dpwm

> We've reached the point where the American left is afraid of the idea of free speech.

Debating the merits and demerits of free speech surely has to fall within free speech. From what I've seen, free speech often gets raised as an unquestionable ideal and kills off sometimes uncomfortable discussion.

Google did something similar with a targeted terms of service update – I believe it was agree or close your account.

I suspect that this transfer is going to be consent-based to avoid non-compliance in the handful of cases cases where they have inaccurate data regarding location.

It appears that the FX-CG50, which has a color screen, comes with Python[0] . Still nowhere near the display you would expect on an entry-level mobile phone, but then probably doesn't have the same power draw either.

[0] https://education.casio.co.uk/products/cg50

And in many cases will be bought as a developed product with public funds.

Apparently this is not what has been breached. From the article:

> no BioNTech or Pfizer systems have been breached in connection with this incident and we are unaware that any study participants have been identified through the data being accessed

I came here to say the same thing. There have also been many stories recently about bad state actors trying to gain access to research, citing only UK / US state. It is interesting to see South Korea included in the list of countries.

Such stories to me do not seem to survive the slightest bit of critical thought, and yet the same stories keep getting pushed repeatedly. The only potential negative I can foresee for the public is that if there were an abundance of data available publicly, funded anti-vaxxers may be able to misrepresent them – but I still think the benefits would outweigh such downsides. In any case, public faith is rather lower than many would have hoped.

> rule #1 should be not to collect data you don't have a safe way to process. GDPR or not this shouldn't even be collected.

My understanding was that the law, at least in England, required for this data to be collected and retained.

There may be other reasons why people are not following this:

> Due to Covid distancing measures, the court made five spaces available to members of the public, in a gallery with a total of 36 seats. Communications from the court repeatedly stated that these would be allocated on a first come, first serve basis - however this was not respected in practice. For nearly three weeks of proceedings, three seats were held back for unspecified “VIPs” for the first hour and a half each morning, and the first half an hour each afternoon, meaning that often only two members of the public (including NGO observers) were present in the courtroom. After RSF learned that the VIPs were in fact diplomats who were unaware these seats were being held for them, diplomatic intervention with the court finally resulted in all five seats being made fully available to the public from 24 September.

One of the few organisations that might have sought to report on this – the Guardian – published the book which allegedly first released the encryption key to the underacted diplomatic cables.

[0] https://rsf.org/en/news/usuk-julian-assanges-extradition-hea...

> Q: If someone robs a bank to get money to fund terrorism then does that crime become a political offence, and should that person be immune from extradition?

Robbing a bank is a crime against the bank. You can be extradited for that. There may be an additional political charge.

> Q: If someone attacks a politician is that crime political and not extraditable? Does it matter which politician?

That is a crime against the person. You can be extradited for that. There may also be a political charge.

We are talking here about extradition for purely political crimes – because they can be and are often completely made up. You may be interested in checking some of your assumptions about the nature of the case and revisiting your opinion. I did, and I found that a lot of what I "knew" about this case was wrong.

Specifically, from RSF (Reporters without Borders):

> Crucially, the prosecution - for the US government - failed to produce any evidence of actual physical harm caused to anyone as the result of Wikileaks’ publication of leaked documents, severely undermining their claim that Assange knowingly put sources at risk. Testimony from Khaled El-Masri argued that to the contrary, the information published by Wikileaks exposed the atrocities to which he was subjected and has served as important evidence in his pursuit of justice. [0]

From the same article:

> Journalist John Goetz testified that Wikileaks had republished the unredacted diplomatic cables, which had been published in the first instance by website Cryptome and a number of media outlets. None of these outlets have faced adverse legal consequences for publishing the documents - only Wikileaks. A statement read into the record by Cryptome founder John Young confirmed that the unredacted files remain on the website to this day, and that Cryptome has never been approached by US law enforcement suggesting their publication was illegal.

Then we have the deliberate stifling of access to the hearing:

> However, at the start of proceedings on 7 September, RSF received a further communication from the court, stating: “The judge has regretfully decided not to grant requests for members of the public to attend the Julian Assange hearing via CVP...she is concerned about her ability to maintain the integrity of the court if members of the public are able to attend the hearing remotely.” On 8 September, Vincent nonetheless attempted to access the CVP via the link that had been provided, and was admitted to the waiting room before being removed and unable to log in again. Amnesty International and other NGOs also reported having their access revoked, along with a number of political observers.

