I'm a prof. When I have a student with special needs in my class, the administration tells me ahead of time. I make the necessary allowances - and those differ from case to case, anyway: whether it's extra time in exams, or someone who is deaf, or someone who is blind, or whatever.
When it happens, I make the necessary allowances. When I don't, then...I don't.
The obsession that everything has to be 100% accessible, for every kind of disability, all of the time? That's just nuts, not to mention a complete waste of resources.
The attitude they’re contesting is that accessibility is a “minimum compliance” category: people tend to invest zero effort into accessibility until caught, and enforcement that waits for students to report suffering is terrible, so automated analysis of accessibility that is ‘always on’ dramatically raises the water level for all accessibility. It won’t reach 100% accessible but it’ll reach a lot higher than the 1% accessible it was otherwise, and that’s a valuable result worth obsessing over. Doesn’t have to be complex: “Your video was uploaded without captions”, “your PDF is missing a text layer” are probably the two most valuable and simplest to implement rejections on the table.
Universalizing statements like "100% accessible" are usually bad ideas. In this case, it's driven not by administrators but the Department of Justice, which is rulemaking accessibility via consent decrees. I think a lot of people miss that and just blame the administrators. Rulemaking is a long process, and the rules being made are stuck in a time before AI could reliably read a book to a blind person: the rules shift the onus onto the content creators, when we've created a whole new ecosystem of ways to eliminate the onus. The DOJ should probably step back and stop trying to regulate this, because the market has already solved it.
I'm in Europe, and we don't use Canvas (at least, I've never heard of it). However, we have similar diseases. In my particular school, it's a massive SharePoint site plus ever more stuff in Teams. Plus Moodle, plus other services.
The MS services have not improved teaching at all. What they do, is fragment communications, and add ever more places people have to look, in hopes of finding things.
But the administration loves them. "The bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy."
Spain here. Most of our public Universities have their IT stack on MS... I cannot fathom how much of our national budget goes to their pockets.
Thankfully, I store my teaching materials on my personal non-uni webpage, and the student's marks in my office's computer (apart from the MS-based Uni system).
Whenever something happens with MS, chaos ensues throughout the whose Uni and the students end up paying the consequences.
This. Yes, the mass internet is curated, created and censored. Usenet is a distant memory. But some changes are positive.
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
Well, yes—parents’ groups are coordinating. Similar to how drunk driving and cigarette rules were passed globally in about a generation. You don’t need reptiles when polling is so strongly against kids on social media.
This chapter explores the defining characteristics of digital authoritarianism as exemplified by countries such as China and Russia, identifying three primary pillars: information control, mass surveillance, and the creation of a fragmented, isolated Internet. Furthermore, this chapter emphasizes that digital authoritarian practices are not confined to authoritarian regimes. Democratic governments and technologically advanced private corporations, especially the dominant tech companies shaping the modern Internet, are also capable of adopting authoritarian tactics.
It's much more than parents' groups. This is coming "top down". For example, here in Switzerland the government decided E-IDs would be a great idea. The population killed the proposal the first time, with a referendum. So the government tried again, and we failed to kill it the second time.
It’s both. This is an unpopular opinion on HN, but most Americans support banning social media for kids younger than 14. The implementation details are not being thought through, which is a problem. But pretending this is a conspiracy is a silly way for technical experts to cede their seats at the table.
"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS."
I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.
The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.
For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are. What is a feature of the OS? That's before considering how users discover and manage other software for activities not covered by whatever is OS provided.
Credit cards as a while use a security model from...what, the 1970s? Sure, they've patched by adding the 3-digit CVC, but really? A huge industry can't do better than that? Honestly, it's pathetic...
Between 3DS for online payments and EMV for POS payments (both launched in the 1990s), payment cards could be plenty secure – if the industry were to decide to mandate them for every payment.
The fact that it hasn't is an interesting study in game theory and economics.
This is true, practical quantum computing is always "just a couple of years away".
At the same time, moving to more secure encryption really isn't difficult. How many times have algorithms been deprecated over the past 20 or so years? It's time to do it again.
Let's just make sure that the NSA hasn't worked in any backdoors. At latest since Snowdon, anything they work on is suspect.
There is no clear evidence that the risk of "a practical post quantum computer would arrive in the next 5 years" is greater than "post quantum scheme X is broken" for any scheme X. The only way to go is hybridation and it is quite hard from an engineering point apparently.
