This is pretty obviously false? I get downvoted quite frequently on HN for posting comments that go against what people typically think. For instance, I find it quite difficult to discuss the productivity gains of AI because any comment I make saying that AI makes me more productive immediately gets downvotes. I am not making inflammatory comments - my comments with a similar tone about other things that boost my productivity, like Rust or whatever, never get downvoted.
I'm taking a moment to recognize once more the work that user @atdrummond (Alex Thomas Drummond) did for a couple years to help others here. I did not know him, don’t think I ever interacted with him, and I did not benefit from his generosity, but I admired his kindness. Just beautiful.
Distribution has always been monetized. What margin did a retailer take for putting your boxed software on the shelf? How about that magazine ad? Google search? And so on. Get over the idea that a platform should give you their distribution for free.
The problem comes when there is no way for you to own the distribution, pay nothing to the platform, and still be able to build on top of it. That’s the closed portion we should rally (legislate?) against.
There is an argument, similar to mine on distribution, that there is no inherent right that a platform should be open. That the extra utility that comes from being open should make the platform more competitive in the market vs. closed platforms.
The challenge is that with dominant platforms they are monopolistic. There is no chance for competitive forces to reward openness.
These two parts of the debate are often conflated, which hides what is truly troubling: dominant platforms controlling both distribution and access.
fun fact, part of the reason this botnet exists is because europe required the ability to install security updates unattended that you cannot disable and they compromised one of the servers that had the capability to push these updates compromising hundreds of thousands of routers.
There's an interactive story that has elements of this[0]. Many of the simpler objects don't have much capacity to think or feel on their own, but the corru equivalent of elevators are fully sentient beings capable of conversation and problem solving, and they're just kind of built to be quite satisfied helping move people around. Corru computers are capable of hosting entire communities of distinct intelligences, each program sentient and (mostly) dedicated to its role. Not all of them can be chatted up, the authorization/access control program understandably isn't very chatty, but it is an intelligent being.
It's a pretty enjoyable experience, and all of the graphics are ordinary HTML elements with 3D CSS transformations, which makes it super hackable and fun to crack open in an inspector.
All that to say, if the best chairs required intelligence, it'd be in everyone's best interest to make that intelligence real thrilled about ass.
I was thinking of the movie "The Beach" when I wrote that. As I remember, hollywood execs decided the idyllic location (a remote Thai beach) wasn't idyllic enough, and bulldozed large sections of it to improve it
A lot of BBSes especially those that had FidoNet or similar distributed message boards let you download all the message boards as QWK packets and software like Blue Link and others. It was a great feature. Reading/replying to boards offline was a much nicer experience, in addition to the cost savings.
EDIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.
Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using.
Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.
Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.
Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.
It's not specific to iCloud Keychain--it applies to on-device Keychain on iOS devices, too, even if you don't use iCloud. Any developer can store data there with no way for the user to know or see what it's saving, and it's shared among all apps from the same developer. Keychain is quite a misnomer here--it's really "store any (short) data you want on a user's device without them ever being able to see or remove it". It transfers when you restore backups on new devices, too, even if you haven't had the developer's apps installed in the last decade.
This is an issue because if you ever use an app by a company, uninstall all their apps, and then install one of the developer's apps years later, they can tell it's the same iOS profile (even restored on a different device), profile what you do across those apps/installs/decades, and associate any accounts you log in with. Essentially they can put a permanent cookie that you can't even see on your iOS profile that's shared between their apps. If you use iCloud Keychain, they can probably profile you across all your devices regardless of whether you reset one.
Apple has said this isn't intended functionality and they were going to address the issue many years ago in iOS 10.3 by removing Keychain data when the last app from a developer was uninstalled [1], but they got cold feet. If I recall correctly, the reason was that some app developers were relying on this unintended functionality to ensure free trials couldn't be used more than once. Apple was going to introduce a service that could store only 2 bits of data to enable that use case and then revisit Keychain deletion when the last app from a developer is uninstalled, but it appears they haven't.
AKA “God did it” with a sciencey sounding name. An answer which explains nothing, predicts nothing, satisfies no curiosity, and closes the book on any further questions.
Have you ever walked into a room and found a vampire?
No, not the sexy kind, but a foul creature with bony limbs and ashen skin? The kind that snarls as you enter, like a beast about to pounce? The kind that roots you to the spot with its sunken, hypnotic eyes, rendering you unable to flee as you watch the hideous thing uncoil from the shadows? Has your heart started racing though your legs refuse to? Have you felt time slow as the creature crosses the room in the darkness of a blink?
