Posts by doublelayer 10688 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
The solution being that the employer pays for the ticket after the candidate agrees to use it. The candidate should not be asked to pay anything for this process. Of course, there is the theoretical risk that the candidate then ignores the ticket or that the employer strands the candidate through a fake return ticket, but since nobody benefits if either of those happens, it probably won't happen very often when compared to the advance fee version.
I think that is incorrect. That is what New York City claims to have done, and even if we assume that they really didn't, I don't know where you get your confidence that they could have. LLMs do not perfectly understand the text they're trained on, so even if you trained it only on the relevant laws, it can still get the answers wrong by random chance. The extra randomness and variability of unrestricted prompts makes this worse.
Take that summary I linked above about what New York state/city laws allow you to do with workers' tips, since that's the subject of the comment thread although I don't know why. Here are two sentences about tip pooling arrangements:
"Under New York labor law, employers are allowed to require their employees to share tips, but they cannot participate in the tip pools themselves."
"The key requirements are that: The pooling system is voluntary [...]"
What does that mean? Those appear to contradict each other, because the employer can require people to do something as long as the people can choose whether to do that thing voluntarily. If I'm an employee who doesn't want to be in a tip pool, the bot can show me the voluntary line, whereas if I'm an employee who does and hopes the employer will make that happen, the bot can tell me that it's fine to require it. The LLM is trying to respond to the prompt, and when the prompt assumes that something exists, the LLM generally looks for valid text that best satisfies that prompt and it doesn't have a full legal understanding. In legal fact, there's probably a definition of "voluntary" which is important here, but the bot doesn't know that because it doesn't know anything.
It's both, but probably neither of them is specifically tilted in anyone's favor. It's quite possible that it would do the same thing by promising to an employee that something they want is definitely legal whether or not it actually is, but it might also be producing specifically incorrect information because of something in its training data which, being an LLM, it's incapable of encoding to the specific rules that the law requires. Laws about what employers of tipped workers can do are complex, and that's a summary from a non-governmental source. Being trained on the more absolute but less clearly-written law, regulation, and probably some court proceedings is not a situation an LLM can generally handle without making plenty up.
That depends what sycophancy means, but we know what they meant when they said it, and what they meant isn't that big a diversion from the dictionary definition. A sycophant might have all sorts of reasons to flatter and support the object of their attentions, but the core part, the unquestioning and effusive agreement, is the important part. The output from an LLM being called sycophantic is often both of those things.
I think they're a smaller part of the problem. The most sensitive data and operations, the things that would cause the most chaos in the nightmare scenario, don't need to go through CDNs and most of them probably don't. Internal data on government, industrial, or infrastructural systems generally doesn't need to use a CDN because copies of it aren't being transmitted in bulk. CDNs are a much bigger thing for public-facing services, and the consequences of those going down tends to be smaller. CDNs are also often easier to switch at short notice. Therefore, though it might make sense for a company outside the US to build a competitive product for people to switch to, it's probably not something that needs a lot of effort or funding when compared to building a new set of productivity software or a place to operate lots of processes.
Judges should restrict action if and only if that action is already against current laws, but when that is the case, they absolutely should because that is their job. If a government wants to do something and the law says they can't, then it shouldn't and usually can't wait for the next election for voters to decide, from the few options available, whether they'll end up supporting it. If the government wants to do that, they have to change the law. If they don't, then judges have the power and the responsibility to stop the unlawful actions, reverse their consequences, and forbid those actions from being repeated, and if those judges are not obeyed, the rule of law has broken down.
So, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, controlling it for 45 years, until they were forcibly expelled, is totally fine? Not counting those parts of Ukraine and Georgia they still control by force and Belarus they control by propping up a friendly dictator? They didn't go home immediately, they didn't go home without firing shots, they did none of the things you're incorrectly giving them credit for, and therefore any points you might have had that aren't completely fictional have been hidden under your clear attempt at ignoring obvious history.
