> “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,”
This is "computer says no (not a citizen)". Which is horrifying
They've just created an app to justify what they were already doing right? And the argument will be "well it's a super complex app run by a very clever company so it can't be wrong"?
It feels like banning advertising for gambling would be a sweet spot between harm reduction and maintaining individual liberty.
Sports gambling ads have ruined sports media. State lottery ads are even worse. The government should not spend money to encourage its own citizens to partake in harmful activities.
But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity [licensed gambling], you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes.
Do I misunderstand, or is this just actually incredible?
While it is technically feasible, it is not a good idea to try and find a technical solution to a people/organisation problem.
Do not accept the premise of assholes.
I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. Maybe under some organisation similar to NL Labs.
--- edit ---
Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route.
I really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer. I really cannot stand seeing websites in a small screen without the ability to quickly open 4 browser windows with 4 tabs each for different combinations of dates, for example.
Historically, traditional matte screen finishes exhibited poor optical qualities by scattering ambient light, which tended to wash out colors. This scattering process also affected the light from individual pixels, causing it to refract into neighboring pixels.
This reduced overall image quality and caused pixel-fine details, such as small text, to appear smeary on high-density LCDs. In contrast, well-designed glossy displays provide a superior visual experience by minimizing internal refraction and reflecting ambient light at high angles, which reduces display pollution. Consequently, glossy screens often appear much brighter, blacks appear blacker without being washed out, colors show a higher dynamic range, and small details remain crisper. High-quality glass glossy displays are often easy to use even in full daylight, and reflections are manageable because they are full optical reflections with correct depth, allowing the user to focus on the screen content.
Apple's "nano texture" matte screens were engineered to solve the specific optical problems of traditional matte finishes, the washed-out colors and smeary details. But they cost more to make. The glossy option is still available, and still good.
It's classic Apple to spend over a decade insisting that that glossy screens were the best option, and then to eventually roll out a matte screen as a "premium" feature with a bunch of marketing around it.
My very similar pet peeve is about websites that use `onclick` handlers and similar to implement navigation. Just use a damn anchor tag, which gets you correct link behavior for free:
* works with middle click for new tab
* integrates with accessibility devices
* works with right click + open in new window or similar options
* etc. etc. etc.
If it's notionally navigation, don't use javascript soup: use a link.
Piracy is just the excuse. What they're saying is that Amazon will allow a collection of corporations (including Amazon) to decide what you're allowed to do with the hardware they pretended to let you buy.
Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?
If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.
I hope that the actual medical field starts taking note of this.
My wife still has to work 24 hour shifts with no sleep, performing emergency surgeries no matter how long it has been since she slept. During residency only a few years ago she and her co-residents were almost weekly required to do 36 hour shifts (on top of their regular 16 hours per day, 5 day per week schedule) and once even a 48 hour shift when the hospital was short staffed.
Of course I’m sure they won’t. No one cares if doctors are over worked.
So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
These kinds of deals were very much a la mode just prior to the .com crash. Companies would buy advertising, then the websites and ad agencies would buy their services and they'd spend it again on advertising. The end result is immense revenues without profits.
I think the explanation is: When you mutate variables it implicitly creates an ordering dependency - later uses of the variable rely on previous mutations. However, this is an implicit dependency that isn't modeled by the language so reordering won't cause any errors.
With a very basic concrete example:
x = 7
x = x + 3
x = x / 2
Vs
x = 7
x1 = x + 3
x2 = x1 / 2
Reordering the first will have no error, but you'll get the wrong result. The second will produce an error if you try to reorder the statements.
Another way to look at it is that in the first example, the 3rd calculation doesn't have "x" as a dependency but rather "x in the state where addition has already been completed" (i.e. it's 3 different x's that all share the same name). Doing single assignment is just making this explicit.
After a 2 year Clojure stint I find it very hard to explain the clarity that comes with immutability for programmers used to trigger effects with a mutation.
I think it may be one of those things you have to see in order to understand.
As a native french speaker, I feel so uneasy reading source code in french. It feels very very uncanny. I've often wondered if English native speakers feel the same when reading normal source code which is always in English. They probably don't. But how? I've always associated the "other language-ness" to correctness and technicality. It must be so weird to code in your own language. Feels like reading bad pseudo code. It's very nice to be able to map "english" to "technical, correct" and "native language" to "descriptive, approximate, comments, pseudo-code". Having only a single language to work with is like removing a color from the rainbow.
I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”
As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.
Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.
I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
The ICEBlock removal is absurd when you consider Waze has been warning drivers about police locations for... Years? The only difference is which government agency is being monitored. This sets a dangerous precedent for selective enforcement of ToS really
They couldn't answer the question most on my mind: "We’ve reached out to Google to inquire about why a custom ROM created by volunteers is more resistant to industrial phone hacking than the official Pixel OS. We’ll update this article if Google has anything to say."
I think it's really cool they can get AI money from the people who want to pay that, to give away the core for free. I can empathize with feeling their focus will be elsewhere (whatever increases revenue) but I figure AI isn't magic, they need to have the rest of the creative suite work well to, yaknow, synergize
Edit: I'll add that I much prefer purchasing perpetual licenses for software that can work without a cloud component. Opus, Sublime, Mathematica, totally agree that paying for software aligns incentives. But if it is online, it's a SaaS, and they can't very well offer you cloud services forever at a one time cost. (Rsync.net has a deal to prepay ~4 years worth upfront and they'll let you use it for life but it's capped at 1TB)
> Microsoft said that using Azure in this way violated its terms of service and it was “not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians”. Under the terms of the Nimbus deal, Google and Amazon are prohibited from taking such action as it would “discriminate” against the Israeli government. Doing so would incur financial penalties for the companies, as well as legal action for breach of contract.
Insane. Obeying the law or ToS, apparently, is discriminatory when it comes to Israel.
This is such a shame IMO. The Serif suite was great, and I used to try to get every designer I could to dump adobe and switch to serif.
