sentinel

The newer types of reactors - gen 3 are way safer than a Chernobyl. I.e. a meltdown could not happen

My rule of thumb when working on side projects is to keep it simple:

- use tech-stacks that I know

- even simpler – use node.js / express (i.e. use only one programming language)

- Standard AWS EC2, S3, Postgres instances

- scale vertically before scaling horizontally

- use GitHub Actions as much as possible

- deploys and rollbacks are done manually

- I keep a list of useful CLI commands in Notion

If you're a small team you shouldn't need to think about kubernetes tbh.

Any recommendations for courses or books that give a 101 intro all the way to understanding these curves and why / how they are used?

I'd like to get a grasp on this from first principles. Thank you!

Another day another “stay away from bitcoin” post on HN

how you would resolve an innocent person being misidentified by a facial recognition system

Due process, which they'll still be entitled to.

Not sure about suing. I'm sure people will try and sue.

Turns out making up "antitrust" cases against US companies is a great source of income for the European Union.

It also seems likely that more surveillance will result in fewer innocent people convicted, not more.

+1 – my gut instinct tells me this is the case. I don't have any data to back it up though, but I have a feeling this is true.

So instead of improving it, you suggest to automate it?

I said no such thing. Read the whole thing again, take the upset level down a few notches and get back to us.

Yea it's a weird situation for sure. I would assume that any facial recognition attempt has taken a hit with masks being so prevalent.

Rephrase please.

Yea I think: - Google and Amazon etc won’t touch it cause it is bad PR - stores won’t buy it cause it’s bad PR; fear of boycotting etc. - physical retail is already on the decline; why spend money in a dying industry - the whole project would have one big flaw - people wearing masks

The 1% there is that “the criminal won’t get caught”. Not that someone else, an innocent bystander, will get caught.

Also what you described can happen to you today as well. It’s the imperfect system we live in.

I doubt that this would happen.

Certainly possible. I don't know what the mapping would be there, and whether it is 1 to 1.

In the pandemic, burglaries dropped significantly, presumably because people were home

I would have expected that to be the case too, but in fact in the US there's been a rise in burglaries during the pandemic.

This is already happening without facial recognition.

An argument here is that it disincentivizes others from doing similar crimes. If the technology is so spot on that 99% of the time you commit the crime you'll get caught, then others will likely not take the risk.

Granted there's an easy counter argument there (all the more prescient these days) that they could wear a mask while committing the crime.

There's a similar (less discussed about) trend happening these days. Law enforcement is using DNA evidence from crime scenes, passing it through (sometimes private) DNA databases and getting matches.

Let's say those database continue to have more data – what are the odds that someone involved in a crime will leave some DNA behind, and will either themselves have their DNA in a database, or, a relative. The chances of you getting away with a crime converge to zero. And if you know you have high odds of getting caught when doing the crime, you might be less likely to do it in the first place.

How did the EU become such a bunch of luddites? Or does it only seem that way from outside?

I get that there are legit concerns about face recognition (as there are benefits), but the concerns _could_ be regulated. Granted, regulation is a much more work intensive process – you have to sit down with a large number of people, get educated on the subject etc. Is it laziness?

Or is this a negotiation tactic? Start asking for a permanent ban, and work your way back to regulation?

You're in the minority.

Not a better analog at all.

1. The mainstream news pushed numerous stories over the past years without those rudimentary truthiness checks.

2. I disagree with many points in that paragraph: - echo chambers: when was the last time you heard a nuanced "from the other aisle" opinion from a NYT reader; an opinion that wasn't covered in the NYT. Same echo chamber, just a different format. - news companies are small and irrelevant: Seems like this narrative has captured everybody's imagination today. Everybody is talking about it. It might even lead to action in Congress. Are news companies really that small and irrelevant as you claim them to be?

Fair – I suppose my point is that they've set themselves up for an out better than others have.

Thanks for this perspective – I was not aware of this. Definitely a good idea and I'm personally happy to see a resurgence in nuclear as a green solution to the climate issue.

You are correct that they both work very similarly. In fact doge was heavily inspired by BTC. Both have PoW and coin minting as a result of block resolutions.

Granted I'm not an expert on doge, but one big difference that I know of is the limit of coins that will be minted – bitcoin caps at 21 million, dogecoin is uncapped.

That's a rather important fundamental when talking about a currency.

I would then point to the communities that hover around either BTC or Doge. From personal observation, BTC is more serious about digital currency as a possible store of value future, whereas doge is a joke / meme focused coin.

At the end of the day, a lot of it is marketing, which is why I actually thought Doge would be a possible contender for a 3rd place crypto coin around the time when Elon Musk was tweeting about it. I believe the fact that it is uncapped and that is really is more of a meme coin than anything serious (see the community around it) led to its downfall. It didn't have solid enough legs.

I've been following this story a bit and here's what I've noticed:

1. The causes seem to vary depending on who you ask. There seems to be a combination of CO2 taxes going up, a hard winter last year that diminished the strategic reserves, incompetent (corrupt?) gov't institutions that didn't replenish them in summer this year, combined with a general trend of relying more on gas and less on coal (and nuclear to some extent).

2. The EU came down with a heavy hand on coal producing countries... which does make sense, climate change is an issue. However, this is going to disproportionately hit the poorer countries in the block, those that still relied on antiquated coal burning power plants. Germany has Nord Stream + some investment in renewables, so they don't care much, France is mostly nuclear, so again, they don't care, Italy and Spain are warmer countries that could get fine through winter. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia etc. where coal plants were closed will be hit the worst by this.

3. The EU doesn't negotiate as a block on gas prices. Each country deals with Russia individually – e.g. Nord Stream being built between Germany and Russia. That also means that the smaller countries are at the biggest disadvantage, or are reliant on either Germany's or Russia's benevolence in dictating gas prices.

Europe can probably get dirt cheap gas from the Russians, the question is – at what cost?

About coal: 2030 seems to be the deadline to close all coal burning power plants in Europe. Every year more coal power plants will be shut down. This year was a deadline year for some countries in the EU.

It was all a long term plan, but poorly executed.

Nuclear would be great. I’m not sure how many reactors are gen 2 or gen 3. Gen 2 reactors are still risky.

Permissive insider trading laws and public participation in German capital markets may not necessarily be correlated. There can be other reasons why Germans choose not to participate.

But, I do agree that (at least) an attempt to make insider trades more transparent does help inspires confidence.

Crypto is a catch-all term at the moment. Some cryptos will be more useful than others. Some (like BTC) could be the digital equivalent of gold. Some will facilitate decentralized companies (e.g. LINK). Some will likely be Ponzi schemes (e.g. dogecoin).

There’s something to be said about losing an incentive here.

Likely they should pay _something_. But they should also be grandfathered in.

But at the same time, over the past year, it’s ridiculous how easily this government decides to change the rules of the game overnight and expect us to catch up without a problem. It was the money printing first, then talk about raising capital gains, now this.

What the hell. People had made plans (to buy a house, or to retire for example) based on numbers that we thought were sacrosanct.

You forgot to add “for no reason”.