dgroshev

Problem is, "rational" is not objective. "Rational" is more like "consistent with one's goals (subjective) under one's perception of reality (subjective)".

When you're saying "Putin invaded Ukraine irrationally" you're implicitly projecting your own value system and worldview onto him.

Let's take goals. What do you think Putin's goals are? I don't think it's too fanciful to imagine that welfare of ordinary Russians is less important to him than going down in history as someone who reunited the lost Russian Empire, or even just keeping in power and adored. It's just a fact that the occupation of Crimea was extremely popular and raised his ratings, so why not try the same thing again?

What about the worldview? It is well established that Putin didn't think much of Ukraine's ability to defend, having been fed overly positive reports by his servile underlings. Hell, even Pentagon thought Ukraine will fold, shipping weapons that would work well for guerrilla warfare (Javelins) and dragging their feet on stuff regular armies need (howitzers and shells). Russians did think it'll be a walk in the park, they even had a truck of crowd control gear in that column attacking Kyiv, thinking they'll need police shields.

So when you put yourself into Putin's shoes, attacking Ukraine Just Makes Sense: a cheap&easy way to boost ratings and raise his profile in history books, what not to like? It is completely rational — for his goals and his perceived reality.

Sadly, people often fall into the trap of overextending their own worldview/goals onto others, finding a mismatch, and trying to explain that mismatch away with semi-conspiratorial thinking (Nato expansion! Pipelines! Russian speakers!) instead of reevaluating the premise.

There's nothing to "pwn", you can maybe turn some switch ports off or change your SSID. It doesn't do routing or firewalling, that's on you.

Aruba Instant On. It's Aruba's enterprise hardware with all knobs stripped and on a huge discount.

I suppose some people might find their use of a cloud based "controller" disagreeable, but I honestly think it's a plus — it's barely ever needed and it's one thing less to maintain.

I appreciate you removing your previous "So you posted a long whine" reply.

> Nope, I wouldn't have a clue - or care!

I find this just baffling right next to you talking about "greater intuition" or "intellectual curiosity". You don't care if your "intellectual curiosity" is feeding on complete misinformation?

You didn't do any "back-of-the-napkin math" (I did, but you, by your admission, don't care), you just took a plausible-looking factoid and run with it. It's equivalent to believing the first SEO spam listicle Google returned and calling it "intellectual curiosity" — worse, in fact, because at least there is a slight chance of an actual human checking those listicle "facts".

I believe the "process" you refer to is roughly:

- pay for GPT-4

- type a question in

- take the answer on faith

- post it elsewhere without doing any work to verify it

Is this correct? If so, I just don't think it's a good process. It also has no "back-of-the-napkin calculations" that you weirdly insist on, you didn't do a single addition in the entire "process".

This is incorrect, and I think this kind of low effort copy-paste of whatever ChatGPT came up with is actively harmful to the discussion. Honestly, I think this practice should be explicitly banned here.

> Distance: The average distance from Earth to Uranus is about 2.6 billion kilometers, but this can vary greatly depending on the planets' positions in their orbits.

Space.com (a relatively relatable source) thinks otherwise [1]:

> Because the solar system is in constant motion, the distance between Earth and Uranus changes daily. The closest the two get is 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers). At their farthest, they are separated by 1.98 billion miles (3.2 billion km).

…which works out to ~2.9b km.

We can also calculate it ourselves. Earth is ~0.15b km from the Sun [2], Uranus is 2.7–3b km from the Sun on average [3]. Thus the distance varies between 2.65b km and 3.15b km, which means the average is (again) ~2.9b km.

Not 2.6b km as ChatGPT claimed.

Which changes the result to 8.9 days.

Which is not a huge difference, but would you know any better if ChatGPT said the distance is 5b km?

[1]: https://www.space.com/18709-uranus-distance.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus

As an aside, "the Ukraine" has mildly offensive connotations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Ukraine#English_defini...

Who are those people? Regulators look at harm to other animals as well, and the fate of the herbicide is one of the most important considerations. Glyphosate in particular effectively binds to soil [1] and is biodegraded there by various bacteria fairly rapidly.

The fact that you are talking about "chemicals" in this generic way is what makes it chemophobia. There can be no serious point in talking about "chemicals" that can't even be defined, it's always irrational.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev2_02581...

What spoiled food has to do with it? If anything, it's a tautology, because "spoiled" effectively means "bad", when the process of "spoiling" is harmless we call it "blue cheese" or "kimchi".

