I would have assumed that to mean, very specifically, that you wouldn't do business with, for example, a Private Military Contractor accused of human rights abuses. The specific business. Not brushing off the individual citizens of an entire country collectively, no matter their agreement with the war, for the issues you have with the country's governance. In some cases, they would have assumed themselves safe with you, in fact, because they were not seemingly aligned with their government and more aligned with Western values, and thought you would be more censorship-resistant. Far from them, I am certain, would be the idea that you would be the first to threaten their domains when they can't even pay for another registrar. (Which is another thing that would have been a good reason for, say, a Russian activist to renew with long 5+ year terms, which... Are you going to refund those? Or just tell them to figure it out?)

I mean, I can understand where you're coming from, but it's a stretch. I would not think that's what the language means in the terms. At all. It would make an activist's day 1000x worse. Imagine if they're right now being detained and can't renew or move their domain (and this is why they took a 5 year term with you!) and they can't even see this email or this discussion. You might make the worst week of their life into a much worse one. It seems bad for business. Just saying. Older netheads expect the net to be censorship resistant, not ban-happy, for what it's worth.

> There doesn't seem to be a +11~, but is it forbidden?

Well, kinda... The thing is, even if not required by standard (It is, there's a Numbering Plan for the US and Can), most 9-to-dial-out systems would fail to call such a number, redirecting 911-anything to immediately dial out 911 once the second 1 is dialed.

IIRC, I've seen POTS also skip the inter-digit tone wait (the time between your last dial and the system going "okay, that's all the numbers, let's call!") when calling x11 numbers, generally considering "911" and other emergency/service numbers to be a magic triple that doesn't wait for other numbers to dial out.

There are no area codes starting with 1 in the US nor Canada to my knowledge since any dialing in a system with 9-to-call-out should end up being dialed as follows :

* 9 (leave system)

* 1 (country code)

* 1 (first digit of the area code)

And there is no step 4, because 911 is a special number like 411 and 311, that has a special dial plan. Since there is a possibility of issues if we make the treatment any less dumb, we don't do that. 999 is a special, unassigned code in the US too. 112 is likewise impossible to clash with here in NA since calling that with a corp system just means typing 9112, which ends up being 911, and dialing it on its own can also be allowed to be a special case since there are no area codes with 1 because of 911.

In fact, even "small area codes" or, officially, "office codes" are also required to not be X11. You used to be able to call locally in your area code without dialing the area code, too. It ends up being that xxx-911-xxxx is also an invalid number. Because locally, you would have had to type "911" to start dialing that number. There are also other limitations that can be seen here as well as allocation for future expansion : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan_...

There's also probably a physical, legacy reason it's probably much more difficult to make a physical 911 switch when "911" is also a valid part of a phone number. It means you need to figure out "Is it what they meant, or are there more numbers coming?" It means the sequence of operations "<open line><9><1><1>" always means emergency, fast connect, and probably easier to implement as a side-channel than as a part of the dial logic? This is speculation, I haven't actually opened a POTS PBX with a physical implementation of the 911 dialing logic.

That cost-effectiveness discussion was enlightening. I find you have a knack for explaining what people don't see, by the way.

Open question, which maybe you might have info about, I'm just curious if maybe anyone crossed something on this; I wonder if that characteristic is inherent to specific energy storage tech; for example in Li-Ion IMR/INR batteries, this might be in part because of the voltage sag and discharge characteristics? In other words, a battery that sagged less under load and had a flatter discharge curve would have a wider range of acceptable durations? For example : https://www.richtek.com/battery-management/img/battery-disch...

This graph gives a general idea of how battery performance degrades the more load you put on Li-Ion batteries, the kind in flashlights, vapes, etc. The ICR18650s of the world et al.. They are not great for energy storage, long term, frankly. The harder you discharge them, the more the voltage sags, requiring even harder discharge to maintain a proper power output, leading to more heat, and power loss in spiky demand conditions. Leaving them on but at low-power for a very long time seems to be more efficient, but by the time you hit that low of a power-delivery, they become less cost-effective, because you could do the same with a hydro plant, a reservoir, and pumps. Li-Ion batteries need management circuits, balanced charge, can be overcharged, can be drained 'till they turn into a brick. They're far from idealized batteries that discharge at all rates consistently at equal voltage all along their Wh rating. A Constant-Power drain on Li-Ion heats up and degrades way worse at low charge or low battery condition, etc.

