Article claims SPLC is a civil rights org that tracks extremist groups.
That was surely once true, decades ago, but they long ago jumped the postmodern shark and now are largely just calling anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a nazi. The folks, sorry I mean "folx" running it now are not trying to track extremist groups, they are documenting anyone who isn't down for the omnicause, anyone who has questions about the revolution.
Once upon a time, a political group who kept public enemy lists (SLPC "hate map) would have been seen as extremist, something not done in a pluralist democracy. Today it's standard operating procedure for critical social justice activism. If you've ever used your own eyes, looked in your pants and concluded that humans are sexually dimorphic, you're probably on the hate map.
In case your simple biology marks you as male, have you ever looked down your chest and noticed those two nipples? Yes, biology and thus sex and gender is very messy and complicated. But for the beginning, at first, you should only try to comprehend the fact that men can even -- against gods perfect design -- produce milk.
I am not a single bit sorry about shaking your overly simplistic world. Maybe, someday you might even comprehend the harm, your ignorance causes.
How could i not call the behavior of pretending biology is simple while going through life with the f'ing counter indication on your body "ignorant". Maybe you are a better candidate for therapy than all those who do not conform to your simplistic norms.
More likely, they already knew what they wanted to say, data or no data: Israel/US, bad: global revolution, good. They have to keep the pressure up so they need to write papers and get articles written about those papers and then get them posted on hacker news regardless of what actually happened. It’s a constant grind, but I suppose it will all be worth it for them if they get appointed on the committee of the vanguard or something like that.
Obv if they have an issue with your usage, they should have told you that up front, but as has been litigated on HN over and over again - no one is actually offering unlimited usage of anything, no matter how many times they use the word unlimited. They may have used that word, the word may even have some legal meaning where you live, but one way or another, their capacity is limited, and your payments are limited, so their ability to serve you & their other customers is limited too. If the issues they are having really are coming from your usage, they are either going to drop you or drop the unlimited plan. Enjoy it while it lasts!
Shoutout to Arq backup which simply gives you an option in backup plans for what to do with cloud only files:
- report an error
- ignore
- materialize
Regardless, if you make it back up software that doesn’t give this level of control to users, and you make a change about which files you’re going to back up, you should probably be a lot more vocal with your users about the change. Vanishingly few people read release notes.
I honestly didn't even realize Backblaze had a clientside app. Very happy user of Arq - been running a daily scheduled dual backup of my HDD to an external NAS and Backblaze B2 for years with zero issues.
I for one would pay for Arq on Linux as I now do on Mac. It would be fantastic to be able to use the same "it just works" backup solution on all my computers.
And I've used enough "gold standard" commercial applications, like the one being discussed in this very article, that I don't trust those either. If you recoil in horror at code written by LLMs, I'm afraid that the vendors you're already working with have some really bad news for you. You can get over it now or get over it later. You will get over it.
I can audit and verify Claude's output. Code running at BackBlaze, not so much. Take some responsibility for your data. Rest assured, nobody else will.
You are not wrong, but I just don't have time. My choices are pay someone or throw my hands up. I have been paying backblaze. But I recently had a drive die, and discovered the backups are missing .exe and .dll files, and so that part of the restore was worthless.
What time I do have, I've been using to try and figure out photo libraries. Nothing is working the way I need it to. The providers are a mess of security restrictions and buggy software.
My favorite Peanuts comic was always the one where Linus is standing at an intersection next to a 'Push Button To Cross Street' sign. He is sucking his thumb and clutching his blanket despondently.
In the last panel, Charlie Brown tells him, "You have to move your feet, too."
Some software has millions or even billions of users. The cost of 16 GB multiplied by million millions or billions would pay for a lot of refactoring.
That said, I think it’s more of a collective action problem. The person who could pay for the refactor to operate in 640 K is not the same person who has to pay for the 16 GB. And yes, the 16 GB is cheap enough in comparison to other costs that the latter group doesn’t necessarily notice that they are subsidizing inefficient development.
