generj

The ideal situation in an invasion for Taiwan is for the US and Europe to have just enough cutting edge chip production to be able to produce missiles and jets.

But not enough capacity left for anyone to get new phone, laptop, or PlayStation for potentially years unless Taiwan is defended. Nor enough capacity for data centers so corporate HQs also demand action.

A lot of the weight loss is likely to be in muscle and bone mass. It’s extremely difficult to work out in zero-G.

For any US Citizens renewing a US passport: if you want a national ID that fits in your wallet, you can pay $30 and get a passport card. They are a no brainer upgrade to a passport application or renewal IMHO. Cost is a bit higher due to a $35 application fee if you are getting them separate from a passport book but I think they are still worth it.

They can be used for land and sea entry to the US. They serve as ID on domestic flights and for I9 employment verification.

Many countries technically require you to always travel with national ID or require it for traveling on trains (since they have national IDs, unlike the US). But passports are bulky and American travelers have been taught to leave them in safes or buried in bags where they are hard to steal. A passport card can be kept on hand 24/7 in case a national ID is needed.

In the event you lose your actual passport after traveling abroad, they would save a ton of time at the embassy since you have a form of passport already on you. Compare this to the panicked alternative of trying to get a replacement with a photocopy of your passport (which standard travel advice says you should have for this reason) and somehow getting a birth certificate.

I loved the M.C. Escher museum. The art-deco decor of the building is on display nearly as much as Escher’s work.

I also highly recommend going to Rembrandt’s house/studio in Amsterdam.

There is some evidence getting people to vote earlier results in them being more consistent voters over time. And they would potentially be fresh off a civics class.

I’ve used a similar technique to create a git history for configuration files in an AWS S3 bucket that has version control enabled.

I thought it was more using their router, especially over time. They charge $15/month for the router/modem which doesn’t sound too bad, but is $180/year on a device that retails for $180 or so. And they’ll happily keep charging that, forever - long past when their costs and a reasonable profit have been made.

They also force you to share your cable/wifi connection with other Xfinity users who are near you. Buying your own router and modem is a much better deal.

Anecdotal, but from a friend (not wealthy) who lived near Jackson as a young adult the largest, most extravagant homes would not be considered vacant. He interacted with caretakers that lived permanently in one of the homes. This is especially important in the winter because temperatures can be so harsh in the Jackson / Teton / Yellowstone area. It was worth it to the owners to avoid any risk of a water pipe bursting. Apparently the caretakers told him utility costs alone for the McMansion were over $5,000 a month.

So clearly vacancy taxes can be gamed after a certain point of wealth. But I think they still would be effective at reducing the number of vacant properties because the bar to hire employees to exclusively live at your property to care for it is so high.

Incidentally my friend’s experiences in Jackson were influential in shifting him away from the libertarian mindset his parents raised him with. The realities of observing the wealth gap really troubled him.

The argument I remember goes something like this (and I could be remembering it wrong).

They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access.

The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty fee in the contract once the gas hadn’t been moving for X number of days.

The line between Kiruna and Narvik is so beautiful I’m not sure why you’d want it to go faster. The speed is heavily dictated by the number of tunnels and turns due to mountainous terrain. It couldn’t be much faster without very expensive kilometer long tunnels.

Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.

A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.

The real justification for browser engine restrictions is not battery life but security.

If you look at any iOS vulnerability reporting, Safari is a big weakness and often the source of zero day attacks. Browsers are hugely complex pieces of software with a lot of attack surface. A large part of Apple’s value proposition is being secure. It sounds like the new approach (in the EU only) that allows additional browser engines requires specific security measures to be taken.

Rightly or wrongly device security is going to be a strong defense Apple has against some of these allegations.

I think it’s interesting this is one of the first large anti-tech anti-trust lawsuits that has actually materialized since the FTC/DOJ signaled interest in going after these giants.

Perhaps the case is less complex and this could be brought earlier? Or there were some really damning things in discovery proving other justifications Apple has (security, performance, etc) are secondary to punishing competitors products.

The case for consumer harm is much more vague than what other firms are doing in my view. iMessage incompatibility with Android group texts is going to be remedied and maybe deserves a slap on the wrist.

