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Brybry

1,871 karma · joined August 7, 2015

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Brybry··on French lawmakers approved a tax of €0.055 for every gigabyte of internet traffic
Here is the actual amendment [1] and also it is not yet law. It's not a tax on individuals using the internet. It's a tax on companies providing content to the customers of ISPs. There is a cap on the tax.

I also don't live in France and think it's dumb but I think we need better information than the topic line to have real discussion of it.

It passed 11 to 10 and has to still pass in the French senate's version of their finance bill and the French government is against it. [2]

[1] https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/17/amendements/3210A/...

[2] https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/1750726/article/2026-10-30/l-ass...

Brybry··on US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears
I would think Roblox's user loss is more about age gate friction. [1]

Which is what everyone wanted right?

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/roblox-ceo-cites-c...

Brybry··on Ousted Savannah police officer gave ICE agent husband access to Flock system
I also do not understand how this doesn't break stuff like CFAA.

If I worked at a company and gave my work login credentials to a friend and that friend used it to access my work's network then I'm pretty sure I'd go to jail.

Brybry··on We still use paper
Also if that many people were put out of a job, to the level that their basic needs were no longer met, there would be mass unrest/revolution and all of the robot production and data centers would be burned to the ground. See: French Revolution, Russian Revolution, etc.

And it would almost certainly happen before it got to the point of "they have enough robots to stop the masses". And probably we'd hit 3.5% rule[1] non-violent government regulation of AI before any of that.

The real risk of AI to me is that we're too heavily invested in it and when the bubble pops it could take a lot of institutions with it. And governments are not in a great position to bail economies out again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%2525_rule

Brybry··on US Rep Announces Congressional Legislation to Protect Video Game Ownership
I doubt it will become law either way.

Congress.gov says Rep. Ritchie Torres has sponsored 171 bills since 2021 and only one became a law, five passed the House and most of those were under Democrat majority. [1]

[1] https://www.congress.gov/quick-search/legislation?congressGr...

Brybry··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
I have a number of family and friends who met online through video games or through online matchmaking websites (and one even through a dating app, starts with an H).

Successful, long term, loving and happy relationships. Not top 5% most attractive people. Mostly nerds, some overweight, some not.

Brybry··on MIT class project turns into an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors
My elderly mom has (had?) familial essential tremor and did two ultrasound brain lesion treatments: one for each hand.

The treatment was very effective. She went from not being able to eat soup without making a mess and barely being able to use touch screens (let alone write) to no visibly noticeable tremor. They had her draw a before and after spiral and it was an amazing improvement.

But the side effects were rough. She had trouble walking for weeks after the first treatment, though it eventually resolved with time and physical therapy. She had speech (cadence, slurring, word-finding) issues after the second treatment that she's currently doing therapy for.

It was a really big quality of life improvement for her but I don't know if she would have done it if she were not retired or didn't have a strong family support network.

Brybry··on China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024
I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]

Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).

So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a0ffc43a-231a-40aa-b5f9-521757830... => https://archive.li/k3PEH

Brybry··on 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit
Iron Mountain does it but they used an existing limestone mine with a large water reservoir [1][2]

Edit: I guess the scale isn't comparable to a, for example, Google data center though.

[1] https://www.ironmountain.com/data-centers/colocation/our-dat...

[2] https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/showcase-pr...

Brybry··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
You can look up crime clearance rates. It's a little depressing.

Here's an FBI chart for 2019 [1]

Though some countries like Japan and Germany have really good clearance rates for homicide. [2]

But more heartening, it seems like it doesn't really matter how many people the cops catch. Crime rates are still generally on a long downward trend (with some bumps along the way). [3]

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_clearance_rate

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/types-violent-crime-rate-...

Brybry··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
> the expectation that the government doesn't tail you without a court-approved excuse is not

Yes but there is an expectation that the government doesn't tail you at all times for your entire life with no warrant, right? Largely because in the past it was infeasible for the government to do so: it cost too much money and required too much manpower.

That's what Alito was arguing in Jones: people expect to be tailed sometimes but they don't expect to be tailed at all times for a whole month. And commentary suggests the Court would have had a similar opinion if they had not sidestepped the issue by leaning on trespass.

As Alito said, the question the Court has not decided (and didn't need to decide in that case) is where the line is drawn. When does tracking a vehicle become a search and enter 4th amendment territory and require a warrant? (He said surely before 4 weeks.)

Brybry··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
The stress on individual was to denote that you can't, for example, get a warrant to search every American's home. It has to be limited in scope.

The judge was saying that the police needed probable cause and a warrant to search the Flock system because it's dragnet surveillance, similar to needing a warrant to access cell phone location data. [1]

Just because you don't have an expectation of privacy while moving in a public space doesn't mean you don't have an expectation of privacy for all of your movements ever in every public space. That scenario wasn't possible in the 1700s.

