NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
In my state of Washington in the last legislative session we allocated $150,000 to study the idea of digital driver’s licenses. The study is due at the end of this year. Maybe in the upcoming session we can get a bill passed to implement them and then in another year, minimum, they can roll out.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
Conviction requires consensus. The system is biased strongly against conviction. The defense only needs one juror to take their side. The prosecution needs all of them.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
I think the case is even stronger for juries here: failure to convict requires just one out of twelve to hold out on voting guilty.
Jury dynamics of the "I just want to go home" variety make this weaker, but I think it's still quite strong. One in twelve gives you a good chance of drawing a concientious and disagreeable person that would always refuse to vote guilty if the evidence was unconvincing for them.
NewCharlesInCharge
10mo ago
But what can I do? If I don't eat that amount, I just go around feeling hungry all day, unable to enjoy anything or focus on any kind of productive work, until my willpower finally snaps and I scarf down whatever is at hand.
What would you do if you were an adherent of a religious tradition that called for fasting? The restriction isn't for the benefit of your own health, but rather divinely commanded, and mandates not less food permenantely, but no food for a day here and there, or when the sun is shining one month per year.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Information on this system is scarce. Seems they’re practicing security by obscurity, I hope they’re doing quite a bit more.
Montana is in no danger of going for Kamala, at least at the moment, so I’m not super concerned about this one instance, but I also had no idea this existed. Do other states allow for this? ChatGPT says Alaska, Arizona, and West Virginia also have such systems.
If these aren’t being red teamed and having their source code audited by actual security engineers they’re almost certainly insecure. Government developer salaries are pitiful and attract low tier developers.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Most consumer devices are locked down in a way that prevents you from dumping the firmware. They’ll have UART disabled completely, or maybe if you’re lucky it might be programmed to support a connection if you provide power to some undocumented pins on the microcontroller.
And assuming you could dump the firmware, you end up with a binary that’s going to be nontrivial to analyze. There’s nothing human readable to give you context clues. Maybe an LLM could help to more quickly analyze, I haven’t tried.
Probably your best bet would be to watch network traffic to the devices, and try to catch it polling Mossad for whether it’s time to explode. But even then they’ve demonstrated the ability to trigger without need for internet access, assuming “walkie talkie” is a mere CB radio.
I wonder if they’ve also tainted Hezbollah ammo supplies, that’s a trick that’s been done before and is also greatly demoralizing.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I think it’s important to know how backlogged the hospital was. Some are chronically slow due in part to people using the ER as others would use a primary care doctor.
It could be the case that this was a triaging error that had nothing at all to do with the specifics of her case.
Or maybe it was actually good triage and there were even more urgent conditions occupying doctors before they could get to her.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
why the fuck is the most powerful country on the planet apparently incapable of deploying world-class secured online voting?
As an industry professional, this is a terrible idea. We can’t even reliably secure private systems where the consequences of failure can be ruinous to their owners. These systems are too complex and the incentives are too great to find holes to exploit.
Even if we could somehow guarantee that the servers were bulletproof, attackers would still have a vast exploitable surface in the clients.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
This was the stated reason on the podcast I listened to, perhaps Cleared Hot, that featured an ex Secret Service agent discussing the first Trump assassination attempt.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
The rules that govern balloting aren't at all uniform. I suppose you could have a gentleman's understanding that electors would just vote for the replacement even if the ballot could not be altered. But then the electors might expose themselves to liability under faithless elector laws. Some states don't merely punish faithless electors, they automatically cancel their votes and replace them with an alternate.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
This kind of job is hard to fit in an hourly scheme, though. Do I go submit my time card with the random times I spent solving problems in my head while showering, walking my dog, etc.?
And if so, how do we prevent trivially easy abuses?
Maybe lawyers can provide an example? ChatGPT tells me they don’t typically bill for time spent purely in thought, but rather only for time spent drafting briefs, meeting clients, etc.
But for software engineers the time spent actually writing code is typically dwarfed by the time spent deciding what you actually need to write. This is how you can have an immensely productive hunt and peck typist on staff. WPM is not the bottleneck.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
They avoided it when possible, but managers at the McDonald’s where I worked in high school would still schedule me above forty hours when their options were limited. Bummer would find many other teenage workers away on vacation with their families, and not everyone was trained to work every position.
Also that 1.5X multiplier was amazing for me at the time, and I’d jump at any opportunity for it.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
It almost feels like he has trouble recalling things that aren’t a narrative.
He could recall Northam’s keep them comfortable quote, even if at first he thought he was the former governor of West Virginia.
But if it’s nerd shit like Walz changing the wording of their born alive law to require that care be rendered, but not life saving care, well he’s just not going to remember that.
I have the opposite problem, my autobiographical memory is shit but I’m great on technical details of complex systems.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I think they know they can get away with fine people on both sides for the rest of Trump’s life. Trump rebutted it both at this and at the last debate, it doesn’t matter.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
You’ll damage your car if you hit a goose.
Also “don’t want to kill themself” doesn’t imply “doesn’t want anyone to kill them.”
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I’m a bit more credulous of these claims given how recently animal torture was just a widespread form of entertainment.
