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As synthetic image fidelity gets closer and closer to indistinguishable from genuine pictures, what, exactly can one do to tell the difference absent something like SynthID?

Who, exactly, is the "bt@brand.io" whose only attributable contribution is FUD regarding SynthID (and what are their motives)?

Reddit has started putting up a paywall of sorts to block mobile web users, saying that instead, users should install the app. old.reddit.com remains as an ugly workaround.

The whole thing is nuts:

1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.

2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.

It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.

We can't control what the telcos do with text messages, but we exclusively use SOC 2 Type II compliant providers.

Quell (textquell.com)

Broken relationships can be difficult and nerve-wracking. Quell gives you an SMS number that enables you to put boundaries around your communication with someone who is blowing up your phone and making your life hard. Their texts are intelligently filtered so that hostility is removed while information is preserved. All raw texts are also routed to email for record-keeping and rewrite verification.

The dozens of "contributors" being presented in random order is, one would suppose, an anti-poaching tactic?

If I were the CCP this is perhaps the cleverest talking point I could have possibly come up with, propping up TikTok while simultaneously condemning democracy.

But to substantively respond: NO. This is exceptionally naive. Democracy assumes shared fates and aligned incentives among (both voting and communicating) participants. A foreign adversary mainlining their interests into half the population of the US absolutely violates this assumption.

It's unclear why the researchers believe that when a dog doesn't learn the names of a bunch of toys it means that they can't.

There are lots of things people are able to learn today that they "couldn't" a few years ago (programming, math, reading). How are the researchers able to tell that the limitation lies with the dog and not with the trainer/household?

(According to GPT4)

Using the hydrostatic pressure formula:

Pressure = Density of water × Acceleration due to gravity × Depth

Assuming the same density of water (1,000 kg/m³) and acceleration due to gravity (9.8 m/s²):

Pressure = 1,000 kg/m³ × 9.8 m/s² × 4,000 m Pressure = 39,200,000 Pascal (Pa)

Converting to atmospheres:

Pressure in atmospheres = 39,200,000 Pa / 101,325 Pa/atm Pressure in atmospheres ≈ 387 atm

Considering a safety factor of 2, as before, we can calculate the required thickness:

Required thickness = Pressure / (Tensile strength × Safety factor) Required thickness = 387 atm × 101,325 Pa/atm / (434 MPa × 2)

Converting units:

Required thickness ≈ 39,200,000 Pa / (434 × 10^6 Pa × 2) Required thickness ≈ 0.045 meters or 1.48 inches

Therefore, at a depth of 4,000 meters, the titanium walls of the submersible sphere with a 10 ft diameter would need to be approximately 1.48 inches thick to resist implosion, assuming a safety factor of 2. Again, please note that this estimation may vary based on the design, shape, and structural considerations of the submersible sphere. Consulting with experts is essential for accurate calculations and safety assessments.

As for amount of titanium required:

First, let's convert the wall thickness to meters. Since 1 inch is approximately 0.0254 meters, the wall thickness of 1.5 inches would be approximately 0.0381 meters.

Now, let's calculate the internal volume of the sphere by subtracting the volume of the inner sphere (10 ft diameter minus 2 times the wall thickness) from the volume of the outer sphere (10 ft diameter):

Inner radius = Radius of the sphere - Wall thickness Inner radius = 1.524 meters - 0.0381 meters Inner radius = 1.4869 meters

Inner volume = (4/3) * π * (Inner radius)^3 Inner volume ≈ 14.012 cubic meters

Outer volume = (4/3) * π * (1.524 meters)^3 Outer volume ≈ 14.137 cubic meters

Now, we can calculate the volume of the titanium walls by subtracting the inner volume from the outer volume:

Titanium wall volume = Outer volume - Inner volume Titanium wall volume ≈ 14.137 cubic meters - 14.012 cubic meters Titanium wall volume ≈ 0.125 cubic meters

Finally, we can calculate the mass of titanium using the density of titanium (4,506 kg/m³):

Mass of titanium = Titanium wall volume * Density of titanium Mass of titanium ≈ 0.125 cubic meters * 4,506 kg/m³ Mass of titanium ≈ 563.25 kg

Therefore, with a wall thickness of 1.5 inches, the approximate amount of titanium required for the walls of the submersible sphere with a 10 ft diameter would be approximately 563.25 kilograms.

Titanium is currently around $6/kg, so ~$3.4k for just the titanium that made up the wall.

SF is rich and unequal. So are dozens of places. Yet I don't know of any other major urban area in a developed country that has the kind of crime we see here.

Yes, let's create great safety nets. As a city with a $9 billion budget (for just 800,000 people; that's $11k for every person living here) they can afford better safety nets than anywhere.

So if it's not the inequality, and it's not lack of funding, what's the cause of all the crime and homelessness?

Here are a few examples of how dysfunctional SF politics is: [1] Chris Sacca tried to give SF free wifi 15 years ago, and they wouldn't accept it. https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/mf1x52/chris_...

[2] During covid, the SF school board decided one of their highest priorities would be to spend 10s of millions to rename their schools https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984919925/san-francisco-schoo...

[3] Because they claimed the law disproportionately impacted people of color, SF made all shoplifting of goods valued less than $950 a misdemeanor. https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto...

