thatsso1999's comments

This is the first time in over 60 years that two out of the three major Hollywood labor unions are on strike, thanks in no small part to the threat of AI to their livelihoods. Basically no one knows what's going to happen next, but the last time this happened, actors and writers made some huge gains against the bosses. It's crazy to think that Ronald Reagan, famous union-breaker, was the head of SAG at the time, too.

This is the first actual hands-on demo I’ve seen, and apparently it’s actually really good. Really want to try out the auto 3d-scanning tech.

“More than a week after the crash, CNN discovered that some East Palestine residents had served as extras in the recent Netflix film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise—specifically while filming the novel’s “Airborne Toxic Event” sequence, in which an errant rail car spills chemicals that produce a noxious black cloud over a midwestern town.”

Hadn’t heard this tidbit about the crash before, what a truly insane coincidence. The airborne toxic event in the novel/movie causes deja vu, too.

yeah it’s hard! I finally won after a couple tries, you have to move fast at the beginning or it gets way harder to keep everyone happy.

"The higher temperature ABS-based printers had total UFP emission rates nearly an order of magnitude higher than the lower temperature PLA-based printers (1.8-2.0 10^11/min compared to 1.9-2.0 10^10/min)."

"Primary gas-phase products of ABS thermal decomposition at very high temperatures have been shown to include carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, as well as a variety of volatile organics (Rutkowski and Levin, 1986). Exposure to thermal decomposition products from ABS has also been shown to have toxic effects in both rats (Zitting and Savolainen, 1980) and mice (Schaper et al., 1994)."

from http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1352231013005086/1-s2.0-S135223101300...

Yes, PLA is somewhat weaker, but still more than strong enough for most desktop printing applications. It's also much less toxic to print with than ABS.

I believe your math is off by a factor of 1000.

125kHz = 125,000 cycles/sec * 2 bits/cycle = 250,000 bits/sec

250,000 bits/sec / 40 bits/code = 6250 codes/sec

2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776 possible codes / 6250 codes/sec ~= 175,921,860 sec ~= 5.578 years

While this is still an extremely long time for the worst case, by the looks of other comments, as well as the author's video, it appears extremely doubtful that most RFID readers have anywhere near 40 bits of security - and it takes about 10 seconds (65536/6250) for the fuzzer to brute force all codes 16 bits or less.

ok, while both are possible, that says nothing about the extremely significant fact that one scenario happens vastly more often than the other. let me relate my own example, from the other other side of the coin, and then tell me which side lands face up more frequently.

i know of a scenario in which multiple employees were making $10,000,000 as management. they were on a full-time schedule, aggressively arranged by management, that allowed a certain percentage of work time to be from home. the result of these employees? they lied about their work, "worked" almost exclusively from home, and had less than 5% of the work output of the non-management employees who had the exact same job duties, but different job titles and also happened to make less.

it took many years (years!) to get rid of these 'employees' (basically by seizing the means of production) and any collective attempt to get management to have even a minimally acceptable work output resulted in angry visits and strike breaking by management. the employees reporting the fraudulent behavior to techcrunch and giving poor ratings on glassdoor were harassed, and management straight up lied to the point where the employees started recording all conversations and actions with management and company executives to even protect themselves and their jobs (as non-management employees!). the employees were basically powerless in getting literally ANY work from those in management, who acted as a tumor in the organization. because of the aggressive and firmly established capitalist culture, these management employees essentially committed theft and fraud as their full-time jobs while making eight figures.

so, which of these two sides of the coin sounds more familiar to you?

Orion has been launched once, on a short 4-hour test flight, during which it only orbited the Earth twice. That spacecraft is very, very different than the Orion that is scheduled to launch with humans inside in 2023. It's not a matter of being "willing to accept the risk" - it's just impossible. Safety is one of NASA's highest priorities, (if not the highest, especially after Columbia), so even considering doing such a thing would be unthinkable and is a non-starter. Even if you manage to somehow sidestep decades of a deeply ingrained culture of safety, it's just not even a possibility right now - significant portions of the spacecraft's design have yet to be finalized, and then you have to figure out how to manufacture it, and once you've actually manufactured it, it goes through several rounds of insane amounts of testing and revision before getting anywhere near the launchpad. Spaceflight is incredibly complex - even if NASA somehow managed to get a blank check (like it did during the early space race) there is still a very significant amount of work to be done that takes a very long time, no matter how much money you throw at it.

Adversarial? I don't believe you read the article. The article talked at length about why having an adversarial approach to dinner was a poor choice, and concluded with the idea that couples should practice 'full communism' at dinner, i.e., full cooperation when choosing the food and sharing it freely when it arrives.