For an individual today, it's fine for the government to tail someone without a warrant. [2] It's probably not fine for the government to put a long-term GPS tracker on your car without a warrant (probably because the issue was sidestepped with trespass). [3]

Even Alito notes that in the past it would have required too much labor for the government to surveil every movement of an individual for a long period of time and so society has the expectation that the government is not doing that. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatrie_v._United_States

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Knotts

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)

[4] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/10-1259.pdf#page=33

Brybry··on Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'
People in the 1700s would not expect all of their movements to be tracked and watched at all times. They would definitely take issue with this. The issue of their time was general warrants/writs of assistance which let the British search anyone anywhere at any time and take their property. [1]

The key issue there was the scope of the British power, not the fact that searches and seizures could happen at all. We wanted warrants that were reasonable and limited.

The issue is not a single security camera from a private bank. The issue is not a single cop in a car investigating someone. The issue is a national and searchable network of cameras where agents of the government can track anyone at any time for no reason at all.

The judge says the police need probable cause and a warrant for a search against an individual.

> Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts. This is the same expectation of privacy that the Supreme Court has continued to recognize in cases like Carpenter and Chatrie. Cell phones also move in public places where people can see you in plain view. But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient. [2]

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt4-2/ALDE_...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...

Brybry··on Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones
Are you saying to take a hash of a picture and convert that to base 6 for your dice rolls to plug into a word list for creating a passphrase?

Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom? I have a lot less trust in my ability to successfully scrub a picture from my phone that deterministically created my passphrase.

Brybry··on In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life
Probably poetic license. You can look at the pictures and see everything looks very clean.

The jugs are sealed. We can't see any "overflowing" buckets. Looking at some water samples under a microscope is not really that messy.

Brybry··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
Certainly it didn't implode and is not failing but it's not clear to me that its user base is increasing from pre-Musk. And Threads supposedly has a similar number of active users.

Twitter had around 230 million monetizable daily active users in 2022 before Elon Musk acquisition. They didn't publish monthly active users. [1]

Twitter IPO S-1 in 2013 said 500 million tweets per day from 215 million MAU and 100 million DAU. "We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs." [2]

2024 Elon Musk claims 600 million monthly active users [3]

2025 SpaceX S-1 Filing 520 million monthly active users. [4]

2026 Also SpaceX S-1 Filing 550 million monthly active users. 350 million daily posts. "The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active" [4]

Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June 2026 [5]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/twitter-twtr-earnings-q1-202...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312513...

[3] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1793779530282443086

[4] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

[5] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/metas-threads...

Brybry··on US Customs supervisor busted for stealing hardware from Homeland Security PCs
I think you're conflating naturalization/citizenship with immigration.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (and subsequent) acts said you had to be white and have lived in the US for X years already to become a citizen. [1]

However, per your cited article a law was passed in 1882 to decrease Chinese immigration (who famously immigrated and helped build our railroads). [2] The Chinese immigrants couldn't become citizens but there was nothing (at the time) stopping them from moving and living and working in the US. [3]

Anecdotally and more recently: my Mexican grandmother, who married my World War 2 veteran grandfather in Mexico, legally immigrated just fine in the 1950s.

But, yes, most immigration was Europeans and African slaves but probably that was because it was expensive unless you effectively sold yourself. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_Chinese_immigrati...

[4] https://www.history.com/articles/u-s-immigration-before-1965...

Brybry··on I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots
My elderly parents regularly click the sponsored links in Google search results.

I don't think it even registers for them that they're ads (even though I have informed them multiple times).

Same for sponsored items in Amazon search results. As an adblock user it's really jarring to see their experience of the web compared to my own.

Brybry··on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS
Mostly a clarification of what I find DNS ad blocking works for on Android, which seems to be somewhat different from your experience (probably we use different apps).

A weak rebuttal of the reason why DNS adblock doesn't work for Youtube and the Youtube app.

Brybry··on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS
Ads from providers like Google AdMob and AppLovin are blocked. Apps could bundle their own DNS or DoH resolver or use hardcoded static IP addresses but in my experience most do not.

Youtube ads do not get blocked by DNS adblock because Youtube ads are served from the same domains as the content and thus DNS blocking would be counterproductive. I don't think it has anything to do with respecting DNS.

I don't have the Youtube app installed to test but the Internet suggests that at least in 2023 it was very possible to block the Youtube android app (content and all) via DNS, which hints it does not bypass system DNS. [1]

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/713289/blocking-youtube-andr...

Brybry··on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS
Yes, I use Firefox on Android with ublock origin, it works great. But using adblocking DNS on your phone will also block most in-app ads which is a big quality of life improvement.

I could also use a VPN to keep my phone always on my home network and thus behind my own ad blocking DNS but Mullvad's adblocking DNS was really nice and convenient.

Brybry··on Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific 'John DOE' Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive
Cox v. Sony Music went all the way to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit started in a Virginia US District Court in 2018 and the Supreme Court opinion was in 2026. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Communications,_Inc._v._So...

[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/cox-communications-inc-v-so...

