The nifty thing about stories is that they don't have to be about something directly to trigger strong feelings in your crowd or listeners.
When we are dealing with the FCC, grounding all flights and radio failures in open bands, you can drive a lot of changes.
There are a lot of pesky ESP32s out there, right? Did your company choose to go with the Espressif platform? You know, the hackable SDR one that crashes planes and clubs baby seals and tries to sell your grandparents bad financial scams?
It is difficult for many of us to argue for these solutions to replace so many real-world identification solutions. Yes, split secrets and PKI systems properly implemented, both socially and technically, could fix these issues.
Social Security Numbers could have been replaced, fully or in part, as secure tokens decades ago.
I wouldn't have to worry about it being my time to lose my personal data in a major security breach. I already have lost personal info enough fighting for humane healthcare solutions in old age.
But if we argue intelligently for these solutions that have been tainted by bitcoin and "crypto" we are crypto-bros. We are tech-bros. Even if we grew up dreaming of cypherpunk technology protecting men and women's privacy and body rights, it doesn't matter anymore.
It's a slippery slope, these cruel anti-tech and anti-other jokes, and for me, my IQ on the political outcomes mattered more than my IQ on math problems.
I see what you're saying about the tabloid. You're right, but there are other issues.
On the surface the confusion it creates for normal citizens who just want to be a little healthier is bad enough.
Yeah, the cabbage I've been eating is less nutritious than spinach or kale. And even the individual foods may have fewer nutrients because of bioengineering or monocrops or agribusiness economics or whatever.
But I'm guessing in five years, the FDA will still be recommending people eat more veggies and reduce portions.
No, the reason media portrayals of research like this are really bad is because it pollutes our shared infospace making independent research more difficult.
It might seem like The Independent wins here and the US loses because of the spread of misinformation, but it's deeper than that. This post gets picked up and incorporated into LLM training data sets and search engines. It begins to modify weights on models that people who don't have time to research in-depth use to make their life easier.
Which in the end gives more power to the FDA and other government agencies. I want the FDA to have power to educate us. But it gives federal institutions power to not only publish information that is truly helpful to citizens, but to turn those recommendations into more authoritarian policies.
This is like watching another measles outbreak in real-time. But a couple decades too late.
Instead we could have spent today educating people on information literacy and how to critically read information sources. But why do that when you can kill Teo birds with one stone?
There are groups that honestly would rather have more authoritarian systems in place instead of years of careful education. If you can blame citizens or other countries for health care outcomes, it makes it a little easier, doesn't it?
There's a cruelty there in a population management style that I really don't think is realized yet. It's tough to gulp down when you see it and not a joke.
Like the other poster mentioned, blanket statements like this ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
I have a smart fridge and washer. I won't name names. But for several years they were never connected or online at all (unless they was compromised and I didn't know). I connected them and one of the first updates included in the washer was changing the default wash cycle from something like 110 minutes to 46 or something. I don't remember all the values if I'm honest.
There are executives who have spreadsheets and charts of how much water that saved per household over varying periods of time. How much it would save with greater adoption. And the unsaid message, or maybe they'll be explicit, of how many people are going to face tragic water supply issues in the future.
It's a powerful message, even if we know it's cyncical and calculated to push not just washers, but firmware security systems and institutions to govern those systems.
And yes, compromised systems can also be used to build zombie networks to push horrible content.
I feel horrible that this critically important surface issue of water supply is used to push other agendas. I honestly wish I could do other work not related to it.
<< ignore the incredibly smart people at major international corporations and their strategies.
Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control. I think somewhere along the way executives got a little to comfortable saying 'they will buy what we give them'.
More to the point, maybe there is exactly too many smart people with agendas that don't seem to align well with my current needs vis-a-vis fridges:
I want something that keeps things cool with minimum of fuss and does not die upon update.
In short, that executive should be fired as they are not doing their job: they are actively undermining their own market.
>Ignore may be a tad strong. I am merely asking for hardware that is subject to my control to be within my control.
Which is how they got into this situation. These are industrial refrigeration systems subject to a huge list of variables (how many units, their sizes, and doors hooked up to a refrigeration circuit, open vs closed cases, ambient conditions, hours of store operation, what type of refrigerant, whether heat is going to a cooling tower or air heat exchanger). They use a ton of energy, and percent optimization leads to millions of dollars over a fleet. They are designed to let the user dial in every operating parameter, like defrost.