Now that it has switched to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI, I wont be using this or telling other people about it any more. Their priorities have changed. No longer are they trying to to beat adobe at their own game, they are just chasing AI money like everyone else.
I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
This is a deletion.
- they're completely stopping all updates to v2; even image trace won't be coming to it. You might have paid for perpetual access to it 2 months ago, but it has completely stopped. As the world moves on (new chips, new OS features, just general software movement) this will increasingly feel like a second-class experience.
- the new "free" software is a sales funnel into the paid subscription, and will also increasingly have that "second-class" feeling as new pro-only things are added to it. it is also practically guaranteed to feed your work into AI unless you buy pro sometime in the next 5 years
In short, something secure, top class, the "best the company offers" product doesn't exist anymore. What was once there isn't.
To summarize: the ear does not do a Fourier transform, but it does do a time-localized frequency-domain transform akin to wavelets (specifically, intermediate between wavelet and Gabor transforms). It does this because the sounds processed by the ear are often localized in time.
The article also describes a theory that human speech evolved to occupy an unoccupied space in frequency vs. envelope duration space. It makes no explicit connection between that fact and the type of transform the ear does—but one would suspect that the specific characteristics of the human cochlea might be tuned to human speech while still being able to process environmental and animal sounds sufficiently well.
A more complicated hypothesis off the top of my head: the location of human speech in frequency/envelope is a tradeoff between (1) occupying an unfilled niche in sound space; (2) optimal information density taking brain processing speed into account; and (3) evolutionary constraints on physiology of sound production and hearing.
A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to.
My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows.
She hated it and begged for us to get a dedicated Windows laptop for that stuff so she could go back to Linux.
Some of you might suggest that she has me for tech support, which is true, but I can't actually remember the last time she asked me to troubleshoot something for her with her laptop. The occasions that do come to mind are usually hardware failure related.
Obviously the thing about generlizations is that they're never going to fit all individuals uniformly. My wife might be an edge case. But she feels at home using Linux, as it's what she's used to ... and strongly loathed using Windows when it was offered to her.
I feel that kind of way about Mac vs PC as well. I am a lifelong PC user, and also a "power user." I have extremely particular preferences when it comes to my UI and keyboard mappings and fonts and windowing features. When I was forced to use a Mac for work, I honestly considered looking for a different position because it was just that painful for me. Nothing wrong with Mac OS X, a lot of people love it. But I was 10% as productive on it when compared to what I'm used to... and I'm "old dog" enough that it was just too much change to be able to bear and work with.
I used Affinity for several years, so to add some background here:
Serif is the company that originally built this software.
--------
2014–2024
Serif developed the Affinity suite, a collection of three independent desktop apps sold with a one-time payment model:
- Affinity Designer: vector graphic design (Adobe Illustrator equivalent)
- Affinity Photo: digital image editing (Adobe Photoshop equivalent)
- Affinity Publisher: print and layout design (Adobe InDesign equivalent)
They were solid, professional tools without subscriptions like Adobe, a big reason why many designers loved them.
-------
2024
Canva acquired Serif.
-------
2025 (today)
The product has been relaunched. The three apps are now merged into a single app, simply called Affinity, and it follows a freemium model.
From what I’ve tested, you need a Canva account to download and open the app (you can opt out of some telemetry during setup).
The new app has four tabs:
- Vector: formerly Affinity Designer
- Pixel: formerly Affinity Photo
- Layout: formerly Affinity Publisher
- Canva AI: a new, paid AI-powered section
Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/h1S6fcK
Hope can help!
Devastated about this. Good for them for making money on the sale to Canva, but still, this is a sad day. Studio is now freemium, in the future probably more and more features (outside of AI) will be added in the subscription, and you will end up with an app full of disabled features and pop-ups encouraging you to subscribe and unlock the new and shiny thing.
There is absolutely nothing in the world that anyone can say to convince me that this is not the end for Affinity. Every single product that went through this ended up being an ad data gathering subscription pushing unusable app for anything useful.
I have both a V1 and V2 license. V2 is probably now useless considering that it will never get any updates. This marks the death of one of the last popular pay once and use forever apps (in the sense that a V3 with new features will never exist).
As I wrote elsewhere, the US government and economy are now essentially a private equity takeover for a large segment of wealthy business: Squeeze out as much money as possible short term - including by issuing debt againts its assets, slashing and burning any costs regardless of ROI and with no regard for the future, and leave the bankrupt husk for someone else to deal with.
The treatment of fossil fuels and renewables fits: Block the obviously more economical and better long-term solution in order to shovel money toward the entrenched wealthy. That it sabotages the future due to climate change and economic inefficiency doesn't seem to be a significant factor to them.
I forgot, one of the entrenched corporate wealthy told us that climate change isn't a big deal, and we should send money to his and his friends for solutions.
I'm not anti-business; in fact, quite the opposite: These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone.
Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.
Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.
Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.
China, north korea, and russia, all prolific cybercriminal nations with significant state backing of the same, are signatories. This means it's at best meaningless and at worst surrenders power to a regime with partial control by objectively bad actors. Staying out of this was the right move.
Plus it has too many implications for surveillance and security; poor idea in any case.
When countries like North Korea, which depends on cybercrime to fund itself, are signatories, you have to wonder whether this agreement means what its title says.
I like calculator quirks like this. I remember as a kid playing with the number pad and noticing a geometric center of mass in number sequences
┌───┬───┬───┐
│ 7 │ 8 │ 9 │
├───┼───┼───┤
│ 4 │ 5 │ 6 │
├───┼───┼───┤
│ 1 │ 2 │ 3 │
├───┼───┼───┤
│ 0 │ . │ │
└───┴───┴───┘
> It also creates legal regimes to monitor, store and allow cross-border sharing of information without specific data protections. Access Now’s Raman Jit Singh Chima said the convention effectively justifies “cyber authoritarianism at home and transnational repression across borders.”
None of this sounds good for privacy and data protection.
