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Quanttek

2,962 karma · joined September 4, 2014

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Quanttek··on EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
The article already hints at it, but lawmakers are not completely dense and allow for relatively easy amendments by the Commission. From the legislation [1]:

> "With respect to radio equipment capable of being recharged via wired charging, the Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 44 to amend Annex Ia in the light of technical progress, and to ensure the minimum common interoperability between radio equipment and their charging devices, by: (a) modifying, adding or removing categories or classes of radio equipment; (b) modifying, adding or removing technical specifications, including references and descriptions, in relation to the charging receptacle(s) and charging communication protocol(s), for each category or class of radio equipment concerned."

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/46755

Quanttek··on We need a middle class for startups
Oh yeah, if we talk about a person, like the business owner or founder, I'd use Mittelständler and if I desperately tried to anglicize it to Mittelstander
Quanttek··on We need a middle class for startups
the "-stand" comes from the German word for "estate" in the medieval sense [1]. It's typically translated with small- and medium-sized enterprises, which is also the lingo used at EU level. As you said, it's a mass noun, so if you want to refer to an individual enterprise belonging to the "Mittelstand," you'd effectively use it as an adjective and speak of e.g. a Mittlestand firm.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_the_realm

Quanttek··on Persepolis of ancient Persia rendered in WebGL
Trouble getting it to work in Firefox on Mac OS
Quanttek··on Zotero 6
It'd be so fantastic if the Zotero team could consider integrating their changes. I know that many probably won't necessarily need its advanced futures, but I see no risk of confusion as it's easy to use and mostly hidden in the "case" category.
Quanttek··on EU regulators: Beware celebrity crypto ads
This is their checklist [1]:

• can you afford to lose all the money you invest?

• are you ready to take on high risks to earn the advertised returns?

• do you understand the features of the crypto-asset or related products and services?

• are the firms/parties you are dealing with reputable?

• are the firms/parties you are dealing with blacklisted by the relevant national authorities?

• are you able to protect effectively the devices you use for buying, storing or transferring crypto-assets, including your private keys?

Pretty basic for those in-the-know but useful for new investors lured in by easy money.

[1]: https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/16/Joint-...

Quanttek··on 'We conclude' or 'I believe?' Study finds rationality declined decades ago
I'm not sure I would take their work at face-value. These studies of word frequencies over time are often too atomized in their failure to consider the relationships between words at all.

And of course, such a change in speech patterns doesn't have to actually speak to a decline in rationality but to a stronger focus on the author of a claim. The rational process of thinking might be as prevalent nowadays, it's just differently worded.

Quanttek··on The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
Exactly! Assist me in my process of researching and writing. and use what I have already done in e.g. putting and classifying paper in Endnote. It's interesting that the author seemed to have a similar idea for a brief second but then tossed it away:

> similar: an app that pops up serendipitous connections between a corpus (previous writings, saved articles, bookmarks ...) and the active writing session or paragraph. The corpus, preferably your own, could be from folders, text files, blog archive, a Roam Research graph or a Notion/Evernote database.

Quanttek··on Six Palestinian organizations hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware
Any state abiding by the rule of law, human rights, and democracy needs to provide evidence proving such allegations beyond a reasonable doubt and enabling the victims to challenge such administrative decisions in court. If Israel wants to drop the pretense of democracy, so be it. But human rights and the rule of law are universal obligations under international law.
Quanttek··on Six Palestinian organizations hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware
1. it's not an "advocacy organization" but a magazine. And this a) doesn't change the fact that the dossier provides no evidence and b) other media has reported on the dossier, including The Intercept [1].

2. I only mentioned that torture has been alleged. Shin Bet has a long-standing pattern of using torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment to obtain confessions.

3. These two disgraced accountants only provided assertions on general hypotheses, no concrete evidence. Such testimony isn't worth much. To quote +972 [see above]:

> An examination of the dossier’s “evidence,” however, along with an examination of the summaries of Abdat’s and Hamuda’s repeated interrogations, reveals that the accountants — who did not work for any of the six targeted organizations — based most of their accusations on general hypotheses, what they alleged was “common knowledge,” or information they claimed was widely “known.”

