xwolfi

Yeah but the right to be forgotten is because there's a perceived imbalance between now and 70 years ago: before, people would forget you, and nobody found it weird. Today, you're labelled forever in permanent databases, and it's hard to get a redeeming chance.

We believe, in Europe, that it's better to have a criminal re-offend, than to have no criminal being given a second chance, and that's totally a choice and we can change our mind later anyway. But for now, we want to try it.

The "Dragon Eater Vulnerability", that all managers will agitate about mitigating for the next 4 weeks...

But you go from the bottom up here, I don't like to describe it that way.

I prefer to say that we naturally classify objects around us using fuzzy boundaries like "a house", "a cat", which don't exactly mean anything: they are templates we use later to actually generate an actual house, or an actual cat (on a piece of paper as a drawing for instance).

The world being separated between our internal classes and the interactive instances of them, we can code that way too: we look for what we actually need in a concept, name it and define only what we need, then instantiate several concrete actors interacting together. Each actor is complete, well defined, with contracts for interactions.

You can then start building on top of this more complex systems, talking in English and defining rationally the world of your little model.

If you start talking about functions, you're basically aliasing a memory address for a bunch of code: you'll goto that function address, with some parameters at some other address, do a bunch of things and put the result in another address for the next function to process. You're building at best a suite of pipelines, which ends up being a little bit too technical and static for my taste.

Another way to defend modelling a software with classes and object, in my view, without trying to talk about functions, is the blank page effect: imagine arriving at random at some assignment. You understand vaguely the business problem, now you need to code a solution. You have 6 months, will generate a few millions a year and will require a team of 10 people eventually to test, maintain, operate and debug: you start with defining functions generating functions with callback parameters in Python, or you launch IntelliJ and you do a Java class model ? I'd be terrified modelling complex problems with just functional pipelines, I think it's just way more obvious to talk about objects at all time if you're gonna do something that is not just processing inputs into well defined outputs.

I'm French so I'm biased but I always try to take Airbus and fidget nervously when it's a Boeing. I simply dont understand why they're still allowed to operate outside the US: with Comac coming soon and Airbus having a better safety record, why both with the americans ?

In Hong Kong and France, the two places I pay taxes in, it's been digital, free and trivial for as long as I've been a taxpayer, a decade+, as well.

It's just weird when you realize the U.S. is so bloated and backward compared to places they criticize constantly like France and HK :D I suppose they don't have ways to pay taxes monthly there either, so it's all a giant lump sum yearly or a tax loan ?

I always wondered why giant tax jurisdictions never try to just do one single non-micro-optimized tax rate ladder across everyone and zero other taxes / deduction / special regimen etc.

I know HK is much smaller, but having only one single tax to collect at a very simple percentage rate, with very few deduction, makes it so cheap and simpler that the government can reduce taxes because it collects them so efficiently. France collects directly from salary, so now there's no tax return for the vast majority of tax payers, it's a bit riskier since you can't escape it, but... can't do much simpler.

Why are you no big fan of the EU ?

But why is Airbus so much better ?

But they provide so little information compared to the DNA you provide. You get stuff like "ancestry" signals which americans love in their quest for racial validation, but they get to connect humans to a point they can find the family of an unknown murderer whose DNA was found on a crime scene.

Which information is more precious overall, which is a call to action rather than a simple joke between friends "oh im 3% Banana".

It's also completely silly: it's marketing for me. OFC OpenAI will not reach AGI, and ChatGPT doesnt ressemble humans as soon as in interactive mode: there is little danger beyond freeing poor copy writers from their miserable torpeur.

But make another company defending against an insane danger from the first and people start dreaming.

And then some king dies in some country and it's a national holiday the next week, and the data entry guy is in sick leaves and your table isn't updated to close trading... happened to the bank I work in, wasn't funny.

And those geniuses in the "we" you described, how did they eat, how did they dress, where did they sleep, who gave them the paper they used to write their thoughts ? Who challenged them, by their stupidity even, to go further ?

