justaguyonline

AI hype aside, this is one of those projects I'd like to know the open source stack of and the academic research behind. It's actually overlaps with an idea that started circling around in my head back when (deep) neural networks were the new hype cycle.

What's the relation between sensor density and resolution? If their array could give femtometer resolution, how much could you drop the density when you only needed to detect forearm muscle movements through the skim.

The way Ctl-labs was trying achieve the same results always seemed like it had fundamental physical limitations due to the nature of electromyography (to this software engineer...)

This is the phenomenon originally named "fake news" in the US during the 2016 elections. As in the comments that YouTube exposé you linked, despite what the evidence in the original investigations showed there were lots of accusations that this stuff was part of coordinated influence campaigns from outside countries. Threatened by this, Trump used the phrase against his criticism: labeling that the real fake news and any deeper discussion on it dropped from US politics.

The real issue is that these platforms have commoditized rumor in a way that gets around our cultural taboos about the practice.

They were always the most likely buyer if you were paying attention.

I admit to being pretty disappointed at the confirmation though. Blue Origin would of done just fine without this merger and 3+ companies competing for US space launches instead of 2 would of been healthier.

Maybe Tony Bruno will launch his own space company? I always thought Boeing and Lockheed were holding him back.

The broad frustration against pharmaceutical corporation isn't simply because they're for-profit. It's because they're not actually taking on the risky business development that profit seeking is supposed to be good at. If we can stop the free riding happening, for-profit pharmaceutical corporations would be just fine.

The inability of wrist trackers to identify deep vs light sleep might cause frustration to some, but their automated sleep journaling is actually more than enough to help change the lives of people with insomnia.

For some reason we had to slap complicated sleep scores and sleep classification on these things to take them seriously when all you needed was simple data gathered consistently over time.

I'm pretty skeptical of the given reason of “cost growth stemming from evolving Lunar Gateway architecture and mission requirements combined with macroeconomic challenges". IMO this is more indicative of Northrop not having the needed engineering talent to run their programs.

The article goes on to mention that Northrop took part in creating the design and architecture of the lunar Gateway under an earlier cost plus contract, which seems at odds with the idea that architecture cost growth was out of their control.

In the end, this is why you hire and retain skilled IC talent. So you can utilize their experience and insight to discover hidden issues and better technology paths before things leave the drawing board.

I was confused by this post because I'd never heard of a Fort Detrick before but I found these articles explain well what's happening: [1]

Domestic propaganda push in china is leaking externally, including posts by a non-existing Swiss scienist that has the Swiss embassy protesting. [2]

With the Wuhan lab theory we at least have independent confirmation of gain of function research at the lab and knowledge that covid virus fragments were sequenced from the area before the real outbreak started.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58273322 [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58168588

The most incredible factoid for me: These machines, the Smartmatic machines, weren't even really used in the election.

Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1]

A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome.

Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere.

[1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems

Not every server is useful for gathering intelligence on a nation either it seems.

Thinking about it, if you want secret information by definition only a tiny fraction of the networks out there are going to have it— anything most of them have wouldn’t be a secret anymore. So any attackers are going to focus the majority of their energy on exfiltrating data from the most likely/productive extreme minority of their infiltrated networks.

I wonder if the wealthy leaving California to avoid state income taxes now that the federal government penalizes states collecting it will finally be the impetus it needs to reform it's terrible property tax system.

And make make no mistake, if there's a large outflow of the moderately well off and up out of Califonia in recent years, it's probably because our last Congress capped the state tax deductions they could take.[1] Effectively making Bluer states pay for the most recent nationwide tax break.

Kind of a moonshot, but it's nice to imagine states leaving income taxes to the federal government because of this and just switching to land value taxes.

Some kind of fairer sales tax like a VATS are another alternative, but I hear too much about the trouble people have with them (added bureaucracy, carousel fraud) to actually like the idea.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/tax-basics/salt-deduction/

I think I would of agreed if I hadn't read a larger quote giving the actual context here. It's very hard to brush it off in the same way:

BANNON: Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now, I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone -- time to stop playing games. blow it all up, put Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that'll light them up, right.

