Phemist

Don't buy into the framing. No scanning at all is what I care about.

Microsoft aiOS

> What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.

Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of the system operating as it should. Flood the internal logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding the high-level warrantless tracking.

I don't see in what world you would want to test this and help Google make this feature better, especially if you're doing it for free.

While we are at it, please also reject the framing of "sideloaded" apps. This framing pushes the use of legitimately installed, often high-quality, software to the periphery. This framing is an essential step in extinguishing our computing freedoms, as "sideloaded" apps are easily cast aside.

Recently I wanted to find a good app to manage my shopping lists as well as keep an ordering of this list so that I could run through the supermarket more efficiently. I really hate backtracking the supermarket to get some item on my list that I forgot was in a spot I'd already been. Of course, it had to work offline-first and I didn't mind a bit of configuration.

Everything on Google Play Store was some cloud-integrated garbage app. The only app that came even close was an app on F-droid called Aisleron, which lets you manage both your home stock and supermarkets in terms of "aisles" of products, flipping easily between what is in stock and what is needed and then managing an aisle-based sorting of these products per supermarket that I frequent.

Great App! However, I worry that this app would never have been released had Google considered actively blocking the author from creating legitimate and highly useful pieces of software like Aisleron.

Well, if Dutch is your second language for sure it is difficult to see.

"Gamen" is one of those anglicisms that has made it into the language, with ugly but in this case useful conjugations:

    Ik game met je (I (play a) game with you)
    Hij gamet met je (he plays a game with you, this is especially nice because of the repeating "met")
    Zij gamet met je (she *)
    Wij gamen met je (we *)
    Zij/Hun gamen met je (they *)

Although strictly speaking it is wrongly spelled as you mentioned, you missed that "Game met je" means "to (play a) game with you (or someone)", which could contract to "gametje" as well (and a similar contraction for "gamepje" would be much more violent ;)). I think this makes "gametje" an excellent name for a party game platform!

Yes, as this blog post doesn't mention it, the "password key" is specifically derived from your Date of Birth, the document's Date of Expiry and the Document Number. For the specimen document in the blog post these values are respectively 740812 (YYMMDD), 120415 (YYMMDD) and L898902C3. They are contained in both the MRZ and the VIZ (Visual Inspection Zone).

Considering the Date of Birth and Date of Expiry are necessarily limited in entropy, one should take care in protecting their Document Number as it is the greatest source of entropy for the derived "password key".

Of course I don't expect these businesses to be charities, but I do expect them to uphold their side of the bargain.

The basic bargain of sportsbetting legalization is that sportsbooks are allowed to legally operate (retain a license) in this lucrative market if they 1) ensure taxes are paid, 2) the money involved is not flowing to bad actors (e.g. through match fixing and other methods of money laundry), 3) the sports themselves are not corrupted (imo an impossibility, but a different discussion) and 4) gamblers are taken care of properly (i.e. nudged away from self-destructive behaviours).

Point 1 is one of those unavoidable things like death. Point 2 is actually in line with their own incentives: match fixing directly hurts their bottom line by paying out on essentially highly mispriced odds. Point 3 is a much bigger discussion, which I feel they are already failing on (for me as a sports viewer with the incessant ads, but also in protecting the athletes that are not in the top 0.01% of any sports).

Point 4 however is something they are claiming they are doing, but in actuality it is complete reversed: the illegal sportsbetting market is, by all measures, out-growing the legal one. In the current environment, the major thing sportsbook legalization did is to provide a gateway drug for the illegal market. Limits and bans in order to (POSIWID) protect margins are the strongest nudges gamblers experience to move from legal to illegal sportsbooks.

> It's not a business where I would want to be involved.

Good :) The fewer competent individuals involved in any way, the harder it is for (owners of) sportsbooks to claim they are upholding their side of the bargain, as this will stand or fall with the competent execution of the AML/Match fixing & duty of care controls. Now to actively discourage others from working there as well...

In these cases one should apply the cybernetic principle. The purpose of the system is what it does.

