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bennettnate5

691 karma · joined October 11, 2019

Systems programmer with an interest in cybersecurity
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bennettnate5··on Kalshi court losses pile up as judges refuse to block state gambling laws
Ah, makes sense. I've never bothered looking into using either so I wasn't aware of that.
bennettnate5··on Kalshi court losses pile up as judges refuse to block state gambling laws
I've seen plenty of lawsuits and dirt specifically on Kalshi, but have yet to see one on Polymarket. Is there anything specific states have against Kalshi over other prediction markets, or are they just the first/most prominent of what will be a wave of lawsuits against these kinds of companies generally?
bennettnate5··on Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T
Yeah, the hockey stick is flipped in the wrong direction if you're looking at the past 4 months, plateauing after steady gains.
bennettnate5··on Partial Operator Precedence
What a lovely pipe operator you have there to chain the functions and contribute to code readability :)
bennettnate5··on Partial Operator Precedence
I don't think character length of an expression is the issue. Reading chained operators is explicitly easier than reading nested functions by virtue of operators having infix notation and not explicitly requiring parantheses where they are not necessary to disambiguate order of operations. The prefix notation of functions moves the operation farther from the eye from operands and introduces the issue of parantheses-miscounting bugs. I'd hardly say the difference in readability of these is a non issue:

(a + b + c + d) * e

mult(add(a, add(b, add(c, d))), e)

bennettnate5··on Too Expensive to Exist
I see it more as a symptom of deaths and incapacities becoming orders of magnitude more rare than they were a century ago. We've always not had a social net (and relatively speaking, we have more of a social net now than before); it's the human perception and familiarity with suffering of those around them that has shifted drastically. If you were alive 100 years ago you would have likely expected to have one or two children passed away and dozens of deceased or incapacitated friends/family members by your thirties; such was life, as disease, malnutrition and other dangers were rampant. Nowadays we have such a lower incidence of death and harm that the relative emotional impact of one is staggering, to the extent that people will go out of their way to assign blame and sue to the greatest extent possible rather than see risks as an inherent part of life.
bennettnate5··on U.S. workers took home their smallest share of capital since at least 1947
"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us"
bennettnate5··on U.S. workers took home their smallest share of capital since at least 1947
Controlled wages and fixed prices--that's sounding suspiciously like a command economy there. Well played, comrade.

(And I say controlled wages because the natural solution people bring up to paying for UBI is to carpet-tax the assets of the wealthy).

bennettnate5··on US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech
I think the precedent folks were pointing to was the great depression--no strong signal of assurance to temper public concern means things like bank runs and sudden collapses of institutions that would have otherwise made it because of group fear. Not sure how accurate that comparison is though.
bennettnate5··on OpenAI's agents talked to each other through the CPU Cache
Until they run on hardware and an operating system that is designed to assure noninterference [1], this is going to continue to be a thing. As the greybeards would say, "we already figured this all out in Multics [2]!"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interference_(security)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics

bennettnate5··on ‘You Are Done’: The letter sent to King by the F.B.I (2014)
The whole "X can't be racist" claim is part of the broader class of intellectual ragebait--subverting the original meaning of a term to elicit reaction and thereby garner views (or in the academic realm, citations), but with more refined language and logic than the usual memes ragebait is found in. I find it frustrating and detracting from actual meaningful social/scientific efforts.
bennettnate5··on Around a dozen banking apps began specifically permitting GrapheneOS
> I am not going to let you require that I run your proprietary malware

This is likely meant as hyperbole, but South Korea's online banking requirements really tries to live up to this reputation

bennettnate5··on AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons
> The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns

Springer would like a word

bennettnate5··on SBD: We Have a Filesystem at Home
> I have unkind things to say about people who make their own pasta

You lost me on the first sentence; my significant other's homemade ravioli is unparalleled. Homemade pasta is a delight to make and tastes so much better than $1 cardboard box pasta

bennettnate5··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
Same goes with the whole "Florida man" shtick--news channels and YouTube channels dredging for wild stories are more likely to get the info on Florida-specific misdemeanors due to sunshine laws.
bennettnate5··on Show HN: Wonderhop – A daily game: guess what most people say, or what none do
I was playing the "Future" section and put "Milliway's" from The Hitchhiker's Guide series when it asked for a fictional restaurant; it only gave me 10 points and said it was from 70s. Milliways is very explicitly positioned in time at the end of the universe, so I should've been awarded maximum points there :)
bennettnate5··on Show HN: XY Music Notation
It took me a while to understand what the numbers were actually trying to indicate (in part because I'm used to numbers in sheet music being suggestions of which finger should play the given note). If I understand correctly now, are you numbering zero-indexed with C as the beginning (0) and B as the end (Y), as a proxy for remembering which key notes are meant to be played in?
bennettnate5··on C for Rust programmers
Some fun quirks I never learned until years after first getting into C:

