neetdeth

How can you acknowledge that the USG colludes with domestic platforms to censor Americans and not think that it is targeting foreign platforms because they make that censorship more difficult?

You know, the obvious explanation that doesn’t require an unseen CCP bogeyman.

Let’s all keep in mind that “adversaries” are just regular countries that some people in government have decided are a competitive threat or strategic obstacle. This is, frankly, bullshit.

If you want to declare a country an enemy of the United States and cut off my ability to access information from that country, you should have the fortitude to declare war. Otherwise I’m not interested in the opinion of some bureaucrat at State, thank you very much.

Unpopular opinion: Just bring back testing.

I’ve seen way too many people speculate recently that Russia’s nuclear arsenal possibly doesn’t work. This is incredibly dangerous.

What’s the plan when humanity is so many decades into a test ban that nuclear detonations are a generational memory? Something akin to a myth. The relative stability afforded by MAD doctrine is bound to decline.

It's easy to predict that this will drive privatization in Russia. Things that can't be done efficiently under the byzantine government rulebook will be farmed out to private entities. Americans should be well familiar with the dynamic.

By the way, we see the same security paranoia cropping up in the West about the use of software of Russian origin. Some of the mockery here seems un-self-aware.

What’s alt-right about it? Every example given on that page is a belief I’ve seen espoused by mainstream conservatives since I started paying attention to politics in the late 90s. The “alt” right of the last decade was a reaction against this.

Besides borrowing language from 4chan, it sounds like a cringe con for milquetoast Republicans who feel targeted for their political beliefs.

That describes Carmack to a tee, but he apparently wanted to support ideologically disloyal art without provoking conflict. The organizers were clumsy, and this mea culpa is unhelpful.

More than 90% of natural gas used in the United States is produced domestically. In California, over 50% of electricity generation comes from natural gas. Supply is less precarious than just about anything else.

Even in a future where the electrical grid is fully nuclear + renewable, using gas for cooking would be a completely affordable luxury and not risky at all.

You're describing a federation of platforms, and this can work, at least technically. XMPP worked wonderfully for a brief moment. Unfortunately, profit incentives are aligned against it.

The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques, where your ability to communicate with someone else is determined by connectivity in the clique graph.

This is a great thing for the kinds of people who would have become deeply invested in a web forum or newsgroup back in the day, but it cannot (and arguably should not attempt to) address the mass market.

To be clear, I’m not imputing motive directly to the Rust project.

I think the people involved have consumed so much American state-affiliated media that they simply don’t ask themselves these questions.

Great post, and the best point is highlighted in bold.

> Yes, the issues the blog mentioned were real human rights issues, but selective coverage of human rights is propaganda.

Russia’s primary internal justification for war is based around a human rights argument regarding the ethnic Russians in the East.

Similarly, many US interventions around the world.

I guess people here will say our concerns are totally valid and theirs are fake. Western governments don’t lie.

When your scope of concern maps 1:1 to that of the State Department, though, it’s a fair question to ask what’s your motivation for amplifying these messages.

Yes, what’s happening in Iran is bad - what do you want done about it exactly? Because certain people in the US government have ideas about that which may not exactly improve the situation.

The iMessage model? Somehow make having a Twitter brand Twitter account into a status symbol. Turn the screws on monetization while giving the product away for free to VIPs. Banish the poors and undesirables to the fediverse, where they can green tweet as long as they like.

> I'd much rather have a (income tax marginal rate * loan amount) debt to pay than a (loan amount) one.

Depends on your ability to pay. In some cases a large debt to a corporation is far preferable to a small debt with the IRS.

Never had a reason to use them, but I do recall that Edmund Optics has some C-mount units with liquid lenses in their catalog. The driver modules will allow control over USB or I2C.

This all makes sense, and in that context it’s unfortunate that Apple’s relationship with the largest game tools company, Epic, is... strained, to say the least.

They could always choose to remedy that with a generous buyout offer.

Yes, it's a common journalistic trope to dig up the weakest, least defensible alarmist take and debunk it. Dismantling the strawman allows you to take a general pro-policy stance without explicitly defending the policy. Simultaneously, you discredit opponents by implied association with the weak argument. It boils down to a form of motte-and-bailey fallacy.

They are no longer easily available - presumably as a direct result of the Facebook incident. I'm sure there are companies still grandfathered in, but as a new entrant you'll be aggressively shunted toward either the B2B or consumer App Stores.

Terrible, considering how text-centric social relationships have become. Reply delays on the order of hours are considered to send a strong signal. "Double texting" is a faux pas.

It pains me to think how many friendships and romantic relationships might have been crushed by this bug. Neither party will ever know why.

Regarding the distortion observed in the output, I believe this is due to the inherent physical properties of the galvo system, specifically that the actuators have momentum. A more sophisticated controller would either slow down the beam when entering a corner, or deliberately overshoot and add connecting moves where the beam is turned off.

There's also evidence of some ringing in the output, which might indicate an underdamped PID controller in the servo itself.

The few I've opened appear to cover a 60-character segment of the ASCII table from 0x20 to 0x5B in row major order with a fixed glyph size indicated in the file name.

I think they're deliberately trying to shed personal users because the hobbyist association is brand poison for Fusion in the professional space.

