ls65536

> both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently

It's interesting because any two random people might not agree on which side is "worse" in this regard. People often think they're immune to the tactics and propaganda of the other side, but they'll frequently fail to see the same or very similar stuff happening on their own side, or they'll downplay it because it doesn't affect them so much personally.

Some might be offended by holocaust comparisons here, but if we are to really take the ideal of "never again" seriously, then it's absolutely crucial that we be free to openly discuss in good faith how situations gradually snowballed from one thing to another and ended up at a certain point in history without needing to censor ourselves so much to avoid offending someone.

And thankfully we've had nothing close to approaching the horrendous events of the holocaust during our present pandemic difficulties, but opposing discussion on the grounds of it being potentially offensive isn't doing any service to the survivors (and victims) of those past atrocities, and it risks us following some of those dark paths of the past into the future if we cannot apply what we learned to our own times.

The various lessons of history must be applied as much as possible in order to better understand our present time and to avoid repeating those mistakes of history.

The worst part is whenever bringing up such points others are often quick to dismiss them as wacky "conspiracy theories" or even just unfounded pessimism about the state of things as they are today. Merely bringing up comparisons of certain observations about society today to those of Nazi Germany (or other reprehensible regimes throughout history) risks getting oneself cancelled or targeted in other ways. "How dare you compare the horrors of World War II with the relative ease of things today! It's nowhere near as bad today as it was back then!", cry the detractors. And they may be right about that in some sense, but those who don't learn from history and apply its lessons to the present are doomed to repeat certain mistakes, or at least to make history rhyme, as the saying goes. The chilling effect caused by the stifling of open discussion about how things are today and where they could risk going wrong in the future is how we all end up sleepwalking into the well-known horrors of the past that we'd otherwise all wish to avoid.

> Ignoring our own privacy, shouldn't we protect those people who the government/institutions/etc already squash down?

And this should resonate even among the individualistic and self-interested who might believe they're unaffected, as those who aren't "squashed down" right now would be wise to not get caught in the thinking that the set of people affected today by certain state, corporate and institutional actions is immutable. "They would never do it to us" (along with the often heard "it could never happen here") is one of the most dangerous ways of discounting problems affecting "others" in the present. When you see people, either as individuals or as groups, being treated a certain way by those with greater power, remember that this could just as easily also be you in the future.

Privacy may not be a goal in itself, but it sure would be painful to wake up one day and realise one has given it up for perhaps more trivial and ephemeral "benefits" along the way, especially if this took place relatively slowly over many years. Privacy (among other things like personal freedom, health, etc.) really seems to be one of those things many people take for granted until they realise they have lost it, or willingly gave it up, not able to easily get it back, only then realising how important it was in hindsight.

"Endurance was found just over four nautical miles (7.5km) and roughly southward of Frank Worsley's famous sinking position (68°39'30" South; 52°26'30" West)." [0]

Truly a testament to the skill of Frank Worsley, Endurance's captain, whose navigation was also essential in successfully reaching South Georgia in a modified lifeboat [1], returning themselves to civilization and calling for help to rescue the rest of Shackleton's men waiting on Elephant Island.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60654016

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_James_Caird

Two more I would recommend in addition to Lansing's that focus more on different specific aspects of that expedition are "Shackleton's Boat Journey" by Frank Worsley (who served as captain of Endurance) and "Shackleton's Heroes: The Epic Story of the Men Who Kept the Endurance Expedition Alive" by Wilson McOrist.

I think anyone with an interest in sailing or maritime navigation will appreciate Worsley's first-hand account of the crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia in a modified lifeboat[0]. Worsley covers the subsequent crossing of South Georgia's mountainous interior in great detail as well.

And often left out from popular accounts is mention of the Ross Sea Party[1], who endured terrible conditions on the other side of the Antarctic continent to ensure that Shackleton and his crew would have had enough supplies to survive the final stretches coming from the other side of the continent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_James_Caird

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Sea_party

> Indeed, in some cases, people bought software they pirated in college because by that point, they were used to it.

This reminds me of some old reasoning for why many software vendors would often tacitly go easy on those copying their software, as it was often seen as a wide pipe to eventual revenue down the road. Rather than letting those (potential) eventual customers go to the competition early on (often much less expensive to purchase, or perhaps even "free"), they would get comfortable with the proprietary features of a certain piece of software and be "locked in" that way. Of course, this practice would be unlikely to ever be officially acknowledged by the software vendor(s), but the people who understood this made "business sense" knew what they were doing.

> Of course it's analogous to theft, because someone very literally ends up with less money in their pocket.