The intention of the mathematician friends of yours may be to prevent money laundering and match fixing from being profitable (and thereby providing a public good). However, so many genuine sharp and/or plain lucky bettors are caught in these AML & Match Fixing cross-fires, it would be very naive to assume these are all just unfortunate false positives.

Sportsbooks are however legally hamstrung in what they can admit to of course. By doing so they would also admit to completely ignoring and even violating one of the core duties imposed on legal sportsbooks: the duty of care (in EU countries at least this is supposedly an important aspect of the legalisation).

By kicking someone off your platform, you definitely no longer have any way to nudge their behaviour into something less self-destructive. Some players might quit, but for those that do not: Illegal sportsbooks will try to take even more advantage of their players, and now you have also indirectly caused the financing of all kinds of other activities that AML regulation is specifically designed to prevent.

My hot take: your mathematician friends looking at suspicious betting patterns are a way for sportsbooks to greenwash and "legalize" their exploitative practices.

> And the requirement for "fair bets" probably interferes

Don't forget the possibility of promotions, which is a major thing for marketing and distinguishing yourself from the pack.

A world of fair bets would be a world where you would need to market your superior odds (e.g. what pinnacle does).. which is directly at odds with fleecing your under-educated customer base.

Hvala puno. Very interesting! I will see how my implementation compares in asm.

I am handling a lot of vectors of size 6 or less with integers of values lower than 500.000. I am packing individual vectors in a u128, which comes down to 6*19 + a 3 bit length field = 117 bits with 11 bit left to spare.

I chose u128 instead of an array of [u64;2] due to the boundary crossing issue that I saw would happen, which I could avoid using u128.

I am not very familiar with these specific bit manipulation instruction sets, so would you know if there is something similar that works on u128 instead of just u32/u64?

I would argue that a word is typable is an edge case, especially dealing with another language. You can type words in basic latin script, sure, but you forget words with letters with diacritics, or even all words in non-latin script. In these cases OCR is also not necessarily reliable.

Wait, does that also mean bars have to police what people are watching on their phone, otherwise risking big fines?

E.g. I go to the pub, have a drink and watch some random LaLiga match on my phone?

Stupid criminals disproportionally get caught.

Selective pressure on the intelligence of criminals will cause them to become more intelligent.

You now need even more draconian legislation to disproportionally keep catching the intelligence-wise lowest quantile of criminals.

In the Netherlands, live streaming of Premier League matches is done by Viaplay (I'm guessing in other countries too?). Their service is very spotty, lots of buffering, especially during highly dynamic (e.g. important) parts of the matches, and they stream at very very low bitrate, often dropping down to 360p.

As a result, people cancel their subscriptions. To recuperate some of the losses, Viaplay now licenses one match every weekend to a third party streaming service, this year it is on Amazon Prime.

So, now besides the high cost and shoddy service, you suddenly need an additional streaming subscription to be able to view every match. Granted, the streaming on Prime is excellent though.

This weekend, the Prime match was Liverpool v Everton, which as a Dutchie is the most interesting match of the weekend (given Liverpool's title win last season, the Dutch trainer and several outstanding Dutch players).

Several friends of mine who are into football immediately quit their Viaplay subscription, so who knows how many matches will not be streamable through Viaplay next season?

As a legit customer you are constantly chasing an ever shifting landscape of poor quality and overpriced services. Meanwhile with an IPTV subscription you pay little, get high quality streams and have access to _all_ content.

Untill GödeLLM comes along and proves this is a permanent phase after all

The final result of course depending on how many r's there are in the raspberry.

Maybe, but that depends on facebook's ability to filter that data.. The filtering should be be easy for my inactive-for-10-years FB account that suddenly uploads a bunch of garbage data. Mixing in genuine data seems antithetical especially considering the garbage may be filtered out.

Indeed, and asking facebook to delete the data or to not use it for AI training is just another data point indicating you care about it. Your preferences will eventually be stripped through redesigns, refactors, careless usage or facebooks crooked idea of consent. The data will remain and be used again.