"Things exposed to chemicals" is literally anything you see around you. Water is a "chemical". Glucose is a "chemical". Vitamin C is a "chemical". I don't understand your point.

No, I'm not saying that, how can you read my reply that way in good faith?

I didn't say anything about Hersheys either.

"Chemicals killing the crop" aren't inherently dangerous to your body, that's just chemophobia.

Best quality artisanal chocolate can easily kill your cat. Nicotine kills bugs and is benign in humans. Belladonna would kill you, but a goat can munch on it without much trouble. Lots of stuff is lethal to some species and harmless to others, "this chemical is so bad it kills plants" is as rational as "chocolate is so bad it kills cats".

Because we need to feed billions of people. Because doing that more efficiently not only saves labour and lives of people who would starve otherwise, but also land as we don't need as much of it, so it can be forests and grasslands and steppe [1]. Currently the most efficient way to grow plants on a massive scale requires using herbicides.

As we need herbicides for industrial agriculture, herbicides need to be judged against other herbicides, not in isolation. Glyphosate is fairly benign compared to other herbicides (compare to [2] for example), it's not "shit".

[1] In fact we are likely past peak agricultural land use https://ourworldindata.org/peak-agriculture-land

[2] https://labelsds.com/images/user_uploads/Atrazine%204L%20SDS...

You can't if you have even moderately complex storage (like an SQL database). There is only one version of that, and while you can make sure that you can run one other version in parallel, it's just one version and a lot of extra complexity.

"Estuary English" is the closest to the "default" there is today. RP is coded posh, Estuary is "vaguely from around London" without any particular colouring.

The set of meaningful sounds (phonemes) is pretty conservative though. They can be rendered very differently (and that's what we call "accent" in native speakers), but it's like moving a densely connected graph around in the soundspace — yes the particular sounds might shift, but it's the relation between them that encodes meaning, and that is preserved. In that sense "English pronunciation" does exist.

Aruba Instant On. Same hardware as their enterprise offerings, much lower prices, zero hassle.

VyOS on a passive Intel box for routing.

Which GDPR article did you have in mind?

Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898075

In particular:

> Optical to Orion (O2O) is a plan to do a lasercomm demo on one of the future Orion moon missions.

> When the Psyche spacecraft launches and heads to the asteroid belt (was supposed to launch in august) it will do the farthest (by far) lasercomm demo. I work in the group that made the SNSPD ground receiver. As my boss says, with a distance 1000x farther than previous space laser comm demos, closing the link is 1 million times harder...

> Fun fact: when the Phyche comm laser is pointed at earth, the size of the spot will be roughly as large as California. Even with the largest optical telescopes, the loss in this link will be insane. That's why you need single photon detectors.

> As you get to farther and father distances, one thing you can do is shift from on/off keying to large-M Pulse Position Modulation. This way you can save up the power on your satellite to send fewer but higher power laser pulses, each of which carries more bits of data. I believe the DSOC mission will go up to M=256. Meaning each pulse of photons received on earth will carry 8 bits of information based on when it arrives within an alphabet of 256 time bins.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904837)

I don't understand what you mean by "bootstrapping" in this context. If you can get your phone or computer randomly inspected and copied on the street, and then thrown in jail or executed for trying to avoid surveillance, there is no need for "backdoors" or "bootstrapping". The government just passes a relevant law and surveils, no need for fancy backdoors when you can do straight interception and bans.

Besides, "you need to protest RIGHT NOW so that you can delay total surveillance regime by a year or two if the government eventually turns North Korean" does not sound like a strong call to action to me.

This feels a bit redundant. If you were in a country taken over by dictators or terrorists, those dictators or terrorists won't hesitate to deploy a mandatory surveillance regime (see: Xinjiang), they don't need a leg up from the previous democratic government. If your country is not overtaken by dictators or terrorists, the "nothing to hide" argument stands.

This hypothetical situation is not made materially worse by the existing backdoor.

If you want to peek behind the curtain, "Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery" by Andrew Greenway et al [1] is full of advice and background on what it takes to launch and operate something like GDS.

Something that fascinated me: how they were planning the departure of GDS leadership years in advance. GDS had to push changes through, which means making enemies, which means eventually being squeezed out. So they just assumed that will happen and adjusted organisational structures, making sure there will be new leaders in place. Just incredible level of professionalism.

[1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Transformation-Scale-Strate...

The digital signature thing is an extension of the overall document culture prevalent at least in Germany and Eastern Europe (or maybe continental Europe overall?).

