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Antibiotic resistant MRSA kills thousands of people a year in the US. The idea that he went to the hospital with pneumonia and then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.

SETI received ~$28m in donations and contributions in 2022, according to their tax filings [1]

As mentioned in the press release, contribution will be used at least in part as an endowment, providing perpetual funding for ongoing programs.

Also, it is my understanding that large philanthropic gifts, particularly from estates, often come in the form of non-cash assets such as stocks or other financial instruments. So probably not a $200m check, but a very nice nest egg to fund SETI projects for decades to come.

[1] https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials

Most of Comcast’s internet is exchanged through transit-free peering agreements, so only about 1% of Comcast’s outbound traffic requires them to pay for IP transit. And that traffic is mainly overseas, so Comcast is effectively a Tier 1 network in the US. Which means their customers’ outbound traffic doesn’t cost them anything.

For most last-mile ISPs, peering isn’t a revenue source. Small ISPs have to pay for peering and IP transit, and large ISPs have transit-free peering agreements with most, if not all, of the internet.

However, large ISPs that enjoy regional monopolies can refuse to upgrade connections with peered networks in an attempt to force the content providers sending traffic over the peered network to instead peer directly with the ISP.

This tactic is really only feasible for ISPs who have captive customers that are unable to switch to another ISP, as the negotiation process requires the ISP to allow the service it is providing to its actual customers to degrade to such an extent that the content provider is forced to peer directly with the ISP.

US Internet (private fiber ISP in the Twin Cities) is an anomaly, not the norm. Minneapolis is incredibly lucky to have a local, private ISP that offers fiber to the home at up to 10 gigabit/s. The only other ISPs in the US that I know offer similar services are either municipal ISPs, co-ops, or Google Fiber.

> that blog post for the past week

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-countcorrectly.html

MDMA was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck. Merck and US Army did several animal trials in the 1950s, but by the end of the decade MDMA was shelved and thought to have no therapeutic benefit. It wasn’t until Sasha Shulgin rediscovered it in 1976 that its therapeutic benefits were discovered, at which point therapists and psychiatrists began quietly using it for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. In July 1984 the DEA proposed making MDMA a Schedule I controlled substances, which led to outcry from practitioners who requested the DEA hold hearings to provide testimony on MDMA’s therapeutic benefits. While these hearings were ongoing, the DEA used its emergency scheduling authority in May of 1985 to place MDMA in Schedule I.

Animal efficacy and human safety trials of MDMA began in the late 1980s, and the first FDA-approved, placebo controlled, double blind phase I study was published in 1996.

The American version of the BBC: PBS

If someone is already in the middle of no where, 2.4 GHz congestion isn’t a problem for them.

I’m always for more unlicensed spectrum.

But I strongly disagree with your distaste for the FCC’s reverse auctions of spectrum. Wireless Spectrum is a limited public resource and an auction is a much better way to allocate it than to have those same companies instead hire lobbyists to try to convince the FCC to allocate that spectrum to them.

Finally, somewhere that is covering the issues I care about but that the mainstream media refuses to cover.

From an SLA uptime perspective, it’s also worth considering that you don’t have a whole team working to fix your self-hosted Gitlab server when it goes down. So one outage overnight of your self-hosted server could be more downtime than more frequent, shorter GitHub outages.

The increasing prices of IPv4 address blocks will probably drive adoption of IPv6. The increased complexity will be outweighed by the elimination of scarcity that IPv6 brings. If we are still using IPv4 in 2100 that would be tragic. IPv4 block pricing: https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/

“Hexagons are the bestagons”

https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY

> “It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.”

If you applied your logic to the use of cloud services then companies like Vercel shouldn’t call themselves a hosting provider because they use AWS. “It’s just a UI that calls the AWS API”

This is AI research, not product development. The project’s goal was to apply deep reinforcement learning to a complex and varied real world task. Google has no desire to sell trash sorting robots.

and then in 2017 Friedman’s former department was renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics after he donated 150m

He previously donated $150m to Harvard College so his children are already all but guaranteed admission. He already has all the benefits Harvard gives mega donors, there isn’t any marginal benefit to this donation other than a department renaming. The only possible thing left for them to give him would be a seat on the Harvard Board of Overseers but that’s unlikely because he is now a politically controversial figure.

He also has a history of mega donations to universities in exchange for department renaming, like his $150m donation to UChicago which renamed their economics department after him (the most prestigious part of the university)

If it was shut down due to a civil injunction for copyright violation, I don’t think the Internet Archive would be able to transfer the Wayback Machine’s data to anyone else without defying that injunction and risk being held in contempt.

