Honestly, even TrueNAS is way more in depth than 99% of users in the wider world want. They want Dropbox at most, and very possibly they don't even want that much involvement. They want backups to just happen without having to put any thought in.
There are other motivations besides money for cranks.
In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.
I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that.
> obscurantist
Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
>Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading
Have you listened to the Piers Morgan interview with Weinstein and Sean Carroll? In it, Weinstein appears to be using as many obscure terms as possible, in an attempt to appear clever.
I have, and that's definitely not my impression. Again to my ears that's just his natural way of expressing himself in a way that tries to express detailed ideas in a compact way. Nothing he says I find that difficult to understand with some effort (other than the hard physics). Personally I don't believe at all he's purposefully obfuscating what he's saying.
> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading,
My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length.
THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud.
Capable scientists who insert themselves into public discourse are able to discuss their work at any level of detail, without jargon, and actually explain what they getting at. EW uses "Gish Gallop" tactics, I guess, to make himself seem smart. Aside from that he goes on bizarre detours where he mixes in his "geometric unity" theory with grievances about higher-ed, side-bars about Jeffery Epstein, his insane brother, and "DISC" (an acronym he coined and uses like it's now common knowledge).
Again I disagree. I've listened to many many of his interviews and it never comes across as indecipherable. If one person can understand it with some effort but some people find him hard to follow perhaps it's not that he's purposefully being hard to understand but that the audience not following isn't putting in enough effort or just giving up and calling him 'jargon filled' when there's actually a real clear understanding to be had behind what he's saying, to put it bluntly and at a risk of an angry response.
... and in the cases where one does manage to put in the effort to understand what EW is actually saying, the ROI has been trite and uninteresting and could have been said with simpler words and gotten to the point in far fewer words.
Example: See the conclusion of Nguyen's teardown response paper to "Economics as Gauge Theory": https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03460
Basically... 1) Tautology, 2) Inconclusive, 3) Not usable
Yeah, that would be nice, but it is SO RARE, I've not even heard of that being possible, let alone how to get at the metadata with godforsaken readers like Acrobat. I mean, I've used pdf's since literally the beginning. Never knew that was a feature.
I think this is all the consequence of the failure of XML and it's promise of its related formatting and transformation tooling. The 90's vision was beautiful: semantic documents with separate presentation and transformation tools/languages, all machine readable, versioned, importable, extensible. But no. Here we are in the year 2025. And what do we got? pdf, html, markdown, json, yaml, and csv.
There are solid reasons why XML failed, but the reasons were human and organizational, and NOT because of the well-thought-out tech.
I am sure there exist people who live and breath media/codecs and they're reasonably fluent at getting ffmpeg to do what they want because of a tremendous amount of practice.
But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.
I sympathise with the overwhelming sensation of the ffmpeg command line arguments.
But the more you familiarize yourself with a/v streaming and transcoding, you soon realize why you need such amount of control.
I mean, with ffmpeg I can easily combine 3 audio clips, 5 subtitles and a separate video, cut away first 25 seconds and the last 5 minutes of the resulting clip, resize it and change the aspect ratio, reduce audio to mono and specify output codecs for audio and video.
And this is still a pretty simple example of what one could want to do.
Ffmpeg has countless other amazing features, demanding more arguments.
How about for example camera stabilization? (-vf deshake)
How would one even start to explain all of this to an app without thousands of command line arguments?
The whole subject is incredibly complex and ffmpeg is by far the most amazing project in this space.
Without ffmpeg, there would be no youtube in 2005, no plex at all and really the whole of modern social web would probably have happened later if not Fabrice was such a fantastic guy :-)
And still I cannot create .ts files (with mp4 inside) using FFmpeg that will be accepted by my dad's TV media player. I have to put them through Avidemux, because somehow it uses a better TS muxer. More compatible with the TV.
Varoufakis uses the word “techno-feudal” because it reflects the fundamental character of where things are headed. Moreover, even the author pointed out why the case is strong for the analogy.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect 100% consistency with “feudalism” to rightfully use the word “techno-feudalism”. But if one is compelled to point out the inconsistencies anyway, the ones the author pointed out are not particularly convincing.
The first three basically boil down to the idea that citizens are free to “opt-out” or find/create alternatives. Are they? I guess in theory, but in reality that’s a far more complicated problem.
Sure, in medieval days, kings could force their will and crush opposition without concern of law, morality, or anything other than who has more power. Today we have surveillance capitalism, and the comprehensive manipulation of truth and attention. Originally this was employed to merely sell toothpaste, but the same tools more lately can and have been used for far more sinister and greedy motivations.
If you don’t agree with that, fine, but but if you must quibble about “inconsistencies” with the usage of the word “techno-feudal”, then at least provide a better alternative word.
Moreover, the point of the analogy is to point out that the purported freedom from these restraints, such as the purported freedom to "opt-out", are in practical terms a mirage for an increasing proportion of the population.
