wdr1

> As someone who lived the first Internet block due to protests

I believe the first Internet block due to protests was in the Maldives in 2004.

The US blocked China from ramping down its use of oil?

What countries have you tried to move to that rejected you & why?

> I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue.

Are they devaluing their brand?

Their sales are up.

Brand Finance Global 500 holds that at #1.

Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies places them at #1.

I cannot think of a single metric supporting their brand has been devalued.

Well, aside from a single poster on HN who doesn't seem to realize they're out of sync with the rest of society.

All of this "you need to understand the code" discussion reminds me of when I was an undergrad. I worked in a computer with someone a fair bit older -- they had even worked with punchcard systems. He was always happy to oblige us with war stories from the olden times & we would lap them up.

He favorite axe to grind was how my generation put too much trust into the compiler. "Just because it compiles doesn't mean you're done. You need to look at the actual assembly. Compilers can be VERY inefficient."

This was in the 90s. There was some merit to his claim.

But today? How many people who write Javascript look at the actual assembly code that is run? Not many.

I can't help but wonder if this current "you need to understand the code" is the same thing all over again. And if in a few years, almost nobody will look at the generated Python, Ruby, etc.

> The right way to do this is to create an API or MCP or whatever catering to bots, and implement corresponding terms in your legal agreements (i.e. after approving a bot to interact with us, you're responsible for purchases it makes), along with some limits to prevent runaway shopping when Muse decides to binge.

From Amazon's perspective, that would be very much the wrong way.

Amazon's concerns here aren't technical. It's entirely about being disintermediated.

It's a common pattern in Apple products. They make it hard to turn off settings they really don't want you to turn off.

Another example is advertising. Apple made it easy for you to turn off advertising tracking for non-Apple things.

Apple made it very confusing to turn off advertising tracking for Apple things, including having a different setting for this to begin with.

> I would date this beginning to 2013. That's around when Facebook feed ceased to be chronological. That's when everyone became rabid.

I'm not sure how old you are, but I remember things being pretty rabid in the 1980s.

I've lived on the westside of LA for ~20 years, so one secret I like to let people in on: there's no water shortage. There's a literal ocean of it. I can see it right out my window.

And all that it takes to turn seawater into potable freshwater is energy.

We don't have a water problem. We have an energy problem.

For all of LA County, it would take 500–750 MW each year to use seawater for all our freshwater needs.

Or put another, with a single nuclear power plant, we would solve all LA's freshwater needs -- forever.

> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.

I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.

Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.

In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.

This doesn't make me anti-government.

I see the need for it & I want it work well.

But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.

I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.

It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.

If Kevin Mitnick were still with us, I feel like he would be proud of these guys.

It's paywalled. Could you recap for us?

> It’s a stupendous amount of walking, with no shade, a moop stick and a bucket

That does sound taxing. Is it volunteer or do people get paid?

> Shouldn’t UAE be upset their entire economy has absolutely rammed by the war started by Israel?

It's pretty convoluted logic to blame Israel for Iran attacking the UAE.