I would need some information about how many of the jobs that someone said was/will be replaced by AI were 1) actually lost rather than a "maybe this person will be replaced soon"; 2) actually had an AI program used in place of the former employee rather than the job being ended altogether or given to a different person; 3) actually done by what they're suggesting by AI, meaning a mostly automated program rather than someone realizing that they had a person doing a mechanical task and writing a normal, deterministic program to do it; 4) actually done successfully for a long time, rather than the AI plan going horribly awry and people being re-hired to go back to human work (of which there have been repeated incidents); and 5) implemented with the financial flexibility to continue to use their current approach at the increasing compute costs of LLMs. Do you have that number? The people who have parts of it seem unwilling to give me that level of detail.
I've seen plenty of things that didn't meet these requirements. Many of them were also sold as having met them. I've seen stuff that wasn't AI sold as AI. I've seen people promise they're going to replace workers any day now and then they just didn't. I've seen AI workflows that are going to save us lots of time which took longer. I've seen normal job cuts which, to make sound better to the investors, they sold as AI when it really wasn't. How much more evidence do you have, because I don't have enough yet.
I think you would. Budgeting this out depends on a lot of things like what work you're doing on the 150 days and where you're living, but I think there are many people who could live a much higher standard of living than a peasant while not working half the year. The problem is that we don't compare our standard of living to peasants from 900 years ago, so it wouldn't feel good. For example, you would probably still have and afford some indoor heating and hot water. Those feel like relatively basic things to us, though to a peasant, they wouldn't be. You would have access to a lot more quantity and variety of food, something peasants did not get. Even something as simple and cheap as a few light bulbs means a lot less time spent making candles, to say nothing of getting the stuff you need to make candles, to say nothing of the convenience of light at the touch of a switch, to say nothing of the significant reduction in the risk of fire. But until we think about that and compare them to a situation we've likely never had to experience for long, they're just light bulbs, beneath our notice and certainly no luxury since they're all over the place.
If we calculate it out, though, we're more likely to see and think about the list of things we either have or have a chance at getting which we would have to give up for the 22 weeks of holidays this gets us. That's logical because those are the two alternatives that are realistically available to us, but it means we underestimate how much a peasant would enjoy the basic standard of living we can obtain if they got time machined into it.
You have comprehension issues. For example, when I said that "none of it [the money] might be yours", that was not an insinuation of your wealth. As I noted about myself, they have people working on investments I have none of my money in, so none of that money is mine because mine is in a different fund. Or, if you invested your money in another bank, then it also might not be yours unless those banks invest in each other. You interpreted that as something it wasn't, much like you are doing with the employees you don't bother to understand.
I don't know what everyone at your council are doing. You could find out if you wanted. The fact that you only consider the people doing physical labor which you can see indicates that listing the many tasks that some of those people are certainly doing is a waste of time since you already know enough to know that plenty of things are done by your council and they need people to implement those. There may be people who don't do much in that building, but you've made it clear that you have either no knowledge or no care for the many things that account for some or all of them.
Just because you don't know what someone is doing isn't sufficient evidence that they're doing nothing. Companies with only one public number might still have hundreds of customer service people behind that number, and even those companies who decide not to have one still have employees to do the things other than customer service.
As for what the people in the Commonwealth Bank buildings are doing, I can explain that. They are trying to take money and turn it into other money, even though none of it might be yours. For example, they operate private equity and commodities trading funds, both of which require a lot of people to do a lot of analysis to determine whether they think something will make money or not. You might not invest in either of those. I don't. Lots of people do, and even more large organizations do, and those investors are willing to pay for people to do that analysis if they trust them, and that's why there are people who work on financial services. You don't go into the buildings and talk to those people because they're not directly interacting with you, but if they disappeared tomorrow, you would notice eventually. Depending on your specific situation, you might notice in a variety of ways and not necessarily negatively, although there is a good chance it would be negatively.
