nfh

Suddenly cutting off a lot of trade suddenly is a stupid and reckless move that would hurt people in their countries as much as it would hurt the US. It’s basically the same behavior as Trump with his absurd tariffs, banning trade with a country, and taxing people obscenely to buy things from that country mostly work out to the same effects in practice.

Incentivizing other trade partners, and maybe slowly disincentivizing the US makes a lot of sense though. Maybe it made more sense years ago, but as they say, if the best time was yesterday, the next-best time is today.

I’m legitimately surprised a journalist didn’t use virtual credit cards. Knowing full well you’re giving credit card info to the world’s most famous grifter? I’d take every security measure available

There are like 3 different routes that make sense for me to get home from work, depending on where there’s traffic

Some games also use the rarity system to funnel mechanically simpler cards into more common rarities, which works well in a draft environment, since those are often the cards you want to have come up more. Which is really the point of the system, ideally it would be a system to support draft environments that work well, without artificial scarcity that hurts constructed players.

But you can also make a constructed format that only allows “simpler” cards that have been printed at common, which is neat. Or one that only allows higher rarities.

Facial recognition technology being used for surveillance is awful, I agree, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here? It seems like they’re just pointing a camera at fireworks, and identifying the property they came from.

Cops with camera drones are also a problem, but it’s not like they’d need anything special you can’t already get off the shelf to do this.

the curing process introduces carcinogenic nitrates, which is a similar risk factor, if I understand correctly

If you’re going to say anything other than unconditionally legal, you need some really clear legal definitions on something, but you certainly can. Like you could define viability as if you delivered it on the spot, you’d have a fully-formed baby with lungs that are ready to breathe, and otherwise unlikely to need life support. You could define the first 6 months of pregnancy as inviable.

You could define the burden of proof in a way that protects doctors, maybe someone trying to already wrongdoing needs to prove that no reasonable physician would agree with their judgement. You could even limit who has standing to take legal action, because some random person on the street isn’t party to it at all.

I’m not saying that “if the doctor and pregnant person agree, it’s legal” is bad, but there are certainly other reasonable options, that I think would play out similarly in practice. Like I’m assuming a doctor about to deliver a baby wouldn’t likely entertain a request for an abortion instead, nor would they likely get one.

The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.

Watching the commentary would be hilarious.

Agreeing with this, expanding a RAID array is not necessarily impossible, with something like RAID 5, and the right RAID setup, you could theoretically add an identical disk without wiping it all in the rebuild. RAID 1, you’ll 100% need to copy the data somewhere that isn’t the 2/4 disks in the meantime. In an environment where storage is expensive, RAID 1 is not suitable imo.

ZFS makes it so easy though. Throw a mismatched disk in? No big deal, it’s in your pool now. Want double parity for extra peace of mind? You can do that. It self-heals so you don’t need fsck, its maximum limits are too big to realistically matter on human scales, and the documentation on it is pretty good.

Certainly, some interesting developments have happened, and we’ve realized our old models/thinking about progress towards AGI needed improvement… and that’s real. I think there’s a serious conversation to be had about what AGI would be, and how we can know we’re approaching it, and when it has arrived.

But anybody telling you it is close either has something to sell you, or has themselves bought it.

Yeah this is it, the problem is that even once you solve the technology problem, it becomes the choice between two logistics problems, distributing liquid fuel for refilling, and moving large amounts of power on the grid on demand. The latter is a solvable problem, but the former is just so well understood.

Certainly, most people are better served by EVs today, for their personal vehicle needs. But I think hydrogen will be a compelling option for people with specific needs beyond the short term. Especially with continued investment in that technology in Japan.

There are two hydrogen fill stations between my home and work, they definitely get used, and the price per kg of green hydrogen is still trending downwards. It’ll never be the next big thing, hydrogen is heavy and has several of the other problems of gasoline that EVs always solve. But for people who need personal transport, and need to frequently go larger distances than one battery charge will support, hydrogen fuel cells solve a problem EVs have, without going back to fossil fuels; fuelling up takes negligible time.

I think hydrogen cars will have a niche for a long time to come, enough to keep the technology around and evolving.

Critically, the people who build these machines don’t typically update drivers to port them to a new OS. You buy a piece of heavy equipment, investing tens, or maybe even a hundred thousand dollars, and there’s an OS it works on, maybe two if you’re lucky. The equipment hopefully works for at least 20 years, and basically no OS is going to maintain that kind of compatibility for that long. Linux might get the closest, but I’ll bet you’re compiling/patching your own kernels before 20 years is up.

This kind of dynamic is unavoidable when equipment vendors sell equipment which has a long usable life (which is good), and don’t invest in software support (which is them being cheap, to an extent), and OSes change enough that these time horizons likely involve compatibility-breaking releases.

Two clear claims are similar levels of ambiguous; not very.

The USA made it a long way without it being a serious issue, like 200 years. Like presidents would pick qualified federal court judges whose judicial philosophies tended to favor their side a bit more, but were generally good at being fair jurists, and cases decided along the lines of which party’s president had appointed them were super rare.

Then in the 80s, Reagan started appointing more explicitly partisan judges, and a far right activist think tank started grooming ideologues who were law students as potential future justices, a few of whom Trump ended up appointing. Basically every appointment after 1982 either continued the trend, or worsened it, with the notable exception of Obama appointing Marrick Garland, though he knew there was a good chance the Senate wouldn’t approve any nominee.

It’s one of those systems that works fine if everybody is acting in good faith, and crumbles when someone tries to take advantage of it. Yeah it’s probably a bad idea.

Because while a lot of Americans support a lot of left wing positions, there are no major left wing parties, and a very small number of politicians who run for national or statewide office who actually take action to further left wing policies. There’s Bernie Sanders, who isn’t a member of a large party. AOC, and a few others qualify, but being a small proportion of those running, they’re a small proportion of those elected, and have relatively little actual influence.

Ideas neither major party supports are basically impossible to see happen.

They’d better hire some people who specialize in burrito repossession

Not in the US, we don’t have compulsory service, and people leave legally all the time. Letting their enlistment expire is a way to leave, they could also get discharged for medical reasons, though maybe that’s not something to plan on. There are others, but I’m not sure how advisable any of them are.

A simple memo reminding them of the penalties for following illegal orders, and clear examples of such illegal orders seems like a really smart move with minimal downside