If Algo-A and Algo-B both rely on "factoring big numbers is hard!" then once the Quantumpocalypse occurs, breaking Algo-B(Algo-A(plaintext)) is no harder than asking ChatGPT 99.5 to add an extra step in your vibe coded cracking engine's frontend, such that it now does B_breaker < cyphertext | A_breaker >> plaintext.lol or whatever the equivalent is for the fashionable language of the that future day.
He was saying hybrid encryption as in use both a well established classical "factoring big numbers is hard!" algo and also a fancy new post quantum cryptography algo. That way if it turns out the fancy new algo can be broken by non-quantum computers at least you aren't in a worse position than you were in before because you are still protected by the well established classical algo.
You have to break both algorithms. One of them is quantum-safe if it's secure, but it could also be completely insecure like supersingular isogeny was.
And in the process immediately convert huge numbers of devices into ewaste. Then check the excuse calendar again for tomorrow's reason to deprecate yet another batch of "legacy" ciphers from openSSL.
It's not another story, the quality of the reasons for scrapping / upgrading devices is the most important thing here.
If the reasons are "the current devices are insecure or likely to become insecure" that's very different from "the new encryption system is a little bit better so there's not much point in upgrading".
If quantum computing never becomes a practical thing, the current hardware and software will stay secure. If it becomes practical, they won't. Seems simple enough.
It'll be a 90/10 rule: 90% of the upgrades will be straightforward. It's important the 10% that'll be hard early. For many it's probably already too late.
There was an article four days ago about 12 million hectares to grow corn for fuel and that energy from solar is 30x more efficient. Maybe they could make a few million of that nature reserve and put solar on other parts? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868063)
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.
Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.
Yes, there is overwhelming evidence of climate change. And that we are causing it.
However research into what we humans can do to ameliorate it is verboten. For example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean... was an actual experiment that found a low cost way to both remove lots of CO2, and improve a fishery. But that line of research has been shut down.
Likewise research into the current impact is only allowed if it agrees with what is politically correct. For example many researchers have found that current severe California forest fires are mostly due to poor past policies, that have resulted in very dense forest, with a large fuel overload. But research that stresses the impact of climate change are easier to publish, and this shifts the apparent consensus on the causes of things like the major 2025 fires in the Los Angeles area.
> The project is also unlikely to bury much if any carbon dioxide for one simple reason: metabolism. As other iron fertilization experiments have shown, it is relatively easy to get plankton to bloom, but it is harder for that bloom to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it takes CO2 with it.
Do you really think that adding iron releases net carbon? That would be hard to explain chemically.
The worst case scenario laid out in that article is that most of the carbon absorbed, was later rereleased. So net zero carbon, not net carbon emitter.
I've seen other reports of that exact experiment that estimated a significant net carbon sink. The actual experiment failed to make measurements that lets us know which actually happened.
Regardless, we've certainly demonstrated that, at least sometimes, there is significant net carbon capture, at low cost. Given the certainty of global damage at present, I believe that this justifies continued experimentation. Even if it means accepting possible risk to local ecosystems. The local ecosystem can generally recover. The planet, not so much.
You think the chemical compounds were just magiced into the ocean with no carbon intensity. It literally says carbon will not be absorbed and that geoengineering is not the goal.
> There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.
With any position, you have to distinguish between its thoughtful advocates and its thoughtless ones-every position has both
Any thoughtful “climate change sceptic” is going to say (a) of course the climate is changing-it always has and always will; (b) of course it is implausible than human activity has literally zero impact on that change. But that still doesn’t tell us: (i) the relative scale of anthropogenic versus natural causal factors; (ii) the validity of any specific predictions of future change; (iii) the likely socioeconomic impacts of any future changes that may occur. It is totally possible that a person may affirm (a) and (b) while questioning the “consensus” on (i) and (ii) and (iii)
Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on the substantive issue - but I wonder about the extent to which mainstream discourse on the topic represents good epistemic hygiene. It is even possible that the sceptics are on the whole more wrong than right, but simultaneously the mainstream response to them is more irrational than rational.
> There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. (that is: If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists)
Absolutely, the issues are similar
And if this can upend the business model of some big companies we'll give some "incentives" to some "doubtful" scientists even if their doubts are unfounded (actually very well founded but you get the gist)
Which sucks because such work should be free of pressures and incentives
> we should send more money to climate scientists.
Couldn't disagree more.
Please spend it on those who might actually fix something.
There's plenty of can remove carbon or can undo the effect of X on Y. Let's stop falling back on the bad argument of we must leave nature alone right after arguing we change billion dollar industries because we can.
We shouldn't learn to be custodians watching the planet die because of past mistakes, we should be fixing and improving the planet and improving on nature because we can, must and should, shoulder this reaponsibility.
Please not _yet more modelling_ burning HPC into the ground just for a crappy bar line graph (based on assumptions)...
> we should be fixing and improving the planet and improving on nature
How do you do this without a process of finding out what works and what doesn't? Isn't that science? Or am I misunderstanding you saying no more modeling to mean we already know everything we might need to know in order to shoulder this planet scale responsibility and just collectively aren't doing anything except making bar charts?
What does your proposal actually look like without science or climate modeling?
> If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
Depends! If you're a large fossil fuel company, the obvious move might be to spend more money on advertising agencies scientists, or entire foundations who question climate science instead.
I am baffled by the number of people on HN, presumably a website for and by technical people, who fail to consider secondary and tertiary effects when it fits their worldview to do so.
There is a yawning abyss of states in between extinction and 'boy sure is a few degrees warmer out here' and none of them are good.
Many organisms would benefit from a warmer climate, just not humans.
We rely on extremely narrow conditions for the fragile supply chains and power structures that keep us on the ragged edge of civilized to continue working. We had an extremely mild contagious disease outbreak, by historic standards, and our economy is still feeling the effects!
Imagine the impacts of something like wildly different rainfall patterns, increased rate of global infectious disease, shifted agricultural zones, changes to Jetstream patterns, large scale crop failures, loss of water supplies, temporary local ecosystem collapses etc. These changes are incredibly fast on the scale of what it takes to reach ecological equilibrium.
These of course mean nothing to biological life, writ large. Life will recover and adapt. To fragile human civilization they mean refugee crisis, resource wars, failed infrastructure, and ten thousand other existentially terrible things.
I get your point but on the other hand humans live quite well in places like Medicine Hat say where it swings from -40 C in winter to +40 C in summer. Against that the likely warming by say 2100 is I think 1.5C up from what it is today which might be just about noticeable?
Did you read the post at all? Second order effects, not primary effects. Its exasperating how much effort people will put into not understanding the smallest things when they are inconvenient to their worldview.
Yes I believe GP was focused on the catastrophe part. It's very likely correct that our CO2 emissions are warming the atmosphere ocean etc, but it's not clear that runaway warming is inevitable or that life or geology have feedback mechanisms that turn an exponential into an S curve. That is, after all, basically what natural selection tends to do. Turning the table again, even if there are corrective factors humans might have immense suffering before it stabilizes. So we don't know.
You didn't ask, but my opinion on it is that we'll probably stabilize on a cleaner energy source and find natural countermeasures when suffering ticks up. Any top down pressure to change things whole cloth seems doomed, no matter how benevolent. We're closed loop creatures.
For Climate Change it's a question of opportunity costs. With expected inputs how much will temperature change? What are the effects of that change? How much effort to you put into changing the inputs? How much effort do you put into dealing with the effects?
The biggest difference is that Climate Change is a deeply political question with a bit of science tossed in. Alzheimer's is the mirror opposite - it's a scientific question with politics added to the same degree of most other things.
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
I think this is not a great example, as there’s a huge group of people that, in fact, does not agree with the consensus and would happily fund research that (tries to) prove otherwise.
I fully agree with your point, though, just not the example.
The comment you were replying to was talking about funding. If you could develop a scientifically plausible model to defend the "burning fossil fuels is not so bad, actually" thesis, your funders would include the oil companies and the greater petrochemical industry. There is a lot more money to fund projects there than... anywhere else in the world, really, by a wide margin.
well oil companies funded "lead fuels are safe" research...
...and it really did backfire (in public relations, politics, etc)
now... I don't think they can actually fund 'research-for-their-profit' -- I mean, would you believe "petro is good for earth" research coming from oil companies, even after the 'lead is good or neutral' research?
Not uncritically, but if the research presents a logically consistent hypothesis, and evidence supporting it, then it would be worth following up on with independent groups and if it remains consistent to scrutiny then it should be accepted.
There are so many counterexamples proving that your statement is just not true. I'll give you just one example, the Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller that took funding from the Koch foundation to attempt to "prove" that the satellite temperature data was "miscalibrated" and estimates of actual warming were overblown. Started the project in 2010. First published in 2011 showing that in fact the warming was real and using more advanced calibration techniques actually showed the warming was worse than we thought.
Expecting scientific rigor is not a bad bias: everyone who has been willing to do actual science agrees that climate change is real and significant. For example, Richard Muller was a climate skeptic who had a great job at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, got funding to establish a team to critically review climate science research … and concluded it was right:
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
If you haven’t read up on both, it’s hard to appreciate how unlike climate science is from the beta amyloid theory. The latter has some evidence but there were always alternate theories by serious researchers because it involved multiple systems which scientists were still working to understand and basic questions around causation and correlation had significant debate.
