The thing is, within normal, stable households, most of good hygiene practices - including hand-washing after using the restroom - are unnecessary. You already share all the microflora, and if one person brings in something contagious, you're gonna get exposed no matter what, and it's up to your immune system to save the day.
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.
Well, yes and no. You're correct that ZX Spectrum is a lot slower than the author estimates, but there's also a software-side performance bottleneck: the code is written in the built-in BASIC language, which on ZX Spectrum, was not only interpreted at runtime, but also almost comically unoptimized. For example, people would use "aftermarket" circle-drawing routines that performed 10x better than the stock ROM implementation.
BASIC on ZX Spectrum was meant for learning, but no serious software of the era relied on it for anything that needed to run fast.
I suspect this code could be 10x faster if written in assembly or a compiled language (a handful existed for the platform).
It's a bit more complicated than that (but no less reprehensible).
The government obtained a warrant to seize the business and, as a part of that, to do a routine inventory of what's inside the boxes. After securing the warrant, the FBI said "sike, we're gonna rifle through customers' stuff to see if we can uncover new crimes... and we're gonna keep the contents via civil forfeiture too."
Several folks sued, and then the government dragged their feet for a while, but eventually said "ok, we'll return your stuff, you have no legal standing anymore." The courts agreed.
The only outstanding issue was whether the government should be ordered to destroy any records / copies of what they found in the deposit boxes they were not supposed to investigate in the first place. That's where the courts differed. The appeals court decision is a pretty scathing criticism of the whole fiasco, but strictly speaking, it only delivers a verdict on that last question (yes, the government has to destroy it).
The author wasn't asking you to write code, but to analyze some existing snippets. And it wasn't about "intuition about how compilers work", because not all of these deal with undefined behavior. Some are merely unspecified - i.e., platform-dependent in a non-crazy way (example: big endian vs little endian). So the gotcha is that you made the reader assume you might be talking about a modern Intel or ARM CPU, but what you really meant is that the return value will be different on PDP-11. Frankly, seems pedantic.
It's even worse: for example, the first one isn't undefined, it's merely unspecified - i.e., "depends on the system in a well-known and predictable way," not "you're doing something very wrong and the result is chaos."
In private life, we probably do more "dumb things" than we used to. The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gains from banning lawn darts and no longer using fire grenades are inconsequential in comparison.
To be fair, workplace safety has improved quite a bit - some of it thanks to regulation, some due to economic shifts (less mining, more office work). This improved the life expectancy of lower-class men.
But that aside, a lot of the gains in life expectancy have to do with very basic things - like flush toilets, along with generally improved standards of living.
People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit.
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
Nobody is arguing that you should feel sorry for short-sellers. It's just a mildly interesting fact, although it's less meaningful than implied in the article, because Tesla is also one of the most-heavily traded companies on the market.
A lot of "index fund" folks criticize shorting and other "gambling" tactics, but it's probably worth noting that the argument for the soundness of index funds hinges on there being a class of traders who identify bad businesses and try to drive their price down. Otherwise, you're just pumping money into a snapshot of the market with no regard for the health of the constituent businesses, and it eventually ends in tears.
It's easy to get hung up on specific examples you can't connect with, but our entire lifestyles are centered around preferences, not needs - and I'm sure it's also true for you. All you need is a 3 x 3 x 8 ft sleeping pod, a waste chute, and a dispenser of protein slurry. Almost everything else is there to accommodate the odd whimsical desire.
Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result.
We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.
> how great was a community to begin with if as the only thing keeping it from becoming a hotbed of fake content is that the users didn't have the tools to fake it.
Do online communities need to be great by some HN metric in order to be deemed worthy of survival?
Some knitters had fun sharing their work online. Now that's ruined by ML. If it was ruined by cryptocurrency mining instead, would we be posting similar "they had it coming" defenses of this destruction? There is a heavy bias on HN toward excusing the externalities of generative AI.
Oh come on. Copyright is a fairly ancient concept that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations. Most book authors, songwriters, and so on aren't fat cats, and they would be harmed if we had zero protections for the duplication of their work. They'd need to depend on state sponsorship or charitable private patronage, both of which are problematic for obvious reasons and limit the range of artistic expression more than the market does.
Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.
Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.
