The spec mandating its as a single string isn’t that crazy. It’s good to have a consistent response format so a basic deserializer can deserialize any error response object and get something out.

If you have different providers. One that returns error: { code: string } and another does something else, you end up with the same problem this post talks about-- Inconsistency.

As far as I can tell, the spec doesn’t limit you to just the one field and you can add other optional fields to the top level to the response that the caller can optionally decide to handle. But if you know there’s going to be a field called error that is a string. You always get at least something out of that to present.

It just goes to show the small parts of API design matter just as much as the big parts. I’ve worked with a lot of engineers who are so eager to draw big boxes and arrow architectural diagrams, but then just rush the details because that’s not important.

The hard part is browsers. Cookies and local storage are limited by the origin URL. You need it explicitly set on the domains you intend to visit, but those domains don’t know your age. The one that knows the age is the identity provider, but it can’t set it for all domains. There are other techniques that you could use, like a smart card combined with a browser extension to do local based user info attestation, but those are difficult to manage at a nation scale and I suspect people will struggle with them, though there are some countries that do have national smart cards (e.g. Estonia.)

Its possible to implement something that hides your actual age from a website, but the tricky part is hiding what website you’re visiting from an identity provider.

Let’s walk through a wrong solution to get some fundamentals. If you’re familiar with SSO login, a website makes a request token to login the user and makes claims (these request pieces of user information.) One could simply request “is the user older than 18?” And that hides the actual age and user identity.

The problem is how do you hide what website you’re going to from the identity provider? In most SSO style logins, you need to know the web page to redirect back to the original site. Thus leaking information about websites you probably don’t want to share.

The problem with proposals that focus on the crypto is that they actually have to be implemented using today’s browser and HTTP standards to get people to use them.

True, but even if there’s only one supplier, there’s still demand-side elasticity of price, which means that price increasing causes some customers to not buy the product. Thus, a company may or may not be able to increase a price 1:1 with the tarriff.

All this is fun economic theory, but I was specifically responding to the claim that tax incentives were better than a tarriff. They both translate into some increase in cost of the goods sold.

Batteries are bounded by more predictable chemistry more so than something like the breakdown of a mechanical based trigger waiting for rust or decomposition. Chemistry makes it easier to model and predict. If you’ve got a 1Ah battery and it consumes x watt hours per hour, then it takes y days to burn through. Tolerances that cause the battery to have slightly more or less capacity or component power consumption will likely be <5%, thus not radically different because nobody is timing this to the minute.

If it becomes more expensive to buy products manufactured in certain countries then customers would naturally change their buying habits to other companies. The price to the customer ultimately acts as an incentive to companies.

These pictures remind me of YouTube thumbnails with fhe style of over emphasized visuals and it makes me wonder if people got accustomed to that style and that makes it easier to pass the BS test.

Just think of all the countries and companies that grab this data, group by email address, then start to identify preferences of people around the world. Its not just for identity theft. The possibilities are endless! And horrifying.

Yeah there’s a few reasons why the offer that wins the buy box (the term for which merchants offer is shown to the customer prominently) and is complex, but I wouldn’t consider it particularly sinister or designed to mislead. If one person has prime and the other doesn’t, it might weight more towards a prime offer which may be more expensive, a price from a merchant may have changed, or gone out of stock.

They’re forging the GPS to look like it’s in the EU. Do we turn off all the EU terminals too?

I’m a little surprised they can’t identify spoofing by comparing the incoming signal to the proposed location. They already have antennas that can be steered using the phased array.

It’s possible, but it costs money to design the hardware so it’s accessible, it has to use a connector which has to be robust against vibrations (is m.2 robust?), then there needs to be a standardized protocol to communicate with the card. Does the car computer need to know how to authenticate against the cell network or does the card? Is it industry standardized or specific to the manufacturer? All kinds of things need to be designed and car manufacturers have no reason to invest in they.

The problem is the cell modem in the car, which is hard to replace. Cars last a lot longer than phones do. When whatever network that the car uses shuts down, then you can’t remote start your car. That’s a marginal cost that the car company has to pay for.

CDs have an advantage over USB drives in that they can’t actually secretly be USB HID devices like a fake keyboard or mouse that runs a bunch of commands when it plugs in. It’s only a storage device.

A super secure environment might then lock down all USB devices to ones known by them and then epoxy all ports and devices.

Great if only my family would even believe this as opposed to just saying something about FEMA using DEW and HAARP and space lasers to actually create hurricanes to be able to extract lithium or something.

ICANN specifically set aside all two character TLDs to be for country specific codes. There’s only a few cases where they kept ex countries TLDs around and phased them out over several years. It would be an entirely new precedent if they did keep it. So I wouldn’t depend on it

I have my doubts that a company would be able to just abandon a live and operational nuclear power plant. I’m no nuclear or power engineer, but I am familiar with data center power consumption. There are companies in the region that would absolutely build more data centers, but are power constrained from the utility companies in the area, that are not just for AI, but for general compute. Even then, it’s low carbon production energy. If you have a ton of excess power, just start forcing high carbon production facilities in the area to close and now you’ve greened the grid.

Computer algorithms solve problems all over the world for companies already. I bet airlines already have teams of people using computer algorithms to figure crew management, flight routing, cost optimization, etc.

The fact that they’re exploring quantum computers and non-classical algorithms just suggests that gate allocation is NP-Hard. Sure things go wrong when computers fail already, Look at Southwest or Delta’s recent meltdown, but to act like this a bad thing is just nonsense. This should be looked at as a good thing that airlines are working on.

Why do you think this is going to replace air traffic control work? It’s picking which gate to park the plane at. This was done by airline and airport operations teams, not ATC. Imagine if you could automatically pick gates to reduce the time a plane spends taxiing and/or minimize time passengers spend walking. That’s 100% a useful application for computer optimization algorithms. Humans aren’t going to do that better and it’s not a function of safety that tower or ground control needs to do.

While I’m not a fan of the loan nor the massive waste of power most LLMs are, I actually think that’s its a good thing because if Microsoft can break through some of the excessive red tape on nuclear plants then they’ll bring this online and hopefully prove that nuclear power can be safe and a good source of large amounts of power, when the huge demand for AI dies down, then maybe they’ll keep the plant around and provide power to the grid.