EnigmaFlare

That first article is just nonsense. The south pole can't support life? It's been supporting humans for half a century. Can't protect against radiation? Live underground like Hamas did. Have to wait 9 months for food? We do that on Earth too - if you're hungry, call a farmer and ask him to plant some food then come back in a year or two when it's harvested. We solve that problem by pipelining it, just as you would on Mars.

He can't build Rods From God for his personal use because the government won't allow it. Or are you suggesting he builds it then uses it to perform a one-man military coup on the US and disables all their defenses? That's complete nonsense.

Visual Basic in VS has aggressive autocomplete and it gets pretty annoying. You often want to write things in a different order and end up having to delete the auto-inserted endif/quotes/brackets/variable names (if it's not yet declared, it changes it to become something else that is), etc.

Years ago, they made Outlook the web email service and I thought they were going to deprecate Outlook the application and keep the name for the web email. But man this is confusing. Too many things are called Outlook.

Looking for signs in the tealeaves is risky though. For example, my doctors sometimes sends me text messages saying something like "Hello enigmaflare, your XYZ Medical Center invoice for $83.00 is due in 7 days. Please pay to 01-2345-67890123-00." It's not using salesman tactics, but a scammer could replicate that and collect the money himself.

Another example I experienced was a door-to-door salesman who say your home has been identified by the government to be eligible for a heavily discounted air conditioner installation. Our company is authorized to provide that. There's limited funding available so buy quick to avoid missing out. So it ticks all your boxes but it wasn't a scam and I did buy it and it really was a great deal. BUT I didn't trust a word the salesman said. I checked with the government myself, found their company from the list of authorized installers, and called them back through that channel to order it. That's that part people keep getting wrong. They don't go through another channel to re-contact them.

1. is better because in general because nobody actually knows who's a all-bad troll and who's a worthwhile activist. Least of all the person being criticized. QB himself isn't hurt after he blocks them and can carry on with his life as if it's not happening.

I've heard celebrities say they don't read what anyone says about them on social media. That sounds like a good idea because there's always going to be haters to any popular public figure. Just ignore them and you're fine.

3rd parties being affected? Well stop associating with the widely-hated public figre if you can't handle the heat of celebrities.

Authority can just be identity of anyone though. For example pretending to be a relative asking for money for an emergency. And urgency isn't always present, as in catphishing and other long-con scams.

Yes. That's what the statistics say. If you exclude shootings by blacks and Hispanics, America's gun killing rate is similar to high-gun-ownership western European countries.

It doesn't even matter what the website looks like, that's what trips people up - thinking they have any capacity to judge how legitimate something is from what it looks like. Almost all scams follow this same pattern that everybody should learn:

1) Stranger approaches you

2) They tell you some things

3) They ask for money

That process looks like a legitimate cold-calling salesman, but you can treat them the same way and not miss out. After step 2), assume everything they said is possibly a lie and go find the actual person/organization you already know and trust and contact them yourself to do whatever it is. If it's not somebody you already trust, as in this case, then abort.

Not at all. I do think people should share their beliefs even when other people don't like them, and other people should be tolerant of that. But the reality is some of those other people will try to hurt you for expressing a belief they don't agree with.

Who are these worst people and who made you the judge? Is it holocaust deniers? Gays? Muslims? Christians? Vegans? Humans are diverse and contradictory in their deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. What about climate change deniers? They get blocked without saying anything vile - just disagreement.

If you were a really good academic, you could come up with a theory that predicts the performance of a model you haven't actually tested. Physics is full of this - theories that predict something novel followed by other people doing expensive experiments to test them. The guy who published the theory gets the credit. That's probably what we want from academic AI researchers - theories that we can eventually use to design models, rather than just haphazardly building something and wondering how good it will be.

Stop publicizing it to the whole world, yes. The world is chock full of homophobic people and some of them are going to see it if you share it with all of them.

What if you're a holocaust denier? What are you going to do? Somehow not share your belief with the world? Yes! Either that or accept the hateful responses you're bound to get if you do share it.

Don't forget this is all about public posts. Not anyone's private life or stuff they only share with people they trust. There's always going to be a Muslim somewhere who wants to kill you for being a practicing gay, or a holocaust believer who wants to punish you for disagreeing with their it-did-happen belief.

What about an ashiest who ties their belief to rejecting the identities of Christians? There's no end to what people vehemently disagree on.

By the way, you can always change your identity if you really want to. Just because you're gay doesn't mean that has to be your identity. You might primarily see yourself as a citizen of your country or what your job defines you as or your personality or religion or just simply yourself if you don't want to be part of a bigger group.

Yes and yes. It's called picking your battles. If you're not equipped to stand up for yourself or have anyone else do that for you, you're going to get hurt when you insult someone else's beliefs they they've linked to their identity or even their purpose in life.

I'm not talking about bullying, where the person being offended is the only one who suffers from it, but rather things like saying "X is false" which offends believers of X and they retaliate with insults. Yes, people get angry when you offend them or even just disagree with them. If you don't want to cause that, don't offend them. Unfortunately a lot of people are so arrogant about their own beliefs, they feel they have the right to both offend people who disagree and be protected from being offended in response.

Not saying the people making death threats are innocent and of course the law should try to stop them, but often it's not powerful enough so people who don't want that unfortunately have to keep quiet or be anonymous when they want to step on the toes of death-threat-happy communities.

How about if you're publicly saying things that offend a whole community, take personal responsibility for that and accept whatever offensive things they say about you in response. People have this dumb idea that everyone else should respect them for what they say in public but they have the right to disrespect others. If you can't handle that, stop saying inflammatory things to the whole world.