Have you shuddered with fear when it places one clawed hand atop your head and another under your chin so it can tilt you, exposing your neck? Have you squirmed as its rough, dry tongue slides down your cheek, over your jaw, to your throat, in a slithering search that's seeking your artery? Have you felt its hot breath release in a hiss against your skin when it probes your pulse—the flow that leads to your brain? Has its tongue rested there, throbbing slightly as if savoring the moment? Have you then experienced a sinking, sucking blackness as you discover that not all vampires feed on blood—some feed on memories?
Well, have you?
Maybe not. But let me rephrase the question:
Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly forgotten why you came in?
It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.
Fiber cable can actually be a very good sensor. Some light gets reflected back from the most minute bends of the cable. By sensing reflections and comparing them with previous reflections you can see whether the cable has experienced any new bends. By timing the arrival of reflections you can calculate exactly where the new bends are. By sensing the intensity of reflections you can calculate how sharp the bend is.
And this is not a research project anymore. Well, the fiber the article talks about is a research project, but there is a company called luna innovations that sells production fiber sensors that operate in commercial environments. There are underground fibers that sense whether someone steps in a restricted area. There are fibers stuck to pipelines that sense whether someone is trying to drill a hole in the pipeline to steal some oil (or any other vibrations or ruptures). There are fibers glued to the undersides of bridges that sense whether the bridge vibrates and bends too much.
It is a very useful sensor, because you can essentially get sensing along a large area without paying for multiple sensors and trying to figure out how you are going to power them, how they are going to communicate back, etc.
The electronics for extracting data from the fiber are complex but they do not have to be out in the wild in the area being sensed, they can be safely housed at one end of the fiber.
Three decades of experience talking here: If you don't see a vendor like Microsoft using a GUI framework for at least 50% of their new applications, then you've made a terrible mistake in adopting it yourself.
Microsoft uses Google's framework for their own applications: Electron.
Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft, a nearly 3 trillion dollar company, uses the framework of a competitor for their own desktop applications.
Teams: Electron.
Visual Studio Code: Electron.
Azure Data Studio: Electron.
Now, let's make a similar list for Microsoft MAUI apps!
I think the 80386's final design benefitted tremendously from the Motorola 68000, then the m68020. Had Motorola not released a proper 32 bit CPU without compromises, it could be argued that Intel would've had yet another stop-gap after the 80286, which itself wasn't intended to be a proper successor to the 8086/8088.
As it is, the 80386 came with a number of compromises. For instance, there was no cache at all beyond a 16 byte instruction prefetch queue, whereas the m68020 had 256 bytes of instruction cache. There were no atomic instructions (LOCK wasn't useful for this), which is why many modern OSes support the 80486 but not the 80386. The fact that compatibility with the 8086 required real mode or VM86 meant that it took quite a long time before software started taking advantage of the 80386's new features.
It was an important chip, but it showed us early signs of what we've come to expect from Intel: attempts to create other markets at the expense of, or with the express desire to not compete with, the x86 (the iAPX 432 then, the Itanic twenty years later), the slapdash addition of "features", such as the additions to the 80286, which then were required to be included forevermore as legacy support, the rushing-to-catch-up when other vendors had features that everyone wanted (real, flat 32 bit support then, 64 bit support twenty years later).
Yeah. The "day job" has always been nothing more than a means to
better ends. Everything worthwhile, exciting, and satisfying I've
achieved in life was in the gaps between doing something I could use
my time better for. Like Twain said - "don't let schooling get in the
way of your education", similarly I think ones "work" happens despite
employment, rarely through it. In this way "capitalism" is a horrible
waste of human capital. Imagine what Ludgate might have achieved if
not counting penny corns. I hope for a world for children who'll get a
UBI, and space in life to develop their true selves.
Worth pointing out that Reddit voluntarily doxxed at least one of its commenters to this plaintiff — when no court order required it to do so. This Ars writeup neglects to mention this, and leaves the implication that Reddit consistently defended its users' anonymous speech in this dispute: it did not.
- "However, Reddit decided to share information about “ben125125”, while protecting the other users. As shown above, “ben125125” responded to a thread about piracy warnings and specifically mentioned RCN. That wasn’t as obvious in the other comments and Reddit feels that disclosing their identities goes too far."
edit: The linked court order also mentions this (page 3, lines 6–7)
“Copt” means Egyptian and was used by the Turkish decedents ruling class to refer to Egyptians regardless of religion.
