It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

I'm a bit concerned that we are now using the term "ransomware" to include situations where data have been exfiltrated. It used to only mean that the data were encrypted in place, and the ransom was for the decryption key (which you still can't trust, btw. How do you know that the data weren't altered during the encryption or decryption process?).

A case where data are exfiltrated is more properly referred to as a breach.

Are we just being sloppy with language, or does calling it ransomware give companies cover to avoid penalties and responsibilities associated with breaches?

ANY dairy product made for sale to the public requires licensing, and yearly inspection of the production facilities for safety compliance. Which makes sense, given the number of foodborne illnesses and poisoning concerns that can come from improper processing and sanitation when dairy is involved. This isn't "excessive licensing requirements" in any way, shape or form, no matter how much dishonest lying-ass conservatives try to misframe it.

The yearly license cost is absurdly low, too. Licensure if you're making yogurt and selling it to the public, year round, is a miniscule $106.

Milk products plant licenses and permits are issued by CDFA for various types of businesses that handle or manufacture milk and milk products. As required by Food and Agricultural Code (FAC) section 35011, a person shall not engage in the business of dealing in, receiving, manufacturing, freezing, or processing milk, or any product of milk unless a license or permit has been obtained from CDFA for each separate milk products plant or place of business. All milk products plants must be inspected and approved by CDFA prior to a license or permit being issued.

A milk products plant license is required for the processing and packaging of products including but not limited to fluid milk, yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, butter and dried milk. Such plants must score a minimum of 80 percent on the official scorecard for milk products plants (FAC 33701) and comply with the requirements for new construction, repairs and sanitation of milk products plants (FAC 33731 - 33782). A separate room dedicated to the manufacturing and packaging of milk products is required, as well as other rooms dedicated to specific operational activities at the facility. The facility may manufacture any quantity of product packaged for sale on or off the premises.

https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/ahfss/Milk_and_Dairy_Food_Safety/Milk_Product_Licenses.html

The presumption that throwing more data and more processing power at LLMs will result in subjectively better performance ..

One thing that is true is it will result in greater Cost; likely with a low ratio of performance improvement to compensate for the added cost of just throwing more and more resources at it.

The improvements aren't that much.. The world seemingly has lost its mind in terms of over-investing hastily in a small number of technologies.

Unfortunately it seems like Detection and Spam prevention will now be a much harder problem than crap generation with these technologies.

If an activity affects interstate commerce, then that activity is potentially subject to regulation by congress.

Unfair Business Competition, Antitrust, etc, are federal issues. It doesn't matter if the company does not engage in any interstate commerce directly - it would still be subject to these laws.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

This effectively makes it impossible to sue an employer for misconduct. Binding arbitration needs to go.

Erm.. This arbitration crap is not some long-standing standard. It's a new exploitive trend that is currently affecting about half of US employees.

They can require arbitration of contractual issues, but in case the employer breaks the law -- having a binding arbitration clause puts them in the DOL crosshairs.. Or so they say

We vigorously prosecute violations at workplaces where workers are bound by mandatory arbitration.

I can see barring someone who is in a sales position from going to a direct competitor in a small market where they would be able to take their clients with them

They don't exactly need a no-compete for that; they really need a broad no-solicit listing everyone who would be in the sales' peoples contact list.

As for future business prospects in the area; the company has not yet paid the Sales person to sell to them, especially not in companies where the Sales folk are paid on mostly commission, eg 25% per account in good standing -- in this case the company might have let go the Sales person solely to terminate Sales commissions from a number of recurring accounts. If the Sales rep had accumulated hundreds of $K per year in commissions but weren't making new sales often, then the rep can get to be seen by management as a liability.

So maybe you could say this is manipulative as well, and simply Ban no-solicits that don't preserve and include fair commission for the term on that person's active Sales and business referred to the company past the end of employment.

I enjoyed the Three Body trilogy in the same way that I enjoy tasting Chinese cuisine... it's interesting to experience the unique flavors of other cultures. A lot of Chinese history, philosophy, and worldview permeates Liu Cixin's fiction, and it gives his writing a subtly different texture than the works of American authors like Asimov or Niven. The handful of American characters in the trilogy like Frederick Tyler and Thomas Wade are particularly interesting, since they look so much like fun-house mirror distortions of Hollywood archetypes. I think it's a combination of the image we project to the world, and China's interpretation of that image. The result feels eerily familiar yet strange.

The experience was similar to reading Stanislaw Lem's science fiction, a Polish author frequently cited as the Eastern bloc's response to Asimov. Lem's fiction is frequently darker and more philosophical than the usual American fare, with overarching themes of defeat and the limits of human achievement. In His Master's Voice, all the scientists of the world gather to decode the first ever alien radio transmission, and ultimately fail to do so. Humans similarly fail to make sense of the intelligent ocean planet in Solaris. In the Invincible, the crew of a mighty starship is forced to flee a planet when they are overwhelmed by the self-replicating machines that evolved there. Contrast this to the triumphant conquest of space by daring heroes usually found in American sci-fi!

This is not to say that all American authors are the same, or that foreign authors are entirely defined by their backgrounds. Nevertheless, I find it interesting to see how other cultures influence their authors, and how they view us in turn.

Intercepting letters is also done in the distribution centers based on the metadata.

That only works for letters delivered with the Postal service. I can have a private courier personally carry a lockbox containing a letter to you at point B from point A, and it will never hit the distribution center.

Furthermore, in case the person mailing the letter encrypts it before sending it in the mail; you won't be able to tell what the letter you intercepted contains. I mean: I can AES encrypt some text and print it out as a QR Code. Only my recipient will be able to read that, so long as only that recipient was given the key.

You can do that with electronic E2E messages just the same; it's just a digital payload you won't be able to decrypt without seizing the keys from the end users.

Likewise, I can use a voice encryption technology that encodes the call over the POTS line I am sending you to E2E; even if the link is "Listened in on" from a central dispatch point - it is only garbled noise.

No logging software is able to record the authentications to AAD, Exchange Online, or other cloud services run by Microsoft, Because they're
  Microsoft's servers; Microsoft doesn't provide you the ability to run programs on their servers - you literally Don't have access to the sets of logs, Tools, or APIs necessary to get the log of authentications without Paying extra for security licenses.

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

The other thing that's weird about this bill is it Purports to Restrict how the law could be challenged in court By stating that there is a Very short time limit to file any kind of challenge against the law, and the DC Court of Appeals has exclusive jurisdiction.