Come on. Millions of people put pen caps in their mouths. Nobody's going to need a special warning when they're specifically thinking about the choking hazard.

During covid, people got so hyped up about trusting authorities, they threw science out the window. Well I guess they never understood science in the first place but wanted to shame anyone who disagreed with or even questioned whatever arbitrary ideas their government proposed. It was disgusting, and those people are still walking around among us ready to damage society next time some emergency happens.

I'm a bit shy about the details but it's used by engineers. Actually there's a lot of opportunity in software for engineers. They pay huge prices and the quality of what they have is often poor. I'm aware of some gaps in the market. For example, modeling thermal distortion due to robot welding. That's not what my product does but that's one where the existing solutions are something like $50,000/year and it's a hard problem in part because the software has to run faster than an actual welding robot making a prototype to be economical to model it in the first place. It takes some clever research to invent the secret sauce to get those speeds.

I've got reasonable financial success in my software product mainly from the merits of the tech. Pretty much all the marketing I ever did was spamming a small mailing list once, making an anonymous website that subtly mentioned my product, got good Google ranking, and got referenced by other people, and eventually making a Wikipedia page which I'm not sure does any good. I got good ranking in Google early on without any particular effort, probably because there just aren't many competitors.

Other people have done a lot to help at their own initiative though. Resellers approach me and market it themselves, customers recommend it on forums, researchers mention it in their published papers, and one customer even wrote a chapter of a book about it - which was key to being eligible for a Wikipedia page.

I'm lucky though because it belongs to a slow moving, well-defined class of products that people in my target industry already understand so when they go looking for a cheaper alternative to the super-priced big names, they find mine. I'm not inventing a new market.

It's not free money though. It's very code-heavy and technical-understanding-heavy and I've spent nearly 20 years actively developing it by now. One man wouldn't be able to just smash one out in a year, and you'd need some reasonably deep domain knowledge.

> put blame on those actively exploiting that

To some extent hackers are like the wind. They're a nebulous cloud of unidentifiable possible-people that you can't influence through shaming or laws or anything else. I think we should see them that way to make it clear that it's primarily the developer's responsibility.

Of course blame hackers when they're within reach too.

Yes, that's what I meant too, sorry.

You can try breathing through one to see. But the hole may also prevent it getting sucked into/deeper into your windpipe in the first place by preventing a seal.

Absolutely. OEM car parts suppliers have liability not just for their own product but whatever consequences happen downstream, like the cost of recalls, etc. And that makes sense becase liability is on the companies that are in the best position to ensure their product is correct.

Vendors of engineering software used by car makers, on the other hand, have no such liability. It's software so its the user's responsibility.

Search MasterLock on Youtube and you'll see that people blame the lock maker rather than the burglars. That's because the lock maker is notorious for making insecure locks.

Social engineering is also something that can be protected against by developers, at least to some extent. Yubikey type 2FA is more resistant to that than user-input TOTP codes, for example. Nothing's bulletproof but it could certainly be improved in many cases. Wasn't some company that experienced a credential stuffing attack recently sued for not requiring 2FA for its users?

We don't tolerate house builders who says "well there's always some way water might get into the framing, so we don't need to bother installing flashings properly - a bit of caulking will do instead."

I agree with her about blaming developers, not hackers. Though not to the point of liability for all developers, but maybe for a few specialist professionals who take on that responsibility and are paid appropriately for it.

Hackers are essentially a force of nature that will always exist and always be unstoppable by law enforcement because they can be in whatever country doesn't enforce such laws. You wouldn't blame the wind for destroying a bridge - it's up to the engineer to expect the wind and make it secure against that. Viewing them this way makes it clear that the people responsible for hacks are the developers in the same way developers are responsible for non-security bugs. Blame is only useful if you can actually use it to alter people's behavior - which you can't for international hackers, or the wind.

Banging this drum could be effective if it leads to a culture change. We already see criticism of developers of software that has obvious vulnerabilities all the time on HN, so there's already some sense that developers shouldn't be extremely negligent/incompetent around security. You can't guarantee security 100% of course, but you can have a general awareness that it's wrong to make the stupid decisions that developers keep making and are generally known to be bad practice.

One way I've heard is they don't book your ticket immediately but predict when the airline's price will go down and book in then. I imagine they have far better data to enable price prediction than the general public, and can spread the cost of getting it wrong over their other customers.

There's a gulf between how people treat workmates/strangers/friends and mate selection. Modern cultural ideas of discrimination go flying out the window for the second category. They might not appear to treat you any worse but will be less inclined to want to have your babies if you seem disabled.

"lack of care" - that's the part about spending time out of another human's life. It's not the poor quality that's the problem but the lack of human effort. Oil paintings are full of visible brush strokes which are an artifact but people love them. For most applications of art - advertising, background decorations, news article pictures, etc. there really is no need to show that humans spent effort on it.

The human effort idea is even a bit morally objectionable. You can feel that you're worth more than others because more of the lives of others were consumed to create your possessions. It's a zero sum game where poor people can never afford high-care art because their time is worth less than the artist's.

That's awesome, but the most powerful one is 9000 lumens from a 1200x600 mm panel, which is 10000 lumen/m^2. I don't think that's good enough for a proper sun effect since sunlight is 100000 lumens/m^2 and even outdoors in the shade is brighter than these devices. But it's certainly a step in the right direction and no doubt much better than natural light for you.