And when shuttle was developed, printers barely existed. Both inkjet and laser desktop printers were introduced commercially 1-3 years before the shuttles first flight in 1981, and weren’t very reliable yet. Desktop printers still aren’t as reliable as a teletype or dot matrix printer. There’s a reason airlines use dot matrix for printing flight manifests at the gate.

Ink plotters, teleprinters, and fax machines ruled the world. But plotters are dreadfully slow at writing text. Radio fax machines may have been viable if they were rugged enough. But they probably weighed as much as the teletype and were much slower - only real advantage is printing diagrams and photos.

Right it clearly was the best choice for the time the shuttle was developed but just shows how removed from the 1960s and 70s we are today.

My earlier point about payload weight was probably the wrong focus. Mission success and maximizing what the crew can accomplish in orbit are greatly facilitated by one way text from ground control, and doubtlessly paid for the 60 pounds

Astronauts were already used to Telex weather reports as pilots so existing UX. And the crew specialists all had PhDs and thus were experts at reading typed paper. So no training on yet another shuttle subsystem.

The teletype could be effectively shared between crew - just tear off the paper. A portable computer could only be used by one or two people, AND would need to be radiation hardened and aerospace qualified.

I am fascinated they used 60 pounds and a large amount of space for this teleprinter. At 30K per pound of payload that is $1.8 million per flight. Really shows how important reliable printed updates were considered.

And all the flaws of the printer that were managed around - turning it off to save power and prevent it overheating with specific tones.

I agree with you, but Apple benefits from inserting as much ambiguity as possible.

For example they previously unpaused X ads, but their ad spend has to be much smaller than previously. After yet again applying the pause stick, later as a carrot to X they can publicly “unpause” again but privately buy only $10K of monthly ads. They don’t get the opprobrium of looking like they have an animus against Musk with consumers who buy iDevices and also like Musk’s culture war issues.

If Apple doesn’t have a client relationship with “X” it is probably easier for them to publicly justify enforcing App Store policies.

Zero chance Artemis is ready in 2025.

If we are lucky it will be before 2030.

There are probably many possible methods to detect a picture being of a display rather than the real world. The easiest clues are depth of field and focal length metadata mismatching (presumably a macro lens or similar would be needed, and also presuming lens metadata is not spoofable and included in the signed metadata). Color accuracy will be subtly off. Cameras can detect more dynamic range depth than most (any) screens can create particularly for outdoor scenes. That’s just what I can come up with right now - scientists will have a field day publishing techniques to detect pictures of screens.

Inserting fake sensor readings is plausible but complicated enough I doubt any but state actors would or could bother.

Even this standard only raises the cost to create fake images to 100K would be fantastic for journalism and democracy. Much better than the cost being $0.

The main issue at play, from what I read in this story [0], is worry he will gum up the trail by saying everything was on the advice of his lawyers. Which would then require hauling the lawyers in and clarifying they of course never told their client to commit fraud or “borrow” billions of dollars of customer money.

>> One decision for Kaplan is whether Bankman-Fried will be allowed to blame FTX lawyers when the jury is back in the courtroom. As we previously wrote, this is called an "advice-of-counsel defense" in which SBF could argue that he sought advice from company lawyers, received advice that his conduct was legal, and "relied on that advice in good faith."

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/sam-bankman-frie...

I genuinely chuckled out loud, thank you.

More substantively I wonder if he will try to argue his use of the money towards effective altruism made fraud OK during sentencing - surely the money was better spent on charity rather than remaining with the credulous.

Why he’s a modern day Robin Hood! And who could be more deserving of charity than himself?

I also deeply enjoyed my Nokia Lumia.

They clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off.

I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in.

It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succeeded. Windows 8 UC targeting tablets and native apps was a disaster and ate up a lot of goodwill. With tablet PCs and netbooks Microsoft had the right idea too early and with poor technical implementation.

By only listing three examples, I am suspect that you do understand the definition of genocide.

There have been many, many more than three genocides in modern times. Since the Armenian Genocide qualifies as modern, anything post 1913 or so qualifies - that’s a minimum of 33 Genocides [0]. The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in about 50 million deaths (probably using a more flexible definition of genocide) [1].

There are at least three ongoing genocides right now: Rohingya, Uyghur, and Darfur. Toss on Ukraine onto that list (forcibly transferring children of the group to another group is genocidal, and they have been doing that). Azerbaijan genocide of Armenians is also happening though it hasn’t been as broadly confirmed yet.