Whether you agree with him or not, this should be no surprise from Varoufakis, given his familiarity with Marx, as it has been a central thesis of socialist thought from the beginning that de jure freedoms means nothing without the means to exercise them, and as such, the belief that the freedoms of a capitalist society are freedoms mediated by wealth or limited by lack of it, and by extension the belief that the working classes aren't substantially more free than serfs.
I certainly would like to see more American made products and manufacturing, unfortunately, making that happen is not just a matter of shuffling money around, capricious tariffs, and the president posturing for "deals" like a real-estate shyster.
Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible. It's not a "short-term" kind of thing.
Our being the office working city/suburb living HN posting white collar types who have no visibility into the non service parts of the economy beyond what is made available in our investment account dashboards.
The industrial workers, the farmers, the blue collar tradesmen, none of them wanted this even back in 1995 or 2005, the evidince that rampant outsourcing was bad in the long term just wasn't concrete enough for their opinions to gain traction and there were other seemingly more important issues that decided elections back then and we did make a lot of money selling our economy out so everyone was willing to let outsourcing hum along even if they didn't like it.
The people who made bank shipping industrial tooling to the far east and bulldozing old factories, the middle managers coordinating with overseas suppliers, etc, etc. didn't want to do any of those things, they were uneasy about the long term impacts but they did it anyway because the managerial class structured the economy such that that's what they had to do to keep the lights on.
These same workers, on the other hand, do enjoy the inexpensive consumer goods (clothes, electronics, home appliances, etc) produced in less expensive places like China or Bangladesh or Vietnam.
These countries also were lifted from poverty and into relative prosperity by this. It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day; the US would turn into an innovative economy producing high-tech gear, doing high-grade R&D and engineering, and producing software, all the stuff the Bangladeshi or even Chinese were not supposed to be able to do comparably well. It just turned out that the engineering and development thrive next to the actual production capacity, and can be studied and learned. Now Chinese electronic engineering rivals that of the US, same for mechanical, shipbuilding, even aircraft / space and weapons.
A similar thing once happened to Japan, then to South Korea: they turned from postwar ruins and poverty into high-tech giants competing successfully with the US by exporting inexpensive, good-quality stuff to the US. But these are politically aligned with the US and the West in general; places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, not so much, and China expressly is not.
Consumer goods that on average are of lower quality and do not last as long, forcing consumers to make more frequent purchases, ultimately costing them more. In the 1950s one could buy a good quality toaster for life. It's very difficult to do so now.
A toaster off of the 1958 Sears catalog cost US$12.50 which amounts to ~US$ 160 today. We can make a $160 toaster today that'll survive nuclear war but no one will buy it.
Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.
Cheaper prices are also a feature: more people have access to goods today because of it.
While not all that is old is great, it's still a solid example.
There are people who would buy a $160 toaster (I've seen different estimates closer to $130, I'm not sure how you calculated yours) if they knew it would last 50 years today.
This shift has more to do with what businesses want than with consumer demand. Companies moved toward manufacturing goods that don’t last as long, increasing demand by ensuring products deteriorate sooner, giving them more opportunities to sell.
>Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.
While that’s partly true, putting a smart screen on a fridge doesn’t necessarily make it better. More often, businesses make changes to improve their bottom line, not to create better products overall. More durable materials were used in the past, and I would rank durability high among the most important features of physical products.
You are living under a rock if you think consumer demand is for expensive high quality things.
Look at the gangbusters runaway successes of shops like Temu and Shein if you want to know where the heart of American consumers is. Cheap shit. People love cheap shit. Even if they know it is shit.
I don't get this though. I had a $10 toaster from Walmart I bought when I went to college. It lasted me over a decade before I gave it away, still working fine. It was a pretty crappy and basic toaster (hot spots), but it was a crappy and basic toaster the day I bought it and was a crappy and basic toaster the day I gave it away. Are you people really destroying your toasters every year or two? How?
And there are absolutely high-end expensive toasters that are waaay better than the cheap junk. But most people are going to choose the cheap junk in the end.
> It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day
This isn't really true except for perhaps the most naive sort of person. It was well understood by most folks that there were going to be winners and losers. You can't gut entire segments of the workforce in less than a generation and not expect extreme pain.
It's just those people had very little political power.
Exactly zero people in actual power are genuinely surprised by the outcome here. Perhaps they are at the political backlash and how powerful it became, but that's about it.
Nope. It was well understood that the American worker was on the chopping block back in the time of Triffin and even Keynes. "Win-win" was always a line sold by people who understood that it would actually be "win-lose" but who expected to be on the winning side (and generally were).
More recently, US capital owners for the last 20 years 100% understood that they were selling off the industrial capability of the USA to the CCP. It was their monetary gain but our problem, so they went forward with it.
Externalize your costs, internalize your profits, build moats, gain cartel power, seek rent.
These are the goals of any "free market" company.
One of my great critiques of capitalism and the economic analysis of it is that all the economists seem to believe that every company wants to happily exist in a open market with lots of competitors optimizing entirely working to reduce costs for the consumer.
