qchris

This is concept is a neat one that I think differentiates the real world from many fantasy worlds. In the latter, many of the core problems are built around somebody having "forbidden" or "dark" knowledge, or the heroes needing to find just the right rare answer to some kind of fundamental problem that somebody wrote down but that was suppressed. Think Horcruxes in Harry Potter sort of a deal.

In the real world, we have classification, but by-and-large those are about very specific elements of very specific things (i.e. the exact shape/location of that secondary, not that the secondary exists or that Sandia does modeling of that sort of thing). No one's really the gatekeeper of knowledge of things like nuclear engineering or biological gain-of-function. There's not really a litmus test for someone to attend to a microbiology graduate program or take a chemistry class that would enable them to develop synthetic drugs.

Same thing with martial arts; no one's hiding some secret martial technique. A BJJ purple belt will, in a fistfight, toy with just about anyone else on the planet not trained in jiujitsu like they're a toddler. And you can just, like, walk into many strip malls across the North America, pay your $200/mo, and a few years later of consistently showing up, you're there. No secret death touch or spiritual clarity needed.

If you haven't seen it already, there was a post a couple of years ago here that got some traction on this subject, in context of a FOIA-related lawsuit filing by a (I'm to understand) well-regarded cryptologist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360533

I sometimes think that situations like this are eventually going to lead to legally-required professional licensing for certain tasks in software development.

Obviously, not everyone who writes code needs a development license (what, I'm going to get licensed to write a blog or put up a site with fruit jokes?"), but if your business is going to involve personally-identifiable information, then you need actual engineering, and the folks that do that engineering need certification. This is a similar mechanism to how engineering licensing even started (in the US anyway), where Wyoming basically got tired of water infrastructure being built by people who didn't know what they were doing.

Licensing could also help provide individual engineers with leverage against managers or C-suite folks who want to move fast & break things. When you're in a professional class with exclusive sign-off capabilities, it's easier to be say "we have to do this right or it's my ass, back off" and should the company says "fine, you're fired", goes ahead with managing the PII, and a leak like this happens, the company's liability goes way way up. That situation overall tends to improve the leverage that skilled workers (like those who know how about database management for PII and endpoint configuration) have to do things right. There's a number of pitfalls that can happen with licensing as well, but I'd be curious to see if a push for something like this emerges over the next few years.

> I would love the option to switch to a more natural voice for more literary text (or even a fan fic) so I'll definitely be checking this out

I'm curious if it would be possible to do some kind of analysis to determine the number of individual characters in the text who are speaking, and then assign an appropriate voice to each of the characters. So if you had something like descriptive language interspersed with a conversation between two characters, that you'd have three voices (a narrator, Character A, and Character B) that are consistent across the text.

For more complex writing with many characters, you'd probably need a wide library of possible voices, and the analysis piece would need to spot-on, since it would be very confusing to have one characters' lines spoken by the wrong voice.

Regarding fanfics, many authors give (or withhold) permissions around creating derivative versions of their work via avenues like ficbinding. Before using a tool like this to create an audio version of their writing, I'd suggest reaching out to a fic's author to see if they'd be okay with that. For personal-only use, though, and especially if it's in context of accessibility for visually-impaired folks, I imagine that many of them would probably be okay with it.

Just want to follow up on this thread to say that Framework (directly via nrp) did follow up with my org and me, and was able to get the aforementioned paperwork back to us.

It's encouraging to see that they've taken this kind of feedback so seriously, and I'm hoping that the organizational steps outlined above will help to make this process smoother for other groups in a similar position looking to buy from Framework moving forward.

> Framework will need to step up its game, especially if it wants to sell more laptops to businesses—a lucrative slice of the PC industry that Framework is actively courting.

This line really resonated with me. I own a 12th-gen Framework laptop personally, and have enjoyed using it enough that I wanted to have one at work as my existing machine is aging out. Like many businesses, my org requires some paperwork ("telecom approval") in order to buy computing hardware, which is basically a short questionnaire that I assume to check off some "we're not actively trying to backdoor you" boxes. I've had vendors get this turned around in <24 hours. Framework, however, has not been able to do this. Their reasoning is basically, per the article,

> [..] interspersed with not-untrue but unsatisfying responses from Framework employees (some version of "we're a small company" is one of the most common)

claiming their B2B lead is "swamped". Unfortunately, they've been that way since I started that approval request (with repeated follow-ups) 6 months ago, and can't even give me a timeline for when they might even be able to review it. I'm trying to get approval for an org with high-four-figures employees; not Google-size, but not exactly a small business either.

