Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: The US needs some GDPR like legislation to shake people awake

Nice idea, but politically infeasible at this time.

A Constitutional amendment in the US requires:

1. Adoption of a proposal by either:

1.1. 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or

1.2. A national constitutional convention, which must be requested by 2/3 of the state legislatures

2. Ratification by at least 38 states

1.1 won't happen because very few Republican members of Congress are willing to vote in favor of reproductive rights, and some Democrats are not either.

1.2 makes similar demands of state legislatures, and consequently would fail for the same reason.

2 won't happen. Already 12 of the 50 states have outlawed abortion, leaving only 38 which haven't. That doesn't mean 38 states would actively decide to allow abortion; just that in 38, either reproductive rights are supported or opponents don't yet have the votes to outlaw them.

Re: Do be evil

RFCs are not Internet-drafts, and a draft is not an RFC.

It's common for RFCs to remain in Experimental state, i.e. on the Non-Standards track and never advanced to Informational – but not all that common. There are currently 529 Experimental RFCs, and 2857 Informational ones (and 338 Historic).

It's more common for Standards-track RFCs to fail to make it to Internet Standard: there are 129 Internet Standard RFCs, and a whopping 3964 in Proposed Standard, plus 139 Draft Standard. (Draft Standard was a level between Proposed Standard and Standard until it was removed by RFC 6410 in 2011. Alas, those 139 Draft Standard RFCs – two of them from the 1980s – don't seem likely to ever make it to Standard.)

But in any case, draft-vixie-dnsext-dns0x20-00.txt is an expired Internet-Draft (from 2008), not an RFC. Regardless of whether it's a good idea, it's just an idea that was published through the IETF's I-D process. It never made it to RFC Land.

Re: So someone steals something that doesnt exactly exist

In order to function, the blockchain is CP, which means that A is "whatever".

It aims for CP, but a number of experiments have shown it's quite vulnerable to partitioning attacks, partly due to the concentration of mining among relatively few parties.

Re: Pollutor pays

It's almost like materials degrade under a flow of energy or something. Who would have thought?

Re: Captain Disillusion

In general people are poor at evaluating the provenance and trustworthiness of information. That's true for pretty much everyone in the general case. Some people frequently make a significant effort at evaluating the quality of some of the information they're exposed to; that's about the best we've ever done with the push for "critical thinking".

Evaluating information quality has a large cognitive burden, and also carries opportunity costs – you can only think about so many things in a given interval. So our minds have to make snap judgements most of the time, and the cues people use (which vary, particularly with neurodivergence, but there are a lot of commonalities) can be discovered and instrumentalized.

Photographic and film evidence has always been unreliable, particularly when it shows something the audience wants to believe. Look at the Cottingley fairies, and how those photographs – which most people today would identify as obvious fakes – fooled intelligent but credulous observers such as Doyle.

Re: How is an AI legally a lawyer?

It isn't, according to TFA. The defendant is pro se and is simply using the model to provide assistance, just as a pro se defendant might use law books or Google.

Re: The King of "Vaccine Subscription"

You forgot to mention Sappeur. The judges can only give you 5/10 for kookery this time. Please try harder.

Re: If Americans are involved

This goes all the way to the top (of the charts).

Re: "They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

Hey, not all bombers are Trek fans. That's an unfair stereotype.

Unfair to bombers, I mean.

Precisely why I gave up on Twitter after only a few months of reading, and why, aside from a quick look at one recommended server, I haven't bothered with Mastodon.

I own maybe a hundred books I haven't finished reading yet, and a couple dozen journal issues. I have at least that many on my wish-lists. I could easily find recommendations for thousands more. There's good longer-format work to read online, including "blogs"¹ and other essay and book-length forms.

Twitter was very popular in some of the communities relevant to my interests and work, but I never, not once, saw something elsewhere which was reported earlier on Twitter, and regretted missing it there.

When Twitter first appeared it received a fair bit of attention in the composition (in the sense of "teaching of writing") & rhetoric and writing-technologies academic fields, at least in the US; there was a fair bit of buzz about it at conferences like Computers & Writing. I was working in those fields then, avocationally, and I was already dubious about Twitter and "microblogging". The years since have not made me suspect I was wrong.

¹A loathsome neologism, which in any case is rarely used in its original, etymological sense.

Re: Not all broken

Never post anything, never had and don't want any followers.

Really? I never posted anything, but over the short time when I actually paid any attention to my Twitter account, I accumulated over 30 followers. Pretty much all people I knew, too. I guess they found the account via Twitter network-based recommendations.

