michaelt

If a place has tornado drills and tornado shelters, it's a safe bet that tornados are at least somewhat likely.

Some safety and security measures have the effect of making a place feel unsafe and insecure, for this reason.

Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.

Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.

Is it just? No - it's just the nature of work.

Anthropic certainly isn't planning to take responsibility for Claude's mistakes - that's the user's responsibility. Describing everything as 'collaborating' is I think part of their efforts to emphasise the user's role in the process.

They could do with a dose of reality, IMHO.

Is a factory making 2GB RAM chips twice as productive as one making 1GB RAM sticks?

Because if manufacturing output is merely constant while chipmakers’ output has skyrocketed (on paper, as PCs went from 32MB RAM to 32GB over a few decades), other manufacturing output must have fallen a great deal.

I mean - yes? If you design a subtle duress pin that only hides certain things, users would have to choose what.

I myself want the bank apps, password manager and email to disappear without a trace, but I don’t care about the social media, photos or web browser history. Other people, though, will have different priorities.

A duress code might let me wipe my phone when someone holds a gun to my head and demands I unlock it. Problem is, there’s still someone holding a gun to my head.

With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.

But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.

Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!

When most sites do browser fingerprinting using audio, they use an 'OfflineAudioContext' - which unlike a normal AudioContext, doesn't run in real time and send its output to system's loudspeakers; instead, it runs faster-than-real-time and outputs to an AudioBuffer. So the browser can easily tell no sound is being played.

For example - you can tell the browser to create a 10kHz square wave, feed it to a GainNode then a DynamicsCompressorNode, output to a buffer, then hash the contents of that buffer - which gives you a browser fingerprint, because of subtle differences between browsers.

I want to know which vendor/model does best at my extracting-facts-from-text task? Which does best at my OCR-a-text-document task? Which can deal with a safe-for-work beach photo without a censorship system false alarm?

OpenRouter lets me run my tests against openai and anthropic and google and x and bytedance and qwen and llama, with a single sign-up and a single payment.

A single person who cuts back on time spent doom scrolling / tv watching / beer drinking to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices is ambitious.

A new parent who cuts back on time with their kids to teach themselves enterprise Kubernetes sysadmin best practices needs their head checked.

Imagine you make a widely hated product targeted at huge corporations. Workday, Jira, Oracle Financials, anything like that.

Then you find that all your users are using ChatGPT to automate their interactions with your product. Instead of your product being crucial to your customers' business and almost impossible to replace, it's turning into a dumb pipe connecting LLMs - and looking very much threatened.

After all, data lock-in is a core part of your business strategy.

Getting people to use your AI tool, though? That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.

Sub-millisecond jitter isn't perfect, but it should lock quite happily, you can get a lock on time sources with orders of magnitude more jitter.

Tracking people by their smartphones? Voters get smartphones out of it, and the state supposedly needs a warrant to track them (except when they don't). And they can always just not get one.

Tracking people's every purchase? Voters get credit cards, cashback, purchase protection and online shopping out of it. And they can always just use cash.

Tracking people's media consumption? Voters get free/super cheap ad supported media, the widest selection the world has ever seen. And they can still buy in stores with cash if they want.

Access to people's photos, no warrants required? Voters get great quality cameras on their phones, and free basic cloud backup in case their phones are ever damaged or lost. And you can always disable it.

An always-on microphone in every home? Voters get huge, incredibly cheap TVs with 4K netflix/Disney/whatever, incredibly cheap smart speakers etc. And the microphone only turns on when it hears certain things.

Flock's problem is they've done the big power transfer without providing the corresponding payoff, and too quickly.

Complete nonsense in practice, obviously - but political gold! Voters get all the same public services, lower taxes, and to think they're being responsible with money. And if you're a 65-year-old legislator, you'll be dead and buried before the consequences start to bite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

You can store 2TB for $14 per month; to fill that with photos you'd have to shoot 0.5GB/day for 10 years.

