AnyOldName3

The justification for patents is that after a (relatively) short period of being under patent, because patents have to disclose how inventions work, the idea isn’t secret and anyone can use it. The patent system is the whole reason why companies don’t and can’t hide their inventions anymore. If we just got rid of the patent system wholesale, they’d go back to keeping things secret. That might be a big problem, or it might mean that, because anything that’s been reverse-engineered would be fair game, more things end up available sooner, depending on whether companies can obfuscate things well enough that it takes longer for a hobbyist to figure out than the patent would have to expire.

Technically it’s just that particular English translation that’s copyrighted. The original text is public domain.

One of the stills from one of the videos that the BBC showed identifying it as a Tomahawk showed it at a very un-cruise-missile way up, so it could just have malfunctioned during terminal guidance or been clipped but not destroyed by air defence, and then hit the wrong target. It could also just have been a governmenty-looking building close enough to an intended target that whoever was checking it didn’t notice it wasn’t the target. It’s a lot easier to get everything right when the whole mission is to hit one person with one missile when everyone’s got enough time to do their job perfectly and everything’s been rehearsed than when there are thousands of targets and people are doing things in a rush, especially if orders are coming from people who don’t care about international law.

There’s nothing inherent to small components to suggest that you have to review them. If they’re small, it’s easier to tell yourself that the LLM probably got them right and you’re justified in not checking.

Using an LLM to write tests and small components is still vibe coding.

It’s not particularly wet, which is why fire fighters add a wetting agent to make wet water to extinguish fires more effectively.

There’s no point retaliating once you’re dead unless the enemy knows it’s something you might do. You also can’t make a plain A-bomb arbitrarily big as you need the fuel to be small enough to be subcritical until it’s assembled, and simple enough to assemble that it spends so little time critical but not supercritical that a random decay doesn’t cause a chain reaction to start before the mass is fully compressed. If it starts too early, there’s enough energy to blow the bomb apart, which stops the reaction continuing. The more material you add, the more often random decays happen, and the likelier it becomes that the reaction starts prematurely. The theoretical limit is somewhere between 500kT and 1MT, which isn’t very much for a city buster, especially if you’ve buried it. You’d have to use more than one, but a pure fission bomb is very senstive to nearby nuclear detonations, so only the first one would be likely to work.

That only debunks it if Lucas spent a lot of time thinking about Dutch and if Luke Skywalker is the only person who ever had a father.

This has the slight problems that:

• The UK’s now trying to make VPNs illegal, and was obviously going to because of the obvious flaws in the Online Safety Act.
• They consulted with MindGeek about the law before passing it, and they own most of the sites with a route to remain viable businesses under the current law, and several agree verification services, so they’re a much better company to blame for this.

Modern nukes contain a subcritical mass of fissile material and require an injection of tritium to arm them, and also require tritium for their second stage to get most of their rated yield. Tritium doesn’t last very long, so needs regularly topping up. If you’ve secretly buried a nuke, you’ll have to dig it up pretty often, undermining the advantages of secret burial. There’s also not much point in having a better nuclear deterrent than your enemy knows about, as the goal is to make them know you can destroy them so they’re too scared to attack you rather than to actually destroy them.

CV padding and main character syndrome.

Password managers are supposed to be designed to resist a situation where they’re compromised, and are only ever supposed to see a mysterious blob of encrypted data without ever having access to any information that would help decrypt it. The headline’s more like M1 Abrams Tanks Vulnerable to Small Arms Fire - it’d be totally expected that most things die when shot with bullets, but the point of a tank is that it doesn’t, so it’s a big deal if it does.

If it’s the problem that I’ve seen people complain about in the past, it’s effectively the same as HTTPS ‘not supporting’ end to end encryption because it runs over IP and IP packets contain the IP address of where they need to go, so someone can see that two IP addresses are communicating, which is unavoidable as otherwise there’s nothing to say where the data needs to go, so no way for it to get there. Someone did a blog post a couple of years ago claiming Matrix was unsecure as encrypted messages had their destination homeserver in plaintext, but that doesn’t carry any information that isn’t implied by the fact that the message is being sent to that homeserver’s IP.

Well there’s the obvious stuff like how the news always implies it’s regular paint, with the more balanced outlets typically vox-popping someone who thinks the painty thing has been permanently ruined without the reporter correcting them, and the right-wing outlets explicitly saying the object has been permanently ruined.

Exclusively using chalk paint hasn’t done much to protect Just Stop Oil from unreasonable consequences.

Manchester is also way better than the average, as long as you stay close to the centre. A lot of public transport has been de-privatised in the last few years as it was the first place to do so after regional mayors were granted the authority to do that (in large part because the regional mayor had been lobbying to get the authority to do that), so now there are more buses and they’re better and cheaper.