ldoughty

The blog[0] explains their choices well. The brief highlights:

- Escape is simply unusable.

- Alt alone leaves the viewport and goes to menu, making further keypresses unregistered

- control is inconsistently placed on keyboards (e.g. laptops) which they don't say directly in the blog, makes extra sense if you recall it suggests not using devices the abuser might be admin/monitoring (public devices, friend devices, etc). It also is highly selected by other assistive technology products just like sticky keys.

They also recognized the issue... And tested it against JAWS and using it with on-screen keyboards

Seems they were very thorough.

0: https://beeps.website/blog/2024-10-09-why-govuk-exit-this-pa...

Note: this is the same link as in the grandparent post

That's a very narrow view...

The people in charge of companies usually have large amounts of stock in their companies... And often bonuses tied to metrics that often includes stock. If their share price drops 50%, that's a personal "net worth" and/or "salary" loss which, unlike most people, they have bounce-back control.

"We need to trim the workforce", "improve margins", "show we are still a solid company"

The above doesn't just happen in AI/Tech stocks, it happens EVERYWHERE... Small business owners see their retirement portfolio hurt, they can't fix those companies, but they might reevaluate what they do in the next 2-3 years so they can get their retirement back on track... How do they increase profits while lowing costs? Try to cut staff/hours, find (perhaps foreign?) cheaper suppliers.

I think AI stock bubble bursting won't result in large scale layoffs, I think it will result in large-scale _trimming_ across the economy, which is almost worse. AI will be expected to fill in the gaps to increase productivity for less than the cost of an employee, which means slower rehiring .. AI will rebound at a "more correct" evaluation. And hiring will slowly pick up as companies see they still need people to produce.

Viewing the stock market as purely a casino -- the executives are the house at various casinos... and the house likes to win at the expense of the players (anyone not a casino)

How is the whole economy exposed to AI?

Out of fear/ uncertainty, investors don't just pull out of AI, but the stock market in general.

More money shifts to bonds/commodities, not just people selling AI, but Coca-Cola and Johnson and Johnson, etc.

Of course, the impact would not be equally distributed, staple stocks will crash less, but there will probably be overall a huge pull out as people panic shift assets.

The resulting downturn likely means a crashing job market (temporarily) as government says "there's no way we could have known" and slowly try to stem the bleeding... Meanwhile unemployment shoots up in any industry that needs consumers (retail, food services, etc., but less so healthcare, government), and companies are nervous to hire on a shaky economy (see: early COVID).

The energy shock will also say inflation should go up, but the crash would want to decrease inflation... Companies will likely have to eat costs to keep prices low to sell inventory that cost them more to acquire.

It's all one big economy.

Note: this is all big hand wavey speculating. The moment things start to turn south there numerous things governments can do to help (e.g. handouts, reduce interest, open oil reserves, etc) so what ultimately does happen is anyone's guess. This is just one scenario based on the fact the current US government prefers uncertainty in the market, e.g. we've had peace with Iran ~8 times according to the USA, but Iran claims some of those statements are false. The straight had been reopened ~5 times, but Iran disagrees there to. Seems like the _goal_ is uncertainty

What qualifies as AI generated? If a human writes it then has AI improve/fix it, does that count?

How do you tell which is the case?

If we don't allow AI help at all, is that perhaps discriminating against those who don't feel comfortable posting with imperfect English?

I agree in principle, but am concerned in implementation... I'm not sure we can be fair without high risk of discrimination

Edit: typo fix

Edit: or am I AI?! And making edits looks more legit.... (To be clear: I'm not, I play by rules)

Looks like the intended use case here is you buy the cartridge once, and refill it, and OpenPrinter won't lock you out after doing so like HP does.

but if facebook/google are the buyers, they do not violate this law... the law seems to focus on the sale & giving of this data... not the reception. This means that they just need a non-Massachusetts based data broker to sell them the data, and then they can store that data to make advertisement decisions (so long as they do not forward it along)

Will this have reach and teeth though?

I can imagine loopholes to this... nothing stops facebook/google from buying this data from companies not in Massachusetts? and facebook/google don't have to give advertisers the location information but can still use that information when determining the advertisement to return, right? In theory the big silicon valley "targets" of this bill don't actually have a huge incentive to give this data away, do they? They just need to be able to read/access it, which I don't think this law stops? Assuming the data broker is not doing business in Massachusetts itself

Really cool! But right as it was nearing 4,000, it seems to have corrupted itself and no longer got any scores above 0. Not sure if that's a code bug or a neural net issue.

avg500 -4.6 last 500 episodes

peak 3959.3 best window

roll/s 20.68 20-step avg

progress 4388 562749 episodes

The Claude Platform on AWS is a first of its kind offering for Anthropic, giving you all native Claude API features from day one. Anthropic operates the service and data is processed outside the AWS boundary.

So it's not... On AWS... ?

This statement sounds.... Backwards?

I get they have another option that is in AWS, but this continues the cryptic naming problem AWS already is overloaded with

The problem is that data centers use SO MUCH water... sure we humans let water evaporate, but this is a new source of water "waste" to the tune of nearing 2 billion gallons/year, just in Loudon County Virginia & connected water users [0].

