Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.
Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.
I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)
There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.
I am surprised that on opting out of ad tracking in Android, they found that the opt-out flag was set to true, but the size of the tracking payload shot up i.e. more attributes being tracked. Not sure what to make of it?
Is it possible its a legal thing that once you opt-out of ads, it enables less risk for the company and therefore more tracking, perhaps?
That would need to be reproduced. I suppose the app itself could also have been put in a different state / with different settings between the two events.
I have been using Pass [0] with passff [1] and been pretty happy about it. Simple and offline password management where passwords live in gpg encrypted files. Additional features I like are tracking changes with git, bash completion and copying passwords to clipboard for few seconds temporarily, and a few very useful extensions.
Pass is awesome. I use it in combination with a YubiKey to store the pgp key. Because every password is stored in an independent encrypted file and every decryption needs a press on the YubiKey even a stolen database and keylogger does not provide access to all passwords.
I use pass with keyboard Maestro on the mac it just gets a autofill input for the password I want, them opens a terminal and asks for the master password if needed and puts in the clipboard. Very friendly way to use it.
Fun fact: Air India is a state owned airline that has been bailed out with tax payer money multiple times. Attempts to sell/privatize the airline has failed too so far.
The problem with this argument - I care about issue X, company C is known to disregard/exploit users with X and so I assume all employees of company C are complicit while I give a free pass to the users who remain ignorant and simply don't care no matter how many times these issues surface.
And where do you stop? Are all doctors working for big pharma related to opioid crisis complicit? what about people working for firms related to the financial crisis? engineers working for any company that suffered data breaches due to lax data security? what about engineers working for companies that haven't suffered data breaches yet but might have lax security? scientists working to certain biotech firms related to GM? engineers working for car manufacturers that cheated emission norms? engineers working for telecom/internet service providers that cheat users by throttling/net neutrality etc. etc. etc.
Yes, they’re all complicit, to different degrees. Even the janitors and cooks are complicit when they support unethical enterprises.
If any Facebook engineer suddenly acquired some moral sense, he should spend his time working to sabotage the company from within. Some have walked away; others have walked away and publicly spoken about facebook’s dubious culture.
Whistleblowing would be a good middle-ground here. Also, I don't think sabotage would be as efficient since FB would just restore everything in an instant.
The problem with whistleblowing is that the consequences need to be more direct and actually leave a dent. As it is right now, FB can absorb pretty much any fines they're hit with.
I was offering creative suggestions. What I said wasn’t anything I’d avoid saying in person, nor did I have any ill will toward the commenter I replied to.
No need for “aggression”. The CIA wrote a sabotage manual, which involved things like “forgetting” to lubricate wheels, spending lots of time in meetings which go nowhere, slowing down and getting distracted while working, etc.
I consider all of the energy being spent in the maintenance of facebook to be malicious. If a datacenter caved in because of a structural flaw in the building, then that’s a lot less energy going into supporting facebook. How many datacenters would have to cave in before they wouldn’t be able to recover?
I have been using OsmAnd~ [0] lately and have been pretty happy with it as an alternative. Uses open street maps, works offline, pretty good and configurable app.
The big issue preventing me from using something like OsmAnd is my need for real-time traffic. Generally, I can figure out where a place is with only the address since the N-S streets in my city are numbered and the first digits of an address on a cross-street corresponds to the numbered Avenues. Traffic, OTOH, can easily vary by 30 minutes on a 15 mile trip day to day even without any crashes along the route.
Is there an open, or at least more private, app that can give me accurate traffic data?
You can't pick one index to your convenience and even then, I have looked at the website - https://rsf.org/en/india which I think is your basis of the rankings.
Their headline was
> Deadly threat from Modi’s nationalism
Scaremonger much? I don't buy the fact that in the Internet age, you have to be some reporter to write against the government policies. If someone has any groundbreaking evidence against anything wrong the government is doing, all it takes is one youtube video anonymously.
They rank the United States at 46, the United Arab Emirates at 128(better than India) and India at 138. Seriously? There has been a mention of 3 isolated incidents against journalists who were affected. All these are criminal incidents where the police have started investigating, just like the thousands of criminal incidents against ordinary Indians.
There has never been a prime minister who was hated this much by an Opposition and god forbid there will never be. I really hope the opposition in India talks about development than scaring ordinary citizens, after 4 years of peace, you can't scare them.
> I don't buy the fact that in the Internet age, you have to be some reporter to write against the government policies.
We don't need reporters anymore because we have the internet? :)
I won't engage further. You're free to believe what you want, but here's what I would like to say
- You can interpret the current situation however you want, but others might disagree. And, anyone that disagrees with you or criticizes the govt, isn't necessarily the opposition or the enemy.
- The govt is not a victim of opposition's hate, opposition and press are free to and supposed to criticize the govt, and they always have.
India has been in a downward trend in terms of freedom of press since 2011. Unfortunately.
Rather than being prentious and accuse others of being half asses, or ignorant, I suggest you only stick to facts as you claim you do.
I am most definitely not denying that everything is perfect. There are things that have gotten worse, however the benefits of what have gotten better are far more tangible, real, and affect daily life than this one data point you provided. There are others which are more tangible that India has faultered on, but again the good far outweighs the bad.
Care to also publish rankings of the country over the years in freedom of press, law and order, mob violence, transparency, economic growth, journalists/writers murdered, appointments/shortages of RTI commissioners, RTI rejection rate, lack of lokayuktas, appointments/shortages of judiciary by govt etc. (or just look it up for yourself)
> There have also been tremendous investments from the government in green tech, like solar.
The goal setup was a 100GW of solar capacity by 2022.
It was about 2KW in 2015 and is about 20KW in 2018. We are most definitely not going to achieve the goal, perhaps not even get close. Lofty goal, sound familiar? I am sorry, I take lofty goals and promises of the Govt. with a pinch of salt until I see some actual implementation.
Yes. Go ahead and publish them. I dare you to. At best there are only marginal negative shifts. So please list all the data that you have.
Furthermore you’re behaving as if having ambitious goals for a government is bad. I would rather have an optimistic, ambitious government that gets somewhere near the goal than a lazy “realistic” government that always ends up underestimating itself.
Reaching a goal isn’t necessarily as important as simply producing a better product. Having a high expectations is a prerequisite to creating a great product. There are, again, so many improvements that India has achieved recently.
Typo, and HN doesn't allow me to update it now. Anyway, my point was that in the past 4 years we achieved 20GW and we expect to achieve 80GW in the next 4 years.
We don't owe anyone anything. I agree. But, no one owes anything to us either. If you think about it, we really aren't doing it for other species, are we? A few among us are being cautious to foresee something that could affect us.
Sure, we can call it save the planet and feel important but say if the ecology balance is broken down, food chains are broken up, its humans who get adversely affected, with perhaps lot of other species but there are going to be lots of species that will do just fine, some will perhaps even thrive. In other words, life goes on, without humans, no one cares.
Disclaimer: Few ideas borrowed generously from George Carlin's take on save the planet. Funny but wise, I think.
Sure. Nobody's arguing against responsible stewardship. What seems to rile people up is the idea that protecting the environment is an instrumental, not a terminal value, and that we can and should trade off environmental protection (here, endangered species) for other things that people find important.
Lots of people see environmental protection as a terminal value instead, and few things offend people more than proposals to trade off terminal values for instrumental ones.
that might be true, but what’s definitely true is that the environment is not winning... we regularly trade environment for industry, and rarely do the reverse. only recently have we decided that sustainable sources of electricity/industry are worthwhile, and still many times have to use economic arguments to justify it.
[0] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...