859 karma · joined August 7, 2024
That is not true. Passkeys support device attestation, enabling websites to lock you out if you don't use their approved devices. Which is happening with all the big platforms right now.
so. no clear explanation.
Thanks!
There are a hundred different issues that are more important to me than the usability of my notebook in a court proceeding. And even so, that proceeding might easily be one against you, so why would you want to produce reliable evidence against yourself?
But when thinking about society and the environment, there are different considerations that make the simplistic capitalist thinking wrong in certain situations. Human labor is such a resource that cannot be strictly evaluated by monetary values.
For example (caveat: slight intentional alteration): > would you drive to the library and spend hours or days scanning through reference material... or would you do a [prompt and have AI provide you with a summary]?
Of course on the first glance, as a lazy person myself, the choice is obvious. But is it really? Doing the research yourself has secondary benefits, such as higher familiarity with and learning of the topic. Even as a boss who pays money for people who do that, I'll sometimes gladly pay money so they'll learn and become better employees.
> That is essentially what the "environmental impact" debate comes down to, but nobody is talking about it that way.
Because the environmental impact of human labor behaves differently than the environmental impact of other resources.
If you consume less steel the environmental benefit is clear. Less consumption means less extraction, less processing, less waste and pollution, etc. There is also a direct feedback loop through our capitalist system to induce this. Nobody will mine iron ore that won't be paid for, processed, sold as steel. In that sense, steel is a flexible resource, because there is a direct relation between demand, supply and environmental impact.
If you consume less human labor, things are not so clear and easy. There is a base rate of the "production" of humans, that is relatively independent from the flow of money (actually, it might even be an inverse relation: the less money you have, the more you procreate). The production of human labor is also a slow process, since it takes around 2 decades for a human to grow up. So the resource "human labor" is basically an always-there-resource at some amount that won't be influenced by market forces. The environmental impact of that amount of humans won't be influenced by market forces. So for the environment, it is actually better to give those humans something to do, and use human labor as an always-there-resource, instead of using flexible resources. Same thing for society, humans with nothing to do are generally considered a problem, so you need to give them something to do.
So in a strictly capitalist sense, you are right. But when talking about the environment and society, human labor is a special resource that cannot be treated like other resources.
I'm guessing with a few more tries to get the right positioning and amount of explosives, those terrorists could blow up US ships as well as the Ukrainians do Russian ones.
That ignores the fact that the then-unemployed human will not change it's resource consumption in any way, because a human coding or a human sitting around idly do have roughly the same resource footprint.
Except of course if you are arguing for doing the Skynet thing and terminate all humans replaced by AI...
Ah, the water-use BS again. In Europe, other than in the US, water use for data centers is strictly regulated. You cannot just do open-loop cooling and use a tap-water -> chiller -> sewer line. Things have to be closed-loop so there is no water consumption beyond the initial filling. The only thing you could get away with is to mist your outdoor units on the one or two hottest days per year. But even that is getting more and more restricted.
Maybe VR glasses will be big soon. Do we trigger on 'blink'? 'look harder'? 'eyeball wiggle'?
Maybe voice interfaces? Trigger on 'say it louder'? 'stuttering'? 'hesitant'?
Maybe guestures, facial expressions, thought patterns? 'think hard about that button to trigger tooltip'? 'furl your eyebrows'?
As I've said, decades have passed with no progress. If progress in other fields is a reason for waiting, it'll be stagnant forever and eventually just dead.
We've had things like https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwidgets-module.html since the late last millenium. Back in the day, there was Delphi, now there is Lazarus, with even nicer Data-Bound widgets. Look at some tutorial for those, that's like magic, and also from before 2000!
Does anyone know why there have been 3 lost decades in native HTML widgets? Any ideas how to fix this?
Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.
You are guessing right. To receive direct debit transactions, your bank typically forces you into an insurance contract to cover disputed transactions, plus they block a minimum balance on your account, plus they require some overview of your company assets, in case the former two measures aren't enough. No chance to get direct debit approved as a private person or small company. And the amounts you can receive, as well as the number of transactions will be limited to your insurance coverage. And if there are more than a very small number of disputes, you are done.
Which is why for small businesses, direct debit is only viable through some intermediary, if at all.
In Dieselgate VW got caught, made the supervisory authorities and politicians look bad, which is why the authorities also weren't inclined to sweep it under the rug completely. They just shielded VW from the financial consequences in Germany (German VW customers got shafted).
