Unfortunately this article seems to be written in the same casual polymath style it claims to warn of, with people making broad generalizations without any deep knowledge of what they are talking about.
I stopped reading at the point where JFK’s 1947 election was claimed to be purely due to wealth. Although JFK is today remembered much more for other historical events--
He was already a nationally known war hero before 1947. See, for example, this 1944 article in the New Yorker:
But why was this article in the New Yorker in 1944? There were thousands of war stories as thrilling or more as the story of the PT 109. The second sentence gives a clue: "Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, the ex-Ambassador’s son and lately a PT skipper in the Solomons...". His story was told because he was the son of Joseph Kennedy, who had been the US ambassador to the UK. And then as now, ambassadorships (at least to pleasant developed countries) were generally gifts to wealthy people like Joseph Kennedy who had helped the current president (FDR in his case) to get elected.
IMO Joe Kennedy was using his sons to rehabilitate his reputation for being a NAZI sympathiser, and I suspect it was Joseph Kennedy not John that was being groomed for a political career.
It's well known that Joe Kennedy was at least a defeatist (when it came to the British), and arguably a Nazi German sympathizer. Please don't ask for citations on basic, easily verifiable facts, it comes off as lazy, flippant, and ignorant.
And wealthy because he invested heavily in distilleries when it became clear that Prohibition was going to be abolished. As the FA indicates, this is the defining moment of brilliance which should be the stick by which he is measured. Everything else about the Kennedy family came about because of that investment, and the insane returns from it.
I wasn't aware that CDNs were much cheaper, and am genuinely curious what service you are using at what prices.
When I look at AWS pricing, us-east-1 at < 10TB, I see: EC2 data transfer out to the internet is 9¢/GB, and Cloudfront is 8.5¢/GB for the lowest price class. That's a slight savings, but at 6% I can't justify the effort to switch over on cost alone.
Cloudflare famously charges $0/GB, with some arbitrary restrictions on the way you use their service, and I’ve heard rumors of soft limits on the total amount of bandwidth you can use before they email you to upgrade to a higher plan.
I’ve never used BunnyCDN, but they charge a flat $0.01/GB for North American traffic, and I’ve heard some good things about them.
DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, and some other cloud providers charge $0.01/GB without a CDN, just using their regular servers, but obviously a CDN is more than just a way to save money — it’s a way to lower latency and improve user experience.
The mega clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP) seem to significantly over-charge for egress bandwidth as a nice profit mechanism, just because they can.
My unpopular opinion is that mega clouds are overrated. They’re fine, but they have a lot of weird gotchas that most people have just accepted as “how the cloud works.”
As someone who’d already been a bit worried about future mass-car hacks, I found the zombie car hacking sequence in 2017's "The Fate of the Furious" particularly terrifying to see in the theater. Rewatching it now, it actually looks somewhat tame compared to what might be since the hacked cars only inflict property damage, not injury.
> Villainess: I want every with chip with a 0-day exploit in a two mile radius around that motorcade now.
Thank you so much for posting this link. I already knew he’d written Mono, the open-source implementation of .Net, but am now in awe at seeing his many other accomplishments, such as starting the GNOME project and making major contributions to initial RAID and Sparc support in Linux.
> With the US Department of Energy dumping money into SCYL and many in the industry congregating around it, the software front is accelerating rapidly.
Anybody know what SCYL is? Based on the low number of google hits I'm thinking it's a typo
If you want to compare with the manual process for crossing obstacles, here’s a little buggy with a gasoline motor, with the lineman hoisting it past an insulator with the help of a pulley, starting around 6:20:
I think you’re trying to express skepticism about this claim, but the way that it’s phrased, if the claim were true, directly answering your questions would be to doxx the author of Slate Star Codex here in this thread.
By taking down the blog and writing the open letter, Alexander has made it extremely clear what his current anonymity preferences are.
It must feel incredibly horrible to be asking for privacy, citing safety reasons, only to have people dig up deanonymizing opsec failures from the past and suggesting they somehow indicated you did not really intend or deserve to have privacy today.
I stopped reading at the point where JFK’s 1947 election was claimed to be purely due to wealth. Although JFK is today remembered much more for other historical events--
He was already a nationally known war hero before 1947. See, for example, this 1944 article in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/06/17/survival