Compare this to my home fridge where all these parameters are fixed in the firmware because the hardware is 100% identical.
Industrial systems are necessarily different from mass-produced home appliances.
It's going to be difficult saying no in other situations where the surface product of the business isn't hated by left or right groups in the US. I hope people don't need that strength.
> Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used.
I don't live in Finway or Norway. It would be nice to be in a country that accepted a more pescetarian / fish-based diet. It might help with the able-bodied reasoning given elsewhere for car driving.
But I live in the US. Here in the US, the loudest advocates we have for biking are groups like Critical Mass. Up in Chicago they have a winter biking campaign. But we know how Critical Mass is perceived by people on the fence about more biking investment. It's a radical group. So discussion digresses into sidewalk safety issues and identity politics. And yes, sidewalk safety impacts people, falls are dangerous for many populations. But all that media bandwidth means simple messages of celebrating biking and transit get lost. There's only limited time on the news.
This isn't an isolated issue. I honestly think that's by design. At this point, in 2026, it's not an accident.
So you have people like me, jobless pervert civil libertarian hipster techbros being the group advocating for more biking. What do you think is going to happen US?
Waymo will be the same thing.
It will be turned into a drama show about saving people feom drunk driving accidents, a very good thing. But then there will be pushback about it encouraging more drinking among the population and increasing rates of domestic abuse. A very horrible and tragic thing.
And some of us will be going to a food pantry wondering why it can't be a more bike oriented endeavor and knowing the truth in our hearts. The US wants drama, even after Trump is gone. And that drama takes focus from just rolling out programs to encourage love of public transit and biking. Media saturation matters. And I don't believe anymore.
So, I'm sorry, Chicago or up north doesn't seem like a great choice personally. It's not healthy for me to dream about up families up there. I'll be biking out west.
> I've been very pleased to see the reaction to Flock in the US.
I've been involved in civil liberties for over three decades. I was a member of the EFF and ACLU when I could afford it, and follower of the early cypherpunks. Like a lot of EFF members, I was advocating against the Patriot Act a d the methods used to pass it after 9/11.
But this feels different. The fact that there is large support feom the left behind this makes me very cautious.
The examples of police stalking is another thing that adds up to something fishy.
I'm very glad that dangerous stalking by those with authority and power is being addressed and dealt with. But I have to wonder if the true people with power aren't using this to create laws tailored to them around future citizen surveillance methods.
I had a possible opportunity to work in a really interesting space with wildlife management and sensor networks, including cameras. It would have been a dream, because it was an awesome space to bring educational material to families about the world around them. Interactive embedded sensors and media integration thst let them learn about nature.
I didn't take that position because of healthcare and medical issues. Bit as a kid who grew up exploring science museums, I would have loved to have given back to the community. I am heartbroken for the result.
But with Flock and the crackdown on cameras, the company is also directly in the path of the legislative and public consciousness shift.
I know whatever they build will keep up with their focus on customer safety, humane wildlife management and public safety. But there's now going to be extra focus on protecting the public from employees of the firm. It shifts the narrative.
It takes focus away from just educating the public. But I guess there are other large companies who can do a better job just focusing on education and inspiration.
It makes me sad. I don't expect those new people against Flock to understand. I'm personally happy about the focus on privacy. But it's not just privacy and education now. The early cypherpunk view has been subtly co-opted.
Are you trying to conflate wildlife tracking and monitoring with this police state dragnet? If so that's a wild take. I'm pretty sure modern wildlife tracking practices are not what's at stake here.
> Nothing in your comment makes me want to go learn more theory, and I would argue that it's nonsense to anyone who is not a mathematician.
What a coincidence this came up today.
I'm not a mathematician. I minored in math, but even the undergrad work was honestly difficult for me.
For most people, this might be nonsense. But it doesnt have to be.
I'm trying to learn about Fast Fourier Transforms because they're relevant for an embedded device system I'm investigating. I'm also not an Electrical Engineer so it is mostly new to me.
To understand the language of FFTs, linear bases and the like, I've started working through Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right.
First, just learning more theory shows me we can learn and grow in our old age.
This week I worked through linear spaces. I'm actively asking myself questions and working with other fields besides the reals and complex numbers so I can understand coding theory in general more.
And the parent's comment about quotient fields and rings is directly related to a question I asked myself about the
> Nothing in your comment makes me want to go learn more theory, and I would argue that it's nonsense to anyone who is not a mathematician.
