mshroyer

> I still can't find a way to remove u2f keys

When I go to login.gov and click on "Your authentication methods", each of my security keys is listed with a "Remove key" link next to it...

There's no such thing as a child-sized N95 because N95 is an occupational standard, not a general population standard like KF94.

I'm not in either of these industries, but I suspect a major difference is that an airline owning a jet has a lot more leverage against potential malfeasance by the manufacturer than the average farmer has against John Deere.

Chrome at least lets you opt into end-to-end encryption of your sync data. Unfortunately that isn't even an option on Edge yet.

VS Code also starts in "seconds" on my machine, so if that's what they're targeting it's probably a success.

> For instance, in my experience the admin site is best thought of as glorified DB UI. If you need something more than what it can offer out of the box, you should switch to coding it yourself, or live with a quick hack.

Agreed. My biggest Django headaches ultimately resulted from me trying to make the admin console do more than it's meant to do.

How, exactly?

Why would we assume subjective experience can't be recreated digitally?

Inert "code" can't suffer, of course. But assuming we accept the materialistic view, what reason do we have to believe that a mind in a simulated body has any less subjective experience than a mind in a "real" body?

I hadn't run across that story before, so thanks for sharing it.

In what sense does it not work?

I'm noncommittal toward the prospect that a C. elegans might be conscious (though I doubt it). But here I was using "soul" to mean something metaphysical, requiring something beyond the physical configuration of those ~300 neurons to explain.

I strongly disagree. The human brain, in its connectome, encompasses enough computational complexity to contain consciousness and suffering. A chair does not, at least not based on any model I've yet seen proposed.

> computer-controlled players in games?

Nah, I'm not particularly worried about that. Because those are all currently based on models too simple to conceivably have anything like consciousness.

On the other hand, once we can simulate a human and its environment at OpenWorm's targeted level of abstraction, presumably we would have a conscious being there?

Oh I think it's an awesome project, too. It's just that it sort of makes concrete what were previously hypothetical arguments about simulating living beings.

I can't bring myself to care much about a C. elegans, but let's say we scale this up enough to simulate something the size of a dog plus its environment. Presumably it has subjective experience, like a real dog? What are the ethics of writing code that would result in its "suffering"?

Ah I see... so it sounds like I misunderstood. You're calling for a higher-fidelity physical model, not something metaphysical :)

I still think it's impressive if we can get a decent-fidelity model of C. elegans behavior at the project's current level of abstraction.

I wonder how much behavioral difference we'd see from a lower level of simulation? After all, you can do a lot with a "RAM and CPU" level simulation of a computer...

Does this freak anyone else out just a little?

This project is simulating an entire organism, including its neurology. To what extent does running this code create a "real" worm?

Sure, it's just C. elegans for now. But over time, we'll gradually see additional projects to simulate larger organisms...

It seems likely I'm misunderstanding something, or are you suggesting that C. elegans has a soul?

Yes, the Framework laptop's battery is more easily replaceable than the new MBP's, from what I can tell without yet having seen iFixit's full teardown of the latter—there's no need to remove the trackpad or deal with adhesives on the Framework, in contrast to the new MBP.

(I'm still thrilled to see this improvement to serviceability on the new MBP, even if previous generations set a low bar.)

My phone is configured to send texts from any numbers not in my contacts to a "junk" folder so they don't disturb me with a notification. Unfortunately, this really is necessary given the amount of junk texts (and calls) my phone number receives.

I could see myself ending up in the same situation as the subject of this story if I were out hiking and I got slightly off course, but I weren't in fear of being truly lost, and if meanwhile the rangers were trying to call me from a number I didn't recognize.

One possible solution: For areas requiring permits to hike, make adding the park's phone number to your contacts a requirement to hike in the park. The reality of the spammy telephone system in the United States is that expecting people to notice calls from unexpected numbers is unreasonable.

(Or just require everyone to carry satellite locators in parks. I don't think we're too far off from that being economically feasible.)

I'm mostly happy with the trackpad. I don't think it uses a haptic click like the MBP's trackpad, for whatever that's worth.

My one complaint about the trackpad, in comparison to the MacBook Pro's, is that while both support using two fingers to right-click, I have to be a bit more conscious about spacing my fingers slightly apart on the Framework laptop's trackpad (in Windows, if that matters) to register the right click, compared to on the MacBook Pro.

The build quality of the Framework isn't totally on par with the solid aluminum chassis of the MBP, but it's totally fine for me. The Framework's fan sounds less annoying, probably on account of the wide airflow through the bottom of the case.

The Framework is much faster than my old Intel MBP, but not quite as fast as an M1 MBP would be. The battery life is middling (but fine for my purposes). Overall I'm very happy with my choice after a few weeks.

It's Thunderbolt. (Typing this reply from a Framework laptop connected to a Thunderbolt dock.)

Both times that the battery swelled up previously, the laptop was still under warranty. Apple wasn't going to hand me a new battery to install myself; I had no choice but to let them install it if I were to have it covered.

Now the laptop is out of warranty. If it were to fail now, I could in theory buy a battery replacement kit from iFixit, and muck around with adhesive removers and many delicate parts and hope I don't break anything else in the hours-long process: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Function+Ke...

That's a fairly user-hostile situation, though. There's a reason Apple doesn't advertise the battery as user-serviceable, in contrast to some other manufacturers.

The Framework laptop is a good choice—I'm typing this reply from one.

My least-favorite thing about the older MacBook Pro I migrated from was that (even when it was covered by AppleCare+) both times its battery failed I needed to wipe its SSD, hand it over to Apple for a week, and then restore it from a backup when it was returned.

If my Framework's battery ever fails I can order a replacement for $59 and replace it myself in minutes.

I see a lot to salivate over in the new MBP. But as long as I can avoid it, or until batteries become radically more reliable, I'll never again rely on a main laptop without a user-replaceable battery.

Mine was delayed by FedEx for a week before being delivered. I chalked this up to what appears to be an at least nationwide FedEx slowdown rather than anything specific to do with Framework.

Of course waiting for my batch of the laptop took quite some time, and I'd be thrilled to see them scale that up.

Yep, The Economist is the weekly print newspaper I subscribe to :)

But my problem is that I have trouble avoiding checking news websites on a more frequent basis. (EDIT: And that includes some online articles from The Economist... which don't seem to come in on a purely weekly schedule, right? Though maybe I'm mistaken.)

> A newspaper has a start and an end. That's as simple as it needs to be for me to move on with my day.

That's the heart of it. As the author writes, "Once I've read the paper, I'm done reading the news." I try to get most of my news from a weekly newspaper (in print) for that reason, though I admit I've had middling success maintaining discipline about this lately.

There's no fundamental reason a digital news outlet couldn't achieve the same property by exclusively releasing stories in a discrete "edition" on the web once per week. I guess the incentives just don't line up to make that happen.

> In contrast, houses and most buildings in Europe are much sturdier, being built with stone or cinder blocks or brick for the whole wall and inside walls.

I don't know the stats, but cinder block construction is very common in Florida. The house I grew up in is cinder block, which helps with hurricane protection.

I currently live in California, and one of the big surprises when moving out here was how much of the construction is simple wooden frames. I wouldn't extrapolate that to all of America.

Even though my new Framework laptop supports Wayland, unfortunately I'll probably end up installing Windows on it. And largely because of the display manager.

Wayland itself works great on Ubuntu 21.04. But the screen resolution means I must run at a fractional resolution for it to be usable. And many of my apps require special flags to work directly with Wayland (Chrome and Electron apps), some exhibit bugs when running under Wayland (VS Code), and some don't directly support Wayland at all yet (IntelliJ IDEA)—meaning they have to run under X11 compatibility and suffer from blurry text at fractional scales: https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/articles/440...

I can still run Xorg of course, with the old requisite tweaks to prevent screen tearing on Intel graphics. But directly comparing the performance of Wayland and Xorg on the same machine seems night and day to me (in Wayland's favor, at least under fractional scaling), so I'll likely resort to Windows 10 until the app ecosystem catches up to Wayland.

(And that makes me sad: I actually prefer Linux for several non-ideological reasons, ranging from ZFS to not relying on unstable registry hacks to invert my mouse's scroll wheel.)

I honestly think this is a reasonable stance because, while I'm not an expert—to my current understanding, the immunity you acquired from having the virus is probably comparable to the immunity I got from my Pfizer shots, if not better in some respects.

As an American, I wish we could all just have an honest conversation about this. Yes, the mRNA vaccines are new technology and I don't begrudge anyone who feels hesitant about them; but I also think there's strong evidence for their safety, and I waited hours in line to get my shot as soon as it was available.

But this business of public health officials trying to shape people's behavior instead of giving them plain facts... I don't think we collectively appreciate how much damage this has done. It necessarily breeds mistrust. It works against the actual goal of ending this pandemic.

> I've never actually heard it spoken

Tune into NPR for an hour and you're sure to hear it.