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thebooktocomeon DOJ sues SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring

> To take a simplistic example, even janitors might potentially have access to ITAR controlled materials if engineers threw them out into a bin bound for a shredder/incinerator and janitorial staff are trained and trusted parts of the disposal chain (which they should be!). Anyone might be able to overhear water cooler conversations.

As I mention elsewhere in this thread, if this is really how SpaceX operates then they’re already in (ethical, if not legal) violation of their duty to protect ITAR from dissemination. ITAR documents should never just be sitting in an unsealed bin waiting for disposal. Employees shouldn’t casually be discussing ITAR around the water cooler.

Assuming everyone around you is permitted to handle ITAR is a recipe for disaster.

thebooktocomeon DOJ sues SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring

Yes, exactly; thanks.

thebooktocomeon DOJ sues SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring

> For SpaceX to internally segment ITAR from non-ITAR is a huge bureaucratic overhead for them which leads to a possibility of mistakes.

They decided to become an aerospace engineering firm in the US. ITAR security is part of the cost of doing business.

If the typical e.g. janitor or cafeteria worker at SpaceX has access to ITAR, as SpaceX seem to have alleged before they got caught, then their ITAR security is pure theater.

thebooktocomeon DOJ sues SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring

It’s complicated, but not always.

Regardless, the ITAR issue is secondary; they hire for roles that do not touch ITAR.

thebooktocomeon DOJ sues SpaceX for discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring

> SpaceX recruits and hires for a variety of positions, including welders, cooks, crane operators, baristas and dishwashers, as well as information technology specialists, software engineers, business analysts, rocket engineers and marketing professionals. The jobs at issue in the lawsuit are not limited to those that require advanced degrees.

The fact that SpaceX deals in ITAR does not prevent them from hiring refugees for roles that do not handle ITAR.

thebooktocomeon Don't fire your illustrator

They’re not mine; I pulled them directly from the parent comment.

thebooktocomeon Don't fire your illustrator

The client "needs" in question here are low cost overall, low marginal cost for each revision, and a totally-interactive "do what I mean" interface.

Shoving a human artist in the middle is a liability on each front.

thebooktocomeon Don't fire your illustrator

Can you give an example of a “clear and bright” line in copyright law that does protect “folks who don’t have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court”?

For context, I’m in the process of translating a work that I know for a fact is in the public domain (sole author died 90+ years ago) and I’ve still got legal questions that I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to solve.

thebooktocomeon Don't fire your illustrator

1. Yes. Always has been, within the ambiguous limits of fair use.

2. Discovery. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/resource...

Some variants of “theft of style” are recognized by some courts already, please see the legal literature on music copyright and the recent 7-2 SCOTUS decision on Warhol’s Prince series.

thebooktocomeon Don't fire your illustrator

> Overall I think this is a net win, especially because I don't think this needs to be the end of the road for human illustrators, but this will force them to adapt and bring more sensitivity to the needs of their clients.

The advantages of AI that you crow over simply can’t be met by any human professional artist. A human can’t do hundreds of revisions profitably. There’s increased “sensitivity” and then there’s needing to read the client’s mind.

If you think this isn’t a death knell for human illustrators in this particular market, you’re deluding yourself.

thebooktocomeon Don't fire your illustrator

Author conflates legal and ethical options for preventing copyrighted work from being used to train ML image generators.

There’s nothing legally inconsistent about passing a law saying, e.g., “ML training is not fair use”. Doing so will not even reduce existing fair use rights being exercised by actual people.

The author’s argument is that doing so is philosophically analogous to human creative processes, but those are—and I can’t underline this enough—human. And the law is not (and cannot be, should not be?) consistent in such a way.

thebooktocomeon Irrigating more U.S. crops by mid-century will be worth it, researchers say

And if you have absolute dominion, so does everyone else around you—and then nobody gets water after the aquifer collapses.

thebooktocomeon The TextFX Project

This feels more like a tool that arrests creativity before it can even put its shoes on.

thebooktocomeon China Stops Publishing Youth Unemployment Numbers Amid Faltering Economy

The Chinese have made it clear through their economic and legal policies that international collaboration can only occur on their terms and under their unilateral control. Nuts to any corporation or organization that tries to achieve equitable footing with their Chinese branch.

thebooktocomeon Disney’s Taylor Swift Era

I don’t think she’s substantially lip-syncing (maybe here and there, but not continuously). I was at the Detroit show and she confessed to having a bit of a cold during the interim into Evermore. And indeed, she coughed and sniffled a bit during other songs it was picked up by her mic. She also got a little short of breath during heavy dance numbers.

