rainsil

There are actually many parts of the world where such voices are routinely positive or neutral[0]. People in more collectivist cultures often have a less-strict division between their minds and their environments and are more apt to believe in spirits and the ‘supernatural’ as an ordinary part of the world, so ‘voices in the head’ aren’t automatically viewed as a nefarious intrusion into the sanctity of one’s mind.

Modern western cultures treat such experiences as pathologies of a sick mind, so it makes sense that the voices present more negatively.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250902-the-places-where...

Australia simply forces people to save a portion of their income into investable retirement accounts. Because the money goes towards productive investment rather than funding what is essentially a government-run Ponzi scheme, retirees on Superannuation live much better than Americans that rely on Social Security. There is a small Age Pension for those who don’t have enough Superannuation income for whatever reason.

In principle the US could phase such a system in by redirecting future Social Security payroll taxes to 401(k)s while maintaining existing commitments. But because Social Security is so deeply underfunded, workers would need to keep up solidarity payments for decades without any expectation of reciprocity once they retire.

Still, everyone would be better off in the long run.

According to the US Copyright Office, fully AI-generated works aren’t eligible for copyright because they don’t have human authors. They’re in the public domain by default.

See: https://library.osu.edu/site/copyright/2026/02/06/artificial...

We have quite a bit of insight into Indian scam centers thanks to the work of scambaiters like Jim Browning[1] who frequently hack into their CCTV cameras and desktops.

The big difference is that the workers in India are voluntarily employed. In fact they often work for companies that do legitimate customer support as well, so they maintain the facade of doing “service” for their “clients”.

It’s also worth noting that Indian call centers focus more on tech support scams rather than romance scams.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/JimBrowning

That’s a good thing. Expanded slogans have object-level meanings. Acronyms just stand as identity markers, and are much easier to dismiss.

It’s harder to argue against “Make America Great Again” or “Black Lives Matter”. Their object-level meanings are fairly anodyne and positive. It’s much easier to argue against “MAGA” or “BLM”, since the meaning is obscured by the acronym.

Political movements with nice slogans should avoid turning them into acronyms.

It seems like if you created a new operating system to solve these problems and it gained some traction, you'd fracture the landscape even more.

Unless your operating system happened to be superior to all the existing solutions in all aspects with no tradeoffs.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

What unexplored space do you think is ripe for a totally new operating system?

But couldn't you just claim somebody else's name/address (such as your neighbor's) when you go vote? Or is a photo stored on the voter roll?

So they'd split off Google Ads then create another ad platform to sell ads on their properties? Why would anyone use the independent Google Ads?

I wonder why they haven't implemented this after so many years. It can't be much more difficult than integrating highlight.js and MathJax, and it's lost them at least one big publication (Hackernoon)

You can always use a privacy coin. Even if they get banned from exchanges, you can transact within the coin, then use an atomic cross-chain swap to cash out to bitcoin.

Alternately, there's decentralized mixing algorithms like CoinJoin that are indistinguishable from normal transactions with multiple inputs and outputs. Bitcoin's Wasabi wallet and Ethereum's Tornado cash do this.

Privacy is really a solved problem for anyone who wants to solve it.

But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs.

This is usually provided by technical books, which are available for a much wider range of systems than you'd think.

There's an inherent trade-off between decentralisation and computing price+performance, so it's likely that centralised exchanges will continue to be cheaper and faster for higher-frequency activities such as day trading, transaction processing, etc. Their utility for speculation decreases with harsher KYC/AML/accredited investor regulation, so it doesn't make sense for them to support that.

WebP images support animation, and they're fully supported in Chromium and Firefox[0], but Safari support seems flaky[1]

[0] https://caniuse.com/webp [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68522707/animated-webp-f...

It's a combination microwave/convection oven.

Well the first year of the Iraq War cost the US $54 billion, according to congress's budget[0]. This doesn't include the total cost of the supporting infrastructure need to be able to deploy troops in Iraq quickly, but we can estimate that using the increase in defence budget from 2002-3, or $94 billion ($132B in 2020)[1].

According to Wikipedia, Minuteman III ICBMs have a 2020 unit cost of $20 million[2], so for the cost of an Iraq invasion, the US could have fired about 6600 missiles. Considering the invasion toppled the Iraqi government, it's pretty unlikely that firing 6600 missiles with conventional payloads would have been anywhere near as effective.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman#Counterforce

I didn't think typosquatting actually worked. I wonder if there's a general way to figure out the most common misspellings of a given domain name...

The nudity exception is probably more along the lines of the usual carve-outs for 'scientific, educational, or artistic' content.

Somewhat disappointed "securities fraud" wasn't mentioned, although the SEC is ever-present.

Elixir and Phoenix is a great option. As a functional language, the focus is on pipelines of functions that progressively transform data structures, which is how Phoenix processes requests (through "plugs" transforming a Plug.Conn struct), and how Ecto, the database library, performs validations. Pattern matching and assertive programming, the use of keyword lists for optional arguments, behaviours (i.e. interfaces), and an ergonomic macro system make the language (almost) as productive as something like Ruby, and typespecs, along with Dialyzer, allow you to claw back some type safety. The architecture that Phoenix promotes, particularly the use of contexts, encourages you to write maintainable, well organised and encapsulated code.

