generj

Or if you want more than 256 gigs of storage built in. The Mini’s pricing makes no sense at all if it’s not Base or with the M2 Pro.

I didn’t downvote but was tempted.

> I'd just as much prefer to use a social media platform that doesn't bend the knee to the government. Let the people decide for themselves what is useful information or not. We live in a representative democracy - this form of government is itself a safeguard against an ill-informed populace.

Over the past decade or two with social media we have increasingly seen people are NOT good at deciding what information is useful. A large percentage of the population believes wild folklore, conspiracy theories, etc. We used to live in a truth based society (with occasional issues when lies were presented as truth). We now have a post-truth society where alternative facts are invented at will and displace reality. Worse many of the peddlers of misinformation are just not harmlessly misinformed but know they are lying.

In times of extreme crisis, we do need a quick fix. There simply isn’t time to waste placating people who think injecting bleach will protect them from an airborne illness in a pandemic. We could have spent a decade giving everyone a Master’s in Microbiology and Epidemiology and still not convinced antivaxxers, because they aren’t swayed by facts but by beliefs that feel truthy to them.

The entire point of representative democracy is to avoid the pitfalls of direct democracy which prevents expert analysis and decisions. Modern society is complex enough it has to be guided by subject matter experts. Can you imagine if the simple majority of users of your software got to decide every product decision from now on? Or worse, you had to get approval from the 5% of users that are mad the app doesn’t display Sasquatch’s location?

Personal responsibility has never alone been adequate to deal with the externalities government is uniquely able to fix - war, natural disaster, famine, and pandemics. Collective action is required for these challenges (and more mundane ones like pollution and other externalities). Any society has to be able to balance between the rights of individuals such that a tiny vocal minority can’t overly endanger the continued existence of society. Doing that well, so that nobody is run roughshod over and everyone gets a voice is important. But in extremis we don’t care to compromise with people who are endangering the herd. Humans never have had much tolerance for that.

I say all this knowing authoritarian governments are often able to do their worst abuse in times of crisis. But politely asking Facebook to take down or spread-limit some misinformation that statistically will lead to death isn’t tyranny.

To points 1 and 2 this particular judge, amongst others, has been known to issue overly broad injunctions that reek of political bias.

The injunction is almost more the point of these cases.

If someone goes forum shopping, they have a decent chance of shutting down whatever Democratic policy they want until the injunction can be appealed. Or worse, a narrow injunction can conflict with a national injunction, which puts an administration in the position of choosing which binding injunction to follow. This recently occurred with an abortion drug [0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/07/1159220452/abortion-pill-drug...

Librarians are allowed to strike, closing down public libraries.

His setup was so nice.

Model building is such an interesting art form. Congrats to the builder for a fine project completed.

Analytics tracking pixels normally ARE GIFs, specifically a 43 byte transparent 1x1 GIF.

But most “GIFs” are not GIFs but rather Mp4, mov, or webm or some other compressed file format. Actual GIFs are extremely wasteful of bandwidth and not hardware optimized. The name lives on though.

Anyone who has worked in data knows this difference instinctively.

There’s a massive difference between the data being theoretically available somewhere in your organization and “trivially” accessible vs actually being able to run a query (let alone the work to actually run the query).

With that said the unbanked crisis is severe and there are big societal benefits to insuring everyone has a checking and savings account. There’s no reason robust safeguards can’t be built into the law establishing the Bank of the United States (Third time is the charm!).

Explosions are fun.

Once the stack was tumbling everyone in the SpaceX crowd knew the outcome (seeing as how they were standing behind Mission Control with better telemetry than is publicly transmitted they likely knew the rocket was going too slow or had too many engines out for an orbital speed test well before we did).

So yeah, cathartic big boom. Nobody got hurt, no customer cargo lost, company and their jobs aren’t at risk. Why not have some fun looking at the explosion then go back to work?

Paper and pencil doesn’t work in the US because of how litigious we are, and because each state operates their own elections. If every state ran elections the same way we could standardize on something like the UK has and have collective faith in it.

When some battleground states routinely come down to less than 1% of voters, incredibly marginal effects matter.

The US still has institutional trauma from Hanging chads.

Just look at all the varied reasons mailed ballots are rejected, especially in tight races.

With paper and pencil, what happens if a mark got erased? If the circle is half filled? If the circle is quarter filled? All of these are questions that will be the subject of lawsuits in a mix of jurisdictions.

Dominion in recent days has said they wanted an equivalent effort retracting the lies as was spent spreading them.

We’ll see if that was just posturing with what the settlement terms end up being.

It will be interesting to see what the terms of the settlement are.

I’m always amazed that firms go right to the brink of trial before settling. Sometimes the judge issues certain rulings that may lead a party to realize their odds are lower than hoped. But otherwise it seems like both parties wasted the court’s time when a settlement could have been reached at any prior point.

Settling often deprives the country of useful case law, or prevents bad actors from having to admit guilt. Totally understandable for the parties involved to take the sure thing rather than risking it all on a trial but it does negatively impact our society.

The advantage would be pre positioned orbital interceptors could effectively reach some percentage of missiles in the boost phase rather than later on when intercept is harder.

Starship also allows for enough mass to orbit to make Star Wars legitimately viable.

It makes sense, the restaurant makes less cash with online orders. Why wouldn’t they try to save whatever they can?

I wonder what portion of this is from biases caring for less about anonymous online orders. Seeing a human face might prompt an employee to stuff more chips or fries in that to go bag.

It could be powerful against non peer adversaries. There are only a few countries that track ballistic launches, and with luck they would be delayed relaying the information to whatever useful fool of theirs the US military is invading until after SpaceForce Starship lands.

