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ThrustVectoringon Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?

Cryptocurrency was and is volatile enough that the correct play is to not build out long-term capacity for what very well could be a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon.

ThrustVectoringon The Case Against Crypto

"Don't use it" is a bad argument in general. Gaining an option is not necessarily positive value, since other people can now attempt to coerce you into using it. I don't want there to be a straightforward irreversible way to send money to foreign cybercriminals; I want this to be impossible so that they don't attempt to extort these payments.

Similar logic explains why selling your kidney is illegal and why voting systems are designed to make it impossible to prove who you voted for.

ThrustVectoringon Reporter likely to be charged for using “view source” feature on web browser

The process is the punishment here. The only adequate protection against capricious prosecution is that in principle you can make a stink and vote out the elected officials abusing their power.

ThrustVectoringon Hospitals still not fully complying with federal price-disclosure rules

> The whole thing caused me to very seriously question the strength of "medical opinion", given patient history, a routine request to simply continue proven treatment turned into a risk scenario for no reason other than the tangled mess of insurers, agreements, drug manufacturers, and the like all more focused on profit than they are patient health.

The flip side of this is the "pharmaceutical representative" entire job description. Basically, your doctor has a wide range of words they use to describe how to treat you. Some of them wind up with the insurance company paying $15 for generic medication, while others wind up doing something like spending $400 on something under patent protection. Pharma's reps jobs are to talk to physicians and educate/convince them to use the expensive words instead of the cheap words out of force of habit.

Anyhow, that's why HMOs and insurers have approved medication lists - to push back against doctors writing down a $400 word instead of a $15 because a pharma representative said that FooBar XR treats Baz syndrome and the doctor wrote that down instead of the generic BarFoo.

ThrustVectoringon Germany: Data retention to be abolished

https://steamcommunity.com/id/ruakai/recommended/582660/

This is the sort of experience that you want. In case you don't want to click through, this is someone with over 1700 hours in an MMO who lost all their progress and items because they took a break and missed the GDPR-related opt-in to get their account transferred.

ThrustVectoringon Google's removed all mentions of an Intercept investigation from Search

It's like how people will make hurtful comments and suddenly change courses and claim it's "just a joke" if anyone calls them out on it.

ThrustVectoringon I Can’t See You but I’m Not Blind

People are being extremely literal here about "seeing" what they're imagining. When you look at an actual tiger, you can count the stripes. When I imagine a tiger, I can also count the stripes.

ThrustVectoringon Ask HN: Own .com for 7 years, a new company trademarked my name registered .NET

There are, roughly speaking, two categories of businesses that receive this letter and differentiate themselves based off their response:

1) "Hobbyists" and the like who are not doing anything particularly valuable with the trademark and domain name. Even if these people can prevail in a lawsuit, the other company is hoping that the owner decides they can't (or won't) risk the time, money, and stress of going through a civil lawsuit.

2) People with valuable businesses whose rights are worth defending. The other company is already pretty sure you're not in this category, since you haven't vigorously defending your naming rights to date.

Overall, you have prior use, and may be able to "win" if it gets to an actual lawsuit. The strength of your legal claim isn't the problem; if you have to spend high-five figures to keep the rights to your hobbyist website, you have already lost. Your goal is to convince these folks to leave you alone on as favorable terms as possible. If your domain name is not particularly valuable and important to you, this likely means A) hiring an attorney, B) using their services to convince the other company that you're in the second category, and then C) selling them your domain name for significantly more than it's worth to you. If your domain name is valuable to you, the only thing that changes is that you may need to pay the stochastic taxes that businesses have to pay to have access to the legal system for dispute resolution, and you might have a hilarious "thank you for informing us of your clients' violation of our trademark rights" demand letter sent back at them.

ThrustVectoringon Supersonic Trebuchet

There's some square-cube issues in scaling this up. Specifically, material strength is proportional to cross-sectional area, while the masses of the structures (and projectiles) involved is proportional to volume. The video hints at this with the mention of the difficulty being proportional to the length of the arm to the 1.6th power, slightly more than 3/2.

ThrustVectoringon HATEOAS: An Alternative Explaination

You don't need to go full HATEOAS to consolidate most business logic in server-side API. Like, this is just an example of an awkward API that exposes `status` and `validation` and makes clients do the business logic, rather than one that exposes `hasInvoice` and/or `invoiceId`. The HATEOAS bit is sending across a URI instead of a resource ID, which only helps when there's business logic for which endpoint to use for a specific resource ID that needs deduplication. And even that is only necessary when the client must make the request directly and can't proxy through a "figure out which endpoint to use and delegate it" endpoint.

To be specific, HATEOAS would help when Visa and Mastercard need to use different endpoints for the invoice, and the payment networks require the client to directly query their endpoint rather than going through a server API you control.

ThrustVectoringon HATEOAS: An Alternative Explaination

IMO, the benefits of HATEOAS are very much overblown - many circumstances you have full control over the version of both client and server, and all it is doing is adding an extra layer of indirection that allows extra complexity and ambiguity to sneak in. Instead of the client depending on a specific known API endpoint, it depends both on the endpoint you give it at runtime and the process that serves that endpoint to the client. And as a bonus, the client now "helpfully" obfuscates what endpoints it needs to render which pages - what you could figure out with straightforward grep for something like "api/v1/books" now needs a deeper understanding of the application.

Like, the way in which the client accesses the "deposits" functionality is either fixed or can dynamically change. If it's fixed, the indirection serves no purpose - just have the client do the thing in the one way that you ever have the client do the thing. If it can dynamically change, the state space involved can and often will grow out of control in a hurry, and I strongly suggest pushing back on designs that require structural dynamism like this.

