Interested in the intersections between policy, law and technology. Programmer, lawyer, civil servant, orthodox Marxist. Blind.


Interesado en la intersección entre la política, el derecho y la tecnología. Programador, abogado, funcionario, marxista ortodoxo. Ciego.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Good news on nuclear, awful news on gas, but considering the German fake energy transition is powered by it, it’s perhaps inevitable.

    Also this just annoyed me more than it should:

    Nuclear power is a carbon-free source of electricity but it is not typically labeled as green energy, like solar, wind and other renewables. Generating power this way requires mining and processing uranium to create nuclear fuel, an energy-intensive process that produces emissions.

    Unlike wind turbines and solar panels, which are made from butterfly shine and faery sighs.










  • Interesting article, and I definitely agree I prefer clear instructions when those are possible.

    I only have an objection. When it’s said that no matter how well chatbots behave, it’s bad design, and that they’re being used to substitute expensive people; well, expensive people’s interface is chatting too. So in that regard I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference. Obviously there is if the chatbot is badly behaved, but the article says that it’s a problem even setting that aside.







  • I see some people are having issues with the scenario, but it’s not as impossible as it seems. The key is that Newtonian mechanics are in principle time-reversible. If a system got to a state one way, it can get back to the state it was by running it backwards, so to speak. A ball going down an inclined plain with a given kinetic energy could be going up that inclined plain up to the top with that same amount of energy.

    The problem with these systems is, it’s possible to impel the right amount of force on a mobile so that it goes through a path and then stops. But since there is time reversibility, it should be possible for the mobile to spontaneously start moving from that stopping point and draw the same path.

    Other weird similar cases are the so-called space invader (particle going to infinity, and therefore spontaneously appearing in reverse) and some strange n-body problem cases.




  • what do I think the history is? A record of the sites I visited.

    What do I think the history isn’t? A correlated record of which advertisements I’ve been exposed to, and which conversions I’ve made, that gets sent to people who are not me.

    Pretty relevant distinction. One thing is me tracking myself, another thing is this tracking being sent to others, no matter how purportedly trustworthy.


  • I’d like people to STOP PRETENDING that the only plausible reason why someone doesn’t agree with this is that we don’t understand it. Yes, I understand what this does. The browser tracks which advertisements have been visited, the advertiser indicates to the browser when a conversion action happens, and the browser sends this information to a third-party aggregator which uses differential techniques to make it infeasible to deanonymise specific users. Do I get a pass?

    Yes, this is actively collaborating with advertising. It is, in the words of Mozilla, useful to advertisers. It involves going down a level from being tracked by remote sites to being tracked by my own browser, running on my own machine. Setting aside the issues of institutional design and the possibility for data leaks, it’s still helping people whose business is to convince me to do things against my interest, to do so more effectively.