noodlesUK

I will say this is significantly psychologically superior to the alternative where things start on the 0 and end on the 5, because people pay much more attention to the start of meetings than the end time. If the end time is set 5 min before people intuitively expect, it will regularly run over and consume your buffer, whereas people will essentially never start early.

I think that deliberately building in buffer so that people's expectations are explicitly set is much better than constantly having to absent yourself "early".

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the implementation of 3rd party app stores in iOS resulted in something like XProtect (macOS's built in antimalware) coming to iOS. It would then be possible to compel Apple to add the signature of an offending app to the malware database.

You don't even need to make the punishment especially harsh.

What helps is to increase the likelihood you will actually get caught and face any consequence. It would be much better to reliably confiscate the cars of the people doing this than to randomly send a very small proportion of them to prison.

All these interventions look like they are in fairly sizeable 4 way intersections. It obviously isn't possible to replace all of them, but I think that it would make sense to lay streets out with roundabouts and avoiding 4 way junctions as the UK and various EU countries do, at least for new developments.

You can't do doughnuts in narrower streets without intersections.

I also think that many of these people are basically broadcasting their identity online whilst committing various reckless driving crimes. You don't necessarily need to show up and intervene at all of them in real time, but if the recent riots across the pond have shown anything, it's that it's fairly easy for the police to knock on your door in the morning and arrest you for misbehaviour the night before.

Ah thanks for clearing that up. Entirely my mistake, I thought that it was a package like the ESP32, but it is not.

Lots of applications don’t require radios, but the previous series of RP2040s had a “W” variant that had wifi and BLE. We may yet see a RP2350W.

In practice, I think that there are a number of fairly high quality voting systems available. A key part of that is maintaining a secret ballot.

1. Widespread voting in person at a number of distributed sites, with paper ballots and either hand counting or machine counting with risk limiting audits. This is pretty technologically trivial to implement, but requires manpower.

2. Widespread postal voting as it's done in places like Oregon, where there's a non-serialised ballot inside a serialised envelope. All voters are sent an envelope and ballot via postal mail, and the return can be done at either a drop box or through the postal system. On election day, all valid envelopes are opened and emptied under the watchful eyes of observers from each party. They are then counted by hand or with machines and risk limiting audits.

What should not exist are voting machines. There should always be a paper ballot in the process somewhere that is human readable.

This is my favourite HN comment of the day: you’ve been told you can’t install Spotify or whatever on your work machine for security reasons so you’ve built a custom hardware keylogger to change the songs on your phone. Truly glorious.

Outside my university there was a fairly fast "A" road (two lanes, high speed limit, actually much narrower than a typical American street). Rather than stop traffic, there was a bridge that crossed the road. To use the bridge you needed to climb a set of stairs. Of course, people didn't use the bridge because it was inconvenient and tiring to have to take a longer route (including stairs) rather than just walk 8-10 meters across the road.

There were severe injuries or deaths every single year when students would cross the road late at night and a car would be speeding at 60+ mph. They eventually installed a puffin-style crossing, which was much better.

The solution, especially in built up areas, is to keep cars from causing problems for pedestrians rather than trying to stop pedestrians from causing problems for cars. Perhaps the cars should be relegated to a tunnel so people don't have to be near them instead.

If people live their lives in the suburbs and that's what appeals to them, I am not going to say they shouldn't (so long as their suburban town is economically viable), but as a city dweller, I think they should have to pay (not just parking) for coming into the city with their cars.

Having cities arranged on grids with huge wide roads is generally a recipe for non-walkable environments. If you are having to wait ages for a light to change every time you go from one block to the next, you lose much of the efficiency of walking.

I think one of the key points that is often not understood widely is that car-centric infrastructure causes things to be spaced so much farther apart (with unpleasant empty tarmac) than necessary. If every building is surrounded by a border of 15 meters of roads, that significantly expands the distances that a person needs to travel to get anywhere. This further prioritises cars and drives demand and cultural norms.

I don't think we should be trying to get away from cars altogether by any means, but I think we should seriously consider banning them almost entirely from city centres. There's still a need for emergency vehicles and goods to be transported within the city, so we would still need some roads, but we could eliminate a considerable number of lanes.

Pen and paper. You can never ensure that the information remains obscure, but if you keep the original documents away from a computer, and share them via post, they will only ever be seen by human eyes. You can’t ensure that someone won’t scan them at some point though.

Unfortunately it isn’t an option in every country. In the U.S., you can freeze your credit for free, but in the UK, you can’t. I think we should get rid of the CRAs entirely, but that’s a conversation for another day.

This sort of ticketing thing is a trivially solvable problem. It is solved at every airport in the entire world millions of times per day. You provide the name of each concertgoer when you buy a ticket, and they show up with their ticket and ID. You often need to show your ID at these kinds of venues to prove you're old enough to drink beer anyway.

I think it's easier to buy local in a smaller country too. Living in the UK, I suspect that 80% of my caloric intake comes from things grown within ~500 miles of me (and nearly 100% of the meat I eat), and I don't make great attempts to shop locally (but I do try a bit). When I'm in the US, lots of my food comes from the US and Canada, but that's a much larger geographical market. There's simply not much differentiation between something that comes from Vermont or Oregon. You might not even be able to tell by looking at a label. Whereas when you live in a small country, you can see "Produced in UK" or another nearby country fairly trivially.

I agree. I recently tried to do something in MS Office that was fairly simple in Pages: create a straightforward invoice.

I discovered that Word doesn’t even support formulae in its tables, which came as a great surprise. Apparently I needed to do this in Excel, which of course meant that the whole document needed to be written as fixed-width cells. This totally sucked for my use case.

