Hacker News Reader

jt_thurs_82on Paxos automatically determined safe and secure

> the most foundational distributed computing protocols—known as Paxos—meets its specifications.

> Paxos is one of the most important examples of the category

>“Most—if not all—consensus algorithms fundamentally derive concepts from Paxos,” Goel said.

A lot of burying the lede here, trying to imply Paxos powers many more applications than it actually does. While Paxos is in decent widespread use, and influential, I find some of the verbiage here lying by omission.

jt_thurs_82on Bugs in our pockets: the risks of client-side scanning

According to the TOS and their enforced end to end control of binaries and user actions, it is. Oops.

jt_thurs_82on My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)

> That was certainly not my experience

jt_thurs_82on macOS Monterey

I personally prefer the global search, I think the consistent behavior is good.

jt_thurs_82on Playstation 3 Architecture

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/08/playstation-3-was-de... my bad

jt_thurs_82on Playstation 3 Architecture

minor correction

> The accelerators included within PS3’s Cell are the Synergistic Processor Element (SPE). Cell includes eight of them, although one is physically disabled during manufacturing.

This was disabled in software (by syscon) early on in the boot process. Many people "unlocked" theirs without stability issues. My understanding was that it was a yield thing, and definitely not intended for general use ;)

> This makes you wonder if IBM/Sony/Toshiba hit a wall while trying to scale Cell further, so Sony had no option but to get help from a graphics company. Interviews from early 2nd party developers confirm this: https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/10/08/playstation-3-was-de...

That's also why the PS3 has two separate RAM, compared to the xbox 360's unified memory - Sony was trying to do that as well.

> HDMI connector

idk if anyone remembers this, but sony was talking about multi display gaming, such as having a status display. There was a prototype that had two hdmi ports and three ethernet - sony claimed it would also be a home server and router at that time. devkits did include two hdmi ports, and i suspect that the two screen claim was something that they made up almost on the spot, but who knows.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PS3_e3_2005_prototyp...

jt_thurs_82on U.S. tightens export controls on items used in surveillance of private citizens

I'm trying to dig through this to understand what it means, but I am far from an expert on regulations or legalese. I'm looking forward to any breakdowns and explanations/annotations of the passages in this article and rule. If anyone has any, please let me know in the reply?

jt_thurs_82on PinePhone Pro Announced

There's a couple of big reasons, as I see it:

- licensing: some people, myself included, think a FOSS/Libre license such as LGPL/GPL3 is better for people and society. Android is mostly apache, which means it's not resistant at all to a company "stealing" it without giving back to the community.

- dependency on google: like it or not, key components of android are completely maintained by google. That means that the future of an open platform is at the whims of one organization. Sure, you could fork, but android is a massive project and a small team could hardly keep up.

- "the core of android can still be used by any phone manufacturer": android, and the related IPs, is pretty firmly in the control of the US government. A lot of funding for non-android mobile OSes comes from other governments interested in a platform and support that is unencumbered from five eyes states

My personal opinion? Having more platforms is good, as are more compatibility layers. Android is more than just an OS or a platform, it's a set of ABIs for running apps that's used by over a billion people.