Viewing profile — OkayPhysicist

I got a couple of these as a kid, handed down from my parents. Quite a bit of fun to play around with. I do remember getting a snap-together circuit which was new, but it just didn…

A core point of the article is that the vast majority of the world is filled with incompetent people who lack basic truth-finding skills, but that you shouldn't inform your opinion…

Even better than rolling is a suit fold. I inherited one, and only got around to using it years later when I needed to fly in to a buddy's wedding with a suit. Ever since, it's my …

The US industry players are unconcerned. Mistral wouldn't be stupid enough to use this patent against them, because they know damn well they'd lose, and then have their patent inva…

In the US, the patent office almost always grants patents as long as the correct process is followed. They don't really concern themselves with whether a patent could be successful…

A healthy social life consists of having people at various degrees of familiarity, who can move up and down closeness spectrum. You start with setting specific relationships. Your …

Why is this so, so common? They're subdomains. They're free. It's not hitting anybody's budget to publish a new DNS entry. If someone has permission to publish anything in your nam…

None of this required Javascript. At all. The same potential attack could have been done with good ol' forms. Sure, you think you're signing into "BigBensSuperStore.com", but you'r…

Whenever the "tens of millions killed by communism" number gets trotted out, it's invariably considering everybody who died due to lack of assigned resources under communism. Which…

A nuclear armed Iran would be fantastic for global stability. Right now, the only nuclear power in the Middle East is Israel, and they act like it, doing their warmongering and gen…

You can do CRISPR in your kitchen. It's been possible practically as long as CRISPR has been a thing. It's not particularly difficult, to the point that my biggest counterpoint to …

Users are habituated to clicking links (mostly from their email) as verification, too. QR codes get a weird amount of hate for something that basically amounts to a hyperlink you c…

Terseness is a significant advantage in pattern recognition. If you write a long, detailed breakdown of every step, not only are you spending a bunch of time writing, you're also o…

50% is a bit much. People do expect their hardware to just work. That means installing drivers and the like. And the act here is so egregious that I can't imagine being an LG engin…

And they suck. Everyone who's ever worn one knows they suck. If they're too big they completely kill all sensation, if they're too small they cut off circulation, leading to, you g…

Most STDs we don't have vaccines for, and the ones that have survived to the modern day are the ones that can be good at hiding. Syphilis, for example, has the nasty habit of seemi…

And the solution already exists, one that doesn't empower the government to do some truly heinous shit. Every power you grant the government is another knife they'll eventually sta…

There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by s…

The same thing you'd do with a doctor with a penchant for harming their patients. Strip their license.

Couldn't any exploit possible via that pathway also be executed based on a link? I don't see how a QR code makes the situation any worse.

There isn't really a direct point of comparison in the US, because by and large the US is much more loosely attached to the concept of having a specific "Our culture" that others a…

Post-crypto, the GPU manufacturers took the proactive move to use VRAM to segment the market for the purpose of price discrimination. Sure, data centers will pay vastly more for GP…

They basically are. Waymo's basically spreading as fast as they can 1) verify they can drive safely in the local conditions (SF has fog, but no snow or ice), 2) work with local gov…

I live in one of the exceptions to that, and still have zero concern that someone's going to shoot up my workplace. Again, civilization works because the vast majority of people ar…

So? The primary thing stopping people from doing really really bad things is, and always has been, most people not wanting to do bad things. It's never been difficult. Literally, r…