cmcaleer

For the same reason Roskomnadzor makes demands of Wikipedia to remove information it doesn't like: to impotently make demands of entities that will obviously not comply so there can be some theatrics before blocking them or marking them as an evil non-compliant entity.

It's truly baffling stuff. If Roskomnadzor made demands of a UK-based website before dramatically fining them massive amounts daily (that will obviously never be collected), people would rightfully treat them as a laughing stock. Yet when Ofcom treats a foreign entity the same way, they somehow expect to be treated seriously.

Honestly 4chan treated this with far more respect than it was due by having their lawyers respond at all.

> Also, ADP does not work in UK, at all.

It does work if you've enabled it before it got disabled back in Feb, and the US successfully managed to get the UK to back off its demands for a backdoor, but it remains to be seen if new UK customers will ever be able to enable ADP again.

It seems short-sighted to not do this as a courtesy, given the reputational hit from the Kia/Hyundai Boyz saga just a few years ago. Who wants to be a manufacturer with a reputation for making easy-to-steal cars? Who wants to (for a reasonable price) insure cars made by said manufacturer?

Lounges have gotten significantly worse since Covid though with overcrowding issues (with some exceptions like KIX), so I don’t think it’s a particularly great loss. My card lets me pay some token amount to gain access to lounges but I’d rather spend that money to get an actual meal cooked for me rather than a buffet and then sit in a quiet corner of the terminal than a crowded lounge.

It’s not that simple. Business is representing an ever increasing % of travellers, so airlines are increasing the % of business class seating, leaving fewer seats for economy seating and therefore less availability in economy, so you might not even end up seeing the savings in your flight ticket since more economy passengers are competing with each other.

A constable is not going to be scanning the faces everyone going to Wembley in one night. Even 100 constables looking at faces entering faces going to Wembley is not going to scan everyone and recognise someone they know from a wanted poster (of maybe a couple hundred faces in their head).

The Met have already lied about the scale of false positives[0] by nearly 1000x, and it's not obvious how much better it will get. With the current tech, this rate will get worse as more faces are being looked for. If it's only looking for (I'm guessing) a thousand high-risk targets now and the rate is 1/40, as more and more faces get searched for this problem gets exponentially worse as the risk of feature collisions rise.

Of course, it'll also disproportionately affect ethnic groups who are more represented in this database too, making life for honest members of those groups more difficult than it already is.

The scale is what makes it different. The lack of accountability for the tech and the false confidence it gives police is what makes it different.

[0]: Met's claim was 1/33,000 false positives, actual 1/40 according to this article from last year https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-69055945

Then what happens if you don't have ID on you (which, for now, is entirely legal in the UK)? What if you're hours from home? Do you then need to completely cancel your day to spend it with the cops instead satisfy some shit algorithm that misidentified you as some known threat? What if you refuse to cooperate because you have better things to do than waste your time with the police? I'm sure that'll go well for you.

What if your child falls victim to a false identification, and then given that children are far less likely to have some form of ID on them than adults, they're stuck for much longer?

Do you trust the British police to take good care of your child? Or will they strip-search her and threaten her with arrest like they did with the then-15-year-old Child Q because they decided that she "smelled of weed"?

Do you really want more unnecessary interactions with the police for yourself or those you care about when your "suspicious behaviour" was having an algorithm judge that your face looked like someone else's?

“Wikipedia is one of the best resources humanity has ever produced” and “The Wikimedia Foundation spends money frivolously while soliciting donations with messages that make users think their money is going towards the project they actually care about” are not statements which are incompatible with each other.

Wikimedia does by and large an OK job (the endowment they set up in particular was a great move), but it’s incredibly bloated in ways that should be curtailed before it gets worse. It’s reasonable to want better for a resource as important as Wikipedia.

We don’t want another Mozilla.

There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla.

Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.

Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.

I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.

I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.

[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!

Bloated is one word for it. The difference in the battery life of my MacBook when Steam is running (and doing nothing) versus Steam not running is incredible, it’s the difference between my battery sometimes lasting one working day and comfortably lasting two.

> Surely it can't be a mere lack of land that drives the cost of rice.

It's not, it's a consequence of some land reform policies that made sense after WW2 to take power away from the rich, but has meant that economies of scale for rice farming has suffered later on.

The median rice farm owner in Japan only is in charge of single digit acres, whereas in EU/US it's like tens or hundreds of acres. So it's harder to justify mechanisation since the economies of scale don't work out and the children of farmers don't want to continue working the farm after their parents are no longer able to because the ceiling of what the farm can produce is low and economic and social prospects are better elsewhere.

That's without even getting in to the JA and the fact that a lot of these farmers are part time.

It's a really complicated issue without a simple fix or cause like labour costs. Realistically these farms are going to have to get consolidated, which is something that is happening, but slowly.

Network effects are incredibly difficult to overcome. Bluesky is the only example that I can think of that came close in recent memory, but fell victim to an extreme userbase and now is experiencing degrowth. Similar things happened to all the (many) times someone tried to create reddit without the reddit.

I guess Kick is an example, but that's not exactly a model to follow unless you're also a questionably ethical casino with deep pockets who wants to be able to advertise to young men.

YouTube has to become truly awful for a new long-form video content platform to gain a lot of traction. Think of how long Windows has been enshittifying for and how slow the move from it has been.

Counterparty risk asks whether you'll collect on that bet.

Also, the firms who take the other side of that bet talk, and you aren't going to be able to get tens of billions of dollars of derivatives without people figuring out what you're doing and acting against you.

It wasn't really particularly material whether Russia had 30,000 nukes or 32,000 nukes in 1994. It was material if other states got the components that were in those 2,000 nukes.

>Civilian 737 boarding airfield where Russia keeps strategic nuclear bombings?