> More importantly, even Abdat’s and Hamuda’s unsubstantiated testimonies indicate, at most, that some of these organizations were involved in civic and public activities such as student events, helping the sick, and poetry classes that form part of the PFLP’s work as a movement in Palestinian society. A lawyer representing one of the accountants, Abdat, further alleges that his client may have been pressured to provide testimony following interrogation methods that could amount to torture or ill-treatment.

Their reliability must also be questioned:

> Moreover, the summaries of Abdat and Hamuda’s interrogations reveal how poorly acquainted they were with the six organizations listed in Gantz’s declaration. For example, during his interrogation on March 31, Hamuda mentioned the six groups but erroneously noted that parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar is the director of Addameer, an organization that defends the rights of Palestinian political prisoners, despite the fact that she has not headed the organization since 2006 (Addameer’s current director is attorney Sahar Francis).

4. I'm not sure we should accuse AI and HRW as biased, simply for standing up for human rights in Israel, which, considering where the majority of violation lie and who the occupying power is, will necessarily focus on one player. After all, it is not the PA but the Israeli army that demolishes homes or holds people in indefinite "administrative" detention.

---

In short, it is up for the Israeli government to prove publicly - beyond a reasonable doubt - that these severe allegations of terrorism funding are true and that the designation as terrorist associations is justified. It is not up to those organizations and their defenders to prove a negative. Innocent until proven guilty is after all the foundation of state respecting the rule of law.

A designation based on secret "evidence", combined with the fact that even confidential dossiers don't offer a shred of evidence, doesn't make this look like a justified designation

[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/11/04/secret-israel-dossier-pa...

Quanttek··on Six Palestinian organizations hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware
it'd also be good to mention that there exists a strong, largely right-wing and evangelical, pro-Israeli lobby in the US that make it politically very costly to not demonstrate unequivocal support
Quanttek··on Six Palestinian organizations hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware
This is undoubtedly false. Speaking of "purported evidence" when there is literally no credible evidence submitted by the Israeli government for these allegations is misleading at best. Their whole case rests on the testimony of two Palestinian accountants, likely attained by torture, that worked for two organizations that were not included in the list of six [1]. They merely state it is "general knowledge" that these orgs are funneling money to PFLP without providing any evidence. These testimonies have been already partially refuted by public information. Multiple European governments and a large range of reputable international human rights organizations, incl HRW and Amnesty, have rejected the Israeli allegations as baseless and unsupported. These organizations are highly reputable and been supported for years by the EU, uk and other reputable international donors.

They are targeted for their role in opposing the Israeli occupation and human rights violations and, in the case of Al-Haq, likely targeted for their role in the ICC investigation.

[1] https://www.972mag.com/shin-bet-dossier-palestinian-ngos/

Quanttek··on Our self imposed scarcity of nice places
yeah, my experience is mostly limited to Poland and Czechia. But I would say that issues around the maintenance of public infrastructure apply to more than just sidewalks. And the attitude of drivers towards pedestrians/cyclists isn't great in most European countries (outside of the Netherlands)
Quanttek··on Our self imposed scarcity of nice places
It's likely the other way around: most Soviet block cities have not only historic centers equally centered around walking/biking but Soviet city design focused strongly on public transport and walkable neighborhoods because cars were unaffordable to most people.
Quanttek··on Finger counting gives away your nationality
You're completely ignoring the fact, started in the comment as well, that white nationalists have widely adopted the signal subsequently
Quanttek··on Default disappearing messages
Well, then you don't got into the settings and configure a default disappearance timer, as the blog post describes. If you don't want to use this feature, don't use it
Quanttek··on PhD student in Switzerland expelled after criticizing the CCP in Twitter
I recommend to continue reading the English article:

> Gerber's goal was to be able to continue studying at St. Gallen. But the university argued that the professor hadn’t kicked him out; rather, he had been deregistered at his own request quite some time ago. In fact, as of the fall 2019 semester, Gerber had been officially enrolled only at the university in China, not at St. Gallen. He had been advised to take this tack by the St. Gallen doctoral program manager. In an email, the manager had said this would ensure that the maximum time allowed for pursuit of the degree would not expire while Gerber was in China. «Deregistration allows you to keep all your options on the table,» the email had said. The reregistration process would be like applying all over again – but with the support of his professor, this would be no problem, the program manager said.

