krn

> I'd never have guessed the vim author would get close to the apple founder.

We would need to see the "inflation adjusted" numbers here, because Hacker News has certainly had a lot of growth since 2011.

The original (unfiltered) source, ordered by the number of upvotes:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Well, "AI tools" can have a pretty wide meaning.

Isn't Grammarly[1] an "AI tool", for instance?

[1] https://www.grammarly.com/

It seems that there is something very wrong with the entire Android privacy community, because fighting between different open-source projects in this space never stops.

From the technical point of view, only Daniel Micay's GrapheneOS currently takes security really seriously by providing constant system updates. It seems that you either have to use GrapheneOS, or buy an iPhone, if you care about both – security and privacy.

The people who are attacking Daniel Micay often incorporate a lot of his work into their own projects. And, naturally, that might make many of them feel inferior or even incompetent – if they are doing this for years to stay in the competition.

> When a custom ROM, even a "degoogled" one, is made, you include a customized kernel and custom drivers, and the AGPS URLs are part of this "driver".

Thanks, this should be the top comment.

Both, Sony and Google, provide driver downloads for their smartphones[1][2].

In this case, the tested "de-Googled" OS (/e/OS) did exactly what it promised to do: removed all network connections made by Google – and not by Qualcomm or anybody else.

Since Pixel smartphones now use Google's own Tensor chips (which are based on Samsung Exynos), they obviously don't make any connections to Qualcomm servers.

This blog post is clearly an ad for NitroPhone, which is simply a Google Pixel smartphone with a different open-source OS pre-installed.

GrapheneOS[3] is only targeting Google Pixel line-up at the moment, and therefore is able to make sure that even A-GPS URLs are "de-Googled" on the latest models.

But the older Google Pixel models with Qualcomm chips make exactly the same connections – from the driver, not from the firmware[4]:

> GrapheneOS has modified all references to these servers to use HTTPS rather than a mix of HTTP and HTTPS. No query / data is sent to the server.

[1] https://developer.sony.com/develop/drivers/

[2] https://developers.google.com/android/drivers

[3] https://grapheneos.org/

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/CalyxOS/comments/pym8l1/comment/hev...

I see Rust and Go as the best high-performance high-concurrency programming languages today, and choose between Rust and Go depending on the bottleneck (Rust – CPU / RAM, Go – I/O).

Rust and Go are very much alike, when Java is not an option because of the JVM startup time and memory requirements (GraalVM Native Image solves this, but at the expense of highly reduced performance).

Rust and Go were designed with concurrency and portability in mind – unlike Java (which requires the JVM), C#, D, Nim, Haskell, or OCaml.

Go becomes an answer when one is willing to trade the correctness of Rust for a garbage collector and a bullet-proof standard library.

That's true, and Clojure (when used with metosin/malli) is probably the only reasonable alternative to statically typed programming languages in terms of long-term maintainability.

Essentially, it's like two completely different reasoning models: inside-the-box (ALGOL / SQL), and outside-the-box (LISP / Datalog).

The first model (ALGOL / SQL) is about designing for machines to better understand, and the second model (LISP / Datalog) is about designing for humans to better understand.

I think that the main issue with dynamically typed programming languages is the lack of robust enforcement.

I believe that many people from Ruby on Rails and Django communities moved on to Clojure, Elixir, and Kotlin.

Others chose between Rust and Go, if performance was the most important thing.

The thing about dynamically typed languages and their expressiveness, is that you are sacrificing the ease of long-term maintenance for the ease of short-term prototyping.

Personally, I am a big fan of Clojure as a tool for designing software, but I would prefer having to maintain a code base written in Rust.

That's probably true, because OpenAI was formed just two months after AlphaGo defeated the European Go champion Fan Hui.

But Google has missed a lot of opportunities since then, and is now trying to catch up.

Microsoft has been an investor in OpenAI since 2019[1].

Now Samsung is considering replacing Google with Bing as the default search engine on all Galaxy phones[2].

I think that's a big accomplishment for OpenAI. And it's still and independent company.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-and-microsoft-extend-partners...

[2] https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-galaxy-phones-tablets...

And how does that compare with what OpenAI has accomplished since 2015?

I'm not blaming DeepMind here.

It was Google's job not to start loosing ground to Microsoft in the age of AI.

I am a big fan of Alphabet as a company, but this is how I read the first two paragraphs...

> When Shane Legg and I launched DeepMind back in 2010, many people thought general AI was a farfetched science fiction technology that was decades away from being a reality.

Translation: "We were not able to see what the founders of OpenAI saw back in 2015".

> Now, we live in a time in which AI research and technology is advancing exponentially. In the coming years, AI - and ultimately AGI - has the potential to drive one of the greatest social, economic and scientific transformations in history.

Translation: "Now we live in a time in which AI research and technology has advanced exponentially thanks to the great achievements by our competitors – and we clearly feel left behind."

> Retailers wont take me because of my accomplished work history.

Can't you just remove it from your CV then? I thought that CV is like personal marketing material: you only list things there that help you to get a specific job – and skip everything else that doesn't.

