it, and would have to be non-trivial to express in ways which a bot could measure.

You’re confusing free to the user with free to the government. Those are all great examples of things which make huge differences in the lives of the people who need them while having no meaningful impact on taxpayers (forget Jeff Bezos, none of us would significantly change our lives if we paid for childcare or housing out of general fund revenue, and that’s before you factor in how much money we’d save getting better treatment with universal healthcare — every time I’ve done the math comparing us with Denmark, it’s been roughly even once you factor in how much we pay for insurance).

Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.

I would talk about threat models. There’s a bunch of detail to cover but the short of it is “you’re protected when you resell the device or replace a drive” or “you’re safe from a laptop thief in a coffeeshop but not the Mossad”. How you get there is the step in the conversation after you decide which of those concerns you.