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antientropic

844 karma · joined July 2, 2013

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antientropic··on Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]
The economics prize is listed on nobelprize.org ("the official website of the Nobel Prize") along with the other Nobel prizes, so I don't think you can justify calling it "unofficial".

Perhaps if the ACM renamed the Turing Award to "The Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Computer Science", the Nobel Foundation would let them get away with it.

antientropic··on European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction
Because the plaintiffs are Swiss. Who else should they sue? Similar cases have happened elsewhere, e.g. the Urgenda case in the Netherlands.

Pointing to the inaction of other countries as an excuse for one's own inaction is a weak argument. Good luck suing Russia. (They were actually a member of the Council of Europe until 2022, so this decision would have applied to them...)

antientropic··on European court rules human rights violated by climate inaction
> There is an international court of human rights.

There isn't. There is the ICJ, which handles disputes between states, and the ICC, which handles war crimes etc. and definitely isn't going to judge climate legislation.

antientropic··on What We Watched: A Netflix engagement report
Your quote left out "subject to a confidentiality agreement". Streamers are not obliged to make this information public, and I don't expect companies like Amazon to do so since they're extremely secretive about viewership numbers.
antientropic··on Is the Physics of Time Changing?
How would you define "movement" without reference to "time"?
antientropic··on AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B
> but it keeps not happening

The article you're responding to is a dramatic demonstration that it has happened: Amazon's IPs would not be worth $4.5B if we hadn't run out. It requires us all to ration a resource (namely numbers) that should be near-infinite and essentially free.

antientropic··on 50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity
Because nobody has yet bothered to sue them for false advertising, so they continue to get away with it.
antientropic··on X.org Security Advisory: Security issue in the X server
The vast majority of C programmers do not use a formally verified C compiler, and most of them wouldn't care about that anyway.

From a security perspective, demanding a formally verified C compiler is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Switching to a safer language like Rust will do much more to improve security, even if the compiler is not verified.

antientropic··on Breaking all macOS security layers with a single vulnerability
This is what happens when a new security model is retrofitted onto an existing one.

In the original Unix security model, there was no security concern with this (except maybe for chroot environments): it didn't allow a process to do something it couldn't otherwise do, since all processes owned by a uid had exactly the same rights. Now that we've started sandboxing user processes in various ways on macOS and Linux, that's no longer the case, and we suddenly need to crack down on useful tools like strace and gdb.

antientropic··on Germany Ends Ban on Abortion Advertisement
Not a very convincing article, since it presents some statistics about the US (e.g. "only 10% of injured Americans ever file a claim for compensation and only 2% file lawsuits") but does not compare them to other countries, so we can't tell whether the US is more or less litigious than the rest of the world.
antientropic··on The Supreme Court just made a US-EU Privacy Shield agreement even harder
Looking at the current war in Ukraine, the "martial spirit" seems to be alive and well in Europe.
antientropic··on Myth 16: ‘What comes after Putin must be better than Putin’
> with Crimea specifically called out, ironically, the United Kingdom and the United States have to immediately declare war on Russia and open hostilities.

It says no such thing (as the Wikipedia article you linked points out). The most it says is that they shall seek "immediate United Nations Security Council action" if "Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used."

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Securi...

antientropic··on In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
There is no such thing as an inherent right. Rights are a legal construct. They don't grow on trees and are not laws of physics. There are rights that I may believe should be universal, yet very clearly are not.
antientropic··on Germany is not as stable as we think. Just ask its preppers
East Germany did not "collapse" in any sense relevant to a discussion about preppers. It peacefully re-unified with West Germany and was never in anything resembling a state of anarchy.
antientropic··on M4 as a templating language (2020)
The GNU M4 manual has a sizable section acknowledging its precursors: https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/manual/m4.html#History
antientropic··on Compiling Rust is NP-hard
Or worse than NP-hard: C++ template instantiation and the C preprocessor are Turing complete. (Except that I believe C++ requires some fixed limit on the maximum instantiation depth, but even so it's still exponential complexity.)
antientropic··on The code on the laptop in the stock photo at developer.bbc.com is user-editable
What's the difference between a "photo" and a "photograph"?
antientropic··on The end of the pandemic is near
The author isn't conflating anything - by saying "national misery" he is making it very clear that he's talking about the US situation.
antientropic··on Vaccinated Americans now may go without masks in most places, the CDC said
> People have memories.

And sometimes they have false memories. For example, regarding:

> 8 Months ago Kamala Harris herself said she would NOT get Trump's Vaccine.

What she said was that she would take the vaccine if the professionals said it was safe, not if Trump told her to take it [1]. A rather understandable level of skepticism given Trump's peddling of miracle cures such as hydroxychloroquine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAjCeMuXR0

antientropic··on In Singapore, Covid vs. privacy is no contest
According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/, Singapore has a total of 31 coronavirus deaths, one of the lowest per capita death rates in the world. So it seems to have worked very well.
antientropic··on EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
I wouldn't be too sure about those GDPR penalties. Dutch universities are also using Proctorio, with the recorded footage being sent to the US: https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-universiteit...
antientropic··on The EU archived “Euromyths” printed in UK media (2018)
Here is the actual (archived) Euromyths website: https://wayback.archive-it.org/11980/20191004103218/https://...

It appears the EC has deleted it since debunking myths in the British press has become rather pointless post-brexit.

antientropic··on John Sullivan resign as executive director of the Free Software Foundation
> I note that children are incapable of consenting. That’s what the age of consent means.

Completing 18 orbits around the sun does not magically imbue a person with free will and the ability to consent. Of course the law has to draw a line somewhere (and many jurisdictions draw the line differently), but that doesn't mean that people under 18 are categorically incapable of consenting.

antientropic··on Media trust hits new low
The article does not describe it as a misconception.
antientropic··on IPv6 Adoption Visualization
How so? It doesn't seem more complex than IPv4.
antientropic··on NASA's Perseverance rover sends stunning images
> Fukushima will be raising ocean radiation for a long time, just one example.

Will it? The ocean is very, very big. Contaminated water from Fukushima is a literal drop in a bucket.

antientropic··on Why northern Europe is so indebted
The article is about household debt. Nordic households aren't bailing out southern Europe.
antientropic··on How this Ends
That's not "nearly everything". Most people don't spend their salaries on lumber or copper. If anything, it shows how little the prices of raw commodities affect consumer prices.

It's also hardly evidence for impending hyperinflation. For instance, aluminum is massively cheaper than in 2008, and copper is still quite a bit below the 2011 level. Commodity prices always fluctuate massively.

antientropic··on Russian Pipeline Is Germany's Greatest Foreign Policy Embarrassment
Western countries traded with the Russians during the Cold War so this seems like a weak argument. Where does the NATO treaty stipulate a trade embargo against the Russians?
antientropic··on Baffling Brexit rules threaten export chaos
The UK did not do great before the EU. In the 1960s it was considered the "sick man of Europe". That was the reason they wanted to join the EEC in the first place (and were refused twice by De Gaulle).
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