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There has never been one song that has come anywhere near that over copyright infringement.

For file sharing lawsuits they all ask for "statutory" damages. Those are in the range from $750 to $30000 in the US (but can be lowered to as low as $250 in the case of an "innocent infringer" [1] or raised to as much as $150000 in the case of a "willful infringer" [2]).

These damages are per work infringed, so even if someone were found to be a willful infringer for sharing a song, and the court found their behavior so egregious that it went all the way to $150000, and the person had made and distributed a vast number of copies, it would still only by $150000 because it is not per copy. (Well, it might be per copy in a way...in deciding were to land on the $750-$150000 scale the court may have considered the number of copies).

There have been copyright and copyright adjacent lawsuits over songs that have hit $200 million in the aggregate, but those all involved large collections of songs. Some examples:

• Limp Bizkit sued their record label for $200+ million saying they had concealed that much in royalties that they owed the band.

• There was a $200 million suit by music publishers against Roblox for allowing users to upload and stream commercial compositions without paying the writers.

• There's a massive suit underway I believe against some AI music generation companies.

As far as I know the biggest ever over an individual song was an award of $7.4 million against "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over accusations that the infringed Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give it Up". (That was reduced later to $5.3 million plus 50% of future "Blurred Lines" publishing and songwriting royalties).

[1] Someone who did not know they were infringing and had no reason to know. This almost never applies when pirating things you know are commercial recordings.

Looks like I had a few memory errors. First I forgot that in the first phase, when they were able to identify people using DMCA subpoenas, they had a used a mix of suing first and offering a settlement first.

Then in the second phase when they lost the ability to identify people that way they switched to filing "John Doe" lawsuits, which then allowed them to get subpoenas to identify who owned the IP address where the uploads came from.

I'd completely forgotten about that. In most cases they offered a settlement once they had a name but still, there was a lawsuit. (If they couldn't get a settlement, or didn't even want to ask for one, they could amend the lawsuit to name the real person and proceed).

There's a protocol, FIDO Credential Exchange Protocol (CXP) which is currently at proposed standard status. It is supported by Apple and Google and some third party password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane). (1Password is kind of annoying though as its CXP export only supports exporting everything. There is no way as far as I can tell to export just a single item yet).

Once 1Password supports proper single export when I make a new passkey I'll store it there and later export it to Apple.

Meanwhile I simply make two passkeys. I've only run into I think two sites that supported passkeys but would not let me make two.

On most sites making a second passkey is as simply as going to your security settings, finding the passkey settings there, hitting the "add another passkey" link, and pointing your phone at the QR code it shows, and then on those phone choosing the password manager that you did not use for the first passkey.

Alsup is an interesting judge. He has handled several important tech cases, such as Oracle v Google, and Waymo v Uber.

He's also a longtime hobbyist programmer working in BASIC, much of it in support of his ham radio hobby. Screenshots of his shortwave propagation prediction program here [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...

The RIAA typically asked for around $2-4 per song to settle without a lawsuit, which would come to a total of a few thousand because they generally only went after people sharing over a thousand songs.

In the couple of few where the party would not agree to a settlement and the RIAA sued, they would pick about 15 of the thousand+ songs to sue over. Statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per infringed work, so the total would now be about 3-5 times what their settlement offer amount had been.

Most parties then got a lawyer, the lawyer told the party that had no chance, and they would then seriously negotiate with the RIAA and get a settlement.

Only a couple would still not settle, went to trial, and did an absolutely terrible job and the judge/jury awarded well above the minimum statutory damages. The RIAA still tried to settle for well below that, but the defendants refused and kept trying to fight and did not have a happy time.

That wasn't just a list of things they could besides breaking crypto. It was the list of the main reasons people are investing in trying to build them.

As you noted the problems they pose for cryptography can be addressed with PQC. Military/Defense/National Security invests in them for the cryptographic applications (and probably also for the logistics applications), but they are only about 1/3 of the investment.

The rest is for the doing better physics simulations and for logistics and financial applications. The physics simulations will be huge and drug development and materials science.

This suffers from the "proves too much" problem. You are essentially arguing that government should only be given powers that cannot possibly ever be abused or be extended to where they can be abused. It is only an argument against government powers against CSAM because it is an argument against pretty much all government powers.