Haven't authenticated to the account in many years, and I don't care to do so now just to find out if I have more people enjoying my complete silence.

Re: who pays for the API

I know of a document-management system at a large university which was using Twitter bots for a change-notification mechanism around 12 years ago. Twitter bots for that sort of application have been around nearly as long as Twitter itself has. Using Twitter for short-text pub/sub tasks is an obvious use case.

There's a good chapter on this in Wexler's The Odd Clauses.

I agree that while the NBC clause has been accidentally useful a few times in the past, it's a nonsensical bit of jingoism that ought to go. Even if there were any actual argument in its favor, it's not like the POTUS job is the only sensitive position in government.

Re: Zulily? Really

They're hugely popular among certain of my acquaintances. Perhaps even more so than Amazon. I've never bothered to find out why.

Blockchain is "emerging" much as a cockroach does. It's a bit astonishing that any serious IT firm is still plugging this solution-in-search-of-a-problem.

(As I've noted in other posts, there are plenty of good applications of Merkle graphs. Blockchain ain't one of them.)

Re: Old people want "safe" cars

Psychologically, I imagine one feels safer if seated higher up, too.

It's probably not just psychological, once most of the other vehicles on the road are taller. Many drivers don't pay adequate attention to other vehicles as it is. And being able to see over the vehicle a little way in front of you is a significant factor.

I like small cars myself, but I have to admit that when I had a '93 Honda Civic Coupe I often had some reservations about both my forward visibility, and my visibility to other drivers. And that wasn't a very small vehicle.

Re: This is an "Applies to USA only" article

In many places, it's damned difficult even to walk. No sidewalks (pavements), or they're not maintained. No crosswalks. No room for pedestrians on bridges and the like.

So, yeah. This is definitely a problem, and why it's easy to get a driver's license in the US (it's a state matter, but I don't know of any state that has particularly stringent requirements), and why many states don't impose any vehicle inspections at all; if you can get insurance, you can put it on the road.

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

And what's the GHG contribution of manufacturing that EV and disposing of a still-usable ICE vehicle?

features that simply aren't possible in the old technology

And that god for that. You can keep your "features" in your EV, thanks. Those "features" are the worst thing to happen to automobiles since, well, ever. Spyware, security holes, idiotic UIs...

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

If you have one car it's important that it can do both short and long trips - demonstrably, it can - but optimising for the shorter trips makes sense

Nof for me, it doesn't. The vast majority of the miles I drive are long trips, and even my "short" trips are often around 150 miles. I batch up short trips, and often the car sits unused for a week or so.

Is my case atypical? Sure, but your generalization isn't universally true either.

There's no current EV model that would be a better alternative for my use case. (Also I think they all have touchscreens, so they're out of consideration for that reason alone.)

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

Coincidentally, I did two trips of just about 1000km (about 625 miles) last week, both in about 9 1/2 hours. I would not have enjoyed adding 7 hours to the total.

And there were no charging stations anywhere along most of that route, of course.

Re: More mass = more energy, right?

True of nearly all vehicles sold in the US, whether made there or elsewhere. Oversided, overpowered, mostly ugly, mostly a poor fit for their use cases. There's just very little market here for small, efficient cars any more. It's a pity; there used to be a pretty good selection of hatchbacks to choose from, for those who didn't need to transport a lot of people or cargo.

The exact same kind of tyres? Tread wear varies widely across tires.

Even across the same brand, model, and size, as tire manufacturers are always tweaking their formulas. While longitudinal studies have some value, anecdotal reports from a few drivers comparing what they used to get to what they get now don't have a lot of confidence.

Re: Weight is relative...

Yup, they seem to be getting heavier too.

Re: vanilla

I believe it means they're not eligible for the Olympics.

Re: This is silly MS

In my experience, Teams videoconferencing is OK; it's worked about as well for us as some of the previous systems we used, including Skype and SfB/Lync. I've only used Zoom a couple of times so I can't really compare it; I didn't love Zoom, but that may have been due to unfamiliarity.

For everything else, I find Teams obnoxious where it isn't actually broken, and steadily getting worse. Take chat: You can't turn off the "smart" (stupid) editing tricks, for example, like trying to convert punctuation into idiotic emoji. Recently a Teams update caused it to always put all text in a quotation block in italics; apparently you can't turn that off either, and you can't change the formatting of the quoted text. The code-insert blocks are visually awful, with a ton of wasted space.

I'm certainly no fan of WebEx, and I understand the economic arguments, but I'd say Teams is far from good.

Re: This is silly MS

To a first approximation, Sharepoint is always at fault.