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rainsford

Re:Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:10PM (#50320276)
That seems like the definition of anti-intellectualism because you're making an implicit value judgement that developing the skills to be successful in a corporate environment is more legitimate that developing the skills to be a successful researcher and/or teacher. Many people who began their careers in the private sector would make lousy academics, but few would hold that against them as evidence they failed to develop broader life skills.

Although in reality it probably doesn't make sense to talk about the private sector as some homogeneous representation of the rest of society in the first place. Many people outside of academia famously struggle to adapt their presumably well developed "wider life skills" to significantly different environments, like switching industries or going between large companies and small ones. There's really no universally applicable life skills or experience that everyone except academics pick up.

Re:Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament on Saturday October 31, 2026 @04:55PM (#50320130)
I definitely agree existing in a particular silo gives you a narrow view of the world, but I've never understood the idea that the silo of academia is somehow worse or less representative of the broader world than small town living or being in the military or any of the other silos many people exist in. The real world almost by definition is made up of the combination of all the things people do and the environments in which they exist.

Obviously being a truck driver is different than being a physics professor. But I'm not sure there is much of a coherent argument supporting the idea that the former exists in the real world while the latter does not.

I agree with the general premise that US tech isn't exclusively in Silicon Valley or Seattle. But those regions clearly still play an enormously outsized role in the US tech industry, to the point where it seems unlikely US tech would be as globally dominant without them.

Notably several entries on your list are companies that were founded and grew successful before moving to the locations you listed, often for tax breaks and/or to fit the politics of the company executives. Aside from Dell, all the companies you listed as being located in Texas became successful elsewhere first. Texas has proved it can lure in already successful companies more than it has demonstrated it can grow them.

Which is itself a legitimate achievement, but if the question is how you grow new successful tech companies, it's not a super useful data point especially if we're taking about different countries. There are relatively few barriers for a company that grew up and became successful in the environment of Silicon Valley to move to Austin with the promise of lower taxes, but Europe can't quite replicate that same migratory model to grown their own tech industry.

Re:Airbnb bans making guests do dishes and take out the trash on Thursday October 22, 2026 @08:18AM (#50194296)
That's hasn't been my experience at all with at least some local rental companies. A popular vacation area near me has a local rental company with significant market share and they have a local office and local staff that can come out to help with things like maintenance issues.

I've used them a lot and have found them very responsive with none of the Airbnb type horror stories. For vacations where you want a house instead of a hotel room, companies like this are a VAST improvement over Airbnb because they offer the type of local service that Airbnb will never be able to do at scale.

Sure that works, but now you have a worse version of the refueling experience you'd have with a gas car. Significantly slower for comparable prices and superchargers are still much less common than gas stations. Very tolerable on an occasion road trip. Less than ideal for everyday use.
Look I'm very pro EV, but there are plenty of people for whom buying an EV would be the dumb decision. Most significantly, those who can't charge at home and have to rely on public charging. Yeah you can make that work, but you lose a significant portion of the benefits of an EV by doing so, to the point where an EV is no longer an obvious choice.

Of course 99% of EV drivers want another EV as their next car, since they're the people who presumably figured out that an EV would fit their needs. I'd be curious what the statistic would be if you gave everyone and EV and asked if their next car purchase would also be an EV. I bet it wouldn't be anywhere close to 99%.

If you want to expand EV market share, which I do, maybe spend more time figuring out how to make EVs work for more use-cases and less time assuming people who don't buy them are just dumb.

Sure China is an authoritarian dystopia, but it's not like that's a necessary tradeoff you have to accept to have a civilization that's rapidly advancing in technology.

In fact if you believe democracy is the superior system of government, it's arguably even more embarrassing that an authoritarian single party state run by billionaire communists is somehow doing a better job as a technologically advanced civilization that a lot of democracies.

Ultimately it doesn't really matter though. The future will at least temporarily belong to those who get there first, regardless of their system of government or other issues. If other countries don't want China to own the 21st century, they should act like it.

Anecdata and all that, but my observation as a long time Twitter user is that it was always possible to find conservative voices on the platform. What has changed with Elon is the proliferation of accounts with names like PatriotMom1776 positing hundreds of times a day exclusively about how Democrats are Islamist Communists. Ironically, I've found it harder now to find good content from real conservative posters who I might not agree with but who offer a different perspective to my own.
Re:(Post-Quantum) Cryptographic Right Answers on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:29PM (#50063964)
Length extension attacks are only one of the issues you can run into, so even if you use SHA3 or truncated SHA2 as your hash primitive you still shouldn't be rolling your own keyed hash construction.

The article references this as "YoloMAC" with a link to a pretty good Trail of Bits blogpost about it. But the TLDR is that just prepending the key to the message can lead to ambiguous encoding problems, so you still need to add extra complexity to your hand rolled keyed hash to handle things that the underlying hash primitive isn't going to protect you from on it's own. You're better off using a non-hand-rolled construction that protects against all the things including length extension.