Opting out of the treaty was probably a good choice. Opting out doesn’t preclude the US from cooperating with international cybercrime investigations, but it does avoid more data collection, surveillance, and sharing.
There's an awful lot of negativity here, but as someone who's 55 and has earned a good wage since I was 17, I really wish I had taken investing more seriously from the very beginning. While I knew of compound interest, I really didn't understand it until like a decade ago. If I'd started putting 5% of my money into a target retirement plan from 17, I'd be retired now. As it is I'm not doing badly, but I really wish I'd started earlier.
So I say: Good on you.
Somewhat related: I just got my son set up with a custodial account and put his "kid retirement" plan into it, and let him pick a couple stocks to put some money into, and put the majority of it into target retirement and a few stocks and EFTs, so he can get some ideas of how they perform, make it a little fun with picking things he's into, and also follow ups and downs of the market, all of which I think is good education.
In Microsoft's defense, Azure has always been a complete joke. It's extremely developer unfriendly, buggy and overpriced.
33 minutes from impact to status page for a complete outage is a joke.
I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.
Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world. That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.
Uv is so good. I'm a curmudgeon about adopting new tooling, and tried uv with a lot of skepticism, but it was just better in every way. And even if it wasn't so polished and reliable, the raw speed makes it hard to go back to any other tool.
Uv combined with type hints reaching critical mass in the Python ecosystem, and how solid PyLance is in VSCode, feels so good it has made me consider investing in Python as my primary language for everything. But then I remember that Python is dog slow compared to other languages with comparable ergonomics and first-class support for static typing, and...idk it's a tough sell.
I know the performance meta in Python is to...not use python (bind to C, Rust, JVM) - and you can get pretty far with that (see: uv), but I'd rather spend my limited time building expertise in a language that isn't constantly hemorrhaging resources unless your code secretly calls something written in another language :/
There are so many good language options available today that compete. Python has become dominant in certain domains though, so you might not have a choice - which makes me grateful for these big steps forward in improving the tooling and ecosystem.
This is the result of a ton of research into Crunchyroll's recent subtitle changes that have tanked the service's first-party presentation quality to an all-time low. The article ended up being quite long, so I highly appreciate anyone taking the time to read it in full!
There is nothing I dread more within the general context of software development, broadly, than trying to run other people's Python projects. Nothing. It's shocking that it has been so bad for so long.
I gotta say, I feel pretty vindicated after hearing for years how Python’s tooling was just fine and you should just use virtualenv with pip and how JS must be worse, that when Python devs finally get a taste of npm/cargo/bundler in their ecosystem, they freaking love it. Because yes, npm has its issues but lock files and consistent installs are amazing
It still surprises me how much essential services like public transport are completely reliant on cloud providers, and don't seem to have backups in place.
Here in The Netherlands, almost all trains were first delayed significantly, and then cancelled for a few hours because of this, which had real impact because today is also the day we got to vote for the next parlement (I know some who can't get home in time before the polls close, and they left for work before they opened).
I hadn't paid any attention to rust before uv, but since starting to use uv, I've switched a lot of my performance-sensitive code dev to rust (with interfaces to python). These sorts of improvements really do improve my quality of life significantly.
My hope is that conda goes away completely. I run an ML cluster and we have multi-gigabyte conda directories and researchers who can't reproduce anything because just touching an env breaks the world.
For single-file Python scripts, which 99% of mine seem to be, you can simplify your life immensely by just putting this at the top of the script:
#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.11"
# dependencies = [ "modules", "here" ]
# ///
It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.
Don’t fall for the lie that this is at all about illegal immigration- that is just an excuse for what has become state sponsored KKK style racial terrorism operating completely outside the law. Videos all over the Internet show them violently attacking and terrorizing hispanic looking people with no concern for if they are citizens or not. At the Wilder raid in Idaho they were shooting children with rubber bullets, and zip tying them to watch as they brutally beat their (mostly US citizen) parents in front of them. At the same time you have the administration actively encouraging white immigration from South Africa, while firing all federal immigration judges that were still willing to hear valid asylum claims from brown skinned people.
I want my country, freedom, and civil rights back.
The absolutely outrageous thing is that apparently they are instructed to ignore all other evidence of citizenship if that app says someone is not a citizen. So even if you have your birth certificate ready, doesn't matter.
This is completely lawless.
From the article:
> He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien.
CSAM apparently also means Customer Success Account Manager for those who might have gotten startled by this message like me.
Some exec at Microsoft told the Azure guys to ape everything Amazon does and they took it literally.
Good thing HN is hosted on a couple servers in a basement. Much more reliable than cloud, it seems!
I noticed that Starbucks mobile ordering was down and thought “welp, I guess I’ll order a bagel and coffee on Grubhub”, then GrubHub was down. My next stop was HN to find the common denominator, and y’all did not disappoint.
This is a game of cat and mouse -- to the extent that LLMs really give consumers an advantage here (and I'm a bit skeptical that they truly do) companies would eventually learn how to game this to their advantage, just like they ruined online reviews. I would even wager that if you told a teenager right now that online reviews used to be amazing and deeply accurate, they would disbelieve you and just assume you were naive. That's how far the pendulum has swung.
>Under the terms of the deal, the mechanism works like this:
> If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
This sounds like warrant canaries but worse. At least with warrant canaries you argue that you can't compel speech, but in this case it's pretty clear to any judge that such payments constitute disclosure or violation of gag order, because you're taking a specific action that results in the target knowing the request was made.
The method is buried about 60% through the article, but it's interesting. It seems incredibly risky for the cloud companies to do this. Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?
Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.
According to the documents, the payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred” and correspond to the telephone dialing code of the foreign country, amounting to sums between 1,000 and 9,999 shekels.
If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.
If, for example, the companies receive a request for Israeli data from authorities in Italy, where the dialing code is +39, they must send 3,900 shekels.
If the companies conclude the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, there is a backstop: the companies must pay 100,000 shekels ($30,000) to the Israeli government.
