ignirtoq

Did blockchain solve it? Is blockchain actually pragmatically solving that problem better than existing alternatives? Or is the cost of adopting a blockchain payment system as the primary payment system, with all the risks inherent in it, higher than the benefits when compared to alternatives?

misused

Give me an example of a real world problem that was either unsolved before blockchain solved it, or blockchain solves it better than existing alternatives.

I'll go ahead and save you "decentralized currency/finance between untrustworthy entities" (i.e. cryptocurrency) because it doesn't actually (and can't actually) solve that in the real world. Humans are too error-prone, and an immutable ledger presents too high a risk for business-ending mistakes for any business with any alternative options to adopt it for their primary revenue pathway.

We enable OCSP in hard-fail mode, meaning that if the revocation status of a certificate cannot be verified because the CA cannot be reached, then it will be treated as broken.

The fact that not every application that uses TLS certificates does this blows my mind. Certificate revocation should be a valid tool to deal with the compromise of cryptographic credentials, but if applications don't check, then they're opening themselves (and their users) up to a security vulnerability.

Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.

“Generally, what happens to these wastes today is they go to a landfill, get dumped in a waterway, or they’re just spread on land,” said Vaulted Deep CEO Julia Reichelstein. “In all of those cases, they’re decomposing into CO2 and methane. That’s contributing to climate change.”

Waste decomposition is part of the natural carbon cycle. Burning fossil fuels isn't. We should not be suppressing part of the natural cycle so we can supplant it with our own processes. This is Hollywood accounting applied to carbon emissions, and it's not going to solve anything.

A balloon full of helium has more mass than a balloon without helium, but less weight

That's not true. A balloon full of helium has more mass and more weight than a balloon without helium. Weight is dependent only on the mass of the balloon+helium and the mass of the planet (Earth).

The balloon full of helium displaces way more air than the balloon without helium since it is inflated. The volume of displaced air of the inflated balloon has more weight than the combined weight of the balloon and helium within, so it floats due to buoyancy from the atmosphere. Its weight is the same regardless of the medium it's in, but the net forces experienced by it are not.

He explicitly argues that “Qatanani is not part of ‘the people’ the First Amendment protects” and that non-citizens cannot “claim its protection.”

His reasoning? A convoluted “originalist” argument claiming that because the First Amendment refers to “the people,” it only applies to those who are “part of a national community” with sufficient “allegiance” to the sovereign. Non-citizens, he argues, owe only “temporary allegiance” and therefore get only “temporary protection”—protection that can be withdrawn whenever the government decides they’ve become “dangerous.”

This sounds like the judge fell out of a parallel universe. Is it typical to make up so many new, complex semantic constructs in a single opinion? A "national community" and some notion of membership in it. "Allegiance" to "the sovereign"? Sovereign what? Like the head of state, or a platonic ideal of the USA? And once "allegiance" is defined, there's now "temporary allegiance" that begets "temporary protection"?

My understanding of legal matters is that judges typically pour over not just the wording and meaning of law, but also the wording and meaning of other judges' opinions and verdicts, and concepts like these are developed over many cases spanning decades or more. I'm really not usually one for conspiracy theories, but either this judge has the wrong job and should be writing tabletop RPG modules, or this has all been planned out, and he's been fed a path his verdicts are supposed to slowly trod, and he skipped ahead a few chapters.

Or a service where I spend $20 a month and get unlimited access to articles, and the money gets doled out proportionately to what I read.

I would honestly like to see a cut of just about any TV show or movie that uses stunt doubles where the doubles do both the lines and the action. I would like to see how different a director would shoot a scene if they weren't constrained to choosing angles and lighting to make it look like two different people were the same person.

At least it was better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Happening in my neighborhood, and today is trash pickup day for my street. Not sure what we're going to do with our trash, but I 100% support the strike. Every job deserves a living wage, no exceptions.

I don't follow Mexican politics closely, but this could be part of an effort to curb obesity. I've heard they introduced taxes on sugary drinks for this, so this might be another avenue.

If people are wanting cheap snacks, and private companies are only making unhealthy ones, you can introduce regulations to micromanage what they can produce, or you can introduce a complex taxation process to disincentivize sugar snacks. Or you can introduce your own product that meets a perceived unmet demand in an underserved market.