What's the difference between "reverse engineering" and speculation in this case? It's widely debated whether any device intentionally caused these symptoms. The article doesn't shed any light on this.
I guess I assumed reverse engineering was understood to mean explaining how a phenomenon actually occurred. They've recreated a similar outcome, but haven't given any evidence that it's related to what happened in Cuba.
If I look at a hole in the wall and recreate it by pounding my fist through the wall to create another hole, did I reverse engineer the first hole? Or did I just reproduce the effect?
This overlooks many changes that have occurred in the recent decades, such as the restructuring of the PLA (including their decoupling from state business), the development of the socialist market economy, and the further development of the rank and file organization of the party. All of these give structure and order where they didn't exist before. The leadership roles in the party have never been less significant within Chinese internal politics, as the collective leadership has been strengthening for the last three decades.
I really don't know where to start with this. The short answer is no.
The long answer is Stalin's supporters said the exact same things. And it's not a surprise -- Xi is borrowing a lot from Stalin's centralization playbook, including "restructuring" the PLA (i.e., purging generals who weren't loyal to him personally and ensuring he has a Party loyalist on every ship) and developing the rank and file (to replace the Party leaders he purged in "corruption scandals"). However, this time around, those of us outside the system smells the b.s. a mile away.
China would be wise to remember that Stalin came thisclose to losing WWII because of these changes. Purging military leaders may make them loyal to you, but it doesn't make them good at their actual jobs.
I think we must have different understandings of what causes power struggles within leadership. The comparison to the 1953-1956 period in the USSR also feels a bit misplaced to me, as although there was a minor power struggle during that period, it didn’t have broad implications the way the death of Mao did. (I also don’t agree that the structure of the CPC is all that similar to the structure of the CPSU during Stalin’s leadership, but that’s not of much relevance in my mind.)
RE: the PLA and the party membership, I was referring to changes that mostly took place during the 1990s, which had much broader implications on the locations of structural power within the PRC than anything that’s been done in the last decade.
Calling what led to tens of executions, had an amnestia releasing 1.2 million criminals amongst the public and had top brass spending days in meetings with emergency support being flown in, minor is an understatement
The centralized, unitary structure of the Chinese government and the CPC make it unlikely that there will be a power struggle — there aren't many levers that would-be power players have to pull to achieve their goals (unlike after the Death of Mao, by contrast). Xi holds three positions of authority in China, and it's unlikely that anyone would immediately replace him in all three, as it's only happened in his case because of the confidence that the membership of the CPC has in his faction.
The next General Secretary of the party and Chairman of the CMC would both be elected by the party's Central Committee. Whoever is selected as General Secretary will most likely also be chosen as President, since this is mostly a ceremonial role. The majority of the Central Committee are in the same faction as Xi is currently, so it seems more likely than not that they'll find people from within their ranks to fill these positions and attempt to strengthen the collective leadership.
I really like Vivaldi, but at this point it’s not performant enough for me to use it on all devices. On a new MacBook Air, the UI visibly lags at times, and when doing video calls it’s unusably slow. I’m looking forward to future versions where this is hopefully improved, although on a stronger machine it’s probably fine.
What makes you think the setting is unrealistic? And why is it an issue that the housing looks pleasant? I’m sure it won’t look exactly like, but for the types of customers that are in the market for consistent 1.5 MWe at $0.06/KWh (their target), a decent-looking exterior and an ability to be placed in remote settings seem like desirable product features.
> What makes you think the setting is unrealistic?
No one in their right mind builds a structure containing a nuclear facility right next to a fully grown tree, for example. If the tree is a spruce, for example, it'd likely be a shallow root tree, meaning not only would the roots penetrate the foundation, it'd also be prone to windthrow - a serious security risk considering the building is housing a nuclear facility.
There's also no security measures to be seen in any of the renderings (apart maybe from the tiny fence right next to the fully-developed road). Doesn't spark much confidence in security against proliferation concerns.
> And why is it an issue that the housing looks pleasant?
