> A lot of the dam removal pressure is activist not scientific - people who have come to believe dams are evil because they aren’t natural
Similarly, a lot of dam preservation pressure is reflexive reactionary thinking that if someone wants to remove the dams, it must be because they're a hippie environmentalist and the dam must be saved to show our commitment to Progress.
Dams have a finite lifespan. Rivers carry sediment. The dams slow the flow of water and the sediment is dropped. This fills up the reservoir behind the dam, eventually making the dam ineffective. In addition, ordinary mechanical stresses wear out dams and they're components, so there is a maintenance cost to just keeping them running.
Many failure modes for dams are catastrophic: a release of water and silt all at once into downstream areas.
Worse, many of the dams that were built in the dam-building boom in the US West from circa 1930 to 1965 or so were not particularly well-thought-out, especially smaller privately planned dams.
In the mid-century American Bureau of Reclamation, building dams was like building new chat services is at Google today. While dams, as a concept, are completely critical to making the western united states survivable with mid-20th century technology, many of the actual dams were not good designs, they are the result of a generation or two of engineers responding to promotion incentives within a large bureaucracy, and they should no more be given the benefit of the doubt as good engineering projects than the last abandoned open source project you saw from Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.
* "In 1941 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that the dam would not be economically effective, as the steep, erosive topography upstream would cause it to silt up quickly. However, the project moved forward and in 1945 the county issued $682,000 in revenue bonds to fund it. Construction began on 18 June 1946 and was completed on 14 March 1948 at a cost of nearly $4 million, six times the original estimate"
* "Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up.[7] The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment.[6] Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt,[1] but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated. In 1964 a safety study was commissioned from Bechtel Corporation, which determined the dam was unsafe and recommended removal."
* The dam was notched twice, reducing its capacity and function, and the reservoir was useless by 2020.
* Ventura county started trying to remove the dam in 1998 (who knows what happened between 1964 and then), but the dam is still there.
Even the good dams don't last forever, and there is no plan to deal with the sediment build up in the West's dams.
However, the Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers dams are the good ones. The real corkers are the private dams. Consider Rindge Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindge_Dam) in Malibu, California, which was privately built by the Rindge family when they controlled the entire Mexican land grant rancho that is present-day Malibu:
* Built 1926
* Completely silted up by 1950, 24 years later. 24 years of "useful" life tops ("useful" is suspect because most Rindge family building projects were weird compliance dodges to preserve control of the ranch. They spent decades building and tearing down a railroad because the law on the books at the time prevented the state from using eminent domain to seize their land for road-building if there was a railroad under construction there)
* Congress authorized removal study in 1992.
* In 2014, dam considered so dangerous due to lack of repairs that the area, which is now in a state park, was closed to the public in 2014.
* The dam can't just be knocked down, what would happen to the 600k cubic meters of sediment that are now trapped behind the dam, that should have flowed down the river for the last 100 years? The plan is to _truck the sediment out_. Some will be dumped in the ocean, the rest in _landfills_.
* The currently scheduled goal to complete the removal project is _2033_. The dam was been functionally useless for its original purpose since 1950. It's 83 year "useless/dangerous" lifespan will surpass it's 24 year "useful" lifespan by 3.5x! Surely _some_ of that is government beauracracy but not all: it's very difficult to unbuild a silted up dam. It's harder to undo things than it is to do them.
I think there is much more significant "religious faith" in the sanctity of dams than there is "belief that dams are evil because they aren't natural" in the United States. Dams are a powerful symbol of America's mid-century confidence in it's ability to bend nature to its will. Hoover Dam is more than a tourist site, it's something closer to a civic-religious site, like the Lincoln Monument. So is Glen Canyon. Grand Coulee Dam is known to a lot of people as "The Dam That Won World War II" for it's role in powering the aluminum-smelting plants and nuclear material refinement sites in the Northwest. How many pieces of infrastructure are considered war heros in the US?
The sanctity of dams is way more obvious in the northeast. There's hundreds and hundreds of abandoned dams on every trickle of water in the mid-Atlantic and New England, all to power mills that stopped milling 100 years ago, but the dams are still there, and the fish are not.
"In a kind of a zen way, those born ultra-rich live perpetually in the moment. Since they understand very little about causality, they do not understand how events happen or things get made. They can be filled with mystical wonderment at the spontaneous generation of material reality. They can also be blind to social realities that sit outside their lived knowledge, which is terrifyingly narrow."
