lordfrito

their mods often seem directed to inflicting their cars on everyone else

Flies in the face of all the talk about consent. I did not consent to this...

The number of people here defending AI cheating as an alternative/clever form of "learning" is eye-opening. Also the people saying it's not the students fault they cheated, it's the systems fault.

All I know is I wouldn't want one of these cheaters performing open heart surgery on me, designing the airplane I'm flying in, or managing my financial affairs. Or marrying my daughter.

I would have thought the defense of cheating to be a much more marginal position.

Regarding shaming: A new strategy I've noticed recently is that my organization randomly deploys emails from time to time that are basically "fake" hacking/phishing attempts. Sometimes it's a PDF link, or a request for an invioce, need a phone call, etc.

If you fall for it (clicking the link) then you get sent to a webpage saying "Hey this was a test and you fell for it... think twice before you fall for this again. Please watch this short security video". Then you get followup emails until you finally get around to watching the video.

Something tells me if you are a frequent offender they have you do additional training.

As annoying as the emails are, I appreciate that this avoids the shaming aspect. Its important to keep the normies on guard against this kind of stuff. And this gets the job done without drawing attention to human level failures. And it keeps everyone a little more on their toes.

I'm a fan of separating the trusted compute levels for commercial and non-commercial uses/sides of the internet. I think we have to move in this direction.

As it stands today, doing business on ebay/craigslist/etc isn't that much different than doing it in a back alley in the bad part of town. Generally a bad idea but YMMV if you keep your wits about you. Of course it's your right to do business that way, but no one in their right mind thinks it's acceptable to do global commerce that way.

Commerce relies on legally enforceable contracts (both paper and EULAs), which ultimately rely on identity to be enforced. It's a bug, not a feature, that someone on the internet can steal my identity to purchase a product in my name and have it shipped wherever they want. It's a feature, not a bug, that my bank asks me for photo ID before I empty my account in person.

I'm not allowed to access banking computers, except occasionally and from within in a sandbox with proper credentials (ATM card for example). If, in the future my bank needs to do their compute inside my house on my phone, then it seems fair that there should be walls that keep me outside of their trusted compute.

That said, I am 100% behind keeping open purpose general computing free and available. Rooted devices, self built PCs etc all of it. I love it, saying this as a person who grew up building their own PCs and programming from a young age. I think that we all should be able to access the non-commercial side of the internet in any way we want, a true public square, warts, gutters and all. Hobbyists can do whatever they like as long as it doesn't touch commercial systems.

As I see it, the problem for most of us is that the social/fun side of the internet has largely been captured by commercial interests. Anything with a EULA should be considered a commercial site, since you're legally bound by a contract using it. As it stands today all the fun things on the internet would require enforced identity.

Maybe having a separate walled off "commercial internet with identity enforcement" will finally open the public's eyes as to the ramifications of the digital world we've built. And also allow us to individually take a stand and push back against the commercial interests through our daily choices of what sites we visit. Basically voting with your ID chip instead of your pocketbook. You can still do business in the gutter if you want to, but for the normies it will be easier for them to spot when they're in a back alley. And it gives parents options for keeping kids off of the anonymous side as as well.

I do think a Reddit with identity would be a much less toxic place. As long as the brave adventurers among us can still access the digital gutters like 4chan and other message boards.

1985: Austrian rock singer Falco records Rock Me Amadeus!

I think it is fair to argue that basic libraries don't support trig on common fixed point sizes.

Its not that hard to roll your own support for fixed point trig. CORDIC is your friend. Easy to understand and easy to implement. Plus you can easily customize it for whatever custom fixed point size you want to work with.

Back in the day I implemented fixed point SIN / COS / TAN / ATAN routines on an 8 bit micro. Angle was represented as 8.8 fixed point, with 256.0 = 360 degrees. Made it nice when adding and subtracting angle values, as 360 degrees would overflow back to zero degrees. SIN/COS values, being between 0.0 and 1.0, were stored as 0.16 bit fixed point, so FFFFh = 0.9998 (approx 1.0). Used it for embedded magnetometer and gyro applications. Worked great and was reasonably fast considering it was an 8 bit micro.

