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This reminds me of another blog I enjoyed -- there's a link shortener called https://y.gy, and .gy is the Guayanese TLD. Venezuela was invading Guyana, so the y.gy owner wrote a whole essay about what it would mean for the .gy domain if Venezuela seizes their physical domain admin infrastructure. Crazy stuff. https://app.y.gy/blog/guyana-war

> Venezuela was invading Guyana

Venezuela was threatening to invade Guyana*


I was shocked that even with the free tier gone, there's still some level of abuse. Even the paywall doesn't totally cure the problem.


Passing malicious URL filters is crucial to operations like ransomware, phishing, etc - hiding a bad domain behind a good one is extremely valuable to hackers and relatively cheap. Though I am surprised they'd pay for it due to the payment -> identity link (maybe it's stolen CCs but Stripe is pretty good about blocking that).


> Though I am surprised they'd pay for it due to the payment -> identity...

Between gift cards, money mules, shell corporations, and "that country doesn't cooperate with investigations"...I'd guess that this is no more than a minor problem for serious criminals.


Hilarious read. Wasn’t sure where this was going at first, but the stuff about the ICANN policies and domain continuity were really interesting.


There was a good article from John Loeber a few months back about browser extensions: https://loeber.substack.com/p/9-15-years-of-market-gaps-for-...

He had the same point, where it feels like browser extensions are a big, somehow under-appreciated market. Browsers are huge platforms -- creating add-ons and making them more capable should be a popular, value-generating thing to do! But for a number of (developer) UX/UI issues, that just hasn't been the case. I hope this changes!


The article suggests heavily that, the way things are going, that's not going to be the case in the future. Right now, Europeans are still living off past prosperity, but if they don't build a real technology industry and innovate, then future Europeans will be much worse off.


> Right now, Europeans are still living off past prosperity, but if they don't build a real technology industry and innovate, then future Europeans will be much worse off.

As an American, I've heard some variant of this for literally my entire life.

Europe is technologically conservative in ways that the US is not. It's unclear that this has, is having, or will have any impact on the actual material wellbeing of the people who live there.

Compare life expectancy[1], or just about any self-reported QoL metric[2] (where the US doesn't perform badly, just not better!).

[1]: https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/data/euro...

[2]: https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/


It seems odd that the Europhiles always fall back on such oblique support. Life expectancy, for example, is heavily impacted by things like demographics and obesity. The 'better life index' is literally editorial content. Its outcomes are driven by its creators' choices with regard to the wording/framing of their questions and the weights of the various components of their scores. The US, for example, has an average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita of >60% the OECD average.. but gets an "8.5" on income? Weird.


I'm not any particular Europhile. The closest derisive (?) term would be an American urbanist; I'm very happy where I am in the US.

I don't think it makes sense to wave away life expectancy as a demographic anomaly: there are counterbalancing anomalies that favor the US (such as tobacco and alcohol consumption), and yet Europe still averages out on top. But even if it was: obesity (and societal compromises made to accommodate it) are part of self-reported QoL metrics. Why ignore that?

The same is true for the Better Life Index: Europe is not exceeding the US in many (or even a majority) of metrics, but is consistently at par with them. The conclusion to draw is that the OECD's framing can be biased, but that bias doesn't actually appear to favor Europe.

As for income: it turns out that perception is everything. Joe Schmoe in America might have more disposable income than the average German or Italian, but he's also aware of his country's lopsided income distribution[1]. That kind of inequality permeates through QoL perceptions.

[1]: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm


It doesn’t really succeed in making that case though, there’s a lot of invective but few facts. If you used the same criteria as the author for the US outside of SV how does it compare?

And as for AI DeepMind is HQ’d in Europe!


> Today’s Europeans are not yet poor — they are still living off the prosperity created by prior generations, and that enables their passive consumption

Supported by something also said by others [7] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...

The underlying issue seems to be an incompatibility between egalitarianism and inspiration to individual exceptionalism.

Why be great in Europe, if the rewards to being great elsewhere are better, and you can afford to relocate?