From what I saw, their legal and bureaucratic systems are geared to try to authenticate everything via physical means, be it signatures (that are supposed to be unique and not just an expression of intent), wet stamps, or (recently) digital signatures. On the contrary, UK works on trust and its legal systems, so you can (theoretically) sign a large money contract with a cross on a napkin, you can open a bank account with a letter from a "a person of good standing in their community" without ever holding a government issued ID, and you can sign contracts with a simple checkbox.

I really enjoy the latter. It's a bit messier, but also feels more humane.

The main issue is that there is no consensus yet on how the API should look like. Considering Rust's backward and forward compatibility promises, committing to an API is an extremely serious step, all the more difficult when it's not clear what the API should be.

Instead, Rust is waiting for patterns to emerge in the ecosystem, so that the universal API is compatible with all of them. It's a much safer route, but it also means waiting for the ecosystem to fragment. This is where we are now, but it's necessary and will get better over time.

Edit: async readers/writers are a good example, because it seemed trivial to set in stone, except now we have io_uring that might require the API to move to the kernel instead of just holding &mut.

There are probably hundreds to thousands of protesters protesting for different causes in London alone every weekend. CCTV tracking of protesters is just not happening, it's absolutely unrealistic. Besides, you don't need street CCTV for that, local police van-based CCTV on mass gatherings is already a thing all over the globe.

Stuff like Ring (centralised, pervasive, and already cooperating with authorities) is way more sus than CCTV on British streets.

The CCTV meme is completely disconnected from reality. There are plenty of CCTV cameras around, but they aren't connected in any way, most of them are private, and in reality the police mostly can't be bothered to try and access the recordings. American obsession with Ring-like cloud connected cameras and their dealings with police forces are way more dystopian than the reality of CCTV as practiced in Britain.

A good example is my partner getting pickpocketed on an empty tube train, which surely should make finding the person easy, right? Nope, the Met told me they'd need to go and pay the train maintenance company to retrieve the recordings from each carriage on the train, and they're not going to do that over a wallet.

In practice it works pretty well, because it implicitly sets a very high bar on the severity of the crime that would warrant retrieving dozens of recordings and tracing people through them. Skripal poisoning or murders get that treatment and are solved pretty quickly. Small scale crime (or whatever dystopian thought crime scenarios people imagine) doesn't.

The West does not. Major R&D effort went into laser based SHORAD that is basically free to fire, with units being already deployed. Besides that, good old C-RAM would take those out no problem.

…plus SEAD/DEAD are incredibly important and (AFAIK) there is only one air force on the planet that systematically develops and deploys tech and trains for it.

…until you need to market to people who didn't get a shipping last month, delay shipping until at least one recharge attempt, or ship before charging for customers you're reasonably sure will pay anyway.

Business changes, and putting rigid firewalls in place without seeing an established pattern of change and without established need for that is a bad idea.

One global database buys you a lot (easy data access, easy transaction consistency, simple locks, even transactional notifications), and you can take it very far performance wise, throwing that away just in case you might need more performance later seems unwise.

There is severe hindsight bias in play here. How many tables weren't problematic despite all those joins and just chugged along scaling fine? How many startups were bogged down by unnecessary complexity or trying to keep a semblance of consistency instead of shipping features and just didn't reach the scale when performance becomes a problem?

Joins are good, actually, and normalisation should be the default. It's much easier to keep things consistent by default rather than trying to make them somewhat consistent afterwards. When something becomes a problem there is a bunch of tools (from denormalisation or materialised views to specialised datastores) to deal with that, but before that it's just premature optimisation.

It's interesting how public discourse has those blind spots, with people talking about autonomous machines killing people as if it's some danger looming on the horizon. They are already here and have been around for decades, we just call them mines (some of which attempt to filter out unintended targets), missiles (anti-ship missiles were collaboratively and selectively targeting ships since the 80s), and torpedoes. Anti-radiation loitering munitions are effectively autonomous killer drones, and Harpy first flew in 1989.

Wider recognition of the fact would do good to the quality of the discourse. What exactly are we scared of, considering that we had decades of experience with these systems? How much truth is there to those fears? How much of it is shallow media driven emotion vs genuine risk?

It's not just $CURRENT-FLAVOUR-NOSQL. It's also doing custom transactions and locking on top and/or thinking in terms of eventual consistency. It's so, so much more complex than just SELECT FOR UPDATE/BEGIN TRANSACTION.