I think stavros means amortization on an individual level - if all software is bloated and requires 16GB to run then my expense for a 16GB stick is not caused by a single piece of software, but everything I use.
Not that I agree of course :) I’m talking more of the net negative of everyone needing to buy 16gb sticks so developers can YOLO vibe-coded unoptimized garbage. But at least I think the former explanation is what stavros meant :)
I remember when they told us that autonomous cars wouldn’t break laws and wouldn’t speed.
I always felt this was just a strategy, and that soon enough fleet operators would turn up the dials on speed and aggressiveness. After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.
There are highways in the US where drivers regularly go 10-20 over the speed limit, if not more; maintaining the speed limit on a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65, will be dangerous for everyone involved, both the cars approaching the slowpoke at 20+ miles an hour, and the slowpoke itself.
I don't know how Waymo is going to square that circle.
That's Phoenix, it's here. Waymos commit to nominally keep the speed at the speed limit but it is _extremely noticeable_ that that's the case because literally NO ONE drives 65 on the freeways here. Everyone is at minimum at 74. It's a rite of passage in Arizona. It's not even a speeding ticket until 75. Goes back to the 70s with the feds trying to force speed limit laws or threatening to revoke highway funding. Arizona said "fine, but it's not a speeding ticket. it's 'misuse of a finite resource.'"
So you'll see the Waymos kind of puttering along at 65 as everyone zooms around them. They DO say they'll occasionally exceed speeds when it's safer to do so, but it's obvious they don't want a narrative of them being speed demons and flying around exceeding the speed limit.
I used to live in a place where this was common -- the issue was not just speed, but a general disregard for traffic law because traffic law was unenforced. You could be going 50 in a 35 and someone would aggressively pass you. At some point, the road is simply occupied by unsafe drivers and there's not much you can do other than hold your line and be as predictable as possible to the aggressive drivers around you.
I understand this phenomenon and experienced it when I used to drive. What I found so revealing was it ultimately meant that the people weren’t actually driving their cars.
Each ostensibly independent driver was being forced to drive a certain way by the most aggressive driver behind them, and in turn they were required to force the driver ahead of them to drive in the same way.
> a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65
If this is the case, then the speed limit is too low. To control speed on such a road you either need draconian enforcement or you need to change the road so people aren't comfortable driving that fast. Make the lanes narrower, introduce lane shifts or reduce the number of lanes, etc.
A large problem in speed limit setting is that 85th percentile is used many times for setting the speed limit and other factors are ignored or aren't weighted as heavily.
It's a very fuzzy practice, and I think as we continue towards an automated driving world, we need to be more critical of how speed limits are set.
Using the 85th percentile as a means to determine speed limits ends up with 15% of all drivers exceeding the speed limit, or worse, more drivers exceed the speed limit than those original 15% because they know consequences may be rare.
Sometimes bad road design (e.g. lanes too wide) are to blame, but in miserable neighborhoods with no traffic enforcement at rush hour you can also end up in a situation where the majority of people on the road are simply aggressive drivers who are familiar with the road. At some point you do need to enforce the law if it isn't being respected. There is a growing subset of people in the US who not only disregard traffic law but pride themselves in a distain for it.
IDK if it's draconian but speed cameras or simply forcing cars to have modules that report speeds at certain points and issue fines automatically should be standard by now. What's the point of having smarter cars if they can't be forced to stay below the legal speed limit.
I don't think building enforcement into cars would be a good idea, or even effective, but a few speed cameras work wonders for changing the overall 'temperature' of driving in an area.
Falsehoods programmers believe about speed limits:
1. The speed limit of a road is always marked by a sign
2. The speed limit of a road is in a database
3. You can look up the GPS location of a vehicle to determine what road it is on
4. Roads have exactly one speed limit at any one moment in time
5. Speed limits rarely change
6. Well, maybe speed limits do change, but only during certain fixed times
7. Roads have speed limits
8. Cars are only driven on roads
9. There are no exceptions for following speed limits
10. Well maybe there are but we can safely ignore those without any real consequences
[...]