When that water source is underground wells, this can take years (on the fast end) or decades (on the moderate end) to get back down. Look at California's water issue -- so many wells extracting water for farming has changed the land topography.

Also, when water 'comes back', it might come back in the ocean and not on land... reducing the available fresh water without desalination.

Data centers need the water to cool... but maybe there's room to find incentives for them to do so while making sure our water bills don't go up like our electric bills are because of the extra load they are putting on utilities.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/19/virginia_datacenter_w...

The owner of the private space generally has authority to deny this already, there's no need for an additional law.

In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.

A bunch of people pay to remove ads, and a bunch of people that are happy to give businesses their attention (view ads) I'm exchange for services... I.e. Gmail, YouTube, but don't feel they use enough / are annoyed enough to warrant $15-25/month.

Some brands are okay with impressions.. you can build trust in your product be advertising it for weeks/months and when the user does make a purchase that brand is on the mind.

But the data collected is property of the government and flock is not allowed to use that data for additional business gain (according to their statements)...

So they can't sell the fact that you're at Target at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday to anybody... Nor build profiles to sell to advertisers... And if that's the case that's very similar to cloud storage vendors.

If I access hacker news, and the record of my visit is stored in an AWS S3 bucket, I can't submit to AWS to delete my visitor record, even though the server, network cards, wires, and storage medium are AWS property, it was hacker news' website that generated that record and their responsibility to take my request to delete it.. AWS' stance would rightly be "talk to the website operator for CCPA requests"

I would argue that the request was invalid in the first place.

If I see a flash on a speed camera operated by a business on behalf of a police department, your argument states I should be able to use CCPA to force the business to delete my picture and the record of me speeding If I can get the request to them before the police can file with the court and request that data as evidence.

The data belongs to the government, and you can't get around that right by going to business that holds the data and asking them to delete it.

I think you're going to have a hard time with this...

Flock seems to leave the data in ownership of the government. They are just providing the service of being custodians for storing and accessing that data.

You probably would get a similar response by submitting your request to Amazon web services or Google cloud or whoever has Flocks data: "sorry, we're just holding the data on behalf of Flock"

In either my example case or your stated case, you would have a very hard time convincing the host business to destroy their customers data without a court order or court case that shows their policy is invalid and they must comply.

Not a lawyer, just noting the parallel.

I do appreciate that Flock's response says that they cannot use the data they've collected for other purposes.. which further reinforces my cloud storage analogy -- the cloud vendor can't look at your data you upload to storage to e.g. build profiles on you/your business.

models are only as good as our understanding. From the abstract:

Here we account for the influence of three main natural variability factors: El Niño, volcanism, and solar variation.

All of these events are decades-long (or longer) cycles that don't have a substantial amount of data points... Sure, solar cycles seem to be 11 years, but we don't have a lot of scientifically usable (for forecasting) data points on that -- maybe 8 cycles? less? And the cycles are not consistent. It's not like Year 4 of one cycle is like year 4 of another cycle, we just determined there's a period of about 11 that looks significant.

Same with El Niño -- it's not like its 'true' or 'false', there's degrees of it.. and when it starts, and if other conditions are right to make additional hurricanes that year, and how much cloud cover that generates, etc. etc. a lot of which we don't have data on past 1960 when we launched our first weather satellite ...

As for volcanos... there's lots of them, and we are not great at predicting the high-impact events... we certainly don't have sufficient data to accurately predict what happens if we had a huge eruption on an El Niño strong year during the height of a solar cycle.

I had a similar push years ago, but I did take this approach once step further. For a similar reason Jeff mentions -- lower maintenance over time.

I was frustrated that (because my posts are less frequent) changes in Hugo and my local machine could lead to changes in what is generated.

So I attached a web hook from my websites GitHub repo to trigger an AWS Lambda which, on merge to main, automatically pulled in the repo + version locked Hugo + themes. It then did the static site build in-lambda and uploaded the result to the S3 bucket that backs my website.

This created a setup that now I can publish to my website from any machine with the ability to edit my git repo. I found it a wonderful mix of WordPress-like ability to edit my site anywhere along with assurance that there's nothing that can technically fail* (well, the failure would likely, ultimately block the deploy, but I made copies of my dependencies where I could, so very unlikely).

But really the main thing I love is not maintaining really anything here... I go months without any concern that the website functions... Unlike every WordPress or similar site I help my friends run.

Molten salt solar power doesn't care. It remains hot.

Advancements in solar also are improving with clouds.

Also, you know, batteries. When someone makes it cost effective to install a device to sell your car battery power on the grid we'll also have a better time managing the grid during spikes... Would be nice if that also did home battery backup in blackouts... 70 kWh would get me through most of the ones I've experienced.

What you describe sounds more like keeping your assets a secret... and if you feel defeated because the government can know, how do you feel about hiring an accountant? Or executing stock trades? You can't keep those activities a secret from those agents working for you. You would probably expect them to keep their privileged information about you _private_ though, right?