Someone would need to immediately begin trying to mirror the entire Wayback Machine’s archive, ideally hosting the mirror in Luxembourg or the Netherlands.

While some of the recent hype around AI may be due to VCs and the industry looking for the next big thing, it’s a bit absurd to think that AI orgs like OpenAI and Stability were holding back research and then only released it once the crypto bubble popped.

This article also misunderstands the differences between the various types of GPUs and seems to think they are fungible.

Large models like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion are trained using cloud compute, most likely clusters of Nvidia A100s. No one was ever using those for mining because it wouldn’t have been profitable. Similarly, no large models are being trained on second hand GPUs used for mining.

No one should be learning Vimscript at this point. That language should have died a long time ago.

A new user coming to the Vim ecosystem in 2023 would be best served by using Neovim with Lua.

It depends on how you’re defining “the spectrum” of healthcare policy. If you placed all European nations on a spectrum comparing their healthcare systems, Germany would be on the right of the spectrum because the private sector has a significant role in their healthcare system. Countries like the UK and Denmark would be on the left of the spectrum because their healthcare system is mostly public. Germany’s healthcare system is only left-leaning if you include the US on the spectrum.

I don’t think the NSA has ever been able to directly link any deaths to the Snowden leaks.

I also don’t see how the disclosure of NSA sources and methods had any impact on the Russians ability to get John Podesta to click on a phishing email.

The NSA’s TAO (tailored access operations), the group that wrote Stuxnet and is known to the cybersecurity community as The Equation Group, is not known to work with outside contractors to develop malware. They’re more likely to collaborate with GCHQ and Israel’s Unit 8200, but not contractors. The NSA does some of the most advanced malware and vulnerability research internally, no contractor has the capabilities they do internally. They might buy some premade malware from contractors, but for a highly targeted piece of malware like Stuxnet it would be developed internally.

People with security clearances spill their guts and tell all on their security clearance forms, because not doing so is a felony that the DOJ takes incredibly seriously. People’s most personal and intimate secrets are in those forms.

Never, ever lie or knowingly omit information on a security clearance form. If you tell the truth and you are disqualified, it’s extremely unlikely that information will be used against you. The FBI isn’t going to come after you for doing mushrooms. If you lie to the federal government while trying to obtain a security clearance, they will put you in federal prison.

During the first days of the Washington Post’s reporting on the Snowden documents, the outlet misreported the mechanism for how PRISM obtained it’s data. It was initially reported, seemingly based on Snowden’s misunderstanding of PRISM, that the NSA has a direct connection into the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. That wasn’t actually true, as the data for PRISM was obtained through Section 702 requests the FBI sent to tech companies which was a practice established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

a VC told them to use a bottom-up TAM, so they started at the bottom and now they're here

The FDIC insures up to $250,000 per depositor, per insured bank. But the FDIC claims process only begins after a bank failure (likely caused by a run on the bank). https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/fdic...

If this is depressing let me tell you about quants and consultants, the true black holes of human capital.

Google's datacenter in Iowa is apparently operating with 97% CFE. I think they have both wind and solar power purchase agreements for that data center but I assume wind is the differentiating factor that makes it their lowest carbon datacenter.

Wow, I didn't realize there were currently any hosting providers who had managed to find 24/7 carbon-free electricity (CFE). Hydro seems like the only option right now for data centers because we don't have energy storage on the scale needed to run a data center 24/7 using only wind and solar. Nuclear may also be an option in the future if small modular reactors get on a learning curve that reduces their price/kWh to be more competitive. I always forget about nuclear as a CFE energy source even though it's like 50% of the US's carbon free energy.

David Roberts, a very wonky and wonderful climate journalist, had Google's director of energy on his podcast to talk about Google's goal of having all their data centers operate on 24/7 CFE. This podcast is why I'm surprised any hosting provider has managed to do achieve 24/7 CFE because its an order or magnitude more difficult than achieving "100% CFE".

Here is the link to that episode: https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-michael-terrell-on#det...

If you're interested in this enough to choose your hosting provider based off their energy mix I think you'd really enjoy his substack and podcast.

For other comment readers if you the difference between 100% CFE and 24/7 isn't clear, Google's blog post announcing their goal of 24/7 CFE explains the difference between the two and why 24/7 CFE is waaaay more difficult and currently only something a company with Google's resources could do.