tetrep

That sort of phrasing is almost to be expected, no? This might just be a cynical atheist's interpretation of Abrahamic religions, but Islam seems to be loosely doing the same thing to Christianity that Christianity did to Judaism, i.e. it purports to be the next theological evolution and therefore all practioniers of {current_religion} should rationally convert and download the latest religious firmware.

I was going to make a joke about how it's a shame they stopped inventing Abrahamic religions, but then I remembered the Mormons! I would like to suggest that Mormonism is the true natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian's journey. At least until someone creates a new Abrahamic religion to succeed it.

Do you have access to the source code / would you be willing to share it?

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of legislated PC terminology for government workers somewhere (but, ironically, what first comes to mind is the banning of "Latinx" by Sanders). What about NYC protecting fat workers from being fired? Body-positivity and similar things tend to be "left" in the US.

> It’s also an explicit goal to ensure that user agents can browse the web without this proposal

How, in an information theory sense, can you stop website operators from using this attestation information to block subsets of users? The "holdback" mentioned in your reference link seems like an optional thing, as if we're concerned about good faith actors rather than the opposite.

It would be nice if the spec included examples of how a hypothetical bad actor couldn't abuse the spec to block non-attestors. i.e. How do we stop "this website only works in Chrome on Windows" but for attestation? Right now, it's trivial to "fix" because we can lie about our environment (it's likely just reading our User-Agent) and it's unlikely that the website will actually not work in other OS/browser contexts.

Some websites really do only work in certain contexts, but I think critics' concern is what happens when the website would work perfectly fine, but it refuses to. I think this is largely the same concerns people have with mobile app permissions, but those can be gatekeeped by mobile app stores who can enforce political goals such as "You can't ask for permissions you don't need and refuse to work when you don't get them", websites have no such constraints.

What's to stop websites from blocking random users now? Nothing, really. But we don't have to bypass any cryptographic attestations in order to try to work around those blocks. This spec seeks to stop that.

And that's why everyone knows there's no relationship between autism and vaccines?

I think you're underestimating the ability for people to abuse trust, i.e. lie.

You can't say "trust scientist A but not scientist B" unless you've got some way to judge them. Which we don't as we're the ignorant laymen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism

edit: Global warming would have been a better example. You can point to scientists on "both sides" that each say the other is wrong. No amount of "blindly trust scientists" makes it better.

I might be reading a bit too deep into this, but the source of data for the study titled it as "Fragile Families" (since renamed to "Future of Families") and it really makes it sound to me, as a laymen, that the data is skewed towards families that might not be representative of an average family / we might not be able to take much away from this beyond the groups that were actually studied.

This is a study about a relationship between mental development and abuse, and it's done with a data source skewed towards low-income families with unmarried parents in large cities. Are these families more likely to be abusive or have ADHD in the first place? Less likely?

There's a relevant joke that the results of most psychology studies should have "for college students" appended to it. I think this study needs a similar caveat appended, "Longitudinal study on the relationship between childhood maltreatment and ADHD in low-income unmarried families in large cities."

From https://ffcws.princeton.edu/about

The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) is based on a stratified, multistage sample of 4898 children born in large U.S. cities (population over 200,000) between 1998 and 2000, where births to unmarried mothers were oversampled by a ratio of 3 to 1. This sampling strategy resulted in the inclusion of a large number of Black, Hispanic, and low-income families. Mothers were interviewed shortly after birth and fathers were interviewed at the hospital or by phone. Follow-up interviews were conducted when children were approximately ages 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, and 22 (began late 2020). When weighted, the data are representative of births in large US cities.

Beginning with the baseline interviews in 1998-2000, the core study was originally designed to primarily address four questions of great interest to researchers and policy makers: (1) What are the conditions and capabilities of unmarried parents, especially fathers?; (2) What is the nature of the relationships between unmarried parents?; (3) How do children born into these families fare?; and (4) How do policies and environmental conditions affect families and children?

> But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.

If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same? I think that scientists are more likely to abuse the trust because it's implicit. You can't expect to abuse someone's trust in you (e.g. as a scientist) if you don't expect people to trust you. All the people you listed as untrustworthy are obviously untrustworthy, which is what makes them not a serious risk. Saying "I really want to trust scientists" is the same as saying "If you want to exploit me, use a scientist to do it." I don't think you need to look any further than the Tobacco industry to see why blindly trusting scientists is not a viable mitigation to propaganda.

I don't really have a good answer for how to make a good decision when you're ignorant (trusting scientists would make this easier), and we're all ignorant about most things. Being skeptical doesn't give you good knowledge, it just mitigates absorbing bad knowledge. So you're kinda stuck if you need to e.g. make a risk based decision about COVID and you don't trust scientists.

