> GNU Taler ensures that the paying customer is anonymous
This right here is the reason why governments won't use it. Governments want transactions to be traceable so that they can audit your taxes. I don't have any issues with that, I actually don't mind paying taxes, but I would never expect a government, no matter how progressive, to use a privacy-based protocol or solution.
It’s designed with taxes in mind. Total user cashflow is still apparent at the bank, just like if you withdrew cash. And the amounts received by vendors are visible as well. So taxable there too. That’s a big part of what’s so cool about it.
My company is full remote, we get things done in time with zero issues. That sounds like the culture and management of the place you work at are not equipped or want to deal with remote working.
I think you are missing the entire point of this. It's not that it had sensitive data or anything of importance. It is that a .gov domain under the command of the self proclaimed Mr. Efficiency and smartest person of Earth about servers and car manufacturing was wide open for script kiddies to deface and access data from. It is a show of hypocrisy and how cutting corners like Dr. Emerald Mine Child here wants will shape the rest of this administration.
> Every other intelligence agency on the planet is about to scoop a ton of American data via cyber and basic HUMINT
I was replying to what was written. I read this as implying that sensitive (or any) data was available.
> and access data from
Again, is there any evidence that any data was accessible, beyond what is visible on the webpage? If you read the article, the flaw was that anything could be pushed. Could you link a source that says extra data was accessible? Your claim is not made in the above article, and I can't find anything mentioning data access, with a quick search.
There’s zero evidence of either of it, just because they got an A record with a .gov at the DNS doesn’t mean this tiny site had any connection back to larger data, and based on my own analysis of how hard every furry hacker on the planet is hitting this, if there was, it would be leaked to the moon already and not speculated on.
That is also my experience. I use ChatGPT to help me iterate a Godot game project, and it does not take more than a handful of prompts for it to forget or hallucinate about something we previously established. I need to constantly remind it about code it suggested a while ago or things I asked for in the past, or it completely ignores the context and focus just on the latest ask.
It is incredibly powerful for getting things started, but as soon as you have a sketch of a complex system going it loses its grasp on the full picture and do not account for the states outside the small asks you make. This is even more evident when you need to correct it about something or request a change after a large prompt. It just throws all the other stuff out the window and hyperfocus only on that one piece of code that needs changing.
This has been the case since GPT 3, the even their most recent model (forgot the name, the reasoning one) has this issue.
Larry just comes across as pissed off. He complains that Obama's article doesn't discuss, or discuss enough for his liking, "Hilary's email servers".
He complains that it doesn't discuss Obamagate in any detail. Possibly because it was essentially a baseless accusation/conspiracy from Trump that when investigated, showed no evidence?
He complains that Trump's page contains too many "negative words", in sections like his "Public Profile" (and then complains that Obama doesn't have a section titled exactly the same, though he does have "Cultural and Political Image").
He complains that the article on abortion describes it as a very safe medical procedure, "a claim that is questionable on its face" - which is why the article links to citations, unlike Larry, who just rebuts with "conservatives don't think so".
He then goes on to claim that "Wikipedia holds positions that some scientific minorities reject" around concepts such as the MMR vaccine, global warning, chiropractic and homeopathy. That latter one is the easiest, as there is zero assertion based in physics that a substance can be imbued with the "essence" of something when diluted to the point where it would take multiple universes worth of molecules to get one original molecule in the final substance. Sanger wholly fails to give a valid reason why anyone should give homeopathic dilutions an equal weight to the rest of our body of work on medicine and physics other than "bias!"
> He complains that the article on abortion describes it as a very safe medical procedure, "a claim that is questionable on its face"
So far the only good argument I've seen for abortions being very unsafe from people ideologically opposed to them is that they're unsafe by definition because they lead to a person dying (in which case, yeah, but that's not what people normally mean by "safe").
Also, as with other culture war medical topics, the danger of the cure needs to be assessed relatively to the danger of the "disease". Pregnancies are not safe. Giving birth is extremely not safe, regardless of method. Heck, even menstrual cycles aren't safe. Even conception can lead to death in the case of ectopic pregnancies, not to mention the health risks of sexual intercourse itself (which is why it's called "safer sex", not "safe sex"). So we need to take those into account as a baseline when talking about the safety of medical procedures or drugs interfering with these. Those on the side that insists on making it a culture war topic usually deny or downplay that baseline risk while widely exaggerating the risk of the procedure.
This goes for abortions, hormone suppressors, vaccines, premarital sex and many more. But of course it isn't about the medical risk. They'd still be opposed even if it were perfectly 100% safe (which can't even be said about ordinary daily activities like using the toilet, walking or sitting). The main "risk" they are concerned about is moral, and that can't really be argued with.
Well, good thing art is subjective. To me these are leagues better than ads and they bring social commentary and inspiration far more than any ad. It's one of the few things I am proud of as someone who lived in the state of Sao Paulo for a good chunk of my life.