"Peasants only worked 150 days a year"
That is completely wrong. What that data you're summarizing actually says is that peasants had to work approximately 150 days a year to afford rent, and that specific number is called out as being in a time of notably high wages. What did they rent? Land, which they had to farm for the food they ate themselves as opposed to the food they farmed on those 150 days for others. We can do exactly the same calculation today. Take your annual cost of housing, divide it by your hourly wage rate. That's how much you have to work this year if you ignore the same things you're ignoring to use that incorrect argument.
If you have a point, making an incorrect claim to defend it doesn't help. Not that this claim would be a great defense even if it was true, because you probably can work 150 days a year if you're willing to live like a peasant would at that time, by which I mean poor-quality and small housing, no education for children, little access to luxuries, and relying on your community's willingness and ability to help you whenever something goes wrong. Then again, you probably have an opinion you're trying to express which is unrelated to historical personal economics, so maybe we should skip to that.
Depending on where you live, there might not be so many cars available whenever you want to use one, and people who live in that kind of place tend to have more cars. Also, depending on how often you need to travel somewhere, getting a taxi, even now when rideshare apps make them somewhat cheaper, might end up being more expensive. If you live next to convenient public transport, that reduces the number of times you need one and therefore the total expense, but keep in mind how many places don't have a complete public transport system, even places right next to cities that do.
This company doesn't build DCs in the UK, but others do and will. Tactics used here may be used in identical or comparable ways during that build process. Comments you already read question whether they can do exactly the same thing because the EIA process doesn't apply to something of that scale or whether it does after all and they have a different regulation they need to work around. Things that happen in the US can affect you, you know.
The problem with that is that, even if all your statements are true, you've put no effort into proving them. You just state them as unquestionable fact when proving them, even with complete access to all Google and Microsoft's data, would still be tricky. I'm not telling you that Azure is better than Google Cloud, but I am saying that you have not proven any of your claims to that effect and you seemingly aren't trying to.
For example, only one group's attempt at a comparison assigns Google Cloud the lowest uptime percentage of the big three, although Azure had the highest number of incidents of some type, and we would have to interrogate how they arrived at their statistic which probably includes deciding how to weigh different types of downtime since it's almost never everything down worldwide. Claims like "literally magnitudes more reliable" require evidence. Since you haven't tried to provide the numbers you claim to have, let's look at a list of large outages in 2025. Microsoft scores 2: an Azure outage on October 29 and a Teams outage on December 19. Google has a Cloud outage on June 12, a Workspace outage on July 18, a Meet outage on September 8, another on September 26, and a Workspace outage on November 12. That doesn't match your statistics. Your claims are subjective under the best of conditions and your arguments are not the best of conditions for them. Either of those sources of outage data can be wrong or have bad methodology, as can your statistics, but we can't even look at yours because we only have vague and exaggerated personal conclusions.
We're talking about Office365, the product for organizations. Pretty much everyone using that has it attached to their own domain. But yes, if you're one of those people who uses a something.onmicrosoft.com email domain, it's not so easy. The next time I see that from anyone other than a spammer, which will also be the first time, I'll let you know. For the rest of 365 users, your objection does not apply.
That comparison is very tricky given how partial outages tend to be both regionally and in the parts of the service that go down. Yesterday wasn't all of Azure and M365 down, it was none of Azure and only some of North America of M365 down, and from reports that was email, not all the rest of it.
That makes comparisons much harder. For example, my employer is on GSuite, and relatively recently, all of our Google Meet meetings were down or rather they worked but dropped people about ten seconds after they joined, all day but fixed by the next. Did that affect only us, our region, the entire world? Was anything else down, since the only parts I regularly use are Mail and Meet? I don't know. Google might not know either. To compare them, I'd have to know, and I'd have to decide how to compare an email outage with a meeting platform outage because, in our case, mail through GSuite was working fine, and yesterday, Teams was working fine. Do you have information relevant to your comparison or is this your anecdotal experience versus articles you read about other services? If it's the latter, you're almost certainly comparing the wrong things.