And I think that's what the parent post is talking about. Today's companies make you agree to 3 50-page documents which they can update at any time and your continued use after such silent updates constitutes consent.. and at some point they will sell your financial status/well-being to people for profit. So the more you feed them the more of your data that is being easily sold.

We ultimately probably can't stop that, but we can make it more difficult. Many apps like this would take your information and sell it.. having an option that lets you track your own finances without becoming a product is nice.

They started with the left hand as requested, but made right hand version as well.

I wish these were also commercially available... I'd love to pay for one of these... I know it's open sources, but I don't know the language nor do I have the skills to construct one myself.

I try to avoid crons at the top of the hour, partly because of this... but also because (in shared / serverless infrastructure) I assume a lot more people are setting their crons for 'on the hour' so there's more resource contention... I also aim for 'after 4am' where I can as well, or 'before midnight', to avoid this whole range.

I think it's completely different ballparks to compare the skill sets...

It is cheaper/easier for me to hire cloud infrastructure _capable_ people easier and cheaper than a server _expert_. And a capable serverless cloud person is MUCH cheaper and easier to find.

You don't need to have 15 years of a Linux experience to read a JSON/YAML blob about setting up a secure static website.. of you need to figure out how to set up an S3 bucket and upload files... And another bucket for logging... And you have to go out of your way now to not be multi-az and to expose it to public read... I find most people can do this with minimal supervision and experience as long as they understand the syntax and can read the docs.

The equivalent to set up a safe and secure server is a MUCH higher bar. What operating system will they pick? Will it be sized correctly? How are application logs offloaded? What are the firewall rules? What is the authentication / ssh setup? Why did we not do LDAP integration? What malware defense was installed? In the event of compromise, do we have backups? Did you setup an instance to gather offloaded system logs? What is the company policy going to be if this machine goes down at 3am? Do we have a backup? Did we configure fail over?

I'm not trying to bash bare metal. I came from that space. I lead a team in the middle of nowhere (by comparison to most folks here) that doesn't have a huge pool of people with the skills for bare metal.. but LOTS of people that can do competent severless with just one highly technical supervisor.

This lets us higher competent coders which are easier to find, and they can be reasonably expected to have or learn secure coding practices... When they need to interact with new serverless stuff, our technical person gets involved to do the templating necessary, and most minor changes are easy for coders to do (e.g. a line of JSON/YAML to toggle a feature)

Apple collects no money from Steam sales, so they don't see a reason to support it.

You don't buy Apple to use your computer they way you want to use it. You buy it to use it the way they tell you to. E.g. "you're holding it wrong" fiasco.

In some ways this is good for general consumers (and even developers, with limited config comes less unpredictablilty)... However this generally is bad for power users or "niche" users like Mac gamers.

The point is that they don't want it to recover. This is evidence that the US Government can't be trusted to provide the service themselves, and those functions should be privatized / contracted out instead... like how our Defense budget is so small thanks to us paying government contractors for everything we need, like $5,000 screwdrivers and $7,500 toilet seats installed by $300/hour Mechanic Specialist II's.

These people mostly already and effectively stopped working... The people I know that took this offer were told to stop showing up for work back in March-ish time frame. I see nothing in the article to suggest a sudden wave of new people taking up this offer -- as far as I can tell, the only thing that's about to change from what this article says is that our unemployment numbers will start to reflect it if those federal workers did not find new employment.

Businesses are not expected to protect your freedom of speech. If you want to say stuff that no one wants to print, you can't sue a business for not printing it.

The government can't stop you from requesting a permit and saying it on public lands, though... And back when telecoms were common carriers, you could have done such from your home Internet, now you can only do it from your voice line.

I work in this space regularly. There can be a delay of 2-3 days from the event to charge. Seems some services report faster than others. But this means by the time you get a billing alert it has been ongoing for hours if not days.

I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. It also doesn't really provide any of the greater benefits of the cloud that come from "someone else's server".

However, to the point of microservices as the article mentions, you probably should look at lambda (or fargate, or a mix) unless you can really saturate the capacity of multiple servers.

When we swapped to ECS+EC2 running microservices over to lambda our costs dropped sharply. Even serving millions of requests a day we spend a lot of time in between idle, especially spread across the services.

Additionally, we have 0 outages now from hardware in the last 5 years. As an engineer, this has made my QoL significantly better.

You can't write a business plans/proposals and get loans/management approval on these kinds of tariffs.

Imagine trying to get a loan from a bank to make a USA manufacturing plant, pointing to the 150% Chinese tariff. A week later the tariff is 25%. Does your math still work? Probably not. Will that bank continue the loan? Nope. Will the bank even entertain a similar proposal from someone else right now? Nope.

If you want to grow USA manufacturing you need to subsidize it, or give private industry confidence it's not going to lose them money. If you can't do that, your relying on charity / non-profit / philanthropy... And I don't see many of those in manufacturing.

But the US government has proven to be unreliable in maintaining commitments -- even words on paper are meaningless as it doesn't seem to stop them from changing the deal later and demanding more ("I have change the terms of our agreement, pray I do not alter them further"), and then another request demanding more. Would TSMC be doing the government a favor and gaining protection, or are they being extorted? ("would sure be a shame if we doubled your tariffs again...")