bell-cot

Outside of high-frequency trading and real-time control, where is speed a serious design priority for modern end-user-facing software?

You are thinking long-term. In the late-stage capitalist taxonomy, long term is a subspecies of lip service.

How on earth do they...

They are the 900# gorilla, and the screams of the smallfolk have no effect on their bottom line.

If that was how they treated top performers, I'd hope you had quite a bit of company on the way out.

If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -

Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.

Pascal's own religious beliefs changed several times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Religious_conver...

The Wager was published after Pascal's death, in an edited collection of his notes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es

In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".

Sounds like they had enough support to get a small-n trial off the ground ...but successful migration was never any sort of priority.

Anyone more familiar with the situation?

Is your "low but real" risk comparable to the risk of driving a motorcycle, of riding in a car, or of using the bathroom?

Reasonable treatments for small, non-aggressive skin cancers (or suspected cancers) are extremely low risk. And reasonable practitioners will often suggest that you merely keep an eye on an abnormal spot - because it doesn't look worth the bother of any sort of treatment for now.

> I'm allergic to fish...

I'd guess that your allergy is to some class of proteins in the fish - and that the production steps for dried bonito (and maybe the time required) denature or destroy those proteins.

True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.

> ...any closer to solving these problems?

If "these problems" is the criminals getting away with their crimes? No.

Unfortunately, human nature is such that many peoples' actual priority is venting the intense angry they feel about the real-world crimes.

And for far too many people, harsh punishments inflicted on expendable whipping boys are an all-too-satisfying way of doing that.

1) No, and 2) Irrelevant. State laws are made by state legislators.

Considering the endless vistas of billboards advertising lawyers for personal injury lawsuits and such in my part of Michigan - I feel pretty sure that >50% of our legislators are enrolled in those lawyers' "gratitude programs".

Some legislators - perhaps honest idealists, perhaps those being paid more by lawyers specializing in such lawsuits - do work at getting such laws passed.

You aren't gonna advance your career as a prosecutor, or even win re-election, if you actually care about that "truth and justice" stuff in the case of some rando out-of stater who you already have a really cool-sounding story about the obvious guilt of.

Ideally, her home state might have some laws (consumer protection, criminal neglect, whatever) which allowed her to sue Cash App for a very large sum.

IANAL - might any such care to comment?

A related angle is trying to get such laws passed, to discourage similar cases in the future.

Consider the story a PSA, for folks who still believe that Trust and Justice are somehow part of the American Way. Maybe use it as a teaching tool with your kids, too.

Responsibility may include vetting your sources - is this person competent and dutiful, to actually know there's no embargo? - and researching the situation, and thinking several moves ahead, and other stuff.

Reality is that everyone has to make decisions in finite time, using the resources they actually have.

And I'd put a whole lot more responsibility further up that chain of contacts. And question how many other people they might have blabbered to.

I'm getting an nginx "403 Forbidden" error from the link.

Same for https://blog.mozilla.org/en/ and https://blog.mozilla.org/en/category/firefox/

Browsing from the US.

I feel that I should be able name several Jules Verne characters, "B" movie villains, and such who powered their underwater lairs and/or sinister superweapons this way - but I'm coming up blank.

Anyone?

In theory, an insurance company could inspect and pen-test.

In practice, that would run into (probably, IANAL) legal issues, cost & staffing issues, and the narrow worldviews and business models of the insurance industry.

No AI is needed for that. The Morris Worm was 38 years ago. Various MS Worms were as common as MS Windows 20-ish years ago. Anyone who's glanced over web server logs in the WordPress era knows about automated scanning for its myriad flaws.

Though one could argue that "AI" is needed, currently, for an editor to decide that a story about a hack is worth publishing.

(Yes, current-day AI's do shift the equilibrium. Somewhat. The French fridges would not be news if the situation was anywhere near as bad as the doomsayers seem eager to proclaim.)

> which is why you never hear about...

It might help that concrete is not combustible to begin with. Vs. (say) linseed oil definitely is.

Sadly, it ain't just the current administration. Try reading about the RealPage rentjacking scandel.

The question isn't "does it happen", the question is "how common is it?". If a normal person is dealing someone who seems to have an "everything is always a conspiracy" worldview - then "that stuff doesn't happen" can be both an assertion that the non-normal is nuts, and that the very frustrated normal just wants them to shut up and go away.

Against the power of n=1 voting, or the against the power of "we got 53%" voting?

I was pointing out that the former is virtually meaningless, but the latter tends to be decisive.

Yes, mass surveillance is a huge problem. But most of the time, most of the voters do not behave as if they meaningfully care about most of the aspects of mass surveillance. That's pretty much the same rule as for the Pentagon buying $5,000 screwdrivers, and bizarre loopholes appearing in the tax code to benefit a few billionaires who are extremely "generous" to their good friends in Congress. Both R's and D's may loudly denounce those practices - but they know that actually fighting against them, where it counts, will not be good for their political careers.

I'd assume that the Plutocrats, their loyal politicians, and the Creep State have worked very hard to convince people to "fight back" with ineffectual tactics.

Which is not to say that voting can't be extremely effective, if organized at suitable scales over time. Trump wasn't re-elected because all the swing voters who'd replaced him with Biden in '20 were overjoyed with how Joe and his Dem's had handled things.

Not a Muskologist, but this feels like a good opportunity to talk to the kids about flamboyant public figures and grains of salt.

If your look at {whatever part is next} is this interesting, I don't know if "which one?" really matters much.

Congratulations on being in the top (guess) 5% of humans in this potentially very embarrassing regard. But please maintain a discretely charitable attitude toward the many who are less fortunate than you.

Correct.

But - my experience - it's just another day of the week when advocates for hunger relief do everything from spending money on mass-market advertising, to showing up en masse at city gov't meetings to argue for the laws|zoning|city support|whatever they need, to personally mopping the floor at the soup kitchen after the meal has been served.

Vs., as a generality, "support" for public restrooms seems to consists of complaining about the status quo either privately or on the web, then going back to suffering.

Based on how involved various churches seem to be in hunger relief stuff, I'd bet most of those groups' organizational advantage comes straight from pulpits and pews. Say whatever you will about the Bad Things that religions have done all through history, or about their deities and beliefs being BS - but organized religion is organized, and understands how to make stuff happen. And it's pretty common for their Believers to also believe in working pretty hard to do just that.

Vs. - at least in private comments I hear, and the occasional essays I recall seeing on HN about this - there have been essentially zero suggestions of ever lifting a finger to address the public restroom problem. Send an unhappy email the Mayor? Nope. Google search for what a city council candidate might have said on the subject before you vote? Never. Even being tidy in the restroom of a non-restaurant business, and showing some hint of gratitude to the clerk? It is a point in favor of this particular article that it doesn't advocate an entitled and thankless attitude.

Summary: Unknown astrochemical processes around the protostar IRAS4A2 have produced a concentration of fully deuterated methanol (CD3OD) which is about 100x the level predicted by current chemical models.

Might we have an astrochemist in the house?