Cats especially seemed to get marked for terrible deaths just for a laugh. Cat burnings, cat drownings. Politicians standing for election in England used to get pummeled with dead cats when the crowd turned against them.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I think you realize that this line of argument applies to you as well should you suffer a stroke that renders you a net drain on society for the rest of your life. You might fall back on “my family would be sad if I were left to die,” but there are millions of Christians saddened by the availability of abortion and especially infants born and left to die.
Utility-based moral systems tend to have these problems.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
I didn’t even perceive it as tongue in cheek. I used to read the Bible and be incredulous that anyone would participate in child sacrifice. Seems to be absurd in so many directions: so cruel, paints the sacrificers in the worst possible light, is evolutionarily unfit.
I forgot when I read someone make the parallel with abortion, but it was a great insight. People sacrifice their children because they perceive them as burdensome and just want to have fun. Moloch is fun! Sexy parties and no annoying babies!
This maps onto nearly every abortion. We just have the technology to more or less reliably kill them ahead of being born.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Trump’s talking points sound like they’re aimed at <85 IQ people who don’t know crap about the world
Make it <105 IQ and we’re just talking about the electorate.
A very small number of people actually know what goes on in international affairs. If we’re lucky we might get a book a decade after the thing happens, written by someone who has an interest in making themselves look good. Or a declassified documents dump, but those seem out of fashion lately.
I’m curious exactly what Kamala’s role was in speaking to Zelenskyy prior to the invasion. My guess is that Trump was right, they weren’t interested in negotiating to avoid a war, Kamala was there to tell Zelenskyy to not give an inch, America had his back, and if Russia invades he’ll secure his legacy as the Ukrainian president that defeated Russia.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
There’s certainly selection bias here. The miscreants are far less likely to bother trying to get a factory job than the Hard Workers.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Imagine the chaos if Trump says he can smell alcohol on Kamala’s breath.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
The nature of the business environment in China makes it very likely you'll be mixing it up with government officials on a regular basis.
But yeah if those translations are faithful it's pretty clear she was working for the interests of her PRC contacts.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Hitler is in heaven
Cooper didn't say this, he made this joke:
If you're having a bad day, just remember that the Trump shooter is currently wandering around Hell looking for Hitler while the two guys Kyle Rittenhouse dropped figure out how to break the news to him.
This is pretty ambiguous!
One interpretation is that Hitler can't be found because he's not in Hell, he's in heaven.
Another is that the shooter believes himself to be in heaven along with Hitler, but is mistaken, they're both in Hell.
Another is that the shooter is looking for "Hitler" who is actually Trump, who he mistakenly believes he sent to Hell.
Nazi Germany was infinitely preferable in virtually every way to modern France
The actual quote here is:
This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.
Where the picture on the left is Hitler and his officers with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the one on the right is the drag Last Supper from this year's Olympic opening ceremonies. You can see it here: https://x.com/jessesingal/status/1830983770826047711
This one is harder to defend, but I think there are two possible angles.
One, he's literally talking about the pictures. The aesthetics here do, in my opinion, favor the Nazi picture. The drag last supper is gross, it features an obese man pretending to be a woman in the role of Jesus, the colors are garish, everyone is unattractive. If you were a time traveler who didn't know what the Nazis had done, you'd have no reason to think the Nazi photo to be repellant. A person in our time objects to the Nazi photo because of what the Nazis did, not how they were dressed.
Or, two, he's comparing the totalitarian endpoints of each ideology. Communism verus fascism. I wouldn't want to live in either Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR, but I don't think saying one is worse than the other is all that offensive.
NewCharlesInCharge
11mo ago
Part of this discourse is equating Churchill criticism with anti-semitism.
But I think it's uncontroversial to say that what happened to the Jews in WWII was one of the worst possible outcomes for them.
Smart diplomacy could have saved almost all of them. Britain could have rescinded the 1939 White Paper that capped Jewish immigration to the Palestinian Mandate at 75,000 per year. The other countries that would later become the Allies could have also accepted more Jewish immigration.
Other European countries like France, Hungary, and Poland were considering their own Jewish deportation schemes in the late 30's. Poland even considered sending them to Madagascar, before the Nazis had their own Madagascar Plan.
A statesman who cared about the fate of the Jewish people, and could see the writing on the wall, could have lead on the issue and at least made it trivial for Jews to emigrate out as their governments became increasingly hostile to their presence. But as far as I can tell, everyone did the opposite. The best we got was the Haavara Agreement, negotiated between the Anglo-Palestine Bank and the Nazi government.
Amazon Fresh had the best model for this, Just Walk Out. Cameras watch everything you do, associate you with the items you pick up and walk out of the store with, and charge you.
Unfortunately a few weeks back the store near me abandoned this. Now they've got a regular self checkout and "dash carts" that are basically a mobile self checkout, where you still have to scan items. According to Amazon customers didn't like it, which is baffling to me. Here's the press release: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-just-walk-out-dash-cart-grocery-shopping-checkout-stores
The accuracy was perfect in my experience. To use Just Walk Out you'd have to scan your Amazon app when you entered and exited. Maybe folks figured out a great way to defeat the tech and theft was too great? But if not then they'd be much harder to defeat than regular self check out.
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