To benefit from European social benefits? If you're that successful, you've far exceeded that standard from personal wealth!

Consequently, you're stuck in a weird middle ground with misaligned incentives papering over a fundamental incompatibility.


I’m aware the opinion exists.


Yeah that's right. There's a blogger in another post on HN that makes the same point at the very end: https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board


Super interesting link there. You should submit it, if no one has yet.

"Governance can be messy. Time will be the judge of whether this act of governance was wise or not." (Narrator: specifically, about 12 hours.) "But you should note that the people involved in this act of corporate governance are roughly the same people trying to position themselves to govern policy on artificial intelligence.

"It seems much easier to govern a single-digit number of highly capable people than to “govern” artificial superintelligence. If it turns out that this act of governance was unwise, then it calls into serious question the ability of these people and their organizations (Georgetown’s CSET, Open Philanthropy, etc.) to conduct governance in general, especially of the most impactful technology of the hundred years to come. Many people are saying we need more governance: maybe it turns out we need less."


From that link:

>I could not find anything in the way of a source on when, or under what circumstances, Tasha McCauley joined the Board.

I would add, "or why she's on the board or why anyone thought she was qualified to be on the board".

At least with Helen Toner the intent was likely just to add a token AI Safety academic to pacify "concerned" Congressmen.

I am kind of curious how Adam D'Angelo voted. If he voted against removing Sam that would make this even more of a farce.


D’Angelo had to have voted in favor because otherwise they don’t get a four vote majority.


You only need 4 votes to have a majority if Sam and Greg were present for the vote, which neither were. Ilya + the 2 stooges voting in favor and D'Angelo voting against would be a 3-1 majority.


I am not an expert, but I don't think that is the way it works. My guess is that the only reason that they could vote without Sam and Greg there is because they had a majority even if they were there. That means they had 4 votes, and that means all other board members voted against Sam and Greg.

It does not seem reasonable that only some members of a board could get together and vote things without others present. This would be chaos.


Is their corporate charter public? I couldn't find it on their website.


No, you are totally wrong. You should not comment on things that you have no understanding of. A non-resident alien is any person in the US who is not a citizen, green card holder, or passes the substantial presence test. There are millions of non-resident aliens on visas in the US.


Substantial presence test is applied by IRS only for tax residency. You can be on h1-b for 5 years, pass the SPT and classify as tax resident but still be non-resident alien in the eyes of DHS/USCIS/SSA.


Very interesting. Thanks for posting. Didn't know about all the B&N litigation. In some sense it's a big landmark against software patents. Huge amount of blowback, and now it's much harder to get a software patent. That's a good thing.


The interesting thing is that the biggest changes to how we handle software patents came from the courts, not Congress. I suspect that eBay v. Mercexchange had a bigger impact on SCOTUS than Amazon did, but there was a ton of law review activity around the '411 patent. I must imagine this was a factor in judicial decisions around 101 eligibility.


Did anyone do worse than me? I got 11/24 :S


10/24. Wow. You'd think it would be hard to do worse than a coin flip. On the other hand, I guess many coin flip sets are going to end up "worse than a coin flip" :D


Just shy of 50% of coin flips will be worse than a coin flip.


10/24

It got to the point that I was saying "ok this one has to be a trap"


Read most of Tolkien's books as audiobooks and this is certainly an area where audio is a much worse medium than paper. You just don't get any bells ringing from the looks of words.


I felt bad about getting 12/24 which is basically "randomly guessing," somehow you did worse than random :D


Besides the point, but why would you abbreviate "Downloadable" as "D/loadable"? The confusion vs. two extra letters trade-off doesn't seem worth it at all to me.


It's particularly funny to me to save two characters while linking to a 568 page PDF.


People vary a great deal, for example the trade-off in making a lengthy comment from a meconium account doesn't seem worth it to me.


I'm uncertain if this was a joke or not, but either way I laughed.


Same and it only cost me time to laugh and comment. In those seconds, the wavefunction of the universe shifted to a hellscape. Use your time carefully /Fluke/Luke/s!


reminds of the plastic vs cotton bag carbon footprint debate


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