Posts by Dinanziame 1321 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2019
The valuation of Tesla these days has more to do with Elon than with how many cars they sell. He claims Tesla will become an AI company. He claims Tesla will create robotaxis. As absurd as these sound, the stock jumps on every of his announcements. If he does not get his money and leaves Tesla aside, the stock will crash. People who own the stock don't want to see it crash. So they'll approve his $56B pay package.
Admittedly, it seems fusion does not get a lot of funding compared to the benefits it's supposed to have. Maybe there's a catch that well-educated people don't talk about? Or maybe it's just really really hard and the research is too frustrating to attract a lot of interest.
There are other differences between the articles as well. There seems to be two versions that got translated to different countries: The nice version, for UK and France, asks you to please remove your SIM card before sending the device for repairs, says it cannot guarantee accessories will be returned, asks you to provide a proper address, has a link to the privacy policy. Then there's the nasty version for US and Belgium, which declares they will not repair your device if it fell in the water or was fried by a surge, states outright accessories will not be returned, threatens not to return the device if you don't provide a proper address within 30 days.
I find the second version very rude: "You will not send in a Device containing non-Google-authorized parts", "You will not send in a Device with accessories", "You will backup all data"... Feels like somebody has been reading the old testament too much.
Looks like the rules are different in the US and the UK:
https://store.google.com/intl/en-GB_uk/about/device-repair/ "If You send in a Device containing non-Google-authorized parts, CTDi will return Your Device to You without making any repairs."
It looks like they also return it without repairing it in France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Japan; but they don't return it in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Portugal. Why yes, I have too much time on my hands.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they somehow fucked up the translation.
We wanted the language to look as closely as possible to natural language so they could read it and understand it, like it was an English sentence
This may have advantages to appeal to non-technical people, but personally I consider it a fundamental issue. Cobol was also designed this way, but there is a reason we now use algebraic-like notation for programming and not Cobol.
It's relatively easy to write and understand a declaration like x1 = (-b + sqrt(b^2-4*a*c)) / 2*a, but if you try to express that as an English sentence you are going to be in pain, and anybody trying to read the result is going to be in a lot of pain.
I think it's very weird that a lot of SQL queries are built by concatenating strings that are afterwards parsed by the database engine. I feel like asking if the transmission should done by printing and scanning punch cards as well. We have so many ways to structure data in a logical way, it would make much more sense for queries to be defined, transmitted and read as a logically structured object rather than a string.
And yes, non-technical may be able to use SQL and would not understand structured data. They are also able to understand spreadsheets and not C++, but we still code in C++.
I'm fairly impressed by the practicality of the North Korean government deciding to make money by modern-day privateering on the digital high seas. Considering they are practically unreachable, protected as they are by China and holding a gun to South Korea's head, there is virtually no downside to doing this.
Google archives or used to archive data on media that could not be overwritten or deleted. The way they handle the fact that it must be possible to delete data for legal reasons is by encrypting the data, and storing the decryption key separately. Instead of deleting the data, they delete the decryption key, so the archive becomes unreadable for all practical purposes.
I'm mildly curious of what issues will come from using in UK systems that have been built for the right side of the road. One would think that "you just need to flip everything and it's all the same", but I'm pretty sure that the engineers are going to have surprises, and at some point somebody will facepalm and say "oh yeah wrong side". In how many places does the code need to be adapted? How do you make sure you catch all these places?
Of course, in theory you would start the code on the very first day by defining the boolean variable driving_on_right_side and use it everywhere, but it's almost certain nobody thought of it at the time, and even after they did, programmers would still often automatically assume the side of the road without thinking about it.
It's rare these days to get an insight into the workings of crypto stuff that is still understandable, though I suppose this particular story is technically not really about cryptography.
To be honest, I'm not even sure that what they did is illegal, though they apparently exploited the system to get more information than they were supposed to. It reminds me of the high frequency trading algorithms which apparently offer the same trade at multiple prices and cancel them after getting confirmation, just to find the maximum price that the trade can happen.
Apart from that, it seems they were able to briefly corner the market for some particularly illiquid cryptocurrencies, which again is not particularly illegal.
I don't think this really seems a threat to cryptocurrencies in general either. Not only did they immediately get found out, the problem of laundering the money is always going to be a problem.
Actually no. The good websites will starve, and the crap ones will survive... Because it takes orders of magnitude more work/money to build something good than something crap. Nowadays, you have thousands of websites that just auto-generate content and try to push it onto you. They don't get a lot of revenue, but it costs peanuts to maintain so they still end up ahead. The good websites, however, those that pay actually people to write good articles, need a more stable source of revenue, and if they lose that they will die out.
For car deaths, we don't have enough data. Though you'd think there's a lot of car deaths, the number in the US is only 15 deaths for one billion vehicle miles. Proper self-driving cars haven't driven nearly enough to get a reliable estimate, partly because they generally don't drive on highways.
