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I call this the quicksand theory of network security. The threat is real but the risk overstated by orders of magnitude.

Remember firesheep? [1] [2] Go to a cafe with open WiFi, fire up extension and click on user who you want to impersonate.

Now imagine if we still lived in a world like that. Someone visits UN meeting and the rest is your imagination.

[1] https://nordvpn.com/cybersecurity/glossary/firesheep/?srslti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep


I used to pick peoples email username and passwords off the network in starbucks.

Have you never sat on public wifi and tried to open an http site? These days it is highly likely to be MITM'd by the wifi provider to inject ads (or worse).

I honestly don't remember a single case where that happened to me. Internet user since 1997.


There's little evidence that this is a common problem.

Besides the graveyard of failed start-ups? There's plenty of evidence, just no strong conclusions.

Did you look at the graveyard of failed start-ups and conclude they would of lived if they had enough non-coding overhead?

I look at it and see just as many failed start-ups from engineer-founders as a do from non-engineer founders. The idea that being a programmer makes you better to run a business has nothing to back it up.

I'm not sure where this idea comes from though, it's not something I argued. The post I replied to claims engineers can't see the big picture and deal with end user requirements, and your own testimony above contradicts that.

there is in meta.

Userneed is very much second to company priority metrics.


I wouldn’t say this lends to a bias of over-engineering but more so psc optimizing

Suffering isn't necessary outside evolutionary pressures. But if a bouillon of animal proteins could be conscious why not.

Relatively few politicians get their campaigns funded by hostile states, although it increasingly becomes more common. And while corruption is multifaceted this is clearly one of the graver violations. Let's hope all of them end up prosecuted. People were shot for less.

Denmark is pretty neat place to live in, alas.

EV maintenance costs are way lower. There's hardly non-recycleable electrical waste in EVs. And they absolutely can last 15 years: depreciation doesn't mean they fall apart.

I am concerned about EV maintenance outside of warranty. My family has routinely gotten even American cars above 200,000 miles, or at least kept them going for 15 years or more.

This has gotten harder over the years. Cars from 2010 rust a lot less than cars from 1985. But they have more computers, and the computers die. These computers are often hard to replace. Even good mechanics tend to recommend going to the dealer. It's rarely less than a $1500 replacement.

And EV cars? They often have an extra half-dozen critical computers beyond what's in a gas car. So I worry that well-maintained Honda and Toyota EVs will fail sooner than their conventional models.

Perhaps this worry is misplaced. We'll see.


Our Leaf is still going fine after 12 years. But a 2013 budget EV is hilariously low spec by today standards. So yeah if you're looking for family heirloom qualities in a car it's a wrong choice. Most people don't drive old cars for sentimental value though.

Java is certainly not the fastest language out there.


Sure, but the relevant comparison isn't between languages: it's between a state-of-the-art JIT implementation of one language and a likewise-state-of-the-art AOT implementation of the same language. Unfortunately there aren't many examples of this; most languages have a preferred implementation strategy that receives much more effort than the other one.


The leadership in democracy does what the population wants, even more so in the past couple decades.


Citation very much needed ;) Even our current voting systems are far from being the best we can come up with in term of fairness. The population most certainly wants to remain in an environment humans can comfortably live in, somehow that's not what our democracies are selecting for these days.


Yet people actively decided as they did, while almost fully knowing where it leads. It could also have been worse given progressing senility, attempt to overthrow government etc. We are not in a new territory after all, just continuation. Tariffs are new mexican wall.

At least accept how your nation thinks on average, no weaseling around simple fact of today's reality.


In fairness while people do obviously want them they also want all the current conveniences of modern life and more. Completely off the cuff but I'm pretty sure the sum of those desires vastly dwarfs concern over longer term environmental effects. Essentially I think the average joe prioritizes their job and lifestyle over nagging climate concerns just like the gov does.


I don't know what kind of citation you expect. It's clear that political participation was never more direct and organized than now in the age of social media. The fools and resentful who always were numerous have found a way to unite and bypass the establishment and educational filters which were effectively restraining politics before. All the cowards, short termists, wannabe dictators, conspiracists and anti-intellectualists who are being elected squarely and fairly represent the people who voted for them.


I'm not from the US and I'm not arguing that the current US gov wasn't elected fairly. It's not a law of physics that leaders of democracies do what the people want, they are selected by a system that was designed to estimate the preference of a population (more likely the preference of the ones who designed it). A democratic system designed differently would have a different outcome, there are good examples of what happens when the system favors consensus for instance [0][1], albeit not at the same scale.

[0] https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-b...

1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Climat...


Yet somehow the desires of the population is fulfilled to a higher degree in authoritarian China than in the beacon of democracy USA.


This uh valiant defense of China misses my point entirely. People in democracies have no excuse hiding their personal responsibility behind flawed leadership.


By the same token, hiding comprehensively broken and undemocratic governance behind "it's the publics' fault, because they get to vote for one of two candidates owned by wealthy donors every 2 years" is the opposite of useful.


This phenomenon is not limited to the United States, the trend is global including many parliamentary republics.


It can be but it never is.


To re-optimize compiled code blocks isn't without effort. Google has publicly spoken about AutoFDO and Propeller [0], after Meta had open sourced BOLT [1] in 2021.

AutoFDO has since been ported to Android and adopted by Yandex [3].

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40868224

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42896716


Hard disagree. Many newer game system emulators (32-bit and up) rely on JIT or "dynarecs" to get playable speeds, and they pretty much all use high performance compiled languages already. They often double the performance over their interpreter or more.

But is that because of JIT compilation or other decisions for how the language should work (dynamic typing, GC, etc.)?


Especially after PGO (profiling guided optimization) gets most of the way there


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