- zero-initialization via `= {0};` will still leave padding and any data not covered by the smallest elements of unions uninitialized, so serializing data structures zeroed via that method is unsafe

- A pointer that increments any more than 1 past the end of a valid memory region (e.g. the end of a buffer) is instant undefined behavior even if the pointer is never dereferenced

- strict aliasing is on by default for pointers of differing types, but not for void/char/uchar. This means that having `struct sockaddr` and `struct sockaddr_in` pointers pointing to the same struct is UB.

The more I learn, the more I run from C.

bennettnate5··on Receipt for sale of Jane, age 18, and her son, Henry, age 1
Slavery is placed next to other wicked acts (and conversely, helping to free slaves is seen as the morally upright high road) across plenty of texts. It's more productive to condemn those who selectively live their faith in the ways that most convenience them and harm others, rather than making blanket attacks on faith or religion in general.

> And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.

> Neither have I suffered that ye should be confined in dungeons, nor that ye should make slaves one of another, nor that ye should murder, or plunder, or steal, or commit adultery; nor even have I suffered that ye should commit any manner of wickedness, and have taught you that ye should keep the commandments of the Lord, in all things which he hath commanded you

> Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but [true] righteousness is [in] one who believes in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler, those who ask [for help], and for freeing slaves

bennettnate5··on A thesis isn't enough for a PhD
A thesis was never the approximation of a PhD (at least in my field of Computer science). The three novel published (or in submission) works that made up the thesis were. Peer review (at strong conferences!) is the bar that remains to keep a student from doing this.
bennettnate5··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
> "I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice."

These are the kinds of people in charge of the reins, folks.

bennettnate5··on Snakes and Ladders
I have mixed feelings about cooperative board games in general. I've played a select few that blend things well, but too often it becomes an optimization problem that one or two players really fixate on and end up directing the decisions for the group as a whole, leading the others to check out.

The games I've found to get past this and remain fun for everyone retain some element of hidden knowledge between players, such as Deadwood [1] where players are cooperative in groups up until a final duel or Hanabi [2] where everyone but you knows your cards and players take turns giving strategic bits of info to get everyone's cards down in the right order.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/245197/deadwood-1876 [2] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/98778/hanabi

bennettnate5··on The Mormon Church Is Quietly Expanding Its Real Estate Empire Across the US
> They need to be taxed

> they can go around buying up assets until they own everything

The real estate transactions described in the article are purely income-generating rather than related to the mission of the church (e.g. for church buildings, temples); as such, any income from them is subject to income tax already under UBIT laws [1]. Same goes for local/state property taxes.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...

bennettnate5··on uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook
Most people I've talked to actually use the "friends feed" in the menu that shows literally only what your friends have posted and nothing else; that could be my friend bias though
bennettnate5··on Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers
Sounds like a great way to strongly incentivize a new form of fraud--fraud-reporting fraud! Imagine how much fraudsters could gain by reporting thousands or tens of thousands of "fraud" calls that they themselves both originate and report from existing SIM farm infrastructure. Any deployment weakness or hole in blocking malicious traffic in the global telecommunications network all of the sudden becomes akin to a weak smart contract that is ripe for exploitation on the order of millions of dollars of fines until it is patched, all due to this depositing requirement.
bennettnate5··on An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan
> The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp –

Hey, she forgot to include O Brother, Where Art Thou!

\s

bennettnate5··on "Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying."
> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation

I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.

bennettnate5··on Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby
Yeah, I definitely think "pallets" would make more sense in this context.
bennettnate5··on European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS
It is. It's far from good, but it's much better than eugenics.
bennettnate5··on How Ukraine Built a War Fighting State
This was literally an extended sales pitch to get people to buy/invest in real estate in Kyiv. Of course they're going to portray it as vibrant and rich.
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