heartbeats

Surely, being literally banned kills the network effects quite quickly?

If they sense blood in the water, you'll have Eurobook in a week, and that's that.

This is not an accurate description of anything.

- Traffic analysis only works for a global adversary

- Feds would need to control a very sizeable chunk of the network to deanonymize your HS, and you can use your own nodes (also see Vanguard)

- "phishing attacks that grab your IP through any number of browser technologies" obviously do not apply to servers

- If Firefox would end, Tor would obviously have no choice but to re-write it all for Chromium.

There is a very simple way to deal with the agent. Just don't answer any questions. Open the conversation, and then respond with "I want to cancel my subscription", no matter what they ask. If they ask if you want some other service instead, don't say "no", say that you want to cancel your subscription.

But if you zoom in, it looks the same.

The easy way to do this is to just connect with netcat and send it from your home IP. If it violates SPF, it is all but certain to go into spam.

Sites hosted behind Tor do not reveal your external IP address.

These companies are providing critical infrastructure. If I run a business that's dependent on the phone lines and they cut me off, I'm entitled to a hell of a lot more than the monthly fee for my line. There's many businesses that are solely reliant on Facebook to earn a living. Should Facebook own them?

Now, see, I've been using Photoshop (and Premiere, and After Effects, and...) for all my life, and yet I've somehow never had this problem. Haven't had to pay a single cent, in fact.

With each new headline like this, I feel more and more satisfied in my decision. Why pay more money than you have to for the exact same service? Worse service, even - I don't have to bother with the DRM nonsense.

(reposting my comment) From my layman's understanding, the process is this:

1. Measure outside interference sources 2. Measure MRI of "nothing" 3. Use ML to estimate f(interference) = noise 4. Subtract estimated noise from signal

So the noise removal process has no awareness of brains, skeletons, etc.

Sure, but it's not like it has the potential for overfitting. From my layman's understanding, the process is this:

1. Measure outside interference sources 2. Measure MRI of "nothing" 3. Use ML to estimate f(interference) = noise 4. Subtract estimated noise from signal

So the noise removal process has no awareness of brains, skeletons, etc.

Why so expensive? Couldn't you just site it way out in the boonies? If you put it on a giant purpose-built concrete cube, it seems like most of this stuff becomes cheaper.

If I recall correctly, some of the Chromebook models had 3:2 screens so you could get "more web on the screen".

This is ... not true, though?

Consumer goods are more expensive in most of Europe, sure, but that's because of VAT - after adjusting for VAT, the price is usually the same.

This makes sense if you consider that customer protection usually covers (1) returns and (2) defective goods. Returns are not exactly a cost to the retailer - they can still sell the merchandise, and replacing defective goods obviously only applies if you stock them. If you weren't selling bad goods, you wouldn't have that problem.

> the amount of time writing software is almost always going to be dwarfed by the maintenance period for software that makes it to production.

Oh sorry, I meant it the other way around!

So, I mean, I've seen this in scripts that I wrote to "quickly do some stuff".

1. Write the easiest possible implementation you can think of, just string together code in the REPL until it works, then put it all into a .py file

2. Some new need arises. Make the easiest possible change that causes it to work, like adding a new switch that completely changes the control flow.

3. Some new bug arises. Make the quickest possible change that causes it to work, like running the entire program in a while-true loop in case it crashes.

4. Continue along this manner until half of the code is commented-out garbage.

5. Rewrite.

There's no need to make it a thing of beauty, because it's easier to just scrap it and rewrite it. For the short term, making a "quick fix" is nearly always better, and for the long term, running a buggy piece of shit might still be preferable to spending good money to rewrite it.

(Also, the good stuff often already exists as open-source software, so it's only the hyper-specific stuff that's proprietary, and that will be closely tied to business needs.)

It's intentionally built to be crap. If your requirements are constantly changing, you want to be able to turn on a dime. If you have "nicely architected" software, that's going to be a lot of work. If the "software" is just a folder of Python files and some shell scripts, adding in some hack to meet some business need is very quick work.

In mathematical terms, the ratio of A - the amount of hours spent writing the software to B - the amount of hours spent running the software is going to be very high. It doesn't make sense to spend two hours to fix a bug, if you can just spend ten seconds applying a workaround, unless you'll run it more than 720 times within its intended design lifespan.

In other words, then, China is doing this for no discernible reason, and the US is just being kind in pointing out how they are harming themselves?

Why would the US not sponsor terrorists in China? Some separatism would do good to distract them, like the US wasted trillions on Afghans.

Not if their adversary went from 500M to 200M at the same time.

You're considering moving because you'd have to spend a day setting up a post box and new analytics?

You don't think you're being a wee bit dramatic here, homie?

Google could trivially re-domicile to Ireland if they wanted to. Just do a reverse merger, and have the services within the US provided by Google LLC, which becomes a subsidiary of Google Ireland Limited.

> That’s the only illegal thing they do

What about the cookie popups, with the "accept" vs. "more info" choices? Is that legal, then?

Hetzner, OVH, Leaseweb, Scaleway. How many cloud providers do you need?