You write as if someone who used Office365 to host email can't move mail provider equally easily, which they can. It's not that hard to switch the email part at least* away from them. The question is whether the new provider is going to be better, because if that one has an outage, there will be as little sympathy for the people who don't have mail flowing as the financial company got earlier in this forum. Companies that must never have outages have a trickier problem trying to accomplish that, but those who can withstand some short outages can select from a bunch of different providers.
* There are other parts of 365 that are easier to get stuck in by inertia, but mail is easy to migrate out if you want and, if you've decided to stop using 365 altogether, you can start with mail immediately while working on the rest. There are features that the mail product has which are not necessarily available with the simple services you suggest, for example distribution groups. I'm guessing you're thinking from the small group perspective though with your registrar suggestion where that is more feasible to manage manually.
Those who want to use Bitlocker do what they have done for a long time. They use it and don't send the key to Microsoft. That means they have to manage keys themselves in one of two ways. One way is to record the keys and store them in a trusted way, such as in offline media in a secure location. Another way is to generate local keys and intentionally not keep any copies, with the cost that a forgotten key passphrase or broken authenticator will make any data stored on that machine unavailable, so if you don't have a storage system outside user machines for important data, that's a risky option.
If you don't want to use Bitlocker, then the only difference is that you find some other system that matches your compliance requirements and security preferences. How you manage keys is exactly the same, including the part where you don't give them to organizations if you don't want that organization to have your key. US law enforcement doesn't have a master key for Bitlocker, they got copies of keys which the users chose to give to Microsoft. That shouldn't be a surprise.
That meant that, rather obviously, you can't get new messages or completely send ones when you're offline, but you can read messages, prepare messages for sending, etc offline. Perhaps a better phrasing is that there is not a single thing that POP3 can let you do offline which IMAP cannot let you do offline.
And if the server wipes my mail, then the server has a problem, which is when I'd use another machine's synced copy or the version backed up from that local copy I was talking about, but the more important problem would be fixing whatever caused the server to do that as I would have to if the server deleted my email before I could download it with POP3. I have also seen that, once, and it was an admin's fault. That wasn't POP3's fault, and whatever server problem you've experienced wasn't IMAP's fault either.
"As they say in business school, what's the value proposition here?"
Bundling, mostly. When some person wants a bunch of related tech services and doesn't know how to set any of them up, you can be their sole provider. Everything runs on the same stack you are used to, so your costs for providing those services are low. But running email isn't something you can provide value for, so you find someone else to subcontract that part to and just administer that along with the rest of the services. Instead of hiring mail admins to maintain the servers and keep them off spam lists, you let someone else do that.
I wouldn't like that approach. Among other things, I like it when the website and email are on different providers because it means I can use one of them to deal with an outage on the other. But I'm already not the customer they're looking for because I also don't like outsourced web hosting. I'll use outsourced servers, but I can run an HTTP server quite easily. There are a lot of people who can't and do appreciate having few things they have to set up, which is why the combined web host, email host, domain registrar, sometimes also business software like office or access management, provider still exists and gets small business customers.
It's not that you should use it, just that a lot of people probably want to because it does a lot of things better. If you don't want the things it does, there's nothing wrong with not using it. However, you should know that IMAP does work offline for everything that works offline. I've got local copies of mail using IMAP. Those automatically sync with the server when online because I want them to, but if the network goes down and I want to get something out of an email, I start my mail client and get it from the complete offline copy I also have.
True enough, but if we're going to decide that an invasion isn't an invasion if there are some locals who also fight, that reduces the US's invasion count significantly since, at least until last year, they often sought out local people or groups who either already supported what they wanted or were willing to do so with some inducements. Sometimes, they did that so much that they didn't have to use any troops at all, merely supporting the local group that did all the shooting. They would still get at least partial blame for those operations, as Cuba should for theirs.
"Cuba didn't go around invading and blowing up other countries."