The issue isn't what the housing looks like. The issue is that it's mentioned at all given the current stage of development.
Just to clarify: the company has been around for 8 years and isn't licensed to even produce prototype reactors yet. Compare this to some of the competition mentioned in the article:
• Elysium Industries (just as small, ~6 years old) [0] features a CAD rendering of their reactor design front and centre
• HolosGen [1] features a detailed CAD rendering of their reactor design on the landing page and includes tons of reference material
• NuGen, founded in 2006 [2] - which is basically a two-person operation with an office in what looks like an apartment building in a residential area [3] - features a CAD rendering of their reactor on their homepage, plus related patents
• XEnergy [4], founded in 2009 and a little bigger, features CAD renderings of both the reactor design and the fuel cells on their landing page
General Atomics - another competitor mentioned in the article - is too big and thus not a fair comparison, which is why I left them out.
I hope you start to notice a pattern here. No matter how small and unimpressive these companies might seem at first glance, all of them focus on the actual technology behind their product and that's what they put at the centre of their presentation.
Oklo, OTOH, doesn't do any of that. I understand that they're in "stealth mode" or whatever, but if you do a CNBC interview and the press material you bring consists of a neat house in a boreal forest with a tree right next to the roof of a nuclear facility and no security measures to be seen anywhere, I call BS on that.
Security concerns are handwaved away without even addressing the point (are the reactors that “operate without security forces and have impeccable security records over many decades.” also found in remote locations?), regulatory obstacles and poor economics aren't addressed either, but instead the reactors will be housed in “aesthetically pleasing” structures - as if anyone cares if they are intended to be located in remote locations, fenced away and obviously surrounded by forest or desert...
[3] https://bit.ly/2SI9yVK (Google Street View of the principal office according to the latest business report filed with the North Carolina Secretary of State)
Perhaps more notable than the headline is the more rapid decline in support for capitalism. Presumably, this is related to the 60-80% of people who have expressed disapproval of Congress in recent years and the widely written-about erosion of faith in public institutions. One can only speculate what this will lead to in the long-run, but if it translates into meaningful political action, it could get much better or worse soon.
Isn't that really a pattern that the runtime adopts (i.e. not the language itself)? For ES, the libraries are dependent on the runtime environment; for browsers, there are the web APIs, and for Node, there's npm. I'm not sure how you could have anything more standard given the nature of things.
This might be just a few levels of people talking past each other, but just in case:
Yes, the full "standard libarary" you can expect to be present on any given JS VM may vary, but there's no plausible reason that e.g. at() should not work on almost any conceivable platform.
They're making a comment on the HN/general paranoia around Huawei in the face of the actual privacy concerns regarding the US government. Does someone need to be a Chinese agent to find this paranoid behavior objectionable?
The us intelligence service probably does not have as good relations to Huawei as it has to Ericsson.
The original Huawei response to allegations was to open themselves up to external audits and encourage other suppliers to do the same. Of course that didn’t help them.
Huawei today is banned from providing network services in denmark.
This particular whistle blower is not alleging that the NSA or any US controlled entity compromised Ericsson equipment, rather that the US and Danish intelligence agencies collaborated but that collaboration ended up being used against Danish interests.
That’s orthogonal to whether using Huawei equipment is also against Danish interests.
But clearly it's never the equipment that's a problem (who seriously believes this can't be observed or worked around with simple isolation/reverse engineering/relocation of factory/firewalling?) but the elected officials collaborating with the americans.
When your telco buys Huawei, it's not to give an entry door to Chinese security services. It's because it's the best at that price point. If they can explain exactly how Huawei is supposed to backdoor their commercial partners, then fine.
Ironically I have a Huawei phone, without Google services, and after the initial withdrawal phase that was painful, I now feel better knowing Google isn't tracking me and maybe Huawei is. The simple fact is my government would never willingly give them the keys, while they do with little hesitation when the fat burgers come and ask.