EDIT: It's possible to list your previous employers without listing your work accomplishments.

> Well ok, but was EY less competent than McKinsey or did they just get unlucky that they're the poor bastards who stepped on the landmine?

I have asked myself the same question, before I noticed that EY is basically the Credit Suisse and the SoftBank of the audit world[1]:

> EY has been involved in many accounting scandals: Bank of Credit and Commerce International (1991), Informix Corporation (1996), Sybase (1997), Cendant (1998), One.Tel (2001), AOL (2002), HealthSouth Corporation (2003), Chiquita Brands International (2004), Lehman Brothers (2010), Sino-Forest Corporation (2011), Olympus Corporation (2011), Stagecoach Group (2017), Wirecard (2020), Luckin Coffee (2020) and NMC Health (2020).

In fact, Wirecard managed to partner with EY, Credit Suisse, and SoftBank simultaneously just before going bankrupt.

Maybe because no reputable companies wanted to touch it?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_%26_Young#Accounting_sca...

If he was indeed the creator of Cash App, he could have been playing a part in the current SEC investigation:

https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/

The report was released just 2 weeks ago.

There was an interesting comment exchange on FT.com a few hours ago[1].

One person wrote:

> Lee’s former company, Block, is currently under investigation by the SEC after the app that he founded (Cash App) was alleged to have been facilitating money laundering. Wonder if there is a connection?

And another responded:

> A hitman isn't going to use a knife.

But when you think about it: if you didn't want something to look like a hit job, that's exactly what you would do – use a knife in downtown San Francisco at 2 AM – and nobody will be surprised.

Personally, I find it a little suspicious, that an important individual could have been murdered accidentally in a city with an average of 4 murders per month, just 2 weeks after the SEC opened an investigation into the platform he created[2].

Also, the place of the murder wasn't described as particularly dangerous at night by multiple locals[3][4].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/f5a27cff-2582-4172-87a4-2861c43c2...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/24/report-alleges-cash-app-frau...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35453269

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448995

The key part:

> Toshin found Pinduoduo to have exploited about 50 Android system vulnerabilities. Most of the exploits were tailor made for customized parts known as the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) code, which tends to be audited less often than AOSP and is therefore more prone to vulnerabilities, he said.

> Pinduoduo also exploited a number of AOSP vulnerabilities, including one which was flagged by Toshin to Google in February 2022. Google fixed the bug this March, he said.

That's probably a good enough reason to stick with Pixel smartphones, if choosing Android.

> I would, however, trust a default MacOS/iOS/Windows system over a default Linux system. The Linux community has a track record of being hostile to the security community - for their own good reasons. Whereas Apple and Microsoft pay teams to secure their OS by default.

I think we can have the best of both worlds here: OS distributions that are being maintained by paid teams of security experts, and that can be audited by anybody.

What are the major ones? Android, Chromium OS, RedHat (Fedora, CentOS), and SUSE.

From the privacy perspective, ChromeOS is no different than Windows and MacOS.

From the security perspective, it's much better, because every single app is running in a sandbox.

I don't even use Chrome for web browsing on ChromeOS, since Firefox works just fine with flatpak[1].

[1] https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en

> "Compromised" meaning that malware hasn't been installed or that it's not being accessed by malicious third parties. This could be at the BIOS, firmware, OS, app or any other other level.

I don't believe there is a way to be 100% certain, but if I had to go to a store and pick a new device with the lowest likelihood of being compromised, it would be a desktop, a laptop, or a tablet running ChromeOS[1].

[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

I agree with most of your points, even though I never felt unsafe in Budapest during the 3 months I spent there, including many many long walks after midnight.

I picked Budapest as an example because it's a well known international destination with very high level of walkability, great public transportation, and affordable prices.

Prague and Krakow are two other similar options in Central Europe, only much less "weird" (and, as a result, a little more "boring").

There are also plenty of pleasant and affordable cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia and Porto.

I picked Budapest for comparison, because as a European I don't know many large, safe, and affordable US cities that wouldn't require owning a car for comfortable living.

> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?

It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]:

> You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

https://github.com/questdb/questdb is a good success story.

I believe that you totally lack understanding of the situation.

These people were never born in Estonia, they were born in the USSR.

These people never spoke Estonian, and never tried to speak.

Nobody ever asked them to stay in Estonia and to pay taxes in Estonia.

They are always welcome to leave, if they don't want to fully integrate into the Estonian society by learning the official language of the country.

Fundamentally, the ethnic Estonians don't owe anything to the descendants of their occupiers.

> Most varieties of Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, forming a dialect continuum (spanning the intermediate Moravian dialects) rather than being two clearly distinct languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech%E2%80%93Slovak_languages

> Having that same problem for 30 years is just bad and you can try to explain it away as much as you want.

I think as an outsider you are completely missing the point: if Estonians ever wanted to give the Estonian citizenship to the residents who are unwilling to learn the official language of the country, they would have already done that.

Because by giving somebody a citizenship, you give them the right to vote. And who would the Russian speakers vote for, if they don't speak any Estonian? Pro-Russian parties and politicians.