They have that in common too. Cuba did it less successfully, but they fought several wars in South America and Africa, with their invasion of Angola being the largest of their operations in both casualties (estimated 5,000 killed) and total resources expended (at least 300,000 troops deployed throughout the years).
That is pretty much what I said. I sometimes talk to the dog, as opposed to commanding the dog, but not to communicate because I know there's no communication. I do it because it amuses me or because the dogs I've lived with seem to like happy-sounding speech when I'm engaging with them and speaking a language feels less silly than happy-intonation gibberish even though they'd have the same effect. If I want the dog to understand me and do something, it's single words and hand signals, which works much better, but they include no "please". If you think of a dog as a human, that sounds rude, but dogs aren't humans and the please would not help, hence my original explanation of why it doesn't make any difference with dogs and little difference to LLMs.
I've said a lot of things to dogs. It doesn't mean they understood any of it. In fact, if you are going to issue commands to your dog, then please will add to their confusion, whereas when I say "would you please stop trying to eat things that aren't edible", I know they won't understand me and I need to distract them more actively. Meanwhile, eating inedible things is evidently fun, so the dog is paying less attention to my request than normal. All the words, including the please and the stop, are just my way of expressing myself while I get started on what will actually work. Similarly, when I'm playing fetch with a dog and they finally stop gnawing on the ball so I can throw it, I do sometimes say thank you, but they're only thinking of getting to run after it again and I could say anything else with the same effect.
LLMs may be a little different because injecting a please into your prompt will change some weights. It's mostly random what that will do if anything and whether it will help. Avoiding insults is helpful because they will just pollute the prompt and make it less likely to do anything useful.
Possibly since you made no attempt at distinguishing which one or ones you were recommending in the post to which they replied. If what you meant was "Telnet clients connecting to something other than Telnet servers are useful in test/development/laboratory environments, but Telnet servers shouldn't be used anywhere", then you should have said so. If you meant that Telnet servers are also useful, then their point is relevant as a counterargument.
But consider the point you replied to that this is designed for a nontechnical user who might find something they need to do to their system which the existing web UI doesn't include. That's when a desktop might be necessary. The user could learn to use the CLI tools and access them correctly, but if we're willing to put that on the user, they can also learn to choose and install these services individually and skip the entire project, and this is clearly designed to make it so they don't have to. The desktop is still optional, but it is one which is easy to add if a user needs one.
To defend ChatGPT, the age prediction model isn't one you can just run on yourself. They run that against you when they want the information, and all the main chatbot will do is simulate that model. Of course, it's likely that their age prediction thing is probably more prompts run through their same LLMs, although I can't prove that, but without them announcing those prompts, you won't get the same answer from an interactive GPT session that their prediction model would give you. I doubt their prediction model is any good, but it is likely a bit better than "guess my age" to an LLM.
Not at all, because that's just one of the factors. Conversation topics is another one of those, and that one is the most easily gamed. Someone looking to circumvent this could probably start a new account and have several conversations about retirement, what to do with their grandchildren, how they used to program in 1 kB of RAM and are tired of those terrible new programmers who dare to use more, and then make their requests. That process might be a little annoying because you probably have to maintain a conversation over a single opening prompt, but fortunately, there are these new programs that can be used to make up relevant-looking text which could do it for you. All it will cost is a bunch of junk data sent through the LLMs' systems.
Which, if it proves popular, will be another reason for the UK to insist that it must age-verify everyone who uses an LLM, which, because the age verification systems work perfectly except for on almost everybody means collecting identity documents, and since LLMs are integrated in all the search engines however optionally, we might as well extend it to those just in case.
There have been rumors of copying ever since it started. I don't know how proven those are, as I've seen plenty of claims that they were overblown or that there was substantial theft but it came too late to make much of a difference to the design, but I have not bothered to study either set of claims and presumably you have.
