mmooss

It's an interesting question. The Trump organization and supporters seem to make these mistakes relatively often. When Trump was challenging the 2020 election, many court filings contained obvious mispellings and other errors.

It's not politically significant - it's not a reason to vote against Trump. It is socially very curious: it's both unprofessional and weirdly malfunctional - almost any text creation platform flags misspelling automatically - and it's hard to explain how the behavior is widespread in a broad group. Rudy Guliani, for example, had been a real, serious attorney; how could he submit that work product?

That's an oddly disconnected fantasy about modern capital ownership.

Capital, including shares in companies, is greatly concentratred in a few people - the highest concentration in ~ a century. The money is going to those people. You might say they are benefitting from the war.

A great many other people don't own shares or retirement accounts. Studies show that ~50% of Americans can't cover ~$500 for an emergency (yes, liquid cash is different than a retirement account, but you can borrow or withdraw from it in an emergency).

Complexity and knowledge grow over time. It's likely that the last SR-71 and the processes and materials behind it were much more complex than the first. You have to recreate not only the first unit, but decades of added knowledge, skill, and complexity.

> how are they showing up in USPS and UPS databases?

Are you overestimating their validation capabilities? Maybe the validation just isn't that accurate or isn't always done, for efficiency.

I once desperately needed a (FedEx or UPS) package that was delayed. Tracking showed it in a facility about an hour away so I asked if I could pick it up there. I was told: 'It's not really there; our (customer-facing) tracking shows where packages should be.'

Their image of super-efficiency is for selling themselves. (If you are deep in e-commerce, you probably already know.)

> prokaryotes have been around a lot longer, so they’ve had a lot more evolutionary time to find perfect proteins for their perfect little uses.

I'm not sure that adds up: It's not that much longer - 500 million years out of ~3.5 billion?

And the evidence shows that Eukaryotes have evolved much faster and further - just look at the Eukaryota domain. And IIRC part of the reason is advantages such as 'sexual' [0] reproduction - rather than just splitting and (cloning?) DNA, combining chromosomes from two parents.

[0] If that's the correct term.

It's an interesting coincidence that in these situations, the same people always blame %vulnerable group%, often going as far as making up evidence. Why do that? I suspect the reason is the vulnerability.

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater! Apple has some impressive privacy technology for Apple Intelligence - including significant open source disclosure for public verification. If you trash them with the rest of the AI vendors, you deincentivize privacy for Apple and for the rest of them.

They describe it in great technical detail here (Private Cloud Compute (PCC) seems to be the server side of Apple Intelligence):

https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

.

At the heart of it, they provide these guarantees:

https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

* Stateless Computation: "Private Cloud Compute must use the personal user data that it receives exclusively for the purpose of fulfilling the user’s request. User data must never be available to anyone other than the user, not even to Apple staff, not even during active processing. And user data must not be retained, including via logging or for debugging, after the response is returned to the user."

* Enforceable Gaurantees: "Security and privacy guarantees are strongest when they are entirely technically enforceable, which means it must be possible to constrain and analyze all the components that critically contribute to the guarantees of the overall Private Cloud Compute system. For example, it’s very difficult to reason about what a TLS-terminating load balancer might do with user data during a debugging session, so PCC must not depend on such external components for its core security and privacy guarantees. ..."

* No Privileged Runtime Access: PCC is designed without privileged interfaces that might expose user data.

* Non-Targetability: PCC is designed to ensure that an attacker cannot target specific PCC users.

* Verifiable Transparency: "security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees."

If for-profit healthcare is allowed then it could be regulated like banking, with requirements to prevent failure (including requirements for financial health), and if there is failure, to ensure customers are protected and provide for continuity.

Like banks, failure of a healthcare institution can be destructive for its customers and the community. If a bank goes under, especially a significant one for the community, regulators see that it's acquired by a surviving institution - often with only a weekend of downtime.

> It's better for your local hospital to be taken over by a PE firm than to go out of business.

It's a false choice. The healthcare system has long dealt with and deal with that situation without private equity.

They are human institutions above all. Saying 'we're a corporation' doesn't at all absolve them from human traits, consequences, and responsibilities.

Thanks!

Thank you very much.

> in prokaryotes, they spin around their axis.

