harles

> … I assume they haven't taken them down because they make money even when they sell garbage.

I’d be surprised if this is the case. The money they make is probably a rounding error compared even just to other Kindle sales. Much more likely is that they haven’t seen it as a big enough problem - and I’m willing to bet it’s increased multiple orders of magnitude recently.

I was just reflecting on why I fire up Paint more often than GIMP, and this is the reason. Especially when all I want to do is paste an image, add a small annotation, and copy it back out, there’s no tool as fast.

The espionage really is next level in China. It’s not just reconstructing software (that’s part of it) but stealing binaries (and source where they can) for everything along the way.

I worked at a large tech co with an assembly line in China and experienced this first hand. A routine scan of one of our calibration machines turned up a Trojan with a copy of all calibration software squirreled away. Fortunately nothing is network connected there, but it was obvious someone was planning to come back for it. The stash had our calibration software and the factory’s proprietary control software on it. Both companies sent security to watch the machine for 48 hours straight until a hard drive shredder could be procured to mutually assure each party no software would leak. It was nuts, but apparently common.

It’s pretty hard not to overlap with big tech companies. Everything has been touched internally.

My understanding is the same though. Unfortunately whether a clause is legal or not may matter little - you’ll run out of cash for legal bills before they do. The best defense is probably just that most companies don’t care about your side projects.

I saw that, but I honestly think it’s a non-story. That’s ~$80k of stock. I sold more of my company’s stock the last quarter (just as part of my vesting schedule) and I’m no exec. I’m sure that’s just a small part of his vest for the quarter - possibly even less than 10%.

I think this comes down to ambitions. Unity wanted to be an advertising company and when that goal started slipping away, they did something drastic. Epic wants to be a store and a virtual production platform. Who knows what they’ll do if those goals seem impossible.

It’s also worth remembering that Epic isn’t the good guy here. When incentives align, most corporations are capable of some pretty awful stuff. With Epic specifically they made accidental purchases in Fortnite very easy and then intentionally buried the refund button outside the store under an obscure settings page [0].

[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...

That was my understanding. They did it (or least claim to have made the change, maybe they left in a loop hole) in response to the Spatial OS debacle. They tried to crush competition in their ecosystem through retroactive TOS changes that time too. Some of the community got rightfully up in arms about it, so they reversed and added these long term licenses. But it seems like that was all just lip service, because here we are right back where we were.

Overview of the Spatial OS stuff for those that didn’t follow it: https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-10-unity-improbable-epic-ga...

I think this is called a single round game. They screw everyone over and will never be trusted again, but get a one time payout in the process. It just seems like a company of Unity’s scale must have a better plan than that.

I hope so, but if it’s likely to get smacked down by the FTC, it’s unlikely Unity would try this path. I’m sure this has been in the works for a long time and all the backlash was anticipated - they just expect huge profits on the other side.

Gotta love the description on theses:

> No need for power, just press on the battery and use it.

Don’t forget about integrated browsers in apps. Gmail, Facebook, and I’m sure a million other apps do this so even when you leave, you’re still in their app.

Base 10 is sufficient. Any base 2 number can be represented exactly in base 10. If you need rational numbers, you need something other than floating point.

I love dnf and apt, but I dread attempting to uninstall anything using them.

> Attck: Hacker can build own facebook app and get victim's facebook access token and use that access token to login into imgur account

I’m not sure I follow this. This sounds like “phish user credentials, then use user credentials.” What am I missing?

Its Entity is a pointer by a different name - in that it comes with all the classic problems of pointers. They just happen to live inside Bevy’s memory manager.

Bevy absolutely allows circular data structures and I’d be surprised if any complex game ships without any - Entity references can easily be circular. Most ECS frameworks are their own memory manager which, sure, prevents running afoul of the borrow checker at compile time but not in spirit.

Dangling pointers, null references, and duplicate mutable references all creep into an ECS. They just have new names since it’s all hidden behind Entity rather than a reference or pointer.

AI for sure. I’d steer clear of prompt engineering though - it’s hot right now, but I expect it’ll be a flash in the pan. Whichever areas you pick will almost certainly be disrupted by AI, so stay on top of it. Generative AI seems like a safe place to invest in.

