That's not a very compelling counterexample, when you consider how often countries with governments force other countries with government to do as they want, often with nothing but economic or soft power.

Buying an entire cart full of groceries that will last for weeks is a somewhat American cultural thing. I'm not saying that I've never seen it, but the norm where I live in Europe is to have one of those hand-held baskets and getting enough for 2-3 days tops.

Or they just don't live in cities which not everyone in Europe does either so they can't just walk a few blocks to grab supplies for a day or two.

Definitely an American thing.

I was shocked to discover how incredibly poorly IndexedDB works. I always thought it would be fast and snappy if a bit alien. But nope, it's incredibly bad!

Despite being a native feature to the browser it's incredibly slow, and the way it works in terms of fetching records based on non-primary keys forces you to either load your entire dataset into RAM at once or iterate though it record-by-record in a slow callback. Something as trivial as 10k records can bring your webapp to a crawl.

I've built some pretty intensive stuff in indexeddb and it was the only thing I've ever done, using native browser features, that I could get to consistently crash the browsers I tested it on (granted, this was many years ago). On top of that, the API is so ugly. I cannot believe indexeddb won over websql (when every browser ever already embeds sqlite). What a shame.

I wonder if those issues are resolved by using the Dexie.js wrapper, because I've had no problems with that.

It does not, I've also used Dexie.js. Your usecase has most likely been too small to run into the very annoying walls.

Language is powerful.

Language can do poker, trading, and other intelligent activities.

Why would there be no money under socialism?

No money is a bit of hyperbole, but fundamentally, nobody really wants to work hard for the exclusive benefit of everybody else.

Greed is an innate human trait.

So there would be money, it would just be less efficient. That's a fair enough claim, but I don't understand why I was downvoted for asking.

Socialism is not communism and isn't anarchism.

Those are not the same, but too many don't know what's the differrence.

Money only works when there is a base level of trust that later, money accepted will have some similar utility.

Emulators are wonderful, I got into assembly for the 6502 processor used in the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and it's been an absolute blast, there is something so inherently satisfying and almost zen-like in it.

A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone.

The same even stakes are not there with robots killing humans. For one side it's a life-or-death situation, while for the other side it's profit margins and numbers. Companies are usually very happy to increase yearly profit for something as minor as a decimal percentage rise in human deaths spread across society, that's not even controversial.

Heck, not only can you not put a robot in jail, you can't even stop it from driving the next day as if nothing happened because it's duplicate running the exact same software and hardware is all over society.

I still think robot cars is a good thing though, because they will have a lot less accidents than us humans who love to drink and drive, or speed for no good reason. Still, it will raise some big important questions.

At least in most parts of the US, hitting and killing a pedestrian does not usually result in jail time for the driver - unless the driver was driving under the influence or was driving recklessly. Most times their license isn't even taken away.

Older article that I remember but still remains true based on news reports I read https://revealnews.org/article/bay-area-drivers-who-kill-ped...

> A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail

We rarely put human drivers in jail even when they're clearly at fault. We often don't even take their license away.

We have put CEOs in prison in the past. We could do so again. If a company really operates with blatant disregard for safety we should. Waymo's CEO makes it clear that she thinks their cars are better than normal humans, so long as that is really the case and she isn't ignoring issues she shouldn't go to prison for deaths their cars cost, but it is (or should be) an option if the company isn't careful.

The point of failure is probably not the CEO, though. They are rarely technical people directly supervising the taxis. If it can be proven that management skimped on quality, then, by all means, jail them. Otherwise, it becomes the fault of the people monitoring the systems.

I'm not saying that stuff like that doesn't happen, but what do you think is the ratio between employers abusing their employees compared to employees abusing their employers?

And with the different kinds of abuse, which "side" do you think causes the most genuine harm to the other though their actions?

Are you sure? I'm pretty sure there are types of bacteria that has existed long before humanity existed, and will exist long after humanity is gone.

"has existed long before humanity" isn't relevant for my argument.

"Will exist long after humanity" -> maybe, maybe not. If we're smart, capable and humble enough, we could, in principle, intentionally outlast them.

By "intentionally" I mean: we can design our future lightcone such that, by whichever measure you care to choose, there are still humans around. Yes, bacteria could be still around, but it won't be because they _chose_ to be around, it will be because it just so happened that the universe arranged itself in a way that they are still around.

By "in principle" I mean: if we spent enough resources, energy and smarts and built a civilization around this goal, we could plausibly (given the known laws of physics) do this. Whether we _will_ do it or destroy ourselves first any of the possible various means, is an open question.

Lineages of bacteria that exist today, here, will only keep existing in the _far_ future (billions of years from now, after the sun chars Earth and then spends its energy budget) if it just so happens that a panspermia event kicked some off our solar system and then they just so happen to find a suitable solar system to keep existing.

We can design our future, bacteria can't.

The problem with that argument (which people also use on animals like sharks) is it assumes that these other organisms haven't also been evolving in the human timeframe. Yes, you can find evidence of organisms that look more or less like modern bacteria or sharks long before humans existed, but the idea that these organisms haven't been under selective pressure since is false. Indeed, they are probably under greater selective pressure now due to the effects of humans on the planet.

Bit of a ship of Theseus situation I suppose. Humans have been and will continue to evolve as well, but you still want to credit them as "humans", so why not give the same logic to the bacteria?

Pretty sure no bacteria will survive on earth after the sun expands enough to char it, yes.

Even if I'm wrong, and it does survive _that_, then it eventually won't survive the sun spending its entire energy budget.

We're the only ones that could intentionally (as in, actively design our future lightcone) to survive that, so that makes us special in my book.

It's roughly the same problem as letting a search engine build indexes (with previews!) of sites without authentication. It's kinda crazy that things were allowed to go this far with such a fundamental flaw.

Yep. Many years ago I worked at one of the top brokerage houses in the United States, they had a phenomenal Google search engine in house that made it really easy to navigate the whole company and find information.

Then someone discovered production passwords on a site that was supposed to be secured but wasn’t.

Found such things in several places.

The solution was to make searching work only if you opted-in your website.

After that internal search was effectively broken and useless.

All because a few actors did not think about or care about proper authentication and authorization controls.

I'm unclear on what the "flaw" is - isn't this precisely the "feature" that search engines provide to both sides and that site owners put a ton of SEO effort into optimizing?

If you have public documents, you can obviously let a public search engine index them and show previews. All is good.

If you have private documents, you can't let a public search engine index and show previews of those private documents. Even if you add an authentication wall for normal users if they try to open the document directly. They could still see part of the document in google's preview.

My explanation sounds silly because surely nobody is that dumb, but this is exactly what they have done. They gave access to ALL documents, both public and private, to an AI, and then got surprised when the AI leaked some private document details. They thought they were safe because users would be faced with an authentication wall if they tried to open the document directly. But that doesn't help if copilot simply tells you all the secret in it's own words.

You say that, but it happens — "Experts Exchange", for example, certainly used to try to hide the answers from users who hadn't paid while encouraging search engines to index them.

That's not quite the same. Experts Exchange wanted the content publicly searchable, and explicitly allowed search engines to index it. In this case, many customers probably aren't aware that there is a separate search index that contains much of the data in their private documents that may be searchable and accessible by entities that otherwise shouldn't have access.

That's not necessarily what happened in the article. He wasn't able to access private docs. He was just able to tell Copilot to not send an audit log.