I'm not sure if the Tu-95 is hosted at any joint-use airports, but joint-use themselves airports are not uncommon. Pskov is joint-use, Ukraine launched a smaller-scale attack on some Il-76s there a couple years back. The scenario that an attack on legitimate target aircraft could be happening metres away from civilian aircraft is realistic.

Not all edge is necessarily ephemeral, if you're thoroughly entrenched and have a deep understanding of a market you will usually just outperform your competitors. Take Jane Street's infamously long-lasting (and profitable!) Indian options trade for example. They had clearly put in the work and effort into understanding a market that other firms didn't do to the same extent, and resources and minds who are good at figuring this stuff out are finite.

You're totally right that edge isn't just knowing if number is more likely to go up, as an example since you mentioned faster access to data: some of the best of the best companies will hire meteorologists so that they know how reliable their microwave towers for transmitting data between e.g. Chicago and NY are (and they can lean in or widen their spreads according to how current and up-to-date their information is).

It sounds like crazy stuff to do, but when your data could be up to 10ms slower than you expect due to weather and you're so sensitive to latency you hire FPGA engineers because normal high performance CPUs aren't enough for you, it's not that crazy.

I sometimes feel like HFT is a waste of good talent and wonder what some of the people I've met who work at JS or CitSec could have done in other industries, but at the same time HFT is often the only industry that correctly prices these peoples' minds. Ultimately having a smoother financial system where risk is more correctly priced is a good thing, even if it's not the best thing they could be doing.

True in this case, but this isn't universal. Some devices with high voltage caps will absolutely still kill you even if they've been unplugged for days. This is why people can and do die while messing about with unplugged microwaves in particular.

I hope it lasts, but I'm seeing gates which have QR code readers, IC card readers,and contactless payment readers, which is obviously unsustainable. One or more of these will have to give eventually, and given Japan's tolerance for QR code payments (PayPay is massive) and foreigners' familiarity with contactless it seems like IC is the most likely one to go.

I'd be sad if they do go or get relegated to some app, I love the little mascots.

> it would be great if we discussed the substance of the points.

Sure, just read the sentence from my response that you skipped over.

To be clear: I didn't implicitly suggest that your mindset of people who use crypto somehow ceding their right to protection from the state was inappropriate, I stated outright that it was a disturbing and callous mindset.

It's like suggesting that people who protest against police brutality shouldn't get protection from the police in emergency situations, or believe people who are racist to healthcare workers should lose all right to healthcare. The type of mindset held by those who care more about retribution against those who hold different views than a just society.

The more alarming part for me is that, given the scale of the breach, there was clearly some way for this CS access to (a) query and download data from a database and (b) exfil that data in bulk. Where on earth were the controls?

Seems unlikely given who has been targeted. I doubt the Ledger or Paymium guys have been evading tax on crypto given that they're publicly involved in it and likely would be scrutinised more than the average person by tax authorities.

This may be surprising, but I actually don't think opting for a payment method with less consumer protections (that I pay cap gains tax on when if I dispose of it for a profit) is me ceding my right to be protected by the police. You're right that it does seem extremely callous and is honestly a disturbing mindset to have. Hopefully you never experience terror like the victims of the last few months in France experienced in your life.

I'm not sure why this is being framed as an Ozempic story, when if anything it seems like it's more of a cautionary tale on not taking on $1.5 billion dollars of debt to buy back shares near all-time highs and crippling your company for over a decade before ultimately forcing it to file for bk.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/weight-watchers-ann...

Its stock tumbled ever since those highs and likely wouldn't have ever recovered had Oprah not bought and pumped it. To this day they still carry over a billion dollars in debt.

In fairness to the WW board of the last couple of years, they did make a of reasonable pivot to try to rectify the ship (like buying a telehealth service which prescribed Ozempic), but ultimately it seems like this buyback from 13 years ago created a burden that just made them unable to weather the storm gracefully.

Similar vein: during The Troubles, physicians in Belfast got particularly good at dealing with managing cranial pressure and making skull plates from bar bombings, and dealing with bone repair from kneecap punishment shootings

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/18/world/ulster-doctors-lear...

If it's so easy, then why do people die from having lesions misdiagnosed as benign?

Even if the success rate of the human eye was in the 99.5%+ range, why not have an extra sanity check from an AI model?

This was the approach I took when purchasing a TV. Getting a TV without a microphone and Wi-Fi connectivity is borderline impossible... in the consumer segment.

My living room is now furnished with a digital signage monitor and a soundbar.

The price was a touch more than a normal TV of a similar size, and there was not much variety (I had to give up on OLED at the size I wanted for example), but I just have such a hatred for the constant nagging for Wi-Fi and terms of use acceptance nags my parents' new TV had.

If your product is cheaper because you sell my data to the highest bidder, just let me outbid them please.

Imagine if a competent CEO had been at the wheel. Instead of spending quite literally billions on who knows what (certainly not a significantly better, more competitive Firefox), Mozilla could have instead transitioned to an endowed foundation model and built a sustainable, long-term future that could weather a scenario like today’s DOJ case which was not impossible to foresee (US v. Microsoft was in 2001 after all).

> filter out people who value their time

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, will spend half a day on your application for free.

His whole narrative he crafted was really unbelievable. I watched a video of him explaining his story, expecting to hear some story of finding consistent signals that stayed alive for a long time or finding crafty wording in bond contracts, but the whole story was that he took a punt on the GFC being worse than the market expected, and he made low 8 figures. And somehow, because of this, by some measure, he was the best trader in the world.

I too was the best trader in the world when I got some skittles from my friend in the playground for free and sold them to another kid for a dollar making an infinity percent profit, but I didn’t feel the need to make a YouTube career out of it.