> Depictions in real life that would be illegal should remain illegal in the synthetic world.

I think creative works would be severely limited if nothing illegal could be depicted within them. If you're arguing only pornographic content should carry this restriction, I'd be interested as to why the same crime depicted in a non-pornographic film is better (in the sense that you think it should be allowed / not made illegal) than the same crime depicted in a pornographic film.

Even restricted to only pornography, I don't see why I (as a hypothetical creative) should not be allowed to include a description of something illegal within the context of a pornographic film. i.e. I think it should be (legally speaking) fine for me to make a hot a steamy porno that also includes, as a core part of the porno, a scathing critique of my local town's property tax implementation while a bank robbery is ongoing. If it matters, let's say the main characters / people having sex are also doing the bank robbing.

If you're trying to restrict what crimes are illegal to depict (rather than all crimes), then I'm not sure what metric you're using for that. Is it only explicitly sexual crimes that should not be in sexual films? Because there's plenty of crimes that are not intrinsicly sexual but that can be sexual because of the observer, e.g. Masochists can be aroused by illegal non-sexual physical abuse, would it be okay to have that illegal non-sexual physical abuse in an otherwise explicitly sexual pornographic film?

If you're concerned about people "getting off" to crimes, I don't think your restrictions are going to mitigate that at all. People are aroused by the abuse in Uncle Tom's Cabin[0]. If you're trying to prevent people from being aroused by "bad" things, I don't think you'll see much success. Hell is other people, after all.

[0]: I'm reading "The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature" by Marianne Noble and it references a letter that's relevant here: "Even in my early childhood I loved to revel in ideas about the absolute master of one man over others. The thought of slavery had something exciting in it for me, alike whether from the standpoint of master or servant. That one man could possess, sell or whip another caused me intense excitement; and in reading 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (which I read at about the beginning of puberty) I had erections."

Same letter, different reference, is quoted on page 65 here of "The Erotics of History" by Donald L. Donham: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt2204r8x.12

> There is a concern about the conjunctions that are occurring where no maneuvers are being made," said Lewis. "You could argue that the probability [of a collision in these cases] is very low, but given the very large number of them, they represent a quite substantial risk. It's like buying a ticket in a lottery. If you buy just one, you are unlikely to win, but if you buy a million tickets, you stand a pretty good chance."

I didn't see anything in the article that implied what sort of odds we're looking at, nor what the consequences of individual collisions would be. Without anything like that, it's hard to understand why this is a bad or meaningfully risky thing. I understand Kessler syndrome is a problem, but is there really nothing less than that that can cause serious issues? The article doesn't really touch on any specific dangers.

You can't apply cake slicing logic because in that scenario everyone likes the (implied homogeneous) cake equally. With gerrymandering, how we slice the cake determines how appealing it is to each party involved, so the gerrymandering slicer could slice a district that would never appeal to the other party. The other party would of course reject it, so you'll at best be in a deadlock.

Whatever solution you might implement to avoid a deadlock can't detect which party is being "unreasonable" in causing the deadlock, so you would need to have another different way of drawing districts, and whatever method that is is likely to be affected by gerrymanderers too. Even something basic like using a uniform 2D grid would likely bias one party or the other, giving an incentive for that party to desire a deadlock for any reason, as they would then win by default.

While there is much talk of protest, nobody in a position of power (like those organizing protests in various subreddits) seems to be offering a diaspora option. The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what they want.

I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.

I don't have any experience with this, but maybe they found a store or something that they could use to get a refund to a specific card and they used your stolen debit card info to get the refund and then proceed to spend it all hopefully before the card holder notices.

It'd be cool if you could submit a specific Github commit (or similar) and then have the app store build it and distribute it. Then the user only needs to trust Apple or Google to not be malicious, which they kinda already need to do if they're using both an OS and app store from them.

> If anything the opposite is far more bleak. Imagine if there was a drug that meant you're less easily satisfied, who on earth would want that?

That sounds like stimulants. You wouldn't be motivated to do things if you were satisfied, so any drugs that motivate people would seem to need to have to have such an effect.

I think it also promotes a culture of "bullshit patents are good, just pay up and move on." Which aligns very well with large companies' large bullshit patent portfolios.

While I agree with some others here that the idea of the government watching public tweets is generally fine, I think the concern here is that there's various legal restrictions on how the government can conduct surveillance, and by using a willing private company to do the surveillance instead, they can avoid oversight and bypass some (most? all?) of those restrictions.

