simiones

It's important to separate what can happen from what will happen.

The majority of people walking in the worse neighborhoods of LA or Chicago never have a single crime happen to them. But that doesn't mean that it's safe to go in a bad neighborhood - and it really doesn't mean it's safe to go there wearing designer clothing, gold watches, diamond rings and wearing your Apple VR device.

The same is true for travel. It's perfectly safe for the vast majority - but it's very important to be aware what may make you a target and what can happen to you if you are. Tens of millions of people visit the UK or China every year with no incident. But if you're a public active supporter of Palestine Action, or an active demonstrator against the CCCP respectively, be aware that you personally face a real risk from this travel, and your devices are actually very likely to be searched at those borders. Vice versa though (anti-CCCP activist traveling to UK, PA activist traveling to China) is perfectly safe, though.

That's completely different. Pleading the 5th and not testifying is completely different from giving false testimony - which is never protected. Even in a trial, if you are asked under oath if you handled the body, you are allowed to say that you invoke your 5th amendment rights not to respond; but you are not allowed to say "no, I didn't" if in fact you did (you can later be accused of perjury in addition to your conviction).

Which tells you of the poor moral character (if not outright participation and complicity) of many people who seemed respectable.

> Did they ever really abuse the power Google could have wielded?

Plenty of times. Perhaps the worse is pushing Manifest v3 with no support for real ad blockers in Chrome. Not to mention no support for ad blockers in Chrome mobile.

Also, their stealing of newspaper content.

Their new push for AI summaries instead of actual search in their search product, stealing even more clicks from sites that actually produce information.

YouTube pushing Shorts to everyone, and now the weird text posts that you can't hide.

In general their gigantic push for ads everywhere all of the time.

That's not an operating cost, it's capital cost.

The problem is that personal vehicles inevitably leads to unsustainable traffic. Now, for low traffic areas, driverless cars might be an acceptable solution. But for busy areas, the geometry of transporting 1M people in cars vs buses is simply inescapable.

"Frustrated with how critical details are missing from the GUI, requiring you to learn console commands? Don't be so ambitious, stop using a GUI for these things at all and write your own CLI for them!"

Theoretically, yes, absolutely. Practically, no, they would be taken down by automatic filters and you'd have to be willing to face Disney's lawyers to try to get them reinstated.

The conflict in Palestine is created entirely by Israel. The militants are just the people who refuse to lay down and take it. This has become more and more obvious - if not through the genocide in Gaza, then through the rapid illegal colonization happening at an accelerated place in the West Bank.

One fun thing I remember from reading some EULAs for physical games I bought in the past: the EULA for StarCraft at least explicitly said that you are required to obtain prior written permission from Blizzard Entertainment before lending the disk to a friend. Obviously this is not practically enforceable, but it shows that nothing of this kind is new from these companies' perspectives.

The way the law is structured, you are never buying copies of digital goods, regardless of the format in which you obtain them. Instead, you buy a license to use the digital good under the specific terms and conditions of that license. That is why if you get a disk with GNU utils on it from the FSF, you are still bound by the GPL in what you can do with the data on that disk.

> Obviously Apple did the research on this.

Just like they obviously did the research on the Apple VisionPro and that is inevitably going to be the next big computing device, right?

I think the research is exactly what's happening right now (or will once it launches).

Ohh, yes, I had not at all understood that this was what you were referring to, especially as I had already suggested this is a real, though to my mind implausible, possibility.

Now, as to how plausible this is, we'll actually get into semantics. To me, saying that "gravity is quantum" would mean that it is a real force/interaction, and that this force obeys the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. So, I wouldn't say "gravity is quantum" if it turns out that the Entropic gravity theory is true, as in that theory gravity is only an apparent interaction. However, I admit that this may only be my perception of what these terms mean together, and that others may use "gravity is quantum" to refer to any theory that explains the macroscopic effects we call gravity in a way that matches quantum theories.