1) Regardless of whether or not Uber is making an actual profit, which is not the point of the article, it is quite easy to show that Uber is withholding more revenue from drivers than theoretically necessary - on all rides, Uber takes a percentage cut of the overall fare, along with ~$1 or so in fees. You could argue that Uber's cut goes to running Uber itself, but the whole point of the article is that there is no need for a monolithic company running the platform in the first place - the software running it is fairly easy to create (given that there are hundreds of ridesharing apps worldwide) and the server costs are minimal - if the average Uber fare is $10 and it takes a 20% cut, it is ludicrous to suggest each ride costs $2 in server time. $0.02c might be more accurate (or even $0.20, if you add in other operational expenses), but that's a delta of $1.98 or $1.80 not going to the drivers for every fare.

2) Yes, to a company that is owned by the drivers and gives them back the maximal share of the revenue, taking into account the (minimal) operating costs.

3) To call Uber a "mediator" when both the customer and the driver have no say in the cost of the fare is laughable. Uber unilaterally sets the price, and if you don't like it, you're shit out of luck.

4) Like the point I made in 1), Uber takes a much larger cut than what is truly necessary. Even if the hypothetical ridesharing co-op had the exact same fares as Uber, a much larger proportion of the fare goes to the driver. And I would disagree that riders are the only constrained variable - there is almost zero switching cost between different ridesharing services for not only the rider but the driver as well. If only Uber and the ridesharing co-op are the only options for ridesharing in a given city, and they have the exact same fares for customers, but the co-op pays the drivers better than Uber, any driver would logically switch to the co-op since they would be paid more, and the customers would quickly switch to using the co-op's app as well, since the waiting times would be shorter compared to Uber.

REI is a consumer-owned co-op, not a worker-owned one. The entire co-op is designed around saving consumers money, not making the workers more.

So yes, REI does deliver the benefits of a co-op to its owners - high-quality goods at a lower price than they would be unable otherwise be able to get. This is the entire point of a consumer co-op. Workers can also be member-owners of the co-op, and frequently are, but the benefits are geared towards getting better discounts on the goods REI sells. This is in addition to the implicit benefits of being an owner of the company and having a say in its direction.

you should post this on thingiverse! you'd get a lot of appreciation there for the impressiveness of the print itself (as a fellow 3D printerer, daaaaaaaamn), and honestly it's so gorgeous I wouldn't be surprised if it got featured.

The living spaces described aren't communes in any way, shape or form. This is just paying to have roommates you don't know with some perks. actual cooperatives/communes are occupied by their member-owners, who have full control over their space. It's laughable that this being marketed as edgy socialist living when it's just a big apartment with some nice branding.

An actual co-op shares food purchases, requires labor like cooking and cleaning, and the members share democratic control over the house's finances. There is no actual reason why you need microleases - the co-op I live in has 6 month leases at a minimum, and on average most members live here for two years. People stay for so long because actual cooperatives foster a culture of cooperation and a community full of real friendships, giving its members a deep, lasting connection with the space and their fellow housemates. Microleases seem like they create a transitory and shallow culture with people coming and leaving all the time and not actually making any connection with the space, partially because you can't leave your mark on the space since you don't own it.

There are very large and active communities of both residential and commercial cooperatives in Berkeley, Michigan, and Austin (where the co-op I live in is), and I think this is because there is cheaper land and individual houses. It's close to impossible for starting true residential cooperatives in downtown NYC because the landlord often owns the entire building, which would require an enormous amount of money to acquire, and would lead to enormous cooperatives which would be difficult to run. There _are_ very large, apartment-style cooperatives - there are at least 5 co-ops in Austin with over 100 people each - but there are many more that are house style with 15-30 people. I think the ones in Berkeley and Michigan tend to be closer to 30-40 people, but they're still just big houses.

The cooperative movement is alive and well and has been for decades. Capitalists trying to jump onto the sharing economy bandwagon just dilute the message and create the wrong impression of what actual shared living is - raw democratic control over your space. Cooperatives have amazing potential in the internet age, but seem to have been largely forgotten by modern day technologists. A non-profit Uber, cooperatively controlled by both drivers and developers, is an obvious example of a great system that would work very well and be immensely popular with drivers. There are a lot of knotty problems to work out, but nothing insurmountable. If 100+ drug-addled college kids can democratically run an entire apartment complex successfully for 3 decades (and even make money, too!), surely today's technologists can build software that allow many more people to democratically run much larger systems.