I read earlier this year about Berg's and Samuel et al.'s (and maybe others') amazing flagellar motor discoveries. I didn't realize they were only prokaryotes; the motor seems like a sophisticated mechanism.

The images and video clips are amazingly well done. It's so rare the serious publications take full advantage of the medium of a web page.

> Comb jellies are ancient marine predators whose hairlike extensions known as cilia refract light as they swim, giving them an iridescent shimmer. They are the largest animals known to use cilia for movement, ...

I've long wondered: What is the difference between cilia and flagella? I've found no authoritative source that differentiates them or that says they are the same (except one paper from decades ago that strongly implies they are the same). It seems like something insiders know implicitly and never bother explaining.

Because a clear distinction is lacking, I don't trust non-expert sources like Wikipedia to be consistent, tor to not confuse them or miss any nuance.

For what purpose? If you have a debit card, cash app, etc., what urgent need is there for a banking application?

A major difference, IMHO, is the abandonment of the rules-based, rights-based, international order. Within it, international war (as opposed to civil war) was nearly impossible - it hardly existed for generations. While you need to prepare for the worst, you need to work for the best, for progress, like so many generations before us in much more difficult circumstances. Preparing for warfare doesn't mean accepting it; we must also work for freedom, including a just peace. It doesn't happen without work.

Again in this era, reactionary and nationalist messaging has dominated and somehow, despite generations of extraordinary success, despite being born into it and seeing its success and superiority, many/most think such an order is infeasible or even undesireable. At the same time, I've seen American leaders in the military industry advocate for becoming accustomed to mass destruction and death.

And shockingly, even the experts and practioners abandoned it and at nearly the height of its success. It's as if a messaging campaign insisted cloud computing was impossible and absurd, and so everyone just stopped using what was obviously working. For the rules- and rights-based order, yes there were outliers and setbacks and threats; that's life. But the entire free, wealthy, industrialized world subscribed, and were untouchably allied, free, safe and prosperous. Now, having abandoned it, all those things have diminished.

What's missing is not acceptance of warfare but ultimate commitment and work for freedom and peace.

Yes, etymology is amazing. You carry tens of thousands of artifacts in your head.

Maybe you do or did really believe those things - lots of people do. There's nothing wrong with it. Saying 'I was joking' is maybe true, maybe it's just using a very common tactic for covering.

Would you expand on your experiences? Can you not share ideas now? What if you enhance them with an LLM before sharing them?

Stop treating AI companies and their software as somehow unconstrained, above-the-law actors. It's delusional that anyone buys that. Regulate them appropriately.

At the same time, mathematicians should be using sophisticated, specialized LLM tools in much more sophisticated ways than lay people. There should be no way lay people can compete. There are new tools to master and if you use your slide rule, you won't keep up. It's a chance for mathematics productivity to boom.

> Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train.

It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.

It's interesting and fun to implement this stuff; I totally agree. Emacs is amazing.

I worry people will get the wrong idea about security: The application used for decryption doesn't need to be the same as the one used for encryption, at least not for any serious attacker. That would be 'security through obscurity'. They need the encrypted text; they don't need Emacs.

More importantly, no matter who you are, that you implemented the encryption yourself (?) is a major flaw - unless you have a cryptography team that has matured the implementation over a decade or so. Nobody is good enough to do that by themself. As the saying goes, anyone can create an encryption routine that they can't break.

They could use an LLM to lookup your HN posts and then to wrangle Emacs. Or just decrypt the text in another application - I doubt Emacs is the only platform for whatever crypto method you use. M-x rot13 ?

> It's not "fascism" to wince and shrug at the taped banana.

Agreed, though your comment does much more than wince and shrug:

> too ridiculous to be seriously defended

Humans are very social animals and we follow social norms, like a herd moving together. Look how similar everyone's clothing is: Nobody is on 5th Avenue in a loin cloth or Elizabethan outfits (unless intentionally violating norms). Why do we all chose to wear the same things? We follow norms.

How do we signal and punish things outside norms, or shape norms to exclude something? Ridicule. Sophisticated public communicators consciously use it - you can see it in the way some conservative publications depict trans people. Their intent, through ridicule, is to push them outside norms - a foundation of facism, normalizing persecution and even brutality and murder. Facists also did/do that to art - it's the same thinking (though not everyone who ridicules art is a fascist - the fascists take advantage of that bit of human nature.)