I use the term "programmable people" for people like this, in that they believe what the screen tells them to believe and they do what the screen tells them to do. It bothers me that it won't be long before these programmable people represent the overwhelming majority of voters. Not sure what happens then but history tells me it won't be good.

This is like maximum 80's cringe... I say that as a child of the 80's... I'm half tempted to cut this up and try and build some sort of vaporwave track. Seems tailor made for vaporwave.

This is awesome! Thanks it made my day!

Watching it from time to time over the years I've noticed all the little 2001 A Space Odyssey references. The Dark Star universe is some sort of "low budget" version of the 2001 universe. By low budget I mean janky. Many things in Dark Star are janky versions of what you see 2001.

For example, the Dark Star central computer is really just a janky version of HAL. In 2001 HAL wishes happy birthday to a sunbathing Frank Pool. In Dark Star, you have Pinback on a lawnchair using a jerry-rigged sunbathing lamp, later complaining that no one remembered it was his birthday. Both have scenes that feature explosive bolts. Also both have scenes with the astronauts getting sandwiches (chicken or ham?). Both have a mission control guy, with the one in Dark Star being completely useless. There are probably more references but these come to mind.

Love that movie.

I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.

This is standard predatory behavior. Child abusers hanging out with kids, weirdos hanging out near the women's clothing department, etc.

It's usually a clear indication of the sort of people you don't want to associate with in your online community. They bring a net negative to the table.

From my point of view I don't see anything wrong with knowing a little bit more about the person behind the app I'm trusting to do my personal compute on my personal device. Personally I always think twice when I download apps from company's whose names I don't recognize. Same with PCs... do you really want to run that *.exe you downloaded from that cool site you found?

Changes like this will help keep developers honest and accountable. Yeah yeah bad apples will still find ways to screw us.

If you want to publish an app to a global scale ecosystem, is it really too much to ask to give some ID?

It's not illegal to do business with whom you want to (freedom of association etc)... but if my business provides you with tools to systematically avoid a protected class (say, black businesses) then my business might not be legal.

Interesting, the Wikipedia article has this to say

Mere customer satisfaction, or lack thereof, is not enough to justify a BFOQ defense, as noted in the cases Diaz v. Pan Am. World Airways, Inc. and Wilson v. Southwest Airlines Co. Therefore, customer preference for females does not make femininity a BFOQ for the occupation of flight attendant. However, there may be cases in which customer preference is a BFOQ – for example, femininity is reasonably necessary for Playboy Bunnies. Several breastaurants like Hooters have also used such requirements of femininity and female sex appeal under a BFOQ defense. Customer preference can "'be taken into account only when it is based on the company's inability to perform the primary function or service it offers,' that is, where sex or sex appeal is itself the dominant service provided."

So basically the question to ask it "Is it a bona fide occupational qualification that the driver be female?" Seems like a high standard to reach. Arguments based on "feels" as in "I don't feel safe around this kind of person/employee" seem like the very kind of discrimination that the law has tried hard to eliminate. It's pre-judging someone based on sex, and deciding that they aren't safe even though they haven't done anything. I understand that women are often harassed, but the law already has a process for dealing with harassment.

I predict this kind of thing (apps that allow customers to discriminate on the basis of protected class) will spread and eventually be challenged in court. Curious how this will all play out and become settled law.

Law is in flux.. Employee or contractor, it's basically not settled law yet.

Sex is a protected class under Title VII of the civil rights act. And the supreme court recently said that even majority classes (men) are protected by this. Since Uber involved in the decision to send more business to female drivers than male drivers, this would seem to me to run afoul of employment discrimination (sorry we don't need as many men workers today, too many of you competing so market forces mean we're going to pay you less, etc).

Can someone explain to me how this is (or isn't) legal under Title VII?

It seems if this is fully legal because it's the customer making the decision, then pretty much any form of "in app" discrimination is legal as long as it's the customer doing the discrimination. How long till "I don't want a black/white/gay/etc driver" options show up?

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — George Orwell, Animal Farm

I've always been fascinated by nostalgia. It is such universal source of both positive and negative feelings for people.

I read somewhere that nostalgia is just bitterness towards the present. It's an emotional trap and best not to linger in nostalgia too long. Change is inevitable, we can't go backwards.

