crispyambulance

I wonder if there's a way for "targets" of CBP to easily maintain phones that can be toggled between their "real work" profile and some boring anodyne "CBP-safe" profile?

Locking/disabling the phone, I think, only creates suspicion as we've seen in a previous case not long ago. But if phones can have a cloud back-ups, shouldn't it be possible to have TWO different "back-ups" that can be chosen at will?

The thing that's really disturbing is not how far Cambridge Analytica actually got in terms of influencing American voters through the "campaigns" they were hired to perform. In the end it was hard to assess how much damage they did.

But that's not the real problem here.

The problem is that it has been demonstrated how ad-tech infrastructure can be re-purposed for political propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation. All of that power is now available to the highest bidder, and the infrastructure providers, as we are now know are utterly amoral, stronger and faster than any government regulations, beholden to their shareholders and nothing else even if the world burns.

   > Now there may be other potential issues that would elevate the matter, if disinformation is used...

Disinformation was used and it is NOT a "potential issue" that merely "elevates" the matter, it's profound offense that requires a harsh and comprehensive response.

I think subway rail systems do have "real live location", but whether that information is consistently provided to public distribution for use through apps is a question mark.

I suspect most systems are a mix of your platinum, gold and silver (and kidding me).

Transit telemetry is inherently spotty on these public-facing applications.

If it's like other systems, it will resort to transit schedule estimations when data is missing and then try to sync as live data becomes available.

   > My TVs are on the IoT network so that I can control them from Home Assistant, but they're blocked from accessing the internet. NS lookups are redirected or blocked (53 redirected to my local DNS resolver, 853 blocked),[...]

That's great, good for you that you can do that.

Unfortunately, from LG's surveillance capitalism point of view, the 0.001% of LG owners that can even think about doing that isn't even a drop in the bucket. They don't care about any one individual, and the vast majority of individuals don't care or understand what LG is doing as long as they can watch TV.

It's only a matter of time before another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up, except with better tools and vastly more data. Or maybe something we can't even imagine yet enabled by simply re-purposing ad-tech into something political and malevolent? Some people will be wise to it, of course, but if enough are caught up in it, it won't matter, we all lose as a whole.

  >...vocation of choice is misaligned with your personality...

I also kind of sense this.

The OP mentioned they were doing systems engineering. That's a very particular hellscape of grinding details. It involves being comfortable constantly dealing with a lack of control and flow. The good news is there many different kinds of work. I hope they can find their path.

It really depends on what the individual goal actually is.

I think engineering curriculums “stop short” on mathematics just as it starts becoming interesting, more generalized and before connections start becoming easy to see and remember. Math is often handled as a bag of tricks.

A lot of engineers would do well to review mathematics at a deeper level than their undergrad days, and that can mean hitting up real analysis, abstract algebra and other topics from scratch in a proof theoretic way.

Once that mathematical fluency is achieved, it becomes possible to ingest other topics at higher levels of sophistication, IMHO.

XML was a good, well-intentioned idea.

The problem, IMHO, was that rampant "xml-abuse" in the naughts. ws-* standards and over-engineered garbage like SOAP ("complex object access protocol") made people loathe XML.

I did like JAXB in Java, XLST, schemas, XPATH. Never got into XSL, but it seemed like good thing too. It worked best when your tooling manipulated it for you or at least helped you in an intelligent way. Much of the hate for XML came from situations where you had to deal with someone's over-the-top-one-size-fits all schema without the benefit of tooling to at least hint you in the right direction.

It still survives in WPF and c# *.proj files. If it were just me, I would still use it for object serialization. But json is king now even though it's inferior.

   > I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn.

Neither do I, but there's huge distances between "spend-an-afternoon-intro-on-it" and "learn-it-well-enough-for-occasional-work" and "learn-it-enough-to-build-serious-databases".

Of course, everyone in HN is "advanced" so what do I know!

    > You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.

Oh, HELL NO!

It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different levels of sophistication. Nothing wrong with that, but to suggest it's trivial is a gross mischaracterization.

Beautiful!

I did have in mind something more like the Socratic method, asking pointed questions of your mentee, guiding them but not pushing them. I suppose that in a weird way that essay is the Hunter S Thompson idea of the socratic method.

I really do think it's important to give thought to HOW to give help.

Especially in the technical communities, there's such an over-emphasis in "asking correctly". It perhaps started with usenet (think Eric S Raymond's INSUFFERABLE FAQ on "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"), and ended with the persnickety and now thankfully moribund stackoverflow gameified and toxic question-and-answer forum.

There is plenty advice around for "how to ask" (really, it's the same if you know the person or not). It all boils down to a Calvinistic "show you're worthy" kind of exercise.

But what about advice for giving help to someone?

