The people horrified at news stories like this are not the same people working in defense tech.
At least, I’ve never met someone who works in war tech who really cares. They either don’t think about it or they believe the propaganda and think they’re making the world safer. Both are bad but neither seems hypocritical to me.
This kind of mental model only works if you think of things as made huge shadowy blobs, not people.
dyld has one principal author, who would 100% quit and go to the press if he was told (by who?) to insert a back door. The whole org is composed of the same basic people as would be working on Linux or something. Are you imagining a mass of people in suits who learned how to do systems programming at the institute for evil?
Additionally, do you work in tech? You don’t think bugs appear organically? You don’t think creative exploitation of bugs is a thing?
This vastly overstates both the competence of spy agencies and of software engineers in general. When it comes to memory unsafe code, the potential for exploits is nearly infinite.
It was a complicated product that many people worked in order to develop and took advantage of many pre-existing vulnerabilities as well knowledge of complex and niche systems in order to work.
Yeah, Stuxnet was the absolute worst of the worst the depths of its development we will likely truly never know. The cost of its development we will never truly know. It was an extremely highly, hyper targeted, advanced digital weapon. Nation states wouldn't even use this type of warfare against pedophiles.
Stuxnet was discovered because a bug was accidently introduced during an update [0]. So I think it speaks more to how vulnerabilities and bugs do appear organically. If an insanely sophisticated program built under incredibly high security and secrecy standards can accidently push an update introducing a bug, then why wouldn't it happen to Apple?
Maybe sometimes? With how many bugs are normally found in very complex code, would a rational spy agency spend the money to add a few more? Doing so is its own type of black op, with plenty of ways to go wrong.
OTOH, how rational are spy agencies about such things?
It’s a cute aphorism, and useful sometimes, but when you look closely or from different angles hedgehogs often have foxy attributes, or vice versa. Some moments in a person’s life they look more like a fox, other times like a hedgehog. Perhaps the distinction applies better to specific ideas or to pieces of work than as a fixed essence of a person.
Einstein might seem like a quintessential hedgehog (surely the principle of relativity is a Big Hedgehog Idea if ever there was one). Then you learn he once invented a refrigerator. Tolstoy looks like an obvious fox earlier in his writing career, but increasingly a hedgehog towards the end of his life. And slightly less exaltedly, I feel like a fox in some contexts and a hedgehog in others. It might change day to day, or depend on who I’m talking too.
(People are complicated. All aphorisms are wrong, but some are useful I guess. I still quote this one sometimes.)
Europe is a continent, with many disparate nations and cultures. This continent is not hostile towards Graphene users.
In Europe there is the European Union (EU), which also is comprised of many disparate nations and cultures but a subset of those comprising Europe.
I say the following as a staunch supporter of European integration and cooperation:
The EU is actively hostile towards any software with the stated goal of safeguarding users right to privacy and security. That means GrapheneOS but also Signal, Matrix and more.
How expensive is the sterilization process, though? That would be my primary concern if tilapia-skin bandages started to get widely available/mass-produced: that unscrupulous vendors would cut corners during sterilization, and then the burn victims would get nasty infections from remnant bacteria on the tilapia skin.
I think any farmed animal is or should have no waste. Even if it’s turned into cat food the skin is most definitely not just waste, there’s uses out there. However, if it is as cheap and readily available as cat food then that’s great for burn victims too.
For one, most all preservation methods are processing, including canning, freezing and drying. You can't possibly claim that frozen or canned veggies are unhealthy
really non-scientifically speaking, the kind of "processed" that seems to be less healthy comes closer to "pre-chewed/digested" and "concentrated" (ground very fine, broken down into constituent parts. Eg: refined flours over whole grains. corn syrup over corn on the cob (or even just frozen whole corn), Fruit juice over sliced fresh/frozen fruit.
A big challenge is how do you make rules/terms for that uneducated (on the topic) folks, disinterested folks, and lower IQ folks (MeanIQ - 1SD) can readily understand and apply in their busy + stressful lives?
To me it seems the point is “processed” == bad. Isn’t it? And NOVA seems to be the gold standard for what’s “processed”.
Of course there’s better things as whole grain bread in plastic foil (whole grain bread freshly made) or infant formula (breastfeeding). But they are more healthy than other things that rank better in NOVA.
"Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. "
if you raise that much money and go under, its usually just fraud.
The french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional).
How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.
Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
Even some financed by Y Combinator.
The thing about weapons is that these startups will have no control in what circumstances they are used.
The hypocrisy is people coming here and claiming that such things happening in the world disturb them.
The world would definitely be a safer place if everyone was a pacifist.
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