But, to attack my point, the utility is very limited - essentially for special ops insertion an hour or so before all the conventional forces show up. A very expensive paratrooper insertion with the possibility of a one way trip.

Even then the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers banging the door down are probably too vulnerable to SAM during the last phase of flight. I guess the hope would be that operators would ignore or be confused by a massive radar blip traveling at high speed before the suicidal burn?

The more realistic case for Starship is shipping lots and lots of military tonnage to orbit. Rods from God are achievable if Starship reuse pans out, and those are truly perfect hour zero weapons before the stealth planes show up.

He didn’t have an insane mandate of Congress, which decidedly was going to impeach him.

It took some time and solid investigation but his party wholesale rejected him and made it clear he had no political future. Nixon was could either resign or be humiliatingly fired.

We no longer have a Congress which values country over party. There’s a good chance Trump could have murdered someone on 5th Avenue and he still would not have been impeached.

Worse it creates incentives to convict people who are likely to be political opponents to prevent them from voting. This practice also removes a voice from one of the most vulnerable groups in society, the incarcerated.

Like many things, it ties back to the failure of Reconstruction. Many felony disenfranchisement laws were passed alongside Black Codes. 7.4 percent of African American adults are disenfranchised compared to 1.8 percent of those who are not African American.

Constitutionally he doesn’t have an option right? States are required to extradite.

I mean the man is surrounded by federal law enforcers 24/7 who would be obliged to take him in so it isn’t an issue anyways.

And supposedly Trump is surrendering anyways, so it’s all moot.

Liquid Death is counter culture, deliberately rebelling against the status quo (and collecting a price premium for doing so). Even here they lean into conformity - their cans are shaped and styled like beer cans - partially for marketing and partially because that size of can was already made. The lettering on their cans leans into existing tropes about rebellious brands.

In one of my marketing classes I learned of 16 different archetypes brands mostly fall into. Usually all brands in a category use similar archetypes. You look at Liquid Death using an atypical archetype for the water category and see a unique clever choice. The author of this piece would probably decry that they use similar branding techniques to every other rebellious archetype brand.

It’s challenging but rewarding to buck category archetypes. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a niche for an aggressively branded toothbrush with an attitude problem.

Even a simple Levenshtein distance would do the trick for most of these product switches.

I’d argue intellectual property existed earlier than that, as soon as states (or guilds) considered certain techniques and skills exclusive to them.

Off the top of my mind, with a solely European view the Venetians moved glass production to Murano in the 13th century at least partially to make a monopoly on luxury glass. World History was awhile ago but other restrictions on technology transfer existed by at least 800 CE and probably in a limited sense well before 1000 BCE.

To pile on on other comments regarding the non viability of air launch rocketry, the only reason it makes sense is for rerouting launch locations based on weather.

The only customer needing an asset in orbit regardless of a weather violation is the military. The other bonus would be spreading out launch locations to essentially any airport rather than a few launch locations that could be denied by enemies.

However their desire for it hasn’t been enough to fund it. Even Astra (with a similar launch anywhere, whenever premise) hasn’t been robustly funded by the US military.

Right if you bank at a regional bank that isn’t connected to influential VC your deposits might still lose value.

So because they have one webpage giving lip service to diversity and the environment, they automatically don’t value their core competency?

I’ve seen a few conservative tweets trying to tie DEI and ESG into SVB’s collapse in a weird attempt to tie it to a cultural war. It just doesn’t make any sense. DEI and ESG are side shows for just about any company and probably pay for themselves as marketing and employee retention for a Silicon Valley focused bank.

The values “We keep learning and improving”, “We take responsibility”, and “We speak and act with integrity” would all play into managing money responsibly.

Correct, storing PII is against GA’s TOS. Which doesn’t at all mean it isn’t ingested somehow or another (and Google can trivially integrate it back to a person if they wanted to). PII is a very malleable term depending on the jurisdiction.

So long as website operators are creating URLs and the data layers published into analytics there’s no way to ensure the data is truly anonymized. It just takes one slip up with a username being placed into a query string, or some other small mistake. In many organizations marketing runs the analytics, and they try to do as much as possible without developers who might notice these types of errors.

It could be interesting to have browsers avoid sending user agents and otherwise minimize HTTP headers to a list of analytics domains.

As a kid, my parents got me a cheap AM transmitter toy that broadcast on 1610.

Cutting edge tech in the early aughts, it ran on AA batteries and had a tape player, a microphone, and an aux in. My broadcasts made it across the cul-de-sac from my room. It was immensely enjoyable.

I trust those who have summarized the video(s).

I have little interest in viewing an extended violent murder of a man. It’s not a matter of spending time to watch them, I don’t deal well emotionally with videos like this.

I didn’t watch ISIS execution videos either, but I trust there isn’t some conspiracy from everyone who did and summarized them.

How do you do the dithering?

He didn’t resist arrest, he was trying to comply with impossible orders.

They then immediately escalated to pepper spraying him, except they screwed up and got themselves instead (which enraged them). They also Tazered him and scared him badly enough he stopped attempting to comply and instead ran for his life.

I haven’t watched the videos, but from commentary I understand he repeatedly tries to de-escalate the situation and is bewildered at how angry the cops are at him. Police department has subsequently said there wasn’t even a valid reason to pull him over.

Probably with some sort of exception for certain things.

I don’t want a chatbot unable to reveal someone confessing to murder for example.

If I could wave a magic wand and fix only one (tedious, not actually important thing) all fonts will have slashed zeroes.

It’s especially tedious that URL bars do not distinguish between I and lowercase L’s.