Groxx

Linux and Windows touchpad hardware and software is significantly more widely varying, usually ranging from "good lord, did any human ever try this?" to "I hate it but it's usually functional", with only a few outliers in the "this does what I expect" realms. Touch screens on the other hand have a 1:1 mapping for everything, and very nearly all of them support 5+ fingers (not just 1 or 2), so they almost always work like you expect. (... when they work at all on Linux)

From past experience (not for quite a few years, but some at least): oh heck no. I loved simulating locally, but the deeply limited touch handling made it infeasible a lot of the time. The dev -> install -> run -> dev cycle is dramatically faster in the emulator, and you don't need to have multiple devices nearby if you're building custom UI for each size.

As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.

As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.

Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)

Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.

Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).

Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.

It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.

yeah, they've been quite logged-out hostile for a few years now. not quite as bad as instagram, but they seem to be holding that as their guiding-north-star...

Yea, or the ridiculous first-gen M1 with only two USB-C and an audio jack. One of which was of course used for charging.

Dongle hell is a real place.

Wild stuff, thank you! I've got quite a few monarch fans to send this to now...

The various privacy-maximalist cryptocurrencies also serve as a fairly effective example imo, like Monero and Zcash. E.g. it seems pretty reasonable to say "one vote" is "one fixed-value transaction", and the count per member is just "they have X transactions in their receiving account". Both of these (one optionally) hide sender and recipient (and amount) while still having verifiable account-value = number of votes.

"controlling" some kid-height character. the button-pressing seems almost frustrated with the lack of response, long holds with no (or opposite) change and sometimes mashing. are they supposed to be buttons a person pressed to direct it? or did it create those too?

>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.

* looks inside *

4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.

I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".

Plus you can bet there will be a never-ending stream of "oops, a bug meant that toggle hasn't worked in 7 years, our bad. Have a free year of credit monitoring, on us!" announcements. Some might even be real accidents!

Then you'd get a certificate warning before visiting the site. Changing what IP you connect to for a domain doesn't bypass the certificate checks.

Given how ridiculously inefficient (i.e. extractive) private companies are in areas which were previously government run... yea I think at this point there might be stronger evidence that private companies are MUCH slower and less efficient. They can move faster at times, but they often do so with outrageously clear malicious intent, so that isn't exactly something to congratulate them for.

Particularly because so much of the code they're trained on has those flaws.

It's usually not too hard to work around stuff like this - wrap it and map it to an exhaustive type, and use tests to ensure that your `unreachable!()` is correct.

Plus like half of the time this happens to me, the summary is WILDLY inaccurate about what the source states.

LLMs are quite good at "I need a thing that does [vague description]" searches, FAR better than ~all "semantic" searches. But oh boy. I do not like them "answering" queries. Feels extremely dangerous.

I mean, kinda. There are likely some blinded algorithms possible[1] in voting systems, and some crypto-systems allow you to falsify entries/queries so you can lie[2] (i.e. you can provide "proof" that you voted for anyone, so you can appear "on their side" if needed).

Are there any voting systems that have both of those qualities? I'm not sure, but I hope so, and the relatively-widespread existence of both seems like there's at least some possibility that one could be built.

1: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3573428.3573750

2: message repudiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol

In this system: I have no idea.

In any system, I suspect it is possible. There are strategies that allow doing private set intersections (or similar): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_set_intersection (i.e. a set with one member is "you", and you can check to see if you're in that 764, without knowing who the others are)

I'm not sure what strategies would also allow you to not reveal to the vote collectors where your vote went, but there might be something.

You can claim to be whatever AAGUID you like, but attestation is based on signature chains that your TPM verifies, for which there are very few, very flaky strategies (since that's the whole point of a TPM). GOS won't be passing attestation likely ever.

...yes? that's usually the case in open source software.

Distract them by withholding information, so you feel like more of an expert than they are, and they don't have enough concrete info to form an attack plan.

An effective strategy for lots of higher tier management. For both good and bad reasons - often they don't want the details, they want to know that you know the details. You're being paid to know those details, after all.

"This will reduce your profit by nearly 30%" is accurate, and real profit is about all anyone cares about (or should care about). Many people would not choose that, if they could choose, but it's effectively required at the moment.

Unless you're 100% profitable, its always a higher effective %. If you're running somewhere closer to 10% (remember that it needs to be after all costs/paychecks/etc), that's nearly a third of your profit.

Anything optional that skims off the top cuts into profits extremely quickly.

Condensing the steam back into water would undo the cooling power, so yes. Massively less efficient. Negative efficiency, as required by thermodynamics.

Your only gains would come from whatever increased surface area the system has, radiating energy however it can. But a radiator without any water involved would be as good or better. Air-cooled datacenters do exist, they're just trading other costs and usually can't release as much heat.

That has to exist, right? Especially a rap genre - gotta stay hip with the kids to save them from Satan's influence.

Then let's just take a random flagship device: https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s26/

The only "secure" stuff I see in there is for local AI stuff, encrypted folders, and securely managing other devices. Nothing at all about hardware security or updates or anything that Google has been adding to Android (which imo they're fair to claim! but nearly none do).

iPhones are similar: https://www.apple.com/iphone-18-pro/ they have a small card to see Apple's general privacy policy near the bottom, but other mentions are stuff on the level of "it supports WiFi with passwords".

While there's tons about AI, cameras, and speed. Because those sell better.

Which is far beyond "a trend" and approaching "a truism" for phone sales pages. I challenge you to show even a single large-market-share phone sales page that makes a device security claim (niche ones do! but they're niche), outside Pixels. The very first one I visited demonstrated my point just fine, as did the second.

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Pixels actually do make some claims ("7 years of updates", Titan chip, etc https://store.google.com/product/pixel_11_pro?hl=en-US) and Graphene routinely holds them up as the sole manufacturer doing a good job (now hopefully two manufacturers, for at least some products). Others really do stand out starkly against even that ankle-high bar.

Yep. Takes a while to get everyone over the "someone's coming, MANIC CLEANING TIME!!" urge, but I find it a lot more pleasant to just... help clean if something needs cleaning? It's a shared space. I don't clean for fun, but it is rather nice to remove a bit of stress from a friend's plate.

There also used to be pretty strong social expectations to host and visit such parties. That was essentially gone by like 1990, for my area, and I always kind of got the feel that everyone was glad to see the expectation disappear.

They can be fun, but I and almost everyone that I'm friends with much prefer to simply visit and hang out with no plans at all. Just be there, maybe chat a bit, maybe ignore each other and read a book for a few hours, maybe find something to eat / do a lightweight potluck. Which rather sucked that COVID ended up shutting down almost all of our communal places to visit for that.

But we used global warming to eliminate winter! For the shareholders!

Kinda. If there's a versioned release at the same SHA, the next `go mod tidy` will replace it with the version.

And while the go.sum file in a module is returned by proxy.golang.org (somewhat surprisingly), that only includes the module's dependencies, not itself. So you're still stuck trusting a goproxy to serve you the correct data.

Also look at their advertising. Endless "X% faster" mentions that often get significant visual space, but when was the last time you saw "security updates 7 days earlier" or "tagged memory for better safety"? Even a single mention of "security" on a phone's manufacturer page is uncommon, and that's usually just mentioning a normal Android feature, or something like Knox or Secure Folder and not "we made choices that make a common class of attacks much more difficult or impossible".

The numbers aren't zero, certainly. Nor does it imply directly proportional levels of effort. But they are incredibly obviously given wholly different levels of attention on nearly all phones, by nearly all phone manufacturers.