I've personally done some software experimentation with speed limit detection in vehicles. The combined accuracy of automatic-traffic-sign recognition and speed limit databases + GPS is far less than 100% in real world driving conditions.
There's a road near me that just dropped the speed limit to 40. This is a divided road, two 12-foot lanes in each direction, good visibility, with turning lanes at intersections. It's highway-class. Most people drive 55 or 60, because that speed feels appropriate and reasonably safe (search the "85th percentile" rule in setting speed limits to read more about this).
By reducing the speed limit to 40 the road is IMO less safe, because there are always some people who very conscientiously do not exceed the posted speed limit. So now you have some people driving 40, while most people still want to go 55 or 60. This creates an unsafe mix of vehicle speeds.
I'm fairly certain "slower traffic keep right" is part of the expected flow.
Maybe the Waymo is technically speeding, but so is everyone else, because speed limits aren't magic, and if the de-facto limit ends up being 50 when the posted limit is 40 or 45, going slower creates extra conflict points for accidents.
Get it straight. It is going faster than the speed limit that creates extra conflict points for accidents. That's the problem. If better enforcement is needed via cameras, radar, etc, then that's the solution....not everyone speeding. Speed kills.
Just slightly over half of US states require you to move right to yield to faster traffic. In some places it is completely allowable to drive the speed limit in the left lane.
>After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.
I'm not sure how you can earnestly make this claim while reading people complaining about the speed and aggressiveness. Do you suspect you're replying to ghosts?
Tesla specifically programmed their self driving mode to roll through stop signs without stopping. I don't think anyone has believed the claims of the self driving marketers for a long time now.
People are getting wise they can abuse these cars on the road, cut them off, not let them in. Waymo needs to respond like other drivers in the city if they want to merge lanes, force their way into the lane and demand space is created.
> there has to be a real purpose. Escorting a bunch of privately owned oil tankers to bring down the price of gas does not really cut it.
While I agree with you in principle, if I have learned anything about politics it is that under whatever political system you care to invent, the people will definitely demand war and a navy to escort private oil tankers if it means they get to drive for $0.01 less per gallon.
Normally I wouldn't think the American public would be so shallow.
But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside her car about the price of gas being $3.65 a gallon. Wild.
So, yeah, perhaps the price of gas is high enough that the public would tolerate some heavy collateral damage at this point.
The issue though is that this won't get us maritime supremacy. To get civilian tankers through the strait you need that. Iran will still take the occasional shot at these ships and who in their right mind would put their ship into a situation where there is even a 1 in 2000 chance you will be struck? At the end we will have boots on the ground, with real casualties, potentially a ship or two actually damaged and Iran unleashed and attacking everyone's critical oil infrastructure and water infrastructure. They will even probably find a way to hit a ship or two in the red sea just to spread the panic. My original point was that we could 'just blow things up' and get in there, not that we would succeed in achieving a great military objective.
Yes, i think the Trump admin has escalated itself into a situation that either involves ground troops or leaving without opening the strait.
The first is bad due to the losses that will be incurred and the difficulty of holding territory.. for unclear strategic reasons (I thought we destroyed their nuclear program last summer / what was the urgency / is this even our war?). The second is bad because the strait was open before this started, so things are worse than starting conditions.
That is not to say Iran is winning. Remember this is not a sports game, and no one needs to win. It is possible, and likely, for everyone to lose (be in a worse position than prior).
> either involves ground troops or leaving without opening the strait.
These options are not mutually exclusive.
> That is not to say Iran is winning.
They are though, the US administration has already lost it's patience, their strategic objectives (whatever they might have been have clearly not materialized), the talk about talks may very well be the administration preparing to make a bunch of concessions proclaim victory and walk away.