The initial execution on their laptops has been good, and I'm hoping that it continues. But at least to me, it definitely feels like there's a lot of maturing to do for the company on the process for product support and customer experience.

Not sure if you've already seen this, but back in November, Rocket 0.5 (stable) was released, and a 501(c)3 dedicated to Rocket was formed that now owns the Github org, etc. As a result, it's been getting much more regular updates, with the original maintainer still involved in development but no longer the only person with push access.

I'd certainly agree that it's no longer the de facto top leader, but as a batteries-included HTTP server, it works well (it's been chugging along powering my personal website for years now) and as far as I know still has quite a sizeable userbase.

[1] https://rocket.rs/news/2023-11-17-version-0.5/

Just adding in a link to their Donation page at https://www.armbian.com/donate/

I'm not affiliated with them or anything, but also appreciate their efforts and have a small recurring donation set up in the hopes of seeing it continue. Especially for groups like this that have image hosting and hardware costs, even a few dollars can make the maintainers' load lighter and help them continue doing this kind of quiet, important work.

It turns out the John Mayer of all people wrote a (imho) really beautiful song about a man building a homemade submarine in his basement, called "Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967". If you feel like taking a listen, it might stir up some memories; I know that I usually connect with it more after a weekend of getting lost in a passion project.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrcMMyNeJJs

The "space is cold" thing is actually a pretty good shibboleth for people who don't know that much about engineering things in space. Most space systems have to put in effort to reject excess heat than to hold onto basic amounts, hence those giant radiators and the high emissivity paint that gets used on most things.

Isn't this sort of what the lawsuit is for, though? Even if it's cheaper to make the initial defective product and say you're sorry after, if the sorry is both guaranteed (prosecuting even the long tail) and large enough, then hopefully at some point it raises the overall cost to the point where it's now cheaper to build things correctly.

Thank you!

Is there an article/primary source on this that you can point up? I spent a few minutes searching but couldn't seem to find anything.

Is there a reason you're not interested in those NVIDIA Jetson modules? Even excluding the GPU compute, I had thought the Orin boards were significantly faster than a Pi 4.

I think it's also worth pointing out that DJI's first-party app isn't required to operate many of their drones. Most of their drones, apart from all but the most recent (i.e. the one this announcement is about probably won't have support for a while, but the previous gen will) has support through apps like Litchi and Dronelink via the developer API, which have additional features and don't have the exact same permissions/data requirements as DJI's first-party apps.

[1] https://flylitchi.com/

[2] https://www.dronelink.com/

It might be worth doing some reading on the actual events of that day. For example, "being shot down by a fighter jet" wasn't an option; the fighters weren't armed when they were put up in the sky. The pilots in them went up knowing that if a plane needed to be taken out, they were going to be using themselves to do it. And none of that is to mention the passengers the parent comment was referring to, who made the conscious, heroic decision that their plane wasn't going to be used as a weapon like two previous ones had been, whatever the cost.

I don't mean to assume bad faith, but this was, at best, a throwaway comment that minimized the bravery and sacrifice of a lot of good people. Either way, I'd like to recommend you educate yourself a bit more. The Wikipedia page has some excellent detail, and if narrative structure is your thing, the book The Only Plane In The Sky is a masterpiece on the subject.

I was visiting my family a few weeks ago in my childhood town, and the topic of our small local river came up. It's about three minutes away, and both the streams that feed it and the larger river it feeds into were fairly big parts of my childhood, including fishing, crayfishing, exploring, and generally playing on the banks. It turns out that there's a fishing advisory in effect this year, advising folks not to eat any fish caught in that river.

The reason is PFAS pollution, where the levels in the water table now indicate the potential for bioaccumulation above the recommended level for human toxicity. The people living in that area are now denied access to clean water and not having to worry about eating toxic fish, and I'm sure the otters and herons in the area haven't gotten the notice. Millions of state tax dollars have now been allocated to try to just estimate the contamination level in drinking water wells throughout the state as well.

