mandevil

This would be true if they were working from a baremetal Apache server. But they seem to be using a vendor, Cloudflare, for their CDN. And so I strongly suspect that they used their existing Cloudflare account to do it. Just type the countries you want to block into a field in the Cloudflare UI and you're done. I've used that UI myself (not for GPDR reasons but for compliance with my countries sanctions). Significantly easier than controlling the cookies and data retention and getting an audit to certify compliance, which I've also done.

There are rumors that the next step is a TSLA-SPCX merger. Each company has something that Elon wants but is hard to get: Elon has super-voting controlling shares of SPCX, but TSLA is part of the S&P500.

Once a company is listed, exchange rules prohibit adding super-voting shares, it has to be done prior to listing. In order to qualify for the S&P500 a company has to have a large enough market cap and be net profitable over an entire year in the market. It seems unlikely that SPCX will qualify for that bar in the foreseeable future.

However, a merger can combine both features into one company. TSLA recently rechartered in Texas, which makes it very hard for shareholders to sue. Presumably most of the TSLA shareholders today like Elon Musk, so they would be okay with the merger, and as mentioned above Elon has full control over SPCX. Since they are in totally different markets it is hard to see what sorts of anti-trust arguments even a hostile government (e.g. Europe or Democratic state level AG's) could convince a judge of. But he does kinda need the merger to seem like something of equal companies, not an acquisition of a failing company by a successful one, so that he can keep both of the features that he wants.

Heh, as a (very white) American I presumed it was America in general today. From what I can see, it seems to be turning into a place where it's all scams, rug-pulls, crypto and sports gambling. This concerns me about the world that my 9 year old is growing up in, the only world he's ever known, even the early 2010s seemed to be higher trust than the past decade has felt like.

The key is selecting officers for competence, not loyalty. This requires all the other stuff in your country to be set up so that the leaders aren't worried about coups from your own military, but the advantage to getting all of that is that you can have a much more effective military.

Why? Because any time junior officers just went through losing a war they are going to be pissed off that they were sent out there to do something that was impossible, and got a lot of their friends killed doing it. And if you let them, they are going to fix your military and make it more effective. My favorite example of this is the unpublished Ph.d thesis from Marshall Michel, The Revolt of the Majors (https://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/595) about all of the junior pilots in the US Air Force who experienced, first hand, how terrible and useless the USAF was during Vietnam and over the course of the 1970's and 1980's built the totally different US Air Force that did Desert Storm.

If you are fortunate enough that you don't have the experience of recently losing a war, there will be a smaller number of junior officers who will be worried about losing the next one, and it will take more effort to identify those officers and put them into positions of power, but it is still possible to revolutionize your military without the bitter taste of a defeat. Defeat just makes it so that there are lot more junior officers committed to reform, and they will have the upper-hand over the more senior officers- so long as they are all selected for competence and not loyalty. If promotions are selected with loyalty as the primary factor, then you don't get reform, you get patronage.

Sometimes a patronage system can be effective, but it ends up being like the Czarist Russian fleet of 1905: Admiral Makarov was very very good, and everything directly under him was competent, but all of the other admirals varied between mediocre and terrible and the rest of the fleet was as well. After Makarov's ship the Petropavlovsk sank with almost of its officers and men (including him) the Russian Navy gave no further benefit to the state, it was just a sacrifice.

Back in the 1950's, as part of a study for putting ICBM bases in Greenland, the US Army built a 2MW reactor (PM-2A) and deployed it to the test base (Camp Century) in Greenland. It powered the camp for about three years, modulo a little problem where it was shut down for a while after a prototype (SL-1) killed two soldiers and a sailor in Idaho. In addition, the Navy operated another one (PM-3A, 1.75MW) for a decade in Antarctica at McMurdo Sound, until they cut it up and brought it back to the US. There was also the MH-1A (10MW- and the only one I've mentioned that used LEU instead of bomb-grade HEU) sitting on a freighter in Lake Gatun to power parts of the Panama Canal Zone.