However, in a game of what technically counts, I don't think that objection, even if correct, is enough to remove it. Unless they just stole completed Concordes and painted new stuff on them, that was still a different plane with lots of differences, including several that led to its less impressive service record. It loses on most metrics, and you can argue as the article does that it misses the more important of the firsts, but that's why they used the word "technically". Technically, it wasn't the same and technically, it entered service first, whether or not either of those were significant factors.
Parents never experienced it themselves? Let's take a child of age 8 and their parent having given birth at the average age in England and Wales of 29.2. That makes a parent born in 1989. A parent who almost certainly had or knew people who did a Myspace account during their adolescence, a Facebook account by age 20, and have seen all the social media companies early in their adulthood. Also, they've been using computers for a large chunk of their childhood and all their adulthood.
These are the same complaints that children and parents have been accused of for several generations. Sometimes, it's true, but often, it's not. Parents have the knowledge to know whether they want to do something and the ability to learn how to use the tools available if they care to do so. Your assumption that social media must be the cause of the unmeasured lack of attention span in children you know, keeping in mind that children naturally lack a long attention span already, is not a good enough argument for demolishing the privacy of every adult and banning children from most of the internet when the goals you are willing to state can already be achieved by parents doing their job.
In their particular case, the Luddites did see job losses, their own. In fact, the machines they wanted to destroy were creating jobs because more people were employed to operate them than were previously, but it didn't require their now obsolete skills so they wanted the machines destroyed. The Luddites wanted their comparatively well-paid jobs to continue and were unhappy that mechanization allowed poor people to start doing it. Don't give them credit for having societal concerns or working for the benefit of others. They never claimed it and they certainly never did.
If you have concerns about these impacts, we will get farther by considering them now rather than attempting to link them to only partially related examples from history, especially inaccurate ones. My concerns about LLMs are a little different because those I've seen mostly don't work. I don't fear massive job losses* from this until someone builds something that does work, but I do fear losses when investors realize how much money they spent trying to accomplish that. However, if I'm wrong and more of it does work than we imagined, then widespread job replacement could happen and we would have to deal with it from our current position.
* Some companies will fire workers now and claim to have used AI. Most of the examples I've seen have been failures with many hired back. Others have been companies that wanted or had to fire workers anyway and decided that claims about AI would make that sound better. A few have actually tried replacing them long-term, and those don't seem to be doing well, for example the translation shops that replaced their human translators with LLMs, which is much cheaper but less good and, most importantly, can be done by me for almost free with a 40-line script, so why would I hire them to do it if that's all I'd get back. So far, I haven't seen successful replacements at any scale.
In their defense, they also accuse the editor of having a lot of AI features, albeit optional ones, and this does seem supported by the long list of "AI", "LLM", and "agentic" features prominently displayed. The creators of the list have decided that optional LLM features are bad enough to land you on the list as demonstrated by their first entry, Firefox, which you can also disable LLM features in and mostly wouldn't see them even if you didn't unless you specifically hunted them down. Whether we agree with that or not, that makes Zed compatible with their rules even though they do accuse them of LLM-written code with no evidence cited.
Less in their defense, they do have a pattern of accusing people of LLM usage with little evidence. For example, the entry below Zed is eSpeak NG, and the crimes they committed there include the use of copilot instructions. The evidence for that is an issue that was created in October saying "Set up Copilot instructions" but with no code linked to it. The other complaint is that Copilot reviewed a pull request, on GitHub, where Copilot is pushed all the time. These seem like flimsy reasons to add something to a list.
I disapprove of most LLM use, but I won't be joining this project. It seems to have extreme criteria for inclusion and to make little effort in distinguishing what happened and how important it was.
On what do you base your indictment of those harassing the original maintainers? Whether we like it or not, saying nasty things on public social media, including here, is not illegal. If you have specific examples of people who went further than that, which I admit I have not seen because I was unaware of this repository until I read this article, you might have a point. If it was merely that they were so noisy and vicious that they caused discomfort and, since they were LLM fans, almost certainly wrong, that's not criminal.