Frankly, the producers and users of these chemicals have proven to be, at the minimum, so grossly negligent and potentially actually malicious, that they can not be considered to be acting in good faith, and "reasonable compromises" should be looked at with extreme suspicion. I feel the responsible organizations fined for both remediation and damages, the individuals responsible made criminally liable for the harm they've caused, and once that example has been made, we can talk about compromises once the "free market" has factored in the actual cost of using these chemicals when they can't just dump risk onto the public.

[1] https://ctmirror.org/2021/08/29/how-widespread-are-pfas-chem...

I read somewhere (I wish I could remember the primary source) that some large hunting ranches are taking this approach as well. Basically, if a buck looks like it would be a "trophy" animal (large antlers, etc.), they don't hunt it. Apparently this was something that started on a ranch where the owner's brother was an advocate for the practice, which they took to heart after he passed away young.

The claimed result was that in even relatively small periods of time (less than a decade), the number of "high quality" deer on their property skyrocketed due to the fittest bucks actually being able to compete and pass on their genes rather than being hunted immediately.

If you're interested in Bevy + WebGPU in particular, they wrote a more extensive update on that section earlier this year[1].

[1] https://bevyengine.org/news/bevy-webgpu/

I don't think it would be too much to say something like a low-end VPS on AWS or Digital Ocean for a personal blog is too much, which would end up running somewhere between $5-10/mo depending on resources/automated backups. At 400 euros, though, they're quite a bit beyond that. I'm a bit curious what their cost per page-served ratio looks like.

You don't happen to have a blog or something where you outline, even if it's without tons of detail or being too specific, what these incidents looked like, do you? These feel like (hopefully) rare enough events that I'd love to try to learn from other people's experiences before I run into this kind of situation myself.

> Mastodon is about as protected as html in that sense.

I think you're probably using the term "enshittify" differently than the parent comment. Enshittification, at least as I tend to see it used, doesn't really follow from a particular technology stack, but more about how an organization itself approaches its end users, particularly against over-exploitation/monetization of a given platform. It typically doesn't speak to the underlying technology (i.e. html vs. MB of Javascript vs. WASM), since that is (within reason) somewhat orthogonal to how the organizations running instances treat their users/how end users actually experience the platform.

I'm not going to try to defend every bad thing about the city; as I clearly stated, it's not all sunshine and roses. But let's look a the public transport issues you names. Again, we can look how the state government under the former Governor Hogan persistently re-directed funding away from things like improving existing light rail or adding new lines[1][2] that would have benefited poorer, usually Black communities, and instead moved that money towards road maintenance or expansion further out into the state in wealthier, whiter ones.

A good example of this is the East-West Red Line project, which would have been the only cross-city rail line that didn't go North-South among the already well-serviced neighborhoods, with a lot of that money getting spent re-vitalizing those areas. But once again, this isn't a cause for dismissal--the new Governor Moore has made reviving the Red Line project possible again[3], which (if it happens), could be a huge boon for the city. Imagine NYC without the MTA or Boston without the MBTA--almost unthinkable. These kind of projects, which finally have the potential to become un-stalled, offer hope of moving Baltimore in that direction.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/larry-hogan-purple-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/fiv...

[3] https://www.wbaltv.com/article/reviving-baltimore-red-line-p...

As another person currently residing in Baltimore (and who just re-signed a lease to stay in a city I've enjoyed living in), it's worth pointing out that when people talk about "systemic" issues in policing and law enforcement, they're talking about things like the fact that for the last, oh, literally 162 years, Baltimore PD has not been administrated within the City of Baltimore, but instead by state lawmakers in the capital, Annapolis, which is around a 45-minute drive away. It's only been during the most recent local election that control was moving locally instead[1][2][3].