It then continues to talk about the voluntary nature of the continued support. The email that was received was also sent by a Chinese student in Canada

Quanttek··on The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”
People here forget another big problem with far-future oriented thinking is that's it's almost impossible to predict anything about the future, especially the fat future. We don't know if there could be a superintelligent evil Ai. We don't know if there could be 10^54 humans
Quanttek··on A case against security nihilism
> The problem is that state-level actors don't just have a lot of money; they (and their decision makers) also put a much much lower value on their money than you do.

I think you have a false perception of the budgetary constraints mid-level state actors are dealing with. Most security agencies have set budgets and a large number of objectives to achieve, so they'll prioritize cost-effective solutions/cheap problems (whereby the cost is both financial and political but finances act as hard constraint). Germany actually didn't buy Pegasus largely because it was too expensive.

Without Pegasus, Morocco's security apparatus probably wouldn't have the resources otherwise to target such a wide variety of people, ranging from Macron to their own king.

Quanttek··on Software engineering research is a train wreck
> The average developer thinks empirical software engineering is a waste of time. How can you possibly study something as complex as software engineering?! You’ve got different languages and projects and teams and experience levels and problem domains and constraints and timelines and everything else. Why should they believe your giant incoherent mess of sadness over their personal experience or their favorite speaker’s logical arguments?

This argument could be used for literally any science but, for some reason, it seems to fall on attentive ears mostly in the software industry.

Quanttek··on Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure
This is not even a free speech problem in the first place. We are talking about actions. To draw up an analogy: If I own a gun store and I sell you a rifle and ammunition because you want to hunt deer and I learn that you started shooting at journalists instead, I can decide to stop selling (an act) you further goods because of your actions.

As pointed out elsewhere, this is a business relationship.

In any case, the grave human rights violations that are the result of the use of Pegasus - including loss of life and liberty - weigh much more than an abstract notion of a corporation's freedom to act and impose their will on other corporations.

Quanttek··on The case for banning non-competes
I don't get the following quote:

> The main idea of the non-compete agreement is that employers want to stop people from walking off the job and taking trade secrets to rival companies. If companies weren’t able to secure those protections, they’d need to pay lower salaries, and we’d all be worse off.

If employers lack such "protections" (i.e. non-competes), wouldn't they need to pay a higher salary, so that their workers are not poached by rival companies?

Quanttek··on Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video]
All these stations are owned by the Sinclair Group, a right-wing broadcasting corporation that is eroding the editorial independence of local stations in order to run segments like these or the "terrorism alert desk" [1]. John Oliver had a great video on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc

Also, the following quote is just utter BS, trying to draw a distinction where there is none:

> Reminder: "While it is extremely dangerous to our democracy..." the US is actually a Constitutional Republic.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ3hb6LhPGo

Quanttek··on Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge
Neither the App nor Google use location data. However, Google still prompts your for these permissions because, in their mind, the swapping of rotating IDs presents an indirect way of tracking somebody's location (although that data is solely stays on the device and is never transferred, unless a positive person decides to upload the list of IDs there were in contact with)
Quanttek··on Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge
The apps used around Europe, including Germany's Corona-Warn-App, do NOT use GPS. It only asks for location permissions since it utilizes the exposure notification API that indirectly tracks your "location" relative to other users (i.e. the ID exchange)
Quanttek··on Venn Diagram of LGBTQ+ and Gaming Communities Goes Here
> harassment in online gaming is frequent and serious, even for non-marginalized people. A staggering 74% of US adults who play online multiplayer games experience some form of harassment, and 65% report experiencing some form of “severe” harassment, such as physical threats, stalking, and sustained harassment. The unfortunate consequence has been that 23% of online multiplayer gamers who have been harassed avoid certain games due to the player base’s reputation for harassment.