[0] https://rsf.org/en/news/usuk-julian-assanges-extradition-hea...

Some readers may be interested in Craig Murray's coverage of the extradition "hearing" [0]. The hearing, to be decided by a judge, has apparently been set up to conclude that Julian Assange is to be extradited to the US.

The UK and the US appear to be willing to discard years of diplomatic sophistries – such as the "rule of law" – for this to happen. This should be troubling to citizens of those countries, because they are openly adopting the tools of the despot.

It's notable that despite being "open court," access to the Assange hearing appears to have been deliberately restricted, despite being paritally online [1]. Notably, generally-respected international NGOs like Amnesty International[2] and Reporters without Borders [3] have raised concern about this. From Craig Murray's coverage, it looks like restricting access was precisely because this hearing was prejudiced.

[0] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur45/3076/2020/en/

[3] https://rsf.org/en/news/usuk-julian-assanges-extradition-hea...

Espionage is a crime against the state. Just like treason or terrorism, the very definition of the crime and its interpretation is by the entity that claims to have been wronged.

Crimes against the state are widely abused by despots for silencing political dissidents.

I ran into this last week with a UK bank. I was offered a CSV file. What I got was a CSV file with excel formulae in it.

I actually wanted a CSV file – preferably without having to resort to sed to strip out excel formulae.

I'm currently reading Punished by Rewards. So far I would say that Punished by Rewards is broadly consistent with how you describe Drive.

Alfie Kohn acknowledges that where the work is low skill, very dull, requires little collaboration, rewards generally work for as long as the rewards continue.

But employee of the month? Stack ranking? Basically they're just going to destroy any intrinsic motivation, and lead to teams where people are reluctant to collaborate.

Blender is way better since 2.80 imho. I have been an a blender user since about 2005. I find 2.80 improved the UI considerably. For me it was well worth the little effort I had to put in.

Part of the problem is that the education is left to less reputable corners of the web.

There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence of the damage that can be done by abuse of internet porn. I could add to that.

But we have those with credentials who have made a good career out of attacking the very notion that porn can be harmful or can be abused. I'm not saying it's shilling, it could just be success by contrarianism, but it's still rather invalidating.

If you are in a position where you think porn is doing you harm, it probably is. But one of the first things you find if you go down that path is that information tends to be on the extremes.

> a huge sponsoring program that saw universities flooded with their hardware

This is really important, and I don't think people quite realise the scale. I was doing a Physics MSc in 2012 and it seemed that almost everybody in computational physics was doing some variant of reimplementing Y with CUDA.

That's not to say it was the wrong tool for many of the jobs – though for some it apparently was, judging by the levels of stress – but I did find it a bit weird how this was an approach to research that pretty much completely ignored vendor lock-in.

I just checked on the linked Compiler Explorer session [0], and if you take out the -m32 then GCC does indeed use divsd instead of fdiv.

[0] https://godbolt.org/z/py3Dw0

My understanding is that in this case it's GCC's optimizer evaluating the expression at compile time in a way that gives a different result to if it's done at runtime.

EDIT: GCC gets it wrong with -O0 (when it's evaluated at runtime) and right with -O2 (when it evaluates it at compile time)

Clang appears to get it right when evaluated at compile time or runtime.

Clang uses the divsd instruction; GCC uses the fdiv instruction – so this really is SSE vs x87 FPU.

Came here to say the same thing. When I see these submissions – pro or anti-CCP – and I see the discussion that results, I'm inclined to flag them. Such stories are not good material for HN, and the submission guidelines make that clear. I thought this was precisely what flagging of submissions was for.

It's also worth noting that some of the worst stories that have resulted in the most division have been ideologically driven. I recall a libertarian think tank that had a number of accounts that apparently existed purely to make submissions for those sites. I'm sure there are other groups that are at it too, I just found that one to be particularly blatant.

Regardless of your political views, the submission of such stories seems to inevitably result in a flame-war that seems only to serve to degrade this community's technologically-orientated mutual respect.

I don't usually like programming books. I am usually easily overwhelmed by them and I find that they are at the wrong pace for me.

This weekend I read most of the Rust book without much effort and found it really helpful for getting up to speed with the language, especially the more novel bits around safety. It took me to the point where I was able to explore and evaluate the bits of the language I needed with only library docs. I know that the remaining chapters are there for when I am ready for them.

My experience with the Rust book as made me more likely to consider starting with a book when approaching programming languages in the future.

