I wasn’t aware Silk Road was taken down via FISA. I’ve read all of the long form accounts of it that I’m aware of and I don’t remember FISA being mentioned at all. Can you share a source?

As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!

If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.

Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

• Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
• The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
• The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

• Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
• Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
• Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
• A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone call Kublai Khan “rock” before.

That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.

You literally spent an entire comment explaining why you should not use scientific notation and now you’re asking why I might prefer precision in byte arithmetic?

Good luck with that.

If I ignore what’s in the search bar, I remember that the prefix “mebi” means 2^20 and use a calculator. Your point doesn’t make sense because you’re asking us to get mad at a tool intended to convert scientific units for using the bog standard scientific notation. Byte math uses powers of 2 ergo we should use a calculator that isn’t explicitly set up for rounding.

When you search “megabytes to bytes” the units are correct and the number is one. If you edit the form, the number might not be one and the units might not be correct. Changing units highlights the unit input.

OP’s ostensible point posting on this community is that searching “megabytes to bytes” gave “mebibytes to bytes” in the calculator but OP’s image shows OP has changed the calculator.

Here is what I get when I complete the search.

And here’s what I get when I intentionally change the units. Notice the color difference?

This article is about a year old. You can play a demo these days. Dunno if it’s any good.

Multiple teams are being cut, at least at Arkane Austin. I don’t know the total heads rolling. Many of my friends are now out of a job. The severance isn’t terrible, at least for some of the engineers. That’s not better than a job, though.

A problem so common it has an official page

I grew up in a town that had one brewery until the late 00s/early 10s. The food was okay but the beer tasted like rubbing alcohol. It was really fucking bad. The brewers were full of themselves and thought they had first mover advantage. A couple of new breweries opened up and things got way better. Suddenly the community was actually vibrant. A few more opened, a few closed, and that cycle started rolling. The overall quality of brewing improved drastically except at that shitty first brewery who constantly struggles to retain talent and compete (other than location which guarantees a steady supply of drunk businessmen who can’t tell good beer from shit beer).

Don’t limit your club. Stifling community will only harm the community. You don’t need to trade secrets; you should always trade ideas and be supportive.