Thiel lost his shit because Gawker mentioned he was gay in an article on their site. Something _everybody_ in Silicon Valley already knew. Then he goes and forms what essentially amounts to a private CIA.
How about Musk? He felt he had a right to hoover up data about people from every government agency, but throws a massive temper-tantrum when people publish where his private jet is flying using publicly available data.
How about Mark Zuckerberg? So private he buys up all the properties around him and has his private goon squad stopping people on public property who live in the neighborhood, haranguing them just for walking past or near the property.
These people are all supremely hypocritical when it comes to privacy.
i hate defending thiel since hes literally destroying society, but he didn't get mad at gawker just for outing him
he got mad at gawker for deliberately outing him right as he went to meet the saudis for negotiations. a country that literally executes gay people. at best it strained the negotiations and made things awkward, and at worst could have put him in peril.
you dont just out people without their consent, and that goes for rich or poor.
So he was willing to make a business deal with the country that executes gay people, as long as HE wasn't in danger? Legitimizing their regime is perfectly OK if it doesn't affect him? The fact that he was negotiating with them makes that incident look even worse for him, not Gawker
Maybe his social media profiles at the time (public, because I'm not "friends" with him) shouldn't have included photos and posts about gay cruise ship vacations.
Or perhaps don't do business with people who would happily execute you? All that says to me is Thiel values money over anything else.
The insinuation that Gawker in any way shape or form "outed" him is just laughable.
Gawker is absolutely trash media, to be quite clear.
> and that goes for rich or poor
I do agree about this, for certain things - but in others, no - and indeed, courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently "public figures"... "due to their outsized influence on public affairs and opinion".
I also have significant issues with his bankrolling of Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker as an abomination of the legal system, including the right to face one's "accuser":
- Hogan had already agreed in principle to a part ownership stake and profits of Gawker.
- Lawyers paid for by Thiel pushed for him to drop that and push instead for bankrupting Gawker through damages (which were laughable, see below). (Hypothetical question, if you're an attorney, ostensibly representing Hogan, but you know the person paying your bills, Thiel, wants a different outcome for the case, when push comes to shove, whose interests are you going to represent? See the following point too).
- When the case and awarded damages -did- actually threaten to bankrupt Gawker, Thiel/Hogan's lawyers did the most illogical thing possible, if they were looking to recoup any money for their ostensible client... they dropped the one claim against Gawker that would have allowed their liability insurance to at least partially pay out.
(Re damages: The amount that Hogan had originally asked for seemed reasonable. Then after Thiel's lawyers got involved, the amount asked for was multiplied five thousand times.
This included economic damages of fifty million dollars. For a man who had made something in the order of $10-15M his entire career? Who had a net worth at its peak of $30M, and at the time of the lawsuit of $8M? I highly doubt that TV stations pulling reruns of old WWF events, lost hair commercial and other endorsements was worth that. (They separately asked for emotional damages, too, to be clear. But there was near zero justification for this economic damages claim.)
I wonder how much Thiel paid Hogan under the table for this proxy lawsuit?
This has been going on for a long, long time. Motorola used to make Android phones that would burn an efuse in the SoC if it thought it was being rooted or jailbroken, bricking the phone.
Phillips, GE, Cree, and others sell high-CRI bulbs.
10 years ago you had to work to find high CRI bulbs but could still find Cree bulbs pretty easily. Now you can get high CRI bulbs at the grocery store.
High CRI bulbs generally have low or no flicker because high CRI is toward the premium end of the market.
Almost all of the bulbs you can find at a hardware store (let alone grocery store) exhibit terrible 120hz flicker. I know because I've literally tried every single one. Also it's not hard to get "high" (~90-94) CRI while nonetheless having terrible deep reds.
Out of the manufacturers you listed, only Philips Ultra Definition (95 CRI, R9 90) have low flicker and good R9. Unfortunately they are poorly made and I have to keep buying new packs each year but it's more cost effective than Yuji for lesser used areas.
Also the claim from TFA is that NIR component improves visual performance (and I've read elsewhere that NIR also has health benefits).
How about Phillips flicker-free "warm glow" bulbs? I honestly have a hard time believing that they flicker because I can literally unscrew the bulb and watch it dim gradually over the course of a second. Which indicates to me that there's a capacitor in front of the LED drivers smoothing the current out. (Which I guess is required to be compatible with triac dimmers anyway.)
Never tried those, but speaking about flicker, some LED lamps flicker not because of the mains frequency (50/60 Hz depending on where you live) but because of their internal switching power supplies.
It's mostly a crapshoot even within the same model line. Even under "Philips UltraDefinition" some styles have high flicker while others don't. I'm not sure being dimmable is any guarantee of smoothing quality, in fact dimming is usually implemented with PWM as I understand so the easy solution to avoid flicker of chucking a smoothing capacitor on there might make it harder to implement dimming. (To dim properly without noticeable I think you'd have to PWM in the kHz range. Even cheap CFLs necessarily had the technology to operate on this frequency, for some reason it seems rare for LEDs to do it.)
Huh, through experience with (mostly non-premium) LED bulbs, I've learned to interpret "gradually dims over the course of a second" an an early indicator of imminent bulb failure.
If you look at energy efficiency, it totally is. But the whole point in the discussion is that IR _might_ (according to the paper) have biological relevance.
The guy in charge of Go's security decreed that SSL 1.3 (which he was a contributor to) was so secure that silly programmers should not be able to override what algorithms are allowed or not allowed, because why would they possibly need to do that, because he's such a genius, and even if someone DID find a security vulnerability, well....they can just wait for Google to publicly disclose it and release a patch, compile the new version, update their code to work with that version of Go, rebuild their containers, put stuff through testing, and then release it into production.