But many people argue the Genocide Convention has too narrow of a definition, and excludes things like the Yemen civil war, the conflict in Palestine / Israel. A review of the ten steps of genocide by Genocide Watch finds 6/10 steps are being followed [2].

“Imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group”, such as denying entry of food, is a qualifier of genocide under the Genocide Convention. The current level of food imports into Gaza is low enough that this is arguably a true accusation. It doesn’t matter if Israel does this unilaterally or alongside Egypt, it’s still collective punishment and a war crime, and probably genocidal.

Apologies for Wikipedia links, but I saw three modern genocides and immediately knew that was wildly off. Better sources exist but these are sufficient to show much higher than three have occurred. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide [2] https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/genocide-emergency...

The flying public pays Homeland Security / the TSA a $5.60 fee to check ID and perform screening.

The cost to the concert going public of ID verification would probably be a lot lower than the costs scalping imposes. And the concert venues could certainly capture more than $5 per concert goer by raising prices closer to what the typical person actually pays.

I’m a big proponent of open source hardware but as your post shows it often involves skills of many disciplines that requires vigorous thought or trial and error. Electronics and physics are unforgiving in a way processors are not.

Even after reaching the prototype phase, the open source hardware is probably only useful to one person: it’s creator.

There is a big difference between making a prototype and detailing the build in sufficient detail other hobbyists can replicate it / modify / use it. Documenting hardware is substantially harder than documenting software. If the project is cool a bunch of people will be excited to jump in; some of these people have zero experience soldering or ordering laser cut parts or whatever. Supporting them is hard.

Then another step up to sell the design to other hobbyists, even just a few extra copies on Tindie.

And then a huge step up from that to selling to the general public, where suddenly FCC interference certifications are needed and the company is liable if the design burns down a few houses. There’s a reason firms making hardware have real engineers on staff held to professional standards. Plus all the cash flow and business concerns when the marginal cost per unit isn’t under 1 cent like software.

Each of these steps often involves multiple iterations of hardware and therefore lead time and cost.

What an incredible write up. Detailed without being boring or glossing over too much of the technique.

This lawsuit, if successful, would have effectively ended the spam filter. Every spammer would have suddenly had some political connection.

Some solid reporting from the new 404 Media.

What legitimate use for a Telegram link in a Facebook/Instagram ad exists? Simply blocking or having heightened suspicion of ads linking to Telegram would stop much of these problematic ads (not the ones linking through Telegram via LinkTree).

If they are in a consolidated market they will just tell you to go ahead and chargeback…they’ll deny list you and make you pay a big fee when yo I get tired of their (lack of) competitors and come crawling back.

100% agree. Open source hardware is a marketing tool that can be highly effective. Adafruit is the master of this type of marketing (Pimoroni are pretty good too). They are selling an ecosystem of parts that enable making nearly anything. The idea of being a maker is everywhere on their site. It’s the difference between going to a wood working shop and a Home Depot - many of the products may be similar or even identical but the goal and the brand are different.

Sparkfun never fit as well in the maker space, and their move towards closed source isn’t surprising in light of their slow decline over the past few years. Their marketing is much more engineer focused, including their product selection.

Adafruit and Pimoroni have the bravery to make new product categories knowing the clones are coming but that they will capture enough of the market to succeed in them anyways. Neopixels are the prime example of this to me.

I love shopping at Adafruit. They make it easy to want to buy from them. It will just work, I know it will just work, and I know they have a library and an example project waiting for me.

I can get the “same” thing on AliExpress often for half or less (depending on the part). But not with the same fit and finish, not with a no solder hookup, and not this week. And if I do buy it on AliExpress I will use an Adafruit library with it. Open source means everyone using parts they introduced to the maker market is their customer, some just didn’t buy the part from them.

Open source helps their customers reverse engineer their products more than their competitors. Paying someone with actual electrical engineering background to read data sheets closer/better than me is well worth it. I’ll buy their parts, prototype with a few of them, and then make the combined form factor I want with JLCPCB. Adafruit even published many of the tutorials teaching how me to do this! They win by trusting their customer enough to let them go free, knowing they will come back.