What a coincidence this came up today.
I'm not a mathematician. I minored in math, but even the undergrad work was honestly difficult for me.
For most people, this might be nonsense. But it doesnt have to be.
I'm trying to learn about Fast Fourier Transforms because they're relevant for an embedded device system I'm investigating. I'm also not an Electrical Engineer so it is mostly new to me.
To understand the language of FFTs, linear bases and the like, I've started working through Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right.
First, just learning more theory shows me we can learn and grow in our old age.
This week I worked through linear spaces. I'm actively asking myself questions and working with other fields besides the reals and complex numbers so I can understand coding theory in general more.
And the parent's comment about quotient rings is directly related to an active learning question I asked myself about whether the set with only the zero element is a linear space. I don't think it is a field if 0 is the multiplicative identity, 0 can't be 1, so it can't be a linear space, right?
But it works. I guess the set of the field for the scalar in a linear space is always assumed to contain more elements. It's a different set than the linear space. It seems like, duh, of course it is. But you don't see it until you work through it. And I'm guessing my experience can inform teaching others.
It's confusing to me, maybe because the notation is sparse in explicitly defining the set of the linear space and the set of the associated linear space.
But this helps me truly understand linear codes down the line, and Linear Feedback Shift Registers and FFTs. It's not just theory to me, I can now understand what my peers are saying and contribute my own thoughts.
OK now you're getting into some more useful topics. Linear algebra is a great one with tons of applications. But if you want my advice, prioritize useful stuff and spend less time on theoretical baubles or bedrock-level boilerplate. This is unless, of course, you enjoy puzzles and hard work with little application.
> This is unless, of course, you enjoy puzzles and hard work with little application.
Wouldn't that be great? If we could teach our kids that learning for the sake of learning is awesome? If only that was all this world was.
But you're right, you and the thousands of others posting, it's not. You have that voice, and the hundreds of online stories about college losing value have that political voice.
In the post-AI future I can imagine recreational mathematics being a socially approved past time. It helps with age-related cognitive decline, etc.
But I can also understand people in that post-AI future who had smart political ideas that were more important to them than smart math ideas.
Impactful ideas.
Just getting snapshots and puzzling out that post-AI future I don't know if we'll have the right space to encourage positive care for our mental and physical landscapes.
I'm not making any political statement here, or at least that was not my intention. Life is short and there are infinite things we could be learning about. The advanced math I'm talking about avoiding here is not recreational math, but you could potentially apply the same logic to recreational math. Personally I see a big difference between "routine" abstract/advanced math and recreational math, though there can be some overlap. People have written books about what makes a pleasant puzzle, for example. Some puzzles are deceptively simple to state and impossible to solve without elite level theories. I think one of the characteristics of a good puzzle is that it can be solved with reasonable effort and not consume your whole life. Another is that it not be so contrived and abstract, that you need to be heavily initiated to even understand it. The worst are the ones that require a ton of mechanical computations even after you figure out the key insight. I don't think those are very fun either. But then again, there are people who don't get tired of Sudoku lol...
China is fucking smart. They have technical expertise to know that by feeding the model certain data, they can shape the outcome of questions posed.
Yeah, in the end, maybe both US and Chinese models can solve Fizz Buzz, or some Erdős problem.
And they can answer our inquisitive minds when we wonder, "Why is the sky blue?".
But deep questions about what is normal in the world they can change the outcome of.
And "Why is the sky blue?" is a deeper question than we think. Because it isn't blue everywhere in the world right now. And whether it is the fault of the US automotive industry, or aggressive investment by China in their own manufacturing base matters.
Of course, both have been responsible for pollution at different times. Growing up in Michigan near Dow Chemical I know this.
But depending on how they select training data answers can be nudged one way or another.
The US is smart too, and they have people working on the same things. It's ironically easier for me to talk about how China's security services are likely to shape their models' perception of the world. Which is a damn shame, because we deserve unbiased answers so we can all help our country improve.
Or countries improve if you want to take a global shared world view.
When we are dealing with the FCC, grounding all flights and radio failures in open bands, you can drive a lot of changes.
There are a lot of pesky ESP32s out there, right? Did your company choose to go with the Espressif platform? You know, the hackable SDR one that crashes planes and clubs baby seals and tries to sell your grandparents bad financial scams?
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