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juliusdavies commented on Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon   the307.substack.com/p/rev... · Posted by u/cramsession
jackling · 3 months ago
Both the 1500 and 4000 number were confirmed by Lebanon, and no reputable watch organization has credibly disputed them, you're not citing evidence just conjecture on how you believe everything went down due to a relative small bits of information.

> along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike

I am not sure what this means.

To add, you're making it impossible to argue anything against your claim. We're discussing how the pagers hurt civilians and if they were properly targetting combatants. You're saying no matter what, since you know the pager was targetting combatants, the evidence that civilians were hurt must be false. Your logic circular.

juliusdavies · 3 months ago
Do you want some deeply studied anthropological journal article on “The use of pagers in Lebanese society “?

Do you know of any civilians anywhere in the world that currently use pagers?

Who had the pagers and why they had the pagers is almost derivable from first principles at this point, never mind the international journalism on the subject.

juliusdavies commented on UDP isn't unreliable, it's a convertible (2024)   proxylity.com/articles/ud... · Posted by u/mlhpdx
ekr____ · 4 months ago
I agree with you about the category error.

In all fairness, though, there are quite a few application protocols which are built directly on top of UDP with no explicit intermediate transport layer. DNS, RTP, and even sometimes SIP come immediately to mind.

juliusdavies · 4 months ago
SIP still has a reliability layer built on top: the humans will say “I didn’t catch that, can you repeat yourself?“ on the video call.
juliusdavies commented on The Secrets We Keep   blog.bl00cyb.org/2025/07/... · Posted by u/luu
juliusdavies · 8 months ago
Very neat variation on the “I’m currently looking for work” post.
juliusdavies commented on Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA   ostechnix.com/linux-reach... · Posted by u/marcodiego
827a · 8 months ago
1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.

2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.

3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.

This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.

juliusdavies · 8 months ago
I find this compelling, alongside the fact ChromeBooks are well placed in retail shops and usually the cheapest things you can buy. They are also ubiquitous in elementary schools. This is more about ChromeBooks than linux.

Add the fact that all my kids hate their school chromebooks.... maybe this isn't such great news for Linux afterall.

juliusdavies commented on Good Writing   paulgraham.com/goodwritin... · Posted by u/oli5679
idlewords · 10 months ago
Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
juliusdavies · 9 months ago
For me the beauty of idlewords's own blog (https://idlewords.com/) is that it's so good it makes me want to write.

Similarly, I find Graham's writing so bad that it also makes me want to write.

(note: idlewords, if you see this, your blog is misbehaving at the moment. For example, PHP is complaining bitterly on this page right now: https://idlewords.com/2018/10/ )

juliusdavies commented on Stop using REST for state synchronization (2024)   mbid.me/posts/stop-using-... · Posted by u/Kerrick
tptacek · 10 months ago
I don't understand this objection. Whether or not the APIs the post describes are according-to-Royle REST, is it your claim that REST is in fact a good approach to state sync? Because that's what the post is really about.
juliusdavies · 10 months ago
Damn that’s a fine coinage. According-to-Royle.
juliusdavies commented on Milwaukee police considering trading mugshots for facial recognition tech   jsonline.com/story/news/c... · Posted by u/Teever
juliusdavies · 10 months ago
Am I wrong to assume police already have access to their area’s database of driver’s license photos?

Never mind mugshots - I think they already have access to most people’s faces, even those that have never been arrested.

juliusdavies commented on Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died   eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03... · Posted by u/leotravis10
tptacek · a year ago
Or, you know, they're inspecting the sewers.
juliusdavies · a year ago
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
juliusdavies commented on The Trouble with Elon   samharris.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/pulisse
idlewords · a year ago
Here's the paywalled second half of the post, for anyone interested:

