chroem-

What's the difference between an anti-fascist and a fascist if they use the same tactics? Two weeks ago "anti-fascists" opened fire into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in my state's capitol.

Although tragic, it would be a fitting end to this boondoggle of a project. JWST was originally marketed as a quick, cheap win for NASA, but it turned into the polar opposite of that.

I won't be executed in the US for doing the wrong kind of yoga.

Also, as an aside, I wonder if 1930s HN would have guidelines against "nationalistic flamewars" vs. nazi Germany.

I'm honestly relieved that the adults are back in charge at the Justice Department. We finally have rule of law again. :)

Good, I hope this will give Australia the power it needs to finally crush disinformation and right wing terrorism. The two go hand-in-hand.

They didn't cling to the outside of airplanes.

They created a power vacuum by pulling out in the dead of night, and then willfully ignored rapid advances by the Taliban. Nobody is disagreeing that it was correct to withdraw, but the handling of this has been nothing but sheer incompetence. Saigon didn't have people so desperate that they were holding onto the outside of airplanes and then falling to their death.

I expect this will be unpopular with many HN readers, but it needs to be said:

US presidential elections are often ugly, but they're an important vetting process to make sure that whoever wins the election is highly competent. Tech companies went to great lengths to scrub content that was critical of Joe Biden during the last election, and now shockingly, he and his political appointments are demonstrating gross incompetence. This isn't a political left or right issue: we skipped an important step during the 2020 election.

The researchers we're talking about are in a spat with Facebook over the notion that Facebook isn't doing enough to censor ideas they disagree with. You're projecting your own bad faith arguments onto other people: we're not talking about burying figs under trees. We're talking about the kind of "misinformation" that includes the covid-19 lab leak or the current predident's son moonlighting for oil and gas companies in eastern Europe. You can't have institutions deliberately trying to narrow the window of acceptable discourse in a free society because there is nobody who will be able to watch the watchers make sure that they're not abusing their authority.

It's not a strawman, because you said it yourself:

> Why would we not want to know how that misinformation spreads, and how best to combat it?

You don't get to suppress ideas in a free society, no matter how much you may disagree with them. You can discuss them and even try to win people over to your viewpoint through debate, but at the end of the day you can't force people to believe something without violating the social contract.

Your premise that there are bad ideas that need to be studied and actively suppressed by authoritarian means is flawed.

Science is for everything that can be objectively measured, and politics is for everything else that people can't come to a consensus on. Bad things happen when you try to frame your subjective political opinions as objective scientific reality. "Misinformation" or not, you can't control what other people think, at least not within the confines of a free society.

The threats posed by disinformation are too broad and numerous for these smaller academic organizations to handle. We need to consolidate our efforts under a single entity that will have more power to fight disinformation and protect truth. A "Ministry of Truth", if you will.

It's not strictly semiconductor-related, but if there's one thing I would like to see, it's low cost, made-to-order integrated analog computers. The low power consumption of analog devices would offset the larger feature size, and hopefully the process could be made cheap/flexible enough so that needing a different IC design for each use case would be a non-issue.

Stablecoins have instant transfers between exchanges because they're not dependent on the legacy banking system. Their primary purpose is moving money around. There are also algorithmic stablecoins which maintain their price by adjusting supply rather than being backed by reserves.

Capital requirements are for something else. We're talking about retail customers being able to withdraw their cash, in which case the reserve requirement is the correct number.

> Walking back to first principals, why can't the USD fail? Because you can print whatever adults in the room decide need to be printed to hold the economy up. You cannot do this with a deflationary digital asset, nor one tied to smart contracts.

The practical implication of solving large scale bank failures with mass currency printing is hyperinflation. You would only get your money back in nominal terms, but its purchasing power would be greatly reduced. See also: Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe.

As opposed to banks in the US, which legally have a 0% reserve requirement. [1]

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

Ah, so it's can by default, but should only when it affects a certain subset of pre-approved issues.

I thought we collectively agreed that since Facebook is a private entity they can do whatever they want on their platform, and they have no obligation to support these researchers. Why the sudden change of heart?

The 450 MWh plant is composed out of 210 battery units [1], so a little over 2 MWh just went up in smoke. Sources say that commercial chemistries emit between 20 and 200mg of hydrogen fluoride gas per watt hour. [2] At 100mg/Wh, the pack would have released a fifth of a metric ton of hydrogen fluoride gas onto the neighboring roadway over the course of the fire. You be the judge whether or not that warrants precautions.

Edit: a second pack is on fire, so we're approaching half a metric ton of HF gas now

[1] https://victorianbigbattery.com.au/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z

> Residents and motorists will notice smoke in the area ... There is currently no threat to the community

That's certainly a bold statement. Conventional Li-Ion chemistries are quite toxic.

I didn't know freedom of speech had a cooldown timer.

>but it's a private company!

No, the executive branch has come out and said that they're the ones organizing this censorship.

I couldn't disagree more. There are clear links between gaming violence and far right terrorism: all of the white incel mass shooters have been avid gamers. These games are practically training camps for right wing terrorists.

Destroying the environment to promote violence and toxic masculinity isn't entertainment.

Less than a factor of two difference is "approximately the same order of magnitude", as I originally stated.

They're marketed as gaming PCs. Why shouldn't they be regulated according to their intended purpose?

There are a lot more gamers than there are bitcoin miners, so it ends up balancing out:

https://www.wired.com/story/xbox-playstation-cloud-gaming-en... https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/11/video-games-...

We need to ban gaming if we want to solve the climate emergency.

Do the majority of gaming PC owners spend most of their time doing those tasks though? I think if the answer were yes, we would be discussing VFX and ML workstations, not "gaming" PCs.

If we can legislate less environmentally harmful ways of doing commerce, why can't we legislate less environmentally harmful forms of entertainment? This is simply the logical conclusion of that line of reasoning.