Maybe I’m easily fooled, but if she was lip-syncing a lot I don’t think they’d leave these imperfections.

thebooktocomeon Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

I’m saying that on the continuum of Marxism, the PRC circa 1965 is somewhere to the middle-far-left and the article above (that OP claimed was Marxist) is all the way on the far right.

I’m not super interested in whether or not their Marxism was “authentic”, and neither is anyone who goes around, as OP did, randomly labeling things they don’t like as Marxist.

thebooktocomeon Maybe the problem is that Harvard exists

It’s the same folk-interpretation of Marxism that always goes around. Now that Marxism is dead and can’t defend itself, it’s whatever anyone wants it to be.

States that were far closer to Marxism, like the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decimated their universities and dispersed their faculties over the countryside, or to labor camps.

This article is not on the same planet as that madness.

thebooktocomeon The climate wrecking ball striking food supply

Indeed, many of the new subsidies are to promote various kinds and scales of rewilding.

thebooktocomeon The climate wrecking ball striking food supply

It’s not related to the article, but the UK is currently restructuring its farming subsidies to, among other things, encourage sustainable farming and mitigate food security risk.

Basically everyone is unhappy about it for some reason. Some sheep farmers were told to reduce their flock by 90% or so.

But on the other hand, the pastures they’ve traditionally used to graze can no longer sustain such flocks (although this is controversial, it seems borne out by my reading). So if they continue to consider only profit motives, the pasture will end up dead and they’ll be out of work anyway.

It’s a hard problem that ought to have been solved decades ago.

thebooktocomeon Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

I’ve yet to meet a customer that cares enough to pay for the necessary numerical analysis.

thebooktocomeon Some tactics for writing in public

Absolutely. And the specific example here—reminiscent of the dongle incident [0]—is definitely one of those.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...

thebooktocomeon Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

I’m not the parent but I imagine they’re referring to e.g., some FFTs use different partitioning strategies in different threading environments, which breaks bit-perfect replication.

There’s also the weirdness that in C++ the floating point environment is thread-local, which can cause all sorts of chaos.

thebooktocomeon Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

Where did I imply that? The fault was with the JVM.

“The impetus for changing the default floating-point semantics of the platform in the late 1990's stemmed from a bad interaction between the original Java language and JVM semantics and some unfortunate peculiarities of the x87 floating-point co-processor instruction set of the popular x86 architecture.”

thebooktocomeon Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

When exp(45) overflows that 64-bit integer doesn’t seem so impressive.

thebooktocomeon Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

As a fellow practitioner of the demonic -ffast-math arts, let us cackle menacingly together. :)

thebooktocomeon Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998) [pdf]

Strictfp is no longer used as of JVM 17. IEEE-754 semantics are default.

https://openjdk.org/jeps/306

Ironically, using your system’s math libraries will probably make replicating floating point results harder. Especially on macOS. Accelerate is a curse.

I disagree with your gloss of Kahan’s philosophy. His approach is more along the lines of “do not waste precision”. But this philosophy is not the complete truth; as close as I can state it briefly, my modification would be “do not waste precision that may be needed later”.

thebooktocomeon ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

My first attempt with Speak with Animals led to a somewhat awkward conversation with a boar, whom an absent druid had recently promised a mate. His "haunches" clenched and quivered with anticipation.

I laughed heartily.

thebooktocomeon America’s Truckers, Cargo Pilots and Package Carriers Are Fed Up

It kinda depends on circumstances.

If you’re mainstream attractive, healthy, and above median income, the US is pretty nice. If any of those things are missing, it pretty much sucks.

thebooktocomeon America’s Truckers, Cargo Pilots and Package Carriers Are Fed Up

That’s how representative democracy works. Generally speaking no country has citizens vote on specific foreign policies, with some exceptions.