This kind of thing has resounding consequences. Baltimore is a city with a complicated history; for one thing, it's down from it's peak of almost 1M people to under 600k [4]. There's a significant history of racism in Maryland at large. There's a lot of fundamental issues, ranging from food deserts to lack of public transportation among the poorer areas. But to say that "[I]t would take Ra's al Ghul to resolve the problems of this city" is not true. It's certainly not all sunshine and roses, there's a lot of work being done at the grassroots as well, from new local investigative news organizations like the Baltimore Banner being funded to small makerspaces being set up in the now-plentiful well-built, but unused buildings that cities like Boston or Washington, DC. would only dream about having near their harbor or highways, and it's unfair to dismiss these things as being worthless.

[1] https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-officials-co...

[2] https://www.wbaltv.com/article/baltimore-city-control-police...

[3] https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/local-gove...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore#Demographics (other sources available)

Just a quick, non-hostile technical nitpick: I don't believe that at any point, energy will actually be flowing back into the drink. If the drink is cooler, the insulator layer will become a significantly worse conductor, preventing heat from flowing outward as well as from the liquid-phase insulator, but thermodynamics/the law of entropy shouldn't really allow for the energy to flow back into the liquid, even when the insulator does re-solidify.

I literally hadn't heard of this brand until this comment, but I figured it was worth pointing out that their "layer of insulation" is a bit more complex than it might seem at surface level, being a phase-change insulator.

They claim that it changes phase right around the 63 degC mark (which, again, is claimed to be the sweet spot for where most hot beverages are enjoyed). Therefore, a hot drink will quickly move to that temperature when the poured liquid is above that transition temp (the liquid-phase insulator being a good conductor), and then stay close to it after dropping below the transition point, when the solid insulator re-forms and stops conducting heat well. If true, I think it's a really neat application of high-tech materials science in everyday life.

[1] https://joeveo.com/pages/the-temperfect-mug (see "Details for the Technogeek)

You could probably make this case for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise as well. TNG and Voyager probably fall closer into the "highly-episodic" category, while DS9 and Enterprise tend to be structured around larger ongoing plot lines. I think they all have the same kind of merit as Voyager with regards to discussions about issues and moral decisions.

Depending on the 11-year-old, you might be able to make a case for Seth Macfarlane's The Orville, which can be a bit more hit-and-miss, but does have some truly excellent episodes, particularly in Season 3.

The newer Star Trek series coming out are probably too gritty if the parent is worried about age-appropriateness (I believe Picard has a TV-MA rating?) and unless you really like The Original Series, it's pretty noticeably a product of its age and I personally had trouble staying engaged by it when I was that age.

I don't know if it's the sunlight coming in through the window adjacent to their desk or some kind of filter, but for reason their desk set-up looks like a computer rendering of someone's desk set-up. It's ostensibly a 4K image, but after zooming it, it feels like the aesthetic of, well, everything, in the image is closer to something painted than it is an actual photo. I'd recommend taking a look at the details on both the hanging plant leaves and the pot reflections. It's somewhat interesting, because none of the other images in the post seem to have the same effect.

Does anyone else see something similar? Is this effect common through post-processing or compression on a certain type of phone or something?

I'd also recommend taking a look at "The Only Plane in the Sky" by Garrett Graff, which is an oral history of 9/11; basically, a huge number of in-person interviews that construct a timeline of the days leading up to, during, and after 9/11, including those of the pilots who went up in the fighters, knowing that should they need to, mid-air collision was the only option if they needed to intercept something. For what it's worth: a great read, but a tough one. I'm sure you won't have trouble finding a book link, but Politico [1] has an excerpt if you're interested.

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/were-the-onl...

As someone involved in ocean tech, I sometimes see a similar attitude, although the number of former naval personnel looking for new opportunities helps to bridge that gap a little bit.

I've had tech people occasionally propose ideas, or ask if something sounds feasible, and one of the first things I often remind them is that the ocean is brutal to most forms of human engineering; something like Murphys Law incarnate. Weird physical stresses, bad wireless comms, corrosion of all sorts, biofouling of all the things, large temperature swings, etc. Sometimes a good day in ocean tech isn't "it worked", it's "it didn't work, but we got our equipment back out of the water." The domain knowledge involved in building or operating even moderately-reliable systems like that is hard to get without first-hand experience. There are lots of important, interesting problems offered by the ocean, but they always come hand-in-hand with these not-so-fun ones, which in my experience tends to dampen tech people's enthusiasm a bit.