cornholio

I think legally the issue was adjudicated by analogy to a closed safe: while the exact contents of the safe is unknown beforehand, it is reasonable it will contain evidence, documents, money, weapons etc. that are relevant, so if a warrant can be issued in that case compelling a locksmith to open it, then by analogy it can be issued against an encrypted device.

Without doubt, this analogy surely breaks down as society changes to become more digital - what about a Google Glass type of device that records my entire life, or the glasses of all people detected around me? what about the device where I uploaded my conscience, can law enforcement simply probe around my mind and find direct evidence of my guilt? Any written constitution is just a snapshot of a social contract at a particular historical time and technological development point, so it cannot serve as the ultimate source of truth regarding individual rights - the contract is renegotiated constantly through political means.

My question was more general: how could we draft that new social contract to the current age, how could we maintain the balance where the encrypted device of a suspected child predator and murderer is left encrypted, despite the fact that some 3rd party has the key, because we agreed that is the correct way to balance freedoms and law enforcement? It just doesn't sound stable in a democracy, where the rules of that social contract can change, it would contradict the moral intuitions of the vast majority.

That's a crypto architecture design choice, MS opted for the user-friendly key escrow option instead of the more secure strong local key - that requires a competent user setting a strong password and saving recovery codes, understanding the disastrous implication of a key loss etc.

Given the abilities of the median MS client, the better choice is not obvious at all, while "protecting from a nation-state adversary" was definitely not one of the goals.

Beyond the crypto architecture debate, I don't really understand how could anyone imagine a world where MS could just refuse such a request. How exactly would we draft laws to this effect, "the authorities can subpoena for any piece of evidence, except when complying to such a request might break the contractual obligations of a third party towards the suspect"?

Do we really, really, fully understand the implications of allowing for private contracts that can trump criminal law?

It's dismissive because most of the requests open source developers get need to be dismissed.

"Where can I send some cash for your hard work" is much rarer than "Here's my very complex edge use case that I need to support ASAP, I think it's quite shameful you don't support this already must not take you more than 5 minutes, come on people do it already my clients are waiting".

An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms.

For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2.

In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.

So, cloudification: lock the customer into a complex cloud dependent solution they can't easily migrate to some other commodity infrastructure provider.

It's an archetypal social coordination problem that can't be solved at a local level. If relaxed zoning pushes all new buildings into my neighborhood, because all other vote against it, then I'm going to end up with 20 stories of balconies hanging above my property but see no benefits, not even indirect ones like lower rents leading to lower inflation and prices etc. Some developer will simply capture that rent - both in the rent extraction sense and the real estate rent meanings.

A smart central planner can act for the shared benefit, they are sensitive to the votes of renters in some other high density area that also can't solve the problem locally etc.

I would summarize the central claim of the paper as: the widespread use of AI to mediate human interaction will rob people of agency, understanding and skill development, as well as destroying the social links necessary to maintain and improve institutions, while at the same time allowing powerful unaccountable actors (AI cabal) to interject into those relations and impose their institutional goals; by "institution" we mean a shared set of beneficial social rules, not merely an organization tasked with promoting them, "justice" vs. "US justice system".

The authors then break down the mechanisms by which AI achieves these outcomes (that seem quite reductive and dated compared to the frontier, for example they take it as granted that AI cannot be creative, that it can only work prospectively and can't react to new situations and events etc.), as well as exemplifying those mechanism already at work in a few areas like journalism and academia.

Yes, I don't understand how such an experiment could work. You either:

A). contaminate the model with your own knowledge of relativity, leading it on to "discover" what you know, or

B). you will try to simulate a blind operation but without the "competent human physicist knowledgeable up to the the 1900 scientific frontier" component prompting the LLM, because no such person is alive today nor can you simulate them (if you could, then by definition you can use that simulated Einstein to discover relativity, so the problem is moot).

So in both cases you would prove nothing about what a smart and knowledgeable scientist can achieve today from a frontier LLM.

Alaska received statehood a century after it was acquired, and only after being substantially colonized by Americans. It's entirely laughable to suggest that US will grant 2 seats ~= 4% of the Senate (plus one representative and 3 electors) to basically a small city of Inuits and Danes, most of which won't even speak English for a good many years to come.

Seems Greenlanders didn't get the memo, the vast, overwhelming majority still think of themselves as "not Americans".

This is the problem with historical narratives, history is not established fact but a continuous re-evaluation of the past. There is always that wako who will interpret some convenient or made up facts as proof that "Greenland is American in all but name".

It seems the issue boils down to what the Greenlanders want: to become some sort of Venezuela of the north in Trump's imperial crown, and be used to maximize the profits of the American corporations that ultimately get to own it; OR full rights as EU citizens and local autonomy to decide who gets the mining concessions, under competitive terms open to all countries that maximize their profits, which stay in their hands.

The historical path of Greenland in DK is irrelevant.

While I strongly doubt this is true, it still doesn't change the fundamental gamble Trump took: it's impossible to predict how a regime change attempt will go, who will betray and who will rally around the flag. Especially in a resource rich country.

Trump was extraordinarily lucky here, the Maduro regime was wholly unprepared and he was immediately extracted from the county; he can claim "mission accomplished", parade Maduro in front of the world media and watch from afar the PSUV leadership tear themselves appart.

But the dice Trump rolled could have easily fell onto a well prepared Maduro regime, which could have downed a few Blackhawks, torpedoed the ship from which they launched, captured and killed a few dozens to a few hundreds US service men, paraded them in the streets of Caracas and used them as human shields protecting the main military targets etc.

I.e, Trump could have easily committed US to a long term war and a ground invasion, without Congress authorization or allied support, and with Iraq or worse long term results.