Similarly, we should consider that some online discussions surrounding this have accused people of using this list to harass the projects accused of using LLMs. Like the last group, I have not seen the alleged harassment firsthand, and you could not blame the fork of this project which specifically asks people to make their accusations respectfully (I don't know if the original did). The most important factor and the only one that could be criminal is what anyone actually said, but I would prefer that neither type of harassment occurred.
That could easily be estimated, and that might be a reason why it's not going to last. But remember when you do that the Anthropic guy never said immigration policy changes were good any more than he claimed the US led the world in manufacturing GPUs. We can come up with a long list of things he could have said that would be wrong, but from the article, I've got plenty of things he did say that are also wrong such as the bad comparisons of GPUs and nuclear weapons. We don't prove him wrong by taking arguments made by someone else, mixing them with his, and blaming him for the inconsistent combination.
And according to David Mitchell, certainly another revered expert in such things, he meant something else. All of which is meaningless because we're describing real events today and relating them to what's almost certainly a story that never happened in the first place even though the person named in it really existed. Though given the number of supporters in the US administration who don't concern themselves with practicality, maybe Mitchell's version or indeed the one you're encouraging us to use is closer to the reality.
The person you're replying to didn't mean malware like everyone else means it. They define anything they don't like as malware. In this case, the Lotus activation system probably wasn't anyone's favorite, but this poster will also define any piece of software that doesn't use a license they like as malware and, having made this redefinition, attack anyone who is willing to run it as if it was what we normally mean by it.
It didn't happen? So what is this study by the Australian government on methods available for age detection and whether they're suitable for legal requirements about? If what you meant to say is that not all companies that were supposed to use it have actually used it and are thus putting themselves at legal risk, that's a rather different thing. They are supposed to be using age verification, most methods for which don't work, and if any politician eventually chooses to care that they don't work, they can find worse ways that will work but come with more side effects.
The problem with that is that it's never that simple. All three of those things could have responsibility. For example, the devs or rather the institution employing them are responsible if they include criteria that make the program decide against someone, either deliberately (dev writes a rule to make sure his enemy will be rejected if they apply) or negligently (they don't clean irrelevant junk out of their training data and end up biasing their model and not testing it). The data brokers are responsible if they have stolen lots of data but not correlated it properly and end up blaming people for things they didn't do which then gets used to judge against them.
In some ways, I think we'd start in the same place. The institutions can get the first round of blame and, after they've done whatever is necessary for restitution, they can make claims against the responsible suppliers. There will be a lot of legal agreements designed to prevent that from happening, which could be a problem for regulators.
That is the only literal meaning, and I can only assume that it was more directed at those web hosts and social media than the non-criminal users of them. It's still not a helpful part of the statement whose main point about willful negligence about advertising standards and, in the case of the web hosts, abuse complaints, is correct.
That is an underestimate of Bluetooth's security procedures. Bluetooth connections are encrypted, or at least almost all are because it's built into the spec. That is, contrary to Lisa's expectation, more than we can say for plenty of hardware on the market that used or uses unencrypted wireless transmissions. For example, I have one of those wireless keyboards that has a USB dongle and connects to that dongle almost immediately when switched on, but it's not encrypted. If you're in range, you can record what I type and you could send keyboard commands to the connected machine. If I used a Bluetooth keyboard instead, you couldn't do either of those things.
Connections can also be authenticated, and this exploit is relevant to that part. Some devices don't bother with that and do let whatever device announces itself connect, but many devices intend to authenticate the devices making connections with shared secret information and, if they do that properly, would withstand an external attempt to divert them.
"The idea that someone can stroll through a carriage with a magic antenna and silently re-pair dozens of earbuds is fantasy. If it were that easy, Bluetooth would have collapsed as a consumer technology years ago."
The lack of an attack does not disprove this for two independent reasons. For one thing, the exploit allowing some re-pairings was just made public and uses an extra piece of software which plenty of Bluetooth devices do not use. If this exploit did work, then it would only have become available to attackers somewhat recently, and then only if they independently discovered it. The fact that nobody attacked using this five years ago doesn't matter if the vulnerable software is newer than that.
