arvinjoar

"Doesn't make sense for us but mandated by policy" is a super common phenomenon that you'll sadly encounter all the time in the industry. Especially when it comes to security. In this case it's at least motivated by something as peripheral as onion services wanting to fit in with the browser ecosystem, which, fair, maybe it doesn't make sense for browsers to bloat their designs by taking onion services into account, and then onion services have to adapt to modern browser standards.

"it would be cool if ..." runs into "but effort" and dies, while "it sucks that ..." is something that gnaws at you

If you're playing Terraforming Mars you want to build your "engine", in terms of resources or points generated per turn. The usual way to achieve this efficiently is to use up as much of your current resources as possible, so that they can compound over the course of the game. An innovative company should thus have costs exceeding revenue, as the costs should lead to future profits. It's of course possible to have costs that do not end up generating any kind of profit, but it would be a bit strange to see a company that has valuable ways to deploy capital simply refuse to do so

Yeah, it's a good example of lindy

Pretty sure that is because of metals. Living things die when boiling anyway

FYI: The author of this blog post also wrote "How to do research at the MIT AI Research Lab". While it's fair to suspect he may not be fully up to scratch with how things are done, he should have a pretty good overview

You can't look only at track record. Afaik they have an unreasonable amount of infantry for purely defensive purposes. They're #3 globally in terms of firepower, of course they won't create trouble until they're reasonably sure they'll come out ahead. Once they're more powerful economically and militarily you'll have a an unscrupulous nation, with a dictator for life, capable of very long-term planning, leading a pretty explicitly racist people in need of massive amounts of natural resources.

So yeah, even though they're not currently adventurous militarily, I wouldn't count on that being the case forever.

I got really stressed out by Trump winning, but I still think the backlash against social media and tech companies has a lot to do with the establishment being afraid of losing power. When the Arab Spring happens, the free flow of information is an unalloyed good, but when Trump gets elected we suddenly need to curtail "troll factories", and ensure Fake News is being fact checked, and see to it that personal data isn't being used to influence elections.

I'm the first person to admit that I'm not impressed by my peers when it comes to electing suitable leaders, but it worries me much more that we're now falling for the temptation of reasoning for them, and protecting them from themselves. I think this straitjacket that we're so eagerly putting on our fellow man for his own good may very well be put on us, or perhaps the truly original thinkers that we yet don't know about.

So no, comments like these aren't infantile, they're crucial for maintaining the liberty that we've thus enjoyed on the internet, and that I would very much like to keep enjoying, even if I don't always agree with how people tend to use that freedom.

The author can't have listened much to Thiel. He certainly doesn't speak without a filter, most of what he says he will repeat in interview after interview, for years. Every now and then he adds something new, but that thing is seldom very off-the-cuff. Thiel is unorthodox, not unfiltered.

Shulgin was pretty weird, but maybe not as weird as some of the others.

Panasonic must be very happy about this plan

When is enough enough? No-one gets to say. For better or for worse, a race to the bottom is a coordination problem where the incentive is always to be the defecting party. This means that however well-intentioned you are, global capitalism marches on without you, your choice is to jump on the bandwagon or become irrelevant. Politics doesn't matter much, it can only stall the inevitable, usually at great cost.