In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.
So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.
Takes like this are an optical illusion meant to create the idea that there is an insane amount of money freely floating around that is just being hoarded.
But just like that money is generated, it's also all spent.
So the actual hard part is deciding what not to spend money on so we can build some crazy physics machines with a blurry ROI instead.
> Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money
Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.
Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion. The second we're able to understand and capture this energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective. I'll continually preach that we need to plan for this economically as a species because none of our current government or economic systems will survive the death of scarcity.
> Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion.
Is it?
You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.
You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.
We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
My point is that you shouldn't believe in marketing claims that are obviously too good to be true, like
> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.
I mean obviously this statement is false as we live in a finite section of the visible universe.
This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.
I totally agree about the management reluctance to just own everything in house.
But I think it’s plausible that SaaS companies will be easier to start with AI coding, and with lower costs (thanks to AI) they will be able to get into the black with a smaller addressable market. So each one can have a different mix of fewer features, for different segments of customers, at lower prices.
The result would be a loss of pricing power by the incumbent do-everything big guys: no more baked-in 10% annual increases. Which is still a pretty big change in their economics. And therefore valuations.
The companies that already have a strong in-house team will greatly benefit from AI. Many of those who don't are in that situation because managers have PTSD from so many failed projects.
Half of all projects fail. That's a lot of emotional trauma.
This was all possible pre-AI. The reasons that some Saas companies win have nothing to do with how quickly or cheaply code can be written for the Saas.
It absolutely offers some legal protection. If it is implemented correctly, no legal framework for it is required. Government forces you to enter your password. You comply and enter "a" password. The device shows contents. You did what you were asked to do. If there is no way for the government to prove that you entered a decoy password that shows decoy contents, you are in the clear. Done correctly (in device and OPSEC) government can't prove you entered your decoy password so you can't be held in contempt. And that is the entire point. It is not like asking the government to give your "plausible deniability" rights. It is about not potentially incriminating yourself against people that abuse the system to force you to incriminate yourself.
> You comply and enter "a" password. The device shows contents. You did what you were asked to do.
No, you did something fake to avoid doing what you were asked to do.
> If there is no way for the government to prove that you entered a decoy password that shows decoy contents, you are in the clear.
But there are very effective ways to find hidden encrypted volumes on devices. And then you’ll be asked to decrypt those too, and then what?
This sort of thing is already table stakes for CSAM prosecutions, for example. Law enforcement can read the same blog posts and know as much about technology as you do. Especially if we are hypothesizing an advertised feature of a commercial OS!
>No, you did something fake to avoid doing what you were asked to do.
Yes, that is what plausible deniability is.
>But there are very effective ways to find hidden encrypted volumes on devices. And then you’ll be asked to decrypt those too, and then what?
I emphasized "done right". If existence of hidden encryption can be proven, then you don't have plausible deniability. Something has gone wrong.
My point was: OP claimed plausible deniability does not apply in legal cases which is a weird take. If you can have plausible deniability, then it can save you legally. This does not only apply to tech of course, but encryption was the subject here. In all cases though, if your situation is not "plausible" (due to broken tech, backdoors, poor OPSEC in tech, and / or damning other evidence in other cases as well) then you don't have plauisble deniability by definition.
Having ways of definitively detecting hidden encrypted volumes might be the norm today, might be impossible tomorrow. Then you will have plausible deniability and it will work legally as far as that piece of "evidence" is concerned.
Every artificial satellite falls around the Earth in a little bubble of terrestrial national law.
On the ground, legal notions of private property provide some legal protections against national government interference. But there is no private real property in space. 100% of the volume of space is subject to the direct jurisdiction of terrestrial national governments. Every artificial satellite persists only because they are permitted to do so by their national government.
Because of the speed and energy involved, in the U.S. all private space activity is a matter of national security. This means that there are far fewer legal protections, not more. The U.S. president could directly order SpaceX to do almost anything, and they would have to comply. Musk spends tremendous energy and money maintaining alignment with the governments he needs to satisfy to stay in business.
Legend has it only a dragon writer could defeat tptacek on Hacker News.