In your comment you aren't just wincing and shrugging, but literally ridiculing (to be clear, I'm not calling you a fascist in any sense)

> It's just common sense.

Which means, common norms. There's nothing special about them; it's just a social phenomenon. Every innovator, including in tech, faces the usual response:

  - First they laugh at you (ridicule you)
  - Then they say it's not in the orthodoxy (if ridicule fails,
    you go from being ridiculous to being a threat to norms)
  - Then they say they knew it all along (you're now within norms)

The same happens with social change, like women working - Ridicule, then a threat to norms, then normalized. What was absurd becomes normalized. In art, Impressionists were once objects of ridicule; now of course it's arguably the most popular style of painting in human history.

> societies also have collective preferences

They don't. People try to make preferences look more universal to justify their own beliefs or simplify thinking, but it's always far more diverse. Look at how the Democratic party attempts to lump simple demographic groups (e.g., black men) into one stereotype of political thinking - and ~25% voted for Trump in 2024.

Societies do have norms, which are very changeable. Look how the far right has changed norms around the world in just a short time. It's not by accident - I've seen guides on how to normalize antisemitism, for example. The leading fascists in history, the Nazi party, had very consciously designed propaganda to do the same.

If someone wants to be an innovator (and have a truly free mind, IMHO), they need to step back and see norms, their dynamics, and what's beyond them, and learn to see what's outside without the filters, to treasure it as potential future innovation. To look at things on their merits, not at whether they are inside or outside.

At the debut of the first play by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming, much of the audience booed and left at intermission. Pinter, the great innovator, booed the audience. (Or so the story goes.)

Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.

While I agree that repeating a 60 year old achievement is pointless, one of NASA's goals for Artemis, etc. is having a platform for R&D for human exploration of Mars. There aren't other nearby large bodies on which, and around which, to work out and shake out all the new tech for Mars. R&D actually at Mars would be very expensive and slower.

Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.

An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?

I think that's an essential point, though maybe for a different reason.

I think the cause may be that most real estate developers are not students of architecture and also are looking to minimize costs and time. Even if the developer wants to build something beautiful, cash flow (burn rate) is a big problem: You borrow millions or more, and have no revenue for the entire time it takes to build the building. Getting credit is hard enough. Do you go more in debt, and possibly for longer, for the nice trim? Does the banker also care about architecture and see that as a good investment?

Also, the trim then and trim now probably were designed with the same thing in mind: Whatever is least expensive with current technology. For example, an architect once explained to me that interior trim, for example where the wall meets the ceiling, has a purpose - it covers flaws in the join. Modern techniques and materials allowed us to eliminate it.

Most importantly, speaking of innovation and technology generally, IMHE what you say is an almost universal experience: Often it's not the new thing that is the problem, it's that the old seems carelessly discarded. All its benefits and nuance; all the skill and expertise; all the deep understanding and appreciation that comes from generations and lifetimes spent developing and using it, that enriched our lives; all lost. Think of poetry, which used to be far more popular - now people barely read it much less have any deep understanding of it. People who would have been poets are now doing something else; who could even mentor you if you wanted to be a poet?

Interesting, I hadn't seen that; thank you. Though that is dated 10 years ago and they haven't done it yet, or not fully successfully. It might be challenging to identify third party clients, though maybe each app inevitably has a unique fingerprint.

> I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower

There might be some survivorship bias there.

> Ugliness has become a cultural norm

I love modern architecture (and art); I find many older forms to be garish, focused on pointless decoration and on wealth display, rather than on the beauty of function and form. The imagination of [some] modern architecture, starting from those fundamentals, is stunning.

You don't like it, which is just as valid, but trying to turn your preference into a universal truth for humanity is not valid. Can't it be just your preference?

Why is it so important? I think the real subtext for most such comments is culture war: A reactionary take on modernism and postmodernism, trying to make them outre, outside norms, attached to political liberalism which is often the real target.

Innovation is usually greeted by reactionary responses; what's odd is that, in our world of modern double-speak, reactionary has become seen as cutting edge instead of a lack of imagination and progress, of retreat and regression. Let's go back to what we were doing 100+ years ago!