This pleases me

https://youtu.be/qw8sTxK6j2I

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by the internet being held together by chewing gum, string, and an informal agreement that the few thousand people who keep the whole mess running won’t all go to the pub at the same time

People keep imagining AGI like its going to be benevolent skynet, when it’s probably going to be more like the Tyrell corporation from Blade Runner

The license change literally just prevents you from stripping their branding if you have more than 50 users a month - this is more permissive than the MPL that Firefox is licensed under

It does, but it’s super dangerous to do unless you have it wired up properly. Proper installations will use a special connector so you can’t plug anything else into that receptical, and will have it interlocked against the main breaker - you can’t plug anything in without disconnecting from the grid. The dangers of doing it amateur-hour are:

• You now have a cable that you can unplug and have live ends exposed - which if you don’t realize is connected to an active generator is super dangerous, and even if you do one slip and you are now the ground conductor
• If you connect the generator while still connected to the grid, your generator is almost certainly going to be out of phase. This will probably cause damage to your generator and anything else plugged in at the time
• If you don’t have an interlock and run the generator while connected to the grid (say during a power outage) you will be back-feeding power into the grid. This is super dangerous for anyone coming to fix the outage, as things that they’ve isolated to fix can still end up being live

Note that this interlock is also required if you have solar - although it’s usually in the form of an automatic breaker that will disconnect and put the circuit into “island mode” if it detects a loss of grid supply

I use Flutter professionally and really like it

Idk, even before Musk went full meth head things were already heading south pretty fast - they’d completely squandered their first mover advantage and their “move fast and break things” approach was really starting to take a toll on their brand reputation. Teslas were already starting to be known as expensive cars with terrible build quality, then the constant delays and broken promises about self driving did them no favors either.

A Tesla made sense when they were pretty much the only really viable luxury EV, but when you can get equivalent cars (with better build quality) from established Western manufacturers for ~75% the price or from a Chinese manufacturer for ~60%, what advantage do they have?

Musk’s cult of personally is/was a big part of it, so they are kinda screwed either way - the stink of Musk won’t instantly vanish if they get rid of him, and taints everything while he stays

I find it telling that AGI people seem to assume that AGI will spontaneously appear as a distinct entity with its own agency rather than being a product that will be owned and sold.

People who have hundreds of billions of dollars can get mid-single-digit percent ROI by making very safe investments with that money, but instead they are pouring it into relatively risky AI investments. What do you think that says about their expectations of returns?

Check them into Git, but be cautious about credentials that might live in the env files that you don’t want to expose if you end up making the repo publicly available.

… so I shouldn’t use the CEOs history of bankruptcy and failed a Kickstarter when judging if I think it is going to succeed or not?

The irony of being asked to sign up to a website to be able to read an article about opsec failures

My concern isn’t that things will get delayed, it’s that I’ll give them my money and get nothing in return

I’m pretty excited about this; my Pebble Time was the best watch I’ve even owned - smart or otherwise.

That said, I don’t think I’m going to be preordering this given how badly the last Pebble Kickstarter went. For those who weren’t around at the time, Pebble (whose CEO is behind this venture) built his whole business around Kickstarter. The first 2 generations were wildly successful, but for the third generation they massively overextended themselves trying to get hardware into mainstream retailers, prioritised building stock for retail channels (because contracts) and ran out of cash before shipping for the majority of backers who had bankrolled this whole thing. Eventually everyone who hadn’t had their orders fulfilled got a refund, but that was only because FitBit decided to buy them. Eric seems like a nice guy and great at the technology - and I’m not saying that I could run a business any better - but I think I’ll wait until there is stock on hand for me to buy outright before I hand over my cash

They talk about AGI like it’s some kind of intrinsically benevolent messiah that is going to come along and free humanity of limitations rather than a product that is going to be monetised to make a few very rich people even richer

Theoretically the contents of these lots would be insured, so if there was a sudden unexpected fire that happened to destroy all the cars Tesla gets a cash payout, unlike if they just sit there where Tesla has to take the cashflow hit of having paid to build cars that noone will buy

This is exactly the sort of argument I was talking about

• The forth amendment counts for less than the paper it is written on outside the bounds of the US
• Most of the rest of the world has laws requiring companies that operate in their jurisdiction - even if they aren’t based in that country - to prove access to law enforcement if requested
• If complying with the law is truly actually impossible, then don’t be surprised if a country turns around and says “ok, you can’t operate here”. Just because you are based in the US and have a different set of cultural values, doesn’t mean you get to ignore laws you don’t like

To illustrate the sort of compromise that could have been possible, imagine if Apple and Google had got together and proposed a scheme where, if presented with:

• A physical device
• An arrest warrant aledging involvement in one of a list of specific serious crimes (rape, murder, csam etc)

They would sign an update for that specific handset that provided access for law enforcement, so long as the nations pass and maintain laws that forbid it’s use outside of a prosecution. It’s not perfect for anyone - law enforcement would want more access, and it does compromise some people privacy - but it’s probably better than “no encryption for anyone”.

So I’m going to get down voted to hell for this, but: this kind of legislation is a response to US tech companies absolutely refusing to compromise and meet non-US governments half-way.

The belief in an absolute, involute right to privacy at all costs is a very US ideal. In the rest of the world - and in Europe especially - this belief is tempered by a belief that law enforcement is critical to a just society, and that sometimes individual rights must be suspended for the good of society as a whole.

What Europe has been asking for is a mechanism to allow law enforcement to carry out lawful investigation of electronic communications in the same way they have been able to do with paper, bank records, and phone calls for a century. The idea that a tech company might get in the way of prosecuting someone for a serious crime is simply incompatible with law in a lot of places.

The rest of the world has been trying to find a solution to the for a while that respects the privacy of the general public but which doesn’t allow people to hide from the law. Tech has been refusing to compromise or even engage in this discussion, so now everyone is worse off.

I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently

Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn’t matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn’t worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it