Arguments that have any chance of persuading a government not to do something (and the public not to support the government in doing that thing) have to a lot more specific than that.

You mean the company that does hundreds of assessments per year of companies all throughout the supply chain, including surprise spot checks, and forces those it catches violating labor standards to fix the problem and also provide remedies to the affected workers?

Quite a lot of the labor issues in Apple's supply chain we found out because Apple found them and included them in their annual report on these and other supply chain issues.

The other is detection of images that may contain nudity, whether sent or received, when the owner/admin/parent enables the feature. It is relatively uncontroversial [...]

That's a new version. The one that as announced the same time as client side scanning to block uploading CSAM to iCloud worked like this.

1. It could be enabled on a child's device by the parents. It was not on be default.

2. If the child received a sexual image (not necessarily just CSAM...if an adult sends a dick pic to a child that is not CSAM but would have been flagged) the image is blocked, the child is notified, told their parents are worried the image may harm them, and asked if they still want to see it.

3. If the child says no, they do not want to see it, that is the end of the matter.

4. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are at least 13 they are shown the image and that is the end of the matter.

5. If the child says that they do want to see it and they are under 13, they are again told that they parents are concerned, and that if they view it their parents will be notified, and asked if they still want to view it.

6. If they say no that is the end of the matter.

7. If they say yes they see it but the parents also are notified and will be able to see it.

This should have been pretty uncontroversial, but there were objections on the grounds that if someone say sends their dick pic to your under 13 child and the child goes all the way through to step 7 and decides to view it, that is a violation of the sender's privacy because that message was only intended for the child.

A large part of the investments in developing quantum computing are for drug discovery, materials science, and logistics.

So let me see if I understand this. Something apparently has recently changed at GitHub that will break a perfectly valid way that clients can configure ssh. Someone hit that problem, tried a bunch of things to diagnose it, figured out what is broken and a workaround (switch to another perfectly valid way to configure ssh on the client).

Rather than going into detail on all the things they tried to figure that out they went straight to concisely explaining the workaround.

They then briefly explain why those two different ways to configure it lead to different flows on the server.

There is absolutely no question that this will be useful to anyone how hits this problem and has this turn up when they search for help. There is nothing in the writing that, if this had been written in 2018, any reasonable person would find to criticize.

But because you see one bit of phrasing that you think might be LLM influenced you flag it?

On those survey results several items show a 5 item bar chart with the bars labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 showing the counts and percentages of respondents who chose 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

For example, "Do you prefer modern or older architecture?" shows 20% chose 1, 34.6% chose 2, 25.6% chose 3, 15% chose 4, and 4.8% chose 5.

WTF does this mean? I don'e see anything that says what those labels mean. I'd guess for questions asking X or Y they mean X, lean X, no preference, lean Y, and Y but in what order?

But some aren't comparisons. One such chart is simply titled "Global Warming". What does it mean to answer "2" to that?

Actual PWM ICs drive LEDs over 10,000 hz, which is truly imperceptible to the human eye.

But then you can get capacitors or inductors emitting a very annoying 10 kHz whine. There are higher end LEDs for various commercial uses that use PWM at over 20 kHz to avoid that.

I'm surprised reviews were enabled for those locations.

From their explanation of posting restrictions [1] that was linked in another comment:

Posting on a particular place may be turned off if its category or geographic area has experienced a continuous pattern of low value or off-topic posts. Contributions are considered low value when they don’t typically play a large part in helping users decide whether to visit the place.

People being detained generally aren't asked by ICE which detention center they want to be put in, and people visiting a detention center generally are doing so to see a client or relative, so ICE detention centers fit this (as do most other incarceration facilities).

Later they list characteristics of places they may restrict, and one is:

Generally unvisitable or have limited public access. These are places where people typically don’t have a choice about which location to go to, that aren’t open to the public, or where access to the place may be limited to people who are stationed or assigned there.

Most incarceration centers definitely fit this.

[1] https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/1303613...

Which market do you mean when talking about "market prices"?

I'm pretty sure the utility where I am has been able to get rate increases approved partly based on rising prices they have to pay to buy power on the wholesale market when they do not have enough capacity of their own to cover all their customers.

