I don’t know about strictly racist, but it’s definitely got colonial overtones. Europe has used “they are uncivilized” as an excuse for the way they brutalized their colonies, erased cultures and enslaved people for centuries

I use Flutter professionally and really like it

Idk, even before Musk went full meth head things were already heading south pretty fast - they’d completely squandered their first mover advantage and their “move fast and break things” approach was really starting to take a toll on their brand reputation. Teslas were already starting to be known as expensive cars with terrible build quality, then the constant delays and broken promises about self driving did them no favors either.

A Tesla made sense when they were pretty much the only really viable luxury EV, but when you can get equivalent cars (with better build quality) from established Western manufacturers for ~75% the price or from a Chinese manufacturer for ~60%, what advantage do they have?

Musk’s cult of personally is/was a big part of it, so they are kinda screwed either way - the stink of Musk won’t instantly vanish if they get rid of him, and taints everything while he stays

Another point on this, in events like this the cell network is often under very significant stress as every single person tries to contact their family and friends at the same time to check if they are OK. The general advice is to avoid making phone calls if you can to keep capacity free for people who need to contact emergency services

If you are going to propose a law, you need to define “stupid”

I find it telling that AGI people seem to assume that AGI will spontaneously appear as a distinct entity with its own agency rather than being a product that will be owned and sold.

People who have hundreds of billions of dollars can get mid-single-digit percent ROI by making very safe investments with that money, but instead they are pouring it into relatively risky AI investments. What do you think that says about their expectations of returns?

Check them into Git, but be cautious about credentials that might live in the env files that you don’t want to expose if you end up making the repo publicly available.

Damn, toner is running out

… so I shouldn’t use the CEOs history of bankruptcy and failed a Kickstarter when judging if I think it is going to succeed or not?

IIRC Ubiquity make a line of point-to-point ethernet bridges that operate in the 20GHz range (because more bandwidth, and if you have line of sight you don’t care about interference as much). Responsible vendors won’t even sell you one without sighting a license cos they can also get in trouble for selling it to you if it turns out you are operating it illegally

The irony of being asked to sign up to a website to be able to read an article about opsec failures

My concern isn’t that things will get delayed, it’s that I’ll give them my money and get nothing in return

I’m pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I’ve even owned - smart or otherwise.

That said, I don’t think I’m going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren’t around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn’t had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I’m not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I’ll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash

There are two truely hard problems in computer science; P=NP, naming things, and off by one safety

Beyond just being able to draw a bow, being able to draw it well enough to have a chance of shooting at all repeatably takes a lot of training - it’s not just lifting a 50+lb weight, pulling it towards you with one and and pushing it away with the other while keeping your arms stable requires a lot of strength in muscles the people don’t tend to use.

Source: former colleague is an international competition level archer - the sheer amount of core strength and coordination and balance you need to be a good archer is wild

They talk about AGI like it’s some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

• The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
• Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren’t based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
• If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don’t be surprised if a country turns around and says “ok, you can’t operate here”. Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn’t mean you get to ignore laws you don’t like

To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

• A physical device
• An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it’s use outside of a prosecution. It’s not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it’s probably better than “no encryption for anyone”.

So I’m going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn’t allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.

Yeah, that was the general point I was trying to gesture to without being too hamfisted about it; people can escape crappy situations and generational trauma with some outside help, either on the small, personal level or the larger structural level

I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently