roca

Whenever you run one of these tools on a file you downloaded from the Internet, you're relying on the tool having no exploitable security bugs. Regardless of whether or not $PAGER was intended to be a "load bearing security component", it definitely is.

I don't know why people dislike THE LAST BATTLE. Too Christian I guess.

MAROONED IN REALTIME, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP and A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY are excellent. I could re-read them. THE PEACE WAR and RAINBOWS END are just average and I would only read them once. CHILDREN OF THE SKY is awful and I wish I hadn't bothered reading it at all.

IBM bought them in 2003.

Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc.

Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and make sure you have distribution across geographies. Good luck with that.

Cost: sure, local wins here.

If systems administration is your fun hobby, or you are incredibly cost-sensitive due to large scale, by all means manage storage locally. Otherwise pay professionals to do it.

What exactly do you think is substandard about Firefox?

One thing the "no deletion" argument misses is that sometimes you have to delete data for policy reasons. At least two cases are important:

* Users ask you to delete their data. If you don't, and they find out you didn't, you have a problem.

* Legal action may require you to delete data. (E.g. you may find that someone uploaded child pornography to your system.)

This is actually a huge problem for companies like Google (where I work). When you have enormous volumes of highly reliable and durable (i.e. replicated) storage, it's actually really hard to make sure you can delete all copies of specific data reliably and quickly.

Please file an rr issue and tell us more about your situation.

Memory size and traffic shouldn't really be a problem. Multicore parallelism is the main problem. I've used rr with some very memory-hungry apps with good results.

There's a spectrum here.

At one end of the spectrum is a thought experiment: one person has box with a button. Press the button and with probability 3/4 everyone dies, but with probability 1/4 everyone is granted huge benefits --- immortality etc. I say it's immoral for one person to make that decision on their own, without consulting anyone else. People deserve a say over their future; that's one reason we don't like dictatorships.

At the other end are people's normal actions that could have far-reaching consequences but almost certainly won't. At this end of the spectrum you're not restricting people's agency to a significant degree.

Arguing that because the spectrum exists and it's hard to formalize a cutoff point, we shouldn't try, is a form of the continuum fallacy.

To me, it matters whether I am responsible for wrecking humanity or someone else is, even if the end result for humanity is the same. (That's partly a Christian thing.)

Just running away and hiding in a cave probably isn't the right thing to do, though. I want to do my best to push for good outcomes. It's just not clear what the best actions are to do that.

OTOH it's pretty clear that "do uncontrolled irresponsible things" is not helpful.

We simply should not build systems that we have ethical obligations to.

And when people inevitably do anyway, I say we should hold such creators responsible for protecting their creations from suffering.

It's a very important point that the insanely rapid pace of change is itself a huge problem. We're still in the same (northern hemisphere) school year in which ChatGPT was released; teachers and students just started trying to understand its impact; and the underlying model has already been replaced with something much more powerful --- TWICE --- GPT4 and "tool-using" mode.

Car crashes don't affect the trajectory of human civilization all that much.

That's not the question I asked. FWIW I'm actually part of one of these groups!

What I want to know is, what gives OpenAI and other relatively small technological elites permission to gamble with the future of humanity? Shouldn't we all have a say in this?

That particular anti-vax theory doesn't hold water when you consider that New Zealand vaccinated almost everyone with mRNA (Pfizer) prior to COVID spreading widely, with excellent results. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1085... NZ cumulative excess mortality since January 2020 is still negative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortali...

I'm not an expert on Mexico but none of this has happened in NZ with the TPP.

So the Biden administration isn't really trying to cancel student debt? They are faking the attempt, secure in the knowledge that courts will strike it down? That sounds like an A-grade conspiracy theory to me.

> The only citizens whose interests really matter in the US are conservatives, Christians and (of course, because the US is an oligarchy) billionaires. Everyone else is a serf who takes whatever scraps fall from the table.

So all my non-conservative, non-Christian, non-billionaire Bay Area tech worker friends, who are doing very well for themselves, are "taking scraps"? Come on, that's ludicrous.

Their vaccines weren't great but mandating them would have been a lot better than nothing.

It's not a great society for Uyghurs, or Christians, or Falun Gong, or anyone who want to speak their mind. It's not just accepting limitations on your personal freedom, it's being comfortable with the oppression of everyone around you.

Really? Why is Biden canceling student debt then?

I know some Christians in NZ who are from mainland China. They have the same stories.

Lots of relatively rich countries are in the TPP, including my country, NZ. It has significant rules protecting labour and environmental conditions. It's fine.

From your link:

> The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.

So they're saying that jobs moving from the USA to Mexico increased the flow of Mexican workers to the USA? That makes no sense at all.

They could have vaccinated their population while they were maintaining zero-COVID. It's a mystery to me why they didn't make vaccination mandatory.

NZ didn't have anything like the COVID death spike that Hong Kong did. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/new-zealan... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china-hong... Adjusting for population HK has had about 50% more COVID deaths than NZ. This is probably because our vaccination rate for the elderly was much higher when the dam broke.

And, adjusting for population, the USA has had > 4x the number of COVID deaths that NZ has had. I don't think makes NZ a "victim of its own success".

> that country, like Africa, is too deeply colonized (likewise, with a despicable morally corrupt elite) to do anything of value to its own people IMO.

https://databankfiles.worldbank.org/public/ddpext_download/p...

> Since the 2000s, India has made remarkable progress in reducing absolute poverty. Between FY2011/12 and 2015, poverty declined from 21.6 to an estimated 13.4 percent at the international poverty line (2011 PPP $1.90 per person per day), continuing the historical trend of robust reduction in poverty. Aided by robust economic growth, more than 90 million people escaped extreme poverty and improved their living standards during this period.

And, as another reply noted, China grew rich after the USSR collapsed. So your facts are wrong.

But even apart from the facts, your thesis doesn't make much sense to me. "Western powers helped Taiwan and China grow rich because politics, and this is bad because ..."?

This assumes that humans in knowledge-based industries will maintain a significant cost-effective edge over AIs in some economically relevant skill domain. There's no reason to believe that will still be true in, say, 10 years.

That's been true for over a decade. Hasn't happened in the wild though AFAIK. I don't think there's an incentive for anyone to do this.

The "problem" here is only that life expectancy has not continued to increase at the rate it was increasing up to around 2010.

I see no reason to assume that life expectancy would continue to increase indefinitely at a linear rate. Most interventions that increase life expectancy (e.g. mitigating major causes of non-age-related death) are subject to diminishing returns.

Unsigned integer overflow is not undefined behavior in C++ so won't be caught by UBSan.

Also, UBSan is more overhead than turning on Rust's overflow checking.