All of these reactors were built in the early 1960's and the last (MH-1A) was retired in 1978. All of them were operated in places that had lots of soldiers around (though McMurdo and Camp Century relied more on being really difficult to get to than actual sentries) And they were never replaced. Because even having guards already paid for didn't help the economics of the situation. Maybe things are different now. But I've yet to see any evidence for it.

Yeah but they were still vulnerable to obscenity charges- in the case you cite Handley took a plea deal and served six months in jail because he was certain that the jury would find him guilty of obscenity (the deal kept him from having to register as a sex offender).

Obscenity has no 1st Amendment protections. As defined by the Supreme Court the standards for it are they are relative to the community around you, n.b. the physical community not the virtual one. So, when a victim of a non-consensual generated CSAM image sues a company in her (99% of such victims are women) locale, who would the jury rather vote for, the underage victim of a non-consensual generated CSAM image, or the company that generated the image?

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8942/w8942...

Some economists theorize that a long time Mayor of Boston (James Curley) used economic populism (taxing wealthy people of English descent and redistributing to poorer, usually of Irish descent) and anti-British rhetoric to reshape the electorate in ways that benefited him, even if it didn't benefit the city as a whole. The theory goes, he had a plan to drive out the wealthy people of English descent so the poor people of Irish descent would make up a larger share of the electorate and he could win more elections.

My understanding is that even most economists think that this isn't actually real. It's largely a couple of economists building a mathematical model, and then looking at cherry-picked examples, e.g., minority mayors during the 1970's and assuming that it was the result of a dastardly plan by the minority mayors rather than the result of larger social forces driving White Flight from cities.

In general, I think that mayors might make dumb decisions, but they largely do it because they think it will be good for the city and are wrong, not because they are twirling their mustache and cackling away.

So for housing it depends on the local laws (1), but for labor this has actually been heavily studied, and the general consensus (2) is actually higher demand for native-born labor. All of those immigrants need goods and services, after all, so they increase demand. Focusing on immigrants providing labor without mentioning that they buy things as well is assuming your conclusion.

And the demand is not just for doctors and other highly credentialed labor. The most nativist work on the Mariel Boatlift (3) (by Borjas) only found a decrease in wages for native-born high-school dropouts, and the general consensus of other economists seems to be that his work was faulty. The general consensus on Mariel (cite fn2 again) is that it was good, economically, for the native-born people in the Miami labor force when an additional 7% of the labor force suddenly arrived as immigrants over the course of a few months.

1: How much housing can be built legally is the key factor here. Immigrants can drive up the prices if no more housing can be built but that's just another way of saying that "no more housing can be built" is a really terrible policy that is enormously destructive. If building housing is relatively easy, then it doesn't drive up prices. In fact, immigrant labor is often used to build this new housing. Don't let your area become like the Bay Area and you'll be fine.

2: Wearing my physics hat, I am not comfortable saying that anything in economics is actually proven.

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift

NASA used pure O2 in space until the end of the Apollo program, but the Shuttle and later used the same air we breathe today, 1atm 80% N2/20% O2. Note that in space, the pure O2 was at 0.4atm, so roughly twice the oxygen partial pressure, but only slightly more dangerous than the air we are breathing now. (You need about 0.4atm to keep your lungs from collapsing, so that's the lower limit.)

Why the difference? It's a question of what risks you were most afraid of. Even today, every single spacewalk is done at 0.4atm pure O2- trying to do a spacewalk at 100kPa even the strongest man in the world would have trouble bending his arms- so before a spacewalk the astronauts need to spend several hours pre-breathing pure O2 to get all the nitrogen out of their bloodstream before they can do a spacewalk. The Apollo program thought it was safer if the astronauts could do a spacewalk at literally any point in the mission, so that's what the spacecraft was designed around.

On the other hand, for long duration spaceflight, introducing a different pressure and atmosphere is just another potential source of health problems. Even today, the largest source of information on how human bodies last under 0.4atm pure O2 is the three Skylab missions from 1973-1974. And so the Soviets- who were always more interested in space stations than the moon- and NASA during the Shuttle era went with the atmosphere that seemed like it offered less health risks for people staying on a space station.