In other words, kWh is never the be-all-end-all of energy storage. If you want long, sustained power in tiny sips, I'm pretty sure nothing beats these ZnO batteries for hearing aids that use oxygen (or is it air?) as fuel. What seems to really matter is the ability to push out kWh on a consistent basis is, as far as I can tell, and we have no really good solution for this?

Frankly, at the time where the questionnaires were filled by the study participants, there were no vaccines available as far as I can tell.

I don't know where that high-horse you're on comes from, but it's quite undignified.

Social distancing, masks, hand washing and related practices were available. While I'm not saying that everyone who ever contracted COVID-19 was careless (and how could we even begin to think such a thing front line workers?), there is going to be a correlation.

A random sample of people from the "got COVID" category is going to be dumber than the population.

Doctors were more exposed than average. Same for other healthcare workers and related fields, as well as service workers, sanitation workers, food industry workers (Frito-Lay has wonderful working conditions since COVID, I'm sure), essential workers... While every person with a desk job worked from home. Every person in physical rehab was stuck being in-person, as well as the occupational therapists, the home help for the disabled, etc... If this is as dangerous as we think, it means every single privileged person was able to stay home, safe and away from the unwashed masses while getting their creature comforts delivered in the safety of their lordly home, while the poor suffered trying to make ends meet delivering the aforementioned comforts while the former class were telling them "we were all in the same boat." And then the people that caught it because they tried to make it easier for others to live through this are supposed to feel what, stupid? These people are good enough for bringing you food, but not good enough to be entitled to control over their body? These people who caught COVID because they brought meds to people door-to-door because the elderly couldn't go out... Are they all stupid? Or stupider than average? Or are you (without thinking) insulting kind, courageous souls from behind your keyboard? Just a humble proposition.

To me, your post feels like an insult to the people who have to work for a living without either cushy desk jobs or the option to work with their brains exclusively, like lawyers. Watch the implications of what you say, especially if you're going to make value judgements about other humans. You don't seem to value these people's opinions or their right to live their life the way they want to. Genocides, fascism, and authoritarianism start this way. "They're stupid anyway." "They deserve it." "They're dirty." "They don't think right." "They're too dumb for their own good." "We should force them to do the right thing." "Of course the people who have that disease are stupid, they..."

The shoah started this way, and I find it disgusting that we seem to be treading the same path again, 100 years later, but for different reasons. History never quite repeats, but goddamn does it rhyme. "These damn $MINORITY, they don't $THING, we should force them to do it!", as if anything gave you such a right over another human being on G-d's green earth. They are not "less than" because they don't think like you. They have a right to be heard, and a right to tell you "I refuse." This is why fundamental, inalienable rights exist. For these moments, where momentary problems would make everything worse for everyone in the aftermath. Losing control over what gets put inside my body is a big deal, and seeing it sacrificed for temporary security makes me feel wrong.

Keep in mind that $MINORITY : $THING in the analogy above has many, many tuples. Quite a few can be pulled from history with not much thought, some persecuted because of genetic reasons, some for religious reasons, some for "I have a right to decide for myself", a.k.a. freedom reasons. But your implication that someone is stupid, and by this I mean actually measurably dumber, to the point of needing statistical compensation in a study(!), and not only stupid, but stupid to the point where they should be "assisted against their will" or mocked for doubting new medical interventions borders on the reckless, stupid, and the kind of thing future generations will look back towards with great sadness, I think. Or they'll never know we had that freedom in the first place.

It's not joyful to me, but I guess it will take one massive wake up call for people to understand vaccines (even the regular type, nevermind these new mRNA ones) are not 0-consequence, and that imposing them on others amounts to giving the state control over everyone's body in perpetuity... "My body my choice", but not when people get scared... Which is deeply unwise. Corollary to this, is that you shouldn't have a right to impose injections to healthy, aware, clearly unconsenting people. Because you might be forcing someone to go through Hell to make you feel safer. Having side effects from a forced injection is inherently cruel, and having it done to you "because you won't do it yourself" doesn't make this easier on the soul, if anything it's an even worse violation of the basic right to choose medical intervention freely and without coercion.

I'm a little sorry, frankly, for the way I might be talking about this (English is my second language), but frankly, I find what you said so offensive to reason and logic that I had to comment about it. This is a very slippery slope, and we might find ourselves slipping faster than we think. Never forget how fast life changed in the last 2 years. It can get really bad, really fast.