Without knowing the specifics. I think one of the issues is that when NSA hooks itself into say a network router, it leaves trace behind (ie. an altered configuration) that can be spotted by the network engineers that maintain that equipment.
I would have guessed they would be a bit more sophisticated than that, perhaps flashing a new "evil" firmware that would look to be perfectly normal and unchanged to those without the correct key.
Objecting to abuses of power by a super power is totally reasonable. Using it as a reason to say "oh, but this other super power totally wouldn't do that" is at best naive and at worst shilling. Looking at gp's comment history I believe they are just a regular Chinese citizen, and not a paid astroturfer - but I do understand how someone might suspect the latter from seeing just this one comment.
> Using it as a reason to say "oh, but this other super power totally wouldn't do that" is at best naive and at worst shilling.
That’s not what they said though. They made an argument that it’s against the interests of Huawei to engage in spying because they would be caught and it would harm their international reputation, in juxtaposition to the confirmed fact that the NSA is engaging in international spying via non-Huawei devices.
The idea that those who aren’t dogmatically opposed to anything and everything Chinese might be plants is insulting. Am I a paid American astroturfer because I work for a US software company? After all, it’s public record that the DOD has thousands of paid social media astroturfers. How is this productive discourse unless your goal is to foment antagonism between our countries?
I don't think that's really true; in the original WWW proposal[1], Tim Berners-Lee specifically talks about using the web to build applications and he considered hypermedia applications to be only a matter of time and resources (about which he was correct).
> Tim Berners-Lee specifically talks about using the web to build applications
And those applicatons are, and I quote:
=== start quote ===
Specific Applications
The following are three examples of specific places in which the proposed system would be immediately useful. There are many others.
Development Project Documentation.
The Remote procedure Call project has a skeleton description using Enquire. Although limited, it is very useful for recording who did what, where they are, what documents exist, etc. Also, one can keep track of users, and can easily append any extra little bits of information which come to hand and have nowhere else to be put. Cross-links to other projects, and to databases which contain information on people and documents would be very useful, and save duplication of information.
Document retrieval.
The CERNDOC system provides the mechanics of storing and printing documents. A linked system would allow one to browse through concepts, documents, systems and authors, also allowing references between documents to be stored. (Once a document had been found, the existing machinery could be invoked to print it or display it).
The "Personal Skills Inventory".
Personal skills and experience are just the sort of thing which need hypertext flexibility. People can be linked to projects they have worked on, which in turn can be linked to particular machines, programming languages, etc.
=== end quote ===
The web, even in Tim Berners-Lee's vision, is strictly about documents.
In comparison, by 1989 France's Minitel had over three million installed terminals with over 6000 different services [1]. Many of them (mail-order, games, ticket purchases etc.) cannot be expressed in a document-centric system. But even then (and I'm pretty sure Tim-Berners Lee had been aware of Minitel), the web was presented as a system for viewing and sharing documents, and the job of applications was left to applications.
It depends on your level of reductionism; if you believe in Unix-style "everything is a file" then "everything is a document, including the applications that edit other documents" isn't a massive conceptual leap.
literally describes web applications as handling documents and only documents. Bases HTML on SGML, which is literally a language to describe documents, and only documents. Calls the system, a ypertext system. Lists exclusively text systems as systems one might connect to.
In the conclusion writes (emphasis mine): "We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards."
HN in 2021:
no-no-no, that's reductionism, what he really meant was full-featured applications, it's not "a massive conceptual leap"
====
Edit.
Time Berners-Lee in an interview [1]:
"It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people — students working with me, contributing to the project, for example — to be able to come in and link in their ideas, so that we wouldn’t lose it all if we didn’t debrief them before they left. Really, it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together. "
You sound like a stereotypical school teacher discussing literature. "What did the author mean, when he wrote the doo was red? Let's look at the evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282030 Ah, yes, definitely fully-featured applications"
This is just playing a game with semantics; the form, canvas, dialog, and keygen elements are also first class. Nobody is saying that the web isn't primarily documents.
