cvwright

Or give the money to a more “working class” med school that trains regular doctors to work in regular practices and hospitals.

Hopkins is the elite - those doctors are going to be the best of the best, and they’re going to be well connected and compensated regardless of where they started.

So true! Copyrights that last 20 years would be completely reasonable. Maybe with exponentially increasing fees for successive renewals, for super valuable properties like Disney movies.

Lately it seems these are always revised down after the initial release. In a month we may find out that the real numbers are even worse.

Spring 2022, when spaces were coming out of beta. My boss tried to switch spaces and got a completely blank white screen. Not a good look.

Personally I use Element every day to keep in touch with the Matrix community, and it works fine for my minimal needs. It’s better now than it was then.

Hey, thanks for trying Circles. We are doing a lot of work on improving the usability this summer, so yes please send us any feedback.

If you’re a Matrix user, come chat in #circles:futo.org.

Otherwise the Github repos all have issues enabled so please feel free to file things there.

Unfortunately the usability of the available Matrix clients leaves a lot to be desired. When we evaluated Element I think it was in a particularly buggy state.

In contrast, Zulip is fast, simple, and “just works”.

I think, rather than looking at the Source First license as something that’s “a replacement for OSI Open Source but less free” it’s more useful to see it as “a replacement for closed source commercial licenses but radically more open”.

Open source has created some really great backend software and developer tooling, but somehow it’s not great at making nice consumer-friendly client side apps. When you look at the best apps, even the ones like Chrome that use open licenses, they are created by a relatively closed group of developers funded by a for-profit company.

The Source First movement is aiming to provide a way for that kind of closed focused team to be more open with their users. I don’t imagine that many Source First projects are going to be looking for lots of community contributions, and that’s ok - the closed source apps don’t do this either and they seem to get along fine.

You can backronym all kinds of things into it.

But in reality it’s four letters that sound good together. (And for which a domain name was available, I assume.)

Not true at all. We do use the "Source First" license for a lot of things, but all of my projects are OSI Certified (TM) Open Source. For example:

* https://github.com/futo-org/circles-android (AGPL)

* https://github.com/futo-org/circles-ios (AGPL)

* https://github.com/futo-org/matrix.swift (Apache 2.0)

There are a few other little things here and there, mostly Apache 2.0, but the above are the bigger ones.

Edit: There is also Alex's Whisper finetuning repo https://github.com/futo-org/whisper-acft (MIT)

libjpeg 6 is pretty good. It's oldschool C so it's pretty spartan, but it's easy enough to read it and follow what it's doing if you have a basic understanding of the concepts. (Discrete cosine transform, Huffman coding, etc)

And it's only had a couple of vulnerabilities, in nearly 30 years of being on the Internet. That's not quite like DJB code, but it's darn close.

My understanding is that it was written by a very small number of people who were experts in the field, as part of the standards process way back in the early 90s.

We had to contact them in order to add team members. Which still put them in the top 2 or 3.

But a lot easier to get started and do simple things.

The "dedicated server" / "private cloud" market is a garbage fire of manual one-off hackery where you have to talk to a human in order to do relatively simple things that are a couple of clicks on even "2nd tier" VPS platforms. Want to increase the limit for the number of servers on your account? Call us. Want to add a new employee to your team? Call us.

Earlier this year, my team evaluated about 10 different providers, including PhoenixNAP, and only maybe 2-3 of them allowed us to (1) create an account, (2) add team members, and (3) deploy a server without manual intervention. And often these simple tasks required multiple rounds of manual debugging with the support team.

I spent 8.5 years teaching at a lower-tier, public "access" university in the US. Don't get me wrong, it was great for what it did, and I was fortunate to work with a lot of awesome people. But we were far from an elite, exclusive institution like Harvard or MIT.

For many years I served on the CS department's graduate admissions committee. Lots of our MS applicants talked about working on sites for major US / western brands, and lots of those kids did not make the cutoff for even our relatively low bar for admission.

I think about that a lot whenever I see that a multibillion dollar multinational corporation has a web page that doesn't work at all.

They also get paid when you send traffic to free, ad-supported sites full of trackers.

I’m not sure what your point is.

There were worries after 9/11 that terrorists were using stego to plot attacks, posting their messages “hidden in plain sight” inside images on public websites.

Someone (Niels Provos?) did a pretty thorough search and analysis of images on eBay and came up with nothing. Apparently it was just post-9/11 paranoia.

Wow that brought back some memories! I knew I had gone to a pizza place with an animatronic band, and it definitely wasn’t Chuck E Cheese. I’ve never been able to figure out what it was.

Yup, it was Showbiz and the Rock-afire Explosion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock-afire_Explosion

Thank you!

