legitster

I think about this a lot when using our corporate SSO tool.

When I hit the button to log into Slack, there are like, 3 popups in succession - the last one ultimately asking for my fingerprint. Then when I give it, there is a flurry of web pages that get loaded and redirects that happen until finally Slack pops up again.

There isn't any realistic world in which I check each window to make sure everything is happening right and I am not being MitM'd.

I'm a fairly technical person, and I would be unable to perceive the difference between a really tight security environment and my computer being hijacked.

To put it more specifically the third-party doctrine needs reforms.

There are lots of things that are public information. Anyone can request public records like land titles, marriage certificates, bankruptcy filings, etc. Even ostensibly social media posts I'm kind of okay with being treated as public information.

The question is - why is Thomson Reuters allowed to get my utility records? If you call up my utility, this is not information they will give you. But Thomson Reuters is allowed to have it.

The utility can point to the language of the contract and say it's in their terms and conditions, but for the most part, I as a consumer don't have a choice between utility companies. And the law appreciates that access to water and electricity is a right - but yet these utilities enjoy a monopoly, so the idea that accepting their terms and conditions was a consumer choice wouldn't stand up to any strong legal scrutiny.

I don't really see much motion toward that goal in the near future.

There is progress! Carpenter v. United States was a clear win that is still slowly matriculating through the legal system.

More importantly, the Not For Sale act passed the House not too long ago with broad bipartisan support. It's stalled in the Senate (of course) - but it's clearly something that has legislative attention.

The product we're talking about here is CLEAR.

And one of the deep ironies is that CLEAR is already highly deployed at the state level, among other things, to verify voter identity and prevent voter fraud!

DHS and ICE also ostensibly already use CLEAR for a variety of other purposes - what's novel here isn't that they are getting access to new data, it's that they want to backseat drive on investigations the states are already conducting, using only a subset of the data the states already use.

Ames True Temper.

Nearly every brand of wheelbarrow you see at hardware stores is just a white-labelled Ames product. (With the exception of Gorilla Cart and a few niche players).

I think E-Books are a bad test subject. Theoretically they are a durable good, but realistically the demand for a single public domain eBook is not a large market and easily satisficed.

If you look at real world examples like wheelbarrows (something like 80% of all wheelbarrows sold in the US come from one company) - sure they use a bunch of tricks to charge more for some customers - but the cheapest, basic wheelbarrow is being sold for something close to marginal cost.

Twain is a good choice, but he also works against the mythology of America. His whole thing was popping bubbles and making grounded stories that work against the backdrop of Americana.

Tracy Chapman is a pretty trolly answer, but I suspect the real answer might very well be a musician or filmmaker, not a writer.

The most technically correct answer is Walt Whitman.

Longfellow got dismissed by several people here for being too sentimental - but I would argue that sentimentality and saccharine character is distinctly part of America's mythos.

Washington Irving and Parson Weems would both also be good candidates. Early writers who had a penchant for mixing real history with tall tales.

The name I would throw out is John Ford. Ford basically invented the modern action movie, the mythology of the West, redefined masculinity, established the tropes of a hero, etc.

“If we use art that looks nearly complete, then people would think that that’s going to be the final art. It has to look like shit. It’s important that it looks like shit.”

This is actually really good productivity advice. Intentionally circumvent problems you are not ready for, but make it impossible not to circle back on them later.

This ties back into the classic "premature optimization is the root of all evil" advice. A lot of projects get bogged down because you have to impress middlemen who can't see the vision. Before you know it you're selling them drapes for windows that haven't even been built yet.

Side tangent: I will DIE on the hill that UI design was peak when Balsamiq was still the most popular wireframing tool. Sketch and the Figma came along and sold design teams a world of endless pedantic arguments about the right hues for buttons.

There's a reason Japan could be burdened with the largest modern nuclear disaster and then choose to double down on nuclear capacity. It's an island nation with no domestic energy reserves - completely dependent on energy markets.

FCEVs make no sense if you have plenty of fossil fuel or access to cheap lithium batteries. But if you see hydrogen as a less resource-bottlenecked way to store energy, it starts to make sense.

This is probably somewhat true, but also I suspect there might be an order of magnitude difference from extracting trace lithium from inert rock vs collecting it as a salt from amongst a medley of very refined metals.

Case in point - lead acid batteries are not a fair comparison. A lead acid battery is so robust you can separate the cathodes and anodes with your (gloved) hands. Getting the elements out of a lead battery is like picking pieces of pepperoni off of a pizza. Whereas taking lithium out of a lithium cell is like pulling only a certain protein out of a roll of bologna. And the protein catches fire in contact with air.

The thing missing here is that nearly all of the games that use these nodes + stones are a variant on Nine Men's Morris (or Twelve Men's Morris, or etc). Discovering the ruleset for a particular variant is kind of like discovering a new version of "Uno" based on uncovering new house rules.

Even if the researchers did not uncover the exact right set of rules, it would probably not be dissimilar from an actual variant that could have been played somewhere in Rome.

The truth is that bombing campaigns alone have never been an effective way to end a conflict. All they do is strengthen resolve.

Even the most extreme case of the nuclear bombs in Japan - had Russia not also invaded from the North with 1.5 million troops, there's a chance they would not have surrendered (and even then it was after a multi-year bombing campaign that eviscerated every other city).

