pweezy

To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip for those of you who classify as AI skeptics".

That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.

Agreed. It feels like the FAA and related government agencies have a rule set based on now-outdated assumptions about the difficulty and cost of space launches. Even just a couple of decades ago, it was never thought that this number of satellites could practically be launched. Similar to many other problems of tech moving too fast for regulations.

I learned about this from the audiobook version of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Maybe that is what you're thinking of?

This is a regionalism in parts of the US, which I’ve seen described as Pittsburgh and its surroundings.

I come across it often and struggle with cognitive dissonance every time - I know of the regionalism but it feels so strongly like a glaring grammatical error.

I see/hear the specific phrase “needs fixed” most often.

This isn’t true - the cap on SALT tax deduction hasn’t changed since it was put in place in 2017.

Some members of congress, apparently from both major parties, are proposing legislation to raise the cap from $10,000 to $100,000 or otherwise raise or remove the cap. But these proposals are not certain to go anywhere.

Excellent, clear answer. Thank you.

China is a nuclear power and neither the US nor China is interested in MAD. Any attacks on Japanese territory would probably lead to a hot war with the US, but almost certainly not nuclear annihilation.

China overtaking the US seems a lot more likely based on sheer numbers. China’s population is over 4x larger than that of the US. So China “just” needs to reach a GDP per capita of 25% to have a larger economy than the US. This metric has been growing rapidly in the past decade or two and from a rough search, seems to currently stand around 17-18% of the US’s figure.

Of course GDP isn’t the only factor in world power status, but it sure is a big one.

Compared to the US, China also has a far larger labor force, a greater ability to manufacture things, and greater government control over its population.

Access to natural resources is similar for many things, less for some (like oil and gas) but greater for others (like rare earth minerals).

Mostly off-topic, but I love the scale used for score bars on this site. Each category has a scale from 0 to {highest score of all devices of this class}.

So every category where the current phone is the best has a 100% full bar. Where it’s not, you can immediately visualize if it’s 70% as good as the best device or 99% as good - even if the high score for that category is, say, 136.

A lot of stricter review sites will say something like (made up example) “no phone gets above a 4/10 score for zoom; only a DSLR/mirrorless exceeds that.”

Which is totally valid! But I want to know how the device I’m reading about scores within its category. Those smaller bars make it look like this gadget has one major weakness despite its other high scores, when the reality might be that it actually has the best - or close to the best - zoom ability out of all devices in this class.

This kind of communication seems like an interesting problem for Starlink (or other satellite internet constellations) to solve. What if the satellites had extra antennas pointed outwards and relayed the data back to the ground at high bandwidth?

Seems like it would avoid a lot of the issues like atmospheric interference, frequency congestion, and careful placement of receiver infrastructure.

Same! Their “agony” sorting (basically sorted flights by a combination of # of stops, total hours, and price) was a breakthrough at the time. It seems to be factored into most flight searches today, even though it’s not labeled as such.

ITA powered the backend flight search functionality for virtually every OTA, even if the ITA Matrix website wasn’t popular among end users.

> It kind of annoys me that they all require $ on the left, whereas shell only requires it on the right

Interesting - it makes it look like Bash uses $ to “read” from the variable, while in PHP/Perl $ only indicates that the rest of the symbol _is_ a variable.

It’s not the same thing, but brings to mind Ken Thomason’s famous “Reflections on Trusting Trust” [0] from 1984.

That describes a concept, over several stages, where a compiler can be made to change the behavior of programs it compiles in a difficult-to-find way.

[0]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

From the original article:

> Fugger charged residents one Rheinischer gulden a year, the equivalent of one month's salary at the time.

XKCD's "Earth Temperature Timeline" is an excellent visualization of this: https://xkcd.com/1732/

This is really cool! Curious if you've heard of or been put in touch with Prometheus Fuels - another YC company that's working on synthetic gasoline/diesel production using direct air capture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240). Seems like it could be a good combination - offload the stored CO2 from trucks at fuel stations, and put it into a fuel synthesizer that would likely work more efficiently with CO2, rather than raw air, as an input.

Ah, I remember those days - I had the same situation at home.

As the article mentions, you could dial the 67 prefix to block your outgoing caller ID on an individual call.

With the blocking-of-blocking, you had the opposite - the 82 prefix _disabled_ outgoing caller ID block on an individual call, allowing you to call subscribers that blocked blocked numbers.

I think my folks finally decided to drop the caller ID blocking after the phone company switched from 7-digit to mandatory 10-digit dialing for all calls. It was just too many digits to dial with the prefix, especially since half the time you would dial without the prefix, get the "blocked" message, then dial again with the prefix.

I've been on the receiving end of this from one or two online invitation services (Paperless Post, maybe?). Had a friend say "can you come to my party or what? You're the only one that still hasn't opened the invitation email". I never had to sign up for an account to imagine what the service was doing - showing "opened" stats straight out of Sendgrid or the like.