Is this true?

My understanding is that for extremely large black holes the tidal forces are negligible near the event horizon. So things should function pretty much the same other than you can't move in reverse and get out.

If two rockets fall past the horizon at the same time, one accelerating forward towards the singularity, and the other accelerating backwards away from the singularity, then shouldn't the distance between the rockets increase, even though they are both moving inexorably forward?

If the tidal forces are low, I'd assume that my muscles are still strong enough to "slow down my hand enough" to move it above my head.

From a product standpoint, we're beginning to look at lot more like Europe did to us in the last few decades. The EU couldn't manufacture a cheap consumer item no matter how hard it tried and no matter how much the EU subsidized things. Just too much government/societal bloat. Seems to be the direction we're heading unless we can recapture the "get it done" spirit of old. I don't think we can do that while we're continually focusing on making sure everything is always fair to everyone all the time.

I'd definitely buy one! Back in around 2007 I went to the Chevy dealer and said "What's the cheapest car you got" and he said you want a Cavalier... I got it with air conditioning and an automatic for around $12k.

It was a great car at a great price, zero problems.

I don't understand why cars have gotten so much more expensive in the last 20 years. There is definitely room at the bottom for entry level vehicles.

I suspect the problem may be the increasingly strict emissions laws that push the OEMs into preferring certain segments at the expense of others. It might be that it doesn't make sense for the OEMs to pursue the low end market, it's not worth the trouble.

Thank you for the link. Amazing article, and 29 years old at that.

Sam Altman complaining about mercenary behavior from competitors... Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Guess he's unhappy he's not the one being mercenary in this situation.

In many ways Chris is ending things just as his dream is about to come to fruition. His vision was just 40 years ahead of the technology. If only he could stay engaged another 10 years. The best times are ahead of us

I love this. Thank you.

This doesn't surprise me. Here's my hot take, having worked building these kinds of ecosystems in automotive and related industries (RV), and also working with German automotive/caravan companies in those spaces.

1) They don't want to invest in building vehicle software ecosystems as it's expensive, time consuming, and not exactly in their wheel house. Wireless and cloud connectivity just aren't their language.

2) They don't want to work with existing proprietary off the shelf ecosystem solutions -- they feel that because it's "their vehicles" they should "own" the technology and IP. They don't want vendor lock in, so they avoid existing proprietary solutions they can't "take over". And by "take over" I mean "have the vendor give their proprietary stack to them for free, so they can then share it with their other suppliers".

3) They expect the vendor base to "partner" to develop "open" software stacks for free -- which most vendors aren't keen on doing as there is little upside for the vendor to spend their own internal NRE building a system that their competitors benefit from and can quickly undercut them on. They generally refuse to pay for the development of a stack that they can own and build upon.

The root cause seems to be magical thinking from the higher ups - "Hey connectivity stuff is everywhere, it can't be hard, why should we pay for this?"

They don't want to build it. They don't see the value in paying for it. So of course open source is the obvious solution. Hey, just have the nerds build it! They love doing that kind of work for free.

Isn't that a bit like asking if computing is mostly ones or mostly zeroes?

It's the relationship between order and chaos that matters. Everything interesting always happens on the boundary between the two.

To be clear- if you support what's happening here: you are a bad person. i genuinely hate you.

This is the kind of political reductionism I was referring to. It's not OK to "genuinely hate" a person (or group of people) you've never even met, based on a single binary opinion you hold.. that's some serious "othering" going on. People aren't so black and white.

If your comment was meant as sarcasm I don't get it.

Politics aside, LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this.

Reminds me of the old joke about California's 4 seasons: Earthquake, fire, riots, and drought.

More and more I don't understand what's happening with all of these political articles making it to the front page of HN and stuffed full of charged comments and lots of grey.

We may be smart techies but the arguments here about politics seem awfully reductive. We're out of our lane on most of this. What's with all the hate here?

The commentary here feels like its sliding it's way towards Reddit. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe it's accidental, or maybe it's on purpose?

Hoping not to lose my faith in the quality of discourse on this website.

As long as it's not about free money I don't see anyone objecting.