I don't think this analogy works very well here. What if the alternative is that the potential buyer would just never have purchased the product in the first place? Then there is simply no exchange that would have occurred, and the seller's "money in their pocket" was never going to be any different in this case.

To think about this analogy some more...Is it theft if one walks into a store, sees something interesting that they remember for their own benefit later, but they choose not to make any purchases? Does that deprive the shopowner of income in some way that the potential buyer should be made responsible for?

This isn't to argue that copying software (or music, or movies, and so on) is universally good or bad here, just that the theft analogy really has some serious problems with it.

I will admit perhaps I was a bit too loose with my own interpretation of the statement there. I think maybe this was influenced by my being tired of grand statements others have made in the past about the infallibility of writing code in Rust (even with liberal usage of "unsafe" without a proper understanding of what this implies).

It's all too often I see some cargo cult-style declaration of "no more C; it's all Rust" as if that has somehow solved all problems and absolved the programmer of the responsibility for ensuring their code is otherwise safe and correct (granted, Rust does make this easier to do), and IMHO this just ends up doing a disservice both to those proclaimers and ultimately to Rust itself. To be clear, this is not a statement against Rust by any means but rather a complaint against the conduct of some of its practitioners.

With that being said, I feel I really also need to state here that I absolutely do not believe the above to be the case with the announcement here...Even to the contrary, I would say, as the name "Hubris" says it all. It's great to see Rust used in practice like this, and I look forward to seeing more of the details in the code itself!

> no C code in the system. This removes, by construction, a lot of the attack surface normally present in similar systems.

Not to be too pedantic here, but it's important to note that the absence of C code, while arguably a benefit overall, doesn't by itself guarantee anything with regards to safety/security...I suppose there's going to necessarily be at least some "unsafe" Rust and/or raw assembly instructions sprinkled throughout, but I can't yet see that myself (as of the time of writing this comment, the GitHub links are responding with 404). Nonetheless, it's always refreshing to see some good documentation and source code being provided for these kinds of things. Many companies in this space, even these days, sadly continue to live by some outdated values of hiding behind "security through obscurity", which is somehow championed (though using different words) as a benefit even to their own customers, so it's refreshing that others (Oxide among them) are really starting to take a different approach and making their software/firmware publicly available for inspection by anyone inclined to do so.

And cancelling any such service should be required to be no more difficult than signing up for it was. For example, if you can sign up online with a simple form and a button click, you should be able to cancel online with a simple form and a button click.

I've been (slowly) cleaning up and releasing more pieces of my online sailing navigation simulator as free and open source software [0].

Always happy to hear from people about what they think, especially from anyone who might might be interested in contributing, or even if you just want to stop by for some friendly competition in the virtual races. :)

[0] https://8bitbyte.ca/sailnavsim/code.html

Though written nearly half a century ago and in the context of what most might consider an otherwise completely antithetical system of politics and economics compared to what we believe we have in the West today, I can't help but see how this essay remains incredibly relevant to us today, perhaps even more so in recent years than prior.

"And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill."

It's important to stand up to lies and to speak against recognized propaganda for what it is, but how capable are we as a society even to recognize the propaganda and lies when we see them? And how many of us have the courage to do so in the face of it? When so many are in survival mode just to make it from one day to the next, this action tends to be deferred to some point in the future when those large masses of people have progressively less and less left to lose, with unfortunately often predictably violent outcomes, as history has shown.

Some of the news I've seen associated with Saildrone recently has really fascinated me, like sailing one of the drones into a hurricane [0] and returning back data (including video) from the event! Just wanted to say great work to you all on that, and I look forward to seeing what else you have coming up!

[0] https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/world-first-ocean-drone-ca...

You're right that they do often show the local magnetic declination's rate of change (around the time of publishing), but even that goes out of date eventually. For relatively short periods (maybe on the order of years or possibly even a decade or two, depending on the particular location), applying this rate of change may give a good approximation of the present day's magnetic declination value, but beyond that the errors can become unacceptably large.

And this is why when doing any sort of navigation activity you should always check the publish dates on your maps/charts and act accordingly!

It probably depends on the specific application, but I would imagine the models/data that various devices in the field are using are probably updated as part of some periodic maintenance schedule. They don't change significantly enough or quickly enough to demand online updates that frequently, but I suppose every device manufacturer/maintainer has their own way of doing it for whatever reasons they might have.

In my own work, I've downloaded the dataset from NOAA and their tools to parse and work with this data to generate my own global 1-degree by 1-degree by 1-year "grid" for magnetic declination [0], along with some code [1] to read this data and be able to give you an estimated value for magnetic declination for any position on the globe for any time instant between 2020 and 2025. Before 2025, I will probably need to download the new data, run the tools again, and update my own dataset (to include values for 2025-2030 or whatever the case may be), but this will definitely be a manual process.