Blocking GrapheneOS is the useless "pretending" part of compliance. They don't really want to do security, because that would cost money, so they pick some actions that seem drastic, harsh and don't cost them anything to implement. Later, when there is a security incident, they will point to their huge heap of pretend compliance, whine a bit about state sponsored actors, high criminal intent and other obvious deflecting bullshit. But they will get away with it, because they did the compliance dance, so they are obviously compliant and did nothing wrong. Nobody in authority will look twice als long as they are neither annoyed or made to look bad.
tl;dr: compliance in Germany is performative
But WebPKI, which letsencrypt is concerned with, doesn't need long-lived signatures at all. TLS connections live a few days at the most, that's how long the connection signatures have to hold up. The only thing that really needs some lifetime are CA certificate signatures and the CA keys themselves. And even for those CA certificates currently, CRQCs won't be a problem before they expire. And browser update cycles are quick enough that new CA certificates aren't that much of a problem anymore.
That's not the meaning of a "high trust society".
You are _trusting_ that the banks and the government are not out to get you. That doesn't mean that they _really_ aren't out to get you. You just believe they aren't and haven't yet been disappointed enough to change your belief...
Edit: and the original article shows btw. that there is yet another failure mode, not only "out to get you". It's that the banks and the government obviously don't care a bit if some people are intentionally left behind.
No, it doesn't. The article is explicitly about intraday-prices. So day-ahead clearance made invalid assumptions about generations and consumption that were not met during the day. This kind of miscalculation does require additional (costly) redispatch measures to mitigate the overproduction, and it can affect grid stability.
And even if there were negative end prices happening: There are metal smelting works and other operators of big resistors who will happily heat up even more. So prices will probably never get so negative that a normal consumer can ever profit from them.
For consumers, power prices consist of the actual price of power, plus network fees. Network fees are fixed at (on average) something like 10ct/kWh or 100€/MWh. So negative prices are only really negative if the power price drops below those -100€/MWh, which rarely happens (the usual dips are at low single-digit cents per kWh).
And even then, there is the issue of network fee double-dipping: Depending on the contract you have with your power company, the size and kind of storage you are operating, and the phase of the moon and your donations to the ruling party, you will be charged network fees twice, once when buying the power, once when selling it again. In that case, the threshold would be even worse, at -200€/MWh.
And all that doesn't factor in the cost of the storage infra.
Edit: And there is another factor: The current very low dip is in the intra-day prices. But contracts for consumers use day-ahead prices, which usually don't include those very large dips that result from miscalculations of weather and dispatch capacity.
Edit2: Just check https://tibber.com/de/preisrechner (use e.g. 10119 as Postleitzahl) and scroll down for the graph. Today, they give a negative day-ahead price of -1.5ct/kWh, but including network fees, taxes and their cut, you still end up paying 18.2ct/kWh...
There is a critical flux/density/mass threshold for nuclear bombs. You can create small nuclear explosions with particle accelerators, which is how it all started. You just cannot scale those accelerators to anything macroscopic. But the microscopic explosions where done very very early, otherwise nobody would have had the necessary data to later extrapolate this to larger scales.
The interesting question after that first discovery of fission was only about how large the critical density or mass would be for a self-sustaining reaction. But as soon as you knew the critical mass, and had enough fissile material to go over that threshold, things became feasible, and easier with even more material.
Quantum computing doesn't have such a threshold, quite the opposite. As far as we know, larger problem sizes and larger numbers of qbits make things harder. Quantum error correction only changes the exponent in that relation.
In the cold war, there was the "Evil East" and the "Good West", and this opposition forced at least some token "goodness" and a certain predictable behavior on both sides. It also forced both sides to have some firm principles they adhere to. Now the cold war is over, and while it did change more in the formerly East, the West, at least in some parts, also learned a few things. Among them that principles are negotiable, especially without a closed opposing bloc with the opposite principles. Doing business with China and Russia not only made people rich, it also moved Western culture more towards the Eastern ones, more than anyone would like to admit. Starting to see things from the Eastern perspective also induced the West to over time to not just understand the former enemy better and learn the "good stuff". We started to find things like strong autocratic leadership, compromises on human rights, ignorance of international laws and treaties, and wars of aggression and conquest more acceptable and even preferable.
So I don't think this is just temporary.
The current third oil crisis won't change much in this picture, because while fossil fuel prices have gone up, electricity prices are also starting to react and rise. That's because electricity demand rises, some industrial users can either use electricity or gas. And because gas prices are rising, which influence a small but very important part of electricity generation: on-demand gas power plants, that smooth out the sharp variations in renewable generation and demand.
And in the one important area of EV construction that makes a real difference, batteries, they tried and failed horribly. Everything else isn't really that special or EV-specific. So this winding down is just admitting that they already failed when the likes of Northvolt went boom. And the imho realistic assumption that production lines can be changed again if EVs should see more demand in the future. After all, some car brands to produce EVs, hybrids and ICE cars on the same line even now.