Recent submissions

Comment · 1 hour ago
I think tptacek means to emphasize the "public comment process" as opposed to "public comment" in general. Generic public comments/discussion are great (I think tptacek would agree because... they're commenting publicly).

It's the public comment _process_, where these Public Comments are given special status and power, that acts as a general drag on governments allowing anything. It's not _democratic_ because these Public Comments skew very unrepresentative. It's a sort of veto power granted mostly to people that don't have better things to do.

The clear alternative I see is to simply empower elected representatives/leaders to make these decisions.

Comment · 2 days ago
> help you play a video game

I have a similar hobby, and for me it's not so much "helping to play" the original game, but playing a _different_ game, a much richer/strategic game.

It's similar to car racing: most people just drive to get places, and there's little point tuning a car & driver to go fast. But if you want to go fast, then you want to go fast. There are negative externalities, for which it's important to keep the scale in mind, but these hobbies also push the envelope of what we as humans can do.

Comment · 3 days ago
> decided to serve in a war you oppose

In the United States, citizens may decide to join the armed forces. Politicians decide whether and when they serve in a war.

The exception would be if a person volunteered directly in a foreign war, eg a US civilian volunteering to fight in Ukraine.

Comment · 4 days ago
That wasn't my line of reasoning. Yes, AI is useful for programming. It just shouldn't be judged by volume of code output.
Comment · 4 days ago
If your measure of a 10x engineer was in (thousands of) cranked-LOCs/day, then for sure, AI has taken their "performance" to the moon.

The rest is basic hard truth, but I really hope that the "quantity of output" rationale withers. AI's core value for programming is in input tokens, not output tokens.

Comment · 5 days ago
There's also a whole extra bonus castle that appears to the left when the camera looks left around 0:22. Which is amusing both because it wasn't there on the initial approach, and also because nobody puts two castles each with their own distinct curtain walls right next to each other like that.
Comment · 17 days ago
Setting timers is literally the only thing I ever use Siri for, so it's not like this is some edge case.
Comment · 20 days ago
It's not entirely clear which comments/criticisms you're responding to when pointing out the lack of margin. Whose excuse is that? And what's it an excuse for?

Security isn't optional just because margins are low. If eg FedEx decided to disregard security because they only made 3% of the value of the packages they ship in profit, they'd lose most of that business fast. But yes, let's not shame folks for failing to preempt theoretical-yet-unseen threats, if that's what you mean.

Comment · 21 days ago
While parent may have indeed been provided an ordinary stock Apple device, Apple's "Automated Device Enrollment" program can be used to administer/manage devices even when shipped directly from Apple to employees. I got a laptop replaced at a former company, shipped directly from Apple to me. I expected to have to reach out to IT to get it bootstrapped with their management tools, but the OS install process did this automatically.
Comment · 23 days ago
There's little reason to believe US soil is particularly safe from drone attacks.
Comment · 1 month ago
Or another way of reading it: a 61% increase over 5 years indicates a 10% annual pace of inflation for this particular basket of goods.
Comment · 2 months ago
Voter preferences can change with time, as voters observe the effects of their previous selections. Most voters don't want and didn't vote for authoritarian rule. They are humans with many diverse challenges & concerns in their lives. Their votes are an attempt to balance/compromise among those.
Comment · 3 months ago
Most crypto mining on GPUs would use 100% of memory bandwidth, but only a fraction of the compute available. This is a consequence of ASIC resistance of their mining algorithms -- custom silicon can only offer a modest benefit over GPUs if the hard part is memory bandwidth.
Comment · 3 months ago
I left a [positive/glowing] google maps review for my child's preschool, only to discover later the review was never made publicly visible. I have no idea why, and there's of course no appeal process. The experience leaves a very bitter taste.

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