ignirtoq

Robin Williams as the Bicentennial Man. The movie was okay; his performance was amazing. I’ve struggled with mortality for a while, like I expect a lot of people do, and to see him as a character who started their existence immortal, and to choose mortality. His death in the movie hit me much, much harder than I expected. I haven’t watched the movie again since my first viewing because I’m honestly afraid of going through that again.

So you want to tie internet access to national government authorization? That’s a sure-fire way to get dissenters against their own government off the internet, but won’t solve your bot problem when Facebook can lobby the federal government to get credentials for its own AI.

As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content

This will be a nightmare for any neuro-divergent students, or really any student with atypical learning needs.

Not OP, but in my circles the simplest, strongest point I’ve found is that no cryptocurrency has a built-in mechanism for handling mistakes. People are using these systems, and people make mistakes. Without built in accommodations, you’re either

1. Creating real risk for anyone using the system, because each mistake is irrecoverable financial loss, and that’s pretty much the definition of financial risk, or
2. Encouraging users to subvert the system in its core functionality in order to accommodate mistakes, which undermines the entire system and again creates risk because you don’t really know how anything is going to work with these ad hoc side systems

Either way, crypto is just more costly to use than traditional systems when you properly factor those risks. So the only people left using it are those who expect greater rewards to offset all that additional risk, which are just speculators and grifters.

I don’t think that follows, because those are temporary conditions, and consuming the drug is a choice made by an individual not currently under the influence. So it’s the person’s responsibility before they consume the drug to prepare their environment for when they are under the influence. If they’re so destructive under the influence that they can’t not commit a crime, it is their responsibility not to take the drug at all.

Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.

Democratic candidates have raised far more than Republicans and can purchase ads at the cheaper rate offered to candidates. Republicans rely more heavily on independent expenditures from their campaign arm and allied super PACs, which have to pay much more per ad.

Gee, it’s almost like Republicans aren’t favored by a large proportion of the population who can donate up to the ~$3,300 federal limit directly to campaigns and have to rely on their wealthy benefactors donating much, much more per capita through side channels that shouldn’t even exist in a functional democracy.

If it’s dangerous to repair it, it’s dangerous to own. That’s the domain for regulations by the government, not arbitrary software restrictions by software manufacturers.

They don’t implement these to keep you safe. They do it purely to make more money.

Before my comment I want to make clear I agree with the conclusion that abortion bans are clearly killing women at statistically significant rates.

That said, the stats reporting here doesn’t make sense:

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5% in 2019 to 18.9% in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20% to 39.1%. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6% to 43.6%.

There’s no way 14.5% of Hispanic women in Texas who got pregnant died some time during pregnancy, during child birth, or soon after. That would be unprecedented for any time since the advent of modern medicine. And the chart above this paragraph does not agree with it either. It’s a chart of deaths per hundred THOUSAND live births, and the numbers for all racial groups are all under 100, so less than 0.1%.

The way it’s stated also doesn’t suggest it’s a percent increase because it says it rose from 14.5% to 18.9%. I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say, but they should definitely have been more careful with presenting the numbers.

If the pig option included immune suppression drugs for the rest of your life, or for like 10 years until it wore out and you had to have another major surgery to replace it, mechanical valve plus blood thinners and a yearly blood draw sounds like the much better deal. I know blood thinners come with their own long term effects, but nothing compared to immune suppression.

That strongly depends on the job. If the company has to follow regulations to meet some security posture, wiping the OS (and all the security tools and configuration set up by IT) to put your own favored OS without matching the security requirements could wind up with you getting fired.

This will be an unpopular opinion here, but Biden has been backed into a corner on this. The immigration system is fundamentally broken and not equipped to deal with modern needs, but that has to be fixed by Congress. Biden had legislation he was favoring, and regardless of what your opinion on it was, Republicans made it clear they won’t let absolutely any changes to immigration happen with a Democrat in the White House, no matter how much they may agree with them.

