My ISP is routing public internet traffic to my IPs these days. What keeps me from running my blog from home? Fear of exposing a TCP port, that's what. What do we do about that?

The error in estimation of foods eaten out I treat as a constant factor baked into the daily caloric budget. If I'm gaining weight, the budget just needs to be tightened, i.e. rescaled to account for an error factor that was larger than anticipated. The problem basically becomes estimating one's own estimation error, then adjusting.

As it is, this is a dumb law, and prejudiced against decisions made in silico rather than in vivo.

So the idea of a highly advanced civilization requiring so little resource extraction, or even being able to entirely synthesize all its resource needs from energy, and manage global resources in a non-destructive way, while letting the natural ecology revert to as close as possible to a pre-civilizational state.

So you see small hubs of super-high-density cities, and vast expanses of "nature". Harder to detect from space that way, thus it could resolve the paradox?

You can see our own time moving that direction with urbanization and re-greening happening simultaneously, population growth falling, and a huge effort to abolish the use of one particular variety of extracted resource.

So by maximizing profit at each step along the path, the company destroys itself. Which ultimately sends profit to zero.

So... there's a break in logic somewhere. A link in the chain where responsibility isn't taken.

I don't think it's accurate to say that it is simply us wanting cheaper things. There has been a deliberate trade and even monetary policy that has led to this outcome. It is a matter of policy that the expertise to manufacture such things no longer exists in the United States.

For example, the WTO trade rules the U.S. engineered and China's entry into the WTO facilitated the outsourcing by which managers of U.S. companies sold core industrial competencies out.

Another policy has been the maintenance of a strong dollar, bolstered by the petro dollar system. This makes U.S. exports on the whole uncompetitive.

The abandonment of vocational training in favor of a college-for-all approach has also undercut the skillbase that would be necessary to maintain a domestic electronics and devices industry.

In essence, you could see it as an abandonment of the working class in favor of college graduates, whose stock portfolios benefitted from the cheaper costs accessed in the Chinese labor market.

The America you are familiar with perhaps doesn't care. But many Americans understand that the trade and monetary policies have undercut their own earning potential, and they buy those cheaper Chinese goods with great resentment, simply because _there are no longer alternatives_ in a huge number of categories.

Eventually the dollar will lose its "reserve currency" status; eventually enough of the rest of the world will be developed enough, or trade relationships fraught enough, or free trade discredited enough, that the pendulum will swing the other direction. I suspect the swing has already begun. Part of my motivation for writing the original post---to test the waters.

It seems crazy to me---these devices map out the interior of people's homes and businesses, often with cameras running and a wifi connection to the Internet. Talk about an espionage giveaway... all to a certain authoritarian country in Asia which manufactures 95% of the devices.

I used to be a big free trade advocate but have come to feel that free trade is something of a gift, which should be given mainly to countries whose vision of the world is compatible with ours. It also should not be allowed to undermine security-critical technologies and capabilities, such as electronics and microprocessor manufacture, etc.

In spite of recent tariffs and moves to restrict exports of sensitive technologies, the tech ecosystem in the US seems to be in a seriously impaired position.

If one were to push back against this and try to launch a robot vacuum product assembled in the USA of US-made components... what would it take? What are the economic impediments to doing this in a profitable fashion? Is there an economic policy that would make this feasible?

It seems there are a number of key components: * Microcontroller * Sensors - laser or lidar to map environment - something to determine floor type / depth * Bluetooth antenna to interface with a mobile app * Vacuum * Dust compartment * Dock to autoclean * Embedded software * Mobile app

Such a device would be an ideal candidate for training using reinforcement learning. (Has this been tried? Or is "robot vacuum" already a solved problem?)

My training is in software and machine learning. Yet it is in on the material side of things where the U.S. lags the most. There are so few physical things of relevance to modern life that we are making here these days, and even fewer at a competitive price point.

Would love to hear others' thoughts. Thanks

EDIT: A relevant article from 2011: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40958469

Points: 13

# Comments: 18

Anyway, I wasn't aware of Bruce Bastian specifically but the Mormon/LGBT angle stands out. It must have taken a lot of character to be out so publicly in that community.

(The LDS church's response to legalization of gay marriage was to excommunicate anyone who got married to someone of the same sex, and to bar their children from baptism and advancement unless they disavowed their parents' relationship. The policy was rescinded in 2019. In earlier times one could get excommunicated simply for _being_ gay.)

It looks like Bruce and his husband made some appearances on Mormon Stories podcast if you want some inside baseball: https://www.mormonstories.org/?s=bruce+bastian

Is this being worked on? Seems like a business opportunity to provide independent proof-of-human in digital form.

Centralized and distributed approaches all appeal. Whatever happened to the Web of Trust?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40384838

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Burn has Candle as one of its backends, which I understand is also quite popular.

It's a different task to re-implement an already-designed language rather than designing and implementing at the same time. Nevertheless I have run into a number of the difficulties mentioned in the article, and arrived at my own solutions - foremost passing around global UUIDs rather than actual `&` references, and enforcing existence constraints at runtime.

I've experienced the protracted pain of major refactors when assumptions baked into my data model proved false.

In some regards these refactors wore some of the shine off of Rust for me as well. BUT I'm still glad the game is implemented in Rust, exactly because of Rust's dual emphasis on safety and performance.

The AI I'm developing requires generation of massive quantities of self-play data. That the engine is as fast as it is helps greatly.

Rust's strength in ML means my AI training and game code can share important types, ensuring consistency.

The effectiveness of Rust for writing CLI tools (mentioned in the article) has lent itself to a number of game-specific command-line interfaces that are of high quality.

Rust's memory safety became critical once I decided to network the game. I don't want `umpired` to be any more exploitable than it needs to be.

My constraints have been very different than the OP's; obviously it makes sense for their studio given their experience to move away from Rust. But I think Rust still has a place in games.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire:_Wargame_of_the_Century * https://github.com/joshhansen/Umpire