In contrast, climate scientists reached consensus about climate change four decades ago and by now have established many separate lines of evidence which all support what has been the consensus position. More importantly, since the 1970s they have been making predictions which were subsequently upheld by measured data from multiple sources. The ongoing research is in fine-tuning predictions, estimating efficacy of proposed interventions, etc. but nobody is seriously questioning the basic idea.
Almost all of the people you hear dismissing climate change are funded by a handful of companies like Exxon, whose own internal research showing climate change was a significant threat produced a chart in 1982 which has proven accurate:
having worked in amyloid, and in an a-beta lab in the second half of the 2000s, we always said under our breath in group meetings that we were skeptical about the amyloid hypothesis, but our grant applications certainly did not say that (or if they did it was a quick throwaway sentence). And I think the lab that I landed in was one of the most honest scientific labs in biochemistry/chemical biology.
Over the past decades the group that are not happy with the AGW consensus in the hard earth sciences crowd have principally funded FUD via think tanks, ala the pro-tobacco lobby back in the day, rather than research.
The few examples of research driven from the skeptic PoV (eg: urban heat skewing, etc) have landed on the side of the AGW consensus.
If anything the current consensus on the scientific front lines is that the alarmism is understated, and the real orthodoxy is astroturfed denial of the facts.
The global fossil industry is worth around $11 trillion a year. It supports some of the worst regimes in the world.
Of course they're going to try to FUD away the science, with the usual copy-paste narratives about how it's really scientists and academics who are corrupt.
It's all about money, power, and entitlement. Not about truth or responsibility.
But no amount of PR nonsense, astroturfing, and false accusation is going to make the slightest difference to climate reality.
Hah! What do you call the cap and trade group? The whole trillion dollar "carbon credit market" is a farce built to profit from climate change catastrophism.
You are mistaking the beneficiaries here. Carbon credit scheme is indeed a greenwashing scam and it is pushed by the oil and gas (plus adjacent) industries. It is plainly obvious that shuffling emissions between jurisdictions does jack shit against reducing the actual real amount of emissions to the atmosphere. Basically the main proponents of the carbon credit fraud are the same people financially motivated to reject long term climate change consequences (aka anti-"catastrophists" in your lingo).
If cap-and-trade held the same levels forever you would be correct. But all of the cap-and-trade systems I am aware of have a built-in lowering of the cap over time. So they start out doing nothing/very little, then ramp up to meaningful reductions over time.
The idea being both to make it easy to get people to agree today (the reductions are tomorrow's problem), and to allow time (and foresight) for industry to adapt to where things are going.
Small change compared to global fossil fuels. Energy (which is still mostly fossil fuels) is 10% of the world GDP.
Climate-change denial is just like tobacco-cancer denial. It's the same banal "I win, you all lose" mechanism. Enormous resources are available (along with the useful idiots) to propagate falsehoods.
>> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
Nonsense. It is actually quite unlike climate science, where the consensus of catastrophe and the evidence for it are both overwhelming. Dissenters are listened to only to the extent they can provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which they so far cannot.
The problem is that the top researchers in the field have spent their lives devoted to amyloid beta. They may well have helped direct hundreds of millions in grants to this line of research.
The idea that they have blocked the treatment of Alzheimer's rather than helping it, is very, very painful. This is perfect for creating cognitive dissonance.
And so, no matter what the evidence, they remain committed to the conclusion.
As a result, the latest Alzheimer's drug to enter stage 3 FDA trials is Trontinemab. (It is currently in stage 3.) It targets the amyloid target.
A relative drop in the bucket is going to, say, the infection hypothesis. This despite the fact that the only intervention that has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's, is the shingles vaccine.
This is my personal pet peeve as well. Like, I accept maybe everything shouldn't be offered to everyone, but maybe just gate keep it behind credit card( but I know that is a market penetration no no ). I feel like such a waste of power ( electrical and the potential we might be missing out on ).
I'm a prof. When I have a student with special needs in my class, the administration tells me ahead of time. I make the necessary allowances - and those differ from case to case, anyway: whether it's extra time in exams, or someone who is deaf, or someone who is blind, or whatever.
When it happens, I make the necessary allowances. When I don't, then...I don't.
The obsession that everything has to be 100% accessible, for every kind of disability, all of the time? That's just nuts, not to mention a complete waste of resources.
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