pulisse

Specifically, DOGE

"He told another colleague ... that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal."

Very few poor people drive into lower Manhattan. And people whose work requires them to drive in that area (delivery drivers, plumbers, etc.) come out ahead. One of the first NYT stories after congestion pricing was rolled out had multiple quotes from tradesmen reporting that they're saving an hour or more a day and prefer the new system.

The point of congestion pricing is to let market mechanisms determine where the optimum is.

Sub-headline: "Pardon follows months of efforts by Changpeng Zhao to boost the Trump crypto company"

> A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.

My sister works in manga and anime publishing and this is an existential threat to her company. Some of the issues they're grappling with:

1. For some of their titles, the genuine item doesn't even appear among search results on Amazon—only the counterfeits do.

2. The quality issues with the counterfeits can result in losing all future business from a customer. For example, download codes will be missing or non-functional. Irrational as it is, customers blame the publisher when this happens and stop buying further titles from them.

3. Amazon seems to be using some slapdash ML to determine how many of each title to order. They'll purchase 10k of vols. 5 and 7 of a series and only 1k of vol. 6. Guess how many of that 10k of vol. 7 end up selling when that happens?

Amazon is, needless to say, non-responsive to their concerns.

It's an analysis of publicly available data.

> I would expect them to be shielded from executive pressure.

In the past month the SEC has stopped most enforcement actions involving crypto.

> anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device.

Italy's not unique in that respect, in Europe at least. You can't do much in Germany without a Meldebescheingung.

Not "any user action". The user has to click the link. The fact that a link can be styled to look like anything isn't very damning.

I'm not seeing what the "catastrophic" issue is. A site can include a link to install an app from a third-party marketplace and, when the user affirmatively acts to proceed with the install, that marketplace can see which site the install request came from.

That's it?

> SQL is mostly used as a compiler target these days, with users using higher level languages

This is not remotely true of analysts and data engineers, who probably write most of the world's SQL.

The system isn't being used to prove its own consistency. The consistency is proved in a different, stronger system.

The conversation here is focussing on industrial espionage, but that's only one use case for this kind of active measure. An association with an opposition political party could easily get one on a surveillance list.

> BPP is the complexity class for decision problems that a randomized algorithm can solve in polynomial time, in the sense that on every input (worst-case), the algorithm is right with at least 2/3 probability (over its own randomness).

What's the theoretical significance of the 2/3 threshold?

Voting in Oregon has been exclusively by mail since 2000 without any such abuse materializing.

If a jurisdiction is reducing the number of election day polling places in an area, they're also going to reduce opportunities to vote in other ways. An egregious example is Houston, where there is now one (1) place to drop off early ballots in a county of 4 million people.

TFA uses sloppy phrasing, but it's correct. The claim is not that earlier logicians such as Frege viewed logical concepts as meaningless. It's that, before Tarski and Gödel, no one clearly distinguished syntax and semantics, and so earlier logicians lacked the conceptual resources to describe the difference between truth and provability, let alone investigate their relationship. (Frege only ever considers a single semantics for any formal system.)

The book presented only a few phrases from within-universe languages. The movie includes non-trivial amounts of dialogue in those languages, which someone had to write. How they did so could be interesting, and an article about that isn't any more suspicious than one about the movie's vfx or any other aspect of the creative process.

There's a great Mathoverflow thread collecting examples of this sort of phenomenon (called "eventual counterexamples" in the thread), together with some interesting analysis (see Joel Hamkins' answer): https://mathoverflow.net/questions/15444/examples-of-eventua...

AirPods, too.

Yes, to RocksDB.

The overwhelming majority of Apple's cloud operations are in Apple-owned data centers.

You want to outlaw price discrimination?

There might not be data for the control group (the general prison population) past the first year.

> Serializable and snapshot are indistinguishable for read-only transactions, no?

No. See "A read-only transaction anomaly under snapshot isolation" [1].

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1031570.1031573

Shouting across the house, "got it!"

They'll charge more to serve you ads when you're in a more receptive state of mind, but the ads you're served won't necessarily be better.

> It seems pretty easy to implement the "unpair" functionality you ask for.

Implementing any functionality over two billion devices is non-trivial, especially when it requires aspects of transactional behavior (as this would).