Posts by Michael Wojcik 12271 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
Photosynthesizing plants will convert CO2 (not CO2) plus H2O to O2 and sugars, given appropriate conditions. Referring to that as "to breath" is dubious.
More dubious is what relevance that has for atmospheric GHG concentrations and atmospheric warming. Existing flora can only absorb CO2 at a certain rate, and are not primarily constrained by the amount of available atmospheric CO2.
Rate restrictions help with online attacks against a single account. They don't help against multiple accounts in parallel, an attack which was documented in the 1990s; nor do they help with offline attacks. And considering how often large databases of password hashes are leaked, offline attacks are a greater concern.
Rate restrictions are also difficult to implement for distributed systems where there may be many oracles.
Well, those are publicly-traded companies with shareholders. And their market capitalization is large enough to cause collateral damage, which many investors – including all those ordinary middle-class US folks who are exposed through 401(k) mutual funds and the like – could be exposed to.
It's not something I worry about; our retirement portfolios are broadly diversified, and our withdrawal horizon is far enough away that we have time for our accounts to recover from normal downturns. But some people could be hurt.
Yeah. I understand the motive behind this – Kerberos makes the TGS (Ticket-Granting Service) the hub for all ticket requests aside from requesting a TGT, so TGSes become bottlenecks. An extension which lets some services avoid the TGS interaction makes scaling easier and can improve performance.
But, of course, messing with a security protocol is an excellent way to break some part of security, and that includes availability.
Yes, I get the H1-B serfdom issue, and it's not uncommon for people in the US middle class to be living paycheck-to-paycheck and want to be sure of another position before leaving. (I wouldn't have much faith in Musk's severance-payment promises; that money has to come from somewhere, and the $12K or whatever that employees are prioritized from bankruptcy proceedings won't go far.) But actually want to work for this idiot? There can't be many left.
I've been reading Miller's Toy Wars (1998) about Hasbro and the other big US toy companies, and I'm struck by the difference between the execs he writes about and Musk. Those were people dedicated to their firms and employees, actual visionaries who created innovative products and marketing strategies. Ruth Handler cooked the books,1 but she was the co-founder, co-chair, and president of Mattel. She invented Barbie. She created her first business from nothing, peddling decorative boxes her husband made in a home workshop at local boutiques. Hasbro's Hassenfelds essentially invented using children's television programming to market toys. Maybe you think all of that contributes nothing to society, but hundreds of millions of children beg to differ. And it was innovation.
What's Musk done? Bankrolled Paypal (ugh) in the early years, and gone along for the ride on Tesla and SpaceX, while wasting money and energy on quixotic side projects. Any already-wealthy entrepreneur could have done that, and I don't for a minute believe Musk brought anything special to the party. He's a beneficiary of a historical moment, and someone else would have played that role if he hadn't been there.
In The Ascent of the A-Word (2012), a cultural history of the term "asshole" in US discourse, Nunberg remarks that Donald Trump is probably the quintessential asshole, as popular usage has constructed the term. I think Musk may have since refined the category. Sure, Trump managed to get himself (or was placed by his handlers) in a more dangerous position; but for sheer assholery I think Musk has him beat.
1Her 41-year (!) prison sentence was suspended, but she and her husband lost control of Mattel and about half their personal fortune was returned to the company. She went on to found a successful business making breast prostheses – she was a breast-cancer survivor herself.
Seems to me the cops aren't even supposed to look over a 6 foot fence without a warrant, unless there is probable cause
It's more complicated than that (isn't it always?), but in the US, it's true that the police aren't allowed to penetrate the curtilage without a warrant or probable cause. Some of the cases testing this are interesting, such as those involving the famous Mullet Doctrine.
Regarding the original post in this thread: In most of the places I've lived, you'd need to secure a zoning variance to have a hedge, fence, or other obstruction more than 6 feet or so tall around your property, never mind 12 feet. That doesn't mean you couldn't get away with having one without a variance, particularly in rural areas, but technically it would be illegal and the municipality or county could make you shorten it.
Yeah, mechanically, all the small USB connectors are rubbish. USB-C might be a bit better for longevity than micro-USB, but I have a Thinkpad with a USB-C charging cable and it's prone to falling out. Barrel connectors are much better from a mechanical point of view.
