rangestransform

Sierra club environmentalists and NIMBYs have the option to shut the fuck up and stop opposing green power generation, but they still choose to

There was a real human cost to how China industrialized that isn’t “muh freedoms”.

China overproduced STEM grads so that their industries could hire them for pennies on the dollar. They had to withstand insane competition starting in elementary school, only to end up unemployed or doordashing.

This isn’t a PRC specific thing either, TSMC is infamous for having PhDs doing night shift lab tech work for pennies (comparatively).

The only reason AI research is in conflict with limiting global warming is the unholy alliance of NIMBYs and Sierra Club environmentalists preventing the building of anything, anywhere. Clean energy has beaten out fossil energy on cost for years now, and only regulatory burdens force datacentres to use portable gas turbines instead of standing up transmission lines to the closest solar or wind farm.

Imagine if all USB-C cables had a patent owned by the consortium and an identification chip made by the consortium. The spec could require that devices would not use the cable at all unless the chip is cryptographically verified, and bad cable manufacturers could be sued into oblivion for breaking the patent.

The more I age, and the more I expect my devices to justwork™, the more I appreciate Apple’s pro consumer monopolistic moves.

VPD has become notably more controversial after Jim Chu stepped down, before that it was notable how professional they were for a North American police department

Based on Alyssa Rosenzweig’s reverse engineering, the current GPUs are still descended from PowerVR IP

It’s still far too scalable compared to what was accessible back then. The police should be handcuffed to paying for a full ass helicopter if they want to do surveillance

There should be no optimization on police resources. When Katz v. USA (no expectation of privacy in public) was decided, surveillance was done by an officer who needed to be paid a middle class salary, maybe armed with a camera and a telephoto lens if we’re lucky. The average city police department barely knew what SIGINT meant.

Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.

Moral responsibility is not real responsibility that can be enforced at the point of a gun by anyone or any nation, and so this responsibility does not have to be assumed

We saw what happened with banning nvidia flagship compute GPU exports to China; it just spurred them to develop a domestic semiconductor industry while still importing black market GPUs at a minor markup. The US would do well to keep the world dependent on American products that are under the jurisdiction of the US government, and can therefore be regulated or killswitched. All this will do is allow China to have flagship model capabilities without being subject to the US at all.

Yellow dots doxxing me whenever I print something is equally despicable, client side scanning on my iPhone is equally despicable.

Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.

I would rather just accept more crime than accept draconian regulation telling me what I can do with a piece of hardware I own

Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead

Maybe this would’ve made economic sense 20 or 40 years ago, but nuclear is too expensive now compared with renewables. I can’t help but think this is a covert plan to bcecome an “almost nuclear” state in response to threats from the US.

Not only are the wages higher, the unions insist on hiring 3x the number of necessary staff (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...)

Having a single buyer gives the government the ability to force standardization across cities, and squeeze contractors. Knowing the US though, it’ll become a jobs program for bumfuck towns like Plattsburgh NY

Everyone should have security robust against nation-state actors by default in the most popular consumer products, so that people who need it can hide in the masses. I hope LLM-assisted “offensive security research” makes insecure software fully unusable so that companies finally take security seriously.

We should not fulfill our imagined moral responsibility to the third world if it has real cost to the people already here

I have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns. Investors in Canada kept passing the same pieces of land between each other for no benefit to society. My pipe dream is that Canada grows the balls to annhilate property values

Forcing developers off of Rosetta 2 is a pro-consumer move because it gives the ultimate incentive for developers to modernize. I don’t want to use Lightroom (replace with whatever app is part of your workflow) through x86 emulation, I want Apple to bitch slap Adobe into porting it to native. Microsoft will be forced to expend resources to support x86 emulation for all of eternity.

Apple throwing their weight around in a pro-consumer way (Rosetta, ask app not to track) is why I use their devices

Those countries could keep their own talent through economic policy (i.e. fuck you pay me)

That they don’t is entirely their own fault and they deserve to be brain drained. “Talent” are people with agency and not possessions subservient to national interests.

A123 also owned the IP to lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry, which is now BYD’s claim to fame

re:2, proportional representation systems oftentimes have more extremist parties elected, they’re just severely kneecapped by not having enough votes to do anything extremist

I got an HP50g from Craigslist in high school that

- was cheaper than a TI

- had a primitive CAS system

- teachers had no idea how to put it into test mode

It carried me through AP calc BC, I would’ve gotten <4 off of my own knowledge alone

There were hardware supply issues around launch time that made consoles a much better deal than the equivalent PC

Funnily enough, I learned to code “depth first” by putting together enough documentation examples and stackoverflow answers to reach a working Android app, long before I learned to code “breadth first” in school.

And I will keep voting to benefit myself, my family, and my country in that order.

It’s their own fault that they do not have visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew or a dynasty like the CCP that’s willing to sacrifice entire generations for future generations.

To not allow a country to govern itself into oblivion is the peak of western paternalism.

I love explaining to Americans how Vancouver suburbia is slightly better than American suburbia in so many ways that matter like trees, real traffic calming, and walkability

That’s because Rs let NIMBYs and the fossil fuel lobby call the shots, and Ds let NIMBYs and degrowthers call the shots. I bet China isn’t powering their datacenters with gas turbines

It’s an improvement over spending 1b/mi building public transit in HCOL car dependent areas

The fact that they need to use gas turbines at all is a tragic condemnation of how the US can’t build shit at all. We should be consuming more (green) energy to make our lives better, and rushing toward diminishing returns on energy consumption. Instead, we have this unholy alliance of (usually right wing) NIMBYs and (usually left wing) degrowthers that make it much more convenient to use a gas turbine than build renewable energy somewhere windy/sunny and plumb it in with some transmission lines. Renewable energy is way past the tipping point of being cheaper, the gas turbines are just there due to regulatory burden at all levels.