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Uncle Sam puts $10M bounty on Russian troll farm Rybar

theregister.com
8 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·10 comments

Judge slams Florida for censoring political ad

arstechnica.com
15 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·1 comments

Russian state media uses AI images of Florida's Disney World flooded by Milton

voanews.com
8 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·1 comments

California Drivers May Soon Get Speed-Warning Devices

caranddriver.com
2 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·1 comments

Ukraine bans official use of Telegram app over fears of Russian spying

reuters.com
6 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·3 comments

[untitled]

2 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

Pro-Russian posters appear on billboards across Italy

cnn.com
6 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·1 comments

Russia's election influence efforts more sophisticated than in recent years

washingtonpost.com
10 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·2 comments

Y Combinator's Gen Z founders are coming back and learning to love San Francisco

sfstandard.com
4 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

AI firms are SF's most desired tenants and are gobbling up office space

sfstandard.com
2 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

Russian government hackers used spyware exploits made by NSO and Intellexa

techcrunch.com
8 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

Among America's "Low-Information Voters"

newyorker.com
3 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

'Terrorgram' Chatrooms Are Fueling a Wave of Power Grid Attacks

bloomberg.com
15 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·10 comments

America prepares for a new nuclear-arms race

economist.com
25 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·61 comments

Sideshows are out of control. Can nerds with annoyances take back the streets?

sfstandard.com
3 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·3 comments

Lamborghini's biggest EV challenge? Not being seen as "fake," says CTO

arstechnica.com
3 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

Silicon Valley parents are sending kindergarten kids to AI-focused summer camps

sfstandard.com
7 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·2 comments

Google Gemini 1.5 Pro leaps ahead in AI race, challenging GPT-4o

venturebeat.com
51 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·32 comments

People are overdosing on off-brand weight-loss drugs, FDA warns

arstechnica.com
2 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·0 comments

The opulent world of six-figure kids birthday parties in Silicon Valley

sfstandard.com
6 points·by worstspotgain·2 yıl önce·3 comments

comments

worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Quite amazing how little traction this story is getting. Back in the 1950s-2000s, when Russia's influence on the West was rather subdued, this would have been the only news in town.

Instead it's more like "nothing to see here, kindly vote in our puppet candidate X, thanks!" for various local values of X.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Sure, but 1000 is just 1 in 3000 voters. In practice it's going to be way more than that, probably 2 or 3 in 10. Thats hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom are going to be punctilious people. Of all the suggested fuckery methods, this would be caught the fastest IMO.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
The ballot printout is not discarded, is it? If not, then the ballot-barcode consistency in the sample can be verified as part of the audit.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Believe me, we've been aware that this is a non-bug feature for a long time.

The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite direction: trying to selectively suppress their opponents' votes further. If it hurts them more than us, it's a worthy goal!
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Indeed, and the math is the same. If out of 3 million voters, just 1000 double-check the printout, they will detect a 1/100 flip with probability 99.996%.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Not with a randomized audit, such as this one for the 2022 primary [1]. If it flipped just one vote out of 100, and you drew an audit sample of just 1000 votes, the probability of detecting it would be 99.996%.

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/13/colorado-counties-begin-audit...
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
If you exclude its pre-Athlon Nvidia-like era, Intel's market cap earlier this year was only ~20% below its 2020ish peak.

It has engineers. It might yet surprise. Nvidia hasn't proven it can turn a ridiculous amount of capital into a matrix-multiplication moat.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
> nothing burger event for an index that has lost relevance

This argument has been around since time immemorial. The right way to think of it is more like a country club or a who's who, rather than a survey or a directory.

As for the news at hand, it's really more about Intel than Nvidia. Sic transit gloria mundi.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
I wish some of the sleeping/eating studies covered the options "sleep when I'm tired" and "eat when I'm hungry."

When remote work is an option, it'd be nice to know the health opportunity cost of RTO. Sadly the cohort is too hard to study outside of nursing home residents.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
https://www.migrationpolicy.org
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
> it decreases demand for existing homes as well. It also negatively impacts employment and many other areas, basically if your run on debt the higher rates hurt

The question is not what's affected. It's how much monetary policy it takes to achieve the desired output and employment effect, and where is the employment effect. We want to stop increasing rates once the effect is achieved.

We raise rates because the economy is overheating. Too much money is chasing too few goods, raising prices. In response to the favorable prices, too many jobs are chasing too few workers, raising wages.

Rising prices and wages (without rising productivity) means inflation. We're at one edge of the Phillips curve [1] and need to move back to the middle.

> That may be a goal, but it isn't the goal.

The goal is actually to raise unemployment. That's what the "cooling the overheating economy" euphemism means. However, we don't have the tools to raise it evenly in all sectors. The only tool we have is the short term interest rate.

Luckily, it affects the long term rate, which affects demand for homes, new and existing. For (say) every 20 fewer homes sold, one realtor and one banker might go unemployed. But for every 20 fewer new homes built (say), 50 laborers might go unemployed. That's why the transmission is primarily through construction [2] [3]. The consumer durables sector (appliances) used to have a large multiplier too, but most of those manufacturing jobs have been automated or moved overseas.