Do you see why this is undignified in a reasonable society? I'm not really willing to entertain this type of speech, and frankly, I'm a little surprised I'm alone in talking about this. I feel like one of those $MINORITYs again, and the $THING we collectively find wrong is my thought. I swear there used to be a novel or a movie about this, but maybe the Ministry of Truth took care of it. What was the term again? Thoughtcrime? Are we really there? "These are the wrong thoughts", like a scientific inquisition? Like "I deserve to get forcefully injected by someone I don't know because I disagree being injected is the right thing to do"? Keep your ad hominem, and get me a proper scientific debate. Clubbing people down is barbarian shit, and it doesn't matter if your bludgeon is physical or mental if it leads to visiting physical harm in the end. Vaccinating people against their will, like a scared animal, or like something "owned", isn't humane. And I'm not sure you understand, frankly, that that's what you're advocating. Because you disagree. Because they're "just being difficult." Or maybe they're being patient. Careful. Well-reasoned. I find this split in society very strange. Intelligent people are calling intelligent people stupid because of political and intellectual disagreement.

We might be making everyone stupider, and the only thing you have to say for these damaged souls and minds is "No great loss, they were stupid anyway."? I guess we'll see if the S protein itself (or fragments of it) is biologically active on its own... The vaccines are basically that. You sure this is reasonable? Really sure?

[Note : For a forum that regularly talks about computer security, I find that very little thought is put to all the possible side effects of biological code uploads through injection. In other words, the "biocomputational-security" implications of running barely-tested mRNA code (dev -> prod, anyone?) in parallel in millions of humans (millions of different codebases...) at once. Especially as computer scientists, we should be very sensitive to unintended, hard-to-find, reveals-itself-in-three-years-once-you-hit-a-weird-bug-and-your-database-is-kaput, rare-as-hell side effects that are disastrous. That's most of our expertise. I guess I'm one of those people that question the wisdom of random protein-generating mRNA being injected into us, with no choice, no right to examine the code, no way to simulate code execution or sandboxing, and coercion included if you don't go along. I know people who wouldn't download a computer file under these conditions, much less agree to medical treatment...]

Thank you for speaking sanity. Is there any easy way to get in touch? I would love to talk.

Imagine if, to avoid damage to engine parts, engines would keep their heat limits in safe zones to not blow up when friction goes up. Imagine if, when you don't tune up your car, it starts running, factually, with less horsepower.

You do lose X horsepower every 1000 miles. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the oil.

You lose X MHz every Y% of battery discharge capacity lost. You get it back with your tuneup. Which involves changing the battery.

You don't need to detune maliciously to get the effect Apple is getting here. The system just needs to self-calibrate to a depleting battery... Which is super good for the battery because it won't actually get worse as fast. Discharge cycles, especially close to the discharge limit, puts strain on cells, which have voltage sag closer to end of life.

When a vehicle overheats and goes into limp mode the car tells you. Changing a vehicles oil does not increase the horsepower in a measurable way like the percent apple lopped off as batteries aged. If that was the case oil changes would be a much bigger deal.

Again, this is all semantics. The whole point is apple never told people they were throttling. And you've got two groups saying "Oh they are so nice, they did it so you could keep using your phone, how nice of them" and then the "my phone is slow I guess I need to buy a new one".

Did Apple turn the "check engine" light on?

I remember a few messages saying my battery was degraded/degrading and needed replacement a few months before my iPhone 6 started dying at 20+% battery because of battery issues. Post-patch, it was slow, but worked.

What's annoying about this particular issue is that the problem that users don't like isn't Apple's battery saving measure, or even being lied to, it's phone performance slowing over time. That is what users care about. The battery peak load degrading over time is a factor, but even with battery replacements phones will feel more sluggish over time because the NAND is a disposable part. Fill up a higher percentage of your total storage? Feels slow. Take videos for a year? Feels slow. There is no reasonable oil change for this and it's something that is not being talked about anywhere.

Is there any reference at all for this?

My iPhone X is 3 years old, and feels just as fast as when it was new.

Reference for what, exactly? There are no references that highlight the issue of storage performance in iPhones. I haven’t even found a review that looks at storage performance of iPhones in the past three generations. Brand new performance, not even performance over write cycle. That is the issue I’m raising.