LiveView is really Phoenix's killer app. It allows you to write responsive SPA-like applications without writing any JavaScript. It sends user interaction to the server over websockets and ships an optimised diff structure back to the client to patch the DOM, without having to deal with client-side state management and JSON deserialisation. It's built on top of OTP GenServers, which make it easy to write performant, stateful "processes" that scale well and are monitored by "Supervisors" that deal with restarting (or otherwise dealing) with them in the event of crashes, which reduces the need for defensive programming.

The ecosystem is also quite good, and I've found well-designed libraries for dealing with most common problems, such as auth, persistent background jobs, serialisation, wrapping common APIs. Documentation for every library is available on hexdocs.pm, and is usually decently comprehensive. For Phoenix itself, pick up Programming Phoenix, which does a better job of giving a big-picture understanding than the docs, but only has a short chapter on LiveView.

By way of criticism, I'd say that Phoenix should work on improving its directory structure to be something similar to [0], and deployment story (it's relatively difficult to find a nice solution that deals with things like migrations).

[0] https://elixirforum.com/t/best-practice-for-directory-struct...

Isn't the Messenger app a "messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse."? They also seem to have standalone web and desktop versions at messenger.com

It's not clear that the government is legally able to censor all types of spam. If the spam is commercial, the Central Hudson four-pronged test on commercial speech restrictions applies,[1] which requires, among other things, that the restrictions be "no more extensive than necessary to serve [the government's] interest". Non-commercial forms of spam would probably be protected from removal by the First Amendment, unless, perhaps, they overloaded the government's servers.

Trolling categorised as "obscene" would be removable, but otherwise may be protected by the First Amendment. Also, the fact that every content moderation decision may be subject to litigation would make it extremely difficult for the government to meaningfully moderate content.

Private platforms, not bound by the First Amendment, and allowed to moderate without assuming liability by Section 230, wouldn't suffer these problems

[1]: Via White Buffalo v. UT Austin

Is the 1.2% intended as a contrast to the "<1%" claim?

I believe the concepts in the first paper are unrelated to those of modern lenses (i.e. functional references). See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17198072/how-is-anamorph...

I doubt this explanation really captures the gist of the phenomenon. Many current and upcoming trends (containers/Kubernetes, machine learning and Rust, for instance) have suffered in varying degrees from either of those problems, yet their adoption among companies is ever-increasing. I suspect they suffer from an issue also shared by the likes of cryptocurrencies: they don't have a "killer benefit"; a concise, persuasive reason that using them is a discrete improvement over current practice (like "high-level systems programming!", or "self-driving cars!").

Seriously, the lack of awareness that pretty much every year is the best year in human history* is rather depressing. Pair that with the coming end of extreme poverty, extraterrestrial habitation, and a non-infinitesimal chance of experiencing radical life-extension (whether through neurotechnological methods such as WBE, or cell-targeting microbiology), it's clear that Gen A/B (is generation naming modular?) will be excellent generations to be born into.

* Except maybe this year, which is an anomaly.

Isn't the monthly subscription model even better for tasks you only do a few times a year, since you can subscribe when you want to use it and deactivate when you're done?

The issue with monad tutorials is that they start at the top - trying to impart a generalizable understanding of the concept (which, short of category-theoretic explanations, requires hopelessly leaky analogies) instead of focusing on the purpose and usage of specific monads.[1][2] Abstract concepts must be first made concrete in order to understand them; in the case of monads, it's best to just look at the type signature for specific monads' "bind" (>>=) functions, as well as examples of usage, while actually using them in (permissively typed) code, rather than trying to connect burrito analogies to real life.

[1] http://dev.stephendiehl.com/hask/#eightfold-path-to-monad-sa...

[2]:Regular expression tutorials, by contrast, virtually never attempt to explain regular languages or automata theory, which is why nobody complains about having to learn formal language theory in order to use `sed`.

A surprisingly digestible (and concrete) explaination of monads (Ch 2): http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/arrows.pdf

Turn-based strategy games such as the Civilization and Total War series are probably good examples to compare chess with. Aside from the potential asymmetries (which can be removed), they are both 'purer' than RTS games and less deterministic than chess. In 1v1s, they're probably a better test of predictive reasoning than chess.

The national debt problem is somewhat overblown in popular opinion. Sovereign debt, in a country that pays it in its own currency, is bounded by inflation, not tax receipts. In practice this means that the US can reduce its debt to more manageable levels by permitting mild inflation (something I can see the Fed doing) and instituting greater fiscal responsibility at the federal level (perhaps less likely).

Also, it's important to note that strictly speaking, growing debt doesn't matter as long as the GDP grows by the same amount. Of course, that's not happening, so there is a problem. But as long as there is some leeway for inflation to increase (which there currently is), the debt is ultimately manageable.