The security community didn’t ignore hard evidence - the “hard evidence” didn’t stand up to basic scrutiny.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
Time scale. Viral load has increased dramatically over what it was like 1000 years ago. The change over the past 100 years is all lifespan due to antibiotics and the sterility another comment is pointing the finger at. It’s possible that viral load + lifespan = cancer, dementia, autoimmune stuff, etc.
I mean there’s pretty low hanging fruit mentioned in the article. If rail strikes are frequent enough to feature in the formula, end the strikes by paying the workers well.
And the average UK citizen seems to have a huge problem with that, but seems to be completely happy with private train company executives getting paid obscene amounts and train companies paying out huge dividends when the services are so bad.
Why do people resent train drivers getting paid well?
When train workers demanded inflationary pay maintenance the highest train driver pay was splashed all over the media in an attempt to get workers to hate one another and ignore the execs and shareholders walking off with all the money.
There shouldn't be any money to walk off with whilst services are more expensive and less good than most other countries.
Creating a market for a natural monopoly like train travel should always include simulated competition against other remote geographies (ie. France), and financial penalties for losing that competition.
Nearly all increase is from Google and their deal with them, a deal that was done before Brendan became CEO. So the revenue would increase no matter who became CEO.
Not to throw this discussion on too long a tangent, but this honestly reads in exactly the same way as fawning comments about Putin "saving his country" by presiding over a period of record-high oil prices.
On the bright side, he and his cronies didn't steal absolutely everything, and some scraps made it to the rest of the population.
Mozilla's leadership is a cancer that will kill it, and will take the work of many good, talented technical people down the drain. IRL parallels abound.
Listen, mozilla's got problems - we can agree on that, and you don't need to compare me to a putin apologist to make that point.
But "go woke go broke" is dumb sloganeering and plainly false. It's not a description of how the world works - it's a call to arms to boycott things labeled "woke". Sometimes things labeled "woke" do well because of their "wokeness", other times the anti-"woke" backlash kills them. Plenty of things "go woke" without ever being labeled "woke". Plenty of non-"woke" things go broke.
Either way, my only real point in citing revenue numbers is to point out that ten years after the whole Eich debacle, mozilla's still not broke. Seems like maybe their problems are unrelated to "wokeness".
This has been an experiment, and it does appear that people will use the tools more and more. Unfortunately we can't escape it - which I agree doesn't make it right.
Perhaps some kind of better licensing? The nature of these tools is that they exist and they have scraped all the "things". Maybe having your own private agent's is the way forward?
Copyright law was created because technology came along and made it so copying was easy. We could have thrown up our hands and said well we can’t escape it, these tools exist! But instead we used culture and law to create a framework where printing presses, tape decks, and computers exist and artists can still be compensated for their work. All that is needed now is some adjustments to account for these new copyright laundering machines.
Private agents doesn’t solve any of this. Those agents use models trained on others work, it doesn’t really matter where the model runs.
All the creators of the original images ingested by midjourney? You understand that if we had the transparency to make a list of names, this wouldn’t be as insidious of a problem for artists, yes?
Is the browser ecosystem supposed to get better if we collapse it to just webkit and blink? Websites track us, browsers track us, web extensions track us, ISPs track us, OSs track us, cell networks track us.
Government passing legit privacy laws is the literal only way to prevent this - not browser choice. Unfortunately gov is fully captured by corporate interests most places in the world.
Seriously. Without cors, js on any site you visit can make requests as you to anywhere. The only thing protecting you would be security through obscurity.
I also want this, but only to run my own apps which I build for my private use. If you don't assume the user is incompetent, you could build a secure browser that provides permission prompts to opt out of cors.
It should be safer if it doesn't send cookies, but you can still get in trouble for "hacking" because you visited a website that contained code that sent "hacking" requests to another website.
As someone who deeply loves LOTR - if you try to apply the rules of LOTR to this world, you will make this world worse. This is true. Inheritance and monarchy does not make for a good government, and we know this.
But LOTR is about vibes not facts. Friendship, loyalty, hope, doing the right thing with what power you have, appreciating what is good and green and gentle in the world, etc.
> the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld
The more seriously you take the rules of LOTR, yes. But you can take LOTR seriously without taking the rules seriously - by taking the vibes seriously.
> Inheritance and monarchy does not make for a good government, and we know this.
Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record. The problem isn't that you can't get good results, but rather the extreme variance.
lol. I lived under the same monarch, QEII, who has ruled for seventy years, and I assure you that I and my compatriots feel far, far, freer in practice and guided more well than any single American ought to feel currently.
They don't have power, but they do have influence. Every Prime Minister has a weekly meeting with the... King (still hard to type that, isn't it?), an off-the-record discussion of what they're doing and thinking, with someone who (theoretically, at least) has the long view interests of the nation in mind. Most have said it's immensely valuable.
That apart, the "show" function is important, too. It separates the Head of State and Head of Government functions, which makes it easier to dismiss the Head of Government, without disturbing the stability of the State. The US system fuses the two, which (in my view) is part of what makes the Congress reluctant to follow through on impeachment. (To avoid recent examples: had Bill Clinton been (treated like) a British Prime Minister in 1998 he'd have lost a no-confidence vote among his own party, and Al Gore would have served out his term. I think that would have been a better outcome than what actually happened, and followed.)
Which can be mitigated by making the monarch powerless.
I’m in Australia and the Trump presidency will be the thing for the next century that we can point to and say that this is why we are not going to ever, ever, ever get rid of the king or queen, in favour of a local president. I suspect that Canada and other countries feel much the same.