I had a similar reaction - email open tracking is something you assume, by default, that regular individuals can't do. And I found it very invasive, even though I know the same tracking exists on all the non-personal email I received.

Since then I've made it a point not to open those invitations until I know I'm ready to respond - since "I never saw the email" is a less harmful conclusion for my snooping friend to draw than "I opened the email and decided not to respond."

Having a dishwasher makes using a grater so much less dreadful - perhaps more than any other single kitchen implement. When I had a dishwasher at home we even got a Microplane zester. It's amazing how much flavor and aroma exists in lemon (and other citrus) zest that's not in the juice.

It seems like Uber put in this "reaction delay" to prevent the cars from driving/maneuvering erratically (think excessive braking and avoidance turning). This, along with allowing the cars to drive on public roads at all before handling obvious concerns like pedestrians outside of crosswalks, is supposed to be balanced out by having a human ready to intervene and handle these situations.

I think one of the biggest lessons here is about the difficulty of relying on humans to maintain attention while covering an autonomous vehicle. Yes, this particular driver was actively negligent by apparently watching videos when they should have been monitoring the road. But even a more earnest driver could easily space out after long hours of uneventful driving with no "events" or inputs. And that could be enough that their delay in taking over could lead to the worst.

Certainly not defending the safety driver here - or Uber. But I think there's a bit of a paradox in that the better an AV system performs, and the more the human driver trusts it, the easier it is for that human to mentally disengage. Even if only subconsciously. This seems like a difficult problem to overcome, especially if AV development is counting on tracking driver interventions to further train the models for new, unexpected, or fringe driving situations.

It must feel odd and incredibly difficult to control an exoskeleton (or any motion restoring device) without any proprioceptive or tactile feedback. I imagine it's like having someone else move your limbs, or for a paraplegic, like using your arms to move your legs.

If we find a way to trigger those sensations, perhaps with separate brain implants, it would be a huge breakthrough and make learning to control the device much faster.

I'm sure that's far from an easy task, though.

I suspect the main reason this type of device tends to be more symmetrical in thickness is to carry an additional battery, needed to power the second display without shortening the total battery life of the device.

The article makes repeated mentions of the lack of persistence (rebooting the phone removes the exploit), suggesting this makes it very little of a security threat.

However, most people reboot their phone very rarely: the occasional software update a couple times a year; if the battery runs out (which people usually go to pains to avoid); or for some people, to try to fix a misbehaving phone.

The exploit does require physical access to the phone for a few minutes. But in situations where that can happen, and the owner doesn't have the suspicion or knowledge to reboot, I think an exploit could easily run for one or several months.

Paired with enough clever software modifications made possible by the jailbreak (like a lock screen that collects passcode input), a malicious instance of this could do plenty of damage.

> I personally believe that great documentation was a big reason for PHP's success in the early days.

I agree. The culture of user-submitted comments with helpful examples and clarifications on each documentation page was a big part of that, too.

Check out the podcast "Business Wars" by Wondery. They have an 8-episode miniseries on Netflix vs. Blockbuster that I really enjoyed and highly recommend. It includes this story, as well as some of the other competitive developments that, as crazy as it sounds now, at the time almost looked like they would bring a victory to Blockbuster.

Same here. I use a 12" MacBook "retina" (not air), which is an ultraportable with a weak CPU. Firefox is borderline unusable, even with uBlock Origin, unless you stick to only 1 or 2 tabs. High def video in YouTube really struggles, Google Maps struggles, and other Google properties like Flights have a habit of freezing up.

Plus the non-native feel you mentioned. No pinch-to-zoom, moving tabs between windows feels clunky, and scrolling feels different than almost every other app.

I try Firefox for Android from time to time, and I also have a lot of issues with polish that make me stop using it every time. Tab management is extremely clunky, the address bar is inconsistent with virtually every other Android text input (e.g. there's a big X that I expect to clear the address bar, but in Firefox this escapes me from input mode). Even getting the toolbars to reappear by scrolling is troublesome - infuriating.

It sucks, because I care about privacy and web diversity, and have been a Firefox user since back in the Phoenix days.

I've always thought that the main reason for Starbucks to push their card and reward program is to save on per-transaction credit card fees.

By my understanding, in the US, typical merchant fees to accept a card are a flat $0.20-$0.30 transaction fee, plus 2-3% of the total dollar amount.

The article mentions the interchange fee (the 2-3%), but for small purchases the transaction fee is more significant.

I assume the majority of purchases are individuals buying a single beverage. If an average drink costs $4, a $0.30 transaction fee alone is eating 7.5% of your gross revenue. That's an absolutely huge amount.

Even if Starbucks cards are bought/topped up with a credit card, that $0.30 fee is being amortized over $20+ worth of product instead of $4 worth.

I also figured this tied in with Starbucks' contract with Square some years back - as one of Square's value props is eliminating the per-transaction fee for credit cards. Not sure why that was cancelled, though.