For those who care at the first setup screen instead of answering any of the questions press Shift + F10
CMD will open
Type (no quotes) “net user Prefferedusername /add” (replacing Prefferedusername with the user name you wish to use) and press enter.
Next type “net localgroup administrators Prefferedusername /add” and press enter.
Next type “ net user Prefferedusername/active:yes” and press enter.
Next type “net user Prefferedusername /expires:never” and press enter.
Next type “net user administrator /active:no” and press enter.
Next type “net user defaultUser0 /delete” (this is case sensitive make sure the "U" is capitalized) and press enter.
Next type "regedit" and press enter.
This opens registry editor navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE"
Delete DefaultAccountAction, DefaultAccountSAMName, and DefaultAccountSID
Right click on LaunchUserOOBE and rename it to SkipMachineOOBE and make sure the value is set to 1.
Close registry editor and type shutdown /r /t 0
Answer: bank/financial apps, enterprise apps, government apps and copyrighted media (music, video, games, books, ...).
Those are the players that demand excessive control over end-user devices, and thus the ultimate driver behind the problem we're discussing.
It's not that a new mobile platform couldn't possibly succeed. It's an open platform that cannot, because aforementioned players don't want it, and without them, mobile devices lose 90%+ of their usefulness, dooming them to become mere gadgets instead of (crappy, toylike) tools for everyday use.
The direct cost is the easy part. The more insidious part is that you're now cultivating a growing staff of technologists whose careers depend on doing things the AWS way, getting AWS certified to ensure they build your systems the AWS Well Architected Way instead of thinking themselves, and can upsell you on AWS lock-in solutions using AWS provided soundbites and sales arguments.
("Shall we make the app very resilient to failure? Yes running on multiple regions makes the AWS bill bigger but you'll get much fewer outages, look at all this technobabble that proves it")
And of course AWS lock-in services are priced to look cheaper compared to their overpricing of standard stuff[1] - if you just spend the engineering effort and IaC coding effort to move onto them, this "savings" can be put to more AWS cloud engineering effort which again makes your cloud eng org bigger and more important.
[1] (For example implementing your app off containers to Lambda, or the db off PostgreSQL to DynamoDB etc)
I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive. The use cases for setting up your system or service entirely in AWS are more rare than people seem to realise. Maybe I'm just the old man screaming at cloud (no pun intended) but when did people forget how to run a baremetal server ?
> We have 730+ days with 99.993% measured availability and we also escaped AWS region wide downtime that happened a week ago.
This is a very nice brag. Given they are using their ddos protection ingress via CloudFlare there is that dependancy, but in that case I can 100% agree than DNS and ingress can absolutely be a full time job. Running some microservices and a database absolutely is not. If your teams are constantly monitoring and adjusting them such as scaling, then the problem is the design. Not the hosting.
Unless you're a small company serving up billions of heavy requests an hour, I would put money on the bet AWS is overcharging you.
I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes:
Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives.
A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily driver for everyone it is certainly the route that needs to be taken.
I'm still unable to use it because is not easy to break away from Android, but is a platform that I think about almost every day, because I do not want to use Android anymore and I'm willing to sacrifice certain aspects to have an open and friendly platform on my hands. And if it is not PostmarketOS then let it be another project.
We need these kind of projects, not kneeling down to a company like Google and begging for Android to be open. Effort needs to be put elsewhere. That's how major projects like Linux, BSDs and open source projects have flourished and taken the world.
As a side note, I personally HATE apps that opens links in an in-app web view (apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc). I really wish Apple could have a system wide preference where it could force in-app web views to open in the browser.
The solution is to run Linux. KDE is a good desktop environment: https://kde.org/
90% of Windows games run on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736925
LibreOffice is an okay office suite (good enough for my purposes): https://www.libreoffice.org/
GIMP is a good image editor: https://www.gimp.org/
VLC is a good media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Back in the 2007 or when it came out in Sweden I bought the iPhone and started developing for it. This was cool, new and exciting and it was fine as long as my company was paying the $100 fee every year. But then I switched jobs and worked at a company which produced mostly open source code. Suddenly I would have to pay $100 every year just to be able to put my own software on the phone ...
This is why I switched to Android, just for Google now to pull the rug from under my feet again ...
Suffered a stroke in 2004 (migrainous infarction). Became half blind. Rested for a good year. Became a photographer for 8 years, then switched back again to software development. From then on, the limits were: WFH only, limit stress, run away from job if things go bad again. Nap if brain feels exhausted. Sleep, more and better. 20 years later (53yo), I'd say I'm doing great! Also fitness helps remind me to take care of the body...
This is amazing. My entire web browser session state for every private and personal website I sign onto every day will be used for training data. It's great! I love this. This is exactly the direction humans should be going in to not self-destruct. The future is looking bright, while the light in our brains dims to eventual darkness. Slowly. Tragically. And for what purpose exactly. So cool.
> During the TLS handshake, the client tells the server which treeheads it has.
I don’t love the idea of giving every server I connect to via TLS the ability to fingerprint me by how recently (or not) I’ve fetched MTC treeheads. Even worse if this is in client hello, where anyone on the network path can view it either per connection or for my DoH requests to bootstrap encrypted client hello.
I'm struck with how long the history of Apple's earliest iPhone has shaped and produced long-term damage to the concept of digital ownership. Apple originally didn't allow anybody but Apple to create software for the 1st gen iPhone, and only later was forced "opening" it my market forces.
People who realized they actually owned the thing they bought wanted to do what they wanted, which required circumventing Apple's control or "jailbreaking". This differentiator stimulated Google to "allow" installing on Android without "jailbreaking" the device aka "sideloading", giving the illusion of the kind of freedom that was never in question on normal computers.
It is interesting though how this same conversation doesn't exist in the same way in other areas of computing like video game consoles or other embedded computing devices where the controls against arbitrary applications is even stronger.
