They already do in the US, so this is a non-response.

> > Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)

> The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.

Once again, this is a vacuous response. If the claim was “high taxes caused the change during FDR’s time,” “There was change” is not an alternative explanation to that claim. If we took the counter-factual claim, do you think the period would have been as transformative if the tax rates weren’t high?

If I were to copy the files on my work device and distribute them, I would be in violation of NDAs which could be pursued as civil offenses. If I didn’t have those NDAs, my employer could try and pursue something in court, along with firing me, but it wouldn’t be a straightforward suit.

None of these are (or at least, should be) criminal situations.

Doing stuff for learning is useful, and the intent behind this general phrase is to not ‘implement your own’ something which is both hard and critical in a production environment. I work in cryptography (for security purposes) and have implemented quite a few things myself to learn, but I still use stable, field tested, and scrutinized crypto for any actual use.

> People say that about hard things, and I only want to do hard things. Nobody wants people who can do easy things, people want people who can do hard things.

Only wanting to do hard things limits yourself quite a bit: what about things which seem easy but could be improved? I worked in a non-tech related medical manufacturing job for a bit and took time to learn the process and tools. Afterward, I implemented a few tools (using what my coworkers (who have no programming or IT experience) have available to them: Excel and the VBA on the lab computers) to help them prep inventory lists which they have been doing by hand. Doing it by hand took them 3 hours as a group (and the first shift had to do this every morning), which my tool did in 5 seconds with a single button click. They still use it to this day, about a decade later.

This wasn’t something ‘hard:’ I glued a few files together, grouped a list by a filter, sorted the groups by a column, and made a printout which was easy to read and mark on as they went about their day. However, my coworkers didn’t even know this was possible until someone came in with a different skill set, learned what they did (by doing the job well for months) and then made a solution.

You must be careful with doing only ‘hard’ things. It requires other people to identify what is hard! In addition: crackpots do only hard things and believe they find better solutions than what exists so far (without consulting or learning about what has been done). Interesting people learn about things as they are (with the humility of knowing that they are not experts in most things) and tries to improve them using the knowledge they already have.

Don’t waste your time rolling your own crypto when you could do the _actual_ hard thing and identify unaddressed space to make careful and considered improvements.

The ‘hash’ function is a deterministic transform, not a source of randomness.

This wallet notification was silly. Prior to this, I believed that their wallet app would give notifications much like how settings app would: rarely and without commercial intent.

What? That makes no sense. You can lookup which court and judge (or panel of judges) issued the injunctions. I do not understand why this non-existent anonymity would motivate a judge to issue an injunction.

> They can still strike down a law or executive branch policy.

Federal courts will only look at cases if there is a party with standing who engages in a lawsuit. If someone is being deported without due process, it will be hard for them to bring suit.

> This forces judges to actually do their job., instead of a nationwide injunction while they decide if they want to do their job later.

In general there are two reasons why these temporary restraining orders which have been issued. The first being that not doing so would cause irrevocable (or ridiculously difficult to revoke) harm (e.g., deporting people to a foreign jail). The second is that the TRO is used to stop something which seems illegal on its face (e.g. deporting people to countries from which they have never been).

> It doesn’t actually alter some fabric of our democracy or checks and balances, because the judges had already gone beyond what the constitution and congress prescribed.

It does alter the power dynamic of our democracy. Now, the executive branch can repeatedly perform illegal acts and only needs to stop its behavior in cases which have been decided. This checks and balances isn’t about stopping each other branch in a vacuum, the intent is to stop the government from overreaching on its citizenry. By crippling all of the lower courts, the Supreme Court has created a bureaucratic bottleneck for itself, allowing the executive branch to effectively DDoS the judicial system with case after case.

> The disruptive aspect of this - with concern to the birthright case that hasnt been ruled on yet - is just another example of this. Judges not doing their job.

No, it was the judge telling the executive branch that the executive branch must recognize the citizenship of children born on US soil. Instead of actually appealing the TRO on grounds of the legality of their actions, the executive branch has decided to complain about the legality of a court telling the executive branch to stop.

