germinator

"Direct" is not a helpful word.

In the US, the government has control over the content too, it just so happens that it mostly concerns itself with combatting certain moral vices (from prostitution to bootleg fireworks) - although to be fair, it also lightly pressured big tech into combatting political "misinformation".

In China, the same mechanisms exist, except the controls on speech are much tighter and the punishments more severe. Every other tech company operating there has a story of officials showing up with demands or threatening employees. I worked at two places where this happened. In addition, most businesses operate as formal or quasi-formal public-private partnership, where the CCP has officials within the corporate management structure. Again, ask anyone who tried to start a foreign-owned business in China.

You can make a reasonable argument that having an oppressive and geopolitically adversarial foreign government effectively in control of the most popular youth social media platform in the country is not great. Or you can make a reasonable free-trade argument. Free trade works only if all participants follow the rules; if Western social media can't operate on their market, they don't get to operate on ours.

There are things to dislike about the US government, but I really don't get the contrarian takes on TikTok. China is objectively worse and its government's legitimacy and lasting power is built in the bodies of tens of millions of victims. We're not getting along right now. This doesn't require cynicism to explain.

I'm guessing you're talking about taxing businesses or products / services instead. That strikes me as a weird argument. Ultimately, all taxes are taxes on the labor of individual humans. "Corporate money" mostly isn't: if you tax it, you either pay as an employee or as a consumer. There are some populist arguments about executive compensation, but if nothing else, executives are still "individual taxpayers", right?

I think it's mostly messing up viewport and movement calculations, which is why you have textures popping into view when already in the viewport, and shifting too much in the periphery.

In essence, you're just mildly glitching the display. It doesn't really alter the map or the spatial relationship of items. You'd need more fundamental game engine changes to really implement a different geometry.

> The irony is that this is a good reminder of the harsh realities that Oppenheimer himself clearly grappled with - if you refuse to build it, someone with less scruples will.

The dilemma was quite different: if you don't do it, your enemy will beat you to it and will kill you and the people you love. It was a very utilitarian, wartime calculation.

The soft variant you're quoting is just a license to misbehave because others also misbehave - and I don't think that was Oppenheimer's qualm.

In the general case, I mostly agree, but it cracks me up that this is the prevailing attitude when it comes to our industry; but when we see police departments or government agencies trying to follow the same playbook, we immediately point out how that's laughable and doesn't result in real accountability.

In this specific case, though, Sam Altman's narrative is that they created an existential risk to humanity and that the access to it needs to be restricted for others. So which is it?

They're very cool until it's your apartment or commercial building, and you have to clean it up - because let's face it, for every clever graffiti, there are fifty that are just tags, swear words, or worse.

And your framing is odd - can you only dislike one of these things? Graffiti or ads? There are successful movements to rid cities and scenic areas of ads, or to tone them down.

It's actually one of the perks of centralized platforms like Reddit: if they want to, they have the technology and the resources to investigate bad actors like that. I don't just mean just finding and blocking their IPs, but untangling their ownership, corporate structure, tooling, and so on. Hiring actual PIs if necessary. It's the bread-and-butter for many spam and abuse teams at Big Tech.

That said, just because they can doesn't mean they will. It's possible that they've grown complacent and underfunded these capabilities (instead relying on community moderators to weed out bad actors). Or it's possible that they're too focused on the short term to see the existential risks. If I recall correctly, they couldn't resist the temptation of selling user content for LLM training, same as Stack Overflow.

But in an internet overrun by spam LLMs, the future are curated, walled-garden communities, and Reddit could be the basis for that.

I really want to be impressed, but I've been reading papers about breakthroughs in deblurring and upscaling for two decades now, and the state of the art in commercial and open-source tools is still pretty underwhelming. Chances are, if you have a low-res keepsake photo, or take a blurry nature shot, you're gonna be stuck with that.

Video, where the result needs to be temporally coherent and make sense in 3D, can't be the easier one.

Yeah, it's a weird metaphor, especially since plywood is a premium, structural material. I wish my Ikea furniture used plywood. Instead, you get fiberboard.

It's also a good example of how the metaphor this blog post is predicated on can fall apart. Your customers care about durability, but they make purchasing decisions based on cost and outward appearance. In a world like that, where you can't satisfy all requirements at once, you inevitably end up cutting corners on the things the customer cares about but can't measure. But is that right? That's how you end up with $200 furniture that lasts a year or two in a home with children or pets.

It's also easy to neglect cumulative costs. Back to software: does it matter if your app uses 100 MB of memory when it could be using 1 MB? On an individual basis, no, because RAM is cheap. Cumulatively, when every other app developer thinks the same, and when you multiply it by billions of devices, your decision might have actually cost lives if you consider the increased emissions and countless other distant externalities.

A milder version of the blog's claim is definitely true. You should pick your battles. But it's all about trade-offs, there are few problems that truly don't matter to anyone.

