scotchmi_st

No idea. Do you think it was pitched like that before the conflict began?

Well sure, but everything short of committing the whole country to total war will always come down to “we could do it, it’s just too politically expensive”. Even in authoritarian countries, there is a limit to what you can get away with.

That “we could do it, we just don’t want to” argument will face its acid test later in the year when the midterms are closer, but certainly if I were in charge of Iran I’d be feeling pretty good about the current situation.

One of the better tech investments I’ve made is in a 20 metre Thunderbolt cable from Corning. It’s surprisingly useful- if you have a monitor that takes TB input then your computer can be stored in a small closet next to your router/switch, where you can’t hear it. Alternatively if you just need a quick 10Gb Ethernet link between two computers with USB4 or TB3/4 that it would be complicated to have next to each other, you can use it for that as well.

I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.

They spend plenty of time adding "pro" features and apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, which they wouldn't do unless they wanted people to use them.

I'm willing to bet it's as simple as that no Apple SWEs or anyone who has to edit video or sound uses an ipad for work. As soon as Apple forced some to use one, they'd fix all of the UI problems that make them a nightmare.

The military base there is small, and the number of troops trained in Alaska is also comparatively small. It also has little dedicated cold-weather gear, and logistical pipelines (especially if Canada refuses to let them in their airspace/waters) with be very hard to set up.

The US may have some understanding of the cold, but the nordic countries have far more, and are far better prepared.

Sure the US could para a few soldiers in and raise the flag, but then what? US equipment and training isn’t designed for a country where the average temperature is above freezing for only 3 months of the year. When it’s minus 30 Celsius, lubricants gum up, batteries die and you need ice-breaker ships to resupply forces (which the US doesn’t have many of). Denmark and the other Nordic countries do have equipment and training designed for those conditions, and they know the (vast) landscape well, since they train there.

Imagine Afghanistan but against a modern, professional army and with the weather trying to kill you.

Which isn’t to say that it would be impossible, but certainly it would cost more in terms of casualties and money than most Americans realise.

Interestingly there are discussions about moving back to having the majority of the power from IC engines as soon as the end of the decade, with synthetic fuels. Personally I can’t wait.

This is an interesting article if you read it like a howto for constructing a neural network for performing a practical task. But if you take it at face-value, and follow a similar method the next time you need to parse some input, then, well, I don't know what to say really.

The author takes a hard problem (parsing arbitrary input for loosely-defined patterns), and correctly argues that this is likely to produce hard-to-read 'spaghetti' code.

They then suggest replacing that with code that is so hard to read that there is still active research into how it works, (i.e a neural net).

Don't over-index something that's inscrutable versus something that you can understand but is 'ugly'. Sometimes, _maybe_, a ML model is what you want for a task. But a lot of the time, something that you can read and see why it's doing what it's doing, even if that takes some effort, is better than something that's impossible.

My wife had her phone stolen recently, in Highbury and Islington tube station. Nothing to be done, by the time she noticed it gone, it was too late. However since then, she's been getting messages from the perps that appears like a message from Apple, with a link that takes you to a surprisingly convincing site, that then asks you to enter your pin. It's clear that not everyone falls for this sort of ploy, but enough do to make it worth the thief's time to steal it, and sell it for parts otherwise.

There are a lot of moving parts to this sort of crime- Apple don't make it easy for you to profit from a locked iPhone, and Android probably don't either. Someone able to write and maintain a convincing-looking website and forward recorded data, someone to take the phone, someone to manage the operation etc etc. Finding out who is stealing the phones would be very helpful in stopping this sort of thing from happening, by cracking the organisations involved.

I get the privacy arguments, but if this does actually help stop thieves, on balance I'm in favour.

I mean, there’s plenty of evidence for the Big Bang, and if that’s the case then the most likely shape that falls out of the maths is a hypersphere, like inflating a balloon as others have said.

The universe isn’t thought to be infinite in that sense- it’s finite but unbounded. There is a finite amount of space that did, we think, originate from an infinitesimal point.

Imagine getting in a spaceship and setting off in a direction, close to the speed of light- if you travelled for long enough you’d arrive back where you started. Like someone walking on the surface of the earth.

Any current cosmologists can correct me, but I believe the consensus is that the shape of the universe is a hyper-spheroid, I.e a 4D sphere.