We all work together to build the context that allows for this new knowledge to emerge. The individual who uttered the new concept the first time is immaterial: they are an element of a group, and the group gets the credit, in the grand scheme.

The fact that we have extremes, like crackheads or Feynman, doesn't make Feynman isolated in his success, or the crackhead isolated in his failure. And without abject idiocy we wouldnt have brilliance.

But have we seen that many people calling themselves socialists not ending up with the same problem ?

Socialism doesnt work because it doesnt consider greed as a positive force. Starting from there, every sign of greed is suppressed until remains only an oppressive bureaucracy in charge of hammering any sign of attempt of maybe earning something.

Socialism is not evil, it's even benevolent: but it's flawed because it ignore 50% of human nature. Better let people deal with their greed in a monitored sandbox that averages out excesses. And that is never called socialism, since it derives too much from accepted socialist dogma.

I live in Hong Kong, so I know how hard the balance is to strike. But socialism worked so little here that most people are 3rd generation immigrants who fled collectivisation, loss of property right and only desire to be left alone by the evangelists of a better world. It's hard to hear people who leave in free capitalist sandboxes lecture us about how socialism could maybe work. Try and weep, as we did.

I was so impressed that I left France forever and Im never coming back. Couch activists like you have no idea the misery those constant distracting productivity-killing micro-movements do to the country in aggregate.

I wish you could enjoy them in your country and we wouldnt have to. But well, as long as we can leave France when we dont like it I guess it's fine.

But that's what the EU is willing to reform. Apple isnt a EU company, hell it may even not contribute much to the tax base, there's less reason to trust them in exchange for gatekeeping against EU companies trying to generate tax revenue on their plarform.

Trusting Apple is nice in the US where it's probably a net contributor to the country's development. Elsewhere, not so.

They are a cash flow generating financial product, like a bond ETF. Apple packages users, resell them to the highest bidder, and interest is collected as return on investment from the payments users make.

Ofc, like a bond, a user pays for a reason: he gets something out of the facility provided by Apple, in kind.

Maybe think of it more simply, one precedes the other, this much positive charge in one place attracts negative charge of equal magnitude around it: if you send more electrons (and to be honest, talking of positive charge for a proton is a bit wrong: a positive charge being the absence of electrons... and electrons giving the "negative" charge as they add up), they'll detach and push away those that were already there.

There is nothing convenient, it's as logical as saying that you were tshirts when you go out: there is nothing extraordinary that one torso = one tshirt, as having two or zero tshirts wouldn't help: 0 would make you want one more tshirt, 2 would make you want to remove one.

In HK we made a deal with China so that our judicial orders regarding Evergrande are considered in their jurisdiction. For now we're waiting to see.

No it's the financial holding, they fuck the investors and that s it: they can ignore it as long the 3 city judges in China let them (but everyone will run out of patience eventually: nothing can save this dead horse).

But Japan has a population crumble, a long LONG tradition of home price devaluation (earthquakes destroy everything, why build super high quality stuff and why maintain, after 10 years your protection is more fragile or obsolete) and prices are extremely low.

In China, they had a speculative bubble sure, but what s gonna kill the market is that in 20 years a lot less young people will exist to even buy the houses, like in Japan.

There is no life on Mars, so it s probably too expensive to bring useless instruments ?

I think you're wrong: people who buy a shitty second-hand car to go to work and have little money to spare on it: indeed, really 0 interest in the car as long as it runs long enough to generate profit to break even.

But if you are going to spend 10k$+ on a car, then you start caring, A LOT. I've seen the change from when I was a student willing to take any crap on wheel, vs when I had some money to burn on a car and I spent weeks looking at everything to end up buying a 10k$ 20yo Porsche 911 :D See, I didn't even look at the fuel cost: only the engine perf per dollars. And it cost me an arm and a leg to run, in Hong Kong where the fuel cost is the highest in the world !