The people Autodesk wants to sell subscriptions to sneer at the "hackerspace" types and scoff at Fusion 360.

For skin cancer narrowly, sure. I don't know what it's like to live with white skin near the equator with primitive or no clothing and no access to sunscreen, though. Losing melanin every winter, getting scorched every summer... It seems like you'd have an individual who is pretty useless for persistence hunting across the savannah. On the other side, a darker skinned individual may experience lethargy and malaise in winter at higher latitude. So we should broaden the considerations to include chronic, nonlethal conditions, and competitive sexual selection amplifies their effects. This was my only point.

> A common example might be the preference for lighter skin in mates that we unfortunately find in several cultures. Maybe we should start calling it eugenics instead of softening it to artificial selection.

You can do that if you want. People really like their mate preferences and this seems more likely to soften their perception of eugenics as a concept than the other way around.

One aspect of sexual selection is that a disadvantageous trait needn't kill to cause differential outcomes in reproduction. If a deficiency results lower hunting success, diminished fighting prowess, loss of mental acuity etc. the individual will be disfavored in mate selection. Iterated over generations, this eventually extinguishes some genes.

There's also the aesthetic aspect, where some traits seem to be favored simply because they are attractive to the opposite sex, which can be justified because offspring will have more favorable opportunities for reproduction, but only because the trait is well liked. A strange attractor in the genetic code, if you will. This happens across species, so I wouldn't call it artificial selection - artificial selection applied to humans is also known as eugenics.

I’ve done the same to at least a dozen “Daily Show with Trevor Noah” ads on YouTube. I’m pretty sure there is no algorithm behind it. A switch connected to nothing that exists only to provide an outlet for user frustration.

Cooperating with Bezos is a different thing though. It would be like nursing an injured rattlesnake back to health.

I'm very willing to believe that this move was driven by actual user research. As a user, the last thing I want to do is create a user name and password for your app, click a link to validate my email, then enter my password again into some sort of cross platform widget that doesn't support keychain autofill. Unless it's an essential service like a bank or an airline, I'll probably opt out of using it.

I'm also very lazy when it comes to payment methods. Trying to order food and the app doesn't support Apple Pay? Delete it and do something else.

Clearly there are issues with the entrenchment of Apple at the center of all this, and these problems would be better solved with open standards, but the consistency and convenience makes an actual measurable benefit in the end user's daily life.

There is actually an equivalence here. Maybe it isn't "money as speech" but it's certainly "dominant market position as speech."

In the former case, one is worried that a company's right to spend their own money and control their own communications (or hire others to communicate on their behalf, which is standard practice), will lead to outsized political influence.

In the latter case, one is concerned that a company's right to control others' use of their product, because they happen to operate a platform that hosts a substantial fraction of the entire public discourse, will lead to outsized political influence.

The private property defense being deployed here is so facile that only a Libertarian could actually believe it. In practice you will not be allowed, for example, to simply buy real estate at a choke point and exercise your private property rights to determine who is allowed to come and go. Public rights of way will eventually be established if you inconvenience the public enough.

If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, there's an excellent project for Hackintosh support on the Intel NUC8i7HVK Hades Canyon machines.

https://osy.gitbook.io/hac-mini-guide/

The only "hacky" bit is the necessary wireless card swap. You get an Intel CPU and Radeon Vega graphics, so the result is more similar to iMac internals than Mac Mini when it comes to graphics performance. Price is steep for the NUC, but starts to pull away in price/perf for higher end configurations like 32GB DRAM + 2TB NVMe.

The Mac Mini will be a nicer and more trouble free experience in every way, and can be supplemented with an eGPU like a Sonnet breakaway puck, so only do this if it sounds like a fun project.

But I can confirm that it does work and work well.

He has rock solid distribution between YT and RSS. Anyone who has heard of podcasts has heard of JRE, it doesn’t need marketing. Joe’s reach is going to take a big hit from exclusivity.

Spotify is clearly paying him enough that none of this matters. It’s the correct trade to make if he thinks JRE has passed peak growth and it’s time to focus on monetization.

Sure, but if they can’t deny US industry the ability to operate that’s one less reason to invade Taiwan. If I’m Taiwanese, I’m probably not confident about surviving a conflict even if the US “goes to bat” for me.

On balance you may be right, because China’s desire to control Taiwan is not exactly the result of a rational strategic calculation. Interesting times...

I don’t doubt it. There will be a slowing convergence and eventually one curve will overtake the other and one day a Chinese design is the fastest GPU.

What I’m talking about is the capability of instantly kneecapping the US tech industry. A sudden differential advantage created by denying capabilities to your adversary. That’s what makes the current semiconductor situation a geopolitical tinder box.

Counterpoint: If the PRC takes over now, they own the process technology NVIDIA and AMD depend on. They can tell the Americans to go pound sand, good luck on your next supercomputer project, and dedicate all production to Chinese origin designs - with a helping of industrial espionage for a kick start. That’s a pretty powerful incentive for aggression that would be reduced if TSMC’s operations were more distributed. So it’s somewhat balanced out.

I think the bigger problem is the assumption that Americans can properly safeguard Taiwanese IP. Anything you send over here you might as well cc: Beijing on the email.