petmon

Rust sometimes throws away errors when they would be awkward to handle - close() in Drop and println!() are important examples. A Hello World with a closed stdout will correctly fail in C but "succeed" in Rust because it ignores EBADF.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1014

Did Apple claim it would impact sandboxing? I don't think they did.

A realistic example: today if your iOS app wants to track users, it must go through AppTrackingTransparency.framework, which allows the user to opt-out, and use the device’s advertising identifier which the user may reset.

Of course this cannot be enforced by the kernel; it's enforced by App Store review. Sideloaded apps would presumably not be subject to this rule.

Epic Games tried side loading Fortnite on Android, and then went back to the Play Store. Here's their statement:

Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.

The case against MS was abusive licensing practices. MS blocked OEMs from choosing their own default browser, and charged OEMs a license fee even if the computers weren't running Windows. That doesn't apply to Apple which does not license their OS.

Android and ChromeOS both technically allow other browser engines, but in practice non-Chromium browsers are a rounding error on those platforms. You can technically allow other browser engines, but that does not create a robust browser market.

It's not "enforced;" it is managed through various means including namespaces, header includes, and prefixes. For example, SQLite is a library whose functions all start with 'sqlite3'. In practice it works well enough: name collisions are uncommon and can be managed.

Yes. You can do a quick and dirty estimate working backwards from the article's own figure of 2.6 million COVID hospitalizations in the US. If you very generously assume 1/3 of Americans have been infected, you get a hospitalization rate of 2.3%. If you assume the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, then the risk to the unvaccinated must be higher.

To be clear the 0.89% figure was obtained by dividing hospitalizations by population, so it includes many unvaccinated people who have not caught COVID (yet).

The chance that an unvaccinated person who is COVID-positive will require hospitalization is around 3%.

Miners have real expenses: electricity, depreciation, etc. Miners also generarte revenue, $45 million per day is a reasonable estimate [1]. This revenue is extracted from the Bitcoin system through both transaction fees and inflation (creating new Bitcoins), but these are sold in portion to pay real expenses, with presumably some profit.

We can estimate 300k transactions per day, which implies about $150 revenue per transaction. Miner revenue is your cost: it is what they extract from the Bitcoin system.

One Bitcoin transaction costs on the order of $150. It's really expensive.

1: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue

Do not question the paperclip AI.

GP does not "get to decide" but hopes to persuade. One possible grim future is that home solar panels do not displace fossil fuels, but instead suffer the same fate as GPUs: eaten up by cryptocurrencies which produce negligible economic value but have a bottomless appetite through their role as a speculative investment. This is terrible for the climate. How do we avoid it?

Cryptocurrencies, unlike trading cards, have large negative externalities. They are causing component shortages, driving up GPU prices, enabling new scams and ransomware, wasting electricity, accelerating climate change.

It might be justifiable if cryptocurrencies were providing real economic value, but if we're drawing analogies to Pokemon cards, then they are net-negative value to humanity and we should hope for them to fail as soon as possible.

No expectation of future returns. People who hold cash expect to lose money.

Probably Simpson's Paradox. A 59 year old is both more likely to be vaccinated and to die from any cause, compared to a 10 year old.

Please edit said comment to add a /s or similar, its intent wasn't apparent to me either.

Fantasy sports is explicitly betting, where any winnings are acknowledged to come from the losses of other players. On average, players will lose because of the house rake, but skillful players may beat the odds.

Axie Infinity seems to be something else, where everyone can "win" just by playing the game. For example, daily quests provide SLP coin which is minted from thin air; there's no skill or risk involved here. The only way this can be sustained is with a flux of new players.

Typically people spend money to play games. How can any game generate net income for players? It's not Wimbledon where fans pay to watch.

I think any income must come from a stream of new players, meaning it's a Ponzi scheme.

It's your opinion that Safari is inferior and broken. IMO desktop Safari is better on UI, privacy, and features like autofilling SMS 2FA codes. It's "behind" on APIs like WebUSB or Idle Detection, and that's another plus: I don't want that stuff.

> Chrome became popular and is popular because it works.

Google promotes Chrome by leveraging the most valuable real estate on the web: the google.com homepage, and GMail popups. This ad space is unavailable to everyone else. They also bundled Chrome with Adobe Flash installers.

I agree Chrome is a good product, but Google uses their influence in search and email to gain Chrome market share. That's fine, it's their prerogative, but it means Chrome's rise is not pure organic growth based on its technical merit.

Yes and very much so. Look at the GPU market: probably crypto has stimulated some GPU additional capacity, but overall crypto has been highly net-negative for non-crypto GPU uses. Imagine if crypto did to the solar market what it has already done to the GPU market.

Yes we agree that Apple has the technical capability of decrypting Messages that have been backed up by users who have enabled iCloud Backup, even if those messages were previously E2E encrypted. I think Apple should fix that.

Your link describes in detail what Apple can and cannot read. They seem to want their customers to know. So how did you conclude "Apple assumes you desire privacy from everyone but Apple?"

If Messages E2E crypto were backdoored, then why would the FBI take an interest in iCloud backups?

I too wish iCloud backups were E2E encrypted, but that is a very different claim from "Apple assumes you desire privacy from everyone but Apple." Apple knows you want privacy from Apple; their privacy policy is quite explicit about what data Apple cannot see.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209110

How does Apple treat Roblox and Minecraft differently than Fortnite?

Phone number is a valid point, but in many other ways Apple actively avoids collecting its customer data. Location data, Messages, Apple Card transactions, health and home, Siri are examples.

Wait, it's not like Filecoin, where the space is made available to other people? The storage is just being deliberately wasted? That sounds ridiculous.

Is this competing with Bitcoin in the sense that maybe I could buy a coffee with it? Or is it competing with S3?

Lots of people photos to their wall, or change their profile pic, etc.

Because the company is large and the churn in the app is very high, it is hard to keep track of what's happening across the app.

Does Facebook activate the camera during feed? The answer may depend on which user is logged in (A/B test), which device is being used, which version of the app (weekly releases), etc. A definitive answer may depend on when you ask, or not exist at all.

Maybe this is the default behavior, but it's possible that this is an experiment that Maddux happened to fall into. You can imagine that Facebook would be interested in gauging facial reactions to feed items.

It also may legitimately be a bug. It's reasonable that if you navigate to a camera surface, and then back, that the camera is not turned off. Because Facebook releases so often, the cost of bugs is reduced, so the number of bugs rises.

(Not trying to defend Fb here, simply answering the question.)

The EC supports battleground states, NOT rural states. Maine is very rural, Florida is not, but Florida is where the campaigning occurred.

This distorts our national priorities. For example ethanol subsidies are so high because Iowa is a battleground state.

We could conduct a popular vote where a Wyoming resident gets 3x the vote of a California resident. This would be an enormous improvement over the EC and I would support it.