These rules on having to give a reason why you access the API but please only use it this way but not that way look reaaally safe. I wonder if Apple even tries to enforce it. Maybe it's possible when the app is a few hundred lines of code, but something like Chrome probably runs in the millions. To be honest, I'd be astonished if the coders who work on Chrome even know about these requirements.
I recall that Firefox changed the default from Google to Yahoo at some point, no doubt against suitable compensation; but they changed back after a couple of years "because it was worse for users". Nothing said about the sums involved of course.
I wonder what Apple will do if Google can't pay them anymore to be the default. They could probably get some money from Microsoft to set Bing as default, but probably not nearly as much, since Microsoft knows they have no real competitor that can bid billions, and a lot of users will change right back to Google anyway. Would Apple still keep Google as default, but without the billions payment?
Ad industry rivals, not so much concerned about the privacy aspect of the whole affair, worry that Google's reimagined tech stack will put them at a competitive disadvantage by denying them the data they use to make their ads more effective.
Well, yeah. Dropping third party cookies is a privacy improvement, so it's bad for them. Google is the one actor in the whole industry who needs third party cookies the least, which is technically a good thing in this case because otherwise they would not going forward with this. Every time Google pushes for privacy, it's because it fucks everybody equally but they stay ahead.
I assume that Tesla cars are able to drive in reverse, so they must have a lever to control that, which very probably also has a neutral and park mode.
EDIT: holy shit it's not a lever it's a fucking touch screen:
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_eu/GUID-E9B387D7-AFEF-4AAF-8685-4FE71E09287D.html
There is practically no technology that can be prevented from existing. It's good that they are not releasing it, but it's good that they can demonstrate this is possible and there was no point in stopping themselves from creating something so dangerous — what they did is not that hard, it is not a mind-blowing advance on what other people are doing. At the most we are one year away from the same technology being developed and actively used by bad actors.
To be honest, I have a hard time believing people care that much about privacy — If they did, they would be a lot more careful about what they do on the internet. I think people use adblockers because they don't want ads, and YouTube could remove the behavior tracking and users wouldn't uninstall the adblockers.
This is why monopolies, or as the case may be duopolies, are bad. When they launched their app stores, nobody argued against the 30% commissions, because it was a smallish market. But the market has ballooned, and at some point they were making money hand over fist, and the 30% commission was becoming disproportionate. With a market functioning properly, rival app stores would have been created with smaller commission fees, and eventually they would have had to lower theirs as well to stay relevant. But since nobody could create another app store for the iPhone, and even for Android the starter advantage of the play store was overwhelming, they never had to do that. If anything, they have become more strict in grabbing a share of everything that was getting paid through their platforms.
So now, countries have to intervene to protect competitors, and the users who are ultimately paying for the fees.
with a weird track gauge (for odd reasons known only to the locals).
I forgot the place where I read this, but apparently BART was designed by engineers at local universities who had no experience whatsoever in rail systems. Consequentially, they thought the best possible thing to do was to reinvent everything from scratch — can't be just following what people developed over decades of experimentation, need to invent something revolutionary. In particular, they infamously designed BART with cylindrical wheels, leading to screeching noise and wear and tear. Forty years later, they finally just changed to conical wheels like all other trains in the world. By designing something very different from all existing systems, they also ensured that it was way more expensive to build and maintain.
As a home owner you need to be budgeting for 10 year replacement.
I don't get this. My parents' house has the same roof tiles as when it got built in 1978... I don't think I've ever seen somebody replace a roof, unless the whole building gets renovated.
I recall that each query costs a few cents, and Google has billions of users. It's all very well to speak of democratization of access, and Google says they want to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful... But these days, they also really insist on not losing money.
Self-driving cars have been around for quite a while, and they thought of that. If you attempt to steal the car it will simply not drive:
Man arrested and accused of trying to steal a self-driving taxi in L.A.
Arguably the John Oliver show was the greatest deciding factor in passing the net neutrality rules in the first place, all the way back in 2015, by encouraging viewers to write to the FCC:
https://youtu.be/fpbOEoRrHyU?t=757
Though this regrettably resulted in a massive roboted spam campaign when the FCC head wanted those rules removed...
No matter what Google tracks and does not track, nothing prevents third-party websites or your ISP from tracking you when you are in incognito mode; and there's nothing Google can do about that. Incognito has never been about tracking; the only use it to hide your surfing habits from your wife.
The fourth amendment only regulates what the government is allowed to do, not private companies. Just like the first amendment, as we've been repeatedly reminded these past few years: Companies are allowed to block your speech on their platforms, it's just the government who technically can't order them.
There are still people trying to sell them! I recently saw a hotel showing NFTs on a wall, and apparently all you had to do to buy them was scan a QR code.
I know a guy who claims he made money on every NFT he's bought and sold. He carefully neglects to mention that there's some he's bought, but never sold...
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