You can spend less - Google Drive and iCloud will offer 2TB for $10/month - but they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy.

Likewise Backblaze has an 'unlimited' backup option - but it's desktop mac-and-windows only, and it's selective about what it backs up - only 'user generated' files.

And yes, once your winter 'proper road bike' has mud guards, tyres with treads, and an all-weather-riding design people might start calling it an 'adventure bike' or 'gravel bike' instead.

I suspect this depends on the weather in your area - road cycling clubs near me often require mudguards for "winter club rides".

To be honest, to me it sounds like you don't want browser extensions then.

To me, directly messing with web page data and browser behaviour is the whole point of a browser extension - what else is a browser extension for?

And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same.

I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media, and almost all of my subscriptions began with me enjoying a generous free tier. And I've tried a number of micropayment systems but none of them seem poised to take off for various reasons.

[1] I don't pay for facebook, because fuck 'em

Modern social media is delivered through 'apps' which are like web browsers, except without ad blockers or privacy settings, and with push notifications to make them more addictive, and they only show one website, and they're each 5x the size of a web browser for some reason.

CEO: "I'm not sure I like the idea of us inviting people to hack us - or paying a 'bounty' to hackers holding a knife to our throat. Will they at least agree to a binding NDA and terms of engagement, in advance?"

CISO: "No, they won't."

CEO: "Well, at least if the hackers are in poor countries, a $500 payout for a critical bug will be plenty, right?"

CISO: "No, critical issues will be 10-100x that"

CEO: "Well will the average quality of these reports better than those we get from our hired pentesters?"

CISO: "On average these will be the lowest quality reports you've ever seen. But 0.1% might be gold. Oh, and I need to hire 3 more guys to sift through these terrible reports. Also our sifters might miss the gold."

CEO: "Oh. Well at least we won't be breaking the law though, right?"

CISO: "Uh, about that..."

And if you've got taxes like that on earned income - shouldn't people with unearned income pay just as much? If your tax on investment gains is too small, you end up with an economy where the salaried worker renting a house pays more tax than their landlord, who owns ten houses.

It's also complying with tax and employment laws in the country the hacker is in, to the satisfaction of your legal and finance teams.

Sure, in western-style legal systems you can call them a contractor and they can pay their own tax. Just don't employ them full time for long enough to trigger 'sham contract' rules that would make them employees.

But your corporate legal team doesn't have anyone trained and licensed to give advice on Tajikistan tax and employment law, so they can't approve this proposed contract without hiring an outside legal expert. And of course all suppliers, regardless of country, must agree to our anti-slave-labour policy which permits audits of...

One might say "skip that nonsense, just send the money" - but the larger the company, the more their in-house infosec becomes a load of uptight squares who love compliance and audit. And the kind of companies that can pay out five-figure bounties tend to be pretty large.

I'm sure it depends on the size of your readership, but in my experience these kind of offers are a drop in the bucket compared to the salary of an expert programmer - let alone someone who's had their company acquired.

I also felt that, just like you recognise that the blog boosted the reputation of your startup, that if a blog with my name on it started pushing snake-oil product or making sketchy SEO posts, that would have the reverse effect.

I'd leave it exactly as it is. If you want to pick it up again in a few years time, you can.

City fire departments, car seatbelts, motorbike and bicycle helmets, video doorbells/home CCTV, car steering wheel locks etc etc.

The dangers are uncommon enough that the vast majority of people will live their entire life without ever having their house burn down or crashing their car. But they're common enough that in a city of several million people, the fire department might attend 100 incidents a day.

Data centres are better neighbours than a steelworks, or a pet food factory, or a fish processing plant, or an oil refinery, or a big distribution centre. By the standards of industrial zones they're low noise, low smell, low traffic, low injury, low pollution, low disaster risk. Low jobs and low tax too unfortunately, but you can't have everything.

The thing is, data centres are often built on open fields. So from the perspective of locals it's not data centre vs dark satanic mills, it's data centre vs open countryside.