If you want a reference that proves that NAND performance degrades over write cycles: then I will only list one, but there are hundreds, at least.

https://doi.org/10.1109/RELPHY.2008.4558857

Sure - entropy.

But is there any evidence that translates into an appreciable impact on device performance?

Perhaps it doesn’t, and this is why nobody is talking about it.

As a person who likes music, making it, listening to it, breaking it down and hacking it...

Making a classical arrangement that evokes a particular expression in the listener is the job of the musician. If an AI system helps you explore the possibilities there, it's more like a studio musician that's able to improvise. You're still the person, the human, the emotional filter, that picks "This sounds right" or "This doesn't" for a particular situation. It's a judgement call. An emotional one.

An AI might be able to fake it, communicate with it, but it will never replace humans choosing the sounds that please them more than others. Humans communicate through music. It wouldn't surprise me that an AI would be able to as well. I don't think it would necessarily write emotionally strong music, not without human training.

Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure, computers might be able to make music. Ask any guy who messes with modular synthesizers. But they're a tool. The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself. It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."

>It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."

I'm not so sure. I often go into threads on HN and realize that every idea I could come up with on the subject has already been expressed better than I could do it, with greater expertise, and cited sources. I don't comment in those threads. If AI bots could populate a thread with every likely human thought and argue it with depth and sophistication in a well reasoned, yet carefully approachable and well-explained way, well then... again I don't think I'd feel like I would be adding much value by participating.

And yet, here I am, bringing up something no one seems to bring up in the thread. One would also logically come to the conclusions that disparate AIs with disparate interests would find different things to express, to make music about, to draw about.

What distinguishes music written by AI from music made from humans? I have a story to tell. If the AI has a story to tell, one that speaks to our human emotions, it might make good music. But the point is to communicate. Even if you take, for example, someone else's words, fit them to a different model in a different field, viewpoint... You might get interesting things. You could make a cover of someone else's song, with your twist. Adding your emotion to the melting pot. AIs might be good at that, just like that, but only through communicating. Just like us. We have no idea whether they'll be better than us at doing it, or merely equivalent. We have no idea what is lossy in our sharing of mental models. Perhaps it is an unsolvable problem, which we will find out in the same way we found out about Gödel's Incompleteness.

It seems to me like we fail to understand how unique we are. We are in a unique position to shape what comes after us, and we are blind to how much we unconsciously select for things. We have an innate mental model of "humanity" we are trying to transmit to machines, and I am not sure we fully grasp it well enough to make sure we are creating something like us. We fail to do it properly to humans, sometimes, who actually do share most of our instincts and habits. Something entirely different from us? Color me skeptical.

This kind of debate only highlights this, to me.

What your comment suggests to me is that good composition requires an agent with a world model and generalized task-solving ability, along with a personality. I think developing the world model and task-solving will be the hard part, and if we can do it, it won’t be that hard to make it have a personality too. That’s just another task.

What my comment is trying to suggest is that AIs are not proven to be different from us. They might not have one "ultimate" form. They might be just like us humans. Diverse.

>>>The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself.

I think this is the key; if you're making music for your own reasons, no AI (or Mozart) would stop you. But if you're trying to make money at it, or desperately want listeners, you may eventually be on the "losing" side.

Would it? Popular music sees major paradigm shifts every few years, and AIs only really generate things based on observation of existing patterns, at least as far as I can tell.

As far as recent examples go, Lady Gaga and Lorde were major breaks from what was prevalent at the time they started releasing music, and then spawned artists trying to emulate them.

A pattern implies that it can "infer" something in the future.

If we oversimplify and compile a list of traits about "the world" as it was in the past that allowed a new genre or artist to flourish, AI could predict that in the future. It isn't like the paradigm shifts just happen in a vacuum.

Granted there are probably millions of little things that lead to this, stuff like the shared experiences of an entire generation coming of age, political climate, trends in other industries, etc. Not that I believe it will ever happen to an accurate enough degree, but theoretically I don't see why it could not be possible to approximate given time and resources.

A lot of those things are completely random and non-predictable, to be honest, no one can predict which paradigm will win and take over for the next decade. Especially since when a game-changing paradigm comes, it is usually not received well universally at all, until the moment it takes over the public conscious completely, and then the switch is flipped.

