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67 karma · joined September 30, 2026

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ba1afd89f34cb23··on Petered
The word “illegal” appears exactly once, paired with “unethical”. That doesn’t seem to be a major takeaway from the article to me.
ba1afd89f34cb23··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
Roku is a publicly traded company so they’re obligated to provide this information publicly, in the 10-Q they send to the SEC.

Page 6 of the below PDF has their revenue broken down by category. Going by Q2 of 2026:

Advertising: 673m

Subscriptions: 548m

Devices (hardware): 134m

https://www.roku.com/investor/quarterly-results

ba1afd89f34cb23··on An ESPN producer who quit because of sports gambling
A surprising number of people unfortunately seem to believe that bad things happen to people that deserve it, especially when it comes to addictions. This has been a prevalent problem with drugs, and it makes addicts ashamed, resulting in them not getting the help they need. For a long time, opioid addiction was a problem for weak, godless, poor people shooting heroin in flip houses that couldn’t possibly affect pill-popping suburbanites.

“Gambling is a problem for poor people, but not the smart, educated folks on this here forum” smacks exactly of that. So while that detail might be orthogonal to the original point, I’d agree that it’s not just a nitpick but a very real problem as a statement that is worthy of being called out.

ba1afd89f34cb23··on The Fatal Flaw of 911
The OS overrides location service settings during emergency calls

> When using Emergency SOS to call emergency services, the call may include your location, regardless of whether you enable Location Services, to allow the dispatcher to assist you.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/emergency-sos/

Android has a similar feature.

There is no legislation requiring this of device (or OS) vendors, but carriers are legally required to make location information available to emergency services, and I think are even prohibited from connecting phones that don’t make this possible. So market forces effectively ensure that all phones do this.

The exception is when the call is too short to get a lock for GPS and location can’t be determined. The phone will still transmit what it can (say, WiFi proximity derived location). Worse case is fall through to carrier triangulation.

ba1afd89f34cb23··on Passkeys are not a trap
They are tied to the issuing domain and the system that carries the passkey will refuse to present it to any other domains. It’s more or less impossible to fall for phishing or a spoofed site. Your password manager may have similar functionality for automatic filling of forms but less sophisticated users can often be tricked into providing passwords via copy and paste.
ba1afd89f34cb23··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
Trickle-down economics specifically refers to economic policy that favors the wealthy and corporations with the argument that this will lead to wealth trickling down to the economically less fortunate. Examples include the Reagan and Trump tax cuts.

This has been studied somewhat extensively (https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/2/539/6500315?login=... is one example), and it’s been shown over and over that this does in fact not work and leads to larger wealth disparity, across many countries where it has been attempted.

It’s possible you’re working off some other definition of the term based on your comment but that’s the generally accepted usage.

ba1afd89f34cb23··on Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape
I think this is spot on. It is not rational, but it's deeply rooted. I vividly remember the children's TV explaining nuclear chain reactions, what happened in Chernobyl, and why kids couldn't play in sandboxes on the playground anymore for a while. Die Sendung mit der Maus had a whole segment with ping pong balls on mousetraps, setting one off, and that cascading into hundreds of mousetraps shooting the balls everywhere. Much like middle-aged American adults in 20 years are going to remember Sesame Street having very special episodes about Katrina or 9/11, middle-aged Germans remember a very fearful time around a nuclear disaster that happened close enough to home that it impacted them - fortunately not in a truly disastrous way. And that has an impact on public opinion, emotionally.
ba1afd89f34cb23··on Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
The Solidaritätsprinzip is named that to distinguish it from the Äquivalenzprinzip (equivalency principle) of private insurance: with private insurance, your cost rate is determined by the services you would like to have covered as well as the assessed risk that you will consume these services as calculated by the insurance carrier's actuaries. In Germany (and other European countries), the public option insurance instead only uses your income to determine your rate: the insured risks are common and paid by everyone together instead of by the individual.

"Solidarity" is a pretty good term for that abstract idea. What would you like to suggest instead?

And yeah, I understand that people that do not buy into the concept of a society pooling together such risk to create a model that works best in the aggregate instead of emphasizing individual choice are going to hate everything about this. If you want to be able to save money in exchange for taking on risk, such a society can't let you easily do that because it'll inevitably lead to a tragedy of the commons; such a society would also likely help you anyway if you made the wrong risk trade-offs and become a burden to the state.

Also, let's be clear: this principle is still very popular in Germany. I haven't lived there in a long time so I was curious and gave it 30 seconds. Admittedly the source here is an insurance carrier, but they found in a survey that while 66% of Germans last year were worried about insurance costs and the financial sustainability of the German healthcare system, 73% support the solidarity principle (https://www.aok.de/pp/gg/update/solidaritaet-gkv/)

ba1afd89f34cb23··on Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
> The fucked up part is the forced solidarity

Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.

ba1afd89f34cb23··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Do you have any external references to any commits that matter, for example in your communication platforms (emails, Slack) or your bug tracker? Or, worse yet, in places where they aren't just text format references, but used for things like CI/CD caching decisions or security scans?

Once you rehash the entire repo, every single one of those external references will be broken. Because no, there's no support for looking up old hash -> new hash or the reverse.

ba1afd89f34cb23··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Her entire section 2 (starting at 6:12) is basically about why git does not and will never allow mixing of SHA1 and SHA256.

The interop discussed is using copybara as a copy tool to move data from SHA1 based repos to SHA256 based repos and vice versa.

ba1afd89f34cb23··on Most data centers refusing to say how much water, electricity they use
You make a very good point. However, in this case, the deadline is two years in the past. From Article 12:

> 1. By 15 May 2024 and every year thereafter, Member States shall require owners and operators of data centres in their territory with a power demand of the installed information technology (IT) of at least 500kW, to make the information set out in Annex VII publicly available, except for information subject to Union and national law protecting trade and business secrets and confidentiality.

> 2. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to data centres used for, or providing their services exclusively with the final aim of, defence and civil protection.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=OJ%3AJOL...