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cbdumas

1,656 karma · joined January 26, 2017

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cbdumas··on Why are we even doing all this?
I sympathize with some feelings the author is trying to communicate, but the cynical and sarcastic style really detract from the authors points in my view.
cbdumas··on The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging
If a firm has that kind of pricing power of course they will use it. Competition is the only thing that restrains this. Most firms don't have this kind of pricing power at all, if Safeway marked up all their groceries to my maximum willingness to pay I would of course just go to Kroger or the local co-op or a restaurant for dinner.
cbdumas··on Wax motor
I'm surprised this page doesn't mention the automotive thermostat which uses the same principle to control the flow of coolant between the engine block and radiator in an ICE vehicle.
cbdumas··on Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal
Can folks responding to this comment claiming that they see PayPal a lot provide some details? Country, industry, sector, something. I'm in the US and I basically never see it on e commerce checkout flows any more (and good riddance IMO).
cbdumas··on Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
I worked as a undergrad assistant in a research lab in 2011-ish, and the lab had a shelf full of PS3s working as a cluster. Regretfully my project didn't get to use it.
cbdumas··on The UK's new under-16 social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents
If governments want to set up online age gates, they should be responsible for providing an electronic ID system and enable privacy preserving age verification (zero knowledge proofs)
cbdumas··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module
There are probably still a lot of cases where you would want PoE though right? Cameras, WAPs, etc.
cbdumas··on Solar and batteries can power the world
The article is about utility scale solar and storage I believe not home installations. It also mentions towards the end that in cold norther climates adding wind to the mix makes sense
cbdumas··on In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?
> It's like math was forced to run on assembly language despite there were more high-level languages available and more apt for the job.

I'm not a mathematician but that doesn't sound right to me. Most math I did in school is comprised concepts many many layers of abstraction away from its foundations. What did you mean by this?

cbdumas··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
That may be true but the sense I get from Gen Z folks who I've talked to is that for them Discord is almost more of a social network for interacting with a community. Their activity might be centered around gaming but they're using Discord to find people they don't already know to play with, talk about the game, etc. For those folks, Mumble will not be even close to an alternative to discord.

Myself, though, I basically only use it to talk to the same guys I've been gaming with since we met in middle school 20-some years ago, and for that Mumble seems perfect.

cbdumas··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.

I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.

cbdumas··on Why did containers happen?
What does the 'ad network and search engine' have to do with it? Wouldn't any organization who serves lots of traffic have the same cost cutting goals you mentioned?
cbdumas··on Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy
> Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web.

It seems your confusion stems from this premise. Is it possible this is not a correct assumption?

cbdumas··on Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft
As I commute on a motorcycle (often in the rain, causing lower visibility) this is terrifying to me and I hope regulators in my state don't let it happen here until Tesla can prove their "camera only" approach is safe.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/nhtsa-...

cbdumas··on Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync
In that case wouldn't you be better off just disabling 2FA? The problem with the cloud sync is that users like the one in the article think they have 2FA but in fact if their Google account is compromised all their accounts using Google Authenticator TOTP second factors are also compromised.
cbdumas··on Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync
Typically you print out recovery codes and keep them somewhere safe
cbdumas··on Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync
> The attacker already had access to ... my Google Authenticator codes, because Google had cloud-synced my codes.

This was such an obvious mis-feature I can't believe they actually rolled it out. For those using Google Authenticator you can and should disable cloud sync of your TOTP codes.

cbdumas··on Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World
> And then there’s the code that we rely on for bank transactions, package deliveries, medical results, satellite launches, airline flight paths, self-driving cars, mortgage payments, and nuclear power plants. This is durable code, and it’s going to stay that way.

I can tell you from first hand experience that, since long before LLMs were invented, critical software supporting these industries is held together with duct tape and baling wire (and Excel). "Durable" does not mean "good". In my experience production code is often ugly, poorly abstracted, full of special cases and hacks, but most importantly it works.

cbdumas··on Notion releases offline mode
> I want note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly.

I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to

cbdumas··on The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know
A few years ago I came across (probably on HN) this little Firefox extension that I quite like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fraidycat/ . Seems like it could help you fill this use case although as other commenters are saying I'm not sure I understand the distinction with RSS
cbdumas··on Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction
I don't know anything about this startup but this is definitely an important problem worth solving https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...
cbdumas··on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?
How does this square with the fact that fertility declines as income rises, both within and across societies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

cbdumas··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
NYTimes publishes a fantastic calculator [0] to help make this kind of rent vs. buy decision. It's not always that clear cut.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

cbdumas··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
NYTimes has a great calculator for doing just that https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
cbdumas··on Gig Companies Violate Workers Rights
My taxi driver on my last time in France (in 2022 I believe) almost made us miss our train from Marseilles to Paris as he drove us around looking for an ATM because he insisted he "left his credit card reader at home". I do not miss taxis and their scummy drivers one bit.
cbdumas··on Propositions as Types (2014) [pdf]
This is the eternal tradeoff of testing, brought to its logical (no pun intended) conclusion. Testing (and formal verification) don't get you anything for free: writing detailed specs or tests is at least as difficult as writing a correct implementation. In fact given a sufficiently detailed spec, a program conforming to the spec can be derived automatically.
cbdumas··on A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
I like this comment because it both argues for "SLC" design and contains the reason why we don't get it: "Sure this thing looks great if only it had <FEATURE>" where <FEATURE> is different for every buyer.
cbdumas··on Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed
I saw that and I'm not convinced this changes anything. The fact that Honey is inserting itself into the affiliate attribution chain at all when it did literally nothing is still wrong to me.
cbdumas··on Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week
Maybe I'm just a tech philistine but I find my Pixel 8a and my wife's iPhone <N> to be basically indistinguishable in any meaningful way.
cbdumas··on Memory safety for web fonts
Despite mounting evidence this perspective remains shockingly common. There seems to be some effect where one might convince oneself that while others are constantly introducing high severity bugs related to memory un-safety, I always follow best practices and use good tooling so I don't have that issue. Of course evidence continues to build that no tooling or coding practice eliminates the risk here. I think what's going on is that as a programmer I can't truly be aware of how often I write bugs, because if I was I wouldn't write them in the first place.
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