mikea1

I think the Martian was adapted well from book to movie, so I have hope for this one. That said, compressing the entire story into a theatre runtime is tricky: I think it would be a win if only half of the character and relationship growth of the two ship bound protagonists comes through in the adaptation (because it was sooo good in the book!)

In the market for internet service, Starlink is a disruptor to existing ISPs. Especially for those servicing rural areas. I don't understand a reflexive reach to encumber a nascent business model with additional regulations. What problem are you trying to solve?

Popular with whom?

Newtonian physics is 'popular' because it is easy to grasp with a high school education.

Likewise, the theories of the early David Ricardo era are easy to understand, maybe popular, but not current with academics or practitioners.

I took gp's use of "opera" to describe an inclusive, wide range of genres that feature human relationships, like space operas. There's definitely mass appeal (think of Star Wars alone.)

> you do kind of root for him in the end

I'm rooting for him too. He doesn't have all the qualities of a classic protagonist, yet I find myself hoping that he succeeds in his madcap endeavors. I admire his grit: I would have not had his fortitude in the face of violent threats nor withstand the constant frustration.

I believe OAuth is working as expected. It provides valid authentication/identity for email addresses because "user@domain" and "user+wildcard@domain" are still validated as email addresses "owned" by the user.

The issue is with the Google org website: admins cannot revoke credentials for accounts/emails they cannot see.

> Because these non-Gmail Google accounts aren’t actually a member of the Google organization, they won’t show up in any administrator settings, or user Google lists.

I'm curious what part of ICANN's mandate is a failure. My understanding is that introducing new TLDs was part of it.

> 7. The Creation of New gTLDs. The Green Paper suggested that during the period of transition to the new corporation, the U.S. Government, in cooperation with IANA, would undertake a process to add up to five new gTLDs to the authoritative root.

https://www.ntia.gov/federal-register-notice/statement-polic...

Maybe there are too many new TLDs?

Ah, yes, you are absolutely correct. The _clever form of one_ trick did not apply as often as I recalled!

In my limited math experience, I really found an appreciation of the number one. My favorite part of high school algebra was realizing that "solving for x" was often just a repeated exercise of multiplying each side of the equation by a "clever form of one."

> It reads like someone had a bad experience with a PM who thought they were Steve Jobs.

I had the opposite understanding about the article. Steve Jobs was an extraordinary leader who through immense will power created good products; an attempt to replace someone like Jobs as the product manager with an ordinary person will result in a mediocre product.

According to the book Breath by James Nestor, humans did not always have wisdom teeth problems: today, modern humans have small jaws because, during our youth, we spend less time chewing our food, so the muscles and bones in our skulls are stunted. Old skulls, like those found in crypts of old European cities, had larger jaws. (I'm going off of memory - my apologies if this explanation is too reductionist.)

I think ICANN would not entertain a startup taking over registry operations for .com or .net. ICANN recently defended their no-bid contract renewal for .net with Verisign:

> If ICANN were to put every TLD out for bid every renewal cycle to give it to the lowest bidder there would be no incentive for registry operators to invest in long-term stability and growth of the TLD(s) they operate.

https://domainnamewire.com/2023/08/16/icann-says-putting-tld...

I find it odd that "growth" is a justification. I was unaware that ICANN has a mandate to promote growth of specific TLDs.

These justifications, especially of "stability", make more sense to me in the context of the root DNS server that Verisign operates. Verisign would not agree to run a critical part of DNS infrastructure without a big TLD contract. I'm certain that maintaining and running those DNS servers with 100% uptime is an engineering accomplishment and its stability requires safe hands.

> how is it so much cheaper

Porkbun doesn't make money when you buy a domain name, but they may make money when you do not renew it:

> At about 21 days into the Auto-Renew Grace Period, the expired domain will be submitted to third-party auction services.

https://kb.porkbun.com/article/37-what-happens-after-a-domai...

Other registrars, like GoDaddy, do this too.

You can quickly go offline via dev tools. In Chrome, it's very simple[0].

[0] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/network/reference...

My main takeaway from Bostrom's Superintelligence is that a super intelligent AI cannot be contained. So, the slippery slope argument, often derided as a bad form of logic, kind of holds up here.

I completely agree that's a valid argument. I just think it is rational for someone to come to a different conclusion, given identical priors.

Another explanation is that there are those who considered and thoughtfully weighed the ramifications, but came to a different conclusion. It is unfair to assume a decision process was agnostic to harm or plain ignorant.

For example, perhaps the lesser-evil argument played a role in the decision process: would a world where deep fakes are ubiquitous and well-known by the public be better than a world where deep fakes have a potent impact because they are generated seldomly and strategically by a handful of (nefarious) state sponsors?

> the pipelined nature of PRQL really maps much better to how people should think about queries

I disagree. Database engines take SQL and transform it into an execution plan that takes into consideration database metadata (size, storage, index analytics, etc.). Queries should be thought of with a _set based_ instead of _procedural_ approach to maximize the benefits of this abstraction - diving into the implementation details to guide the execution plan formation only when necessary.

Also, the pipeline approach could be achieved with common table expressions (CTEs), right?

That said, I think PRQL looks promising because it is a solid attempt to make RDBMS development more approachable. I also like that `from` comes before `select`: it is far more readable. A solid and modern IDE experience for PRQL could be a "killer app".

