bpp

If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?

I'd assume the real trigger here is "reaching AGI," which would help OpenAI shrug off some of their Microsoft commitments thus making OpenAI models available on Amazon Bedrock. Which is what Amazon is really after.

It's not illogical to staff up an agency charged with efficiency so you can cut more staffing elsewhere. This is honestly what most SaaS does.

I have a few friends who were involved in the creation of the US Digital Service, and as it stands it is one of the absolute best parts of our government. Formed after the Healthcare.gov disaster, the USDS brings Silicon Valley tech knowledge to the government in an attempt to ensure that we all have the online government services that we deserve. It's a tiny agency up against a massive bureaucracy that is anything but open to new ways of doing things. And they've made progress, but not enough.

I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.

Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.

[1] https://www.section508.gov/

I work in AI product eng for a larger company. The honest answer is that with good RAG and few-shot prompting, we can consider actual incorrect output to be a serious and reproducible bug. This means that when we call LLMs in production, we get about the same wrong-answer rate as we do any other kind of product engineering bug.

Laughed out loud.

And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.

I haven't thought about that episode of "Pinky and the Brain" in years, thanks for a chuckle.

I wouldn't call Monkeypox a maybe virus, especially along with these. Its spread was mostly limited to a single community (sexually active gay men), and it absolutely would have spread out of control had there not been a very strong vaccination campaign with high rates of compliance. Within that community, there were many people who were impacted and many others who changed their behavior to help mitigate to spread.

Works until you get a bug in the deletion job. I've seen exactly this happen.

When I was a student at Brown, Facebook would report which dorm you were logged in from, right there on your profile (for all to see!). If Facebook knew where you were on campus, campus IT certainly has a view into your physical location. Nothing about this surprises me.

This seems worth taking with a grain of salt. I've never heard of this source before today, and the top story on the homepage opens with "MOST MAINSTREAM MEDIA MAVENS ARE BRAZEN PUBLIC RELATIONS AGENTS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY." At the very least, "The National Pulse" has an agenda that they're pushing.

The explanation I saw indicated that they keep readers on the site longer, which helps with both SEO and ad revenue (if they scroll deeper).

With regard to the phone number spoofing: I recently had an actual call from American Express's security department marked by AT&T as "Fraud Risk," presumably because it's been spoofed in the past. It delayed the detection and resolution of the theft of my card number (not by much, but still...). It's criminal that we haven't better secured the Caller ID system.

Been using Stackdriver for four years and will back up those who are saying it works very well.

Thanks for clarifying – really changes the connotation of the headline.

Came here just to post this link; it's really stuck with me over the years.

Roughly 1/3 of cannabis is grown inside [1], primarily for reasons of quality control. I'd actually expect this number to grow as the legal market expands and tighter control is needed to keep up with regulations. Which is to say that I'm sure there's a market for this.

[1] https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-...

I'm curious why Congress has chosen not to regulate (or ban) the grant of tax incentives to companies as enticements for development; this seems to easily fall under the interstate commerce clause. All states lose out when they compete against each other in this way.

That's not quite right. We won't know how pay works out until there's an appropriation ending the shutdown, but in past shutdowns both essential and non-essential employees have been paid what they're owed (I'm not quite sure how this works for hourly workers).

Which is to say we'll have forced some people to work for no pay, and paid others for doing no work. (Yes, the pay is in fact just delayed. But "no pay" is pithier.)

Huge market opportunity for OnlyFans.com and similar Patreon-for-porn sites.

Assuming poor security practices is the new assumption of monetary debt from a merger. One wonders what it will take to get companies to take auditing potential acquisitions' security practices in greater depth.

Wow, was thinking of this exact comment. 100% correct. (Somehow the online mattress craze seems immune to the same downfall.)

Your point about FDA's mission is paramount, but in this case it extends to HHS (its parent) as well. It'd be foolish to expect large (calcified) government agencies to, of their own accord, take on tasks so far outside of their core competency. The FDA primarily deals with substances that we put in our mouthes (although of course they do have responsibility for medical devices). Security engineering just isn't at the core of their mission; this is the kind of thing that ideally could be outsourced to a better-equipped agency.

Not sure how the new map was generated, but it would be extremely cool to be able to plug in any city and have a map generated. Or at the very least have it for other major cities; I'd totally buy one with times from San Francisco.

You seem to be implying a dichotomy; it's definitely a work hard/play hard kind of town.

Unfortunately there are far too many women and people of color on that team for it to be believable.

(Stole this comment from a friend, but...worth it.)

Woah, EFNet...I was definitely 12 years old on EFNet back in the day.

Your toilet analogy is partially true but is incomplete. Toilets manufactured immediately after the regulations went into effect are in fact less effective. However, the industry innovated, improving previously inefficient bowl designs and creating other inventions that improve performance. Toilets manufactured today are at least as effective as those created before the regulations, and consume fewer natural resources (no small matter here in California where we're staring at drought again).

Regulations may impose a cost, but they can often spur innovation and economic growth as well.

Go has the empty interface, if you really need it.

People losing their life savings because they kept it under their mattress is basically the reason that banks were invented. So I suppose this has all come full circle now.