noodlesUK

I'm shocked by this comment. Where is expensive enough that it will have steaks that it can't just write off, but isn't so nice that waiters with bodycams don't mess up the ambiance?

In the UK this is extremely common. Bouncers and store security generally wear body cams. I don't think this is a huge issue, as the cameras are only usually writing to a ringbuffer. Most of the time, the camera isn't actually recording as such. In some ways, this is less invasive than store CCTV, which is usually actually recording at all times.

I think that one issue with private security guards using body cams is that there's even less guarantee that you'll get exculpatory evidence from them, as they will just delete stuff that paints them in a bad light. The police at least have procedures in place to reduce the likelihood of that happening, though how well it works in practice, I don't know.

If you're interested in learning more about the level of damage caused by various nuclear weapons, the site NUKEMAP (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) provides a much more detailed set of parameters.

Agree, most of the Brits I know think it's hilarious that it's ended up as a term of art, and Americans are generally completely oblivious to its meaning.

I am in no great hurry to change the word though. It's not something that comes up much outside of extremely technical contexts, and whilst it's a bad word, its regional character and multiple meanings kinda make it fine. It's not like it is being used for the meaning that's offensive, the meanings have unrelated histories (and the offensive one is much newer).

I don't think it would be right to change an ordinary English word because it sounded similar to an offensive word in a foreign language, and I think that's essentially what's happened here.

I agree. I think that a website using (styled) normal semantic HTML forms would be wayyy better for accessibility than some chatbot service which is likely doing some weird things to the markup as a response to stuff coming in on web sockets etc. I think Gov.UK is a great example of how those forms should look most of the time.

I would be a strong advocate for some regulatory framework requiring an effective right to access human support for businesses exceeding a certain size.

I've worked on chatbots for a couple of years. I too have come to the conclusion that they're generally garbage from a customer perspective.

Sometimes they can serve as a useful intake system for collecting information before passing someone off to an agent, but even then they tend to be less useful than just filling in a form. I think in most cases, a step by step form followed by a live chat would be better.

Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. These people should probably be passed off to human beings, but then those human beings are wasting their time dealing with similar issues constantly.

LLM chatbots are even worse. They have great latitude to say convincing and incorrect information, but can rarely actually do anything. It would be much better to just publish a good knowledge base.

I would say a pet peeve of mine is when you do end up having support staff that are human beings, but are not empowered/trained to actually solve customer problems sufficiently. From a business perspective a chatbot is a great replacement for that, because it also regurgitates a script without actually having to action any business processes.

Thanks for clearing that up - I thought the fees applied to all sales, not just ones with attribution to their ads. (I'm not an Etsy seller myself, but I'm friends with people who are)

The fees are still astronomically high even without the ads program.

It's usually pretty easy to tell tbh. Unlike buying online you can inspect the goods as they are right there in front of you. There's usually a pretty noticeable difference between Alibaba "artisanal" stuff and the real McCoy. In any case, I suspect that at a lot of markets, if someone were to be coming in and selling stuff under totally false pretences, the other stalls would get their pitchforks out.

You can also chat to the person and see if they're knowledgable about their stuff. Depending on the craft, the person might actually be doing it in front of you (or customise their goods somehow).

The real answer is where they always have: local markets and craft fairs. Most towns and cities have some kind of periodic craft market, which is often related to a farmers and/or food market. They usually have some kind of weird schedule like first Sunday of every month or similar.

You can also see if your local arts centre/university/whatever has some kind of market. There's also usually different kinds of conventions for specific industries where people will set up booths.

The automatic enrolment in the Etsy advertising program means the platform fees for anyone selling more than 10k USD increase sharply at that point to ~20% of total revenue.

What that means is that any artists/makers that are doing volumes that represent anything even close to a full time wage are totally shafted. If I were an artist selling stuff, I would strongly consider a switch to something like Shopify, especially as you then aren't on a storefront sitting next to a whole bunch of drop shipped garbage.

I think this attitude is true for many businesses, but not restaurants.

Restaurants are one of the few areas of the market where local businesses that are deeply connected to their communities still thrive.

There are plenty of restaurants & pubs near me who recognise me as a regular customer by name. The people at those places genuinely enjoy making their customers happy. It's much easier to care when your customers are living, breathing human beings with names you know whom you see frequently. The same can't be said for McDonald's, but there are places that aren't so soulless.

It really depends on the context. If you’re talking about evidence in a court case where things are referred to by page number that’s one thing, but if you’re a public authority releasing some internal manual, there’s no need to keep the formatting identical, especially if you’re omitting entire sections.

The best way to redact a document in practice is not to go over it with blur or black boxes, but to completely delete the text you want to redact, and replace it with a placeholder such as REDACTED. This means you won't leak length or anything else. Of course, it can change formatting and page numbers, so it's worth being mindful of that.

Just make sure you don't use a file format which supports history (such as PDF).

If you have to redact with black boxes, the safest way is to redact-rasterise-OCR. That obviously breaks some stuff though and degrades your document quality.