If you feed an AI a bunch of modern car designs and ask it to design a new car, it will design you something like a modern ford or honda/toyota, but it will never design something like a Cybertruck. Which I believe will be the next paradigm shift in the design of trucks (that has been super stale and stagnant for at least the past 20 years), but this is yet to be seen.

For an example with music that has already happened and became apparent - Kanye West's "808s and Heartbreak" album from late 00's. On release, it had very polarizing reviews, most of which were skewing towards "really weak and weird". Fast forward 10 years, most of hip-hop and pop music is directly influenced by that album, most of top 50 albums use similar patterns and methods used in that album, and critics have made a complete 180. So now 808s is hailed as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) paradigm changes and influences in music of the past decade as a whole, as well as the best album by Kanye, despite at the time being called the worst. Imo an AI trained on music of 00's that came before 808s would have never been able to come up with something like that, but it totally could've come up with another top 100 song using existing paradigms.

It doesn't have to be like Kanye's album at that point in time to be a paradigm shift, though. If 1 artist didn't get big or some genre blow up then it would have just been filled by an infinite amount of others that we never heard. Even considering a single artist hitting it big there are how many that are never heard of? An AI could produce an equal number of artists and only has to win once every month/year/etc. I think this is similar to the million monkeys at a typewriter thing.

It's hard to say - maybe for a sufficiently advanced AI, Lorde's style would be an obvious extrapolation from the popular music of the time. Certainly we're not there yet, and it's an open question if we ever will be - but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one day AIs can make better music/poetry than the best humans, by any metric we care to use.

I'm always going to enjoy a person coming and showing a bit of themselves through their music.

That's not something we can really lose without losing something that connects us. People want a story. That has sold since the beginning of time, and it will keep selling. People will keep being moved to music, giving money to the artists that inspire them, and that requires connection. Maybe an AI/human team would make some really incredible stuff, and I'd be willing to pay for it if it makes me feel something. I think the human touch of "selection" will never truly leave, even if only in the listener's mind...

I'm sure they'd have said the same thing about a computer being able to win Go not so many years ago...

I think the problem with music is that there is no "objectively good" music composition. It remains entirely subjective and all criteria that are used to differentiate between "bad" and "good" albums are highly subjective. (Maybe something like "originality" might be measurable in some way but even there it gets tricky really fast)

So music generation (similar to poetry) is imo a completely different problem space altogether.

I think the only difference is that instead of one win-lose metric, there are 7.7 billion individual good-bad metrics on music.

For every individual doing the evaluation, I think it will certainly possible to train an AI to beat humans at getting "good" scores.

Real, authentic music generation is a harder problem than go or chess, but I'm not sure that makes it any more emotionally difficult for a future writer to face a true musical AI than it was for Lee Se-Dol or Kasparov.

It might be hard to judge. Some people will insist that generated music is bad, because it's just their subjective opinion, even if 90% of random selection will find that music good.

You are splitting hair here. Which end user really care about what the composer was thinking when they created a piece. A piece can be enjoyed without having any knowledge of its author.

The point is: what if the tool becomes so great that practically anybody can use it? Anybody could be that "filter" and "be" a great musician.

http://aiva.ai - anybody could be that "filter"

Imagine the day when you can’t find a more satisfying note than the one the computer already have chosen.

I really wish we could stamp out this excessive pedantry. It is completely clear what OP meant. There is no need to pretend we are robots.

I know many hackers who can communicate just fine without redirecting conversation to a debate over the meaning of words. Semantics are trivial to clarify. Pedantry honestly has very little to do with building things except when resolving miscommunication.

Besides, words have multiple meanings, and there are many floating signifiers in the world. Correcting diction without an acknowledgment of intent might as well be pissing into the wind.

On a personal level, aimless pedantry is a terrible attribute in people you work with, and these people can be toxic to productivity.

Hackernews comments don’t get run on anything. Not to mention that they are imprecise anyway because they are written in English.

And proceeded to get told by the english landowners to "Speak White" when we'd speak our native french tongue.

We're just about as white as they come. "Speak White" means "Speak the english of your captors."

There is an actual poem from about the time of the Quiet Revolution named "Speak White" which would explain this really well, here's (ironically) an English translation of it :

https://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=738881

Gonna guess beat/mood/song analysis.

Yeah but they can use the raw song for that I suppose.

Easier way to match voices?

Nor is it a surprise that it shows up in any segment of children not exposed to healthy male influences. That knife cuts both ways.