astrashe2

Google treats its customers like a monopolist.

Did you check in between the sofa cushions?

Graham's book "On Lisp" is really good. I think we should all try to recognize what's good from people, and call what's bad what it is.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad in SV now.

This seems really clever. I don't know anything about what it takes to serve the targeted needs, so I could be wrong. But it's the sort of thing that pops out as really cool and useful, tech that makes the world better.

Windows 95 was definitely better for MS users, but it was really just patching a hole in a single company's product line. Macs were far more solid than Win 95/98/SE at the time, and things like Sun Sparc 5s were more solid than Macs. Before people were getting hit with security problems all the time, they used to go years without rebooting Unix servers.

It was more like one company with a stranglehold on the market was terrible. The intensity of that has waxed and waned, but that's been true from then all the way until now.

There were an usually large number of big prize winners in last night's Powerball drawing. The drawn white balls form an arithmetic progression, with a common difference of 16.

General Motors is worth $72B.

Here's a mirror link: http://archive.today/CJlNk

It doesn't change the reality of what's happening, so I don't think this is worth much, but most people here don't think that.

I think the big problem is that this is more like a sanction, more than the government saying they don't want to do business with them. They government is saying that anyone they do business with can't do business with Anthropic.

So it's extremely important that they get an injunction that allows the cloud compute companies to continue to work them. I think they probably will, but it's really crazy that the government is actively trying to kill them off over this.

I think that sometimes they decide certain businesses have too much fraud, and they just get out of them. It's terrible for them to do that with no notice, though.

Were any people who work for the garment industry involved in GNL's creation, or is it something that's coming entirely from tech people?

It wasn't quite as old, but there was an old MS DOS database system called Cosmos Revelation that was sort of a proto-nosql/graph database used keys and values for records, with the values being stored in long strings that contained field separators, and support for multiple values of the same time in a single field of a record. It used a language called R/BASIC that had library routines to help you work with the data structure.

This software is my retro computing white whale, I've never been able to find it. But I think it's evolved into a product called OpenInsight, by Revelation Software, which still exists.

This is a great description of how I use Claude.

It would be really ironic if the guy who kept harping on the need to make us an interplanetary species ended up being the one who triggered a Kessler effect.

But I don't think even he believes he's going to launch a million satellites.

My doctor's office was using it. I didn't want to give them my biometric data.

I'm writing my first custom policy for MS's B2C identity provider, and it's a painful process.

Making authentication and SSO more painless will actually make the world a better place -- apps will become more secure, people will be less frustrated when they use them, etc., and people like me will have less stress in their lives.

This matches my experience as an amateur programmer. The initial hill was steep, but I don't think it was because people weren't friendly.

There is one cultural thing that might be confused with unfriendliness. Sometimes people react badly if someone posts incorrect information. But I think that's good. When you search for information about Python or PHP you have to wade through quite a bit of junk. Ironically, it's sometimes easier to find correct answers for Clojure.

Clojure itself is very clean and consistent, it's got a lot of polish to it, which makes it comparatively easy to learn. And there isn't that much of it. But for a long time the tooling was hard.

That's far less of a problem than it used to be. deps.edn and shadow-cljs both made things easier, as has Cursive. People say nice things about Calva, but I don't know it.

I'm a big fan. Babashka alone is enough to make learning Clojure worthwhile. Also, for someone like me, it's kind of nice that it feels almost finished. Once you learn it, you know it, and now that the tooling has settled down a bit you don't have to keep running to keep up.

I was on the Cypherpunks list, mostly as a lurker. The technical discussions were amazing. I was really into it at the time, but now I find some of the political ideas to be embarrassing.

Other people had a lot to do with the spread of strong crypto as well. Many people realized that encryption was necessary if we wanted to do business online. Matt Blaze (who was on the Cypherpunks list, but never said anything crazy), helped blow up the government's compromise solution, mandatory key escrow, by demonstrating flaws in their Clipper chip technology. The MIT Press published PGP's source code in book form, using an OCR font, because books couldn't be blocked as munitions. I think Hal Abelson, who wasn't on the list, was the person behind that.

The basic political idea behind the list was that you could effect change by writing code. Instead of going to the government, with your cap in your hand, and saying, Please, sir, can we have strong encryption?, you write code and give it away, thus making the law impossible to enforce. This sounds really cool when you're young, especially if you write code, but it's an anti-democratic idea.

The political positions of some of the leaders was kind of an extreme, anarchist spin on libertarianism. Bitcoin is a currency designed to solve a specific problem -- it's kind of the ultimate solution to the old goldbug fear that governments will print money and dilute the currency. That's impossible under Bitcoin.

The original crypto currency the Cypherpunks were really into was David Chaum's Digicash, which was designed to solve a completely different problem, the same one Monero is aimed at today. It was supposed to be untraceable. Instead of asking governments to lower taxes, the idea was that programmers could create a way to transfer funds anonymously. In theory, taxes would become impossible to collect, and national borders would collapse.

Eventually this led to things like discussions of anonymous murder contracts. There was a proposed protocol that was supposed to allow you to put out a hit on someone with complete safety. You could pay the killer anonymously with digital currency. I think the payment would go into some sort of escrow, so the killer would know they'd get paid. I don't remember how the system was able to know that the hit had taken place.

Those murder contracts were one of the things that made me pull back from the list. But it really was terrific to read, even though I think it would be a mistake to lionize it too much. Arguably, they were struggling to make the whole world run on 8chan's rules.

Thank you, this is helpful.

Does anyone have any idea how a person could go about trying to understand the basics of what's going on here, even in just a hand wavey way? This is so far above my head it seems like magic.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to disqualify someone, but I agree with the basic point you're making.

What you've described happens with religious people of a certain type as well. Sometimes they can adopt a legalistic approach to right and wrong that allows them to do things that are very much against the spirit of a teaching, by claiming they meet the letter of the law (or rule). Other times religious people take the position that the end justifies the means -- that their moral mission is so important that it's OK if they cut corners, sometimes very serious ones, along the way.

I've never known what to make of SBF's parents, especially his mom, a scholar who has championed the idea of effective altruism. I don't know how much his parents knew about what was going on at FTX, but they seemed to benefit from the wealth the company threw off while FTX was at its peak.

On one hand, it seems reasonable to me for parents to support their child, even or perhaps even especially when the child is being prosecuted. I don't know the truth of anything that happened. But it seems that SBF's defense is probably made up of lies. If that's the case, is it OK for his parents to sit on the sidelines and support SBF while he continues to lie?

Thanks, I'll definitely give that a try.

I think they still introduce small problems for people who run software they don't like. For example, if you run Linux on your desktop, and want to use a Windows VM for work, you can't run WSL2 or Hyper-V in the KVM/Qemu guest, even if nested virtualization is enabled and working with other operating systems. It used to work, but now it doesn't, and no know knows exactly why.

These situations are murky. I don't know that they broke it deliberately. Maybe it broke on its own and the problem affects so few people that they just don't care about it.

And you can't really demand that they spend their developer resources on things that they think won't help them. But on one hand, they wrote their own Wayland server for Windows 11, but on the other hand, they say, we can't make Teams work on Wayland.

They do lots of odd stuff. It's pretty easy, and pleasant, to run a headless linux server on Hyper-V, but setting up a proper desktop system on your own is hard. They don't actually create a wall you can't get around, but they create obstacles that make it easier to do the things they want you to do.

It's not fair or reasonable to get mad at them about this stuff. It's more that we should be clear about where they're coming from.