Brybry··on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS
I use Mullvad's adblocking DNS server on my phone which is not always behind my home router.
Brybry··on A mysterious kidney disease has arrived in Texas
OSHA has a proposed heat injury prevention rule that would make 80F (heat index) and 90F (optionally 95F, heat index) as initial and high heat trigger temperatures.

With the initial heat temperature, workers would need to be provided water and a break area that's shaded or air conditioned (it can also have a fan but employers must evaluate that the fan is used at the appropriate temperature and humidity and not cooking or dehydrating people). Interestingly the CDC warns not to use fans above 90F, which is much lower than the ~102F limit OSHA suggests. [1][2][3]

With high heat temperature, 15 minute breaks in the cooling area are required every 2 hours along with some buddy system/monitoring requirements. [4]

The notice of proposed rulemaking has a wealth of interesting study citations for risks (including kidney health issues) and risk reduction but it's a lot to even skim through.

I think a systematic review they cited suggested "hats; loose fitting, light/brightly colored/reflective, breathable, clothing; ventilation patches in PPE" for optimal clothing. But I do wonder if optimal clothing might vary based on temperature and humidity.

As a Louisianian, I don't know how the roofers do it. Sometimes it's so hot and humid it's rough to breathe outside just standing doing nothing.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-14824/p-2907

[2] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-14824/p-596

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/heat-health/about/index.html

[4] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-14824/p-2932

Brybry··on Reverse engineering my ADHD test
Isn't this true of nearly all mental disorders in DSM-5 and ICD-11?

We don't really know what mental disorders are and so we don't have objective diagnostic tests for them. [1]

We just have treatments that sometimes work for some people (and with the replication crisis[2] that sometimes is probably a lower value than expected).

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6732705/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5835722/

Brybry··on Starbase, LA
Grade school level Louisiana info (probably somewhat wrong): It's generally brackish marsh/swamp land. Basically think silt/dirt with a bunch of plants evolved for this specific environment.

Then you take a bunch of humans and you cut down all the really old cypress trees for lumber. To facilitate that process you cut channels through all the plants that are in the way so you can ship that lumber via new unobstructed waterways. You also do it for oil/gas exploitation.

So now you have a lot of infiltration of saltier or fresher water and less protection during storm surge and such. Lots of plants die and these plants were holding the dirt/soil in place (and the storm surge helps wash that away).

Also you re-engineer the original waterways that deposited silt/dirt and helped build these areas up so that they deposit silt/dirt in other places (also you harvest the silt/dirt for use in farming so it never even gets that far down the waterways in the first place).

Brybry··on Starbase, LA
Take a look at this site: https://tropicalcyclonedatabase.com/storm_tracks.html?_v=90

Filter Lifecycle Intensity by category 4 and 5.

You won't see any lines close to land near Cape Canaveral. Though to be fair, Vermilion Parish seems to be far enough west in Louisiana that it doesn't get direct hits either (but some are close).

Then look at the NHC Storm Surge Risk map: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...

Cape Canaveral is mostly 0-3 ft with some >3 ft. Meanwhile the entire immediate coast for the new Louisiana SpaceX location is >6 ft to >9 ft.

I think they'll probably have more a lot more trouble with storms than Cape Canaveral. The dynamics along the Atlantic coast are a lot different from the Gulf.

Brybry··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
I've also found sometimes you get (cached?) versions of profiles with really old posts if you're not logged in.

And media often won't play without doing bypass shenanigans (forcing native controls).

The main site won't even let you attempt to search but nitter and xcancel search worked great.

Twitter is basically unusable on the official site without logging in, even though it may not seem that way after a cursory check.

Brybry··on Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded
Xiaomi's Xring O3 is manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [1]

MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is also manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [2]

There was no world interdependence change (unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries).

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-launches-XRing-O3-claim...

[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9500-Proces...

Brybry··on Illinois just told every operating system to start reporting your kid's age
You don't need to look at their internet history. You talk to your kids about safe behavior. Then you're somewhat around when they're using the computer/device (until you feel they're of an age where that's not needed). The very knowledge you might see their screen at any moment will moderate behavior.

And properly working parental controls don't let the kids install another browser without permission.

I bought my niece a Chromebook for a specific purpose (she needed a device to do vision therapy with). I installed FamilyLink on my phone.

In FamilyLink I went through each setting and put everything as restrictive as possible. She can't install apps. Only the vision therapy website is whitelisted. If she tries to go to a different website or install an app it gives her a prompt letting her ask an adult for permission.

You don't need to be a software engineer to do any of that, you just need some basic reading comprehension. Eventually when she's older I can make things more permissive.

Now that said: the FamilyLink software could be much better.

It seems to be mainly designed for kids on android phones, not chromeOS Chromebooks. None of the screen time monitoring features work. I can lock her Chromebook but I can't see how much time she spent on it or set time limits on apps. I can't put a time limit on the Chrome browser (or any default apps). And if there is a way (outside of adding the device to an organization like a school does w/ Google Admin/Workspace), the documentation is not great at saying so.

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