It's funny to read this kind of bullshit but imagine it being a description of like, Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Pointing out somebody who was born into wealth who's good at a thing doesn't disprove his thesis.
I'd counter your example with another: the documentary Born Rich pretty well captures the article's point. There are lots of young people who were born into very wealthy families who clearly don't understand how anything works even at a basic level and at some points of the movie the more self-aware ones are anxious about and reflect on this fact.
For instance one admits that she doesn't understand how her credit card bill ends up with so much money on it every month, how people could possibly live on a fraction of what she spends, or how money is made or how expenses are paid. This fills with anxiety because she understands that she is utterly dependent on the largess of her family.
Are you saying that because they are backed by a big startup they can't be a fraud? China has a big problem with financial fraud of various kinds partly because of rapid growth and partly because of how regulation is shared between Beijing and the regions meaning some things fall between the cracks. https://www.ft.com/content/77f61cf0-5b9d-4ea8-854a-4f220039d...
Evergrande sold promises of houses, FTX and Lantian sold promises of huge investment gains. But if you buy something on Temu, it's actually delivered to you in a week.
The worst case is that the unsustainable growth is propped by VC money, like the early days of Uber, but the consumer is still the one that's profiting here.
Not sure the consumer is winning here. Eg the UK consumer advocacy organization "Which?" tested 3 electric heaters ordered on Temu and found all three unsafe[1].
The US bbb has them at a "C+" rating due to complaints about goods being ordered but not arriving etc[2]
> Amazon S3 is the original cloud technology: it came out in 2006. "Objects" were popular at the time and S3 was labelled an "object store", but everyone really knows that S3 is for files. S3
Alternative theory: everyone who worked on this knew that it was not a filesystem and "object store" is a description intended to describe everything else pointed out in this post.
"Objects were really popular" is about objects as software component that combines executable code with local state. None of the original S3 examples were about "hey you can serialize live objects to this store and then deserialize them into another live process!" It was all like "hey you know how you have all those static assets for your website..." "Objects" was used in this sense in databases at the time in the phrase "binary large object" or "blob". S3 was like "hey, stuff that doesn't fit in your database, you know...objects...this is a store for them."
This is meant to describe precisely things like "listing is slow" because when S3 was designed, the launch usecases assumed an index of contents existed _somewhere else_, because, yeah, it's not a filesystem. it's an object store.
Yeah, I'm really worried the author is confusing OOP with an object store.
To quote GCP:
> Object storage is a data storage architecture for storing unstructured data, which sections data into units—objects—and stores them in a structurally flat data environment
I have basically no physics education, but I was educated in the US. In my high school, where I took an ordinary, low-quality physics course (the one for weak students that didn't require calculus), the introduction of quantum mechanics was motivated by the photoelectric effect. Now, like I said, I don't really have any physics education and I don't really understand the photoelectric effect _or_ quantum mechanics, but my basic recollection was waves hands you shine a light on certain materials and electrons pop out, and it looks for various reasons like this behavior is packet-y rather than smooth as one might expect.
Basically in an intro American physics class, if they've got an opportunity to get Einstein involved, they're gonna take it.
I've never heard of this myth either.
FWIW, the authors, Nils-Erik Bomark and Reidun Renstrøm, also appear to work at .no universities.
yesterday on my way to work i saw a guy in one of those huge pickup trucks cut a corner on a right turn, run over the concrete bike lane seperator, which was marked by a row of roughly three foot high reflector sticks (which he also mowed down), and then drive his right front wheels up over the curve onto the sidewalk.
on a perfectly clear morning in a residential neighborhood, with curbs painted with that yellow reflective paint.
> but maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate.
