EPWN3D

I get the feeling private equity is involved somehow.

Like it or not, the other team get to play lawyer too. Flock's argument is almost certainly along the lines of "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it. Why is a camera any different?"

We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.

RTO mandates should just be treated as a constructive dismissal and make you eligible for unemployment benefits -- not to mention raising the employer's unemployment insurance rate.

Evidence for that is Apple. The one company that didn't go on a hiring binge during the Covid years is also the only company not doing mass layoffs. What a curious coincidence.

AI is providing a cover story for incompetent executive management decisions at firms worth trillions of dollars. I'm not saying anything about how useful or not useful AI will actually be, but it's clear that these geniuses funded a bunch of dead-end projects chasing fool's gold, and then they needed to free up capital to get in on what could be an actual gold rush.

Literally the argument math teachers make about calculators.

Whether you qualify for a public defender varies by state. It might be that while yes, hiring a lawyer would destroy her financially, she has the assets to afford it. In which case, depending on your local laws, the court might be fine saying she has to get her own lawyer.

Yeah entirely possible that GLP-1s are the closest thing to exercise in a pill.

> Because the minimum wage under US law for a tipped job is $2.13/hour and most find it socially and morally problematic to deny that person their primary source of income.

If a tipped employee fails to make minimum wage, the employer has to make up the difference. You're not denying them anything, you're making the business owner pay their payroll.

Additionally plenty of states have minimum wages much, much higher than the federal one.

You could make that argument about virtually any service profession. Maria is very likely not subject to the tipped minimum wage. She probably gets paid market rate for cleaning services. And while that isn't extravagant, it's probably not a poverty wage either.

Additionally, if an employee is subject to the tipped minimum wage and fails to make the regular minimum wage over a pay period, the employer must make up the difference. That's why restaurant owners fight tooth and nail for tipping.

The reality is that tipping helps one person: the business owner. You don't have to subsidize their payroll if you don't want to.

I think you're mostly right, but there's nuance. Modern society has basically made the penalty for certain genetic traits way more severe because calories are so easy to access. In the past, if you had a genetic predisposition to over-eating, it wasn't going to really catch up with you due to overall scarcity.

But now? You pay a very heavy price because you can very cheaply get your entire daily supply of calories in a single meal.

And don't forget, a lot of these people are set up for failure by their parents. The number of overweight children I see is staggering. These kids are almost certain to spend their lives being overweight or obese because of what their parents feed them. A drug that helps someone overcome that is a very good thing.

It's also a bit dizzying. Really easy to just get lost in the spectacle of the mountains.

I haven't noticed any retail wine prices stabilizing or decreasing, at least in the Bay Area. Napa wines are still exorbitantly priced, and imports are way the fuck more expensive due to tariffs.

Dude you and me both. My parents bought a combo VHS/DVD player that as it turned out could also handle VCDs, and I was able to watch a pirated version of AI with it. Eventually I got hold of a PowerMac 8500 with RCA in/out and really got cooking.

Seeing content created on my computer actually play on a TV really felt like a miracle in the 90s.

Moreover, I've never seen the reverse. No one gets clicks by talking about the benefits that humanities majors. plus reap if they cared to understand technology.

If it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. But the reality is that credit hours are expensive, and everything unrelated to your concentration is just a pile of extra debt you can never discharge.

Is humanities helpful for technology majors? Sure, I'd buy it. Is it worth the money? Probably not. Personally, I think CS majors should study law, if anything. But you can't do that at an introductory level (e.g. there is no Contract Law 101 for general education curricula), which is a real shame.

Oh man you're right. How could I forget about Unreal Tournament? I totally forget that mod player I found, but it was fun to cobble together playlists.

By the way if you liked the Deus Ex soundtrack you can check out the Sonic Augmentation ocremix album. Really good.

I haven't thought about Realmz in a long-ass time. It had some really crazy tracks and was the only game I know of that used MOD instead of MIDI for its music.

I don't see anything wrong with a social media ban for teens in concept. In execution, it'll be difficult to do effectively though.

What I would like to see is changes to the tax code to disincentivize the social media business model and the advertising industry generally. For example...

1. Tax the crap out of advertising revenue on social media platforms

2. Stratify the ads and ban the existence of paid tiers which include advertising. If you pay for something, you don't see ads, period

3. Ban the use of trackers and fingerprinting on any paid service without explicit opt-in

4. Create a tort for data leaks that travels with any company which handled the data. If anyone in the chain leaks it, you can take an action against all of them, and the penalties are individually assessed

5. Ban the collection and sale of profiling data for anyone under 18

6. Ban the ad-supported tier for anyone under 18

This heavily disincentivizes algorithms generally and makes paid tiers more appealing, which is much easier for parents to control. The problem with social media and teens is that teens can even sign up in the first place. Make them use a credit card, and you suddenly have a much higher barrier to entry. If I tried to subscribe my parents to HBO as a kid, it wouldn't have worked, and this is why. It wasn't because the government banned 14 year olds from seeing HBO.