I think you would probably just pick enough primes at the start to handle numbers up to the number of bits you need. If we stick with primes that fit in 32-bit unsigned integers, then using the largest k such primes covers numbers up this many bits or decimal digits:

     k     bits  digits
    10      319      96
    20      639     192
    30      959     288
    40     1279     385
    50     1599     481
    75     2399     722
   100     3199     963
   150     4799    1444
   250     7999    2408
   500    15999    4816
  1000    31999    9632

     k   bits  digits
    10    159      48
    20    319      96
    30    479     144
    40    639     192
    50    799     240
    75   1199     361
   100   1598     481
   150   2397     721
   250   3991    1201
   500   7967    2398
  1000  15868    4776

   k  bits  digits
  10    78      23
  20   152      45
  30   220      66
  40   281      84
  50   327      98
  54   334     100

In 1970, the US was 83.5% non-Hispanic White. In 2020 it was 57.8%

The claim was that in 1070 the vast majority of students in a public school were from the same community, and that this is not true now. The data you cite does nothing whatsoever to support (or to refute) that claim.

It just supports the claim that communities today probably have a different makeup than communities in 1970.

Also, in the 1970 I don't believe that most students in a typical public school were from the same community, unless we consider "white people" to be a community. Most people consider themselves to be part of several communities, and identify more strongly with those communities than with a broad racial community.

At my school in the '70s for example even though it was maybe 85+% white most of the white students would more strongly associate with communities based on something other than being white. One big group was the military kids from families stationed at the nearby major air force base. That community was majority white but had a fair number of black kids. Another was the kids from the farms from the vast agricultural areas that surrounded our town. That community was majority white but had a pretty substantial number of hispanic kids (the farms had more hispanics than whites because the farm laborers were mostly hispanic, but a lot of their kids went to the high school in a different town). There was also a Mormon community, which was very white, and a Catholic community which was more mixed.

A white Catholic air force kid would be more likely to identify with an hispanic Catholic aggie kid than with a white Mormon kid, because the Catholic community is probably a bigger part of their identity than the generic white community.

In 1975, the single motherhood rate was 15%. In 2015, it was 40%

The questionable part of the article was the implication that it matters if your child goes to a school with a higher percentage of single mothers than schools in the '70s had, leading parents to send their kids to private schools to avoid such children.

There is research that children of single mothers have a harder time in school. But does having such children in the same school as your child cause your child to have a harder time?

In 1980, Spanish speakers were 5% of the US. In 2024, it was 13.9%

This actually suggests the article's claim is wrong. The claim was that a "vast majority" in the '70s spoke English and now that is not the case. But by the most commonly accepted ranges to count as a "vast majority" that would still be vast majority speaking English.

It's a pretty well-established fact that children of two-parent families have significantly better outcomes than those of single-parent families

Does there being children from single-parent families in the same school as your child lead to your child having significantly worse outcomes?

Recall the context from the article:

> For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.

It is listing things about other children that it implies drag down your child and so leads parents to turn to private schooling.

Look at all the countries with it already or that are in the midst of implementing it [1]. It won't stop there.

Even if the tide turns it is going to be pretty widespread before it ebbs. Why not work to make sure before that happens it is done in a way that protects privacy?

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

Walmart groceries have also gotten more expensive and Walmart owns the land that the vast majority of its stores are on.

I'm proposing that organizations like that recognize that age verification is going to happen, and try to ensure that when that happens there will be at lease some age verification services that do it in a way that doesn't subject you to a "papers, please" situation every time you go to a website that has to check age.

It can be done with either 0 or 1 "papers, please" events per device rather than 1 per website or worse 1 per website visit, and without preventing anonymous access, but most of the laws do not require that it be done that. Most age verification services will do the minimum required, which usually will mean they are more intrusive and more leaky.

The best way they could ensure that, if they can't convince governments to write the age verification laws to require it, would be to operate such a service themselves.

I took a quick look at the Texas law. Like a few other such laws it allows sites to use an external service to do the check, as long as the service uses a "commercially reasonable" method of doing that. That basically means it has to be based on government ID or by inference based on certain types of transaction records they can get access to (e.g., if you have a mortgage they can reasonably infer you are an adult).

As far as I can tell it would be possible to build an age verification service based on an open source ZKP implementation such as Google's Longfellow [1] that would be acceptable to these laws, but would allow anonymous age verification. It would be similar to the system the EU is now trialing, except not limited to iOS and to Android devices with Google Play. Longfellow should be able to work with those but also most modern smart phones running any OS the supports the phone's secure element, and also desktop computers that have secure elements, and devices like YubiKeys.

