Love Spotify myself. They've done what none of the competitors have managed in my opinion.
Good free-tier, amazing premium service and price, an unbelievably large collection of artists and music, strong privacy protection without the need to provide credit card details (for free tier) or mobile phone numbers, in a super-polished and easy to use package, without all the terrible data-collection.
They really have become the kings of music streaming.
You don't have to provide details, ever. I have Spotify Premium. I go to a retailer and use cash to buy a card good for a year's subscription for $100. Then I enter the card into my account. The email address is @mailinator.com in case I ever need to check something, but otherwise they have no clue who I am.
When it expires, if I haven't been paying attention, I live with free-tier for a day or two until I can go buy another card.
It's getting increasingly difficult to trust American-designed chips and systems for me at this point... and I can't help but feeling that people paid way, way too little attention to everything we learned from the NSA and CIA leaks a few years back.
If you don't trust American chips, then what chips do you trust?
We certainly don't have much choice when it comes to choosing chips. It's an incredibly expensive process and only a select few superpowers can successfully maintain semiconductor industries.
I trust anything made by European companies, NXP, Philips, ST, Siemens etc., anything from Japan, South Korea, and most of the Taiwanese and Chinese companies.
Unfortunately, with some rare exception, they're not allowed to make x86-compatible chips, because the U.S. has worked long and hard to forbid the ISA, and everything used so far to implement it, from being standardised and thus kept under an unbelievable weight of patents.
Hopefully the build-up of more European fabs, and realisation that the EU has to make its own chips, will eventually remedy some of this.
What a bizarre pile of mystical euroism. NXP/Phillips sued a university to quash research about the garbage security of their contactless smartcard implementations. I'd rank NXP/Phillips way down at the bottom of the stack with state-owned Chinese semi firms.
The semi industry is really cutthroat. Outside of US giants, Intel, Nvidia, Quallcomm, and recently AMD, who cream the highest margins as their products are basically irreplaceable, the rest of the semi companies (including most EU ones) are just competing for cost (barring the current shortage where they could amp their prices too).
I disagree, an important difference is this: The U.S. has been proven definitely guilty of all accusations of espionage, sabotage, backdoors etc., while there have never been any clear proof presented for the Chinese counterparts -- only accusations, and overwhelmingly from the very country that has committed all the wrongs itself.
Take whatever side you want, but at least keep to the truth.
The whole thing is worth reading, but be sure to read the section “The Irreplaceable Man” if you work anywhere near computer security. Once you understand the tactics used by crypto front companies to keep their employees in the dark, it should be pretty easy to spot such companies from the inside.
Good read, and it hints at just how absolutely nuts the situation is be today with almost everyone in the world having cellphones, tablets, laptops and what else running predominantly American-designed software and hardware.
Haha, yes, you are reading correctly. To clarify: my employer bought the machine for me to have for this purpose. They know how grumpy I get with unsolved mysteries.
Aligned branch and jump targets are just for the sake of maximising instruction cache hit-rate. It will always remain a micro-optimisation and will not make a difference in this and most other cases.
There are reasons to hate Jeff Bezos and the super-rich, but him buying a big boat from a Dutch company isn't really one of them.
Would you rather he bought the boat from a company in another country? Remember, buying luxury yacths is not the same as taking precious resources out of a country, and he doesn't decide the salaries of the ship builders.
The link posted here on HN doesn’t seem to work, but the anger is about dismantling a national monument bridge that was promised to never be dismantled again (unless, apparently you are quite rich and then you can get the promise broken), not that a Dutch company built it or that it took natural resources out of the Netherlands. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/02/a-bridge-too-far-local...
Do you think the average Rotterdam resident cares nearly as much as the press and online forums would like you to think?
Also, I find it rather suspicious that none of these articles are actually discussing the technical implementation and potential issues facing that. What real risk does opening the bridge present?
I live here, people are upset and talking about it. The article I linked to also covers what you’re asking about, going over the perspective of the citizens concerned with breaking the promise as well as the perspective of the mayor and companies who believe they can do it safely.
Agreed, it will also be debated by our elected representatives next week.
In the end Dutch people tend to be pragmatic and I suspect it will be dismantled again, but we will see. At the same time, there is a strong sense of societal fairness and that being rich shouldn’t be able to buy you exceptions. In the meantime it is a real discussion that is happening, not anti-billionaire propaganda that no actual citizens care about.
That’s right, jobs matter too and that’s the discussion that’s happening (otherwise they would presumably just keep the promise to not take it back apart).
For what it’s worth, it didn’t go off the previous time without a hitch, it ended up being covered with scaffolding for over a year I believe. That was where the promise to never do it again originally came from.
My guess, informed by nothing other than my own cynicism, is that the Rotterdam city council will use the manufactured outrage to extract more money from Bezos to dismantle that bridge.
All this is does is hurt the local shipyard. Do you think the next buyer of a super yacht is going to build there? Or even smaller yachts now that there's a political limit on the size of ship they can sell.
Also throwing eggs at the boat just makes work for some poor souls who will have to clean it. The boat is designed to withstand the ocean, it can get wet and be washed.
This whole thing is so silly, I'm compelled yet embarrassed to comment.
What I'm getting at is that Jeff Bezos didn't plan for the bridge to be dismantled, he was probably not even aware of it, and him buying a big boat is besides Amazon's exploitation of workers, tax-avoidance and sucking money out of countries.
>And given that the alternative involves killing people it's probably the best path we have
This argument pretends sanctions don't kill people. Limiting trade with a country makes it difficult for people in that country to get access to affordable drugs, killing many people with treatable diseases. We have seen this in Iran, where people with diabetes struggle to get insulin, haemophiliacs die unable to find necessary medication, and treatable cancers kill victims of all ages.
Further, lowering the wealth of a nation will make it harder for the poor to get the basic necessities like food and shelter.
Targeted sanctions may work differently, but they're far less proven than you claim.
> Targeted sanctions have historically been shown to work.
Do you mind providing an example or two, with a sentence about how they “worked?” I ask because I can’t think of any sanction that had any result besides further impoverishing the people while the leader stayed in power.
But I am a layman and I would be happy to be proven wrong.
The alternative is minding your own goddamn business if you’re not willing to commit to the necessary coercive steps.
Sanctions targeted at an individual are useless when they live in an unfriendly country. And sanctioning the whole country results in NK. Great, you’ve sent millions of people back to medieval life and dear leader still gets to hang out with Dennis Rodman when he wants. Very effective.
The path that computing is on is "You will buy a screen, pay monthly for internet access, and then pay monthly to access a cloud service where you access all your SaaS applications.
Good free-tier, amazing premium service and price, an unbelievably large collection of artists and music, strong privacy protection without the need to provide credit card details (for free tier) or mobile phone numbers, in a super-polished and easy to use package, without all the terrible data-collection.
They really have become the kings of music streaming.