DontGiveTwoFlux

Drivers killed about 200 times as many people as bicyclists over a 15 year period. You are misplacing your fears.

https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-pedestria...

OP describes systems which seed tests with non-determinism to catch users who write tests relying on undefined behavior, such as order of equal elements. Writing tests against these systems is a game changer (once you figure out what’s going on and why there are flakes). I’m a huge fan of this subtle change which has spared me at least one bug. It also allows library authors to gain the advantage of not accidentally producing a behavior that induces Hyrum’s law. Kudos to the team for making this work at scale.

Not mentioned in the article is power density. How quickly can the energy be released? Consider solar panels, you need a table sized cell to get 100W. That can make for a big battery to get grid scale power output if these cells are only as power dense as solar panels. The energy density of a heat based solution can be very high- metals can get very hot and they are dense enough to store a lot of energy. But if you can’t get the energy out of the battery fast enough that limits the applications. By comparison lithium ion batteries can dump power out extremely quickly, which is what makes them great for cars. Hydro is even better.

I hope that iterations can get some language level treatment via a mechanism to hook into the ‘range’ operator on custom containers.

I was curious to see if anyone had tried the coal mine bit. This is the closest I could find, a business plan to sell coal attached to carbon credits. Not sure what’s happened since 2016.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environme...

I worried about this too. But I think my attitude has changed after watching lots of the PBS Space Time youtube channel. They do a great job of breaking down these concepts at a level where highly interested non-physicists can get what feel like the real details without dumbing it down too much. They have good videos on many physics topics, and regularly explain new discoveries.

https://youtu.be/QLSIZg0npuA

If a Netflix subcontractor didn’t pay their actors, writers, etc, they would catch a well deserved deluge of criticism. Of course it wouldn’t happen because those workers are organized to prevent these abuses.

I haven’t done the analysis myself, but I highly doubt winterization would double the cost of energy. It’s probably some small portion of the capex to build the plant in the first place. Would you pay an additional 5% or 10%? Probably, especially if you get to avoid your home being flooded by burst pipes, rendering it potentially unlivable for much longer than the week of power outage.

Unfortunately the percussive clacks from a keyboard are probably too broad spectrum to neutralize. These transient waveforms are hard to beat.

Stamping out the above board market for hacks, is not a perfect solution. But limiting the free flow of these hacks from private companies to law enforcement and governments will decrease their availability and abuse. The expertise to build these hacks is high, and so is the potential for abuse. If government needs to build it in house instead of calling up a vendor like NSO and forking over a few, we can expect a better outcome.

High taxes incentivizes more productive use of real estate, such as multi family housing.

I find that the prices of the food are also inflated over what the restaurant would charge.

As someone who writes <5 commits of C++ per year, it is very frustrating. I can’t get through a code review without reviewers referencing at least 2 blog posts about proper style for modern C++. I’m sure if I were an expert who used it every day I could remember all the gotchas and best practices, but it sure is tedious to deal with occasionally. Too many foot guns and conventions, not enough constraints in the language.

This comment hits on one particular issue of ulterior motives in the actions of a non-profit.

But more generally, there is a whitewashing going on. Look at the Sackler family, which for decades got to put their names on museums, hospitals, etc. they get to go around spreading a story about how good they are while rotting out communities with their dirty opioid pushing. They got called out, sure, but how many other Sacklers are out there with their reputations unburnished?

Racial inequality isn’t a one percenter problem if your child was Killed by the police. Pollution isn’t a one percenter problem if your kids all have asthma from inhaling coal fumes or have been drinking water with lead. I could go on.

These problems sound like they have nothing to do with wealthy people standing up for one cause or another. The issue is that the wealth is so often created or amplified by greedily outsourcing these problems to the powerless. The wealth begets more power, and institutions that launder the story of that wealth into a whitewashed canvas of do goodery.