So maybe — just maybe — it's not the insane inequality. It's utterly horrible governance.

If you've been privy at all to the conversations founders etc. have been having for the last 48 hours, I don't think they're going to come away from this feeling like "don't worry". There was never a guarantee that the fed would step in, and there won't be a guarantee going forward. Treasury management will be a thing that all VCs worth their salt will insist on going forward.

No one knows that taxpayers will have to pay anything for any of this. It's possible they'll end up ahead. The assets were/are there to cover depositors. The timing of the asset liquidation/redemption is the problem, and only the "bank of last resort" can help avert contagion from skittish depositors, mass layoffs, and pointless disruption.

As said above: would you prefer to see hundreds or thousands of small companies fail, their employees go on unemployment insurance, etc.?

Feel as though it's worth mentioning here that using LTE Direct (https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2014/11/true-or-false-gett...) every phone could become a node in a long-range mesh network in an emergency. This approach takes advantage of both the strong radios in smartphones and the available node density provided by smartphone ubiquity.

The tech has already been proven—carriers just need to be mandated to add it because there's no business reason to do so.

Cars fail and need to pull over regularly. It's hard to understand why this particular incident is all that notable.

I think you're confusing hydroxychloroquine with ivermectin.

I don't know why this hasn't come up yet, but watts per bit has fallen precipitously over the last 150 years, which means it's pretty unlikely we'd see any stray radio signals from other planets unless we managed to catch them exactly during their very brief 1-2 century inefficient stage.

And even if we're not in a "dark forest", keeping quiet is generally good social hygiene and tends to correlate with maturity. Which may be a side-effect of #2.

By your logic, any documentary that interviews prison inmates would be unethical.

Smaker asked ~150 inmates to participate, and only a tiny handful agreed.

Real estate is one of the few markets where non-experts can make money, where it’s not a hyper-liquid winner-take-all game. Coupled with this is the fact that housing is a necessity and owning a home leads people to invest in their communities more than if they were renting, I think it’s a good thing if Zillow (and OpenDoor, etc.) fail at pushing everyday people out of the business of real estate investing. Here’s hoping we see some regulation—the illiquidity of the home buying market is not a problem that needs to be solved.

This was the top link on HN an hour ago and now it’s not even on the front page.

Could this be used instead of chlorine in swimming pools?

Here: https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Abstract/9000/...

This and more: ground all flights in and out until the journalist is released.

Sometimes. But I can’t say that I have a “security first” mindset, which seems analogous to “trust no one”.

> to help keep their customers safe

The elimination of a distinction between “safety” and “security” is unhealthy imo, as it leads to a failure to distinguish between unintentional harm caused by nature, and intentional harm caused by other people.

E.g. “safety first” is only intelligible if it doesn’t also prevent you from trusting anyone (which is what would be implied by “security first” as a general priority).

I’m a Canadian who came to the US for grad school in 2005.

The lack of a (British) sense of Duty in the US is one of the most striking differences I noticed when arriving here. I suspect it’s in part a result of the frontier mentality: “I got mine you go get yours”. This went obsolete almost as soon as the West was Won, yet remains as a somewhat pathological vestige.

Selling lets the PE firm be “the bad guys”. ISOC gets to dodge responsibility while retaining nearly all the profits of being culpable.

When will Twitter provide all users with the ability to easily verify their identity?

One of its biggest issues is troll armies — this would quickly vanish if we could filter by whether someone had validated who they were and where they were located.

If Bumble can do it, Twitter can.

The Upton Sinclair quote has seldom been more apt.

Assuming it could be effectively and efficiently administered, replacing all income taxes with a wealth tax (and VAT) would massively simplify the tax code while making it significantly more fair and heavily rewarding those actively generating the greatest returns.

Under such a scenario, the only people significantly negatively impacted would be those who hoard wealth or invest it poorly, and as a consequence are unable to overcome the periodic tax.

As to its fairness: when the wealthiest pool their resources in order to protect their assets’ value, as is the case in e.g. a hedge fund, we see them happily sign up to a 2% yearly levy.

A more elaborate metaphor makes situation more vivid still: imagine the scenario in which America’s wealthiest were to all move to a “Galt’s Island”, except in doing so they left the American security blanket and became entirely responsible for the defense of their assets. In such a scenario, the idea that the merely wealthy would pay the same as the hyperwealthy immediately stops making sense, as it’s the hyperwealthy who are both benefitting most from the security afforded, and the ones who are most responsible for Galt’s Island being so tempting a target.

America is Galt’s Island, except we have seen a systematic shifting of the burdens of its upkeep from those who can most easily afford it to those who can afford it least.

The headline shouldn’t use the term “voter fraud” as it’s a concept invented after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act [1] to (one presumes) restrict democratic participation.

“Election fraud”, “electoral fraud”, are all far better for many reasons.

If you must refer to the other concept, “voter impersonation fraud” is the appropriate term.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=voter+fraud&ye...

Or maybe extreme, frontier-inspired individualism went obsolete once the West was Won?

I’m all for smart people being paid well to work hard. But there has to be a better model. Perhaps something similar to the massive payouts we see lawyers getting in class action suits, except instead of law firms and defendants we have drug researchers and illnesses.

You could say the same about not voting.