You would have to verify your age with the age verification service to set things. The easiest way to make it so that is not a privacy risk is for the age verification service to be offered by some entity that already has your ID documents. In the EU that would be the governments themselves, but I don't think any US state governments are ready to do that.

The age verification service doesn't necessarily need to store copies of whatever ID you present. It just needs to know you are when it issues its ID documents that get bound to your device's secure element. If this service was offered by some entity that has a widespread physical presence (a bank would be perfect) you could go in, show ID in person, and get your device enrolled.

Even better would be for a trusted non-profit to run this, like the EFF or the ACLU. Yes, I know they don't want age verification to happen at all, but they are going to lose that one, and it would be prudent to try to make it so that people have a privacy preserving way to do it that can be used anonymously when that happens.

Anyway, once your device is set up verifying your age to a website would involve a protocol between your device in the website the uses a ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof) to demonstrate to the website that the identify information the age verification service bound to the secure element on the your devices says your age is acceptable. The ZKP doesn't disclose anything else from your identidy information. (The web server sees your IP address of course, but they would see that without age verification too). Note that the age verification service has no idea when, or were, you age verify at a website.

[1] https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk

The U.S. government on Friday said Boeing can once again issue airworthiness certificates for its bestselling 737 Max aircraft and 787 Dreamliners, an authority that was stripped from the manufacturer after fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 of the 737 Max.

I'm a bit confused by this. From what I've read an "airworthiness certificate" is not a certificate that the aircraft design is good and safe. That would be a type certificate.

The airworthiness certificate is issued for a particular aircraft and certifies that it conforms to the approved design for that type of aircraft, all outstanding airworthiness directives applicable to the type have been applied, no unsafe alterations or repairs have been made, all required documentation and logs are present, the inspector doesn't see any damage, leaks, or other problems that could make it unsafe, and other things like that.

The two 737 MAX crashes had nothing to do with anything that would have been found during their airworthiness inspections. They were functioning exactly as they were designed to, as covered by their type certificate.

So what was the point of suspending Boeing's authority to do those inspections?

There are generally 4 ways you can deal with presenting two independent mono sources to one person using headphones:

1. Mix them together into one mono channel and send that to both ears.

2. One in each ear.

3. Make separate mixes for each ear. For each ear's mix make one of the sources louder than the other, picking a different source to make louder for each ear.

4. Like #3, but also add delay in each ear's mix to the source that is weaker in that ear.

#2 is generally better than #1. Personally I'd find it annoying because it is very unnatural, but it makes it a lot easier for the brain to separate the sources, makes it easier to focus on one and ignore the other if you need to do that, and prevents the auditory masking you can get when two sources are in same place in your perceived audio space.

#3 fixes the masking problem with #1 but #2 still because it is still easier to focus when you need to. Also, in each ear the weaker signal is unnatural and the brain expends some effort to filter it out, which is fatiguing over long periods.

#4 is by far the best. It solves the long term fatigue problem from #3 because our auditory system is built to expect a weaker version of anything one ear hears first to arrive shortly later at the other ear, and automatically filters it out instead of having to do it at a higher level. The delay shifts the perceived source of each voice to somewhere outside the head instead of somewhere inside, which is more natural, which is much less fatiguing than the "one voice" per ear approach (the brain almost always does more work when something seems unnatural).

Many military planes use #4, as do some Airbus models.

Users are often very sensitive to tail latency: a service that responds in 150ms 19 times and then takes 2s on the 20th is still perceived as annoyingly slow.

This reminds me of some research I read about in the 1980s or 1990s on perceptions of the speed of command line commands. If command time varied over a range from nearly instantaneous to say 100 ms fairly uniformly through that range, people would perceive the system as overall being faster when the researchers added a variable delay to all the commands that made them all take 100 ms.

Humans apparently really like consistency.

When SRE attempted restart Service X, requests queued in the job queue were all retried en masse, which led to an overload of the partially-restarted service and a subsequent failure

...and this reminds me of something else, from around 1983. I was working at a small Unix workstation maker. The guy in the office across the hall found one morning that the battery for the clock on his workstation had died, and the system time had come up after boot as the Unix epoch.