> they wouldn't be lagging if the effects must have already happened

You can model the lag effects as geometric decays of the original impulse. You need a negative original effect (one impulse of high unemployment) that will then regress back to baseline (continued but fading unemployment.) We didn't have any impulse, hence no decay.

The only thing that could really go wrong is a resurgence of inflation if the cuts were too fast, but chances are we would have seen that already too.

> relative to where we would have been without intervention

The problem here is we were at too much output/employment. We had to get through that moment and fix the problem without overshooting in the opposite direction.

We couldn't do better, that's the whole point. It's not like there was potentially more output to be had. The actual problem is that output was too high. That's why there was inflation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve

[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2022-12-20/new-...

[3] https://www.infracapfunds.com/post/why-the-us-is-unlikely-to...
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
The goal in increasing rates is to cool the economy by reducing construction, i.e. housing starts. Exchanging existing units doesn't affect employment and output as much. Since starts dropped by a third, it follows that prices would have been even higher without the raise in rates.

> we really won't know for sure for at least a decade or so

We absolutely already know. The contractionary effect of a raise in rates is largest in the short term. You can't have a lagging effect after rates are cut if there was no contraction to begin with.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Prices are not the relevant statistic though, it's housing starts [1]. They dropped from ~1.8M in April 2022 to ~1.3M today. Prices are affected by supply and demand equally, while starts are much more affected by supply.

As for how the Treasury and Fed managed the crisis, it was easily the most incredible macro success story since I've been alive. Had you told me in 2022 that they'd manage sub-3% inflation without a recession at all, I'd have said you believed in fairy tales.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
That's not really surprising, considering that's exactly how interest rate increases are supposed to work. They crowd out a bit of business investment and a lot of housing investment [1]. This in turn cools the economy by curtailing construction.

Unfortunately, housing in most areas was screwed to begin with. This was not nearly the case with prior inflation bouts that required rate increases. The Fed was left with two bad choices. It did what it had to do.

If the economy was Windows XP, housing would be its networking stack - its most exploitable sector. This is largely because of local governance and regulatory capture [2]. Housing has been artificially undersupplied for 5 decades under a variety of pretexts, such as architectural integrity. It has effectively turned the sector into a pyramid scheme that captures the wages of renters.

[1] https://archive.is/8wAry (from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/opinion/inflation-interes...)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Is there a blog post about what specifically she found to be inscrutable? The C++ doesn't look all that terse at a syntactic level, and has plenty of comments. Are the problems at the domain level?
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Here's an algebraic example to keep things theoretical. If the easy to delete version proposed by the article is:

   f(x) = 6x^2 - 5x + 1
The prospective extensible version is:

   g(x,a,b) = ax + b
   f(x,q()) = q(x,3,-1) q(x,2,-1)
   f(x,g)
It's the generalization for factorable polynomials. It's clearly harder to read than the easy to delete version. It's more complex to write, and so on.

However, it's algebraically orthogonal. It has advantages in some cases, for instance if you later add code for a 6th-order polynomial and need to use its zeroes for something else.

We know that it could be better in some cases. Is it a good bet to predict that it will be better overall? The problem domain can fracture across a thousand orthogonal "creases" like this one. The relevant skill is in making the right bets.

Here's an example that's not orthogonal. Let's say we think the 6 coefficient might be more likely to change in the future:

   g(x,a) = ax^2 - 5x - 1
   f(x,q()) = q(x,6)
   f(x,g)
This version is most likely just adding complexity. A single function is almost always a better bet.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
At the risk of turning a unison into a chord, here's my two cents.

If:

1. You know where the 'creases' of orthogonality are. You've carved the turkey 1000 times and you never get it wrong anymore.

2. As a result, there is hardly any difference in complexity between code that is and isn't easy to extend.

Then write code that is easy to extend, not delete.

The question is whether your impression of the above is true. It won't be for most junior developers, and for many senior ones. If orthogonality isn't something you preoccupy yourself with, it probably won't be.

In my experience, the most telling heuristic is rewriting propensity. I'm talking about rewriting while writing, not about refactoring later. Unless something is obvious, you won't get the right design on the first write. You certainly won't get the correct extensible design. If you're instructed to write it just once, then by all means make it easy to delete.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Global Russian paranoia would actually be alright. We used to have that in the 80s. Certainly better than global Russian domination by way of stooges like Maduro, Orban, Wagner in Africa, and you-know-who in the US.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
The most salient feature of Russian meddling is playing all sides, both ideologically and in levels of sophistication.

The less-sophisticated efforts are basically misdirection and camouflage. They are intentionally disarming, akin to how their 'strongman' puppets make an effort to bumble and 'accidentally' feed the trolls. Covfefe bigly, if you will.
worstspotgain
·2 yıl önce·discuss
> camelcase naming for everything, getters and setters for every class variable, interfaces everywhere

This is not far off from the guidelines in many cases, e.g. Windows code (well, not every variable of course.) A lot of Java design was copied from C++.