Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
The top 1% of people make 20.7% of the country's income. Given progressive tax rates, they should be paying a lot more than 40% of Federal income tax revenue, but rates don't scale enough, and aren't lax enough on other classes.
Comment · 1 year ago
It wouldn't be doing this: https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

It wouldn't specifically brag about doing it, while leaving out that they were specifically dealing with Palantir, because they know what they're doing is unethical: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-fo...

Being available for use by militaries is incredibly irresponsible, regardless of what scope is specifically claimed, because of the inherent gravity of the situation when a military is wrong. The US military maintains a good deal of infrastructure in the US; putting into their hands an unreliable, incompetent calculator puts lives at risk.

It would be structured as a non-profit (there are no teeth to a PBC; the structure is entirely to avoid liability, and if you have no trust in the executive body of an organization, it has zero meaningful signal).

It would have a different leadership team.

It would have a leader who could steelman his own position competently. Machines of Loving Grace was less redeeming than Lenat's old stump speeches for his position, despite Amodei starting up in an industry significantly more geared for what he had to say, and Lenat having an incredibly flexible sense of morality. Its leader would not have a history working for Chinese companies and jingoistically begin advocating for export controls.

It would have different employees than the people I know who are working there, who have a history of picking the most unethical employers they can find, in a fashion not dissimilar to how Illumination Entertainment's "Minions" select employers.

Comment · 1 year ago
Complaints =/= Crime

The subway has millions of riders in a day. One hundred and fifty complaints per precinct (which is a generous estimation) is nothing, and the NYPD is a failure of an organization that pays over half a hundred million dollars a year on misconduct lawsuits. NYPD officers have a higher crime rate than the people of New York.

Comment · 1 year ago
Luckily, similar to how they made a choice for these constraints, you also chose yours. Both are artificial constraints; nobody is forced to solve problems in an esolang, and very few people are forced into having kids. You could have chosen their constraints instead. You chose a constraint set difficult for you; they chose a constraint set difficult for them, and the wonderful thing is that you both can work on the problems at your own pace, under the constraints you've chosen for yourselves.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
It was proposed by a North Carolina Republican: Thom Tillis.
Comment · 2 years ago
Lots of things are wasteful. Punishing a bad actor who is actively infringing upon your legally-enshrined rights is better than buying a sportscar with that money.
Comment · 2 years ago
As it says in that link, the author of said link applied for a software patent after the initial GPL violations (that even in your article, he doesn't apologize for; he simply points out that he was a jerk about it while not meaningfully accepting guilt). If you look at the actual events of that situation, Pearson acted far worse than what you would imagine from just reading his own words, years later:

https://wordpress.org/book/2015/11/thesis/

Pearson never made amends; he continued his bad actions long after being called out (and possibly still does).

The correct solution to bad actors is to raze them to the ground; Matt isn't wrong in this. He has the means and is doing something principled with them: Destroying a bad actor.

This should be encouraged; it is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Comment · 2 years ago
Police are gangs, though, definitionally.
Comment · 2 years ago
Have you ever been pulled over by a cop and given a warning? Many people have.

As long as there's any amount of leeway in enforcement of the law, things like courtesy cards will exist. All it is is a little nudge to say, "Hey. I'm one of you and yours. Let's let it slide."

That will continue to exist even if the cards entirely disappear.

Comment · 2 years ago
There's nothing sexualised about it. The person is of an ambiguous build and facing away from the camera. The article does more sexualising than the photo itself does, in the typical way that British media likes to oversexualise and play scandal to sell papers.
Comment · 2 years ago
It obviously can. My first sentence was "uBO already runs on iOS." You asked if Orion was compatible with "normal desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions." There's no distinction between desktop Firefox extensions and mobile ones! Addons on both are just standard WebExtensions, and I've already noted that it runs both Chrome and Firefox extensions.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions

Your lack of understanding of what browser extensions are is exactly why it would be better if Apple explicitly banned browser extensions from the App Store. Ignorance is a malware vector, and even you, a commentator on Hacker News, do not understand the browser extension ecosystem. Instead, they're taking a bunch of flak for something they aren't even doing, all the while iOS has had a browser supporting uBO for years.

Comment · 2 years ago
Chrome on Android doesn't support browser extensions. Google is an advertising company. They are not incentivized to allow extensions. Extensions block their ads, and are a risk vector for mobile users, who are often young, inexperienced, and running outdated systems software.

> What's Orion

A web browser, using the same Webkit as everybody else on iOS, with support for browser extensions.

People give Apple too much flak for the mismanagement or warped incentives of browser vendors. Lack of extensions in existing browsers isn't their fault to any degree.

> and is it compatible with normal desktop Firefox and Chrome extensions, or with the mobile ones?

There's not a separate spec for "mobile" Firefox extensions and desktop browser extensions. Google WebExtensions. It's an open standard that desktop Firefox follows and that Chrome almost does.

Comment · 2 years ago
uBO already runs on iOS. Orion is compatible with Firefox and Chrome extensions. The lack of extensions in mobile browsers is a sign of Mozilla's decay, not a sign of Apple being unnecessarily restrictive. They also don't care about you having extensions on Android; their most recent redesign left Android Firefox users without extensions for months.

Mozilla is an ad-supported company from every angle: Pocket, search deal, the ads built into Firefox. Why don't they get more of the blame for the current state of the browser ecosystem?

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