Another concern is the perverse incentives setup by private surveillance tech like this, where you very easily get into ShotSpotter situations where the ability to deliver perceived value to the government is more important that not fabricating evidence to ruin people's lives: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...

I know Palantir will work with your data, but do they also offer any sources of data themselves? If so, this sounds more or less the same as that (or at least that part of their offerings).

I'm very ignorant of the legal context for this sort of thing, so I really don't know if it'd be trivial (legally) for the government to try to get this information themselves.

As an analogy, I think this is (ethically) similar to parallel construction. But rather than hide the illegal activity outright, you tunnel it through a private company. That way you get the same derived value as you would if you had broken the law to do it for yourself, but without the law breaking. I guess something like Room 641A is the best of both worlds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

As others have pointed out, the article contains almost no details about the waste. Here are the details directly from the government meeting: https://documents.dps.ny.gov/public/Common/ViewDoc.aspx?DocR...

Full details of the meeting (including video and transcript): https://dps.ny.gov/event/indian-point-decommissioning-oversi...

Edit: I have no context as to know if the proposal is good or bad, environmentally or morally, but the slideshow is for public consumption so it's pretty readable (not that it'll give you that context).

Kale is a nutrient rich leafy green food in the same family as broccoli. A lot of people seem to hate the flavor, I don't mind it and I wonder if it's because I ate a lot of broccoli as a kid (didn't have any kale until decades later).

For some reason, in America, there's a cultural association with healthy food (especially if it isn't meat based) and left-wing political progressives. I think that is also playing a part here, as there's an implication that the progressive left-wing NYT would be interested in publishing more healthy food propaganda and otherwise "telling people how to live."

What if they're not?

What if it really is economically better for Microsoft to "double dip" and try to monetize Windows beyond its purchase price?

Sounds like they're on-prem:

The computers are submerged in mineral oil that captures heat that gets transferred into pool water with a heat exchanger. The pool still has a gas boiler to boost the water's temperature if required. Deep Green claims it's transferring about 96 percent of the energy used by its computers and reducing a pool's gas heat usage by 62 percent. Deep Green is paying the Exmouth Leisure Centre for all the electricity its data center uses, as well as any setup costs, and the Exmouth Leisure Centre gets the heat for free.

It's less NIH and more "cache your dependencies." Details will very greatly depending on what your tech stack looks like, if you're lucky you can just inline a cache. I know Artifactory is a relatively general commercial solution although I can't speak personally about it.

If you can't easily use an existing caching solution, then the only NIH you need to do is copying files that your build system downloads. I know many build systems are "just a bunch of scripts" so those would probably be pretty amenable to this, I don't know if more opaque systems exist that wouldn't give you any access like that. If so, I suppose you could try to just copy the disk the build system writes everything to, but then you're getting into pretty hacky stuff and that's not ideal. Copying the files doesn't give you the nice UX of a cache, but it does mean that in the worst case scenario you at least have the all the dependencies you've used in recent builds, so you'll be able to keep building your things.

A deserving; that which makes one deserving of reward or punishment; merit or demerit; good conferred, or evil inflicted, which merits an equivalent return: as, to reward or punish men according to their deserts.

"Just deserts" is a common phrase that uses it in the same way.

> Not mentioned in the video is that Philips Ventures is effectively buying up MedTech companies with proven tech, and hovering up the IP into their portfolio as an 'innovation' strategy.

Why is that bad? Unless there's something underhanded about the sale, it sounds like it's exactly what a lot of startup founders want: make an MVP, get noticed, get bought, take your pile of money and make another business or go sit on a beach or whatever you want to do.

There's a reason why the science community demands rigorous papers and not "you saw it with your own eyes so it must be true."

See also: Professional illusionists.

I can't speak for literally all businesses, but more or less everything a business publishes is marketing/PR. They fully control what they allow to be published, why wouldn't they make sure it paints them in a positive light wherever possible?

IDK, seems perfectly inline with certain demographics aging, accumulating wealth, and business exploiting that.

I don't think it's a coincidence that things from the same era, like super heroes, are also currently popular.

Nostalgia is a strong drug.

I think it's less blindly doing and more seeing your attractive friends dieting and becoming more self-conscious about your own weight.

I don't want to give reactionary CEOs too much credit, but I dont think it's fair to describe it as blind.

What's your source for areas of the U.S. without doppler? It looks like NEXRAD dopplers are "everywhere" in the U.S.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEXRAD

How are peoples' names less made up than their pronouns? It seems just as rude to refuse to use someone's preferred name as you would their preferred pronouns.

Wireless has nothing to do with it, you always need encryption: https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her...