Here's how the adoption of this technology is going to go (this is the way all AI technology adoption has gone for 60 years):
1) Papers will come out showing how by creating a more effective way to leverage compute + data to make a system self-improving, performance at some task looks way better than previous AI systems, almost human-like. (This already happened: "All You Need Is Attention")
2) The first generally available implementations of the technology, in a pretty raw form, will be released. People will be completely amazed at how this machine can do something that was thought to be a hallmark of humans! And by just doing $SIMPLE_THING (search, token prediction) which isn't "really" "thinking"! (This will amaze some people but also form the basis of a lot of negative commentary) (Also already happened: ChaGPT, etc)
3) There will be a huge influx of speculative investment capital into the space and a bunch of startups will appear to take advantage of this. At the same time, big old tech companies will start putting stickers on their existing products that say they're powered by LLMs. (Also already happened)
4) There will be a wave of press, first in the academia, then in technology circles, then in the mainstream, about What This Means. "AGI" is just over the horizon, all human jobs are about to be gone, society totally transformed. (We are currently here at step 4)
5) After a while, the limits of the technology will start to become clear. A lot of the startups will figure out that they don't really have a business, but a few will be massively successful and either build real ongoing businesses that use LLMs to solve problems for people, or get acquired. It will turn out that LLMs are massively, massively useful for some previously-thought-to-be-nearly-impossible or at least contigent on solving the general AI problem work: something like intent extraction, grammarly-type writing assistants, Intellisense on steroids, building natural chat interfaces to APIs in products like Siri or Alexa that understand "turn on the light" and "turn on the lights" mean the same thing. I have no idea what the things will actually be, if I was good at that sort of thing I'd be rich.
6) There will be a bunch of "LLMs are useless!" press. Because LLMs don't have Rosie-from-the-Jetsons level of human-like intelligence, they will be considered "a failure" for the general AI problem. Once people get accustomed to whatever the actual completely amazing things LLMs get used for, things that seemed "impossible" in 2021. Startups will fail. Enrollments in AI courses in school will drop, VCs will pull back from the category, AI in general (not just LLMs) will be considered a doomed investment category for a few years. This entire time, LLMs will be used every day by huge numbers of people to do super helpful things. But it will turn out that no one wants to see a movie where the screenplay is written by AI. The LLM won't be able to drive a car. All the media websites that are spending money to have LLMs write articles will find out that LLM-generated content is a completely terrible way to get people to come to your site, read some stuff and look at ads, with terrible economics, and these people will lose at least hundreds of millions of dollars, probably low billions, collectively.
7) At this trough point where LLMs have "failed" and AI as a sector is toxic to VCs, what LLMs do will somehow be thought of as 'not AI'. "It's just predicting the next token" or something will become the accepted common thinking that disqualifies it as 'Artificial Intelligence'. LLMs and LLM engineering will be considered useful and necessary, but it will be considered a part of mainstream software engineering and not really 'AI' per se. People will generally forget that whatever workaday things LLMs turn into a trivial service call or library function, used to be massively difficult problems that people thought would require human-like general intelligence to solve (for instance, making an Alexa-like voice assistant that, can tell 'hey can you kill the lights', 'yo shutoff the overhead light please?', 'alright shut the lights', 'close the light' all mean the same thing). This will happen really fast. https://xkcd.com/1425/
Sometimes when you see an amazing magic show, if you later learn how the trick was done, it seems a lot less 'magical'. Most magic tricks exploit weird human perceptual phenomena and, most of all, the magicians willingness to master incredibly tedious technique and do incredibly tedious work. Even though we 'know' this at some level when we see magicians perform, it's still deflating to learn the details. For some reason, AI technology is subject to the same phenomenon.
> And just a daily reminder that biometrics are usernames, they are not passwords.
I think you should stop giving out this daily reminder. This meme has outlived its usefulness.
Using face id to unlock a local key store to enable my device to sign a signed challenge from a site I want to log into with the private key stored on my device is not a 'username' in any meaningful sense.
The problem is, the metaphor about passwords and usernames is not a good, structure-preserving simplification of the actual problem of authentication.
The biometric data and/or pin code are not being used to prove that you are you to Gmail, it's being used to unlock the set of private keys you have on your device. This doesn't fit into the metaphor at all.
If my non-technical parents said they were migrating all their accounts to passkeys, I would be very pleased. I wouldn't be worried about their inability to change their biometrics and that causing a problem following some sort of breach in the future. I am highly worried about their extreme susceptibility to phishing, especially in their inability to distinguish phishing sites from real sites, or real account maintence contacts via email and SMS from phishing contacts, their reuse of very simple passwords that are probably circulating in combolists already, and their general inability to retain username/password pairs. I have a lot of sympathy for them when I try to talk them through something like logging in to an Apple device with their apple id, when their appleid username is their email, which ends with @gmail.com. "But...why would i log in to apple with my gmail?" nevermind how confused they are about 'log in with google', 'log in with facebook', etc.
