mreome

For an even deeper dive into this topic...

Technology Connections: Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY

If you haven't tried it, I would take a look at Inoreader. Especially if you have YouTube channels that you want to follow (it directly integrates with YouTube subscriptions).

This is effectively a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812933

There's a fundamental difference between just providing/using a mechanism for user feedback, and interrupting someone's workflow with frequent unsolicited nagging requests for feedback.

Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._Arriba_Soft_Corp.

Fair Use - Internet Publication - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Internet_publication

  > "... the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ... found the purpose of creating the thumbnail images as previews to be sufficiently transformative"

Not exactly the same since this involved a search engine, but would seem to agree that preview thumbnails would be considered fair use.

I'm currently paying for...

Obsidian Sync (Notes)

pCloud (Cloud Backup and Sync)

Pandora (Music)

ChatGPT (Misc)

ProtonVPN (VPN)

NameCheap (Domains/Hosting)

DigitalOcean (Hosting)

Interesting... it took me longer to think through this list then I feel like it should have.

This comment lead to what I believe is my first laugh-out-loud reaction to maximizing a window.

They still make (mercury free) versions of these. The Heat/Cool version is CT87N1001 and the Heat-Only version is CT87K1004.

The last apartment I lived in installed new "smart" thermostats throughout the building. It always seemed to change the target temperature at random and I got so frustrated that I swapped it out with a dumb Honeywell one (and swapped it back when I moved out). I never found having to make the occasional manual adjustment to be an issue.

/s

Maybe "It doesn't get promoted by the algorithms" then?

The account seems legitimate though, long post and comment history with a clear set of specific interests and personal views. Some of which appear to be related to working in video/graphics. If this is astroturfing, it's beyond expert level.

Thompson's Rule for First-Time Telescope Makers: "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."

It doesn't appear to work for google subdomains. For keep.google.com gives a very blurry google logo with the edges clipped off. For mail.google.com the result is a broken image link.

It is not unheard of for a presenter to have to pay the same registration fees as a non-presenting attendee, but it is also common for invited speakers to attend for free and even have their travel and accommodation expenses covered. It is extremely abnormal (if not unheard of) for a legitimate conference to charge a speaker an additional fee for presenting.

The concern in the example is that if the data is unencrypted then there are many untrusted middlemen that also have access to the plaintext and could use it to blackmail either/both of the trusted sender/receiver.

All natural spring water. From concentrate.

Without adjusting for cost of living this kind of analysis is going to get heavily skewed in favor of the language du jour favored in select tech areas where the cost of living, and average income for almost everyone, is drastically higher. Additionally, many of those same cutting-edge technologies are not going to be represented in many lower cost-of-living areas, where there are still lots of opportunities using more mature technologies (think C# for business applications, or C for industrial applications). This will pull the averages down for those mature technologies, even though they represent incomes that may actually be higher relative to the cost of living.

Google, Facebook and Twitter can only block you from Google, Facebook and Twitter respectively. ISPs can, and do, refuse service to some people. In some areas that means effectively being banned from the entire internet.

Admittedly bans/refusals from IPSs are orders of magnitude more rare, but I find it disturbing that there there are no regulations or oversight to an ISP refusing or terminating service, when access to the internet is so fundamental to modern life, and to many people's livelihoods.

I can't do my job without high-speed internet access, but I either don't use, or can easily replace Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I would point out that according to that link this is not a right under the US constitution, but a right under the California Constitution which contains a broader affirmative right of free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that there is no implied right of free speech within a private shopping centers under the under US Constitution.

Also, at least 13 other US states with similarly worded rights to free speech in their constitutions have ruled that this does not include a right of free speech in private shopping centers, as has the European Court of Human Rights.

The problem with "tools to distinguish who's worth listening to" is that, as you said, "its an impossible judgement to make and its impossible to find a fair judge."

No individual can be knowledgeable in all the areas of science, economics, medicine, technology, etc, that would be necessary to understand and filter even a tiny slice of the daily news. Any tool will necessarily be making judgment calls for it's users in some way, and once the tool becomes the standard, those judgments will (effectively if perhaps not literally) determine who gets banned.

Secure should really be seen as a necessary component of correct security. I don’t see random() as part of security, and the problem is that people use it as such (that’s the failure of our profession as I see it). You wouldn’t want the default string equality operator to be constant time to prevent a possible timing attack, and in the same way I don’t think random() should be cryptographically secure by default. If you need secure random values, you are (should be) a domain-expert and should be selecting an appropriate cryptographically secure random generator from a security library, in the same way you would with a constant-time equality function.

I guess it's a matter of perspective over who random() is for. I see random() as for the programmers who don't know what kind of randomness they need, and don't need to know that because they just need something 'random' not something secure. I expect the domain-experts to know that it's not what they need. In my mind it's not that random() is not secure, it's that using it for something it's not intended for is insecure.