Okay, so what about the Apollo 1 fire? To speed up testing, Apollo 1 did two tests at the same time: the Plugs-Out Test, where the astronauts were in the spacecraft with everything running and practicing their countdown, and the Overpressure test where they pressurized the spacecraft to 1.4 atm (to mimic the pressure differential in outer space). And they did it with pure O2. So you had all of these electronics running in an environment at 1.4atm pure O2. And that was incredibly dangerous, in a way that actual spaceflight, a mere 0.4atm O2, was not. But it was just a test, another in a long string of them, and no one involved ever really analyzed it as a potential hazard.

After Apollo 1 a few things were changed: one was that they did the Plugs Out test and the Overpressure test at different times, and a lot of stuff was turned off for the Overpressure test. Another was that the Apollo capsule at takeoff was 1atm 80/20 until a couple of minutes into flight, when it dumped the cabin atmosphere overboard and replaced it with pure O2 at 0.4atm. That's why the astronauts carried little packs in their arms in all the pictures of them getting into the spacecraft, that's the pure O2 tank that they were breathing off of until they could switch to the atmosphere in the cabin after it was replaced.

They were definitely used on Mir- in 1997 one caught fire, blocking the crew's access to their escape Soyuz, though they put it out.

It looks like NASA helped redesign it to be safer, creating the modern Solid Fuel Oxygen Generator (SFOG) system still in use on the ISS as the backup.

Just a FYI, S&P rolled back the dual-class rule. It was in place from 2017 to 2023.

There are indexes which explicitly try to capture the entire market- the Russell 3000 is most prominent, but the Wiltshire 5000 is another one, and Vanguard's Total Market Funds and ETF follow the CRSP US Total Market Index. I believe all of them plan to include SpaceX/OpenAI etc. within a few weeks of its listing, which is what I'd expect from their goal of tracking the total market. Other indexes follow just a few stocks- most famously, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (built during an era of when it had to be calculated by hand every night) looks at just 30 stocks in a weird way(1).

The S&P 500 isn't either of those. It has a list of criteria for inclusion, one of which is profitability. They are sticking with that criteria. If you don't like it, sell your VOO and buy VTI instead.

1: It is essentially impossible to build an index that tracks the DJIA because, since it was done on pencil and paper, it isn't actually market-cap weighted, but is share price weighted, with a correction factor for each stock to account for splits, one stock replacing another, etc. Because of that nature, the weights of the DJIA change minute by minute, so someone attempting to track it would be subject to enormous error.

NASDAQ-100 following ETF. Until recently, the only one that tracked the NASDAQ-100, which is a tech heavy index.

In September 2016 almost exactly the same thing happened to a Falcon 9 at the Cape, also on a static fire. New Glenn is bigger, so bigger bang, but pretty much exactly the same thing.

Off the top of my head, I recall in SpaceX's case it was a helium tank failure- a helium tank weld failed and the helium tank itself shot through the cryogenic oxygen, hit the far wall, and gave off a spark. But that sort of failure is only apparent when everything is pressurized correctly, which means tanks have to be full. The goal of the test is that you detect that sort of failure before it goes boom and then can fix it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgJEXQkjNQ is a video of SpaceX's failure.

LL Bean for me. Original at first, then the deluxe later as I got more homework. And I used an accordion folder, one slot for each class, for holding handouts etc. in addition to the notebooks and binders.

A report by some judges tried to carefully conceal the name of a judge who did a lot of terrible things (having a multi-year affair with a senior police officer, including sexual encounters in their chambers), even trying to hide their gender to make it more anonymous. But within about 10 minutes two different LLM's identified who did it, reasoning through the various possibilities and ruling most of them out.

WFH alone, let alone compressed work schedules, can improve the "fertility crisis": https://www.nber.org/papers/w34963

Couples (in prime reproducing age) where both members WFH at least 1 day a week have 0.32 more live births per woman per lifetime than couples where neither does.

The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user.

So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc.

That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago.

And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.