Moving to a model where their devices store webauthn credentials and guard them with a pin or faceid-style biometric shortcut is a _massive_ improvement in practical resistance to account takeover for my parents, and I don't think continuing to say 'biometrics are usernames in authn' is accurate or helpful.
> If my non-technical parents said they were migrating all their accounts to passkeys, I would be very pleased. I wouldn't be worried about their inability to change their biometrics
My 76 yr old dad can't do it. His phone is some shitty android trash that when he's setting up his biometrics, he shakes a bit, and it never stores the finger data correctly. I have to hold his finger and his phone at the same time to even scan it. Then, unlocking is also super unreliable because of the shaking. He refuses to get a better phone cause this one "works well enough."
This is so true - most older people I've worked with have major problems with touch devices. No one has come up with a satisfactory solution. This is not a new problem - I remember working with my grandfather in his 80's on a 286 equipped with a mouse - his arthritis prevented him from accurately positioning the mouse. Today's touch interfaces are far worse. And fingerprint scans are very difficult to get right and use with older people. Maybe face scans are fine but I've never trusted them. Regardless of security logins, there are a host of other issues - complex navigation, complex and confusing layouts (especially desktop), and hard to manipulate controls. One example, a simple zoom or skype call - why hasn't anyone ever developed a simple device to allow for same without having to use intricate controls. I've always imagined something similar to the video enabled nest or alexa devices but with physical knobs and push buttons. There's a very large market being ignored for some reason.
> There's a very large market being ignored for some reason.
It's no surprise that the tech industry, which largely employs urban, educated 20-somethings and 30-somethings, tends to produce products aimed at urban, educated 20-somethings and 30-somethings.
> No one has come up with a satisfactory solution.
Stick your finger inside of a dynamically sizing aperture, or clip a finger reader onto your finger? If both the finger and the reader shake the same there shouldn't be a problem.
That doesn't solve the general touch issue, but it solves this particular case.
It might not be that the android is crappy. Some people's fingerprints stop being readable as they age, and there are various injuries and diseases that have that result.
Essentially every biometric has a population they won't function well with.
It's 100% accurate. And I get why it may not seem helpful, but I think this is simply due to this industry trying too hard to cater to people who want things to be 6-year-old level easy.
Security is HARD. There's no getting around that. Your data is valuable and protecting it is not an easy task. At some level, security and convenience is a zero-sum game.
As for old people, my dad writes down his passwords on a text file in his laptop and has a printed backup in the house.
And, yes, he does have to bug me sometimes to re-login or change a password, but we've never had a security problem, which is way more than can be said for a lot of people who tried the INHERENTLY unsafe "3rd party manager" thing.
The security triad is "something you are", "something you
know", and "something you have". Fingerprints are something you are. Usernames are something you claim to be.
The username is the "claim" you are this person. The password is the "proof" you are.
If I'm fingerprinted by any federal agency today (and my fingerprints have been on file with the government since the 90's for a security clearance), then my fingerprints can serve as absolute proof of my identity. This is helpful to me should my identity ever be stolen and I need to show absolute proof of who I am.
Good point, you're right. And with e.g. federal agencies, this fine.
But given the relatively high level of laziness, capriciousness, and general failure all around that is "IT security by means of companies who are rarely held accountable," it's good to point out that this is what makes biometrics worse than usernames and should probably mostly be avoided, or at least optional.
Your points are taken, but I do believe that the "something you are" is better than the "something you know" and "something you have" pieces -- as the knowledge or the thing you have can be stolen.
Sure fingerprints, face scans, and iris scans can be stolen as well. But certain things are really hard to fake, including potentially, scans of faces and an iris scan at the same time -- unless you can somehow graft a new iris and grow a new face.
Put it like this: a dead victim is found naked along the side of the road. Which leg(s) of the security triad can the police use to prove the identity of the victim?
If convenience plus precision are your only goals, sure. But this requires probably too much trust in the systems. I'm fine with the FBI having that power and information.
Google, who I don't pay and doesn't owe me much, not so much.
Those are all factors in multi-factor authentication. If a service does not require the "something you are" there's still good security if they require the other two factors. If the only required factor is "something you are" that's bad security.
> unhedged duration risk, nor the moral hazard created by the bailout
Just making sure I understand your point here, are you just against "banking"? Unhedged duration risk w/ LOLR backup is essentially "the banking business".
What's the moral hazard? The equity is wiped out, most of the debtors are wiped out.