[0] https://github.com/ls4096/sailnavsim-core/blob/master/compas...

[1] https://github.com/ls4096/libproteus/blob/v0.6.2/include/pro...

Related to this topic, here's an interesting NOAA site with more details about Earth's magnetic declination and containing lots of data about how it changes spatially and temporally: https://ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/declination.shtml

They even have detailed data for predictions about how it is likely to change in the coming years (presently up until the year 2025).

But you still get those guarantees and benefits in the Rust implementation itself, even if not at the interface (to non-Rust code). By a similar argument, a standalone Rust program "gives up" its guarantees whenever the process makes a call to libc or to the operating system (syscalls), but this isn't really a practical problem.

The fact is that it is overwhelmingly more difficult to write and guarantee that your C code is "safe" to the same extent that a naively-written Rust program which accomplishes the same thing would be, especially as your software's complexity increases.

Is it possible to write C code that has the safety properties of Rust code which provides the same functionality? Absolutely, in theory. But will you be able to accomplish this and then guarantee this safety and have the confidence that future code changes won't break those guarantees? That becomes exceedingly more difficult to do, nevermind the extra time and effort it would take. In most cases this would be prohibitively expensive, and you'd just get on with life hoping for the best and mitigating what you can.

In my view, one of the killer features of Rust is its ability to be easily ABI-compatible with C as needed, which I see as a pragmatic feature of Rust that acknowledges the messy software reality of our world and the fact that C (or any other language) isn't just going to be "replaced" by rewriting stuff everywhere, neither anytime soon nor probably ever in totality. This lets us more readily combine the great capabilities of Rust with the enormous volumes of useful code that already exist today without resorting to dogmatic approaches of always thinking we need to rewrite the latter. The "rewrite everything in Rust" idea is fun in an academic kind of way, but in the real world economics will prevent that from happening everywhere, in a similar way that economics usually prevents you from validating and providing certain safety guarantees about your C code.

> modern chips are a lot more reselient against crashes according to the telemetry Microsoft collects

Sort of a side point, but this got me wondering...Is there something inherently less stable about these older chips, or maybe is their stability somehow a function of their lifetime that would really matter here? My own anecdata (which is from a far smaller dataset than what I imagine Microsoft would have access to) would suggest that this isn't really the case, at least for anything otherwise capable of running something like Windows 10 or Windows 11, but I'd be interested in reading more about it.

Is it that old systems tend to not be physically maintained as well thus resulting in cooling issues and more overheating?

Is it that these "crashes" are application crashes due to the attempted execution of instructions in (newer) x86 extensions not implemented by these (older) chips?

Or just too sensitive about the wrong things.

How about fake chimneys with some sort of fake stone/brick veneer on the exterior? Looks convincing from afar, but you can tell they're fake if you saw them under construction with the wood framing and plywood underneath.

Site seems to be unresponsive right now (overloaded due to HN?).

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20211012131321/https://conscious...

Your "computer" is no longer just a computer, it's a whole network of computers in itself!

This reminds me of an old Greek proverb: "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

Obscurity and secrecy seem to be so ingrained in the Apple culture that I don't see this changing anytime soon short of some kind of existential crisis or a major threat to a substantial amount of their revenue. And even then it isn't likely to be easy to turn the tide.

Right now we see these negative externalities of security vulnerabilities being "paid for" by their customers, in the vast majority of cases seemingly unwittingly, but that can only go on for so long before it backfires (even if it's a long time).

I would further add that not only do we often have a tendency to focus on specific narrow health goals while missing the big picture, but it sometimes seems we are doing things (though perhaps in some cases unwittingly without the benefit of hindsight) at the expense of broader, long-term health goals as well.

Maybe this is really just our human nature and hubris ultimately doing us in. We focus on trying to resolve short-term, acute situations where the cost-benefit calculations are perhaps more tangible and easier to measure and understand, but as a result we ultimately fail to properly consider the possible longer-term costs of our actions, even if those may turn out to be more damaging (by some measure) in the long term. In the pursuit of an ephemeral benefit today, the negative and possibly persistent effects of our actions get massively discounted, with the burdens of cleaning up after our actions ultimately placed on our descendants. If solving some problem today causes some problems down the road, then we seem so sure today that somebody else will manage to figure it out then, ad infinitum. The ratchet can only tighten things so far before something breaks.

I wonder also if perhaps avoiding a change of course, despite the costs of not doing so, in the interest of "saving face" might also be playing a role here. As I understand it (and at some risk of overgeneralizing here), this is a big cultural concept that I think might be underestimated by a lot of people in "the West" as a factor here.