> More than half of online multiplayer gamers who experience harassment believe they were targeted because of their identity. Women (38%) and LGBTQ+ (35%) players reported the most online harassment. In addition, Black or African American (31%), Hispanic and Latinx (24%), and Asian-American (23%) players weren’t far behind in these negative experiences. And Jewish and Muslim (19%) players reported being targeted because of their religion.

...

> > Fun as a monolithic principle silences the voices of marginalized gamers and promotes reactionary, territorial behavior from within privileged spaces of the games community. Moving beyond fun, by contrast, opens up whole genres of possibilities, many of them queer. The spirit of no-fun is the spirit of alternatives, of disruptions, of difference.

Quanttek··on Why Decentralised Applications Don’t Work
> political intervention and regulation always works out in favor of the status quo.

A bold statement needs strong evidence. "Always" is already debunked with one counter-example. A look at the history of the labor movement or that of anti-trust legislation proves you wrong. Former pushed for worker-friendly legislation out of a grassroots and labor party-based movement, achieving laws that are often more demanding of larger companies. And latter may have seen a lack of enforcement since the Reagan era, but is chiefly centered on making big companies pay.

Quanttek··on Internet and Public Sphere: What the Web Can’t Do (2014)
> After the inventions of writing and printing, digital communication represents the third great innovation on the media plane. With their introduction, these three media forms have enabled an ever growing number of people to access an ever growing mass of information. These are made to be increasingly lasting, more easily. With the last step represented by Internet we are confronted with a sort of “activation” in which readers themselves become authors. Yet, this in itself does not automatically result in progress on the level of the public sphere. Throughout the nineteenth-century – with the aid of books and mass newspapers – we witnessed the birth of national public spheres where the attention of an undefined number of people could simultaneously apply itself to the same identical problems. This however, did not depend on the technical level with which facts were multiplied, accelerated, rendered lasting. At heart, these are the same centrifugal movements that still occur today in the web. Rather, the classical public sphere stemmed from the fact that the attention of an anonymous public was “concentrated” on a few politically important questions that had to be regulated. This is what the web does not know how to produce. On the contrary, the web actually distracts and dispels. Think about, for example, the thousand portals that are born every day: for stamp collectors, for scholars of European constitutional law, for support groups of ex-alcoholics. In the mare magnum of digital noises these communicative communities are like dispersed archipelagos: there are billions of them. What these communicative spaces (closed in themselves) are lacking is an inclusive bind, the inclusive force of a public sphere highlighting what things are actually important. In order to create this “concentration”, it is first necessary to know how to choose – know and comment on – relevant contributions, information and issues. In short, even in the mare magnum of digital noise, the skills of good old journalism – as necessary today as they were yesterday – should not be lost.
Quanttek··on Dear EU: Please Don't Ruin the Root
> "The non-profit root server operators might have to leave the EU and put up active measures so that no Europeans can use their root servers. They can’t afford to do all the paperwork for NIS 2."

I think this is the point where the argument falters. The author is overstating the cost impact regulatory compliance has and understates the non-profit resources. Also, the idea that commercial providers will take over with their competitive edge in regulatory compliance doesn't work, since there is really no impact of such compliance skills on service quality. Everybody provides the same service, so if the operators can comply somehow (even if slow and badly), they are good

Quanttek··on Efficiency Is the Enemy
Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, a highly-influential think tank (the Bertelsmann-Stiftung) suggested closing half of Germany's hospitals because of the low bed utilization and simple inefficiencies that pop up when smaller hospitals deal with less-common cases.

That plan has now been effectively scrapped. The large number of ICU beds per capita has been one of the main reasons why Germany got so well through the first wave. The plan also overlooked that the main bottleneck has always been staff, who were already running with very low slack.

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