The fact that mobile phones aren't yet just a standard type of portable computer with an open-ish harware/driver ecosystem that anybody can just make an OS for (and hence allow anybody to just install what they want) is kind of wild IMHO. Why hasn't the kind of ferver that created Linux driven engineers to fix their phones? Is Android and iOS just good enough to keep us complacent and trapped forever? I can't help but think there might be some effect here that's locking us all in similar to how the U.S. healthcare system can't seem to shake for profit insurance.
I'm sometimes surprised at the plethora of cheap handheld gaming systems coming out of China that support either Linux, Android, or sometimes both, and seem to be based on a handful of chipsets. If anybody ever slapped an LTE module and drivers onto one of those things we'd have criminally cheap and powerful, open phone ecosystem.
Nvidia seems to be operating more like a sovereign wealth fund than a traditional business. They have a very-in-demand product, that is not likely to last forever, and is getting their fingers in as many pies as possible with the money and influence while they have it.
Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
gamescope -S integer -F nearest --borderless wine game.exe
I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
mkdir ./game
squashfuse ./game.squashfs ./game
pushd ./game
wine game.exe
popd
sleep 1
umount ./game
rmdir ./game
taskset --cpu-list 1 wine game.exeI always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule.
I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.
Author here. I admit I am rather startled by the tone of many comments here and the accusations of disingenuity. Splitting hairs about the origin of the term "sideload" does not change the fact that those who promote the term tend to do so in order to make it feel deviant and hacker-ish. You don't "sideload" software on your Linux, Windows, or macOS computer: you install it.
You have the right to install whatever you want on your computer, regardless of whether that computer is on your desk or in your pocket. That's a hill I'll die on. I'm dismayed to see that this sentiment is not more widespread in this of all communities.
I think we could set the bar substantially higher. Don't even bother with discussion of sideloading. Talk about bounded transactions and device control.
What is needed is: Once I have purchased a device, the transaction is over. I then have 100% control over that device and the hardware maker, the retailer, and the OS maker have a combined 0% control.
This guarantees I'll never buy a Samsung appliance. If they're this willing to screw with their customers today, they'll do it again tomorrow.
Sadly, I'm including their TVs in this. I have one today, displaying the output of an Apple TV and not directly connected to the Internet because hah, no way, but I'll be shopping around when it comes time to replace it.
Pity. They make nice stuff. Not nice enough that I'm willing to tolerate their anti-customer shenanigans, but otherwise decent quality.
> "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
> "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."
[flagged]
I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence.
ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, helped with wording on the appeals, and yes, helped keep me pushing forward at some of the darkest moments when I was grasping for anything, however small, to help keep the pressure up on the insurance company.
I didn't follow everything it suggested blindly. Definitely decided a few times to make decisions that differed from its advice partially or completely, and I sometimes ran suggested next steps by several close friends/family to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. But the ideas/path ChatGPT suggested, the chasing down different scenarios to rule in/out them, and coaching me through this is what ultimately got movement on our case.
10 days post denial, I was able to get the procedure approved from these efforts.
21 days post denial and 7 days after the decision was reversed, we lucked into a surgery slot that opened up and my child got their life saving surgery. They have recovered and is in the best health of the past 18 months.
This maybe isn't leveling the playing field, at least not entirely. But it gave us a fighting chance on a short timeline and know where to best use our pressure. The hopeful part of me is that many others can use similar techniques to win.
A big part of this IMO is that “money won”, for lack of a better phrase. There is no real concept of selling out anymore. Being shamelessly focused on wealth accumulation seems to be socially acceptable in a way it wasn’t fifty years ago.
Someone will probably say this is because current generations have less financial security, and I’m sure that’s a factor. But I think it’s a cultural shift that is much older and tracks better to the decline of traditional sources of values (community, cultural groups, religion, etc.) and their replacement by the easily understandable dollar. So it becomes harder and harder for a cultural definition of success to not mean financially successful. And being financially successful is difficult if you have deviant, counter cultural ideas (and aren’t interested in monetizing them.)
The American Medical Association owns copyright to all the codes and their descriptions. They have an extremely restrictive and expensive licensing options and they strictly forbid training models with the codes.
This month, the practice was called out (https://www.help.senate.gov/rep/newsroom/press/chair-cassidy...) so the Overton window may be opening.
The AMA (a nonprofit!) clears ~$300M/year revenue from the codes, which is the direct cost passed through to consumers, but the indirect costs are the byzantine nightmare of OP.
having hired an expert in this field, I can tell you they aren't really that sophisticated. I found myself with an absolute mountain of cash after an accident as part of a settlement. My medical insurance won't pay claims until I've exhausted that cash. The claims I had were much higher than even the mountain of cash. The lawyer I hired use a pretty effective strategy: he contacted all of the claims against me and told them we could engage in N-way negotiations amongst all the parties until we came to a settlement so everyone got their nibble of the pie. Or they could get X today, where X was some amount that was a bit less than the rate the industry actually gets paid for those services. They all accepted.
The discounts he negotiated left me with tons of cash & were in excess of the fee he charged me.
The thing is the prices are all made up anyway. The hospital hallucinates prices, so they don’t blink an eye when an llm does the same.
For those curious, the 24 official languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish.
Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian are the three Uralic languages.
All the others are Indo-European, Greek being the only Hellenic one, Irish the only Celtic, the rest are Baltic, Slavic, Italic, or Germanic.
(I originally used the term Balto-Slavic, though I was unaware of some of the connotations of that term until just now. Baltic and Slavic do share a common origin, but that was a very very long time ago)
They’ll devalue the term into something that makes it so. The common conception of it however, no I don’t believe we are anywhere close to it.
It’s no different than how they moved the goalpost on the definition of AI at the start of this boom cycle
> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel.
> Microsoft’s IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now includes models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails.
Does anyone really think we are close to AGI? I mean honestly?
These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
This reminded me of Matt Blaze's work on physical lock security back in 2003. He found a method of deriving the "master key" for a building (one key that opens all locks) from a single example: https://www.mattblaze.org/masterkey.html
When he published about this he was bombarded with messages from locksmiths complaining that they all knew about this and kept it secret for a reason! https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/kiss.html
It was a fascinating clash between computer security principles - disclose vulnerabilities - and physical locksmith culture, which was all about trade secrets.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote shown on page 28 in this court case: https://www.scribd.com/document/372802863/18-CIV-00442-ARNE-...