The US Constitution is an amazing document, I suggest you read it if you are an American. It's pretty short and has a lot of stuff that is useful to know, even if you aren't a lawyer (I am not). Because I am not a lawyer, I didn't word it exactly correctly.

The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution says, in its entirety:

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

The key in this context is "No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law." If a government agent takes that from you without due process that is a civil right of yours being abridged, at least in the US. I can't speak for other countries.

Civil Rights law is how these sorts of things are enforced by individuals who were harmed, in your example a Law Enforcement Officer violated someone's civil rights by killing them in the line of duty and their family can sue for violation of the deceased's civil right to life. Qualified Immunity short-circuits that entire process for the individual LEO's (it does not protect the organization, just individual officers).

If the prosecutor thinks they can get a criminal conviction for murder (or whatever) that is a totally separate process that is between the People (whom the prosecutor represents) and the defendant (in this case, the LEO who killed the guy in the line of duty). Qualified Immunity never applied to criminal cases(1). But criminal cases will not provide any money or anything like that to the victim (or their family)- that comes from civil suits alleging that the LEO violated someone's civil rights. And that is what removing Qualified Immunity encourages, individuals who were harmed can sue individual officers and receive payments from those individual officers (Colorado's police reform bill holds individual officers responsible with their own money up to certain limits where the organization becomes responsible; I don't know about other states).

1: Which are rare against LEO's because prosecutor's don't want to anger the LEO's that they work with regularly. This is why civil suits are generally the main avenue for people to get justice from over-zealous LEO's.

California SB 2, signed by Gavin Newsome in 2021, removed Qualified Immunity as a defense for all lawsuits brought under the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act.

I'm not a lawyer, and I have never lived in California so I don't know how much that covers. The QI removal I knew best was Colorado (CO's law also made individual LEO's have to pay with their own money, up to certain limits), and was doing some googling which listed California and New Mexico.

Not the legislature: the Supreme Court. Qualified Immunity was created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court back in the 1960's when a police officer arrested- and then a judge convicted- a group of black and white Episcopal priests for "making a disturbance of the peace"- that is, having black and white people out in public together as equals. This was Pierson v. Ray, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967.

The current implementation of it- where you need to have "clearly establish" a Constitutional right with a prior case in this region- is based on Pearson v. Callahan from 2009, and it takes a terrible Supreme Court precedent and makes it even worse. This has created the patchwork "no case in the circuit has clearly established that a police officer must not make a warrantless search on a Tuesday in May" sort of quibbling.

The work of legislatures has been to roll back qualified immunity. Colorado, New Mexico, and California have removed qualified immunity for their law enforcement officers at the state level. LEO's can still claim qualified immunity for suits under federal law, but they cannot for some suits brought under state law or the state constitution in those states.

The Supreme Court has also, at the same time they've made it harder to hold police to account, made it harder to hold politicians to account, gutting bribery laws and expanding "free speech" to include paying politicians. And the recent idea that a President can't be prosecuted for any "official acts" is also nonsense created by the Supreme Court. This isn't Congress fault, there were laws that prevented it. The Supreme Court just decided that they didn't want to enforce those laws.

The Supreme Court at the root of a lot of the dysfunction in American politics, and somehow still has more respect than they deserve.

If you use HTTPS they can see that you hit wikipedia (they will see you are trying to do a DNS lookup for en.wikipedia.org), but they can't see that you are viewing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundeprutterutchebane in particular- that is only available to someone who can read the body of the HTTP request, which with HTTPS is encrypted.

The threat of force is much more potent than the actual use of force: this has been the delicate dance that the US has used with Iran since the Revolution.

It took an idiot to try and actually use the full force of the USAF against Iran and reveal that the force was manageable- not great, but not going to topple the regime. And once that force was used and Iran's leaders realized it could be survived, that threat became much weaker, forcing a decision onto that previously mentioned idiot, he could either escalate to use greater force (some form of ground troops) or admit that he made a mistake and lost a war. And I suspect that the same will be true for Iran: the threat of cutting those cables is far more potent than the actual effects of cutting the cables.