The other reason is that, whether you can attack devices in bulk with this or not, most people don't have any reason to want to. What's the benefit in mass-hijacking headsets all over a train? It's a prank or vandalism at most, even if you can activate all the microphones you don't need to because you could just carry your own microphone to get the same useless audio. This would be of most use to a targeted attacker trying to go after one device, and that wouldn't necessarily have become public because it could be difficult to detect.
In practice, I think your conclusions are closer to correct in that a lot of devices I'm aware of won't accept pairing requests when they're already paired and, if I'm understanding the information on this vulnerability, that's still true of the hardware they are referring to. It seems like an attacker would need to make their attempt in the smallish gap between the user powering on their accessory and it connecting to their main device, and if the attacker succeeded, the user would likely become confused because they're not getting a connection. The user is most likely to turn the accessory off and on again, breaking the attacker's connection and if the attacker keeps intercepting it every time, they would think their accessory had stopped working properly. There are a few circumstances I can envision where it would work better, but the attacker would need to get quite lucky to find one. You still can't prove that from it not already having happened to our knowledge.
"That treaty has always been a dead letter. Tell me, what formal complaint has EVER been filed by one country against another under it?"
Canada, against the Soviet Union, for the contamination caused by Kosmos 954. The USSR paid, though not all they should have. So far, that's the only one, but it worked that time.
However, I wasn't arguing that some other country would make a claim against the US and the US would pay, since there's no logical claim to expect. I was arguing that the US would probably not jump to permitting this company to do whatever it wants because they don't see a benefit from it, this company can't do it, and this company will need approval from some government, almost certainly the US government, to launch their stuff.
We don't agree on the important things. We agree on simple facts. There are larger conclusions that we draw differently from facts, some of which I would agree with you on and some of which I wouldn't. The difference in the parts that aren't reliable is extremely important and results in completely different next steps in research and policy ramifications for fusion power compared to wind and solar power, hence why pointing out that both do indeed have something unreliable is not a useful point.
I don't know why you post. If you do for the same reasons I do, to try to understand what others believe and, where I think their beliefs are harmful, it can be useful to understand where you differ with them. I think those you debate wind and solar with will also agree that wind stops blowing sometimes and that is a problem, and you could then skip ahead to how good or bad the current solutions are and future solutions will be, the point there's likely disagreement on. If you think that agreement that the sun sets and solar panels don't do much after that is concession, I think you're doomed to never convince people of your opinion no matter how correct it might be. If you have a different reason, then this advice is probably useless and I think we've gone as far as we can go with this.
I don't think you can define mark to market as "shady accounting". They are legally mandated to do that for things they intend to have available for liquidity. Their risky choices worked out badly, and if the laws had been different, maybe they would have avoided making those choices, but they didn't hide what they were doing.
But perhaps the better question is why your point, to the extent it is correct, has any significance whatsoever? People buy bonds, sometimes with the intent of selling them before they mature, sometimes without that intent but with the knowledge that they can if it eventually comes to it, and sometimes to hold them but being judged on their market value by a lender or a manager or a client, and all of those groups have a legal right to information about the plans of the company to which they're providing cash to evaluate the credit risk they're taking on. What does it matter that some subset of them might have had a plan which means they're not any worse off? Your post suggests that the bond sellers are a distinct group from the bond holders when they're not and that there's some difference between them that has any meaning here.
I think it's a way of making brand recognition pay out for them. If you know only the names of the main providers and go to their websites, you'll see only the expensive plans. If you're willing to pay that and don't do the research, then you buy one. Meanwhile, anyone who isn't willing and wants something cheaper does some research, finds the less advertised brand, and still ends up paying money to the same place. It's an efficient way of finding who doesn't mind spending extra money or doesn't realize there is a choice and getting more from them.
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