It's easy to lash out against the VC culture, but the problem is us. We're the ones who dream of building a billion-dollar unicorn in two years - and that means entirely unsustainable efforts to build products and grow by burning heaps of VC money while constantly pitching for more.

How many founders move to the Bay Area thinking "you know, what I really want to build is a small business?" And how many HN techies would enthusiastically join a project like that?

I don't think that's a good explanation. The vast majority of people behind such initiatives don't come from underprivileged or victimized backgrounds.

It's more about this idea of being an advocate for the downtrodden - a good person fighting the racists on behalf of those without a voice. And because you're fighting the good fight, it's of course OK to make the oppressors uncomfortable or to bully them into submission.

Depending on your priors, this is either messed up, or it's messed up not to act and accept the status quo. Pick your poison, I guess.

> email is usually a better identifier, assuming you already need one for other reasons (like you say recovery is typically needed).

If you remember which one you signed up with, and it wasn't your work email from two jobs ago.

Eh. It might be a part of it, but the hobby just lost its luster. It used to be this magical way to connect with friends and strangers. Now, cell phones and the internet make it a lot less magical.

Other aspects of the hobby aged poorly too. The ham community (and the regulators) were slow to embrace use cases that might have been interesting to younger people in the 21th century - say, mesh networking. Instead, the kids were supposed to follow in the footsteps of the old-timers and get excited about slow-scan TV, RTTY, and collecting QSL postcards.

Frankly, I don't know of any other hobby with a comparable amount of gatekeeping. It sucks because the increasingly idle spectrum will eventually get auctioned off for commercial use.

I don't think it's about believing one way or the other. Hunter ed warns you about this and recommends precautions.

But also consider that millions of deer are hunted and consumed in the US every year, and that hunters don't seem to be developing prion diseases at an elevated rate. We know relatively little about prions, but it seems likely that humans are fairly resilient to this, perhaps except for some predisposed individuals. Genetic factors are suspected, but there's no smoking gun. Acquired vCJD is exceedingly rare too.

It's easy to portray it as arrogance, but in manufacturing, you run into small problems and ambiguities all the time.

By analogy to software engineering, do your bosses or clients give you water-tight, formal specs for the software you need to build? If they could do that, they wouldn't be needing you in the first place.

We zero in on situations like that and pretend that it's the worker's fault for making the wrong call, but we ignore that if they didn't make the right calls a thousand times before, nothing would ever get done.

In this case, if pedal cover is a friction fit and can slide off and get jammed in between panels, this doesn't sound like an assembly mistake but a pretty major design error, right? Your designs should be resilient. What if the owner sprays WD-40 on a squeaky pedal and the cover slides off?

You're basically walking into the middle of a niche debate about semantics. There is a faction that dislikes the use of the word "anthropocene" to refer to the current geological era - and specifically, the past 100 years or so. Their main argument is that it's an imperceptible blip on the radar compared to the scale of other geological eras we study.

This article is a response that can be summed up as "no, we're changing the environment faster than anything before, so it counts". It's framed not as a genuine debate, but as an attempt to dispel "myths".

"Why this matters" is left as an exercise for the reader...

In the US, CFAA prohibits causing "damage", which includes "impairment to the integrity or availability" of data or systems. But as with many other things in law, it boils down to the court trying to assess your intent, whether you could've reasonably anticipated the outcome, and what that outcome ended up being.

There's no law that says "you can't send more than n packets per hour".

This exposed client keys, not server keys. The client keys are at risk only in a handful of specific scenarios - e.g., if used to connect to rogue or compromised servers, or used for signing outside SSH.

This is not exploitable by simply passively watching traffic, so even for client keys, if you're certain that they were used in a constrained way, you should be fine. The difficulty is knowing that for sure, so it's still prudent to rotate.

You'd be surprised how little of the niche pre-internet stuff is digitized. There are some exceptions (national-circulation newspapers, some English-language books), but it's a minority of what's been published.

The setting. There are countless safety regulations that apply only to workplaces. This isn't OSHA regulation. This is coming from the consumer protection agency.

I think there's a better argument for it, because there's some power asymmetry at play between the employees and the employer. It's harder to say "no" if you need this job to pay your bills. I still wish we had clear limits and tests for this, though. Instead, we have bureaucracies that keep expanding even after they tackle the most pressing issues.

For hobby work, the government is protecting me from me, and there are no winners in that game. I'm not imagining some hypothetical dystopia. The hobby landscape in Europe is already far more constrained than it is in the US.

Circular saws are not just "a bit" safer. They cause far fewer injuries despite getting more use in construction. Table saws really are a menace.

I'm not in favor of this regulation because I don't like the idea of the government regulating hobbies, and I think it ends with some tools and hobbies getting banned altogether... but we should make this much clear.

The "users ceasing to post stories after one year" metric seems a bit wonky to me. I mean, I don't doubt it, but it's probably skewed by accounts created for self-promotion or spam. If you look at front-page stories, I think that most of them are from long-time members.

It would probably be useful to separate the churn for throwaway accounts and the ones that cross some engagement threshold - 50 comments or something like that.