Their statement has two possibilities:

A: If gravity is quantum, then (B) there must be some particle-like think that we call a graviton that mediates the interactions, and then seeing a rubidium atom fall must have been an interaction with this particle.

not A: If gravity is not quantum, then they are making no claims about a graviton.

If you think gravity is not quantum, then you go to the "not A" branch, and they make no claims about that branch - so there is no contradiction with their IF.

There is a difference between "being in a superposition" and "occupying the same space". The uncertainty principle basically tells you that an electron is never in a defined place - it exists with some probability in many different places (technically it could be at a definite position, but only if it had completely indefinite momentum, and that's not physically meaningful given energy constraints).

Now, say we have an experiment where two different sources each fire one electron in some direction; and say the electrons have the same spin and other properties except for their initial position and momentum. We can meaningfully say that for a certain location between the two sources there is some > 0 probability for either electron to be there, so the amplitude of each electron's wavefunction at that position is > 0. However, that doesn't mean we can ever find both electrons at that same postion at the same time: the individual wavefunctions are just parts of the two-electron system's wavefunction, and, per the Pauli exclusion principle, that one will be 0 for any state of the form "electron A at position x and electron B at position x". So, for any position, you can find either electron there, but never both.

An additional wrinkle is that this only applies for two identical electrons. If the electrons have different spins, then they can actually be found at the same location at the same time. You can have a spin-up and a spin-down electron in the same place at the same time, but not two spin-up electrons. This is the fundamental property of fermions. However, you can have any number of identical photons at the same location - that's the fundamental property of bosons.

The statement "if gravity is quantum, this was an interaction with a graviton" is true even if it ultimately turns out that gravity is not quantum. The statement is about the consequences of a premise, and is not falsified if that premise is false.

The only way this statement could be false would be to have quantum gravity but no particle that mediates this interaction - which doesn't seem plausible almost by definition.

> There aren't laws to ensure that. Within specific jurisdictions, sure, but not globally.

Many trademarks are indeed more or less global.

> A lot of companies also don't trade under their full name. Apple, famously, wasn't founded as Apple but as Apple Computer, and was only able to rename after achieving a deal with Apple Records.

That's irrelevant - Apple Computers owns the Apple trademark (for certain industries).

> The lack of more namespaces also led to things like nissan.com being owned by Uzi Nissan (and now his family, I assume) rather than the car company.

It's not perfect and not guaranteed to be unique, yes. But people's names have many orders of magnitude more collisions.

> <firstname>@<lastname>.name as an email address.

No, you'd at best get `??@firstname.lastname.name` as your email address. Which, again, is irrelevant, as it's impossible to say which of the many thousands of Firstname Lastname people this might belong to.

> (The cultural aspect is irrelevant - it was not enforcing a specific order. If people wanted to register lastname.firstname.com, nothing would stop that)

I wasn't referring to a specific order, but to the cultural idea that people have 1 firstname and 1 lastname. In Spain, for example, people typically have 1 first name and 2 last names - but you couldn't get `a.b.c.name` as an address. Having a first name, a middle name, and a last name is also very common.

There are also cultures where people simply have one name, not first + last. For example, a person's full legal name in Tibet might just be "Woeser".

I'm sure it's also a matter of how much time you actually dedicate daily to this - and it's quite hard to maintain passion and focus for 8+h /day on the same game for 30-40 years.

DNS names are never permanent, they are in fact extremely im-permanent, always requiring periodic re-registration (though, to be fair, with pre-emption rights, so you have some guarantee of keeping your registration if you don't forget).

> Also, .name filled an actual need for general non ccTLD

That's a silly idea. While there are laws that ensure to a decent extent that there is a single company called "Google", so that it's relatively unambiguous who `google.com` should refer to, there is no uniqueness whatsoever to personal names. There are likely hundreds of thousands of people called "John Smith", so the FQDN `john.smith.name.` would not really tell you anything.

This is without even going into the fact that "first-name.last-name" is culturally specific (though, to be fair, a large proportion of cultures in the world use this format).