Re:Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:14PM (#50013757)
It's actually much worse than that. Institutions were rarely able to actually detect said compromise, leaving attackers with certs that were indistinguishable from the real thing and valid for a long period of time. Even when institutions could detect the compromise and could quickly rotate certs, getting users to not still trust the old ones could be a non-trivial challenge.
Re:Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:53PM (#50013569)
I agree with you that it's a very good thing, although I think the automation is less the end goal and more a means to an end. The end in this case being moving the idea of webpki certs from pets to cattle and the positive impact that has on the security of webpki.

The original idea of these certs, that they're very valuable long-lived secrets that have to be carefully hand managed and protected, while simultaneously being accessible to your active infrastructure, was always going to be too brittle. The idea of short-lived secrets that are regularly reissued allows for much more robust validation and less catastrophic failure modes.

I'm generally not dogmatic about this kind of thing and think there are often multiple right answers. But short-lived webpki certs are one of those things where if people don't see the value, I'm convinced they're not thinking about security correctly.

Re:Let's Encrypt: 64-Day Certificate Lifetimes Coming Feb 2027 on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:45PM (#50013494)
Even if your own personal key handling security measures are better than the security of your domain registrar, which I seriously doubt is the case for most people who handle certificates, the impact of an attacker managing to obtain your real long-lived cert is significantly worse.

An attacker who manages to get a cert provider to mint a new certificate for your domain might be able to appear legitimate, but remember that it's a new cert, not an identical one to the cert you already have. You as the domain owner can easily detect this new cert was created using CT logs and visitors to your site can potentially detect two certs for the same domain depending on whether the attacker can convince them to only visit the spoofed site. Short lived certificates also mean the attacker must execute their new cert attack frequently if they want longer term success.

On the other hand, an attacker who manages to penetrate your impenetrable personal cert management security measures now has the real cert they can use to pretend to be you for as long as your certificate is good for. And unless you detected their one-time break-in, there is no way for you or anyone else to tell this is happening since the attacker is using a cert that matches the real one byte for byte.

Edit: I forgot to mention that short-lived certs are also a response to the general challenge with certificate revocation mechanisms as a reliable way to respond to the unlikely event that you actually detected your long-lived cert was stolen. Even if you figured out an attacker stole your certificate, convincing users to not keep treating it as valid has a lot of interesting failure edge cases. You might just have to wait for its validity period to expire.

I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong in this specific case, but basically every change in every single sport ever is treated by the participants and "serious fans" as a horrible idea that will be the death of the sport.

Sometimes changes really are bad and are reverted, but more often the changes eventually get accepted and years later everyone involved treats it as an integral part of the sport.

Even "serious fans" almost always seem to be biased by the state of the sport when they started watching. Every change since that point is horrible and misguided, but they rarely argue for reverting changes that happened before then.

Re:In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults on Sunday October 04, 2026 @03:56PM (#49957249)
> Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power.

The math the person you're replying to was talking about was solar power vs ethanol. While your 800 m^2 sounds like a lot of land area for enough solar panels to fully charge a large electric truck, it's basically nothing compared to how much land area you'd need to grown enough corn to produce enough ethanol to power a similar truck. It's about 500 times as much land area, a fairly obvious result when you consider you get solar power from the land basically every day and corn once a year. Growing plants for ethanol is dumb.

Of course the benefit of a combustion engine is that you don't need to grow corn to make ethanol for it, at least as long as you can get fossil fuels out of the ground and the enemy doesn't disrupt your supply chain for drilling and refining fuel oil. But that's irrelevant since that wasn't the land-use comparison the parent poster was making.

Re:Tesla takes on $30B in credit as it approaches unprofitability on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @07:39PM (#49915881)
Shorting it would only make sense if you believe the stock value is at all correlated to the technical feasibility of the long term vision. I think the entire point of the person you're responding to is that it's fairly obviously not.
Re:AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @07:49PM (#49902440)
Anecdata to be sure, but my personal experience with AI has been that I've used it to do stuff that is certainly useful but far from significantly transformative. It definitely helps make certain tasks easier and faster, but it doesn't do so consistently enough with enough of those tasks to make my overall life experience feel that much different.

Maybe I'm using it wrong, or maybe the tooling around AI hasn't yet caught up to the capability of AI models. It feels somewhat wrong to me that the benefit any individual person gets from AI is derived from their own prompting rather than autonomous systems that run in the background for them. But either way, the massive investment in AI compute seems very disproportionate to the actual benefit the average person, or even a tech savvy person, is seeing day-to-day right now.

That's not how good risk analysis works. You also have to consider the alternative that you exclude someone coming for a job they excel at while becoming a net benefit to society just because they couldn't support themselves in an eventuality that didn't come to pass.
Re:US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution on Sunday September 20, 2026 @07:04PM (#49781050)
Rooftop solar in the US is incredibly expensive from most installers even as panel prices have come down and energy prices are typically low enough that the payoff time and up-front cost are seen as not worth it for many people. The US also has a lot of homes where (cheap) natural gas is used for cooking, heating, and hot water, which you'd have to continue paying for even after you installed solar panels or pay a lot of money to convert to electrical equivalents.