JACK MAXEY (CO-HOST): You know what Steve, just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia, these were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated if you will with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors.

BANNON: That's how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war.

The call to replicate actual specific events in the American Revolution really makes it feel real, along with the mention of a civil war being on.

I guess I don't see that much of a difference between someone picking what are the best articles, news and videos to show by hand and someone designing an algorithm to do the same function. Their organization still has responsibility every time they choose to show some content over others.

I don't believe that when an algorithm is used, the output is suddenly not a function of human nature or human design. That suddenly no human has any responsibility for it.

Not a German, but my read is that the German Government badly wants this factory to be a success so Germany can get a toehold and not be left behind by the change to EVs over the next couple of decades. When you take into account how much effort Germany puts into babying their auto industry in general, it's not surprising that Tesla would be allowed to move faster than your typical company.

How does an article about military recruitment for voluntary enlistment share the core story of a children's book where the main character is drafted? I find it hard to imagine more different themes.

In Ender's Game, the main character repeatedly tries to out smart the military and avoid his draft by becoming more and more brutal.

In this article, the military is portrayed as a group of pseudo drug dealers, seducing poor youths into a life of violence and war crimes.

Really, this article is fascinating in how it assumes that the reader will agree with it's unstated thesis that entering the military is the worst thing that could happen to a person.

You took the post from right under by fingers.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon makes the exact same point but gets there via analysis of where Americans are spending money for food. Since the 70s we've more than doubled the fraction of our income we spend eating outside of the home.[1] This tracks with the rise in adult obesity in America and is a divergence from trends in other developed countries like France.

[1] Chapter 10

Sounds like exactly what I was looking for, where did you pick it up?

What would it take to have a Thunderbolt/USB C condom? You know, like those standard USB adapter that just drops the data leads on a usb charger to make attacks like this impossible. Maybe we would have to implement a hardware switch on the device itself?

I'm not going to feel safe charging with a public use charger until I find some way to insure only power and not data is making it to my device. Even POE feels like it's safer than modern peripheral standards right now.

(I admit this might not be perfectly linked to the article, it's just a need I've felt for a while but I can't seem to buy a solution for.)

"Starting a war to deflect from problems at home", what the heck would you call the invasion of Tibet then?

And while not literally a war, what purpose do you think the bellicose suppression of the fact of Taiwanese independence both domestically and abroad serves?

Some people seem so obsessed with the country they live in, they can't see the rest of the world properly. An over focus on domestic politics distorts everything with parochialism.

Interesting, I feel like the Author is describing what a well done Visual Novel does in their critics of the whole Adventure Game Genre. To summarize lazily: "remove the stupid puzzles and just take the reader on a wild ride for a couple of hours"

Maybe they kinda predicted YUNO and the whole VN explosion in Japan that came soon after their article was published. Or a least the reason why the demand was there.

Granted, these games still cost 40+ bucks and deliver 20+ hours of gameplay, which differs from the vision the Author outlined. But that seems to be because the extra effort does lead to better returns (and maybe that consumers want 20+ hour games), so it's a good thing.

A Just-So story cannot be a hypothesis since a good hypothesis must be testable for actual science to be done later.

In contrast, a Just-So story will never be followed up on and simply exists to supply an easy to digest explaination for a phenomena. An explanatory meme so to speak. Hence their comparison to fairy tales via titles like "How the Tiger got it's Stripes"

And I hope in the future that we all do what Oberlin should of done here. To take a step back when the news makes us angry or sad, when we hear about someone far away violating principles we hold dear. By being angry in the here and now we inevitably hurt structures and people that have done nothing wrong and efforts to direct that energy back towards the violators often do the same to whatever distant place they live in.

I think it's important to note that the biases Oberlin showed are something we can all do if we're not careful.