HVDC is enormously expensive even today and completely impractical for bulk transport 100 years ago. You can't look just at corona, capacitive etc. losses of HVAC, you need to factor in the entire economic equation. The total overhead of AC (cost of equipment + energy lost for the lifetime of the line) is still lower for overground transport over reasonable distances and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

That's a bit like saying AC electricity was just a fancy way of delivering what customers really wanted, DC energy.

I'm sure that DC customers used their Edison DC equipment for decades after the grid went AC only; but in the long run the newer, flexible, lower overhead system became the default for new equipment and the compatibility cludges were abandoned.

I think this kind of feedback is a good example of something an LLM is very good at suggesting. I regularly feed my important raw texts to an AI, and ask it not to rewrite it (!), but to give me line by line grammatical, style and tone advice, point out uncommon language, idioms or semantics etc. Also, they are good at fact checking, they can quickly verify each statement against web sources etc.

On the other hand, LLMs are very bad writing partners, they are sycophants and very rarely give substantial criticism, the kind of feedback an editor would give and is mentioned in the article.

This is the substantial service an editor will provide going forward in the AI slop era, where everyone and their grandma will self publish some personal masterpiece: a contact with the real world and setting the bar high, to the point you need to struggle to achieve the required quality. Writing a book, especially finishing a great book, is not supposed to be enjoyable, it's hard, grueling work.

In truth, I have never seen a company doing such an insane 180 against it's traditional suppliers as Google is doing against the websites populating its search pages which now Google milks as mere training data. Google Search is dead, from the perspective of the websites, and there is less and less incentive to spend effort and money to appear on the first pages.

Google better have a good strategy because this is bound to have 2nd order effects down the road, like, why would I pay money for advertising on a dead internet search engine? If AI is killing organic results, then AI better make money itself, because dead websites don't buy ads.

> and this usage was given a "shelf life"

While it might technically be true, that surely does not absolve the engineers who did this crap.

There is a general social expectation that new buildings should be structurally sound for a duration on the order of a century. So, if you deliver something that has a mean time before catastrophic failure around 30 years, you also need to account and set up the institutions that will handle the failure, the same way nuclear companies are required to set aside money for their decommissioning. You need to have periodic inspections for signs of early failure etc. and this whole circus needs to be disclosed and priced into your tender.

In reality, this entire fiasco was a dirty and cheapest way to satisfy the contract, ye old "good enough for government work" as evidenced by the fact no substantial number of private buildings of the same period are having this problem.

The maintenance provision was snuck into - or bribed into - some mountain of legalese, but the fuckers knew exactly that they were putting children in harm's way.

Manufacturers update software periodically on these devices, so each new generation is a MAX to some degree.

You could say the aggregate is air and the cement still performs its role as a binder, it binds all the air bubbles into a stable matrix. Hence "aerated concrete".

The UK crisis involved steel reinforced AAC beams that were used (of all places) to support roofs of schools. UK turned out to be a rainy place, the rain infused into the cellular structure and corroded the steel, with disastrous consequences.

It's a very particular use case of a very particular product, not relevant to the wide majority of AAC uses around the world, which is largely non-structural and not reinforced, or subjected to moderate compressive loads, such as lateral walls for 1-2 stories buildings in non-seismic areas.

The industrial version is produced in an autoclave, this allows precise control of curing, density and final mechanical resistance/insulation values. Hence, the name the material is best known by - AAC.

On the other hand, the video linked attributes too much credit and complexity to the foam manufacturing method, it can certainly be done with very primitive technology. Here are some dudes doing it in a developing country, it's very very basic, the foam generator is basically a steel wool sponge where pressurized air combine with water containing the foaming agent. They give out the complete recipe and details of their tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h6zBbVkuQI

I think it was mostly a branding exercise, Salesforce wanted to signal to its customers that they are on top of this whole AI thing and there is no need to go to some unknown AI startup to "AIfy" their business. So they wanted to capitalize on FOMO / fear of being disrupted while using a bad labor market to improve profitability. They succeeded in this and made news around the world, but maybe not so many new customers.

You know you need to be careful when an Amazon engineer will argue for a database architecture that fully leverages (and makes you dependent of) the strengths of their employer's product. In particular:

> Commit-to-disk on a single system is both unnecessary (because we can replicate across storage on multiple systems) and inadequate (because we don’t want to lose writes even if a single system fails).

This is surely true for certain use cases, say financial applications which must guarantee 100% uptime, but I'd argue the vast, vast majority of applications are perfectly ok with local commit and rapid recovery from remote logs and replicas. The point is, the cloud won't give you that distributed consistency for free, you will pay for it both in money and complexity that in practice will lock you in to a specific cloud vendor.

I.e, make cloud and hosting services impossible to commoditize by the database vendors, which is exactly the point.

The disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable.

The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.

> In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture.

It's quite something they are envisioning a 100 billion dollar project to move the capital instead of limiting water waste in desert agriculture and closing Tehran's water loop by reclaiming sewage, greatly reducing the net demand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhCNpX3s-D8

There has been substantial development in a replacement for all copper wires in the form of CCA - copper clad aluminum conductors.

This product combines the advantages of both materials - low price and mass, stable connection, can be soldered etc. while using a small fraction of copper. It's making inroads into aviation and motor vehicle harnesses, and will probably be the default low cost option for new homes in a few decades.

> All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities.

If by people you mean 18th century farmers or 19th century merchants, sure. I guess you could make some semblance of an argument for countries like Belgium or Japan, but it's downright ridiculous to claim United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.

Increasing population merely to EU average would create housing for hundreds of millions.

Sounds like a great test case for public intervention to shake up a bad market equilibrium: acquire large areas of land and build new cities and neighborhoods unencumbered by land use and zoning bylaws.