In other words, they're propaganda. At least in the case of graffiti with social commentary, anybody can go out there and put their message up. Murals with social messages are propaganda sanctioned by the property owner, or even commissioned by the government, making it establishmentarian propaganda that pretends to be transgressive by adopting the superficial form of unsanctioned graffiti. Such murals are tacky and inauthentic; scrawled gang signs have more soul.
So you've established yourself as the arbiter of what is both establishment and propaganda... Did you become the thing you hate?
This may be a case where you spend so much time trying to be contrarian and not asking "Would getting what I want actually improve anything in the world".
This really stretches the meaning of propaganda almost to the point where it's synonymous with individual speech. Propaganda is systematic opinion making where some group does things like call tons of people or distribute tons of leaflets, or astroturf internet forums. It's not the same thing as putting up a mural on a building you own, or a sign in your yard.
I think a mural could be part of a propaganda campaign, but I don't think by themselves they merit the categorization.
Are these the majority of the murals and are they clearly Pro-government? I can't even find one example of what you might be talking about. This seems like a total non-issue.
No, they don't bring any social commentary, they only bring sycophancy. As soon as you criticize it you are moderated and silenced into oblivion. Your "social commentary" can only go in the way they demand that it go.
I don't know what kind of systems you worked on in your career, but even simpler systems with smaller userbases than twitter are quite complex if you are new to it.
Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
> A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
Having a senior engineer with a lot of context is worthless if the work environment does not promote open communication. You don't want to be the senior engineer or leader who shows "poor judgement" by opposing the mercurial owner "for no reason" if you're overridden and the feature launch succeeds without a glitch; no one gets fired for implementing a request that came straight from the top.
This is why non-rushed, scaled roll-outs are essential for large system: had they tried this on 1% / 5% / 10% of random traffic first, they could have caught this. Yet again, if the directive to roll it out to production came from the very top, you set that gate to 100% immediately.
“Trying to make a pigtail out of these unbrushed hair may unscrew the ears”. Sorry, yep, twitter is big. But if preventing tens of doomed requests before a login requires a senior engineer with lots of context, then the program was screwed up long before the layoffs.
I don't disagree, but: Twitter was big and it worked. Then someone created incentives for many people who know the code to leave.
The one's left don't know all the code (how could they?), but were forced to change many things about the site at a "just do it" basis. This error didn't happen because someone was too stupid to remove the code, it did happen because the connection to another thing was removed and the failsafe on the landing page doesn't have exponential backdown built in, not something you can necessarily know or investigate before, when an executive breaths down your neck and wants you to just do it.
This is about the new managment, not about engineers.
Your argument is that it is a non sequitur to say that the right skilled people are not at twitter, using the argument that the right people with the available skills were not involved in this feature.
Twitter could be packed with extremely skillful senior engineers who don't understand the product well enough to predict complex outcomes of planned changes.
Likewise you can have a "poor quality" 1x employee who has knowledge of how everything within the stack is glued together; where there is chewingum and where there are steel beams.
They are potentially more vauable than the 100x engineer who has intimate knowledge of how googles shipping container datacentres work.
From the announcement presentation, this happened due to this image being an average of many, many different images. Due to it's size, the motion of the accreting material around SgtA* moves much, much faster relative it than the material around M87. While the accreting material around both BHs move at similar speeds, M87 is about 2000x more massive than SgtA. Due to that, the material around M87 takes weeks to orbit it, while the material around SgtA takes hours. Since each data point can be minutes or hours apart, the final image for a single data point can vary greatly between other measurements, and thus the need to average everything. To put things in perspective, we just confirmed through this image that SgtA*'s shadow is about the size of the orbit of Mercury around the Sun. M87's shadow, on the other hand, has a radius larger than the distance of the Voyager probe to the Sun.
>I don’t know much about this subject so I can’t really weigh in on how much the post makes sense but [...]
Then how can you say the criticism seems substantive? He brings nothing to the table to show that his criticism is valid, it's basically "I don't like, therefore wrong". The proper way criticize their paper would be conduct your own experiments using their parameters and methodologies and show that the results you obtain do not match theoretical results or results of other observations through other means.
>On that point, scientists don’t need you to chastise people for questioning their authority online. I think a lot of them would be offended at the idea that you think that is what they want.
We question their authority on this specific subject they seem to be criticizing. If you make a claim without having at least the background to support said claim, what value does it have? It's the same as a person without background in microbiology or virology claiming vaccines don't work when they don't even begin to understand the science behind it and the mountain of evidence that says otherwise.
This right here is the reason why governments won't use it. Governments want transactions to be traceable so that they can audit your taxes. I don't have any issues with that, I actually don't mind paying taxes, but I would never expect a government, no matter how progressive, to use a privacy-based protocol or solution.