MikePlacid

> boring similar photos I've probably already saw like 100 times from a slightly different angle

I’ve started a blog about my summer house in the Sierra Nevada foothills as a way to stay connected with friends and family. Suddenly, I have around 100 subscribers… from Russia, as the blog is in Russian. Although it may not feature anything particularly extraordinary, such as the sky, plants, and animals, these things remain captivating to me. The ever-changing scenery, including the sky, apricot and lilac trees, raccoons, cats, and deer, seems not boring to my readers too. It’s incredible to think that a hundred people in Russia are concerned alongside me when a stray cat returns after my absence in California… We also laugh together on California politics but not very often.

The blog is hosted on Telegram, not Reddit though - for obvious reasons.

> Humanity has never needed billionaires and only in abstract theory does their existence benefit the rest.

I’ve witnessed how decisions are made in a country with no billionaires - they were made by Politburo guys. I’ve also witnessed how decisions are made by Elon Mask. I’d have Mask over Politburo every time.

Billionaires are just centers of power who are not subject to the Party ideology and control. Why would anyone refuse having the power more distributed?

> if you are born rich, you get to be rich, if you are born poor you get to stay poor.

I came to the US with $700 in debt. But I didn’t stay poor.

>Then it seems natural to start to dislike each other.

It may be natural, but it seems extremely counterproductive.

Well, destruction of a competitor is always good for owners of the company, not for workers.

>All it would take is one activist shareholder to blow that whole thing apart.

The following fascinating story about stealing money from Pacific fleet operations mentions 27 (twenty seven) whistleblowers whose reports were ignored:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/navy-repeatedl...

> processing is usually stuck at 99%

Why call it 99% then, call it 49%.

Looking at my Ricochet modem: mesh networks are so cool, but…

Well, speaking of airplane industry one thing is obvious - you can’t build great airplanes without money and you can’t get large sums of money without building great airplanes. The survival/prosperity question is of balance, not of preference of one to another.

I do not know why the author decided to “simplify” things. In my field of experience such simplifications end very badly. I guess if someone decided to really just build great airplanes no matter the costs - his enterprise would have ended very badly too.

Now, the question of finding a proper balance, as each engineer knows - this is the question of real pain and real beauty. But - is it possible to write an article about a struggle to find a proper balance in something? anything? Will anyone read such an article? Imagine, how many things should be explained before the problem becomes clear…

Industrial espionage does not necessarily improves engineering culture.

When I visited NITsEVT, a big-big-big organization dedicated to adapting of the stolen IBM 360/370 software to Russian language and Russian computer variants - I was amazed at how low the software culture was there. It looked like the only way to implement something was to look at how some American (but not necessarily bright) person has implemented some similar thing.

The whole “adaptation” project led to overall degradation of software culture as compared to 60s, when a lot of Russian system software was an original one. Or so a lot of people were saying.

Right direction to go, comrades!

Now, start dismantling the shower and the toilet - save the Earth.

Well, what about your own dwelling. Each of your rooms can house one additional family. And yes, I am counting a living room and a dining room too:

Communal apartments (Russian singular: коммунальная квартира, romanized: kommunal'naya kvartira, colloquial: kommunalka) are apartments in which several unrelated persons or families live in isolated living rooms and share common areas such a kitchen, shower, and toilet.[1] They generally lack privacy.

Well, I’ve lived in a communalka without a shower, a toilet was outside. These are bourgeois luxuries, they increase price of the house.

> state-backed construction on a postwar scale

One more innocent question: Should our state build enough houses just for existing population or for all South America population too?

Shhh! I would pay to watch America moves this way.

You forgot one crucial step in that book: nationalize all the housing and pack more families into the existing units.

I’ve lived in a country without sprawl and without the automobile. I’ll watch with great interest if this country moves in that direction.

Could you please suggest any mechanism for limiting anybody’s input into decisions?

> but it's still piracy if you don't pay for a service in the ways they provide.

Nope, it’s called “negotiation”. Here’s the money I want to pay for your service. You don’t want it? Fine, I’ll leave it here in case you change your mind.

(Youtube can die in my book, I’ll just shrug.)

> But the prestigious and serious news organisations still do perform serious high-quality reporting and investigative journalism.

You’ve omitted one word: honest.

I remember clicking on some Google ads - when they were unobtrusive and textual - just to get these new nice guys some additional revenue (often ads were “on-topic” even).

But these jumping, blinking, content obtrusing things? And I am on a tablet 90% of the time…

Most probably. Petro is the Ukrainian first name, while Petrov is the Russian last name. Zailenko is the Ukranian last name. So the only valid combination is Ukranian. (Do not ask me how I know this. I can’t explain. Just a trained neural network produces these results).

Technical curiosity: how site owners are able to detect blockers and why blockers are not able to bypass detection?

As for ads I prefer Brave Browser model, where I pay websites directly, bypassing advertisers.

> I ran about 30k machines with sshpass and it worked just fine. Easy to script. I don’t understand at all why we need something else here.

Do you keep all your passwords in one directory or in something more complicated?

You are probably asking about the passh page. Examples there show that sshpass creates a new permanent tty entry with each use, while passh does not.

More importantly though is that sshpass keeps your password permanently on your computer, thus increasing security risks considerably.

Nice article explaining why Apple won while Google lost: https://www.theverge.com/24003500/epic-v-google-loss-apple-w...

> Apple and Google both arrived at 30% as Thr number for their cut and why it’s never changed in the 14 years it’s existed

Trial documents show that Google charges 0%, 10% or 15% - depending on a situation. Lower than 15% rates were called “bribes” by Epic lawyers. The jury seemed to agree.

I do not know about Israel, but I can read both Russian and Ukrainian. And there is a pretty objective test: read a Russian president’s statement - see how it is reported, read a Ukrainian president’s statement - see how it is reported.

Note: I can’t verify facts in the field, but I can read the statement and see how it is reported. So, samples:

1. After pro-Russian forces achieved a major victory in August 2014, the Russian president issued a rather consolation-seeking statement, between other thing “asking” pro-Russian forces to release prisoners.

This was reported as a belligerent statement.

2. At approximately the same time the Ukrainian president issued a statement basically justifying war crimes as means to win the war, on the lines: “our children will go to schools, and separatists’ children will be hiding in basements - that’s how we will win this war”.

This was not reported at all.

Again, these things are easy to check - just read / listen to the original. Still, the media are lying about them. What do you think they are doing reporting things that are not that easy to check?

“ incl eg ukraine” is in the wrong place. It should be here:

“We can support war crimes and install really bad regimes (incl eg ukraine) all we like cause we’re the good guys”.

Otherwise OK.

> If they were to for example steal the 5G architecture from another company

What about this article? It says Huawei has the largest 5g patent portfolio in the world: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/huawei-to...

Huawei to start demanding 5g royalties from Apple, Samsung - from 2021: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/huawei-to...

So

>> 100M bots posting 3,500 times per second...

and

> We used the OpenAI API to generate 50,000 statuses for the bots to choose from at random.

I wonder: 100M OpenAI bots talking to each other continuously and with much vigor - how is this affecting OpenAI’s uhm… intellect?