I agree that Monarchs are great if they realise their long term legacy is best served by doing very little-to-nothing but still bringing the Prime Minister to account once a week (the A/UK/CA/NZ evolutionary model). However, even the ceremonial power is proving problematic in a world where the government of UK wants King of UK to have Trump for tea and the government of CA wants King of CA to spit in it.
Monarchy does not prevent enslavement. In fact, serfdom is a relatively common feature of monarchy. That’s what those two things have to do with each other.
The UK, under a monarch, abolished slavery and set the Royal Navy to blockade slave ships.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
Good that you agree slavery was abolished by a country with a monarch ... you skipped over the second point; the country most associated with industrial scale slavery in the world had no monarch.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
Slavery was “abolished” in the UK while that same nation continued to traffic and profit from enslavement for quite a long time it’s “abolition”. Is your point that monarchy is good, or that slavery is associated with all forms of government?
"guest workers" as a term completely excludes serfs. Serfs are attached to the land, guest workers on the other hand come from a completely different place. North Korea is not a monarchy, and what's happening there is forced labour, or slavery.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
Serfs were forced to work for little to no wages, and often can't leave the country because their employers confiscate their passports. That's about as close to modern serfdom as you can get.
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Perhaps absolute would be a better wording. After all there are also very few absolute democracies, absolute free markets, etc, etc.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
Admittedly it's possible that might run afoul of a dictionary definition or three. I'm not sure. I suppose it's all largely pointless speculation anyway since someone with a long enough term is going to be incentivized to modify the system to officially become hereditary if it isn't already.
> Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
Officially though?
Contrast with your other example, North Korea, where many of the abuses are indeed officially recognized.
There's plenty that the laws (or at least enforcement) in the western world fail to stop. In many cases you can argue that it's intentional (and I might even agree with you). But that doesn't make it official in that it isn't what's written down or what the electorate explicitly agreed to.
> Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
The thing is, regular autocracy has to destroy the institutions of power transfer. If there's a presumptive successor, then the autocrat can never feel secure in their power. So hereditary transfer is the only model that is at least tolerable for autocrats.
But building the institutions of power transfer requires people who are invested in them. So you need feudal lords who derive their power and wealth from their relation with the monarch. These feudal lords _themselves_ are interested in power transfer to make sure their heirs can be secure.
That's why, historically, elected kings turned into hereditary kings with only one exception, Vatican (for obvious reasons).
> For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know.
Mikhail Mishustin. The Prime Minister of Russia takes over in the event of the President being indisposed and acts as temporary President until the President recovers or a new one is elected.
Putin is holding his power because he set himself up as the final arbiter in conflicts between powerful "clans". This is largely unofficial power, that he holds personally (not due to institutions).
He is preventing anyone else from gaining similar levels of influence. For example, Mishustin's power was cut down by the changes Putin pushed into the Constitution in 2020.
Side note, this situation is 100% typical for autocracies. And once the autocrat dies, the country very often descends into chaos, simply because there are no institutions that are capable of resolving conflicts between groups without violence. Example: Libya.
It's almost as though the global political landscape has varied significantly over these thousands of years and various societal features (including monarchy, serfdom, slavery, etc) aren't inherently linked to one another.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
Yeah, that’s the ol’ philosopher-king argument. I get it, but I don’t really buy into it. I.e. if the next monarch is a despot, their rule is a part of the previous monarch’s actions… so even a truly good king will inevitably harm the people under them.
You don't actually seem like you're disagreeing with me though? I spoke only to the form of government as it pertains to end results, not to how we should attribute "points" to a given ruler or politician. Credit assignment is similarly difficult when it comes to voters and elected leaders.
The end result is higher variance over a long period of time as a dictatorship switches between good and bad leadership. Meanwhile democracies consistently fail to execute on large scale visions. There's a reason corporate structure generally resembles a dictatorship, and that same reason is what eventually leads many of them to fail.
It's also notably light on the "prosaic" aspects. It just says that elves "dwelt" here and made a kingdom there. But as GRRM said: what was Aragorn's tax policy?
At least in the Once and Future King, the only real King Arthur story that I've read, I got the impression that Arthur pulling the sword from the stone was more of a metaphor of him "being ready" to be king more than just genealogy or anything like that.
When Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, he was remembering all the stuff that Merlyn taught him about the different ways that animals run their societies and how it informed how he would lead if he were in charge.
> Meanwhile off-by-one errors are ludicrously common…
Off by one errors in general have nothing to do with being 1 or 0-based indexed.
In French off-by-one error is called “the post and fence problem” because there's always one more post than piece of fence (unless your fence makes a loop).
It arises because it's easy to confuse the number of intervals between elements and the number of elements (which is also: do I need to include the bounds or not). 1-based indexing isn't going to help at all in the general case (it will help for the most basic error which is getting the last element of an array with `a[a.length]`, but that's it)
Off-by-one errors are more likely with 1-based indexing because they don't have the nice properties of 0-based/right open intervals that mean you don't have to add or subtract 1 all over the place.
For example what is the index of pixel X,Y in an image buffer? X + Ystride right? Nope! It's X + (Y-1)stride.
What's the range of the Ith block of N elements? [in, in + n)? Nope! It's [(i-1)n+1, in].
I have to deal with that nonsense in Matlab all the time. Nightmare.
These claims may well be false, but they deserve scrutiny, and waving them away while perpetuating a much repeated lie isn’t helping anyone except criminals and corruption.
Bottom line: this deserves investigation.