On the other hand, I'd love it if these laws had the side effect of outlawing Dell's utterly broken power-supply DRM. I've had that fail on two work laptops in a row. And it fails on the motherboard, so swapping chargers doesn't help. It's a notoriously crap implementation.
Kevin White pointed out (years ago, on Popehat) that this is quite common. Do not answer questions from the FBI, or other Federal officers. Speak to them only through a lawyer. Lying to a Federal officer is a felony, and they're often quite good at leading you down the garden path into making some sort of false statement.
Bankman-Fried and Ellison were former quants (they worked for Jane Street). Not really the same cultural position as stereotypical frat boys, whose damage radius tends to be rather smaller.
They were also vigorous promoters of Effective Altruism (not necessarily vigorous practitioners of it), but the EA community is good at rationalizing its bad actors. You just update the posterior probability that an EA proponent is actually a greedy, self-serving bastard.
Lots of people in the middle class in the US are millionaires, technically speaking. My wife and I are, at least the last time I checked our retirement accounts. Of course those have lost a lot of value over the past year, but given the breadth of our portfolios and bias toward low risk, either they'll be back up by the time we reach retirement, or most people will be in a similarly depressed position so we'll still be comparatively wealthy. We have mortgaged real estate but thanks to a hot local market it's worth quite a bit more than what we owe (not that liquidating it would be anything other than a last resort; we live here because we like it).
But we're solidly professional-middle-class in terms of possessions, liquidity, etc.
Being a millionaire is not, in itself, particularly exciting.
ASX, for one, has thrown in the towel on its much-ballyhooed Blockchain project.
I expect we'll see most central banks walking quietly away from cryptocurrency, at least for a while. Managers for institutional investors either were burned or saw their compatriots burned; they'll be reluctant to argue for significant positions in the cryptocurrency / DeFi space for a bit.
Some celebrities may take notice of the SEC investigations and class-action suits coming down on their peers who were too eager to promote cryptocurrency investments, and similarly decide to stay out of it.
Pro-cryptocurrency politicians I expect will learn nothing, and in fact will double down. The Backlash Effect is particularly strong for the sort of people who are inclined to go into politics (i.e. ideologues).
This is what you get when you provide sophomores with vast amounts of resources and no supervision.
Ellison, like SBF, loves espousing (and probably to some extent holding, though she seems to have a rather low level of commitment to them) radical opinions. She's not big on considering their actual ramifications or complexities. It's the intellectual equivalent of adrenaline addiction: craving the rush that comes from being controversial.
That's not a good personality trait for a business leader, or for that matter any other sort of leader.
Yes, it's quite different.
Apps pre-installed by the manufacturer are part of what you elected to purchase. You may find them undesirable, and may object to the manufacturer's failure to notify you about them; but they are the actions of a private party, and as such are a matter that falls under the statutes that govern purchased products.
The state (in the broad technical sense of "whatever organized governments hold sway in a particular jurisdiction") installing an application on your device without your consent is a government intrusion into your personal property. Those have a very different status under US law, as they should, given the overwhelming power of the state. Doing so without your knowledge is even worse.
Others have noted that the app is (apparently) not active until enabled by the user, which is good; but it's not nearly sufficient to excuse what the plaintiffs allege in this case.
Many of the services Alphabet/Google kill exist not for themselves, or for their users, but to harvest data. That's what Google's telephone directory-assistance service was for. That's what 8.8.8.8 is for. That's the primary function of search and Mail and Maps and Drive.
When the rate of new data falls to a certain point, there's no reason to keep the service going.
In other cases, of course, it's Google doing long-term A/B testing, or tweaking services to change how they're monetized. Thus we have Voice merging into Hangouts, then Hangouts and Duo being terminated in favor of Meet and Chat. One vein starts to look tapped out, so move on to another.
Exactly. The entire purpose of an organization like this is short-term extraction of value. It's a completely logical capitalist formation. We may dislike it (I certainly do), but it's not some sort of aberration; given the way public ownership of corporations works, of course some people are going to create parasitical organizations that seek to grab whatever cash they can quickly, rather than look to the future.
After all, Keynes' Maxim still applies: In the long run, we are all dead. If your job is maximizing profits for a group of people who are currently alive (and may not be for that many years), then planning for the future is untenable.
If I were Alphabet I'd be looking to unload Nest. Sooner or later the Amazon juggernaut will roll over most of the other players in the "smart home"1 space. Amazon want to control as much of home-automation technology as they possibly can, and they're quite prepared to cross-sell and predatory-price until they do.