Rick Hartley's content is fantastic, but I think it caused collateral damage by making hobbyists who work with 8-bit microcontrollers and I2C believe they need to follow the same rules that must be followed for GPUs and PC motherboards. It's not Rick's fault, but it's a matter of the cult-like following he's developed among some hobbyists. Old-timers on PCB design forums try to impress and intimidate novices by citing his advice without really understanding if it's relevant. And most of the time, it isn't.
A lot of his videos should be prefaced by "it's interesting, but you don't need to worry about it unless you're working on the types of projects I'm paid to work on." Without this disclaimer, PCB design becomes less accessible. It's akin to teaching basic chemistry by starting with quantum foundations and insisting that everything must be derived from that.
Well, on the flip side: the whole reason these are sold is that the FDA is preventing the substance from being sold OTC. This is not an example of a manufacturer putting something unwanted in the product. It's all just a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of a deal with willing buyers. It creates some risk of accidents, but I doubt there were any.
I'm not sure the regulation here is great. As with Rx-only contraception, these regulations force patients to spend money and discuss their intimate life with a doctor for no real reason, which many people find difficult. And it's not like you undergo thorough screening to get Viagra anyway. A doctor is not gonna say "no".
The problem with bodies such as the FDA is that once they address grave risks, they seldom reach this point of "OK, we fixed the problem of arsenic in patent medicine, so let's scale back for now." Instead, the bureaucracies only grow. Today, far too many drugs are Rx-only and stay this way for too long. The need for prescriptions for equipment such as eyeglasses or contact lenses is hard to justify too.
Mozilla has been diversifying itself away from Firefox for 15 years. They're still pouring money into SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, on top of a range of more recent projects that have no realistic chance of ever generating serious revenue, such as Mozilla VPN.
I think there are two realistic paths for the company. One is to make the browser amazing and edgy in ways that Google and Microsoft can't match (out of the fear of cannibalizing revenue or running into regulatory trouble). Mozilla has a shot at it, but it's unlikely to happen if they have a defeatist attitude about it internally, and are focusing on non-browser pivots.
The other path is to basically turn into some completely different company, throwing money at unrelated pursuits such as AI and hoping that you get lucky. But what gives Mozilla any edge with that?
At first, I figured that's the explanation, but you're ignoring a more puzzling statement in the article:
> To explain how an AI-generated story written by an AI-generated person was published despite this policy, B&H says it was part of a “test” to identify and protect against such content.
> “Our editors wrote a test article in mid-November as part of their efforts to identify and protect against AI-generated content. They overlooked adding disclosure to the article indicating that it was AI-generated, which was a mistake, and did not delete the article after the test.”
It's a bit weird because electricity delivered to your home is generally more expensive than fossil fuels. What currently makes EVs cheaper to operate is that at the pump, you pay hefty taxes that go toward road maintenance and related purposes. For now, this taxation disparity incentivizes driving EVs. In the long haul, this will probably go away.
I'm surprised by the "more spacious" comment, however. In the same size class, EVs tend to be more cramped because of how much space is needed for batteries. Even for large cars, like the Cybertruck, the trade-offs are fairly evident. No spare tire, for example.
Is there any article explaining what they actually did, or are alleged to have done? With the VW scandal, there was a fairly in-depth discussion of the technical aspects of it. But all the articles about Cummins seem exceedingly vague.
IIRC, VW had code to detect emissions testing and reduce performance at that time. What did Cummins do?
Copyright doesn't apply to ideas. It applies to works, which are specific, complete expressions of ideas.
The problem artists have with LLMs is not that they routinely output copyrighted works (it can happen, but isn't common), but that they copy human-expressed knowledge and art styles on an industrial scale, thus destroying revenue streams that supported or encouraged creative expression in the past. I doubt this is going to be solved via existing copyright laws. I suspect that the need for disclosure of copyright on the source material is to build a case for more novel legal protections for artists down the line.
It's unfortunate, but also not surprising. These cropped up in some of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet with no particularly good prospect for long-term sustainability.
At first, you have an influx of excited members, so it feels like you have a shot at it - but within a couple of years, most of them drop out. They either get discouraged, or they find their groove and really want the convenience and flexibility of working on their own schedule with their own tools that aren't abused by strangers.
If you want to run a Makerspace in Portland, Seattle, or in the SF Bay Area, you better have an endowment from a wealthy donor, a long-term government grant, or something of that sort.
That said, these practices do matter in other settings shared with strangers, so reflexive habits are worth having for that reason alone.