abdullahkhalids

I am concerned by all chips and software made by giant corporations. None of them are trustable, and any one of them will sell me out for a buck.

We must constantly fight to have open source and audited chips and software made in commodity fashion.

For a more down to earth example, my graduate school student union also only negotiated the floor of pay and benefits. The compensation for graduate students varied easily by 50% over this floor, even students in the same department.

Thanks for the detailed answer.

How optimal is the PCB density? Do you think there is significant room for improvement to have a smaller PCB and larger screen and/or battery?

Do these cards solve the electronic cash problem (in a completely different way than cryptocurrencies)? What I mean is that

- Are the card readers special/trusted issued by bank/govt in some way? Or you can transfer money from one card to another yourself fully offline?

- Is there any requirements that the transfers have to be eventually communicated to the bank by one of the parties to be fully resolved?

- Has someone managed to create fake cards with fake money in it, or this is impossible by design?

Protesting against a suboptimal Nash equilibrium is not wrong, just because protesting is ineffective at changing the rules of the game.

There are no technical reasons preventing the Mastodon federated network from scaling to billions of users. An individual server might not be able to scale to even 10 million users, but that is by design. There should be thousands or better tens of thousands of servers each supporting a small number of users, with moderation handled at the server level.

Why would you include the money required to pay shareholders, pay the humongous parts of the company doing ad tech, the lobbying money, the fine money, etc. What is the cost of running a social media site?

I have previously calculated that Mastodon costs including development are on the order of 1 EUR/person/year [1]. Even if you 10x it, it's nothing. Facebook does nothing more technically complicated than the forums of the 90s. It's just smarter design.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

My central problem is that in current pull based systems (both CC and direct debit), the merchant has access to the information to take money from my account. But that information can leak and someone else can take money from my account.

It's insane that digital systems are less secure than cash based system. If a merchant hands me a paper invoice, they can't just take cash out of my wallet.

The merchant should communicate to me where I need to deposit money, and I should put that into my system. The merchant should have little to no information about me.

That still works. There are three entities: customer, bank and merchant.

The merchant should never be able to pull from your bank account. However, the merchant can send an invoice for a payment. Either the customer manually pushes the payment, or delegates to the bank that each invoice from merchant X should immediately result in a payment push [1].

The difference from the pull system is that the customer can at any point end this automatic push payment, but in the pull system the customer can only beg the merchant (eg. the gym) to stop charging their account.

[1] Or even better in an ideal world, delegate this pushing to their local finance app. So the bank can't put roadblocks for a customer cancelling a subscription.

Banks and Visa/Mastercard probably love that you fill out your CC details on an online store, and next time you can just 1-click pay. Probably causes a big jump in revenue/profit. That's why they never innovated much.

Of course, it is incorrect, and digital payments everywhere (on a kiosk or online) should be intentional pushes, not pulls.

I wonder if it makes more sense to just add a tax on tires. Tire wear for most vehicles should be proportional to actual weight [1] and mileage, modulo tire quality. So just slap a tax on each tire quality type and there is no need for a system to record the mileage and weight of every car.

[1] Commercial vehicle weight is strongly determined by the cargo load.

Someone who "speaks the truth" without caring about how other people might feel, is rightfully termed an asshole, and generally not considered a good person.

Similarly, when politicians pass laws that maximize a single value while disregarding the harm it does on other consequential values, they are considered bad people.

The world is complex. Systems of decision making must do careful multi-value optimization to be considered good. Single value maximization is evil because it abdicates responsibility.

In the specific case of modern capitalism as-is-implemented, structures like ETFs and bank saving accounts are specifically designed to launder moral responsibility. "I just allocated my capital to the highest return instruments as recommended by my financial advisor. How could I know through all the opaqueness that I was directly enabling child labor and environmental destruction?"

Have been using Mail-in-a-box [1] for about 5 years [1]. I haven't done any maintenance for at least 3 years, besides occasionally clicking restart in the admin webpanel every time it does serious security updates.

I don't send a lot of emails from it, but the ones I do are delivered.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

China's UnionPay and AliPay are to various extents are integrated with the systems in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia [1]. Each country has its own system, but integrates with others.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/china-indonesia-have...

Someone willing to use AI to convert the thesis to Latex so we can compare?

Latex is used because writing math in latex is very good, and despite how everything else (like tables and figures) is so bad.

That's why people take the math subset of latex and use it in other contexts - exactly like this product.

This also applies qualitatively to physical devices. It takes some effort to determine if a vehicular accident was caused by a fault in the vehicle or a driver error or environmental causes.

Some key inherent differences with older engineering fields is that software can be more complex than physical devices and their functionality can be obfuscated because it is written as text but distributed as binaries.

However, the main problem is that software has not been subjugated to enough legal regulation. Ultimately, all law does is draw lines somewhere in the gray between black and white, but in the case of software there are few lines drawn at all, due to many political and economic reasons. Once we draw the lines, most issues will be resolved.

There is a difference between

- software company decides to release a new version and auto installs it for everyone who has the old version (like Google Chrome)

- software company decides to release a new version. The Debian packaage maintainer checks if the update is fine, is compatible with Debian policies, then includes it in the packages repositories.

In the first, there are no checks. In the second, there are.

What's your opinion on FreeCAD's scripting abilities [1]? The link [1] claims

> FreeCAD has been designed so that it can also be used without its user interface, as a command-line application. Almost every object in FreeCAD therefore consists of two parts: an Object, its "geometry" component, and a ViewObject, its "visual" component. When you work in command-line mode, the geometry part is present, but the visual part is disabled.

[1] https://wiki.freecad.org/Python_scripting_tutorial

No. It's a legitimately difficult problem because there not all naked pictures of kids are illegal. The false positive problem is bad for business, but also generally bad even if the big social media was benevolent.

Moderators need to actually understand the context of the picture/video, which requires knowledge of culture and language of the people sharing the pictures. It's really difficult to do that without hiring moderators from every culture in the world.

But small federated servers can often align along real world human social networks, so it's easier for the server admin to understand what should be removed.

You are just saying that physical life doesn't function. People get banned or removed from all sorts of informal and formal groups all the time because of completely illegitimate reasons. That's just human politics embedded so deeply in our psychology it will never go away. They simply move to different groups - and similarly online they can move to a different federated server.

But that's not possible in today's oligopoly of social media. An invisible algorithm will ban you, and there is no way back, and few alternates. Big Social Media is way worse from a sanitizing perspective than some federated social media.

CSAM exists on social media because they are so large that it's not possible to moderate them effectively. To me this is a a no-go. If a business is so large that it cannot respect laws, it needs to be shut down.

The correct way to organize social media is in federated way. Each server only holds on average a few hundred or few thousand people. Server moderators should be legally responsible for content on their server. CSAM on social media will be 100x suppressed because banning people is way easier on small servers.

Not many moderators will have to look at CSAM because the structure of the system makes is unappealing to even try sharing CSAM, knowing you will be immediately blocked.

I feel like for Project 1 at least, the old dashboard is better than the new one.

The problem with a set of mutually conflicting laws like this is that good designers are able to intuitively understand which ones to ignore and which ones to use for a particular project.

What's the price per use compared to a standard industrial metal one?

There is in fact just such a repo maintained by Terence Tao and other mathematicians [1] who are actively using LLMs to try to find solutions to them.

[1] https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems

The Greasemonkey Firefox addon that allows you to run site specific JS has been around for two decades [1].

[1] https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/

That's where your supervisor comes in. In most cases, they should be an expert in the field, and guide you towards a useful and novel problem.

Moreover, I am not suggesting you don't look at other papers at all. But google scholar and some quick skimming of abstracts and papers you find should suffice to check if someone has already done the work. If you start fully reading more than a handful of papers, your ideas are already locked in by what others have done, and it becomes way harder to produce something novel.

Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language).

The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.

> You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it

This is definitely the wrong way of going about a research project, and I have rarely seen anyone approach research projects this way. You should read two or at most three papers and build upon them. You only do a deep review of the research literature later in the project, once you have some results and you have started writing them down.