Web 3.0 is The Phantom Menace.

> Launching the nukes would be bad for whoever they blew up, but bad for whoever launched them, too, particularly if whoever they launched them at launched their own.

Yes, but it wouldn't hurt them in terms of power. Here's Mao:

> I'm not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn't matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left.

> If the US were to release all the wrongly-convicted brown-skinned people, would that be good for China and bad for the US?

It would presumably be neutral; the US either does it for some reason, or for no reason. If they do it for reasons of social stability or keeping crime low, it would hurt them. If they do it out of laziness, corrupt legal systems, etc, it would be to their gain.

> if China stopped abusing its Uyghur citizens, that would ... arguably [be good] for the rest

If so, why keep doing it? And why do they have to be told by the US to do what is good for them? Is the US in the habit of giving countries "helpful hints," like a back-seat driver? When the US encouraged the Soviet Union to abandon its economic system, did they do so out of concern for the well-being and economic standard of ordinary Soviet citizens, or for some other reason?

> I don't think we are harvesting them for transplant organs.

The organ harvesting stuff is not exactly proven:

> According to a unanimous determination by the China Tribunal in May 2020, China has persecuted and medically tested Uyghurs. Its report expressed concerns that Uyghurs were vulnerable to being subject to organ harvesting but did not yet have evidence of its occurrence.[240][241][242][243]

Grant that they're putting them into labor camps and re-educating them, but harvesting their organs? This is some comic-book villain type stuff. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> massive project

What project? Do you mean how it reacts against sanctions that try to divide the country, in much the same way as Israel does, or for that matter the U.S. would, if someone were trying to put sanctions on prison labor?

> US is not going to sponsor guerrillas in Xinjiang, under any circumstances.

...because? Because the US loves and values the territorial integrity of China, or what?

> with no repercussions

If so, why are they doing it? For the sake of being evil?

Well, is it to defend against small, irrelevant third-world countries with a handful of nukes with barely functioning delivery systems, or is it to defend against large, serious places with serious arsenals? Because these are two very different goals.

If North Korea is a bad example for a thought experiment, then you should pick a better example.

As for China - surely the U.S. and China could come to a mutual agreement to reduce their nuclear arsenals?

It might be worth noting here that China's "rapidly expanding" arsenal clocks in at 350 warheads, while the U.S. has only a meagre 6,185 (barely 17x the size). If America is concerned about large nuclear arsenals, surely they could take the first step or three?

> A "no first use" policy is worth less than the paper it would be printed on.

In that case, its decision seems even stranger.

Unlike web1 and web2, web3 is a grift. In contrast, this appears to be a genuinely innovative technology.

There's no contradiction here. It's obvious that when the U.S. criticizes Chinese behavior, they do it in furtherance of some goal. Since power is a zero-sum game, assuming that it is happening, it follows then that stopping it would be beneficial to the U.S. and thus harmful for China. (If you're saying it isn't happening, then obviously China can't do anything to stop it, but at that point you're dealing with reverse conspiracy theories)

Now, why should China do such a thing, that will (from first principles) only harm it? It's possible to arrive at such conclusions, but only from the perspective of what is best for the U.S., not China.

The debate over the Uyghurs is actually just one large state trying to get the leg up on the other. People mustn't allow themselves to be used as pawns in a cynical game between others.

Surely, this is not a serious take.

For one, NK hardly has the capacity to "destroy" the US - they barely have working ICBMs.

Secondly, whatever the amount of nuclear warheads necessary to deter this is, it's surely less than 3,750[0].

We cannot know whether it is impossible to stop the "genie," as no serious attempt has been made. The U.S. and Russia together hold 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. The Cold War being over, are you seriously proposing they need this entire arsenal in order to defend themselves against the very serious and dangerous threats of checks notes Pakistan and North Korea?

If so, then how come the US still reserves the right to a pre-emptive nuclear strike? How come it has not adopted a "no first use" policy like China and India?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

You guys are talking past each other. It's (mildly) dishonest to point at any one event and say "this is global warming". It's entirely accurate to point at a single event and say "if it weren't for global warming, there would be a 1% this happened, but with global warming, it's a 10% chance".

It's like the Swiss cheese theory of accidents: accidents don't happen because one guy wasn't paying attention, they happen because one guy wasn't paying attention AND because the guy who was supposed to supervise him was off AND because the manager hadn't thought to call someone else in AND because the system designers forgot to add a rule for this AND the regulators because they forgot to require ...

There's a fine line to thread here. On one side, you're lying if you say that global warming was the sole, isolated cause of this. On the other side, you're criminally irresponsible if you forget to mention the fact global warming certainly was an important contributory cause.

Alex Jones is restricted from most mainstream media platforms; he is unlikely to ever attain a significant following again. He is unlikely to be able to purchase Internet access for his business, if it ever got big again. He is permanently consigned to irrelevancy.

The same goes for Donald Trump. After being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and any other platform, there is no chance of him ever being elected again. If he ran in 2024, the total information dominance his opponent would have is simply too strong.