There's plenty of ways that giving someone help can go horribly wrong, and I think that it's not uncommon for people to be blindsided by such a request.

> ...it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal.

I think the point of this is not to make "a product". It's just a fun project that you can build yourself or participate in some way with it's creation and/or funding.

It's not practical. That's OK.

Motto's, slogans, mission statements...

All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed "don't be evil".

Yes. It was good enough to communicate that news item.

Did Alibaba perform "an attack" or were they taking advantage of resources and going beyond Anthropic's terms of service? Didn't Anthropic do the same kinds of things when building their models?

These are all interesting questions, but they don't have to be addressed in full by a news blurb about a letter Anthropic wrote to some senators.

The standard of neutrality that people here pretend to require from news organizations is not even remotely realistic.

It was a timely story from Reuters. They do fast news feeds, like APnews. Could it have been better or more accurate? Sure, they could have gone into why distillation may or may not be seen as "an attack". But then it would have been a more involved story, defeating the purpose of a news feed.

The Reuters piece was "good enough". Some other place like the NYTimes or WSJ can follow up with more detailed investigative coverage if it's a worthwhile story.

Ferriss has been part of what I call the "self-help industrial complex" for a very long time. He also has known Thiel since at least the early naughts.

  > Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers.

Indeed, it has been very clear since Jan 20 2025 that our executive branch of government is not a rational actor. I don't expect them to make the right decision about anything.

  > They were asking for regulation.

That's what they said, but were they, really?

I've heard others call it a marketing ploy that AI companies keep coming back to-- the idea that "it's soooo dangerous, we have to be careful".

If we're talking homemade vacuum tubes... I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just use metal endplates with feedthroughs for electrical (like spark-plugs) and with v-grooves for o-rings or some other gasket material. this kind of construction can handle vacuum easily, I think?

A lot of success-striving people are pretty grossed out by absurd levels of wealth inequality as well.

Sure, some folks are going to be fantastically wealthy, that's OK to a large extent.

But, we're on the precipice of trillionaire's existing in a country where literally half of the population is functionally illiterate (yes, that's the USA), where the middle class is dissolving, and where we are approaching a feudal level wealth inequality-- and all this stuff is accelerating.

I mean, I guess it's not that bad. We still have a democracy. It's not like we have billionaires re-arranging political power and public resources for their pleasure and benefit. Oh wait, we do!

The thing about "compound growth", even in the most general sense, is that it ALWAYS ends, and that end is typically a crash of some sort.

In biology there's the notion of a growth curve. It starts out with the familiar "compound interest" exponential growth, but unlike Econ-101 textbooks, that curve then proceeds to resource depletion (overshoot), followed by "die-off", followed by extinction, where (N -> 0, where N is usually something like yeast-cell count, but if you're applying this model to something else, it could be stuff like well-being or money).

I do appreciate how helpful AI has been with troubleshooting and providing vital background info in repairing appliances. I've been doing this since before AI, as appliance repair services from professionals are all but gone where I live.

However, neither AI nor (most of) the videos can help with finagling frail snap-fit assemblies one encounters in appliances. A lot of appliance repair work is very simple but requires significant practice and figure-it-out time, in addition to waiting for sketchy parts from Ebay. Half the battle is just finding the damn parts.

I've used this pattern for ~10 years now:

1 Subscribe at some very reasonable intro rate: $4 a month for 6 months

2 The intro rate expires and goes to $25 a month.

3 I call the number to cancel, say I am canceling because expense

4 They offer the intro-rate again to keep me, I accept

5 goto 2

Lately, however, I haven't even had to call someone. I just go through their webapp and it automatically offers the intro rate again. I suppose that if I decline that, I would have to talk to someone, but I really like the NYTimes and $4.24/month is reasonable to me.

And yes, I think they do have some sense of desperation chasing them. It costs money to do what they do and newspapers are a hard business.

By the way... if the OP really doesn't want to bother with a subscription, many public libraries offer digital access in the form of 72 hour passes to the NYTimes, the passes are unlimited. I realize that public libraries aren't cool for the libertarian set, but it is a viable option. There are tons of other newspapers and magazines available to read online for free too through your public library (needs a library card though).

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).

In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.

With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.

Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.

Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!

  > When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...

That's fine, I guess, if your idea of "success" is apple-scale product home-runs (good luck with that).

For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.

> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?]

The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.

In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.

Beyond a certain amount, the actual number becomes meaningless especially for people who already have dynastic wealth not even counting this. It's just what they happened to negotiate.

It's quite a retirement package.

A lot of this is a matter of taste and judgement.

In the same way that it's possible to have an xml/json/yaml/toml config that creates despair in those who have to maintain it, a python or bash script can grow into a monster in the basement.

Or, it could be a cogent script that makes its intent and operation obvious. I prefer that when possible.