There's an argument that links are "portals" that take you somewhere, while buttons cause some action to happen, Whether you treat a file as a resource (which your browser just chooses to save on disk instead of rendering on screen), or whether you treat it as an explicit "download" action, is a matter of semantics I guess.

There are actually two theories on insider knowledge. One states that allowing insider trading is beneficial, as it allows prices to better match the underlying reality, the other states that this discourages non-insider trading, which actually makes the prices worse. Stock markets lean heavily towards the second theory, while prediction markets seem to be leaning towards the first.

I guess what's old is new again.

If you wanted to accomplish anything more substantial than reading static content (like an email client that beeps when you get an important email, or a chat app that shows you new messages as they come in), you needed to install a desktop app. That required you to be on the same OS that the app developer supported (goodbye Linux on the desktop), as well as to trust the dev a lot more.

We seem to have collectively forgotten the trauma of freeware. Operating an installer in the mid 2000s was much like walking through a minefield; one wrong move, and your computer was infected with crapware that kept changing your home page and search engine. It wasn't just shady apps, mainstream software (I definitely remember uTorrent and Skype doing this) was also guilty. Even updates weren't safe.

On one side, we have Apple giving us great APIs but telling us how to use them. On the other, we have W3C being extremely conservative with what they expose, exactly because of things like this.

Alternatively, they might require you to set up a subdomain with a cname alias pointing to them (or a common CDN), negating any security benefits of such a practice.

One conception is "take me back to the previous screen I was on", one is "take me one level up the hierarchy." They're often but not always the same.

Mac Finder is a perfect example of a program correctly implementing the two. If you're deep in some folder and then press cmd+win+l to go to ~/Downloads, cmd+up will get you to ~/, but cmd+[ will get you back to where you were before, even if this was deep in some network drive, nowhere near ~.

I feel like mobile OSes lean towards "one level up" as the default behavior, while traditional desktop OSes lean more towards tracking your exact path and letting you go back.

Without Cloudflare, you can censor whatever you want. If you have the support of an (undemocratic) government on your side, you can even DeDoS them, making sure that information critical of you cannot see the light of day.

Your touch screen stops working. You want to dump the data by plugging it into the computer. To do that, you need to click "approve" or "trust" or whatever on a touch screen. A touch screen which.... stopped working.

We have definitely moved much, much too far towards security on the security vs. convenience tradeoff. We need a "I am not a human rights activist, I neither understand nor need all of this stuff" mode.

Labs need accurate benchmark measurements, at least internally, to figure out what model improvements actually matter.

Having models exploit benchmarks serves no purpose. If they wanted to make their models look better than they are, they could just make the data up.

All of those sports make intuitive sense to me, I really don't get why we make such a big thing of balls though.

The entire advantage of capitalism over socialism is that customer choice forces you to make better products, and everything else stems from that. If you only have one grocery store, one school system, one health insurer, one employer in town, it doesn't matter how bad they get, you'll be their slave forever. This is particularly true if the person making the decisions at those institutions doesn't profit from them doing well.

In a private prison system, there's no choice, you can't just switch prisons if you don't like the one you're in. This is the worst system of all, as there's still the profit incentive, without competition keeping it in check.

I think you could do a private prison system well. Maybe let the prisoners choose their prison, with major disincentives for prison owners if prisoners escape. Maybe pay them for every day their newly-released inmates stay out of jail, encouraging rehab programs that actually work. Those would align what's good for the owner with what's good for society, which is all that capitalism is ultimately all about.

People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.

Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."

If your license allows others to take the code and redistribute it with extra conditions, your code can be imported into the kernel. AFAIK there are parts of the kernel that are BSD-licensed.

You can find a "hook" to effectively manipulate people with advertising, but that hook gets less and less effective as it is exploited. LLMs don't have this property, except across training generations.

"We'll gather a bunch of talented people together, figure out what this industry needs and then do that, let's hope we can do that before the money runs out" can be a viable business plan. There's no guarantee it's going to work, there's never a guarantee a plan is going to work, but it can work sometimes.

Humans have a problem distinguishing "John from Microsoft" from somebody just claiming to be John from Microsoft. The reason why scamming humans is (relatively) hard is that each human is different. Discovering the perfect tactic to scam one human doesn't necessarily scale across all humans.

LLMs are the opposite; my Chat GPT is (almost) the same as your Chat GPT. It's the same model with the same system message, it's just the contexts that differ. This makes LLM jailbreaks a lot more scalable, and hence a lot more worthwhile to discover.

LLMs are also a lot more static. With people, we have the phenomenon of "banner blindness", which LLMs don't really experience.

It often comes up in (anti) free-speech trials, where the government compels the perpetrator to issue a public apology to the victim. Forcing them to buy an ad in a newspaper for example is not unheard of.

As far as I understand, Americans consider this to be "compelled speech" and hence prohibited, but I might be wrong on this.

Forced obsolescence is when the consumer always buys the cheapest product that checks their boxes, regardless of build quality. This forces you to either use cheap parts that you know will break, or leave the market entirely. The consumer may bitch at "planned obsolescence", but when push comes to shove and they're looking for what their next is going to be, they only look at the price and features, not quality and longevity.

We should be re-framing this in consumer's minds, and list "price divided by warranty" as an important dimension to evaluate a product on.

If you install Windows first, Microsoft takes control (but it graciously allows Linux distros to use their key). If you install Linux first, you take control.

It's perfectly possible for you to maintain your own fully-secure trust chain, including a TPM setup which E.G. lets you keep a 4-digit pin while keeping your system secure against brute force attacks. You can't do that with the 1990s "encryption is all you need" style of system security.