To be clear, what's being theorised in the paper is essentially a warp drive, but it's not FTL (or some cheat that allows FTL without technically going FTL for some definition of FTL). It's proposing a technology for sub-light relativistic travel using the idea of gravity warp.

I don’t know the stats because they’re obviously private, but I’d suspect that 10x more people use Siri than chatGPT and Gemini every day. I would much rather that they focus on improving Siri’s voice recognition and increasing the number of actions it can take, rather than trying to make it a general purpose talking computer.

I use Siri all the time to set reminders and alarms, to control devices, and to change buried settings like auto brightness etc.

What I care about is responsiveness/latency and accuracy, not having the thing pass the Turing test.

Yeah you do, it's itemised on the receipt/invoice. You're legally required to break it down and provide a receipt so that business customers are able to correctly account for VAT. The only difference is which price goes on the tag/menu.

I've heard this argument loads of times in the US, and it's clearly based on a belief that taxes should add friction so people understand how expensive they are.

Most other countries have gone the other way and decided that transparent sticker pricing is more important than people understanding that their taxes are separate from the price of goods.

I’d be seriously concerned about the risk of water ingress, but I figure it would be much safer to just have a little fan blasting the thing.

I’d love to see senior leadership lead by example at some of these companies. If they’re doing badge tracking they could have a live leaderboard of the leadership’s total time in office. I bet it would make interesting viewing.

I agree about QuickBooks being good for small businesses.

Perhaps I've just been so personally burned by how complicated US compliance is from outside (form 5471 and friends being a personal boogeyman of mine) that I've missed that it's quite easy to do business inside the US. I am aware that you have to do stuff like file as a foreign business if you do business between multiple states.

I don't like that you have to pay a private monopoly company (Intuit) to stand a chance of being compliant with your tax obligations over there.

On a contrary note, many more of my circle in the UK are running small businesses than their peers in the US.

N.B. the distinction between startup and small business.

The US is not a very friendly place to run a small agency or an artist's studio - here in the UK it costs a few pounds to register a company (or nothing as a sole trader), and doing accountancy and compliance is WAY easier. It's fairly simple to employ someone in the UK, but it's hard in the US without a league of accountants and lawyers behind you - hence why stuff like Stripe Atlas exists. I wouldn't run a business in the US with revenue below 150k.

No, RAM is not something that is exposed on the PCIe bus (which is what thunderbolt is based on). RAM has a different protocol (DDR5 in this case), and as it says in the article, is very sensitive to the distance between the CPU and the RAM. External RAM isn't really something that is viable in the modern era of computers as far as I know.

In the U.S., yeah that’s how it works.

I think this is a cool feature, but I don't really see the kinds of people who need to do multicam setups grabbing a load of iPhones and tripods and doing things that way. Does it also support some other way of capturing with pro cameras (SDI or HDMI live capture for instance)?

This is actually a break in tradition for Apple - they had been going out of their way to call things specific names like LLMs, generative models, transformers etc. I guess they've decided that the AI term is here to stay.

One thing I have never quite understood is the desire for housing prices to constantly go up.

Even a current homeowner might want to move one day, and if house prices uniformly fell by 50% relative to current earnings, they would find themselves more able to upgrade their house. The only people it would hurt would be people moving from owned accommodation to rented accommodation or cheaper owned accommodation.

What am I misunderstanding here?

EDIT: It seems I was forgetting a key fact: mortgages. When people hold a mortgage and their property value goes down, they can be left holding the bag.

I know this comment comes a bit late, but thanks so much! That library is exactly the kind of thing I have been looking for. I've just signed up using your app. I'm curious, my UK passport didn't scan correctly with NFC. Do you only support EU docs for NFC validation? I expected the NFC scanning to work with any ICAO 9303 document.

I would say that Mullvad seems to be the exception - they know their stuff. You can even pay with cash for even more anonymity.

As far as I know preview doesn’t support creating or even viewing cryptographic signatures at all.

Countries regularly legislate and regulate against various forms of unfair terms in contracts, ranging from the deceptive and absurd to fairly mundane things. You can’t enter into contracts requiring illegal behaviour for instance. This is true in the U.S. and all other countries that I’m aware of.

In the UK and other European countries, particularly regarding consumer goods or other kinds of contracts with an inherent asymmetry of negotiating power, there are lots of things you can’t agree in contracts, such as disclaiming general fitness for purpose and safety.

Deciding that you can’t agree away your rights to redress through the judicial system seems like a reasonable extension of these kinds of rules.

Absolutely, and that's what I tend to do with my documents IRL, but I think it would be really nice if we could move to a world where signing documents digitally actually meant something more than `signature.png`.

In the EU, in order to have a legal guarantee of being treated as the same as a handwritten signature in all member states, you have to meet "Qualified Electronic Signature" level, which means cryptographic signatures and the involvement of some kind of trust services provider who validates the certificate used to sign. In practice this is rare, and ordinary electronic signatures a la Preview work for most things.