Also I find it kind of weird that the search box is case-sensitive. HN itself preserves capitalization when rendering usernames to the page, but must not be case sensitive in the backend since the username shows up in URLs.
Yea If I remember correctly, its the backend which is case-sensitive.
Don't worry though. I am still thinking of fixing the case-sensitive issue.
I had gone to run some errands. Right now, how I am thinking of fixing it is via thinking of using algolia api or maybe by having a singular request to news.ycombinator.com itself while still being client side but I have to see if that's possible/what's easier.
Edit: Almost done. I just wanted to see what LLM's might think of it. So wanted to see them (go wild?) [ie. without my bias of algolia api because I was (thinking?) of other ways too also a better thing was that I was procastinating with the implementation a bit] so pasted it.
It* decided that a better response was to lowercase the username fields and then lowercase the input.
I think I had overarchitected a solution and in hindsight, I thought that the idea of lowercasing usernames would've been slow but clickhouse is a beast too.
I think I was almost thinking the same thing too. Going to update the website with case sensitivity pretty quick.
Thanks! Case insensitivity is useful for mobile visits because the iPhone keyboard by default is capitalizing the first letter typed into that field. That would work for your username, but mine was not found initially. It is now, after your update.
For context, the U.S. is also currently investigating whether Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election (he didn’t), whether aspirin causes autism (it doesn’t), and whether transgenic research is woke (it’s not).
“The U.S. investigates” unfortunately does not mean as much as it used to. That said, I would rest easy in the knowledge that someone deep in the NSA already knows with absolute certainty whether the WhatsApp client app is doing anything weird. But they’re not likely to talk to a reporter or plaintiffs lawyer.
Warsh played a substantive role in addressing the financial crisis in 2008 and has a lot of relationships and respect across financial markets.
How independent will he be? Who knows. But folks believe he is at least knowledgeable and competent. Which is not widely believed of all the president’s appointees.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with flying Mexican flags. Americans fly flags of other countries all the time. There are English flags all over a nearby pub in my area. Heck, there is an entire national holiday for celebrating the Irish—a holiday for which the Defense Department made an exception to its policy of avoiding cultural observances.
The overreach by the current administration is what is driving the volume of protest activity. Specifically the high-volume targeting of lawful residents and Hispanic-looking citizens, and the “show your papers” geographical sweeps—none of which fit typical American notions of what is lawful.
To some extent this overreach is intentional, as an exercise in generating social media content, and to intentionally make people upset as a pretext for deploying greater levels of force.
It also seems politically performative since the current administration is focusing efforts in Chicago, Minnesota, Maine, etc, not Texas or Florida where there are far more undocumented immigrants.
There were protests against the Obama deportation campaign but they were far smaller because the campaign itself stayed within bounds that fit most people’s notions of lawfulness and propriety. They also did not make the huge mistake of deciding in advance to all-out defend every single bad decision by every law enforcement agent. That alone is a huge factor in the pushback that officials are getting, even from GOP and 2A leaders.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with flying a Mexican flag - if you are trying to create a lighting rod to attract all the anti-immigrant vitriol. It's the same kind of dumb as "defund the police" - actively harmful.
And I strongly suspect that if I flew a Russian flag in the very liberal and tolerant Bay Area my house might just accidentally catch fire. Despite my right to do so.
I vouched for this comment, which got flagged dead. It’s got an accusatory tone, which is not great. But it also has accurate substance.
It’s true that westerners visiting nations like PNG for work are often cloistered behind elaborate security. This is in part because the organization has legal responsibility for sending those workers, and the deterrent security measures are way less expensive than the legal and PR headache of an incident. In addition, well-funded and highly organized foreign businesses attract local ire in ways that random individuals do not.
In any one of those countries at any given time there are also foreigners passing through on travel or less organized work (e.g. academia) who experience the country without that thick security layer… and are perfectly fine.
May be because they have less money. Almost any westerner is much richer than the locals, so makes a good target in a way that most South Americans do not.
This is true of a lot of foreign countries where people somewhat exaggerate the security issues, but really isn't of PNG. It's the kind of place where it's not just the foreigners who need a thick security layer to travel, there are plenty of places in the country where no official government representatives could safely travel to without basically bringing the army.
So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
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