I read Giridharadas' book, and I found it to be pretty narrowly focused on hypocrisy of the wealthy class. Sure, there is a lot of undeserved back patting about how much good people are really doing in the world, but that's probably always been the case. I would have preferred a serious treatment of the ways in which the world has been improved through the mass reduction of deadly infectious disease, famine, and extreme poverty. Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now explores these topics. To read Giridharadas, you might think that all social ills are caused by the wealthy in society, which made it harder for me to take his side on everything.

Still, his main point stands that elites should feel bad about their concentrations of power and that the link between money and political power should be weakened.

You could subscribe to a newspaper or magazine.

I have to imagine that this is to mitigate problems with bandwidth intensive low level networking equipment that is performance sensitive, not application level code. That equipment typically runs code in the languages you mentioned.

The foil in this article were tabloids and paparazzi. I imagine you were not the one rifling through People magazine before Instagram, much in the same way you don’t follow these people now. Yet, these tabloids had cultural cachet among many, and no longer hold the same spot. Why is that? The answer appears to be Instagram, an app. Quite interesting, indeed.

Pressure to IPO sooner would probably be a good thing for most people. Index fund holders got to benefit from the rise of Amazon and Google much more so than the rise of Uber. Public company accountability mechanisms may put a damper on some of the founder -led vision that private cos are willing to abide, but generally it would be better if the wealth were spread around.

I disagree. US companies can have such an outsized impact by the volume of money they bring, that it can create a moral vacuum that sucks up all the air in a place. Everyone has a price, and when the price is in dollars it may be surprisingly low for the less well off. Someone ought to police it.

Furthermore, bribery abroad may undermine US interests and policies. It’s easy to see why companies would want to pay a bribe to build a store in Brazil (mentioned in the article). Compared to the other costs involved it’s probably pretty cheap and can really speed things up. But that million dollars (or whatever) feeds a system that seeks its own remuneration over serving it’s constituents. It’s not just someone else’s problem. It helps to paper over the enormous drag this rent seeking behavior has on everyone.

Furthermore, the law gives employees a basis to stand on to say no. Now I don’t know if there’s really much to that- I’ve never been propositioned for a bribe, but I imagine that being able to say I can’t, it’s illegal, would help me to say no.

Let the market decide.

Well sound uses different neural pathways than audio, so it's not a totally fair comparison.

And how many of those were untested? Most I imagine.

Can any member of the class lawsuit here comment on the settlement? How did that work out for you?

Most insurers require customers to limit their risk in all kinds of ways.

I’m curious if there are cyber mitigation’s that are out there, such as mandatory two factor authentication, requiring up to date software and OSes or other measures. It seems like any insurance company would Be highly Interested in forcing these best practices.

The article makes this out to be about digital devices like Echo and Google home. I agree that these devices should allow for choice in what gets sent back to the companies.

More broadly, I believe that being able to secretly record conversations you participate in is probably for the best. This varies state to state. For example, in New York 1 party consent is legal but in California it is illegal, from my understanding.

Though I haven't had a need to secretly record anything, it feels like a backstop against fraud from bad actors. You hear about so many horror stories from telephone customer service, law enforcement etc, that may have had a recourse if only there was a recording.

The article describes a case where an innocent man had to spend a week in jail. Eventually, he was released and the presumed actual perpetrator was caught. The lead seemed to come from the location data, so it wasn’t useless at least.

But the so called justice system says that it got it right here. The innocent man lost his job when he couldn’t work for a week. Depending on his situation he could miss rent and be evicted too.

Why do we have a system that says justice was served? It’s cruel and unfair.

This dragnet police tactic will scoop up more bystanders and probably convict more than a few innocents as well. I like the timeline feature- it has been genuinely helpful for remembering when I did things months ago. The tie in with photos is also a fun way to remember trips. It’s sad that the cost of these features is to roll the dice on getting arrested because a crime was committed nearby.

The indictment charges that he conspired to crack passwords on government computers. It appears that the free press protections extend to only accepting documents, and not pursuing of them. This makes sense to me on its face. Newspapers reporters hacking into government networks goes beyond reporting, and should not be journalistically protected.