Never heard of this incident before, very interesting.

What I found the most interesting was the fact that the original arrests happen the day after the election of Trump. That actually explained a lot to me about why a young man who was the student treasurer of the college would do something like this and why the campus would react they way they did. (though college students tend to shoplift a lot more than you'd expect in my experience)

Unfortunately, people have a way of acting out their anger and fear about things that are to big or to far away for them to touch on their local communities. Sometimes twisting parts of them them into mistaken effigies of larger events or people they truefully have no connection to.

After reading through the thread I'll give it a go too.

Tolerance: Hardly Easy

Traditionally this wasn't so. The dominance of this idea that that companies are chimeric organisms whose only utility function is to return value to shareholders is actually mostly an artifact of the last 50~ years.[1] We have various defenders of leveraged buyouts and activist investor techniques to thank for it. Traditionally, corporations had an embedded duty toward the societies they formed in and their employees equal or above profit.[2]

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)#Hist...

I prefer to think of it as eldritch. It can be difficult to master all it's features, but it's one of the few (pseudo) protocols whose age is actually it's strength.

And I really recommend this PBS Space Time Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wICOlaQOpM0

He makes excellent points that given historical data, a mm thin solar sail really shouldn't be our first conclusion instead of a collection of rocks that broke apart and refused back together (think of a combination of Shoemaker-Levy and Ultima Thule).

And given the short length of time we've been observing space, chances of one of the first things we see enter our solar system be a tumbling, solar sail would mean that interstellar space is chock full of wildly tumbling solar sails! We need to take base rates for probability into account and realize that since most of the stuff we've seen in space is just rocks and most of our models predict just rocks in interstellar space, the probability of it being anything other than just a rock is very low.

This whole media obsession with Avi Loeb definitely feels like an example of news organization paying too much attention to the institution an academic works at and not how the rest of their field thinks about their ideas.

Found the story as written by SexyCyborg in the post very hard to follow, plus it felt a little too self serving to take 100% at face value.

I'll admit though, I saw her once on Hacker News the first time she went viral, later read that Reddit "expose" and then promptly never thought of her again. It took a while to walk back what I thought was happening so I could understand what was going on.

This video [1] helped me get the actual context of the article.

The West honestly doesn't come off well in this, but neither does China really. More of the same "are the people with power over others using it with decency and respect?"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0dkwwV_iaw

Do you have any idea what the career/educational path of your editor was like? While it's not a career I've ever thought of having, I've lately realized that at even a portion of that level of skill is a powerful thing to have.

I've thought for a while now that the design of the internet may have been fundamentally sabotaged by that fact that it was primarily created by government funded academics. In that scenario, there wasn't any need to attach a price to any part of the resources used by this new creation, since it's creators paid few if any costs for it themselves. So eventually the internet grew up to be fundamentally free, where to charge a price to download a webpage goes against every instinct baked into the system and the user.

What other method of information transfer has no default method of requiring payment before transferring information? If the internet had had to pay for itself at any point during it's beginning, you can bet that HTTP status code "402 Payment Required" wouldn't of sat abandoned for 20 years with no implementation.

With the level of outsourcing and specialization that has gone on, most car manufacturers are evidently not really car manufacturers anymore, but actually internal combustion engine manufacturers and assembly line operators. They just pay other companies to make most of the parts for them and keep the engine in house as their "secret sauce", as a technology that can't easily be copied.

Likewise, Tesla isn't really an electric car company or even an electric motor company. Electric motors are something everyone's known how to make for a hundred years and they actually get a lot of their generic car bits like their interiors from the same companies who supply traditional car companies. Tesla's actually a battery pack company (this is why the PowerPack and the SolarCity merger makes sense). It's the knowledge and the experience that went into those packs that keeps other companies from easily copying Tesla.

The problem Ford and any traditional automaker faces is somehow pivoting from their current secret sauce, which took them decades and billions of dollars to develop, to a new one in a field that's completely unrelated, where almost nothing they already know applies.