> Now, the IRS knows almost everything about your finances. They get electronic data from your employers, your bank, your brokerage. Most of commerce is settled electronically. Paypal and Venmo send them your info if you receive more than $500 in a year. There is nothing to be gained by randomly auditing the average family if the numbers on their report match what the IRS knows. The IRS can zero in on specific activities, such as people claiming unusual business deductions. But they no longer need to routinely audit most of us, and they don't need funding to that effect.

I think that this is a solid argument for why the government should be reducing filing burdens. If they already have the vast bulk of what is needed, and they're able to rely on that to audit people in case of discrepancies, they also should allow people to file more easily (or not file at all) using that information. Many other countries, including the UK where I currently live have a system wherein the most common kinds of employment don't require filing at all. The US could become one of them if it really wanted to.

I agree conceptually with where you're going, but there are problems with this approach.

If there's some situation where taxes are high, but almost nobody falls into that situation, you might find that upon removing the associated taxes, people will structure their affairs to fit the newly created hole in the tax code.

Unfortunately, many complex systems are not created by any deliberate design, but by the accumulation of small decisions which often make sense at the time, but create something akin to horrifying tech debt over the course of decades.

Everyone agrees that the current system is a monstrosity, but there are winners and losers in any attempt to simplify things. The winners might be happy, but the losers will kick up a huge fuss.

This isn't even just a US/IRS problem. It's here in the UK too [1]. Governments have been axing customer service budgets for years now, but IMO it's a foolish choice.

Bad customer service from the government leads to more errors impacting citizens' lives, which results in more lawsuits and other issues. You ultimately need the ability to sort out problems, and it's better and cheaper for that to happen earlier.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68413088

I can imagine that for many government tasks, there would be a need for a reduced-censorship version of the AI model. It's pretty easy running into the guardrails on ChatGPT and friends when you talk about violence or other spicy topics.

This then begs the question of what level of censorship reduction to apply. Should government employees be allowed to e.g., war-game a mass murder with an AI? What about discussing how to erode civil rights?

I think that for low-risk classification tasks and similar, something like an LLM is a great tool, and I can absolutely see it being extremely useful for intelligence work where sifting through stuff is very hard. However, I would not at all trust AI to make actually important decisions independently.

If your EID card has a photo on it, it has biometrics. The biometrics are the photo and fingerprints (if your country required them). The fingerprints are not accessible to terminals without a government certificate on them, but the photo can be read trivially. You can download one of many apps (ReadID or Regula Forensics are good options) to see what's on the card.

The standard is ICAO 8303 for how the data structures work. It's the same as ePassports. EU cards implement EAC for the fingerprints, which has a whole mutual auth PKI system.

I feel like there are three places that you can conceivably do age restrictions, each with their respective pros and cons.

On the client: The typical parental controls situation with a blocklist. Responsible adult sites could send an HTTP header like X-Adult-Content or something to ensure they would be blocked by clients with the controls on. This could be enforced by regulation, with devices for children required to respect that header in addition to shipping with a blocklist. This couldn't be bypassed with something like a VPN (which you probably couldn't install with parental controls on anyway), because it would be baked into the client.

In the network: Similar blocklist style situation - this already exists to a certain extent in some countries. Mobile phone providers and ISPs would be required to block adult content (via dns or similar) by default, with a toggle to switch it off available to the adult account owner. We already block illegal content this way.

On the server side: This requires adult websites to be cooperative, which they will only be if they care about the jurisdiction in question. This potentially pushes kids/others to access sketchier sites which wouldn't be blocked.

I am strongly for pushing this down the stack to the client. I don't have kids, but I'm pretty sure iOS and Android as well as MacOS and Windows all have robust parental control systems. I'm sure people use them, and we can safely encourage people to use them more. If they aren't on by default already for children, they could be.

Short of biometric verification with presence detection I don't see how it's possible to do remote age verification in a good enough way that you couldn't just use an adult's credit card or device to bypass it.

Anyone who knows anything about tech knows this is just a wedge issue, and people aren't interested in solutions to the actual problem of kids accessing inappropriate material, only soundbites.

That's a potentially reasonable argument, however there are a couple of issues mapping from the physical precedent to the digital world. In the physical world you would show your ID to the store clerk, or (more likely) not even be asked for ID at all if you were sufficiently old-looking.

In the digital world, everyone has to show proof of age, as there's no quick sanity check. Further, none of these states have a privacy preserving way of demonstrating age. All of them require either passing payment details or identity details to an intermediary or the website. The recipient of the identity then gets to hold onto whatever details you provided for the rest of time, and may use them for stuff like ad targeting. This is in an industry that is well-reputed for being scammy.

Just FYI the “map of the UK” includes the Republic of Ireland, which is very much not part of the UK.

There’s not a 100% great term for the collective unit of land. Generally people go with “UK & Ireland” if they’re trying to be sensitive.

I didn't mean write-off from a tax perspective, I meant it in the colloquial sense of eating the cost. Most restaurants are able to absorb the cost of a few mistakes without it impacting their bottom line horribly.

I've only ever seen someone dine and dash once or twice ever in my life, but I've seen restaurants fix mistaken orders plenty of times.

It seems like body cams on servers is a huge overreaction.

I think the bioweapons take is really strange. My experience of AIs is that they have an extremely large breadth of knowledge, but when you get into any real depth, they are lacking.

Any decent graduate student is infinitely more capable in their field of expertise than a layperson with an LLM (not to mention likely has equipment that ordinary people don't). We don't ban biology or physics degrees for fear of people making WMDs, why should we ban LLMs, which are comparably way less dangerous?

That would require the device to be constantly recording (or even streaming). Most body cams don't work on that principle - they write to a buffer and don't save the recording until you've hit the button. Once you hit the button, it records.