People don't work as rational machines balancing perfectly cost and profit in a constant manner over time. It's more a constraint compromise game with a repressed desire for luxury that seem to drive us: you'll buy what you can afford and within those boundaries you will choose comfort and design over economic optimization. Like when people buy an iphone, evidently they didn't look at all about cost for performance and choose something economically suboptimal but luxurious.

Accept it and you'll start liking them more I think.

Well from here in Hong Kong, it still seems well alive: we still see improving knock-offs year on year of US-designed stuff, I got the habit to go to stores, take a pic, get it auto detected in Taobao and pay 10% of the brand price for an exact copy from Shenzhen that seems to work just as well, not question asked.

What I love is how we can get iphones or other apple stuff repaired within the hour for 10 USD at random street shops, sometimes a small walk away from flagship Apple stores that charge hundreds of dollars for someth that doesnt seem to be sourced differently or at least works just as well.

I dont know how people can live in trademark-enforcing countries now. But maybe it wouldnt scale if no design could be profitable middle-term ?

As a side note, I got a huawei phone recently and I couldnt believe how good it was compared to an iphone: it last longer, it has way more features that even Android takes time to copy back and it looks very premium. I got some friends almost envious until I confess all the hoops I had to go through to get Google stuff working: that stung.

Medecins Sans Frontieres

So let me try to "share" something with on a banking app, see if that returns your balance. And then I'll tell you it's designed that way after I publish it along with 15M other people's balance. Not a leak guys !

You misunderstand, I have a very unique French email address and I got the email. There is no way they enumerated my email address, there is no way they matched 15M randomly generated first.last@gmail.com emails: mine wasn't even that.

For info, that same email address has been receiving many many haveibeenpwned warnings, it's everywhere and I consider it basically completely public lol.

Well it's not a prison but it's a big group of people reaching compromises to make it safer for everyone else. Look at it this way: if nobody knows your address, not even the people guaranteeing property law, someone could enter your house, get you to fuck right off, and you'd end up naked in the street with everyone asking where's your proof you live there.

Simplification sure, but you started.

You mis-construct law enforcement / crime prevention. First, it's never about solving all crimes committed by "bad people", the first priority is to show a big red lock everywhere sensitive so that your nice grandma doesn't go "oh well, the door is open and nobody's looking, might as well go see what's in there". Opportunity is the biggest driver of crime in humans, and it would be unmanageable not to have those sanction regimes in place, just as if nobody had door locks.

Second, they need to make it illegal FIRST, or there would be no sanction evasion crime: if they don't act all naive and say "you cannot have an account here at all", then having an account would be fine... now the criminals need to cheat and lie, which they can be charged for.

Finally: not all crime will ever be punished and there's definitely a cost calculation: do we want to take fingerprints of all clients in banks to match them to a central id card database, to end up with criminals infiltrating the fingerprinting system anyway and everyone else having to do those dumb fingerprint checks for nothing ? Better keep it simple while the criming stays manageable.

Not only the name is matched here in Hong Kong, but the address as well: so many people don't believe it, and I have to strongly insist they just write it better and poof, payment works !

I think it's a sort of option / depends on amount: some sites don't ask more than your card number and it works, some other you need to redo 5 times before they match properly. And anyway here you need to approve in the app like for a Google 2FA in Android.

Same, but why would others live there ? When you invest in real estate, you expect, I hope, to rent. Sure you can just wait it out and lose in estate taxes, but normally: you expect people to live there.

Sadly, since living conditions in the US are deteriorating, dangerous, and unattractive, your investment... is the same: people won't pay a fortune in rent for the privilege of being mugged in their sleep (exaggerating for effect).

And again I'm not even saying that it's actually like that there, but that's how we seem to perceive the US from abroad: we're not jumping on it, it's scary and strange, and it doesn't bring as much yield as safer, less unstable countries. I'd rather buy a losing property in Japan, making up for the value loss (automatic there due to earthquake damages) in stable unchanging rent, with an asset I can safely visit when needed, or at least just access when needing to sell.

If you just want real estate exposure you make a REIT mix and pray the Gods you won't be scammed, from a few click in your broker's app. When you buy a real thing, you don't touch the US.