As it's possible for both parties to lose, a party can win all the battles and lose the war.
It is hard to game out the best scenario here. Wait, it really isn't. We should just stop. Make a deal with Iran, accept egg on our face and step back. Why? Because they are destabilized. They are likely to crumble. If we keep attacking then they stay alive. If we go away then they have to deal with their broken infra and deeply unhappy population. They were on the path until we hit them. Then, like nearly every country ever, it gave their government legitimacy. If we walk away and focus, hard, on helping the gulf nations that we just hurt badly it will stabilize the region and allow them to fall. But that will never happen because we went into this due to ego and we will stay due to ego.
What if Iran escalates when US decides to go? I don’t think US can go without leaving a power vacuum, which, given current forces positioning, would benefit Iran most probably. I don’t see a path to helping Gulf nations, which will pragmatically be inclined to work with Iran as neither of them can leave like US can.
>That is not to say Iran is winning. Remember this is not a sports game, and no one needs to win. It is possible, and likely, for everyone to lose (be in a worse position than prior).
As of right now, Iran looks likely to end the war with permanent control of the strait of Hormutz. They'll tax the gulf countries in perpetuity.
Gulf countries can't reasonably afford to go to war with Iran over this either, and it's even less likely that they could prevail in such a conflict. Gulf countries can't even afford to go to war with Iran now, with the US actively fighting there.
Iran can suffer terrible short-term and medium-term economic consequences while still establishing a whole new kind of dominance over the region.
> the people will definitely demand war and a navy to escort private oil tankers if it means they get to drive for $0.01 less per gallon.
This was more true in the 70s: the various fuel economy improvements mean that the impact is reportedly less than half this fine, and the millions of people who bought a hybrid or BEV don’t even notice. I think there’s less of an “war at any cost” bloc now, especially after the humiliating collapse of the last Republican president’s big Middle Eastern learning opportunity, and a lot of people would be willing to abandon Israel to fight Netanyahu’s war alone if it saved them money at the pump.
The issue is that the administration has kicked the bee hive, and is now claiming that securing passers by from angry bees has nothing to do with them.
Its a great way to diminish what lingering shreds of trust the (hopefully) former allies of the US may still have had.
The US has better ways to decrease oil prices internally that commit to losing boats in the strait.
Coincidentally about an hour ago, I wanted to look something up in ChatGPT and I happened to be in a browser window I don’t normally use, with no logged in accounts. I assumed it wouldn’t work, but to my surprise with no account, no cookies of any kind it took my query and gave me an answer.
Yeah, additionally gemini.google.com is also free unauthenticated, which I've been using for a very long time (a year?). Why this is being treated as news is confusing.
I used to mostly use chatgpt in an incognito tab, logged out. Until I notice it seems to have some context of my logged in session, and of the logged out as well. It may be paranoia or prompt deduction as well but that felt strange.
You’d have to devise some sort of fire proof mini airlock, large enough for a laptop or whatever the largest device you expect to deal with. This would be pretty expensive and not very practical, but even if it was, then you’d have to deal with the ethical and legal issues of where it lands and whether or not it might cause a fire there too, to say nothing of injuring someone or damaging property.
Sure, I wasn’t trying to imply that it couldn’t be done, only that it would be expensive and impractical for civilian aviation, especially when there are good alternatives.
That was surely once true, decades ago, but they long ago jumped the postmodern shark and now are largely just calling anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders a nazi. The folks, sorry I mean "folx" running it now are not trying to track extremist groups, they are documenting anyone who isn't down for the omnicause, anyone who has questions about the revolution.
Once upon a time, a political group who kept public enemy lists (SLPC "hate map) would have been seen as extremist, something not done in a pluralist democracy. Today it's standard operating procedure for critical social justice activism. If you've ever used your own eyes, looked in your pants and concluded that humans are sexually dimorphic, you're probably on the hate map.
https://quillette.com/2023/12/27/the-splcs-new-enemy/
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