There are two truely hard problems in computer science; P=NP, naming things, and off by one safety

Beyond just being able to draw a bow, being able to draw it well enough to have a chance of shooting at all repeatably takes a lot of training - it’s not just lifting a 50+lb weight, pulling it towards you with one and and pushing it away with the other while keeping your arms stable requires a lot of strength in muscles the people don’t tend to use.

Source: former colleague is an international competition level archer - the sheer amount of core strength and coordination and balance you need to be a good archer is wild

They talk about AGI like it’s some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

• The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
• Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren’t based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
• If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don’t be surprised if a country turns around and says “ok, you can’t operate here”. Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn’t mean you get to ignore laws you don’t like

To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

• A physical device
• An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it’s use outside of a prosecution. It’s not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it’s probably better than “no encryption for anyone”.

So I’m going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn’t allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.

Yeah, that was the general point I was trying to gesture to without being too hamfisted about it; people can escape crappy situations and generational trauma with some outside help, either on the small, personal level or the larger structural level

I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently

Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn’t matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn’t worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it

Please tell me they struck a deal with Zack

I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that’s probably a good deal for the city

Sweet, thanks!

“I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!”, said a voter for the “leopards eating people’s faces party”

Do you have a link? I’ve been using the square Aqara ones for years but they are way more expensive than that

Nah, cos the way the self driving thing will be structured will make it pretty much impossible to actually buy one - they’ll be crazy expensive to buy outright, but you can absolutely lease one - oh but if you are using it for commercial purposes it’s more expensive cos… insurance or something, oh and don’t forget the per-km fees, and the servicing fee, and the battery wear fee, and …

Yeah, doordash can gdiaf. Local burger joint only does delivery through doordash, but adds 20% on top of the base price to cover the fees doordash change them (fair enough), then doordash adds the delivery fee they charge me on top of that as well. They double dip on fees by changing both the restaurant and the customer, what should be a fairly affordable lunch when I don’t have time to make something or go out and get it myself would end up being stupid expensive

howdoyouturnthison

That’s what I mean - only doing DEI things only when there is a profit motive isn’t ideal, but it’s better than not doing DEI at all.

In an ideal world, doing the right thing would either always be the profitable thing to do (either because customers are smart, or because laws punish you if you don’t), or companies would do the right thing regardless of profit simply because it’s the right thing, but clearly we don’t live in an ideal world.

It isn’t, but it sure is an improvement

No worries - I’m a native, but still had to think about it a bit. English is weird

Sort of, there is a parallel derivation where tool can be an innuendo for penis (“used his tool”), so describing someone as a tool is a slightly less vulgar way of calling someone a dick; unrefined, rude, obnoxious.