The Internet is, it turns out, pretty good at routing around damage. The Russians have done some cable cutting in the Baltic Sea and it is annoying but it is not a winning move.

Depends on exactly the situation- when I worked on a very expensive desktop application years ago I was warned about giving too much information in error messages as it might help crackers.

With how powerful Ghidra is now, I'm not sure that it matters much any more.

I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.

I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.

1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.

So Ashburn VA is a datacenter hub because the very first non-government Internet Exchange Point (IXP) anywhere in the world was there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East). Back in the 1990's something like half of all internet traffic all over the world hit MAE-East. That in turn made AWS put their first region there (us-east-1 preceded eu-west-1 by 2 years and us-west-1 by 3 years). Then because there were lots of people who knew how to build DC's- and lots of vendors who knew how to supply them- the Dulles Corridor became a major hub for lots of companies datacenters. For AWS, because us-east-1 was the first, it's by far the most gnarly and weird- and a lot of control planes for other AWS services end up relying on it. Which is why it goes down more often than other regions, and when it does go down it makes national news, unlike, say, eu-south-2 in Spain.

But NoVA is basically the same sort of economic cluster that Paul Krugman won his Nobel Prize in Economics for studying, just for datacenters, not factories.

I was a IC/manager for a few months. Spending all day in meetings (there are actual things you have to do to manage 15+ people) and then going home and coding for 2-3 hours every night burned me the hell out and I left that company, good riddance to bad rubbish.

Companies above a certain scale- let's use Dunbar's Number as a good threshold- need full time managers to handle the necessary information flow through the company. Middle-manager is actually something that AI can't do yet, because their main job is to figure out what things everyone else around them needs to know (inside and outside their team), which requires a theory of mind that current LLM's just don't have. Is this policy change worth telling your team about? Is this feature creep worth telling other teams about? That is the decision that managers have to make dozens of times a day, and it requires a model of what various people know, to know whether this is important to them or not.

No, the laws are different- and more consumer friendly in the US- so the US consumer behavior is different.

Back when credit cards were first starting out (which happened in the US) the US Congress passed a law- the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974- that consumers were only liable for $50 of losses as long as they reported the missing credit card within 60 days of the end of the fraudulent billing cycle. This was back when credit cards purchases were all made on paper with the machine that went "kachunk" and transferred a carbon copy of your card- everything was done completely offline. That law has not been changed, in fact, most banks completely waive the $50 and don't hold card-holders liable for anything reported (basically, annoying a customer over $50 isn't worth it to the bank). Thanks to the internet, suddenly cards got a lot easier to steal and a lot easier to exploit- but banks are still on the hook for all losses reported within 60 days of the end of the cycle. The result is that American banks have invested an enormous amount in real-time monitoring of credit card transactions, and are doing lots of stuff to monitor this- they care deeply since ultimately they are on the hook- but the consumer doesn't care. This is why US card's from the consumer perspective are so much laxer, because our banks have invested far more on the back-end because the consumer is held harmless in a way they aren't with European cards.

As a totally separate issue, the EU has regulated the amount of interchange fees that card-companies can charge, but the US has not capped them. The result is that US card-holders can get significant kickbacks for using cards (especially true for the top decile of wealth), in a way that is functionally impossible with EU issued cards that have capped interchange fees. There is a big lawsuit happening now to try and allow merchants to only accept low-fee cards (the standard VISA/MC/AMEX deal requires treating all cards equally, which gives them an incentive to push people to higher interchange cards). We will see what happens with that suit, but until then, American high-spenders can have much higher rewards on their cards, which also encourages greater use of the cards- and making them have less friction than the EU versions.

The problem with this is now you are solely responsible for managing all of the changes, all of the variation of life. Chrome changed the shape of this API, you are responsible for finding it and updating it. Morocco changed when their daylight savings took effect, now you need to update your date/time handling code. There are a lot of these things that we take for granted because our libraries handle it for us, and with no dependencies you have to do all the work. Not a big deal for making a double-pendulum simulator for your daughter to play with that will stop mattering next week, but is a concern for a company which is trying to build something that can run indefinitely into the future.