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bdavisx

948 karma · joined June 6, 2012

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bdavisx··on 'Lake America' makes one thing clear: We can't trust U.S. tech companies
>each side has their own legal name.

I think there's some question as to whether the President can just rename things with an EO - what's the legal name of that lake right now from a US standpoint - there isn't a 100% answer for that.

bdavisx··on US police fear Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record them
>probably a good argument to not allow random cameras in.

About as good of an argument as the prisoner who insists that cell searches for contraband must be announced a day before the search. Do you think the people running the jail would go for that?

bdavisx··on Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search
Here's my thoughts on how Flock and related tech should be handled. Nothing gets stored unless there's a specific judicial warrant. They can take a pic of my license plate, I'm in public, ok. But unless they have a warrant naming my license plate specifically, then nothing gets stored. At all. No log of the plate, no photo of the car, driver, etc. NOTHING. And this needs to be easily auditable.

Those are my thoughts, curious about holes in my idea.

bdavisx··on US Food and Drug Administration rejects petition to set PFAS limits in food
I wonder what it would cost in the US to have a pint of blood taken - I can't donate. Guess I could do it myself...
bdavisx··on DOJ Closing Abbott Labs Case Spurs Wider Corporate Crime Retreat
>I still haven't figured out how he's profiting from Trump Accounts yet

I would guess that he could have been paid in many various ways (TrumpCoins anyone) by financial institution(s) that were set to benefit from the accounts. Have the trump crypto companies followed all of the KYC laws?

bdavisx··on Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5
This is a serious answer, even though it sounds smart-assish:

How likely is it the resolution was money flowing to the correct people?

and a follow-up: How likely is it that the block was put in place just to get that money flowing?

bdavisx··on Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct
They also at some point purchased Pivotal Cloud Foundry and increased the licensing costs by incredible (order of magnitude) amounts.

They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.

bdavisx··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
>The ones deeply interested in the subject would likely skip college anyway

Spoken like a true software engineer ;), there are jobs where you have to have a degree to get the job. "Real" engineers with sign-off responsibilities, Medical Doctors, etc.

bdavisx··on The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
>In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.

LOL, no, we've never even been in a winning position. Were we winning when the CIA used cocaine to finance weapons for Iran? I guess we were winning when we put a lot of black people in jail for decades for possessing crack while white wall street folks were getting slaps on the wrist for getting caught with the same amount of coke? Our country having the highest percentage of people in prison sounds like we were winning too. Lots of winning.

bdavisx··on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
> they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan.

Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?

bdavisx··on Something is afoot in the land of Qwen
>While I don't personally support the examples that I am aware of, I also recognize that in those specific cases the executive branch appears to be within the bounds of the law. I don't even object to the executive branch having the power to cancel the visas of political dissidents

It's my understanding that the 1st amendment applies to everyone, not just citizens. So if that's true (not 100% sure about that), how can political speech (protesting) be a valid reason to remove someone from the US?

bdavisx··on Technical Excellence Is Not Enough
And if everywhere they went would do the same thing, then they wouldn't be able to leave. Too bad people have been convinced that unions are bad.
bdavisx··on Why software stocks are getting pummelled
>It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

It's not that cut and dried - it all depends on what your company needs from SaaS and how big it is. SaaS companies like Salesforce don't charge a "small monthly fee" - they charge 10s of millions of dollars per month for large corporations. It's not hard at all to push that money towards AI development and have a better solution built in-house now. Yes, it still takes serious project management skills, but so does integrating Salesforce or other large SaaS software.

bdavisx··on The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala
I haven't used Scala for quite a while now - but a while back they had a serious asshole problem with a lot of the community.
bdavisx··on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home
I don't want to nitpick, but they didn't say "healthy", and I think the current situation wrt news ownership should be called out at every opportunity, because not everyone is aware of it.
bdavisx··on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home
>It's much easier to successfully bribe/coerce/undermine a single individual running an independent newsletter like this than it is an entire newsroom.