He shut down, put in a new battery, booted, and then set the clock to the current time, 13 or 14 years after the epoch.

Almost immediately his hard disk light came steadily along, and he could hear the disk furiously seeking, and the system became completely unresponsive.

It turned out AT&T cron in the early '80s wasn't smart about time changes. It had tried to all at once every cron job that should have run in the 13 or 14 years that the time just jumped.

Suppose I'm trying to explain how a project works and as part of that I need to explain about an algorithm I found in a book, are people going to object if I say "Here's an explanation from <cite to book>" and quote a few paragraphs?

Suppose instead I found that algorithm by describing the task I needed an algorithm for and asking an AI for the most used algorithms for that task. I picked one of its suggestions, read up on it to make sure what the AI said about it is correct, and then I implemented it. If when explaining how the project works to others I say "Here is a good explanation from <cite to AI> on how this algorithm works. I have verified that this is accurate", and quote the AIs explanation how is that different from the book case?

Let's turn this around.

I don't use any paid AI or any agents. I just use some of their free interactive question answering interfaces.

There have been some times where I've been doing a project in a language or environment that I do not use a lot, and maybe need to use language or environment features I've never had occasion to learn.

I don't ask AI to write it for me, or even to write any particular functions. I might ask it some syntax questions, or what data structure in the language's standard library is usually used for a particular task. Mostly I use it as an interactive manual that is really good at generating examples if I need clarification on how something works.

If you were working on a similar project and posted asking questions about it, there is a decent chance I could write a useful answer for you.

Suppose the questions would have fairly involved answers, and it might take me 30 minutes to write up something entirely in my own words. That is still going to include knowledge that I got from the AI when I questioned it earlier.

I could also cover the same points, except for parts of it where what I'd be saying is mostly just writing in my own words what the AI taught me (and which I verified is correct before using), so might have to only spend about 4 minutes writing original material, and another minute doing some selected copy/paste from the AI (maybe with some editing).

That 5 minute answer would be exactly as useful in answering your questions as the 30 minute answer.

I don't know you. I have no reason to try to help you other than a general "it is nice to help people" thing.

If you can't be bothered to read it because I didn't spend 500% more time than was necessary to fully answer your questions (time that benefits me in no way whatsoever), why should I bother answering at all?

All it takes to get accused of being AI nowadays is to remember and use (1) what you were taught about composition in your high school English class, and (2) what you learned from "The Mac is Not a Typewriter" [1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201782634

The only organisms that can actually pull this off are ones that can get by without oxygen: super simple bacteria and archaea. That means the entire natural world relies on a relatively small number of microscopic species to make nitrogen usable by more complex forms of life.

I remember reading that this was a significant factor in why people were so alarmed over DDT. It had not been anticipated how widely it would spread beyond the places it was intentionally used and how it would persist. It ended up in almost all ecosystems, full of life it had never been tested on.

If it had turned out to kill many of those small number of microscopic species that almost all plant and animal life relies on we could have been royally screwed.

That obviously turned out not to be the case with DDT, but it made people realize that we had to be a lot more careful when designing and testing pesticides than we had been.

Notice also the article has two by lines. At the top it's "by Paul Gilster" at the top of the text it's "by Peter Marinko".

It is Paul Gilster's blog. It looks like all articles there are by him, hence his byline at the top.

In this particular article he writes an introduction talking about self-replication, then says "Right now I want to introduce Peter Marinko, who today weighs in on self-replication and the problems therein", describes Marinko, and then the rest of the text is Marinko's, hence the second byline after Gilster's introduction.

Something similar happens in the next article on the site. Marinko write a length response to comments on the first article. Gilster decided that would be better as a separate article to further discussion: "When Peter wrote recently with his thoughts on reader reactions, I asked him for permission to run it as a regular post rather than a comment, because I think this is a lively question and would like to see us continue to explore it".

So that too is a post by Gilster, and so with his byline, but after an introduction it just run's Marinko's text, so has a second byline for that section.

He does the same thing on this article [1]. He wrote a review a paper, some commenter had interesting thoughts, and Gilster posted an article talking about that, introducing the commenter, and then the rest of the article was the commenter's text. So two bylines, one for the intro and one for the guest text.

It looks like the other articles on the site are just Gilster, and so only have one byline.

[1] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2026/06/05/observations-on-t...