His options under executive action are extremely limited. The strategy of letting the system flounder to illustrate the need for reform has only worked against him, so now he’s trying something else. I don’t agree with the current system, the reforms that he proposed, nor this executive order, but man, there just isn’t a good solution here, and he’s feeling the political pressure on it, which while it may be misdirected is nonetheless real.

I find the very term “content” fascinating, because the exact definition you choose puts it on a kind of spectrum with “useful” at one end and “measurable” at the other.

When Daniel Ek talks about “content,” he means any pile of bits he can package up, shove in front of people, and stuff with ads. From that definition, making “content” is super cheap. I can record myself literally screaming for 30 seconds into the microphone already in my laptop and upload it using the internet connection I already have. Is it worth consuming? No, but I’ll get to that. And content under that definition is very measurable in many senses, like file size, duration, and (important to him) number of hours people stream it (and can inject ads into). But from this view, all “content” is interchangable and equal, so it’s not a very useful definition, because some content is extremely popular and is consumed heavily, while other content is not consumed at all. From Daniel’s perspective, this difference is random, enigmatic, and awe inspiring, because he can’t measure it.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “useful” definition where the only “content” is good content. My 30 seconds of screaming isn’t content, it’s garbage. It’s good content that actually brings in the ad revenue, because it’s what people will put up with ads to get access to. But what I would consider good content is not what someone else would consider good content, which is what makes it much harder to measure. But we can all agree making good content is hard and thus almost always expensive (at least compared to garbage passing as content).

And that’s what makes Daniel Ek look like an out of touch billionaire. The people who make good content (that makes him money) use the more useful definition, which is difficult to make and expensive and actually worth talking about, while he uses the measurable definition that’s in all the graphs on his desk that summarize his revenue stream.

I don’t think our current system is nearly as robust as you think. Trump’s first term laid that bare.

So many laws dictating what the president can and can’t do don’t have any actual repercussions for breaking them written in them because it was assumed impeachment would be sufficient. Trump showed that with our current system that means if you can’t guarantee you’ll have 67 votes in the Senate, then those laws may as well not exist. And every week the Supreme Court shows how much “settled case law” isn’t anymore, so with a corrupt high court in his league, even the laws that do have teeth may be subverted.

We absolutely need to make changes to shore up the system and plug the gaps, but we have to do so with care that we don’t end up handing new, more powerful weapons to the very bad actors we’re trying to protect against.

Totally agree. These systems are critically important for our society. They need to be considered with care, and we need to be mindful of the complexities that come with any changes to them.

Super easy for those in power to keep their rivals from being able to run for office. Currently the president and afraid you’ll be unseated by the opposing party’s candidate? Just start an investigation on them! Boom, no more rivals.

No, it doesn’t say why. And it also doesn’t actually say Biden spent that money. It says Congress “allocated” $7.5 billion. There are plenty of processes between allocation and actual expenditure that could be holding this up.

The attack vector described in the article uses the VPN client machine’s host network, i.e. the local network the device is attached to. They don’t discuss the DHCP server of the VPN provider.

I hate this basic assumption that privatization will lead to cost reduction unless proven otherwise. Cost reduction is a question of optimization of process combined with requirements for quality. You can either make what you’re doing more efficient or reduce the quality. The military can be extremely efficient when it wants to, so I’m not surprised at all that when outsourced to the private sector, costs didn’t go down. There was probably just no room to optimize given the existing requirements, and then private companies had to make a profit, so quality had to go down.

The human fatality rate of COVID-19 is 1-3%, depending on how you count cases. From what I’ve seen reported, the human fatality rate of this strain of bird flu is closer to 50%.

(Lots of “ifs” coming) If this starts to spread human-to-human, if it spreads as easily as COVID, and if we don’t lock down and this becomes endemic like COVID, COVID will look like a walk in the park compared to what this will do. I’m crossing my fingers that COVID was in that mortality sweet spot where it was bad enough to cause a lot of deaths but not quite bad enough to make officials make people angry with actually taking care of the problem. 50% mortality should be comfortably on the side of “deal with it at all cost.”