michaelt

An academic can be an ivory tower type who thinks sports matches, superhero movies, social media and star musicians are a waste of time.

But politicians who think the Superbowl is a waste of time, that star wars is for children, and that Taylor Swift's music sucks pretty quickly figures out sharing those opinions loses far more votes than it gains.

Intelligence? Problem solving? Understanding statistics? Speaking in front of rooms full of people? Communicating complex ideas clearly? Useful for both jobs.

But an academic can be bookish, shy or haughty. Pursuing your own ideas is actively encouraged. There are arguments - but the main audience for the debates are other academics. They needn't collaborate on research with anyone they don't want to, and when they do collaborate everyone has the same destination in mind even if they disagree about the route to get there. When dealing with students, they've all chosen to be there, passed exams and paid money. The work is mostly low-medium stakes, with time to get important things right. And of course they have excellent job security.

Politicians, though? Gotta love campaigning and talking to voters. Gotta all get together behind the party's national platform. Even colleagues in your party are rivals because everyone wants the top job. 'Debates' all about playing to the audience and getting 3-second soundbites for social media, not engaging with the substance of arguments. No choice in who you collaborate with, including people with deep-seated disagreements about things like tax, debt, spending. Gotta represent voters many of whom hate you. Do well at the job and high stakes things you didn't even do get blamed on you, like train crashes and oil markets getting expensive. Oh, and every 4-5 years you're fired and get to re-apply for your job.

A lot of exercise equipment manufacturers will display very approximate numbers, based on assumptions the user can adjust if they want (but they seldom do).

If you jump on a treadmill at the gym and set it to a brisk walk, it'll show you a 'calories burned' count that goes up by 7 calories per minute based on your speed and an average adult's weight.

It doesn't have to be all that accurate to motivate the user to just do 5 more minutes, and to put a checkmark on a product feature list.

S6. Summary of indoor cycling (Peloton) workouts by year (2018–2025)

  2018 (age 70): 11 workouts, 20 min, 171 watts
  2020 (age 71): 14 workouts, 60 min, 175 watts
  2021 (age 72): 140 workouts, 30 min, 177 watts
  2022 (age 73): 164 workouts, 20 min, 167 watts
  2023 (age 74): 73 workouts, 30 min, 187 watts
  2024 (age 75): 59 workouts, 45 min, 165 watts
  2025 (to march): 69 workouts, 30 min, 165 watts

Going up to 5-6 workouts per week is a step up, but this wasn't an inexperienced rider. And who knows how much outdoor cycling they did, which the Peloton wouldn't have recorded?

Which is something that happens inside a trust boundary. After all, if an untrusted third party gets to install your OS it's game over, UEFI bug or not.

And consumer devices often don't have a network card - or come with PXE disabled in the BIOS.

As I recall, EV certificates also had the 'problem' that a lot of companies trade under names that aren't their full legal name, making the EV cert confusing. To use modern examples, twitter.com having an EV cert for "Space Exploration Technologies Corp", google.com having an EV cert for "Alphabet Inc" and suchlike.

Because, as a German academic once explained to me (years before the rise of LLMs), if you want your ideas to be influential you need people to read your papers, and you get a heck of a lot more readers when publishing in English than you do publishing in German.

Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to draw a clear line once you start allowing some AI writing tools.

And these days, you can get an LLM to stitch those functions together

And it's been possible to get Windows-style self-unlocking FDE for 10+ years, such as by using Ubuntu Core - it just costs a bit, and most users aren't willing to pay $$$ to type one less password.

The design of the TPM makes much more sense for a closed-source operating system, where making it impossible to run a non-microsoft-signed OS protects you against rootkits. Open source OSes don't get that benefit, and the remaining benefits are very minor (and come with big downsides) so I can see why open source developers weren't in a hurry.

Yes, I'm trying to say it's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of other ways you could organise a justice system, many of which would lead to more just results.

For example - a fixed price system. 8 hours wages from the two parties to the dispute buys 30 minutes with one judge and two lawyers. More than enough time to deal with a minor matter like a scratched car. Or if you prefer a continental-style inquisitorial system, you can lose the lawyers and have 90 minutes with a judge. The fees mean judges and lawyers take home 5x the average salary.

If we've got a Lamborghini justice system, delivering amazing performance to people with a spare $250k and doing nothing for anyone else - some would say that's not the right price/performance trade off.