ThrustVectoringon Is it stealing to read by the light of your neighbour’s lamp?

It would likely be considered either trespass to chattel or to land.

ThrustVectoringon Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

The US regulatory scheme (among others) guarantees that nuclear power is expensive. ALARA - As Low As Reasonably Achievable. In practice, this means that if nuclear power is cheaper than alternatives, regulators can demand that more "reasonably achievable" steps are taken to reduce exposure to radiation.

ThrustVectoringon Is college worth it? A return-on-investment analysis

An important thing to note is that college is often a positional good. A large part of the value of a college degree is that it gets you hired at the expense of people with a worse educational background. This is necessarily something that does not scale as total investment in higher education increases.

In other words, this is very much the value to the student, not the value to society. The ROI values should be used for personal decision-making, and not for funding of institutions and subsidies for college attendance.

ThrustVectoringon Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

People without a controls background typically mean "positive feedback" at all times, regardless of what words they use.

ThrustVectoringon YouTube: filmmakers presumed guilty until maybe proven innocent

It is not required by the DMCA, sure, but it (or the like) is required by the various content owners who have the power to sue (or not sue) YouTube. Following the DMCA's requirements only helps after spending millions of dollars on legal fees and if you manage to persuade the courts. In lieu of that, YouTube has decided to just give IP owners what they want.

ThrustVectoringon YouTube: filmmakers presumed guilty until maybe proven innocent

"The law to the letter" is a legal fiction. There's your interpretation of what the law is, the content creators' interpretation of what the law is, and you can spend millions of dollars in legal fees and risk billions in damages to find out what the law actually says for your particular case.

ThrustVectoringon Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets

A large part of the value of twitter is the userbase and reach of twitter. It's a network, and networks are natural monopolies, there's no collusion necessary to push out competition.

Now, if you were talking about something that uses the payments oligopoly (eg, Patreon clones), I'd be way more sympathetic to that. There, you can't even call it a conspiracy because they're operating in broad daylight. But for the social networks, it's all natural AFAICT.

ThrustVectoringon Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets

It's not like they're saying "do this exact thing or else" to Twitter - that'd be an obvious first amendment lawsuit. They're stirring up public opinion and voicing their concerns about "disinformation", and hoping that something will be done about those meddlesome posts.

ThrustVectoringon Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets

It's possible that this is the least-bad censorship option they could implement under threat of retaliation by US government leadership.

ThrustVectoringon Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets

Yes. Moderation actions are actually explicitly called out for greater protection under section 230. The "publisher" exception is a lot narrower than people think - it's for when the purported "third party" making the statements isn't actually a third party.

ThrustVectoringon Twitter disallows liking, commenting, or retweeting “Misleading” tweets

I don't think there's a legal theory that gives legs to any sort civil lawsuit, but retaliatory lawmaking from congress definitely is a risk. That's a big part of the point of hauling in tech CEOs to testify to congress about their disinformation concerns; it's a veiled threat to pass legislation against their interest unless something is done about the problem.

And because it's merely a veiled threat, there's no basis for a 1st Amendment lawsuit alleging censorship by the government.

ThrustVectoringon Atlassian fired me while I was taking care of my wife who is fighting cancer

If you're worried about this sort of thing happening to you - and you should be - this comment is a reminder that disability insurance exists and is extremely reasonably priced on a software developer or other white-collar professional salary. With an insurance policy paying the bills, you can plan on taking unpaid time off to take care of your partner if the worst should happen.

It's morbid to think about, but going into these situations with a robust contingency plan absolutely beats the alternative.

ThrustVectoringon YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

A healthy dose of legal realism here: doing something that is technically within the scope of the law as written does not fully remove the risk and expense of getting sued over it. The process is that you can still get sued by Viacom for a billion dollars, spend a ton of money on lawyers and discovery over many years, and wind up making the entirely reasonable call of implementing ContentID or the like and settling. You do more than you're legally obligated to do on behalf of copyright owners, but whatever, the people uploading videos bear the brunt of this cost.

ThrustVectoringon YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

When rightsholders give notice of alleged infringement, YouTube can't simply be like "well, they say it's fair use, so we're going to ignore this." If they did, they'd be knowingly contributing to copyright infringement and lose out on safe harbor provisions.

ThrustVectoringon YouTube takes down the Ig Nobel show because of a 1914 recording

There's a name for deliberately hosting a service that blatantly disregards copyright enforcement. It's called "contributory infringement", and the litigation of which will have existential amounts of potential damages.

ThrustVectoringon PAM Duress – Alternate passwords for panic situations

> told them to give me a number to call them back on

I hope you managed to communicate that you needed it to be able to independently verify that this number belonged to the purported caller. Eg, if it's from your "credit card company", the number should show up on the credit card company's website.

ThrustVectoringon Google introducing tool for under-18s to remove images of them from search

The solution to both is actually to have such a common name that you get lost in the noise. If your first + last gives seven digits of google search results, you have to put in some serious SEO work to appear on even the first ten pages, rendering this vector private by default.

ThrustVectoringon Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

IMO the biggest "improvement" that this sort of clerical "productivity" generates is that the same workforce can keep up with inflicting even more inane bureaucratic demands on the people forced to interact with it.

ThrustVectoringon Craig Murray will surrender himself for prison

The courts are the government. A separate branch from the executive and legislative, sure, but it's still a government entity.