Reading other comments, I recognize that I was fortunate to have a project in mind that motivated my reading of the book and just happened to be an excellent fit for Rust.

Naive answer: if lawmakers disapprove, they can just ban companies from helping people counter mass-surveillance efforts.

Two years ago I felt the same way.

Then I ran a mail server for our small family business. And of course, we had DKIM, SPF and DMARC. At first, everything was great.

Then we started having bizarre deliverability problems to a growing provider of corporate emails. So after trying a number of solutions, we settled on SES. All was great again.

Then we started having weird deliverability problems that resulted in bounced emails to an accountancy firm. One of the public IPs ended up on a blacklist. This got fixed fairly swiftly. Things were good again.

Then it happened again.

Yes, deliverability can be solved – the question is for how long. Maybe we chose poorly with SES, but it seems other providers have had problems. I ultimately concluded that it's really not worth the hassle, and we ended up with the email provider that was causing us the bulk of the problems. It was a difficult pill to swallow, and I realize that I've done my part in making the problem worse. But sometimes, life is too short.

The world was different a decade ago. We didn't have overzealous spam filters by default that self-reinforce their awful decisions. I appreciate that spam is a really hard problem. But the solution we have is worse than the problem: we've just made an oligarchy of email, where not even all the big players have the clout to keep themselves out of blacklists all of the time.

And with all that said, for a personal email server, I still might self-host – but I'd be prepared for emails to not get reliably delivered.

I haven't used roam, but the screenshots made me wonder if there might be some overlap with TiddlyWiki, "a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information."

TiddlyWiki can be as simple as a single HTML file, but can also work with a server.

There are also quite a few extensions, including TiddlyMap[1], which adds concept mapping.

[0] https://tiddlywiki.com/

[1] http://tiddlymap.org/

Is there a way we can verify that they're doing that?

> The difference is that there is no certificate authority vouching for each participant in a video call's identity, so you would need to do independent identity verification if you want to ensure that the call is secure, which some people would do by reading the public keys of each participant aloud, and people verifying that everything matches what they see.

This is a good point I hadn't considered. It led to me questioning how signal did it "right," and realising that there is seemingly no way around educating users to check public keys.[0]

So if video chats were meaningfully E2E encrypted, we would need a way to verify the public keys, which afaik Zoom doesn't have.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160828135326/https://www.inter...

Thanks, I hadn't realised that. Looking into it, it seems PGP creates a shared symmetric key and then shares that key using public-key, which does seem like the most obvious way to do it.

[0] https://superuser.com/questions/554513/pgp-encrypt-single-me...

Is E2E encryption desirable for video chats with >2 participants?

Let's say I'm talking with two other people: is there a way to do E2E encryption without having to send out the same stream twice?

edit: Just realised a common key would allow this. But I am still interested in schemes for deriving a key amongst multiple parties using a middleman without the middleman knowing the key. It seems like a rather hard problem.

Don't forget the other direction: the people who die due to the shortage of ICU beds. There will be uninfected people who die that in normal times would have survived.

Only the excess deaths will allow us to have a true comparison, but sadly we only get those long after.

I think they're talking about the 2nd-derivative of the cumulative deaths. As they can (presumably) only increase, the first derivative is >= 0. The second derivative tends to zero as the cumulative deaths flattens off.

Edit: Now that I think about this some more, you're right. There has to be a decrease in the daily cases, which implies a negative 2nd-derivative. They mention "relative 2nd-derivative." It seems to be defined in the paper in a way that leaves me more confused:

> Daily fatality rates from the included countries were then used to calculate estimates of the relative second derivative of total deaths, N, 1/N d²N/dt², for a period of at least ten days.

Does this mean they are taking the second derivative of the reciprocal of the cumulative deaths?

I've seen very little coverage that really uses the term exponential in a way that suggests those reporting know the implications of that. I've seen one plot with a logarithmic y-axis, and that was in the Guardian some time ago. From it, it appeared a crude heuristic could be drawn that from the point that lockdown is implemented, the cumulative deaths appear to grow between two and three orders of magnitude.

I've been grabbing the data put out by Johns Hopkins [0] for the last few days to update some plots in a very hacky Jupyter notebook.

Crucially, the plots are normalized to (estimated) populations and the y-scale is logarithmic. I've put them on github in case anyone else is interested [1].

[0] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

[1] https://github.com/dpwm/covid19-analysis/blob/master/Coronav...

edit: Clarified that though exponential growth is widely used, the implications of that are not followed up. It's past my bedtime!