Biotech is heating up. Sure it’s not pure CS, but there’s plenty of crossover. Doing computer vision on the glossy insides of a person is a serious CS challenge for example. Its disruptions are slow but possibly larger than other areas. Intuitive’s surgery robots are everywhere you look now for example.

Augmented reality. Apple’s Vision Pro is a big validation of this direction. We haven’t figured out what the killer apps here are yet and I expect we’ll see a similar gold rush and set of disruptions like smartphones as folks figure it out.

Self driving cars. These were way over promised but we’re getting past the hype. I’d expect to see robust (probably geofenced) Level 4 systems by the end of the decade.

IANAL, but this is what design patents are for. They’re much shorter though - 15 years it looks like for fonts [0].

[0]: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/my-word-design-patents-on-...

Caloric restrictions was my first thought as well.

Also, the fact that we’re talking about this person means he’s an extreme outlier. I’d expect reaching 98 is much more common outside of prison.

> increased levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which the liver makes in response to inflammation in the body, can promote social media use among middle-aged adults and college students.

Sounds like they found correlation and called it causation. I’m keeping an open mind, but I find this article dubious. No link to any of the studies, no alternative explanations (I would guess any negative health markers are associated with higher tech use), and the title is a little too strong “Inflammation linked to social media use” would be easier to swallow, or even “contributes to”.

I find press releases like this both not useful and overall bad for the scientific community. It’s unfortunate because this may genuinely be an interesting line of research.

I hope something comes of this. Going to an optometrist felt like going to a car dealership the last time I went. Blue light filtering was that worthless upswell they wanted to push on everyone. This situation reminds of Cheerios claiming to lower cholesterol[0] and I hope it similarly gets FDA scrutiny - although my amateurish interpretation of the law is that blue light blocking claims are vague enough to not run afoul of regulations.

Overall this situation is just sad because I heard it first from ads, then vision professional, and now folks I know. It seems like it’s infected our collective consciousness without any serious questions of it’s true.

Edit: [0]: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/Cholesterol/story?id=7574156

There’s definitely a Marxist undertone to the whole thing. What I really don’t get is the conclusion which suggests tearing it all down. Why not build more “Ivy+” and attempt to lift others up rather than flip the table? Yeah, it’s a tall order, but much more practical (not to mention positive) than getting rid of top schools.

I really doubt there’s intentional fraud here, but they were forced to publish (or pre-print to be pedantic) early. [0] This certainly led to less rigor.

[0]: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248 apologies for the Twitter link, I didn’t have time to find a better source.

Somewhat tangential: clicky switches, like Cherry Blues, tend to click twice for each stroke. I think this leads to people assuming there are twice as many strokes going on. Tactile switches tend to only click once (when they bottom out). So, fancy keyboards can make people sound faster than they are.

Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. I think that’s much too strong of a reaction.

The FAANGs I’ve been at, and especially where I’ve managed, high impact work is rarely passed over when it comes to both comp and promo. The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. It’s a common problem in pure engineering, and one that’s becoming more obvious in management as the article alludes to.

Yes, it’s unfair but I think it’s also necessary. Every big tech company I’m aware of has lagging rather than leading promotions. You need to already be doing the job at the next level and have demonstrated it through your work. For directors, that includes being able to build an org from scratch. Can’t demonstrate it? No promo, no exceptions.

The flip side of this is that most companies really don’t need so many directors and senior managers. ICs have had to deal with slim pickings at senior level promos for a long time, and I’m honestly glad to see some parity coming - even though would’ve preferred more promos on the IC track rather than few on the EM.

One final thing worth noting is that comp bands are extremely wide at these levels and have significant overlap. I’d be much happier in a world where good work is rewarded with better comp rather than pressure to take on a bigger role.

There’s no allegation that they actually wanted it or attempted to extract tax data. They have it now, but it seems more like gross negligence rather than some nefarious plot.

> Statistically, companies that raise venture capital are vastly less likely to succeed than those that are bootstrapped.

Any citation for this? I’m highly skeptical of this claim.

It needs to be a warning to the industry, which requires real consequences for those involved. A warning could encourage abuse by others - there’s little to lose except having to stop after getting caught.

Does anyone know if carbon credits actually work? In theory, they seem great. In practice, I’d expect them to be rife with abuse.