1Not that I think it is, mind. I wouldn't put an Internet-connected thermostat in my home if you paid me to.
Though I have no love for Alphabet, I agree. Ignore "activist investors" as much as possible.
That said, of course this sort of "milk investments for short-term profit" is explicitly what this sort of investor exists to do. Whoever wrote this letter is just doing his job. It may be an obnoxious job, but that doesn't mean the author is a fool – just a professional raider.
That's the thing. You can't use the summary to evaluate the patent. The summary is there to help people decide whether the patent might apply to some instance. You have to read the primary claims to see if there's anything not obvious to an ordinary practitioner (which is the standard).
Anyone who complains about Morisette's examples patently does not know what irony is. Perhaps you should learn about rhetoric before trying to correct others about it.
Irony is the trope of the violation of expectations. It's one of the "master tropes" that subsume other tropes and figures. In fact, under its broadest definition, it includes all tropes, since communication consists precisely in what new information is produced in the recipient. That new information in turn consists precisely of what expectations were violated.
Every communicative act is ironic.
The Grammarly ads do manage to achieve a particularly obnoxious strident tone, which coupled with their choice of chipper Bright Young Things as models makes them impressively grating.
"Do you ever write anything? Would you like your writing to be filtered so it is devoid of style, voice, and interest by a collection of half-assed heuristics derived from ill-considered schoolmarmish style guides? You need to download Grammarly immediately! Do it now! I SAID NOW."
I have various writing-related degrees and used to teach writing, so my opinion of Grammarly (and the built-in "grammar checkers" in Word and the like) is not high to begin with; but I'm certainly not taking usage, diction, and particularly style advice from a company that produces advertisements to such poor rhetorical effect.
I'll withhold judgement since we don't know anything about what the agreement was between the customer and shop. It sounds like the customer might have been very vague about what was to be done, in which case attempting to recover files would be justifiable, and then as you say if there were reasonable grounds for suspicion based on filenames it's hard to see this as a privacy violation.
The cases given in the article were obviously more clear-cut.
Yes, when you arrive in the US on an international flight, you go through Customs. That's a cursory check for the vast majority of people. They look at the form and wave you through. They don't examine your luggage or other possessions. Even if they did, hollowed-out pound coins with SD cards are not high on their list of things to look for.
KittenHuffer mentioned the TSA, who would be involved for the return trip. That's even less of a concern. CBP officers are Federal officers; TSA scanners are not. TSA scanners consistently fail to catch 90-something percent of suspect material in tests. Their primary effect is to make people throw away their water bottles.
I can't see lending one of my vehicles to anyone I wouldn't trust to offer to compensate me for whatever fuel, or electricity if I had an EV, they used. I'd decline, but they'd offer. Except family members who've learned not to bother, of course.
But if you're in the habit of letting people you don't trust drive your car, then ... I'm not seeing how this threat model works.
Dear Mr 6 sir –
I hope this missive finds you in good health through the support of our Savior Jesus H. Christ. While we are not previously acquainted, know that I am Prince Michael Wojcik, only surviving child and heir to King Bezos of Amazoncom. Our family fortune of some $126 billion (ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX BILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) now falls to me, but I am temporarily unable to retrieve it because our family misplaced the checkbook and I lack funds to purchase a replacement.
If you could see your way to forwarding to me the minor sum of $10,000.00 (TEN THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) which I might use to remedy this inconvenience, I would happily divide the fortune with you in equal shares. Expect your portion by next Tuesday or possibly March 2047 at latest.
While I'm no fan of election spending, and I'm pretty dubious about Citizens United (I understand the SCOTUS argument, but I think it's a stretch), capping election donations is tricky. If it's a per-race cap, you spread your money around. If it's a per-donor cap, you spend through proxies. Tightening a law to forbid both of those will almost certainly fail Constitutionality tests and have adverse effects if it's not stayed quickly.
And then there's peripheral spending, such as the "issue ads" which are so beloved of PACs. You don't mention the candidates, just advocate for a position on some hot-button issue, which the candidate of your choice, coincidentally, happens to agree with you on.