The only moral hazard I see is we've disincentivized individual depositors from assessing the financial strength of their banks. To me, this is a good thing. I hope we can bring similar moral hazards to choosing a plane to fly on, bridge to cross, building to enter, restaurant to eat in, hospital to go to, etc.
Other banks had less duration risk and some used hedges. No bank is going to profit from this particular environment but it's possible to manage assets such that the entire business doesn't implode.
Similarly, a lot of dam preservation pressure is reflexive reactionary thinking that if someone wants to remove the dams, it must be because they're a hippie environmentalist and the dam must be saved to show our commitment to Progress.
Dams have a finite lifespan. Rivers carry sediment. The dams slow the flow of water and the sediment is dropped. This fills up the reservoir behind the dam, eventually making the dam ineffective. In addition, ordinary mechanical stresses wear out dams and they're components, so there is a maintenance cost to just keeping them running.
Many failure modes for dams are catastrophic: a release of water and silt all at once into downstream areas.
Worse, many of the dams that were built in the dam-building boom in the US West from circa 1930 to 1965 or so were not particularly well-thought-out, especially smaller privately planned dams.
In the mid-century American Bureau of Reclamation, building dams was like building new chat services is at Google today. While dams, as a concept, are completely critical to making the western united states survivable with mid-20th century technology, many of the actual dams were not good designs, they are the result of a generation or two of engineers responding to promotion incentives within a large bureaucracy, and they should no more be given the benefit of the doubt as good engineering projects than the last abandoned open source project you saw from Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.
Consider Matilija Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam):
* "In 1941 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that the dam would not be economically effective, as the steep, erosive topography upstream would cause it to silt up quickly. However, the project moved forward and in 1945 the county issued $682,000 in revenue bonds to fund it. Construction began on 18 June 1946 and was completed on 14 March 1948 at a cost of nearly $4 million, six times the original estimate" * "Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up.[7] The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment.[6] Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt,[1] but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated. In 1964 a safety study was commissioned from Bechtel Corporation, which determined the dam was unsafe and recommended removal." * The dam was notched twice, reducing its capacity and function, and the reservoir was useless by 2020. * Ventura county started trying to remove the dam in 1998 (who knows what happened between 1964 and then), but the dam is still there.
Even the good dams don't last forever, and there is no plan to deal with the sediment build up in the West's dams.
However, the Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers dams are the good ones. The real corkers are the private dams. Consider Rindge Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindge_Dam) in Malibu, California, which was privately built by the Rindge family when they controlled the entire Mexican land grant rancho that is present-day Malibu:
* Built 1926 * Completely silted up by 1950, 24 years later. 24 years of "useful" life tops ("useful" is suspect because most Rindge family building projects were weird compliance dodges to preserve control of the ranch. They spent decades building and tearing down a railroad because the law on the books at the time prevented the state from using eminent domain to seize their land for road-building if there was a railroad under construction there) * Congress authorized removal study in 1992. * In 2014, dam considered so dangerous due to lack of repairs that the area, which is now in a state park, was closed to the public in 2014. * The dam can't just be knocked down, what would happen to the 600k cubic meters of sediment that are now trapped behind the dam, that should have flowed down the river for the last 100 years? The plan is to _truck the sediment out_. Some will be dumped in the ocean, the rest in _landfills_. * The currently scheduled goal to complete the removal project is _2033_. The dam was been functionally useless for its original purpose since 1950. It's 83 year "useless/dangerous" lifespan will surpass it's 24 year "useful" lifespan by 3.5x! Surely _some_ of that is government beauracracy but not all: it's very difficult to unbuild a silted up dam. It's harder to undo things than it is to do them.
I think there is much more significant "religious faith" in the sanctity of dams than there is "belief that dams are evil because they aren't natural" in the United States. Dams are a powerful symbol of America's mid-century confidence in it's ability to bend nature to its will. Hoover Dam is more than a tourist site, it's something closer to a civic-religious site, like the Lincoln Monument. So is Glen Canyon. Grand Coulee Dam is known to a lot of people as "The Dam That Won World War II" for it's role in powering the aluminum-smelting plants and nuclear material refinement sites in the Northwest. How many pieces of infrastructure are considered war heros in the US?
The sanctity of dams is way more obvious in the northeast. There's hundreds and hundreds of abandoned dams on every trickle of water in the mid-Atlantic and New England, all to power mills that stopped milling 100 years ago, but the dams are still there, and the fish are not.