So all Egyptians are Copts. Some Copts are Christian
The church, sometimes referred to as the Coptic church literally meant “the Egyptian church” and played a key role and maybe to this day, for example with a bishop sent to Ethiopia.
As for “who think of themselves as a descendant of those mummies?” Pretty much all Egyptians do, the national soccer team is often referred to in Africa as “the pharaohs”. Of course some Arabs Turks Greeks Armenians British and French stayed over the 1000s of years but given the population was already well established over confined space(3% of Egypt is populated, mainly around the Nile and coast) the influx couldn’t overtake the indigenous population.
This is not just some fantasy / wishful thinking either. If you observe farming habits, certain traditions, specific tools, fishing, sailing etc, you can see a very long and continuous way of being. It is called “maat”
Some studies concluded 98% genetic makeup overlap between the ancient and modern Egyptians. There is such a thing as “Egyptian ethnic group”. Travel through the streets and you will see the resemblance. TV shows? Not so much.
With that said, the Egyptian constitution of 1920s declared “the Egyptian is anyone who wishes to declare themselves Egyptian”.
If you make the bottom of the pile accessible in some manner (like with a door), it's more efficient to withdraw the grain from that point due to gravity.
The Great Pyramids are around the 50° mark, where modern wheat's angle of repose is roughly half that (27°). That's not to say a pyramid-like structure couldn't be used to store wheat—just that the shape of these particular pyramids don't directly mimic the free-standing angle that a wheat mound would form.
Opening this and then searching for "\.db$" reveals all of the processes that are (probably) using SQLite, which is fun for finding things you can poke around in.
Throwaway because it could be easy to identify my position from my normal account name.
Carmack is many thing, engineering genius above them. However, he would frequently wade into areas where he had no experience, demand others do what he said, ignore evidence he was wrong, bully people, and disparage entire teams who were doing good, and in some cases legally required, work. When data proved his idea was wrong, he would say words to the effect of "I don't care, because I still believe I'm right from an ideological background". He would devalue people, there expertise, there experience, and there thoughts because "I'm John Carmack". Truthfully, I have never worked with someone before who was somehow so politely toxic to a workplace.
Carmacks work in VR was absolutely invaluable from a technical standpoint, but VR now is as successful as it is in spite of his influence, not because of it. When I hear people say "If only Meta would let Carmack do what he wants we'd see his ideal VR experience and it would be amazing". You already saw it. It was Oculus Go, and by every metric is was a commercial, financial, and technical, disaster.
We hugely underestimate how processed all of our senses are.
Hearing doesn't listen to pressure waves. It does some very complex real time source separation to distinguish between different sound sources.
Then it performs overtone and resonance matching to identify different speakers.
Then it follows up with phoneme recognition to identify words - which somehow identifies phoneme invariants across a wide range of voice types, including kids, male/female, local/foreign and social register(class)/accent.
Then it recognises emotional cues from intonation, which again are invariant across a huge range of sources.
And then finally its labels all of that as linguistic metadata, converts the phonemes into words, and parses the word combinations.
It's not until you try to listen to a foreign language that you hear the almost unprocessed audio for what it is. And even that still has elements of accent and intonation recognition.
My adoptive father was an LEO who spent most of his 40+ year long career between the Bay Area and Alabama. He had plenty of stories to tell about the Moonies. He spent 10 years as basically the right hand man and enforcer for the police chief in a very well know southern city. He would literally run folks out of town on the request of the chief and/or the mayor. Sometimes he'd use violence and other times he'd use intel.
Mostly harmless stuff like running out the Dixie Mafia when they setup up porn shops or illegal gambling dens. He spent 3 years under cover in the KKK and helped ruin their credibility in the Central Alabama area.
And then some questionable stuff like breaking into a Nation of Islam church and spending multiple days camped out in their attic until he was able to take photos of the leader of that church engaging in extra marital affairs with the wives of church members. He used those photos to cause quite a bit of mayhem and violence amongst the church members until the church was no more.
But his most interesting story is when he claims to have discovered (I have never been able to verify this like I have the other stories) that the Moonies from Europe had their passports withheld and then those passports were sent to Korea in order to get their operatives into the country.
I have no idea if that was true, but every single time we saw someone selling a flower somewhere he would share that story.