-----

6. This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.

7. At the end of 2022, I abandoned Twitter/X altogether, having recognized the poisonous effect that it had on my life—but also, in large part, because of what I saw it doing to Elon. I’ve been away from the platform for over two years, and yet Elon still attacks me. Occasionally a friend will tell me that I’m trending there, and the reasons for this are never good. As recently as this week, Elon repeated a defamatory charge about my being a “hypocrite” for writing a book in defense of honesty and then encouraging people to lie to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. Not only have I never advocated lying to defeat Trump (despite what that misleading clip from the Triggernometry podcast might suggest to naive viewers), I’ve taken great pains to defend Trump from the most damaging lie ever told about him. Elon knows this, because we communicated about the offending clip when it first appeared on Twitter/X. However, he simply does not care that he is defaming a former friend to hundreds of millions of people—many of whom are mentally unstable. On this occasion, he even tagged the incoming president of the United States.

All of this remains socially and professionally awkward, because Elon and I still have many friends in common. Which suggests the terms of another another wager that I would happily make, if such a thing were possible—and I would accept 1000 to 1 odds in Elon’s favor:

I bet that anyone who knows us both knows that I am telling the truth.

Everyone close to Elon must recognize how unethical he has become, and yet they remain silent. Their complicity is understandable, but it is depressing all the same. These otherwise serious and compassionate people know that when Elon attacks private citizens on Twitter/X—falsely accusing them of crimes or corruption, celebrating their misfortunes—he is often causing tangible harm in their lives. It’s probably still true to say that social media “isn’t real life,” until thousands of lunatics learn your home address.

A final absurdity in my case, is that several of the controversial issues that Elon has hurled himself at of late—and even attacked me over—are ones we agree about. We seem to be in near total alignment on immigration and the problems at the southern border of the U.S. We also share the same concerns about what he calls “the woke mind virus.” And we fully agree about the manifest evil of the so-called “grooming-gangs scandal” in the U.K. The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale. (And if grooming were really one of his concerns, it’s strange that he couldn’t find anything wrong with Matt Gaetz.)

Elon and I even agree about the foundational importance of free speech. It’s just that his approach to safeguarding it—amplifying the influence of psychopaths and psychotics, while deplatforming real journalists and his own critics; or savaging the reputations of democratic leaders, while never saying a harsh word about the Chinese Communist Party—is not something I can support. The man claims to have principles, but he appears to have only moods and impulses.

Any dispassionate observer of Elon’s behavior on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality. There is simply no excuse for a person with his talents, resources, and opportunities to create so much pointless noise. The callousness and narcissism conveyed by his antics should be impossible for his real friends to ignore—but they appear to keep silent, perhaps for fear of losing access to his orbit of influence.

Of course, none of this is to deny that the tens of thousands of brilliant engineers Elon employs are accomplishing extraordinary things. He really is the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. And because of the businesses he’s built, he will likely become the world’s first trillionaire—perhaps very soon. Since the election of Donald Trump in November, Elon’s wealth has grown by around $200 billion. That’s nearly $3 billion a day (and over $100 million an hour). Such astonishing access to resources gives Elon the chance—and many would argue the responsibility—to solve enormous problems in our world.

So why spend time spreading lies on X?

juliusdavies · a year ago
This essay really reminds me of someone I know who's integrity and impulse control has changed dramatically over the last 2 years coinciding with their descent into crushing poverty (e.g., phones and internet and electricity often cut off, forced to use the local food bank, narrowly avoided eviction notices, etc).

Perhaps Elon is experiencing a degree of stress in his life that most people just cannot fathom - I am certain this other person I know is. I can imagine that extreme affluence and fame might also be as stressful as dire poverty. I believe extreme stress negatively affects integrity and impulse control.

juliusdavies commented on In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work   slate.com/life/2024/12/wo... · Posted by u/mooreds
ornornor · a year ago
The article was pretty much empty: someone trying to be edgy and making their word count. I didn’t enjoy reading the article and wish that for once I read the comments before the link.
juliusdavies · a year ago
I enjoyed the article very very much but I accidentally completed a BFA in creative writing in my youth so my taste in writing might be a bit off.

u/juliusdavies

KarmaCake day365March 6, 2009View Original