I went in expecting yet another screed about how passkeys were not issued by RMS in a FOSS encyclical, and therefore not only were they insecure, but they were also a morally bankrupt abomination. I was pleasantly surprised to read an actual thoughtful critique, albeit one I largely disagree with.

The author's assertion that the greatest risk to an individual is account lockout versus phishing or password harvesting is just not grounded in reality. I get phishing emails and SMSs daily. The criminal ecosystem running these campaigns is extremely active already and set to become even more so with LLMs. These campaigns are by far the biggest threat to normies.

Whereas account lockout happens most often with multiple failed password entries, which passkeys completely eliminate. I just don't know where this risk evaluation comes from.

The author also points out that even with passkeys, if you're able to also log in with e.g. security questions, you still have a much weaker security footprint for that account. This is true, but it's also true of a TOTP second factor. So I'm not sure what the criticism is here.

The exportability argument is a real weakness and something I'd like to see addressed. Passkeys don't have an equivalent for backup TOTP codes that you can just write down somewhere or trivially store yourself. But it probably wasn't in v1 because the people who designed passkeys figured that websites would not go all in on them immediately and would preserve other authentication methods, which is exactly what's happened.

> Before signing, the encoder fills the field with a placeholder (0), repeated for the field's exact length - signs the entire payload including that placeholder, and then writes the real signature over the top of it. To verify, you put the placeholder back.

I hate shit like this. Do not let your crypto layer know about the structure of what it's signing. Keep security stupid.

There's also "date the rate, marry the price". If you're a buyer and think that rates are going to come down within a couple of years, you can lock in the lower price of your home for property tax purposes and then refinance when rates are lower.

But a lot of people bought in 2024 expecting that to happen.

That's the sense I get from this post. Lots of emphatic proclamations, virtually zero actual argument. There's a statement that "consciousness is very likely biological"... and then that's it. No argument for it, no citation.

If you want to argue that AIs cannot be conscious, that's fine. But the argument has to take the form of something like "Consciousness requires this, this, and this, and these are properties that AI does not have and cannot have for this reason, this reason, and this reason."

I've never seen that argument. Because it basically cannot exist. Consciousness almost by definition is a subjective experience, and the only reason I'm pretty sure that other humans are conscious is that I'm a human and I'm conscious.

So it's your own anecdotal experience, but someone should build a service to track it?

I don't think that's completely true. When times are good, intelligence and education probably come out in the wash. But when times are bad, and people are losing their livelihoods, intelligence has a lot to do with how blame is assigned. In other words, you're a lot more likely to get scammed the less intelligent and less educated you are.

And that's what we got here in the US -- a conman ran a very successful con on people who just weren't all that smart or educated. And there were enough of those people to supplement the base tribalism and propel him to victory.

> And given that almost all C programmers are also C++ programmers, no mere syntax can faze us :-)

This is... not true at all.

It was that lightweight because it provided basically none of the functionality that is essential to a modern OS. Because it wasn't a modern OS.

The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive, and the dependency graphs are poorly understood even by the engineers who work on those systems. Innocuous pieces of functionality have a way of becoming load-bearing over time.

If you ran around disabling random bits of functionality in Windows because you wanted to reclaim some resources for your games, you'd probably wedge the OS, cause random crashes, and prevent your games from even launching. Like you might think "Well my game doesn't need Bluetooth, I only use a wired controller!" but I would not be surprised at all if yanking out the Bluetooth stack from the OS caused random crashes and hangs.

Yeah that's why step 0 is to tell the LLM to write a test suite for the thing you want to rewrite. It'll do that, but it does require adult supervision. Once you have that test suite, you can send the LLM into an inner dev loop. Like human programmers, LLMs are great when they have a fast inner loop.

The fact that LLMs exist doesn't mean you can just stop thinking. It mean the things you have to think about will be different. You have to treat them as savants with absolutely no ambition.

Yes like any tool, LLMs can be used poorly. But they do enable large-scale rewrites or poor-quality code because they are capable of understanding it and enumerating its behaviors in a matter of minutes or hours. It's the kind of understanding that would take a human months or years to develop.

Add to that their ability to basically set up what is essentially a perfect testing environment when asked, and you've got a feedback loop that lets you just step back while the agent cranks out a new implementation in a memory-safe language with a full test suite and bug-for-bug compatibility. I'm not kidding or exaggerating. This stuff is possible now, people just need to look past their anxieties about being replaced.

That is true presuming that the author does not intend to keep this fasting regime up after they reach their goal weight. There are certainly people who do long fasts on a regular basis.

300k is a huge amount of money if you have no dependents. Otherwise it's comfortably middle class, but that's it.

Yeah this sounds a lot like a natural evolution of SIMD for me, just cut out the middleman and put the SIMD units straight into RAM.

I can imagine some power savings for always-on display applications too. Rather than periodically waking the CPU/GPU to update the frame buffer, you can just stash small bits of periodic logic in memory (e.g. move the second hand of a clock).