I once worked for a company that kept its passwords locked in a safe. One day, all other copies of the password were lost, and they needed it, but the safe's key could not be found.
They expensed a sledgehammer and obtained the password through physical modification of the safe using a careful application of force. Some employees complained that meant the safe wasn't... well, safe.
The security team replied "Working as Intended" - no safe is truly safe, it's just designed to slow down an attacker. At that moment, I was enlightened.
It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):
> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
DST was a mistake and it needs to die. It solves no problems and only creates them. And not even the type of problem that someone could profit from, just plain old complete waste of time for everyone problems.
Just stick to winter time (because that's the correct one) and adjust all working hours once and for all to be like summer time, for e.g. instead of business opening at 7AM and closing at 10PM they can open at 6AM and close a 9PM. There will be a period of adjustment, but we have a period of adjustment twice a year already, so nothing is lost.
Why match working hours to summer time? Because I want to have more sunlight by the time I'm done with work. Especially during winter. We have it completely backwards, if we are going to adjust our clocks we should adjust them in a way that gives us more sunlight during winter, not less. I don't care if it's dawning by the time I'm going to work where I will be stuck indoors for nine hours, I want sunlight when I'm free again.
> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer.
If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse.
Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuinely maintaining more friendships because phones make it so much easier to message?
> he routinely destroys bogus claims of various companies within seconds
I watched his video on high-security shipping container locks. Jeez, two minutes long? They must be tough!
No, it was two minutes long because he bypassed ten of them, one after the other.
Having wrangled many spreadsheets personally, and worked with CFOs who use them to run small-ish businesses, and all the way up to one of top 3 brokerage houses world-wide using them to model complex fixed income instruments... this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Spreadsheet UI is already a nightmare. The formula editing and relationship visioning is not there at all. Mistakes are rampant in spreadsheets, even my own carefully curated ones.
Claude is not going to improve this. It is going to make it far, far worse with subtle and not so subtle hallucinations happening left and right.
The key is really this - all LLMs that I know of rely on entropy and randomness to emulate human creativity. This works pretty well for pretty pictures and creating fan fiction or emulating someone's voice.
It is not a basis for getting correct spreadsheets that show what you want to show. I don't want my spreadsheet correctness to start from a random seed. I want it to spring from first principles.
> On July 7, the company dismissed the lawsuit against McNally instead.
> Proven also made a highly unusual request: Would the judge please seal almost the entire court record—including the request to seal?
Tough at first then running away with the tail between their legs. Typical bullying behavior.
> but Proven complained about a “pattern of intimidation and harassment by individuals influenced by Defendant McNally’s content.”
They have to know it's generated by their own lawsuit and how they approached it, right? They can't be that oblivious to turn around and say "Judge, look at all the craziness this generated, we just have to seal the records!". It's like an ice-cream cone that licks itself.
> the case became a classic example of the Streisand Effect, in which the attempt to censor information can instead call attention to it.
A constant reminder to keep the people who don't know what they are doing (including the owners of the company!) from the social media.
I wonder if McNally knows a lawyer familiar with lock picking ;-)
Provenance and trust are relevant for a remote KVM.
But I can't find any information on their Web site about who runs the JetKVM company, not even a partial name or handle of anyone, nor even what country they are in. Which seems odd for how much this product needs to be trusted.
Searching elsewhere, other than the company Web site... Crunchbase for JetKVM shows 2 people, who it says are based in Berlin, and who also share a principal company, BuildJet, which Crunchbase says is based in Estonia. The product reportedly ships from Shenzhen. BuildJet apparently is a YC company, but BuildJet's Web site has very similar lack of info identifying anyone or their location, again despite the high level of trust required for this product.
Are corporate customers who are putting these products into positions of serious trust -- into their CI, and remote access to inside their infrastructure -- doing any kind of vetting? When the official Web sites have zero information about who this is, are the customers getting the information some other way, before purchasing and deploying?
If these people are still running the companies, why aren't they or anyone else mentioned on the company Web sites? That would be helpful first step for trust for corporate use. So its absence is odd.
> Under questioning, however, one of Proven’s employees admitted that he had been able to duplicate McNally’s technique, leading to the question from McNally’s lawyer: “When you did it yourself, did it occur to you for one moment that maybe the best thing to do, instead of file a lawsuit, was to fix [the lock]?”
Sometimes a single question tells you how the entire case is going to go.
LPL owns Covert Instruments, who employs McNally, the YouTuber who got sued in this case. Probably not a coincidence that Covert Instruments wasn't named in the lawsuit.
I used to rent a storage unit. I lost the key to it, and went to the manager. He came back to the unit with a small battery powered grinder. Cut the padlock's loop through in a few seconds.
Most locks are only good if the attacker doesn't have any tools.
If you don't know him already, I highly recommend videos by LockPickingLawyer — he routinely destroys bogus claims of various companies within seconds. It's quite entertaining to see how little security you actually get from most locks.
I wonder if anybody tried suing him…
I've had to try to clean up after a similar early decision and it was very painful.
Please stick with utc across the board people, someone someday may have to clean up your mess.
I've told this story before, but it's super relevant here. When I set up all the servers for reddit, I set them all to Arizona time. Arizona does not have DST, and is only one hour off of California (where we all were) for five months, and the same as here the rest of the year.
I didn't use UTC because subtracting eight when reading raw logs is a lot harder than subtracting one.
They use UTC now, which makes sense since they have a global workforce and log reading interfaces that can automatically change timezones on display.
Even letting the LLM “clean it up” puts its voice on your text. In general, you don’t want its voice. The associations are LinkedIn, warnings from HR and affiliate marketing hustles. It’s the modern equivalent of “talking like a used car salesman”. Not everyone will catch it but do think twice.