And the more you restrict legal spending, the more will turn into under-the-table and quid-pro-quo spending, which is harder to track, so we lose transparency; and there's less of a gap between simple expression and dirty tricks, because you've made expression (past a certain point) illegal. That reduces incremental risk of employing dirty tricks.
Probably the most effective way to reduce spending on elections is a cultural movement, in much the same way that the US reduced tobacco use. The problem there is that most people are happy to see their opponents' spending reduced, but not so much that of their chosen candidates.
Currency is any sort of bearer-token proxy for value that some market of significant size is willing to to accept. You can use pebbles as currency if you can find people who will trade things you want for them.
In the modern era we mostly see top-down currencies, which are issued and controlled by governments. In some cases, where governments fail particularly badly, bottom-up currencies created by "the people" appear; this happened in parts of Somalia a while back, for example, where people started using nominally-worthless old bank notes as IOUs in the city markets and eventually they were circulating as currency again.
Most cryptocurrencies are bottom-up currencies, though we have some central banks such as Singapore's pushing top-down cryptocurrencies (for no readily-apparent good reason).
To the extent that cryptocurrencies can be exchanged for goods and services that buyers want to purchase, they're currencies. Governments can restrict or outlaw them, of course; governments can restrict or outlaw anything, including things that may be imaginary (e.g. China placing restrictions on reincarnation). That's the beauty of holding the monopoly on force. But few or none have simply outlawed cryptocurrencies or other bottom-up currencies outright, to the best of my knowledge.
And that an explicit part of the NSA's mission is to improve the US position against foreign SIGINT. That part was famously de-emphasized for a while around the turn of the 21st century, but under subsequent NSA directors and other Executive Branch influences became a priority again.
The NSA considers itself pretty good at finding vulnerabilities and creating exploits. It doesn't mind raising the bar to make things harder for others.
The second is that you almost always end up restricting the language features to some limited, safer set or replacing core functionality (e.g. malloc or the compiler) with something custom.
This is an important point. You can't have completely memory-safe C at the translation ("compiler", though C does not, strictly speaking have to be compiled) level, because you'd have to violate the C standard in various ways. For example, the translator can't tell how large an object with dynamic lifetime might be, nor how large an object passed by an external caller might be.
If it's a hosted C implementation, as most are, you have to provide malloc and friends. That's required by the standard unless it's a freestanding implementation.
So you might create a language which is similar to C with additional memory safety, but you're stuck with an uneasy compromise: something that isn't C enough to correctly translate and execute all conforming C code, but doesn't achieve the degree of memory safety you can get in something like Rust.
D is probably as good an attempt at a safer C as anyone's going to produce. C++, used in a careful, Stroustroppian manner, can achieve a decent level of safety; but C++ is also, as a language, required to carry a great deal of baggage. It's also huge (the C standard is large but comprehensible; the C++ standard defies the understanding of mortals), which makes it hard to reason about in general, and the vast majority of the considerable quantity of C++ code I've seen is rubbish, which suggests that many C++ developers find it difficult to be vigilant about their use of it.
No programming language is perfect. I like LISP and Scheme; I like OCaml and F#; I like Rust. I'm not particularly fond of Go, but I don't think it's objectively bad. I've enjoyed writing OO COBOL for .NET (which is not very COBOLy, to be honest), of all things. I've done a couple of non-trivial things in Java, and I don't mind working with it once I get back in the habit. I wrote a couple of academic projects in Javascript (for Reasons) and that was fun, though I wouldn't want to do anything big in the language, and third-party Javascript libraries are a plague. But all these have their faults, too.
Most of my work is still in C, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
OCaml is a LISP variant, correct ?
No. OCaml is a member of the ML family, which also includes Standard ML and Haskell. The ML and LISP families are not closely related. Five seconds of research would have told you that.
So it can never achieve the efficiency and realtime capabiities of an imperative language ?
This is precisely the sort of handwaving bullshit that lets your readers know you have no real arguments to offer, and they can safely ignore you.
Yes. There are people in this thread (and other similar ones) who want to use "RPC" to mean any distributed execution. That might be acceptable in informal use, but as a term of art "RPC" was coined to refer to a specific architecture for distributed execution.
Musk make a technical claim, and that claim was not precisely correct in its terminology. Since it was a technical claim, Frohnhoefer was justified in calling him out on it. Musk was also wrong in various other ways, of course. He's quite efficient at being wrong in a small amount of text, which is why he's perfect for Twitter.
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