Versus...seeing there's a vulnerability, someone adding a one-line change to disable the vulnerable algorithm, compile, image update, test. And a lot less testing because you're not moving to a new version of the language / compiler.
The man has no practical experience in running a production network service, an ego the size of a small moon, and yet was a major contributor to a security protocol now in use by billions of people.
But hey, you can be a handbag designer and end up head of design at Apple soooooooo
Lots of the real world vulnerabilities out there exist exactly because of people choosing to support a range of crypto algorithms.
Sure, if it's an internal tool you can recompile both ends and force a universal update. But anything else and you need to stay compatible with clients and anytime you allow negotiation of the cryptosuit you open yourself up to quite a few subtle attacks. Not saying that choice about go is clearly a good one but i don't think it's obviously wrong.
> Since I use my laptop for programming and often use it in low light conditions such as a living room with dimmed lights in the evening, OLED just doesn't make sense.
What? Low light is ideal for OLED compared to most LCDs where in low light contrast is poor due to bleed-through on the black areas via the backlight. The problem here isn't the laptop, it's between the keyboard and chair.
> I narrowed it down to two options: Buy a refurbished M1 or M2 Macbook and run Asahi Linux Buy a Framework
...or stop being a dogmatic baby about your OS and run MacOS, which is infinitely better than Linux as a desktop OS?
> I looked at some other brands but it appears that in 2025 there's just aren't many good options for Linux users
A market of less than 1% has terrible options? *gasp*
The only people still using Linux on desktop are people who think that *twenty five years* into "the year of the linux desktop" this will be the year that Linux doesn't stop being the worst option for a desktop OS.
If 2/3rds of the current linux distros hung up the hat and went to go help with other distros, there _might_ actually be progress on this front - but the nerds are too interested in fighting over asinine personal preference type things nobody else cares about, to actually make a distro that works properly and reliably. The Linux world is so hopelessly fragmented and there's thousands of people doing the same work as at least 6 other people all because they think their particular way of installing a linux package is better or their file layout is best.
Literally nothing keeps the power equipment industry from making their carb parts out of components that won't rust except being cheap asses and wanting to sell parts and kits and keep their dealers happy with repair business.
We still do for piston aircraft, thanks to intense lobbying by the aviation piston engine industry.
There's even a 100LL alternative that has sailed through most tests the FAA requires but the FAA has been stonewalling them for something like a decade. The FAA is full of paper-pushing corrupt beaurocrats who are firmly in the pocket of industry, as demonstrated by the thousands of victims of Boeing crashes from the idiocy of the MAX program (wherein Boeing did not want to spend the money to redesign an aircraft for bigger passenger and cargo loads, so they just stretched the plane, which put the Cg out of whack, which meant they needed to have a computer help fly the plane...and then skimped on redundancy.)
I don’t think that an unleaded fuel is 100% ready to go, but you’re absolutely right that the FAA is a huge reason why. My plane is certified for 80/87 (a fuel no longer produced) but the paperwork involved means I’ll just keep burning 100LL for the foreseeable future. With all the engine damage that incurs.
I'm sure you wouldn't throw stones from a glass house. Either way, I suspect you're reading what I wrote as "well, this is easier and I don't care enough to put in the effort." Conversely, there is currently no realistic (not to mention safe) path forward. I am subject to significant and rigid regulation that precludes any other action. My comment was intended to point out the absurdity of the situation in the hope that awareness can lead to change.
Aviation is currently going through a chicken & egg situation much like the electric vehicle charging network. Unfortunately, it's hampered by regulatory inertia. To blame that on an individual is wildly counterproductive.
It seems more like an incredible feat of bureaucratic perverse incentives. How is the thing that poisons people the default and the thing that doesn't is what requires specific government-imposed costs?
Didn't Toyota (note I'm not an expert) build a diesel that they hoped to certify for smaller planes since it can run on standard jet fuel but couldn't get it approved and abandoned it?
That manufacturer falls under "fool, money, parted, easily." A Finalmouse which is probably the pinnacle of lightweight gaming mice, costs about $180 and they want $100-ish more than that?
> Yes, it's expensive but it still costs less than replacing mice over and over.
I have a ten year old Razer Ultimate still going strong, buddy. $100 new.
> My otherwise mild skin condition completely destroys the shitty grippy/gummy rubber they put on scrollwheels and sometimes the sides of the mice.
No, whatever you're putting on your skin is. In any case: buy a $20 set of grips/pads and problem solved...
> the carbon fiber rod that snaps into place horizontally across the shape makes it more rigid than the stock mouse.
If you're having issues with rigidity of your mouse, you're holding it too tight...
I think you've missed every point I was making, keep up the good work.
> Finalmouse
Trash product, none of the people I play with or against use one. You've kind of outed yourself here but I'll humor you further.
> I have a ten year old mouse that works fine
Good for you. I assure you I use mine far, far more than you. If you knew who I was you could go find me on esportsearnings, I've won against and have played with some of the people you see in mice ads.
> No, whatever you're putting on your skin is
I don't put anything on my skin. My body makes far more of everything than it needs. I have to wipe them down with a bit of soap and water every few hours or they will be absolutely caked in skin. If I wait more than 4 days to file or cut my fingernails they are disgustingly long.
> buy a $20 set of grips/pads and problem solved
Have you ever tried doing this? They are attached to the shell with adhesives that cannot be removed without also destroying the plastic underneath.
> rigidity
Was highlighting how the weight reduction does not come at the cost of structural stability. If you knew what you were talking about you'd know many struggle with squeezing the mouse too hard. I do not have this issue
Stop pretending like Schmidt was or is "one of the good guys." They all knew from day one what the score was.
reply