Yeah, it's explicitly disallowed by ICANN to register a domain with this unicode character (along with numerous other characters):

https://www.verisign.com/assets/icannrestricted/idn-icann-re...

Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about OpenNIC. It looks like an alternative to ICANN where the key distinguishing trait is that TLDs and domain names are awarded with a landrush model (whoever claims it first owns it.) If it gains popularity, I wonder how it will avoid squatting and after-market (i.e., after-registration) trading.

> Less jobs is not necessarily a good thing ?

The rollout of the lightbulb significantly reduced the economic potential of candlemakers, but it improved the quality of life for society overall. So, whether technological advancement is a "good thing" depends on which group you are in: the one with obsolete skills or the one that benefits from cheaper and/or better goods and services. Either way, the overall economy benefits from creative destruction.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

I understand that you are being poetic, but just in case someone reads this as fact: you are describing a dedicated circuit - which is what telephones used. The internet works on packet switching, so there are numerous little breaks between the signal and receiver as your data is routed along a "connection".

> Most waiters/waitresses are payed below minimum wage and make up the difference with tips.

It's slightly more complicated: hourly wage is the greater of ($3 + tips) or (standard minimum wage). So, the effective minimum wage is still the standard minimum wage.

> ...dns verification proves you temporarily control name resolution relative to a viewer.

> Both are trivially hacked, multiple ways.

I'm genuinely curious how it is trivial to "control [authoritative] name resolution relative to a viewer".

> good chunk of the republicans are honest to god libertarians

This is key: Colorado has far more libertarian-conservatives than social-conservatives. It comes from the Western ideal of "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Libertarians are "classical liberals" and value individualism, so they do not push for government-sponsored restrictions. The conservatives in many other states are socially-conservative and legislate to preserve their social values and cozy business interests.

> this particular instance I’m thinking of full reserve banking (deposit banks turn back into glorified vaults), print central money for mortgages (and burn that money when it’s paid back), and democratically (with congress, referendum, whatever) define clear criteria about who can contract mortgages, and what for.

This is an interesting idea. The problem with a single lender is that it removes incentives for good customer service and (sometimes) good products. Monopolies, whether public (DMV) or private (your local cable company) are universally hated. It would be difficult to design the right incentives for the government to provide a good product.

I think the main disconnect is that deposit banks never operated as a glorified vault. Lending against deposits is supposed to be understood by anyone entering that agreement. I understand why it may be a surprise when you first learn about fractional reserves because it may not fit an existing mental model. Instead, it seems unfair that a bank can create money. But it's not. Money supply and money velocity is a term used by economists to describe how much and how quickly money exchanges hands. The world's accounting books, with all debits and credits, always sum to the same total: however much money the central bank has printed.

There are a lot of benefits of the current system (liquidity, virtual guarantee of withdrawal, conveniences). Your proposal would replace a system where you receive a small income from your deposits to a system that steadily decreases the size of your deposits; I think that would be a hard sell.

> That’s the thing though, they could lend out and pay interest on “savings” with the understanding that the money might not be immediately available for withdrawal as it’s “in the wild”.

Those are Certificates of Deposit.

> they didn’t seem to get in trouble due to fractional reserve lending but from the liquidity of their assets.

It was the opposite. SVB had over-invested in long-term US treasuries, which are extremely liquid, but were falling in price due to the rapid increase of interest rates. If not for withdrawals squeezing their reserve, SVB could hold onto those treasuries until maturity and get back 100% of their principle.

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I think the disconnect is that savings accounts are not popularly well understood. People are shocked when they understand that the money they deposited is not sitting in a big vault.

You could tweak fractional reserves to be 20% (or 80%) of deposits, but that comes at a cost too. For example, it would create scarcity of money available for lending, which in turn would make loans more expensive (e.g., higher interest rate mortgages could double the cost of home ownership.)

The current system prevents the worst of bank runs by covering a good chunk of assets with insurance (FDIC in the US). It's a system that allows banks to fail and protect customer deposits.

The collapse of SVB was not a "catastrophe" because the banking system is intended to let banks fail. The alternative is far worse.

> banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it

How could a bank lend _any_ money if it must reserve 100% of deposits as cash?

> they are printing money and decide who can borrow and who cannot, without democratic oversight

I do not understand how regulations are equivalent to democracy. Either way, banks are heavily regulated in the G7 countries. Such regulation was thought to exacerbate the mortgage crisis of 2008 because regulations created incentives to offer mortgages to people who should not have qualified.

Supply and demand of deposits and loans creates a competitive market - banks operate with razor thin margins.

I still do not know how you would improve upon the current system.

> fractional reserve lending is fraud

I don't understand how it's fraud. Banks could not lend at all if they must retain 100% of deposits.

On the lending side, it would hurt everyday people and the economy if banks could not lend. Loans are important for homeowners (mortgages) and for businesses of all sizes (research and development).

On the savings side, your community bank provides incredible guarantees with your deposit that are difficult to find elsewhere: deposits are very liquid, principle is virtually guaranteed, and convenience in routing the money wherever you direct it.

What would a better system look like?

> this would give the business undue influence over politics?

It's about power. From the article:

> Communist authorities dislike the idea of anything, let alone a large private business, outshining the party. And the country’s leaders bristled at the high profile of Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, an icon of Chinese enterprise who every now and again dared question their decisions.