Except he didn't say it[1], or at least no-one who was there remembers him saying it, and it seems like it's something he added in a later revision of his own memory.

As John von Neumann later said, 'sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it'. It's clearly what Oppenheimer wanted.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Trinity

I don't know how the law works where you live, but in my country, 'probably did it' isn't enough for a conviction. Even then, this isn't some spurious made up court trial, and the probabilities you're working with are easily inflated to suit the narrative you want.

Conspiracy theorists will always say they have enough evidence for their theory, of course.

If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence.

The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea of this escaping from a lab (a friend who used to work at the CDC told me some rather scary stories about working there), but there's no serious evidence it was the case here.

On the other hand, many people would like it to be true, because it feeds into a conspiracy narrative. People can't believe things like global, deadly viral pandemics can occur naturally, even though they do.

This is really misinformed comment. Aside from the specific case here, in the UK at least, on average two women a week are killed by a current or former partner[1]. Women are at far greater chance experiencing domestic violence than men[2]. In 2018 there were 1.32 million domestic abuse-related incidents and crimes reported to police of women, of which 746,219 were considered by the police to be criminal acts under uk law. There were only 78,624 prosecutions and 60,160 convictions for domestic-abuse related crimes. In other words, only around 6% of domestic violence reports end in a prosecution, and of those only 4% end in a conviction. The stats are probably similar for different countries.

If you want to push the idea that a significant number of these cases are bogus, you really have to provide some evidence for that. Domestic violence (against both women and men) is real, and people (usually women) often die as a result of it. Spouting off sexist tropes that women are just going it because they're 'scorned' really isn't acceptable.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand... [3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

This story has been covered for a while by the investigative/satirical magazine Private Eye in the uk-

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justi...

There's also a podcast about it as well-

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49

It's a fascinating and heartbreaking story. The film Brazil made real.

If the state where you live wants to know if you've been at a protest, they have more efficient ways of figuring that out than sending someone out to walk around, trying to collect AirDrop IDs. That should be the least of your worries.

I mean sure, I'm not saying there's no issue here. But it certainly isn't 'huge' either.

One explanation is that Apple has sat on this for 2 years, knowing this is a serious security bug. Another explanation is that they just don't think it's that serious. The article states-

> The discovered problems are rooted in Apple's use of hash functions for “obfuscating” the exchanged phone numbers and email addresses during the discovery process. However, researchers from TU Darmstadt already showed that hashing fails to provide privacy-preserving contact discovery as so-called hash values can be quickly reversed using simple techniques such as brute-force attacks.

The post that they then linked to is about how, by hashing random phone numbers, you can effectively de-anonymise users of popular messaging apps.

So you'd need to be in physical proximity to the person, and what you're getting is details like your phone number which aren't especially private anyway (they literally need to be given to people to be of any use). It's far from the dragnet-level issue facing Signal & Whatsapp and others.

I don't know, but that doesn't seem like an especially serious issue to me. It seems just like a research group trying to make some hype for themselves.

> The artist could refuse to transfer this if they don't like you

Really? What if I, the person who bought an NFT, just gave my private key it's tied to, to someone else? What recourse does the artist have then?

> That is: it's proof that the work is "for" you.

I mean yeah, but it's all just semantics in the end, isn't it? The art (or whatever else) may have been made for you, but it doesn't matter- de facto, it's in the public realm. I'm over here, enjoying the thing, even if some database somewhere says you own it.

As for the license keys idea, is that such a big problem? Do people actively go around stealing license keys from other people? Willingly making copies for your friends and colleagues, sure, but that's no different to giving your friends and colleagues the private key tied to the token, which presumably would be possible if you create a new one per transaction.

The concert ticket thing is perhaps one use I hadn't thought of. But that seems like a niche solution to a problem that doesn't really exist, and doesn't really solve it anyway? People often buy tickets often in order to resell them outside the venue. That just means the touter handing over the unique private key they used to buy the ticket along with the ticket itself, surely. They same goes for forum access, or anything else.

The following rant is probably obvious to a lot of people but I really have to get it off my chest.

I really don't get NFTs. I feel like every article I read about them (even the critical ones) is describing them in a way which then turns out to be far more mundane.