That said, I know a lot of people who have recently installed solar panels on their roof and it's increasingly worth it from a financial perspective. The other thing worth noting though is that while cool, rooftop solar really isn't the best approach to installing solar capacity compared to grid scale solar farms on land which also tends to be abundant in the US.

Re:US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution on Sunday September 20, 2026 @06:59PM (#49781001)
But the solar panels we already have don't suddenly stop working, which is an important difference between sourcing solar panels from a potential enemy and sourcing raw fossil fuels from one. There's also nothing stopping the US or other trading partners from making solar panels, China is just the most convenient and cheapest source as it is for many other things. And to that point, the end of trade between the US and China would be incredibly damaging to both countries whether or not we buy solar panels from them now.
Re:US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution on Sunday September 20, 2026 @04:57PM (#49780008)
You're not being pragmatic, you're being myopic. Our current energy systems are the result of deliberate complex work. It seems shortsighted to think it's somehow the only system that can ever be built just because other systems have new challenges to overcome.
Re:US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution on Sunday September 20, 2026 @04:55PM (#49779996)
That seems like a pretty bad example considering the rising popularity of EVs has coincided with an enormous grown in available charging infrastructure to service the EV customer base. It's almost like human society can handle complex, interdependent systems as they change, either through deliberate organization or natural market incentives.

It's not like the current mix of electrical generation and fossil fuel distribution is some naturally occurring phenomenon or alien technology. It's an enormously complex and interdependent system we built. I'm pretty confident we can build new and different things.

Re:“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @07:38PM (#49636182)
> That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.

If that was true we'd be getting closer to a point where you could mention "X" without having to further specify what you're talking about, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Maybe more to the point, "Twitter" already had that instant association that Musk totally threw away.

But I actually think changing the branding of the platform was far less dumb than the related necessary changing of terminology associated with using the platform. Twitter managed to associate a unique word for posting on their platform, "tweet", that became widely used and an instantly recognizable reference to using their social media platform specifically even if you didn't mention their name. You could "post" any of a dozen places, you could only "tweet" on Twitter. That's the kind of branding that doesn't happen often and a company would kill for, and Musk threw it away in favor of the same "post" terminology that literally every competitor also uses.

I can't speak for everything the author has written about Tesla, but I don't see any intent stated or implied in this particular article. Instead it seems to mostly be accurately describing an action taken by Tesla that doesn't cast the company in an especially good light. That's not bad journalism just because some people might like Tesla or Musk and want to give them the benefit of the doubt or downplay anything negative they might do.
Re:The moral panic over data centres is foolish on Sunday September 06, 2026 @09:42AM (#49586482)
> going to go out on a limb here and guess that net-net, a datacenter provides more benefits to a broader spectrum of society than a golf course does.

Is that true locally though? Having a golf course nearby your home is better than the golf course just existing somewhere, at least if you play golf, but that is decidedly not true of data centers. You might benefit from at least some of them existing, but derive very little benefit from having one in your backyard and a lot of potential downsides.

To be fair, there are an embarrassingly large number of places in the US where safely walking to a store a few hundred meters away would be very difficult at best.
Re:New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:27PM (#49442644)
I don't remember any previous price increase this significant or sustained. Relevant to this thread, I don't ever remember major computer companies like Apple having to significantly jack up their prices because hardware costs had gone up so significantly and stayed there.
Re:New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:19PM (#49442580)
I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a new computer that was either cheaper or faster than the one you already had.

That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.

I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.

One maybe non-obvious benefit I see in that from the individual Tailscale user perspective is that only having SSO rather than username/password keep the security of my login in the same bin as the larger customers where Tailscale makes their actual money.

A username/password would be perfectly fine for my use-case as an individual user using Tailscale for my homelab and personal devices. But I suspect the majority of real paying customers don't want a separate authentication flow just for Tailscale and would rather use the SSO they already have. I have confidence Tailscale wouldn't half-ass usernames and passwords is they offered it even if it was mostly just for non-paying hobbyist users, but I'm also sort of glad I get to bucket my account security risk with the people paying their bills.

This seems like an entirely predictable outcome of data center builders and operators behaving like anti-social neighbors with noise just because no law prevented them from doing so.

Building a data center near homes and running your incredibly loud gas turbine generators 24/7 for months, destroying the property values and quality of life for the people living there, is a giant middle finger to the community they've moved into. I'm not saying the backlash banning them entirely rather than adding some additional regulations is entirely logical, but it's very understandable. And should have been eminently predictable.

There is a much stronger argument for why housing should be built near existing housing than for why data centers need to be built near existing housing. Housing NIMBYs are being unreasonable because if they got their way the only new housing would be built in the middle of nowhere, which is clearly unworkable. Data center NIMBYs are arguing for much the same thing, but focusing on building data centers a good distance away from housing seems pretty reasonable.

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