The problem is that "with a handicap" is in itself ambiguous. People sometimes use it positively, sometimes negatively. That is, you say that Shin had a two-stone handicap, that can in itself be understood as either "Shin was given an advantage of two stones over the AI" (the reality) or "Shin was playing with a disadvantage, giving the AI two extra stones" (the more common reading of "to have a handicap").

Only if you were to assume that a player's prowess remains constant throughout their career, which we generally know to be false. (I'm completely inventing dates here) If Fisher played Kasparov in 1990 and Kasparov played Carlsen in 2020, you can only compare Carlsen to Fisher if you assume Kasparov's skill was about the same for this entire duration, which no one believes to be the case.

A small note - it's Elo scoring, not ELO. It's named after Arpad Elo, it's not an acronym of any kind.

> the type system ensured that, unless the capability had been revoked, illegal requests would not type-check at compile time

I don't think I can imagine what you mean here. How would my compilation success depend on whether an Admin has given me the right to read or write to a certain path?

The question is - how do you get the ability to write to pathA and to pathB but not to pathC, while another user gets the ability to write to pathA and pathC but not to pathB?

Do you get a huge list of capability keys when you log into the system, one for each path? Do you ask a service for a capability when you want to perform the action?

Oh, I'm sure it can be done, and what you're describing sounds quite nice.

All I take issue with is the claim that this is a way to make the unauthorized actions "impossible to utter". The reality is that, at least at some level, you always have to evaluate a request and, based on some cryptography related to user identity, decide if you'll honor it or refuse it. That may be checking a cookie to look up the user and then checking a separate place to see if the user is authorized to perform the action (perhaps with an extra step of finding a role, etc), or it can be checking a "pre-approval" signature obtained at some earlier point as you're describing here, but it's ultimately the same concept, and isn't "implicitly handled" in one case anymore than the other.

First of all, this necessitates a certain data model, where instead of a "UploadFile(file, destPath)" operation, I have to have a "destPath.UploadFile(file)" operation. This would be ok for this case, but not all operations can be expressed in this simple parent -> child relationship.

Furthermore, even here, this doesn't cover another case: what if I am allowed to add files to destPath, but I'm not allowed to modify a specific file? This API still has to fail if `destPath/file.Name` already exists and I'm not allowed to modify it (or it at least has to do something different than when `destPath/file.Name` doesn't already exist).

And even if we accept that we can only ever write things in this way, this still leaves the problem of terminology intact. Depending on the technology, it's simply not true that I can't "utter this phrase" if I don't have the capability. For example, if this is an HTTP API, then I can always do a `POST /dest-path/upload-file` with the file I want, regardless of whether I have the authorization to access that or not. Sure, if it's a HATEOAS-style API, the `GET /dest-path` might not return a link to `./upload-file` at all, but that doesn't mean that I can't utter that sentence - i.e. issue that HTTP request.

> If the subject can utter the action, then it can perform it.

This sounds like another layer of weird terminology that doesn't mean anything for someone who is not familiar with whatever capability system you're thinking of.

Say I am a user who can see a particular directory on a shared setup. I try to upload a file in this directory, using the same method that worked on another directory. The question of AuthZ is: will I be allowed to do it or not? In the plain sense of the words, I can absolutely "utter the action", I have all of the "verbs" (upload) and "nouns" (the file, the destination path). Still, I should not be allowed to perform the action if I was only given read-only access here.

Now sure, you can say that "upload to dirA" is a different verb than "upload to dirB". But this is just confusing terminology, it doesn't enlighten anything.

Do you have proof Apple is facing unexpected demand for the Mac Mini because of AI? Do these news sites?

This comes off as claiming that no one could possibly read Harry Potter if they haven't read The Illiad yet, nor the Illiad if they haven't read the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Note that it's not uncommon for even more widely prescribed medication to have no firmly established mechanism of action. Acetaminophen/paracetamol is probably the best example.

Ultimately medication is prescribed based on evidence from clinical trials, whether or not the mechanism of action is fully understood. SSRIs work to help with depression in clinical trials when compared to placebo, so they get prescribed.