Except the problem in the US now is that newspapers are owned by corporations that own a bunch of newspapers, or very rich individuals/families - and a single individual can dictate what an entire newsroom says.

I don't see much of a difference when it comes to corruptibility.

bdavisx··on The U.S. Government Just Followed Through on Its Ban of DJI Drones
The problem with your statement is there's no way to know - the reality is it could have been a bribe or lack of a bribe; it could have been an actual foreign policy decision based on facts; or some other reason. It's not hard to come up with reasons why it was done, but with this administration there's no way to know whatsoever unless you actually know someone on the inside.
bdavisx··on US will now review H-1B applicants' social media – require them to make public
I don't think anyone would argue with that - the problem here is that the requirements are being changed thru a process that involves no public or congressional input.

The other issue is that the vetting will likely not just look for terroristic or other 'illegal' social media content - it will look for whatever the administration decides to look for - again without oversight.

bdavisx··on Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs
Debuggers are great when you can use them. Where I work (financial/insurance) we are not allowed to debug on production servers. I would guess that's true in a lot of high security environments.

So the skill of knowing how to "println" debug is still very useful.

bdavisx··on High-income job losses are cooling housing demand
>if you can rent cheaply enough for 10-20 years the boomers will start dying in sufficient numbers that if there is somehow no reversion on home prices in the mean time there should be insufficient buyers at that point and prices will eventually fall.

You may be missing something - there's so much money flowing upwards in society that the rich/ultra-rich will simply be able to buy ALL of that real estate as it becomes available. If not ALL, then everything that's desirable.

bdavisx··on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.
bdavisx··on Nvidia takes $1B stake in Nokia
This will sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. It seems like with this administration, having the regulators reverse their decision wouldn't be that hard, especially with a "donation" to the ballroom or something along those lines.
bdavisx··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
Serious question - it seems that many of this Administrations activities are illegal in some way or the other. I know that government officials are shielded from a lot of actions so they can not be prosecuted.

What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.

NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?

bdavisx··on Ask HN: Any resources for finding non-smart appliances?
For the curious, I checked some prices on the maytags - a little less than 3,000 USD for the front loader, the Speed Queen commercial ones were cheaper.
bdavisx··on Ask HN: Any resources for finding non-smart appliances?
That's an insane amount - how old is the dryer?

I've replaced two heating elements in my ~9 year old Samsung dryer, I think the heating elements were less than 50 USD. I did the labor myself so I don't know how much that would have been - you do have to take the dryer apart, but it doesn't take very long if you have experience, 15-20 minutes or less.

I would not recommend Samsung - I've had to take that dryer apart more than 10 times to replace/fix things, I can't imagine how much it would have cost me if I couldn't do it myself. The only plus there is now I can literally break it down and put it back together very quickly when I need to fix it.

Luckily the Samsung washer has been fine.

bdavisx··on A skyscraper that could have toppled over in the wind (1995)
Unless you try to cheap out, then you end up costing yourself more in the long run, lol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane
bdavisx··on An upgraded dev experience in Google AI Studio
I'm not going to waste my time looking up sources, but I remember that Starlink actively worked against Ukraine at one point - so yes, indefensible.
bdavisx··on The White House, LLC
Trying to what-about this just shows that you're either being deceitful or don't understand the differences. Biden Jr. was taking advantage of his dad's position - and everything seems to point that Biden Sr. was not involved and didn't really want to be invovled. The Trump family is all in and everyone is involved trying to grift as much as possible, including the President.
bdavisx··on The White House, LLC
Yes and no - there's an argument to be made that you can't pardon someone for doing something illegal on your orders.
bdavisx··on Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left
>If you ask a US citizen who to blame for this trade war, it'll be trump.

Not the MAGA/Fox News Watcher, they simply don't live in reality.

Luckily the "swing" voters aren't that dumb, they will realize they fucked up voting for Trump and he's to blame even if they won't admit it.

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