I would argue that if you're asking yourself "What is the worst that could happen if someone guesses the result of random()?" and your answer is "I don't know," then you're doing something you shouldn't be doing.

There are a lot of domains where security is a non-issue and performance is a huge concern (graphics, game logic, many kind of simulations, etc), and the default is the reverse... always just use the installed non-secure random() and if that's too slow consider other options.

Having a flag you can enable to warn about a non-secure random() usage, when it makes sense for your company/usage, sure. But banning it outright makes no sense, and the default behavior you want is very situational.

It's going to depend on your experience, for me I have often run into the exact opposite extreme... where the non-secure random is to slow for my uses-cases (games, graphics, procedural texture gen, etc) and a much faster but less statistically random generator better suited my needs.

I would argue that the default behavior should favor the novice and non-domain-expert. Should game programmers, graphic programmers, etc, be expected to know that they need to tune the performance of random() or should the domain-experts writing cryptographic algorithms be expected to understand the limitations of random() as it applies to their use-case?

It's not that you shouldn't be using it necessarily, it's just that for many cases (games, procedural generation, graphics, many kind of simulations) it's unnecessary and slow. In my experience if someone doesn't know if they need a cryptographicly secure random(), or if a given random() implementation is secure then they (a) don't need it or (b) are trying to implement something they shouldn't be.

There is a difference between generating these kind of IDs and writing the generator for these kinds of IDs. You shouldn't be rolling your own UUID generator if you don't fully understand the concerns/requirements in regards to your source of randomness.

Generally speaking, I'd agree the need for a cryptographicly secure random is niche in that it is limited to the implementation of specific libraries/functions that despite being widely used, should NOT be frequently re-implemented.

My counter would be that if someone "doesn't know whether they need secure randomness" then the problem is not that random() is not secure, it's the fact that someone is doing something they really should not be doing in the first place.

I did not intend to imply anything in regard to your positions, my intention was only to argue my interpretation of, and issues with, the current system and discuss why I think alternatives are better. Apologies if any of my posts came off as a personal attack.

I am in full agreement that proportionate representation (e.g. Maine and Nebraska) is a step in the right direction, but my personal feeling is that the presidential election should be the one place that every citizen's voice and vote should be equal. I can't imagine another situation where that should/could be the case and I think it's important to have that one place where every voice in the country can be equally involved and every vote equally weighted.

The short version of why I don't think any vote-per-district approach makes sense for the presidential election is that it will always reduce the election down to the "swing" districts that actually decide the outcome and get the most attention from the candidates. It can come down to very few votes, and a candidate pandering to the more extreme fractions can flip those sometimes-tiny margins.

I'm left-of-center in a very Blue state, but it bothers me that more conservative voices in my state have no impact on federal elections. They can't swing the state for the presidential election or congressional representatives, so they are provided little voice on the national stage. I think giving more influence to right-leaning voices from left-leaning areas, and visa-versa, could help bring the whole nation much more into balance and away from extremism.

You can try to minimize the issues I'm describing, but I think they're inherent to any vote-per-district approach such as the Electoral College. So I am seeing the two options as vote-per-district, and popular vote. Are there other solutions you're considering that I'm not seeing here?

In my mind one of the biggest negative effects of the Electoral College is that it doesn't just provide more/less national voting power, but in many cases effectively strips voters of any power over the Presidential election.

Unless you live in a swing state, you generally know how the Presidential election will turn out in your state. So if you're in the minority in a non-swing state, you know going in that your vote will have no effect on the outcome, it's effectively just going to get discarded. If you're in the majority, your individual vote still doesn't have a lot of power, anything over the 51% is irreverent and effectively discarded.

With a popular vote, every single vote counts. No matter how big the majority or how small the minority in a state, every vote still has power. Nobody's vote is invalidated by where they happen to live.

Part of my point is that states, and often congressional districts, do not really represent a "common culture and people" in a lot of cases. NY for example is a Blue state, but is Red by area. Those same boundaries can also introduce arbitrary borders that divide people with a common culture and life experience. The problem with the Electoral College is that it's just become a set of meaningless rules and lines that the political parties game to their advantage. I'd be less opposed if it weren't winner take all by state, and even less opposed if the electoral college districts ignored state lines and actually represented real cultural and environmental boundaries (instead of gerrymandered puzzle pieces) while trying to strike a reasonable balance between population and area. Given the virtual impossibility of that, I think that a popular vote is more reasonable then the Electoral College.

We're trying to represent a diverse set of people and industries by dividing them into a false binary partitioned by largely arbitrary state lines, many of which were defined over 200 years ago, and leaving the vote for the presidency up to a tiny fraction of the population in a few of those arbitrary partitions. How is that equal or equitable? All states have some combination of rural, urban, and all the shades of gray in-between. Texas has Austin, Massachusetts is over half rural, NY is a Blue state that's mostly Red by area. Why should someone's vote have no weight because of where they live? I'm not saying that a popular vote would be perfect, I'm just saying that the Electoral College is absurd.