kirklennon

Bernie Sanders is emphatically not a Democrat and doesn’t want to do any of the work of building or supporting the party, but when he decides to run for president, he suddenly wants the party’s money and infrastructure, only to abandon the party ASAP after the election. He may be fine as a senator, but as a presidential candidate, he’s just so utterly loathsome. He’s got major entitled old white man syndrome and it makes me lose absolutely all respect for him.

If you’re on to a contested convention, you can’t directly reflect the will of the primary voters in the first place (because they didn’t pick a winner) so I can’t really find any reason to object to superdelegates, most of whom are elected Democrats and already literally representing their constituents in Congress, etc.

Under the 2018 rules, in the Democratic National Convention superdelegates can’t participate in the first vote and can participate only in a contested convention. Seems reasonable to me.

Wikipedia also reminded me about this little bit of Bernie hypocrisy that I’d forgotten about: “Sanders initially said that the candidate with the majority of pledged delegates should be the nominee; in May 2016, after falling behind in the elected delegate count, he shifted, pushed for a contested convention and arguing that, ‘The responsibility that superdelegates have is to decide what is best for this country and what is best for the Democratic Party.’” Talk about unprincipled political opportunist.

Apple introduced the “Power Nap” feature to do this stuff in 2012, support starting with the 2011 MacBook Air, and almost a decade before they started switching away from Intel. The chips are capable of it, at least in the right hands.

If he were not part of the Seattle police I might be willing to put down my pitchfork and give him the benefit of the doubt, but since he is, in fact, a prominent member of a lawless gang that is notorious for egregious civil rights violations, I say guilty until proven innocent. He’s already actively lost the trust of the public.

It’s news from over three months ago. This is just a screenshot highlighting a single new feature from the iOS 17 page.

Summary of events:

Facebook makes a service and it gets really popular. People start sharing everything on there, including links. The ability to freely link to anything with a public address is one of of the foundational principles of the open World Wide Web.

Facebook comes up with “Open Graph” metatags that websites can embed in the code on the webpages. Facebook (and others) can use this to automatically generate rich previews of the link. Facebook isn’t taking anything from these websites; they are adding extra code specifically for Facebook so that instead of just a URL, the link can automatically include the article title, lede, and a photo.

For many reasons, some of which involve the internet and some of which are entirely self-inflicted, advertising revenue craters for most newspapers. Facebook is profitable.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and some other big media companies decide they want to convince the Australian government to create a new tax on Facebook and just give the money to them instead. Canada decides to copy this idea.

Facebook tells Canada that links to news articles represent a very small percentage of the content being shared on Facebook (despite Facebook inversely representing a large percentage of the source of traffic of these websites) and that ads near news links are extremely low value. The news links are of effectively zero commercial value to Facebook and they’d rather just block them entirely rather than pay some arbitrary tax.

And now tiny indigenous publications are suffering from a lack of visitors all because some billionaires wanted to squeeze some money out a politically-convenient target.

Honestly I’m not complaining. This was, functionally, a large transfer of wealth from rich venture capitalists to ~everyone in the form of below-cost rides for several years.

Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There’s no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn’t they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn’t what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.

The very simple version is that the newer versions support faster speeds.

The confusing alphabet soup of Wi-Fi versions got renamed. 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 7 is still in development so 6 is the best in-use version.

what do people think of the idea that if the U.S. had not dropped those bombs, a larger-scale nuclear exchange, possibly between the Soviets and the U.S., would have happened because no one would have seen the consequences in 1945.

I still think the use of the atomic bombs on Japan was inherently immoral and unjustifiable, but if I’m searching for at least some silver lining, I do think it’s almost certainly true that if those two comparatively small bombs weren’t dropped then, more and larger bombs would have been dropped later.

I’m not really concerned at all with when Americans landed in Japan. The US unilaterally established air superiority over Japan and had successfully blockaded the country, bleeding it dry of oil. The Japanese mainland was functionally militarily defeated prior to any land forces making it there.

The western Allies and Soviets both actively took Germany, coming in from either side and meeting in the middle. They split the country because they were already there. The Soviet Union never really made it to Japan proper. They took over Manchuria and Japan surrendered ASAP to the US alone once it became obvious that the only alternative was to surrender to both powers later and likely be split like Germany.

It’s worth highlighting that this was the immediate impetus for surrender. The atomic bombs were basically non-factors.

This is such a lazy, dumb take. Nobody even complains about Cortana because nobody used it in the first place. People complain about Siri precisely because so many people are using is so often that they inevitably come up against its shortcomings. It can certainly continue to grow and evolve but it’s a real-world useful tool today.

This is the same News Corp. that convinced the Australian government that Facebook owes them money whenever anybody (including News Corp. itself) shares a link on Facebook to one of their articles, all with the justification that a link tax was needed in order to fund journalism.

Lina Khan’s stewardship of the FTC has been one of high-profile failures, clumsily targeting big companies over things that are, in fact, legal. It’s like she thinks she’s a senator trying to win political points with cheap, lazy shots rather than being the head of a wonky enforcement agency. Fresh after failing to block Microsoft’s purchase of Activision, she’s now targeting Prime, a service that consumers overwhelmingly actually like. I have no doubt that Amazon likely has violated antitrust law in some ways, but I have no faith in Khan’s FTC to actually target the legitimate violations with boring, relatively minor solutions. They’ll overshoot and bungle the whole thing, yet again.

I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I’ve learned, the more convinced I am that it’s completely useless. I’ve never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn’t be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There’s no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn’t going to care that you’ve got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can’t unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you’re not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.

Blockchain isn’t useful for anything important, and it’s not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it’s a dead-end technology.

Why would you allow a virtual assistance to spy on you constantly?

Because it’s not? A low-power process on my phone is listening for the wake word. When it hears other stuff, it ignores it. When it hears the wake word, it processes my request, tied to a separate anonymous identifier used only for Siri itself. I’m not really losing any privacy at all.

And as a side note, is there a way to kill Siri completely on IOS (not just go trough all app settings and disable siri there)?

It’s just the first two toggles (Listen for “Hey Siri” and Press Side Button for Siri) in the Siri & Search menu that you’d need to turn off. There’s not much to it.

The scenario where they’re lying would would mean they’re falsely responding to countless subpoenas for data by claiming they don’t have information that they do. This would be a massive globe-spanning crime requiring the coordination (“conspiracy” in criminal law) of hundreds or thousands of people, and also enormous civil liability. This would instantly wipe hundreds of billions of dollars off the stock and destroy their reputation, all so they could … what? It’s cheaper and easier for them to simply collect less data in the first place. Useless user data is nothing more than a liability for Apple.

The UK’s surveillance proposal is more draconian than China’s current treatment of Apple, though. FaceTime an iMessage work exactly the same in China as they do in every other country. They’re fully end-to-end encrypted and Apple’s logging of metadata is extremely minimal. China’s policies are deeply problematic they seem content to let Apple get away with the bare minimum of legal compliance, in contrast to local companies who bend over backwards to comply with every whim of the CCP. Could Apple make a principled stand against China? Sure. Would that make some self-righteous people feel good? Definitely. Would it do anything at all to improve the privacy of people in China? Absolutely not. They’d lose their most-private option. That’s the real-world outcome.

The UK, on the other hand, is actually still a democracy. A combative and principled stand against government overreach can actually change government policy and preserve end-user privacy.