matthewdgreen

Relatively low cost. The cost of PV has dropped much faster and they’re building much more of it, even compared to their plans from a decade ago. SMRs are supposed to be the design that solves this, essentially moving nuclear into the same “build it at mass scale in a factory” footing that solar PV is on. But solar is deep down the production curve and SMRs are just beginning it.

They have an entire model trained on plenty of these reports, don’t they?

Of course there are conspiracies in the world. The problem with “conspiracy theorists” is not that they’re wrong about the existence of organized conspiracies, it’s that they’re so routinely, 180 degrees wrong about the specifics, and so easily mislead into being useful idiots.

For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.

Or anything that boosts Akkermanskia.

Say more?

Other random LV fact: Louis Vuitton was a lock maker, and the locks he made were advertised as “unpickable” (more advertising than reality, sadly.) He even had Houdini try to pick one. No, this has nothing to do with TFA, but I like locks.

I dislike this project where we venerate folks who made one major contribution. The scientists in my field that I respect the most are the ones who followed their early work up, both with further strong (additional) scientific contributions, and/or (as they moved out of the active phase of their scientific careers) with good mentoring and policy contributions.

It looks like Watson did some of the latter, then did his best to reverse all of his work:

  “I really don’t know what happened to Jim,” said biologist Nancy Hopkins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in the 1990s led the campaign to get MIT to recognize its discrimination against women faculty. “At a time when almost no men supported women, he insisted I get a Ph.D. and made it possible for me to do so,” she told STAT in 2018. But after 40 years of friendship, Watson turned on her after she blasted the claim by then-Harvard University president Lawrence Summers in 2005 that innate, biological factors kept women from reaching the pinnacle of science.

  “He demanded I apologize to Summers,” Hopkins said of Watson. (She declined.) “Jim now holds the view that women can’t be great at anything,” and certainly not science. “He has adopted these outrageous positions as a new badge of honor, [embracing] political incorrectness.”

I started a company during COVID and we hired: one engineer in SF, one in NY, three in different areas of Israel, plus co-Founders in Boston and Baltimore. There’s no way we could have hired all this specialized talent in any one city at a price we could afford. I also missed the in-person dynamics, but I can’t imagine how you’d build this kind of team without remote work.

I have intense anxiety attacks on atorvastatin. Rosuvastatin at the low dose (5mg) doesn’t do much, but at 10mg and 20mg it caused the same effects. It took years and multiple cycles of going on and off the drugs to become confident this was the problem. I switched to Repatha which doesn’t have this problem (it does make me a bit hungry though) but it’s expensive and it took a while for my insurance to approve it.

Whose incentive? All the major drugs are generic now and (at least my) insurance pays for them without even asking for a co-pay.

The general advice is that the scans are only useful sometimes. That is, they can show a problem. But a clear scan doesn’t mean you’re fine. So don’t base anything on a clean scan, be proactive with all the rest of it. My two cents, by the way: Repatha is pretty amazing.

Health insurance that can discriminate against people based on pre-existing conditions rapidly becomes health insurance you can’t use. Sure, it’ll be cheaper for a few years. Then, with non-negligible probability, you’ll develop a serious condition. At that point the cost becomes anywhere between “high” and “infinite”. If the point is just “private insurance is dumb”, sure, I mostly agree.

It's only a problem if (1) the immigrants in question behaving in a dangerous and criminal fashion, or (2) you need to urgently deport millions of peaceful, non-dangerous immigrants in an extremely short period of time, and you don't care about the harm this does to society.

Obviously in case (1) you can just detain and carefully identify people, since they're actually doing dangerous things and you'll have probable cause to detain them. Note that this was the case that nearly all the 2024 election rhetoric was focused on (i.e., deporting the "rapists and murders".)

In practice we're seeing that the true goal is (2), rapid emergency deportation and arrest of non-criminal immigrants. There is absolutely no emergency that requires this to be done quickly or carelessly, such that there's any risk to US citizens' (or immigrants) civil rights. It can be done carefully, with strong evidence, without violating civil rights. But of course, violating civil rights and creating disorder appears to be the goal.

Today I watched a video of a US citizen being dragged out of a car and arrested because ICE ran into her car. She was held for the better part of a day without medical care. So no, I'm not going to assign highly-optimistic data-free priors to the masked agents operating these agencies, nor am I going to assume that (for the first time in my experience) a hastily-assembled government database is accurate.

You're free to hope for these things if you want. But hoping does not make them true.

Fake documents are a problem for immigration enforcement officials. They are a problem that makes immigration enforcement harder, and requires officials to be more creative. They are not a problem for me, a legitimate US citizen, such that they require my rights or freedom to be curtailed in any way. And let’s be clear: that’s precisely what TFA is talking about: an unreliable, unauthenticated database that officials will believe over my legitimate and truthful statements of citizenship, and over my legitimate and truthful presentation of US citizenship evidence.

As I said in a different comment, we US folks have decided as a society that we don’t want to have mandatory difficult-to-forge national ID. When asked this question democratically, US voters and their representatives have repeatedly* turned down this option and explicitly banned the Federal government from issuing Federal ID cards outside of optional passports for international travel. We made this decision precisely because we distrust the sort of Federal government that would require us to carry that sort of document. There is nothing accidental about this, and you can find explicit statements of this bipartisan consensus all over real Federal legislation; there’s really no possibility that we did this by accident or without due consideration of the tradeoffs.

You’re correct that this lack of standardized documentation makes the immigration enforcer’s job harder, since they can’t just force people to produce proof-of-citizenship on demand and they can’t detain US citizens, and they can’t necessarily trust every paper document they’re given. I’m sympathetic! But that’s the tradeoff we’ve made as a society. The answer is not “throw out the rule book and risk depriving citizens of their rights because our job is hard.” The answer is: respect the rules you were given and due the best job you can without depriving US citizens of their rights.