People (such as the author here) talk about how they are the digital equivalent of trading cards. Pokemon, M:TG etc work because the cards themselves are hard to accurately duplicate. But the images and other digital items supposedly traded via NFTs can all be duplicated easily, like any other file on a computer. The only thing you get here is a record in a database with your (virtual) name on it next to a hash of the file. That's it. It's not even like your 'ownership' according to this database would have any legal implications.

A real world example might be a card system where anyone could easily scan and print out the same card as the one you own, but that in some database somewhere, there's a record of your ownership of the card. It doesn't matter. Everyone has a copy of your card anyway. The reality is that you aren't the owner of it, whatever your protestations.

A lot of people always complain about how hard it is to figure out what Urbit is, but I'm pretty sure the obfuscation is part of the plan.

I've been following Urbit for a while now (maybe 6-7 years?), and over that time, it has gotten clearer about its goals and motives, I believe because initially they wanted to speak to a very small group of weirdos who saw what was on it and were intrigued to learn more. Starting from a small clique of like-minded people.

Now it's possible to understand what the idea is (some sort of VM running an esoteric set of languages to build an operating system that, among other things serves as a 'digital identity' of sorts). This is the point in time when they want people such as HN readers to understand it, so they make it so it can be understood (more or less). I also think the esotericism of the programming languages is also to prevent anyone from having a go, and to limit people who can program in these languages to just those who are heavily invested in them.

But as others have pointed out (including the author of the post), the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets), because Yarvin is a neo-reactionary who believes life was better when we had monarchies in charge of everything.

He does this at the same time as wanting a clean-slate programming environment, because computers these days are very complicated and buggy or something.

All of this speaks to a desire for things to be simple. Simple politics, simple computers. Democracy and computing these days are not simple, but that's because _humans_ are not simple, and if you want humans to have an equal voice and standing, then that's probably going to result in not-simple systems, in politics as in computing.

We should resist it, for the same reason we should resist anyone trying to agitate for feudal revolution.

I agree, but there also exist papers, magazines and news sites that have capitalized on the fact that literally anyone can report the news these days, to provide news at a slower, more accurate rate.

The Atlantic's Coronavirus coverage has been excellent for example, and the FT (while I don't always agree with the opinion pieces) has some of the most accurate and sober reporting around- often at the expense of being the first paper to a story.

When the price of information drops to near-zero, the niche papers can fill is to provide _trustworthy_ information. This could be where every reputable paper goes in the future.

Right but I'm also weary of the kind of second-guessing about the future and the nature of 'progress' that leads to a kind of epistemological paralysis. Taking an approach of 'it's all very complicated, who knows what the future holds, let's not try to plan for it' is also wrong.

Although it's more complicated than that, because IC engines are only have about 15% efficiency, whereas electric motors are up at about 80%.

Personally I find it really irritating that so many people, such as the humanities teacher, suggest that technology has made life on Earth worse recently like it’s a commonly-understood truth. Yes there are problems with a handful of companies right now, but for the most part life has been improved for the vast majority of people in the world thanks to things like mobile phones.

I did mention Defense and other science projects. 2 things that are mostly publically funded, although morally I don't see where the difference lies. If you believe in a kind of Peter Singer redistribution of wealth then why stop at public money.

But I'm willing to bet that if SpaceX or whoever ever do become fully self-sustaining, a large proportion of people will continue to view space technology as frivolous and unnecessary toys for rich people, instead of valuable research and development that helps everyone.

The thing that irritates me more than anything about the argument that sending people to space is a bad idea is the unique bias people have against space technologies.

No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead", or "We spend billions on the music and film industries, let's shut those down and instead tax everyone for the average entertainment spend and send the proceeds to developing nations". Or defense for that matter.

Hell, you hardly even hear people say that about other, dubiously cost-effective science projects like the LHC.

I doubt there are many climate scientists on here, and I am certainly not one, but the problem as I see it is that the public and industry generally are resistant to subtractive solutions: driving less, going on fewer flights, carbon taxes and so on. Therefore the best solutions are additive: planting billions of trees and investing in industries that reduce carbon emission. Planting trees in particular is something that is- a) simple b) fairly cheap c) has a range of other benefits such as helping to improve air quality and reduce water runoff, preventing floods. d) helps wildlife more generally

I know it's more complicated than that, but that's a good place to start. Perhaps even pay people to grow trees on disused land.