The only realistic scenario for regime change is boots on the ground. The Iran "experts" who suggested a bombing campaign were never serious people.

This is one of the reasons weapons and technology development overall explodes during wartime. Desperation is the cure for risk aversion.

It's also a reason to be skeptical of a military spending a bunch of money developing technology during peacetime. In reality the expensive stuff they went into the war with is always going to be less effective than the cheap stuff they came out with.

Fox News doesn't seem to understand the difference between News and an Editorial.

Also, if you want to take sides in a story, take it with the side that can admit making a mistake.

She probably will not publish this result because she thinks it is not interesting enough. Classic file-drawer problem in academic science.

It's truly insane that everyone in the academic class understands the fundamental problems of herding and sampling bias and yet every incentive is in place to do this.

I have a friend who works at Ubisoft. Even 10+ years ago, she clearly saw the writing on the wall - the massive developer/publisher consolidation was going terribly:

- Every studio uses their own custom set of tools and development practices. The economies of scale of merging studios together just doesn't really exist.

- The functional difference between most engines for consumers at this point is largely meaningless. There are no order of magnitude gains like there used to be. Most of the engineering is on the cloud services architecture or anti-cheat.

- The median "developer" at a game studio is not actually a very technical person. They mostly just spend their days inputting content and assets with the available tools.

- The value of a AAA game is not how innovative the gameplay is but how much content they were able to stuff into the game.

- Nobody cares about "exclusives" anymore when 90% of AAAs have interchangeable gameplay with other AAAs.

- The cost to start a new studio is negligible compared to the cost of acquiring existing IP.

A lot of where they are getting water from right now is an ancient underground aquifer - there's not a lot of water there though, so the plan was it was a stopgap while the water recycling plan comes online.

Although the aquifer water plan itself is largely failing. The underground water was much more saline than they originally thought, so from space you can see lots of failed irrigation circles.

He quite often gets into problematic areas of many projects - see his series on Billionaires row in New York.

There's just an exceeding amount of signal to noise ratio when it comes to big projects. Criticism of foreign projects comes out of the woodwork by non-local sources, and yet we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel. Him taking a neutral tone and accepting source materials at face value is fair.

Mega-projects have been a defining feature of human civilization since its inception, so there's ultimately not a way to cover them that is not either glamorizing or unbearably self-loathing.

I would argue a fast food kitchen (or any kitchen) is a factory. An incredibly efficient one at that. Things are made and assembled to order from intermediate components.

We take it for granted the amount of labor that goes into our food. There's no reason we could not make other consumer goods in the US at such scale - we just have weird, self-imposed constructs that say assembly line workers get more prestige and protections and food workers don't. Or that we are willing to pay $8 more for a nicer version of a meal, but we won't pay $5 more for a nicer pair of flip flops.

In contrast, Nintendo's idea to sell physical games that are essentially transferrable keys seems like a much smarter compromise.

Part of the appeal for the Switch and Switch 2 is the stability of their resale market. It's easier to pay for a new game when you know you can get 50% of your money back on the used market.

Just to add to this, women make up 20% of the Army, but only account for 2% of ground combat units (even less during the period this data was taken).

Women in the Army were disproportionately less likely to be at risk of combat. So the comparison about being "less likely to be killed by enemy combatants" is itself incredibly clickbaity.

In the long run, green energy and data centers are ultimately going to be complimentary.

One of the biggest problems with investing in a renewable grid is curtailment and managing demand or production spikes. In California, they already have to turn off solar plants during peak hours to help manage overproduction.

Even if you have massive quantities of energy storage, you don't have enough "inertia" in the grid to keep power levels consistent as DC power sources flick on and off.

Data centers can act as massive variable loads that can ramp up or down that turn excess energy into something vaguely profitable. And they can also help to create demand for more supply of intermittent green energy sources.

Fair, but the year over year growth of labor productivity has been really consistent, as has consumer prices:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto

So in terms of how much consumers are making in relation to their expenses, it's been remarkably steady this whole time.

I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress.

Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.

The Fed tracks this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=tjto

Unit cost on labor has increased at a more or less steady pace this whole time. Ergo, it's not so much that labor is decreasing as other things are increasing faster.

It's hard to argue that technology is increasing labor productivity an order of magnitude faster than it was in the 50s. It's more likely something else in the dataset (returns on capital/rent) is exploding in value.

"Abject poverty" is currently defined as living on less that $3 a day and dealing with things like chronic hunger and exposure.

The best approximation would be the homeless population in the US (about 500k people), but even then most homeless would not even qualify.

"Half" is a gross exaggeration.

People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not.

The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.

The data here would already include healthcare contributions.

2 things:

- this article is out of date. The market has changed a lot since the AI boom. - That's a 10%ish of all housing in the city. Right now, of available units SF has one of the smallest vacancy rates in the country right now. The difference is (as the article alludes), apartments that are undergoing renovations, not currently permitted, etc.

It's kind of insane that you look at a city like San Francisco that's on a tiny bit of land in a desirable location and they absolutely refuse to build up.

I get that their Victorian houses are pretty, but they're only about a 100 years old and they are now crammed full of people and cars. It's too young of a city to be sycophantically in love with its past self.