What is with the negativity in these comments? This is a huge, huge surface area that touches a large percentage of white collar work. Even just basic automation/scaffolding of spreadsheets would be a big productivity boost for many employees.
My wife works in insurance operations - everyone she manages from the top down lives in Excel. For line employees a large percentage of their job is something like "Look at this internal system, export the data to excel, combine it with some other internal system, do some basic interpretation, verify it, make a recommendation". Computer Use + Excel Use isn't there yet...but these jobs are going to be the first on the chopping block as these integrations mature. No offense to these people but Sonnet 4.5 is already at the level where it would be able to replicate or beat the level of analysis they typically provide.
It's similarly insulting to read your AI-generated pull request. If I see another "dart-on-target" emoji...
You're telling me I need to use 100% of my brain, reasoning power, and time to go over your code, but you didn't feel the need to hold yourself to the same standard?
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
Back in 2007, I published the first YouTube bypass of the Master Lock #175 (very common 4-digit code lock), using a paperclip.
After the video reached 1.5M views (over a couple years), the video was eventually demonetized (no official reason given). I suspect there was a similarly-frivolous DMCA / claim, but at that point in my life I didn't have any money (was worth negative) so I just accepted YouTube's ruling.
Eventually shut down the account, not wanting to help thieves bypass one of the most-common utility locks around — but definitely am in a position now where I understand that videos like mine and McNally's force manufacturers to actually improve their locks' securities/mechanisms.
It is lovely now to see that the tolerances on the #175 have been tightened enough that a paperclip no longer defeats the lock (at least non-destructively); but thin high-tensile picks still do the trick (of bypassing the lock) via the exact same mechanism.
Locks keep honest people honest, but to claim Master's products high security is inherently dishonest (e.g. in their advertising). Thievery is about ease of opportunity; if I were stealing from a jobsite with multiple lockboxes, the ones with Master locks would be attacked first (particularly wafer cylinders).
It's bad in concept as well.
All of that data sent to a third party server is going to be public on the Internet at some point. Security? Don't make me laugh. Countries that required government IDs to participate online have already made this mistake and those IDs have been leaked. Just because it's open source or run by $NOT_MICROSOFT won't make it any safer.
The problem with other people consenting to it is that it makes every one else less safe. People get compromised and scammers can use that compromised data to work against people who didn't share their data with the, "Benevolent Open Source Recall Service."
It's important to understand that we could genuinely lose general purpose computing. I don't think it's in serious danger at the moment, but we've been in the midst of a slide in that direction for the last 10-15 years. Part of it is mobile phones, part of it is TPM, part of it is market forces. The latest turn is strictly political. We've really foolishly built the technology necessary for authoritarianism just a few years head of a general global trend towards authoritarianism. At the moment, anyone can use Linux; it's better and easier than ever. Will the laws of your country make it harder or more difficult to avoid? Will major vendors lock you out of basic functions? Will age verification require an agent run on your Windows or macOS computer? (or worse, require the use of a smart phone just to use the internet?)
We're not anywhere there yet, but we're closer than we've ever been, and things keep moving in the wrong direction.
This is good stuff coming from the guy who said it's ok if people coordinate terrorist attacks on facebook as long as the company continues to grow
Cool idea and execution but having in-app purchases to buy hints for a game targeted to kids is a big no.
I get the market forces and such but I don't want to have an app subtly teach my non-existent kids to reach out to in-app purchases like that.
In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company:
Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud.
Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an additional $200 on a Nanit floor stand if you want sleep tracking. This is purely a software limitation since there's plenty of other ways to get an overhead camera mount. (I'm curious how they even detect if you're using the stand since it's just a USB-C cable. Maybe etags?)
Of course Nanit is a popular and successful product that many parents swear by. It just pains me to see cloud based in-home audio/video storage being so normalized. Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution. I'm sure the cloud based video storage model will continue to be popular because it's easy, but also because it helps justifies a recurring subscription.
edit: just noticed an irony in my comment. I'm ranting about Nanit locking users into their 3rd party cloud video storage, and the article is about Nanit's engineering team moving off a 3rd party (S3) and self-hosting their own storage. Props to them for getting off S3.
> MSRC bounty team determined that M365 Copilot was out-of-scope for bounty and therefore not eligible for a reward.
What a shame. There’s probably LOTS of vulns in copilot. This just discourages researchers and responsible disclosure, likely leaving copilot very insecure in the long run.
Reminder the creator of Wren wrote the awesome Crafting Interpreters book [0].
[0] https://craftinginterpreters.com/
> defining AGI as matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult
I don't think people really realize how extraordinary accomplishment it would be to have an artificial system matching the cognitive versatility and proficiency of an uneducated child, much less a well-educated adult. Hell, AI matching the intelligence of some nonhuman animals would be an epoch-defining accomplishment.
In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs.
Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
Wow, people are really clueless about how nuclear power plants really work. It's really not that dangerous to fall into the water.
I've been using git since 2007, this only dawned on me last year.
Git is especially prone to the sort of confusion where all the experts you know use it in slightly different ways so the culture is to just wing it until you're your own unique kind of wizard who can't tie his shoes because he favors sandals anyhow.
I feel like something was lost along the way.
git init —-bare
“origin” is also just the default name for the cloned remote. It could be called anything, and you can have as many remotes as you’d like. You can even namespace where you push back to the same remotes by changing fetch and push paths. At one company it was common to push back to `$user/$feature` to avoid polluting the root namespace with personal branches. It was also common to have `backup/$user` for pushing having a backup of an entire local repo.
I often add a hostname namespace when I’m working from multiple hosts and then push between them directly to another instead of going back to a central server.
For a small static site repo that has documents and server config, I have a remote like:
[remote “my-server”]
url = ssh+git://…/deploy/path.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/my-server
push = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/my-laptop
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but my parents and my whole extended family are from an area in eastern Michigan, about 2 hours north of Detroit.
