In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

It kinda looks like your arguing that voting doesn’t work.

Maybe.

Kessler Syndrome doesn’t impact the ability to produce or launch satellites.
It impacts the ability of satellites to function in orbit but it’s not a fixed limit.

Humans have a pretty good track record of developing technologies that break through insurmountable theoretical barriers.

strains credibility

Not sure why.
Security professionals are constantly complaining about insiders violating security policies for stupid reasons.
Security publications and declassified documents are full of breaches that took way too long to discover.

The Navy may have great security protocols but it’s full of humans that make mistakes. As they say, if you invent a foolproof plan, the universe will invent a better fool.

The original article said the Navy hadn’t provided all the details.

It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.

They didn’t give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.

Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.

It looks like that’s an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.

The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called “STINKY” and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.

It doesn’t look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that’s because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.

They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.

The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it’s only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we’ll never hear about it.

We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.

There’s a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.

That is, the total number of “tech-savvy” users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of “non-tech-savvy” computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)

You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80’s or 90’s that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that’s because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.

Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you’ll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.

A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you’re a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you’re a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19

Some day we may have little boxes like in “Diamond Age”. Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they’ll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.

That sounds just fine. I’m pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.

I think that true “tech-savvyness” isn’t really a generational thing.

Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren’t satisfied with, “Just do it.” or “Shit just works.” They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they’ll poke at it and try to understand it better.

It’s not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.

I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I’m transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it’s much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.

Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.

The former richest man in the world gave away much of his fortune and continues to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Wealth_and_philanthropy

Bruce Wayne is not like that at all though. He’s in a position where he could actually do something about the problems of Gotham City and decides to go LARPing instead.

To be fair, he beats up a bunch of rich criminals too but he whole thing is really more about his ego than about doing good.

Thank you! I can finally fill the void that vibeless OSes have left in my soul.

All joking aside, it does raise a good point.

There are many things that can be objectively analyzed and it might not be a good idea to choose them based off of vibes. When you’re designing those things it’s still a good idea to take vibes into account because people will ignore all that and put googly eyes on their 3-D printer.

You pick your OS based on vibes?

Only a little.

Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.

The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.

This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.

Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.

Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.

Laughs in Austrian.

The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.

eg:
3:15 -> “viertel vier” = “quarter four”
3:30 -> “halb vier” (“hoiba viere” in dialekt) = “half four”
3:45 -> “dreiviertel vier” = “three quarters four”