“life is so miserable” and yet “so many children” was basically most of human history

It doesn’t matter to me if they “really care” about privacy or not. Megacorps don’t “really care” about anything except money.

What matters to me is that they continue to see privacy as something they can sell in order to make money.

All of the new privacy declarations are silly, but this one is especially ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure I can trigger a hit to the naughty API just by updating a @Published var in an ObservedObject. For those unfamiliar with SwiftUI, this is the most basic way to tell the system that your model data has changed and thus it needs to re-render the view. Pretty much every non-trivial SwiftUI app will need to do this.

FUTO | Austin, TX | On-site / Hybrid / Remote | Full Time | iOS / SwiftUI / Javascript

FUTO is an organization dedicated to developing, both through in-house engineering and investment, technologies that frustrate centralization and industry consolidation. Through a combination of in-house engineering projects, targeted investments, generous grants, and multi-media public education efforts, we will free technology from the control of the few and recreate the spirit of freedom, innovation, and self-reliance that underpinned the American tech industry only a few decades ago.

We are hiring a Swift/iOS software engineer to work on Circles, our end-to-end encrypted social network app for families and friends. https://circles.futo.org/

The successful candidate will be responsible for the development and improvement of Circles’ desktop and mobile applications on Apple platforms. You will be involved in development of unified codebase that runs across iOS, iPad, and Mac, ensuring the application is robust, user-friendly, and high-performing. For more information see https://futo.org/jobs/ios-engineer-circles/

To apply, send your resume and cover letter to jobs at futo dot org with the subject "Software Engineer Circles".

------

Update: FUTO is also hiring for hourly engineering roles on the revolutionary cross-platform video streaming app Grayjay https://grayjay.app/

These roles include:

* Plugin Developer - We seek to create plugins for the Grayjay app, targeting platforms such as Twitter, Spotify, Bilibili, Dailymotion, among others. This role demands profound expertise in reverse engineering and JavaScript development. https://futo.org/jobs/plugin-dev-hourly/

* Recommendation Engine Developer - Grayjay aims to introduce a feature that recommends creators/videos to users based on their interests. The initial task involves developing an algorithm to tag channels in a way that correlates them with similar channels. https://futo.org/jobs/recommendation-engine-dev/

* FCast Developer - We seek to create an open source casting protocol for wide adoption. Some work has already been done (see https://fcast.org/). You can help bring FCast to a wide developer audience by making libraries for multiple languages and are interested in bringing FCast to new platforms (Roku, AppleTV, TizenOS, WebOS, …). https://futo.org/fcast-dev/

Seems like this is true at the larger scale as well. For example, IBM and SGI etc helping to improve Linux in the 90s / early 00s.

I thought the joke was that people wanted it so they could watch porn on a crowded airplane.

Which, I dunno, ewwww.

Teach at a broke public university, and you never have to juggle huge teams of TAs.

My strategy was to, like you said, grade problem by problem. Then for each problem, first find all those who got full marks. Then group the others into piles based on what mistakes they made.

This ensures that everyone who made the same mistake(s) gets the same grade. It also tends to shuffle the order of the exams after every problem.

Obviously you don’t need this strategy for simple multiple choice questions, and it’s probably also not a great fit for long-form essays. But it worked great for technical short answer problems in CS and security.

The problem is the adpocalypse. Everyone stopped paying for ads that weren’t the super-targeted kind.

I was supervising a MS student on a project trying to mess with the moderately-targeted ads of the day. We watched this happen in real time as it wrecked our hopes of ever writing our paper. All of the ads we were studying got replaced overnight with much cheaper generic ads for cars or airlines or big-brand liquor. And then websites started going out of business.

I'm ok with arresting someone who brings a gun or fentanyl, if that means we get them before they can kill someone.

This might be the first time I’ve heard someone refer to infosec Twitter in a positive light. They were always inflammatory and belligerent and spiteful.

The same crowd has now migrated to ActivityPub. You can find them there still acting the same way today.

I find that most nonfiction books follow a common structure:

* 1st third of the book: Lays out the basic ideas, gives several examples

* 2nd third of the book: More examples that repeat the themes from the 1st part

* 3rd third of the book: ??? I usually give up at this point

I sometimes wish that more books were like "The Mom Test" - just long enough to say what they need, even if that makes for a short book.

I would totally buy a faster PineTime!

PineCube too, for that matter.

I have a PineTime. Two actually - one for me and one for my kid.

It’s the perfect “smart” watch for children who are too young to have a “real” smart device. It shows the time, the date, a basic step counter, and not a heck of a lot more.

I have an Apple Watch too. There is no comparison. It’s like the iPhone vs an old Motorola flip phone.