All you have to do is read my first paragraph and to see how utterly fantastical that notion is, and why regulation is needed to counteract every one of those simple game theory power politics end goals
Paradoxically for some, the state's power is needed to keep the markets free and competitive. An obvious example is the protection of property, hence state-financed police and courts. A slightly less obvious, but as important, are anti-monopoly protections.
'Dumb' is probably the right word. That's how a free market works - every actor works in their own interest. If you try to do something moral but it profits less, then you'll be competed to bankruptcy. Just how it works.
We want a more 'just' system, it requires regulation, so everybody is playing the same game.
Oh! We've deregulated. That's supposed to help make folks more profitable. But, whoops, it's the same playing field no matter the particular rules. So deregulation helps who? Big players, international players. Not you and me.
Look at the Auto work force in 1960 and in 2025. Wages became so high that it drove automation/robots and created the Japanese/Korean/European auto industries. Had huge tariffs been enacted we would still have some of those jobs in the USA, but those lost to robotics would still be lost due to the basic economics of fabrication.
Can this all be rolled back - All the King's men and all the King's horses can not put Humpty Dumpty together again.
I can see a possible future where people are all paid the same $$ and you can not 'shop for slaves' as we do in Asia. This level field would take a while to achieve - even now wages in China have risen a lot and they are not the cheapest labor country now, but their assembled physical plant still dominates. China now has excess physical plant and must replace the USA as a large buyer. Other countries feel the same pressures and erect tariffs of their own. I see many years of this levelling to occur. USA will have to reduce these high tariffs because the USA needs many things and it will take 10+ years to create the physical plant that was allowed to rust away over the last 20-30 years - even now a little has returned, but the 'rust belt' has been melted down and it will return slowly.
>Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible.
People have vastly different needs when learning a second language. Many folks never need to progress beyond "perpetual beginner" and that's perfectly fine.
If you're traveling for work or pleasure, it's nice to learn some key things about the language and freshen up on vocabulary. Basic words/phrases about time, money, food, etiquette, and travel will go surprisingly far when you put yourself somewhere that another language is spoken. That's what duolingo and, I guess, things like it do well. It doesn't matter if it's focused on translation at that most basic level.
To actually learn a language takes a lot of time. Years of regular sustained effort. I don't know what is meant by "modern methods" but I am skeptical that they're vastly better than classroom instruction, and in any case, the outcomes will depend more on the motivation of the student than the exact method used. The only way to shorten the time it takes to learn is total immersion.
You're a little too kind to Duolingo. It is useful for the very, very beginning, but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.
Making something as fun to use as Duolingo but that actually teaches you the language is an open problem.
> but people sink a ton of time into it which could've been used to actually learn the language.
Or it would be used to do something completely different that is nor language learning at all. There is this hypothetical world where the 10min of duolingo before sleep with some binging here and there is the only thing to prevent you feo. regularly spending considerably more effort (and time) if a more serious effort.
That is just not how it works.
Here is the thing - Duolingo is actually teaching things. Slowly. And not things of your choice. But you are slowly progressing. And it gets you further then downloading anki deck or graded reader you find boring or even language transfer and giving up on them three weeks later.
You can make an app with different trade off or more fun app. But you will have to choose between causual and intensive.
Yeah, that's fair -- you can view Duolingo as just, basically, a fun game, and you do learn something.
But I do think there's space for something equally entertaining (not anki decks!) and more effective.
I learned Spanish decently well, and I think one of the most helpful things I did for that was just hanging out with people, speaking Spanish, and drinking -- not grueling at all, very fun!
I can't understand how someone like that got into such a position.
It was deliberate. President Stable Genius wants a loyal "yes man" in that critical position. The Fox new host was it. Competence and continuity are not important for what the administration is doing.
If Hegseth gets cut-out, someone equally ridiculous will be chosen to fill that role.
I frequently experience "diminished memory" and failure of retention especially when coming up to speed on something that I am unfamiliar with or revisiting stuff I rarely do.
It's often possible if the AI has been trained enough, to inquire about why something is the way it is, to ask about why the thing you had expected is not right. If you can handle your interaction with a dialectical mindset, it seems to help a lot as far as retention goes.
If API, language and systems designers put more effort into making their stuff sane, cogent, less tedious, and more ergonomic, overreliance on AI wouldn't be so much of a problem. On the other hand, maybe better design would do even more to accelerate "vibe coding" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> The ECDLP involves finding the integer k such that P=k⋅G, where P is a point on the curve, G is a known point (the generator point), and k is the ephemeral key. The difficulty of this problem is what makes ECC secure.
I am trying to match up the statement above with the visualization directly below it where they show the generator point, G, on the curve. The plot shows k, the ephemeral key, as another point-- but it's NOT an integer, k is a point! And then there's a Q, which is the public key, and that's not described in the paragraph above at all. Nor is P shown in the plot.
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