Especially back then, the local economy was heavily dependent on Dow Chemical, who has a massive facility in the area. My grandfather worked there. He was one of the first people to ever handle Saran wrap. He also recalls hilarious stories, like a time when someone pranked the foreman by dumping some stuff in the soap dispenser that turned into a sticky, snotty goo when exposed to water. He also worked in an area that used lots of iodine for a couple years. His whole body was sunflower yellow when he came home from work, but he says he never got a cold!
Some stories are more harrowing. There were air raid sirens to warn people when Dow was venting something into the atmosphere. If you heard the sirens, you went inside ASAP.
And then there was the dioxin plant (aka agent orange). He says men in their 40s who worked in the dioxin plant looked like they were in their 80s. Many hard-working people died young there.
Luckily, he was never in the Dioxin plant on a daily basis - he was a diesel mechanic and a welder. Had he been in the dioxin plant, he probably wouldn't be alive today to share those stories. I fear that, as this generation leaves us, so will the cautionary tales.
https://www.michiganlcv.org/case/no-compensation-victims-tox...
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2023/01/30/705...
Maybe I'm too old, but are there people that really didn't know that any ssh access is sufficient for using git?
It’s actually quite shocking to leave the U.S. and experience the drastic fall in respect.
The U.S. has over a century’s worth of dominance and control built in, so it’s not gonna unravel anytime soon and countries will need to grovel along for a bit.
But the decoupling has begun, is almost certainly irreversible and is gonna hit Americans hard at most a decade from now.
We have no idea the the chain of motion that has already been set in. Trillions of dollars worth of goodwill and respect has been lost in months.
You’re right, you don’t know! When I worked on a nuclear aircraft carrier, I learned that the people working down in the reactor spaces got significantly less radiation exposure than the people working on the flight deck. My ship was ported in Japan when the Fukushima disaster happened, and we had to abruptly go out to sea because we couldn’t let the (minimal) fallout contaminate the reactor spaces and make it impossible to monitor the reactor itself properly.
> I don’t particularly enjoy building orgs and figuring out people stuff. Engineering management involves navigating interpersonal dynamics, performance reviews, and organizational design. These are crucial functions, but they’re not where my strengths lie.
This bit got me. It's a direct quote from the linked post for those who haven't read it
Whenever there's a change like this, my gut reaction is to grieve and try to imagine ways that things could be kept the same.
After thinking, "maybe puzzles could be designed by a group instead of an individual and they could share the work," I then thought, "and couldn't an LLM help?"
And with that, I had to remind myself: Advent of Code isn't about there being 25 puzzles, and so maintaining volume at all costs has nothing to do with it.
And aren't we so lucky that it isn't! Aren't we lucky to have had the prior 500+ challenges given as gifts over the years! Aren't we lucky to have a great demonstration of humility and care! Aren't we lucky to have 12 new gifts to look forward to this year!
Thank you!
One of the reasons I stopped participating was that as the second half of december was approaching I had less and less free time for solving the puzzles. So to me it is also a welcome change, I will try to finish it again this year.
The number 39 refers to the 39% tariff rate on Switzerland.
Kind of insane that the American President just made up a lie that tariffs are paid by foreign countries and rest of the administration just went along with it. It flies in the face of any common sense.
My understanding is that reactor and waste pools are some of the least radioactive environments as they are constantly monitored for leakage.
Man, if I'm trying to decide which company to work for, and I see a blog post from its CTO crowing about regularly checking in code on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd start backing slowly away. And when I got to the bit that said "AI has made me three times as productive," I'd turn and run.
Your job at the top is, more than anything else, pushing down a healthy culture. That includes things like setting an example of not working through the weekend. If you're doing it, your reports and their reports will feel the need to do it, too. Don't. And if you do anyway, certainly don't brag about it!
And then listen to this insanity:
> Our team had considered potentially having the customer build their own integration on top of our API in order to get around this requirement, and scoping it out properly would have required many meetings across product, legal, and engineering. I built and shipped a working version in a day. It wasn’t perfect, but it solved their immediate problem and preserved goodwill with the customer.
That's something you're willing to share out loud? Your company's technical process (which you're fully in control of, Mr. CTO) is so cumbersome that it seriously hinders your ability to execute, but, being above that process, you personally choose to circumvent it, foregoing required legal or engineering reviews, and shipping it immediately to your critically important customer? If one of the engineers who worked under you did that, you'd probably have fired him.
> I use the data to train Nuclear Radiochemistry AI Agents and [...]
As someone who is not involved in this ongoing discussion, I have to just say that invoking LLM agents when asked for credentials is not going to go in your favor.
Can you quantify why you're better qualified to assess risk from this brief report than the nuclear experts on site that know the full picture?
Ultimately, yes; he will die no matter what.
FYI:
the primary hazard from acute, high-dose uranium ingestion is chemical toxicity leading to acute kidney failure (nephrotoxicity), not radiation.From the paper
> The pipeline (bottom) shows how diverse OpenImages inputs are edited using Nano-Banana and quality-filtered by Gemini-2.5-Pro, with failed attempts automatically retried.
Pretty interesting. I run a fairly comprehensive image-comparison site for SOTA generative AI in text-to-image and editing. Managing it manually got pretty tiring, so a while back I put together a small program that takes a given starting prompt, a list of GenAI models, and a max number of retries which does something similar.
It generates and evaluates images using a separate multimodal AI, and then rewrites failed prompts automatically repeating up to a set limit.
It's not perfect (nine pointed star example in particular) - but often times the "recognition aspect of a multimodal model" is superior to its generative capabilities so you can run it in a sort of REPL until you get the desired outcome.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing
Palisades MI reactor. Currently shut down and de-fueled but a restart of this reactor is apparently underway, with new fuel assemblies being delivered.[1]
Worker was wearing a life vest.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_Nuclear_Generating_S...
[2] https://www.mlive.com/news/2025/10/michigan-nuclear-plant-wo...
This is bad but cavity water radiation is usually very weak. Ingestion could be bad but its not like he swallowed a uranium isotope which would be catastrophic.