ElevenLathe

Joined 11 years ago

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Mar 17
J. Random Hacker.

SRE at a company you've heard of. I don't speak for them.

elevenlathe <a𝓽> justemail.net

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 days ago
Like I said, I just tried that and my results say it's happening. GeoIP isn't perfect though, and US/CA telecom infra is hopelessly intermingled, so maybe it's just a technical limitation. I can say when I look from Austin, it's "Lake America", but if I look from Geneva it's "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".
Comment · 2 days ago
I'm not so sure on the Turkmen Sea example. Google is (trying to) sidestep this issue as much as possible by making the name on the map depend on your physical location, language and localization settings, or both. They could easily make the Caspian Sea say Turkmen Sea only in Turkmenistan, and probably would if they wanted to keep doing business in Turkmenistan. This is already how it works for Lake Ontario: if I access from the US, it says "Lake America", but if I VPN to somewhere in Europe, it says "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".

In terms of lawyerly distinctions, I would actually argue that there is still no legal basis to the rename. The president has directed the federal executive branch to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America, but...that's it. It literally doesn't and can't apply to Google. No law has been passed, and even if there had been it's pretty clear that it's a 1st Amendment issue to compel private entities to refer to things in particular ways -- it would be a slam dunk even on this Supreme Court. Their decision to do it is a voluntary act meant to curry favor with this administration, or at least to avoid pissing it off. This isn't like the Indian laws that make it illegal to publish a map that shows Kashmir as part of Pakistan, it's just a memo to the federal bureaucracy. Yes, this doesn't really matter because there are punishments that are within the power of the president (like cancelling contracts, or cooking up bogus DoJ investigations, or failing to resist antitrust enforcement, etc.) that they want to avoid. This just goes to illustrate that the rule of law in the United States is mostly a fantasy.

Comment · 3 days ago
Spectrum is finite and must be shared. In the absence of a functioning world government, it makes sense to treat it as a national resource. And no, I don't think the FCC should be in the business of policing the content of what is broadcast on the public's spectrum, only that it is done in an orderly way.
Comment · 3 days ago
That sounds a lot like "censor foreign media and domestic anti-regime media". I'm of the opinion that if foreigners can convince me and my countrymen of something just by posting, we probably didn't really need the convincing anyway. Even if it turns out my position on something was changed 180 degrees by foreign posters (even Chinese intelligence employing cutting edge propaganda AI, or whatever bogeyman you want to employ), then: Fine. Whatever. Persuasion of citizens in a democracy is just how a free society works.
Comment · 5 days ago
Does this mean LA would be a feasible option for longer-cycle storage, IOW keeping a reserve topped up most of the year for those duldrums weeks with little solar or wind?
Comment · 5 days ago
Does anyone know the current state of agent-assisted Smalltalk, Pharo or otherwise? Intuitively it seems like a match made in heaven, since the agent can directly manipulate the running program, but I also assume that there is very little training data available for Smalltalk.
Comment · 5 days ago
It's strictly worse than the alternatives mentioned (cubes and real offices). Why not be negative?
Comment · 5 days ago
I've been thinking about this a bit, and I think the only real answer is to have some alternate body of trustworthy people constituting an armed but unofficial Civil Guard (or whatever you want to call it) waiting in the wings to take over the maintenance of order when a sympathetic Sheriff or City Council fires the whole police apparatus at once. They would then be deputized/sworn in/officialized, and they could keep order and disarm the old cops while a permanent new force is set up. This is admittedly a dangerous situation to put one's local community in -- especially without backing from the Feds or the statehouse -- but I don't see a way around it.

The only alternative would be a whisper campaign to suss out the trustworthy pockets within the existing police apparatus, but that is probably even more dangerous. Imagine the police chief in your city going public with information that there is a left wing plot to overthrow order from within the police department!

Comment · 16 days ago
Presumably the creditors would then own the DCs. The price to build them is a sunk cost (meaning: not actually a factor in determining what they are now worth), so they would either sell them off for their new value or else run them at market rates.

The big question then becomes: what is the market value of these things? Is it even positive? Creditors will eat the difference between that number and whatever they actually lent (less what they've been paid back so far, if anything).

Comment · 16 days ago
It's like taking out a mortgage to buy a house, and then somehow dodging the payments by assigning the debt to the house itself.
Comment · 16 days ago
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Comment · 17 days ago
Where can I find a leftist cable news channel? Literally don't think they exist. MSNBC and CNN are as pro establishment as anything.
Comment · 17 days ago
I would push back on this framing. Individuality obviously exists, and we were created in God's image, etc., but there isn't a way to avoid politics forming people into groups of some kind. Let me try to explain.

If we don't band together to help one another, we're stuck playing by the rigged existing rules of the game. Organizing (either in the traditional labor sense, or via super PACs and racism) allows us to change the rules in our own favor, because we can wield more power.

With that laid out, what kind of group should we organize? The bigger the group, the more power it has. But also: the more coherent and lockstep the group is in its actions, the more power it has, at any size. So the goal of all politics is to form the biggest coalition you can that still holds together.

Many socialists think, as a strategic question (not one of ideology), that the goal should be to organize the whole working class (everyone who must sell their labor in order to survive). This is the biggest group you can possibly have that still shares a common interest. The problem is obviously that this is an unwieldy group and it's really really hard to do, particularly in the face of almost infinite money trying to stop us. There are various thoughts on how to address this problem, the classic one being to organize whole shops or industries at once, and slowly building momentum that was, but fundamentally it is about putting together the biggest possible political grouping that coheres.

Right wingers have a different strategy, which is to use identity politics (racism, xenophobia, sectarianism, sectionalism, etc.) to organize a smaller coalition but in a very tight, coordinated way. The play is that a relatively small group of committed actors can use things like propaganda, violence, and dirty tricks to seize or maintain power.

Fundamentally the left and the right are trying to do the same thing, which is to put together a coalition that let's them change the status quo. If we protect our individuality too much, we get rolled by the other side. Establishment oriented people tend to miss this.

Comment · 24 days ago
Because Congress allocated this money for one but not the other.
Comment · 25 days ago
This is is exactly how I've been using AI for writing features: I write a spec. AI writes a test. I inspect/edit/give notes on the test until it's what I want and make sure it's red (to validate that my/the AI's assumptions are more or less correct). Then the AI edits the code only to make the tests pass. Then I do a sanity check on things and tidy them up to my liking. Cut a commit, work on next test.

TBH I feel like a dinosaur working this way, reading about others' more autonomous workflows. One merit it has is that it is a very cheap way to use AI, at least on the apps I work on, because Kimi K2.6 is more than adequate to give good results with this workflow.

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