Who is supposed to tell the executive branch to stop doing something illegal, congress? Part of the point of the executive branch was to allow for some expedience, congress is slow. A judge is in a perfect position to tell the executive branch to stop, they don’t need to wait on committee and are not beholden to the president. Without the ability, the executive branch can quite literally do whatever the president wants.

The first two major points they pose against email can be summed up as ‘people don’t use security unless it is by default, and because it wasn’t built-in to email we shouldn’t try.’ To which I respond with: perfect is the enemy of progress. Clearly, email is sticky (many other things have tried to replace it), and it has grown to do more than just send plaintext messages. People use it for document transfer, agreements, as a way to send commands over the internet, etc. Email encryption and authentication is simply an attempt to add some cryptographic tooling to a tool we already use for so many things. Thus, these points feel vacuous to me.

The last two points are less to do with email and more to do with encryption in general, and it is probably the most defeatist implication of the fact that there is no ‘permanent encryption.’ It is an argument against encryption as a whole, and paints the picture for me that the author would find other reasons to dislike email encryption because they already dislike encryption. These last two points are an extension of wanting an ideal solution and refusing to settle for anything less.

I derailed this conversation to make a meta point, and it wasn’t your fault at all.

Sure, I agree with what you’ve stated here.

> Correct. And I don’t buy the dichotomy you are framing of biased companies vs unbiased government.

I reread what I wrote and still don’t see that I framed the conversation in this way. What I did frame was the motivation of the company (which I implied to be profit) versus the motive of the government (that of public interest). These are both biased and the effect of the bias could be anticipated: companies would slant their published information with a focus on the effects of profits, whereas the government’s overt bias would slant its information output towards safety (in the case of the CSB) without much concern for profit.

> The term “objective truth” was just thrown around. Might as well just say it’s an “absolutely good”. The level of discourse in these threads is science = good, agency with science in name = science. Cuts against agency = bad.

Sure, we both agree the author is biased towards the government, but you’ve missed the thrust of what I wrote entirely: your nuance added absolutely no value to the discussion, it didn’t make a point or refute anything the author said.

Additionally, by stating that the CSB provides an ‘alternative source’ of truth, as a correction to an originally described objective one, you are (possibly inadvertently) claiming that the company is also providing a different source of truth, rhetorically raising the value of the information the company provides while lowering the value of the CSB information.

Don’t be the person who adds nuance for the sake of nuance.

That’s a leap (if I’m being charitable). I think you could state that most people don’t trust DOGE, especially given DOGE’s apparent lack of concern for the American’s they are technically working in service of. I don’t believe DOGE has the capability of identifying fraud, let alone have the desire to stop it.

This sounds like it came from someone who has never spent more than a passing interaction with government employees.

The government employees I’ve worked with seem to actually care about fixing things, doing their work well, and maintaining their group’s objective (whatever that may be).

So, your solution here is for people who think the current administration is particularly bad to either not complain or accept any whataboutisms you have?

Your ‘both administrations’ quip is a vacuous justification for the current administration’s actions. If this is the basis for your justification, then, regardless of the truth of your claim, you’d be inconsistent to then praise this specific administration for anything positive. Thus, outside of nihilist generalizations about the overall structure of the US, you can’t meaningfully contribute to this conversation. Without giving a positive justification for the administrations behavior, your contributions are ‘logical nonsense.’

I’d rather simply complain about the doublespeakers in office at the moment and say it is wrong to do so, and there is no ‘logical nonsense’ in that.

The transformer is operating on the probability functions in a fully deterministic fashion, you might be missing the forest for the trees here. In your hypothetical, the transformer does not have a non-deterministic way of selecting the 1 or 0 token, so it will rely on a noise source which can. It does not produce any randomness at all.

Even then, if the government is weak than the ‘more power over you’ is simply false. Maybe the magnitude of the power is more for a government, but companies apply their power with much more frequency.