JavaScript's weak typing and implicit type conversions get in the way of reasonability though:

  >>> '13' % 2
  0
  >>> 'nan' % 2
  NaN
  >>> NaN % 2
  NaN
  >>> null % 2
  0 

this package ensures that you have a sane complement to is-odd, e.g. `!isOdd(someVar)` is always even (in the domain of natural numbers). A naive implementation of is-odd: `(some_var % 2 === 1)`, does not have a sane complement.

Anyway, to include this package as a dependency is indeed overkill. I would most likely opt for vendoring this package into the project (including licenses and acknowledgement), as the code is unlikely to change and is MIT licensed.

This does not make much sense. A 10% fee is acceptable if the alternative is significantly lowered sales (50% +) due to increased friction in the money transactions..

So if they are not declining on ethical grounds, and the merchant will definitely pay up the 10% processing fees, why are VISA and MC not offering the option?

I also installed Brave on my partner's iPhone and I agree there are no big qualitative differences in the blocking.

Probably for Google the easiest way to keep 3rd-parties from integrating native ad blockers is through licensing agreements for new code/modules in chromium. At this point there will be a fork of chromium, taking the latest non-adblockerblocker-licensed version and the two versions will start to diverge with time.

My point however was not that Google might one day block 3rd-parties from integrating ad-blockers in their own chromium variant. My point was that building on the chromium-base will improve the chromium-base, which will improve Chrome and additionally allow them to claim they haven't monopolized the browser market.

Genuine incompatible-by-time forks of chromium are not in Google's interest and thus Google needs to balance their competing interests of maximizing ad revenue, but also keeping Chrome a high-quality product and not being seen as a browser monopolist.

I once made a comment along these lines (de-Googled Chromium-based browser isn't good enough, as it supports the browser monoculture and inevitably makes Chrome as a browser better) and got a reply from from Brendan Eichner himself.

His point was that there isn't enough time to again develop Firefox (or ladybird) as a competitive browser capable of breaking the Chrome "monopoly". I don't know if I really agree.

Evidently, Google feels like the time is right to make these kinds of aggressive moves, limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers.

The internet without ad blockers is a hot steaming mess. Limiting the effectiveness of ad blockers makes people associate your browser (Chrome in this case) with this hot steaming mess. It is difficult to dissociate the Chrome software from the websites rendered in Chrome by a technical lay person. So Chrome will be viewed as a hot steaming mess.

I guess we will soon see if people will stay on Chrome or accept the small initial pain and take the leap to a different browser with proper support for ad blockers. In any case the time is now for a aggressive marketing campaign on the side of mozilla etc.

I am in no way affiliated with Google. So if you still think this is a PsyOp, please consider Hanlon's Razor:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Although, please also consider that Hanlon's Razor itself was coined by a Robert J. Hanlon, who suspiciously shares a name with a CIA operative also from Pennsylvania. It is not unimaginable that Hanlon's Razor it in itself a PsyOp. ;)

These menu websites obviously track the living hell out of you and now they can tie restaurant food preferences to everything else they have already gathered.

A waiter recording your order is at a completely different, much smaller scale. Additionally, the waiter is an anonymizing wall between the system that records my order and me and will only correlate orders across multiple visits to the same restaurant. Not potentially across single visits to multiple, geographically highly separated, restaurants.

And on top of that you are directly helping chromium to an even larger marketshare and bringing us closer again to the internet's technical monoculture.

Usage of Brave indirectly helps Chrome become a better product, by significantly increasing stability and security of the chromium-base, sucking up resources that couldve also been spent on a more privacy-friendly browser alternative.

Sounds like an interesting concept, a "work as you please" approach where compensation is unrelated to your hours worked (and ofcourse it being at least some livable amount).

I was indeed not very serious, neither is the comment I would write in response to this:

-- Ah yes, Hanlon's razor, one of the CIA's more successful PsyOps. --

But then I was shocked to learn that the Razor's namesake Robert J. Hanlon actually did work for the CIA and now I dont know what to think.

https://wydaily.com/obits/2019/04/09/robert-j-bob-hanlon-70-...

It was a trap. Clickbait to get every privacy-minded tech enthusiast on their site. Now, simply because they interacted with the page, facebook, in their opinion, gets a blank cheque to track you wherever they wish, on and off-site.