And PS this situation is hardly unique: we also make ordinary cops’ jobs harder by requiring them to respect suspects’ civil rights and demanding probable cause to make an arrest. It’s tough! The result there is that cops have to work harder and be smarter; they don’t just get to detain anyone they want just because they might vaguely hypothetically be a criminal.

Maybe the plan is to buy up all the companies that currently pay them for ads?

Apple claims to have implemented an entire second security level for their Bluetooth apps based on iMessage, but I trust it not at all.

(To be clear, I trust the iMessage protocol with reasonable confidence. I judge the probability that Apple has applied this extra layer of security uniformly to all sensitive data to be about 8%.)

With due respect, that problem is on CBP. I am somewhat (albeit decreasingly) sympathetic to the unique challenges that immigration enforcement agencies face in the US. We live in a country where the citizens have decided democratically that no US citizen will ever have to carry proof of US citizenship, and moreover, that national ID and standardized proof-of-citizenship passports should not even be mandatory for citizens to possess, let alone carry. We even decided that the Federal Government should be explicitly banned from creating those forms of ID.

We made these decisions for various reasons, but broadly because the voters felt that US citizenship and lawfullness should be presumptions, rather than something you had to prove in order to enjoy your rights as a citizen.

For an immigration agent, this is really tough. You have to identify unauthorized immigrants in an environment where you can't just require lawful citizens to carry ID or proof of citizenship. You legally can't arrest or (more than briefly) detain a US citizen for failure to carry citizenship documents. You have to walk on eggshells even with actual unauthorized immigrants, to avoid violating the law. And our proof-of-identity document systems are deliberately decentralized and unreliable, so you can't just check a master database. It's a tough problem!

But that's the way the cookie crumbles. We designed our society to make this kind of "papers please" enforcement difficult, which means that immigration enforcement needs to be smarter and more savvy, or else we need to actually change the laws. What ICE and CBP are trying to do now is just to ignore the law, and that doesn't work. Citizens' built this law to protect their rights; you can't just take away those rights because CBP have a tough job.

You are describing rules that pertain to non-citizens. U.S. citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship ever and they can't legally be arrested or detained for this. The most that legally ICE can do to a citizen is briefly stop them to ask questions. Anything beyond that is an illegal arrest, full stop.

There is a lot of constitutional law here, not a lot of ambiguity. While mistakes happen, and ICE is clearly becoming more eager to violate the law (see TFA), that doesn't mean we should be unclear about what the law says. In particular, prioritizing the (incorrect) results from an app over any sort of claim or presentation of proof is illegal.

The correct answer is that you’re a US citizen unless proved not to be. That’s how the US has always worked, since we’ve made a long-term societal decision not to require papers or allow extrajudicial treatment of our people. This app and everything behind it is foundationally wrong and unamerican.

I mean, how did you expect them to build this? The goal is clearly to build an infrastructure that can be easily used to persecute US citizens, so you can’t let details like actual proof of citizenship get in the way.

These gambling businesses specifically target that 25M. You absolutely can make that much harder for businesses to do, and it will significantly reduce downstream misery.

These services make a relatively smaller piece of their profit from "responsible" people with a lot of self-control. In many cases, the business is probably not viable without problem gamblers. Problem gamblers account for anywhere from 51% of revenue for sports betting apps, to 90% in the case of casinos [1,2] and the numbers seem to be getting worse.

[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN... [2] https://www.umass.edu/seigma/media/583/download

Leaving aside the obvious governmental influence in this “private company’s decision”, we, as a democratic society, have the right to decide when and if the two major smartphone OS makers have the right to ban apps. We even have the right to decide whether those exclusive app stores should exist. Whatever I thought about this matter before, my feelings are different after this decision.

“The large changes within the planned power capacity mix highlight the impact of the sudden swing in federal government energy policies following the reelection of U.S. President Donald Trump.” Globally renewables are absolutely dominant. Even the changes in the US are taking us from 7%/74% new to something still pretty lopsided.

We sort of are paving the earth with panels, depending on your definition of “we”. Globally we installed 380GW nameplate just in the first half of this year and will probably match that in the second half.

If you take this thought process even farther, specific words and phonemes should occupy specific slices of the tradeoff space. Across all languages and cultures, an immediate warning that a tiger is about to jump on you should sit in a different place than a mother comforting a baby (which, of course, it does.) Maybe that even filters down to ordinary conversational speech.

I worry about it. I do tend to wonder if it can change your relationship with addictive and maybe risky behaviors, does it also potentially make you into a more conservative (not politically) person? Does creativity and risk tolerance go down as well?

Not useful for much in the real world, but extremely useful for online age verification.

I’ve been involved in research that lead to major changes in TLS deployments across the Internet and so I can tell you that (1) research absolute can and should be structured to drive security improvements! You’re crazy if you think that isn’t an important goal. And (2) the way you structure, identify and disclose findings matters a lot when considering how well you achieve this goal.

Just to give an example of effective change-driving work: I would argue that persistent efforts via tools like Shodan and Censys have done a huge amount to clean up the Internet, at least as compared to one-off research efforts followed by “appoint activists to do the rest.” The reason is that companies respond to persistent measurement campaigns in a way that they don’t respond to one-off PR dings.

Most of the research you cite is pretty obscure and you’d have to search for it. Most of it didn’t get a lot of follow-up. When some of the firms with unencrypted backhauls were contacted by the current researchers, they didn’t even know that their backhauls were unencrypted. Finding and communicating this stuff, then following up on it relentlessly is the difference between “we knew and nobody did anything” and “it got fixed.”

Also don’t think for a second the vocal political types can do this work without constant communication from researchers who are willing to continue this work over a period of years.