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Comment Re:Fuck "Eat the Rich" (Score 1) 89

And here's why that study was meaningless - "We are not going to consider the impact of the principle being decided. Rather, we just want to know who got the money in the case in question." That is, they ignore the single most important factor and focus only on the least relevant - the private fiscal implications of the ruling.

There may be something of interest in the findings, but in regards to the nature of cases being heard, not the relative finances of the claimants.

If it's the principle that's driving the decisions, not the affluence of the beneficiaries, across a sufficiently-large set of cases we'd expect to find no correlation between the political leanings of the justices and their votes benefiting wealthy vs poor people. Which is what the article said happened for many decades.

Unless, of course, the principle being applied is "Who benefits?"

It's worth pointing out that although gtall framed it as the Republicans siding with the wealthy, it's equally true that the Democrats are siding with the poor. Both sides are inordinately focused on who benefits.

Comment Re:I mean (Score 1) 133

I don't doubt that HP-UX was capable but it's exactly the situation that the guy in the article is describing -- it was 100% an enterprise product sold to banks and similar customers with zero effort made to make it sexy or accessible to even broader commercial customers.

I used HP/UX as a development platform in the mid-90s, cross-compiling to m68k boards running pSOS and VxWorks. It was a little weird, but rock solid, utterly reliable, as were the HP workstations it ran on.

Comment Re:More complicated (Score 1) 136

The 'killer app' will be a smaller lighter (and safest) solid state battery with a range over 500 miles Thats when adoption will take off to get the people that are hesitant to switch

Nah.

All that's required is that EVs be cheap. A 300-mile range is sufficient. When the purchase price of a car with a 300-mile range is at or only slightly above the purchase price of a comparable ICEV, EVs sales will explode because they're cheaper to operate and maintain. All of the range anxiety and concerns about fires (which are silly, since gasoline vehicles are a lot more prone to burning) will inhibit a few people, for a little while, but pretty soon they'll all have friends and relatives who are driving EVs and happy about it, and they'll start making the switch, too.

It's all about the benjamins.

Comment Re:Makes sense to me... (Score 2) 202

The LLM's that ChatGPT and Perplexity use were trained on data that's at least a few weeks old before a new model is released to the public.

It's not really meant to tell you about today's headlines.

Sure, but Claude, at least, knows that its knowledge cutoff date is January 2025. It's sometimes lazy and will tell you that current events precede its knowledge, but if you tell it to do a search, it will, and then it will accurately describe what it found. Other times it just automatically searches when it realizes you're asking about something that is too recent to be included in its training data.

It seems strange that other LLMs that have the ability to search the web don't do the same.

Comment Re:Is it worth it (Score 1) 230

We went from massive worm problem to almost no worm problem overnight when connections were put behind a NAT.

And you could have achieved exactly the same thing at lower compute cost with a stateful firewall. NAT didn't save you from worms, the stateful firewall that NAT requires in order to work did. But you can have the firewall without the NAT, and the result is simpler, more efficient, easier to manage and more flexible.

Comment Re:Not everything is name based (Score 1) 230

We are so used to the constraints put on us by IPv4 that we don't even consider what opportunities open up when every single device on the planet has its own globally routed IP address.

Yes, all those opportunities for insecure IoT devices to be compromised.

So have your router run a firewall that denies inbound connections be default, the same way NAT does. This is a side effect of NAT, but can be done better and more easily by a simple firewall.

Comment Re: People gave up on the Internet... (Score 1) 230

I don't want people all over the world connecting to my bedroom. If I wanna host a website I pay an extra $8/mo for VPS

Then don't run a web server in your bedroom. And maybe have a firewall that blocks inbound connections by default (which is a side effect of NAT, but absolutely does not require NAT).

But many of us would like to run servers from home.

Comment Re:Even gold and silver are partly like fiat (Score 2) 55

Admittedly, gold and silver have a utility value, but the price is much higher than the utility value because most people want it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, not to make stuff with.

Silver and gold aren't like fiat, they're inherently inferior to fiat currency, for exactly the reason you cite.

PPH is deeply incorrect when he says that fiat currencies are not backed by assets. Fiat currencies are backed by legally-enforceable promises to repay debts. Every dollar created is balanced by the simultaneous creation of an obligation by someone to do some sort of productive work to generate value that is used to retire that obligation (at which point the dollar is destroyed).

Precious metals have a small utility value coupled with a large speculative value. Fiat currency is also a mixture of utility and speculation, but the mixture depends on the probability that the borrower on the loan contract that created the dollar will repay the debt. Since nearly all debt is repaid, dollars are mostly real utility. Further, the probability of default is offset by the fact that borrowers that don't default repay more than 100% of the debt, because of interest (though interest must also offset the discount rate, i.e. currency devaluation, i.e. inflation). So the precise mixture of utility and speculation behind a dollar is hard to nail down with precision, but the speculative part is very small, usually indistinguishable from zero.

Fiat currency evolved rather than being designed, but it's hard to see how a more perfect system could have been designed. Not only does fiat currency have greater intrinsic value than precious metals or similar physical exchange media, it naturally expands and contracts the money supply as needed, which facilitates rapid economic growth in good times and prevents devastating deflation in bad times.

Cryptocurrencies are among the worst possible forms of currency. They have negative intrinsic value (they cost money to produce but have no intrinsic utility), have very limited ability to expand money supply when needed (they could adjust the mining success probability, but there are strong disincentives to do so) and cannot contract the money supply when needed. Further, they have very high transaction costs, which leads to them being treated as assets rather than currencies. The fact that they're very hard to regulate does, however, make them great for crime of all sorts.

Comment Re:Crypo is terrible as an investment (Score 2) 55

There's no physical assets

So, pretty much like every other fiat currency.

No, fiat currency is asset-backed. The assets in question are legally-enforceable contracts to repay loans. Fiat currency is precisely a legally-enforced commitment to produce something of value in the future, bundled up into an exchangeable medium.

Comment Re:You mean microdosing alcohol. (Score 0) 96

I spent a minute trying to figure out how you could consume photons in liquid form.

Same! Well, not liquid form, maybe. I thought maybe they were talking about getting sun exposure.

I re-read the headline several times, before giving up and reading the summary. At least the first sentence mentioned alcohol, which is when the metaphorical light bulb began emitting metaphorical photons.

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