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rickycook

692 karma · joined June 16, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rickycook; my proof: https://keybase.io/rickycook/sigs/V0nSHpU2l5arnKSd953WEYUlLTx5mZIo4uHIAlhJEA4 ]
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rickycook··on Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft
i _adore_ matrix! keep up the good work!
rickycook··on The AirPods Pro “Rattlegate”
best not talk about the price of medicine in USD; people might lose their lives
rickycook··on How to Make Python Wait
i’d say that multiprocessing probably covers 90% of “do it in the background” tasks, and asyncio covers 90% of async networking tasks

futures, uvloop, tornado, twisted, coros, gevent, etc are kinda just all related to, or do similar to asyncio

threading is kinda not as useful as you might like in python because of the GIL (simplistically, assume that python can only do 1 thing at once regardless of having multiple threads available or not until you know why that’s not always the case)

rickycook··on Is Death Reversible?
a core dump of the brain is pretty damn big... so that’s not really saying much; just that maybe we don’t have a man data to restore from
rickycook··on Perfectly Cropped
and i hate that they removed it in the latest generation! i know you can do the hold down on space instead, and i know that you can then tap with a second finger, but there’s so much more you could do much quicker with the force touch keyboard!
rickycook··on US Constitution – A Git repo with history of edits
i’d argue that it’s not “designed to fit our workflow” so much as designed around a subpar, but flexible tool that everyone was using. that don’t make it good; that just makes it ingrained
rickycook··on Let's Encrypt makes certs for 30% of web domains
who ever said free? they could make a paid service like LE with automated renewals etc that integrates better with enterprise software, or that does better audit logging, or any number of things. let’s encrypt is a great service, but there’s still plenty of money to be made off overzealous corporate security policies
rickycook··on exFAT in the Linux kernel
advertising yes, but also why they are kind of lax on piracy: the real money is in corporate, so you have to keep people using your ecosystem at home so that’s what they want to use at work
rickycook··on Show HN: Zero-Config Documentation Websites for Python
i don’t think people were labelling him a nazi; i think they had issue with their own projects, or their name being accidentally associated with nazis
rickycook··on How Does Esperanto Sound?
the very point of esperanto is that nothing is of “similar difficulty”, so even comparing to spanish is disingenuous
rickycook··on New Electric Motor Could Boost Efficiency of EVs, Scooters, and Wind Turbines
they did call out scooters and drones, so id guess you’re right
rickycook··on Information operations directed at Hong Kong
i agree with you completely, but a law is far more clear cut than complex social dynamics.

the outcome is similar in either way, and both are equally bad, but one is far easier to define specific actions, and specific parties that are not acting correctly.

rickycook··on Information operations directed at Hong Kong
it’s not either or
rickycook··on States to Move Forward with Antitrust Probe of Big Tech Firms
have you ever tried to start a competitor to facebook? plenty of platforms have, and you haven’t ever heard of them because whilst better, facebook has a monopoly by way of critical mass... it’s almost impossible to pull significant populations away from their platform: not even google could, and google plus was an excellent product; far better than facebook in almost every way
rickycook··on Information operations directed at Hong Kong
i think the problem is that the current chinese government is going further and further away from what average chinese citizens would probably want, and them using misinformation to keep order

hong kong has demonstrated, with some of the largest protests in global history, that they do not want the chinese government to interfere with the autonomy that they currently have. the chinese government has responded with misinformation to sway their population so that they can continue to constrain hong kong in ways that they don’t want

the point isn’t really that the chinese government isn’t better than an alternative, it’s that it’s going in a direction further away from what it’s citizens would generally agree they want, and not allowing people the knowledge to even know it’s happening, let alone the freedom to have a discussion about alternatives

rickycook··on Information operations directed at Hong Kong
true, and that’s definitely a problem, but government is a bigger issue because they have the ability to force a population: corporations can only influence (we can have a different discussion about how corporations give you “choice” but not really, but i think they’re different cases, and government is clear cut)
rickycook··on Updating our advertising policies on state media
i tend to agree with the sentiment, however i’d say the important distinction is that a government has the ability to force things on people, a corporation only had the ability to influence “choice”... we can discuss whether that choice is truly a choice in many cases, but i think the initial difference is enough for it to stand on its own on the other side of a clear line in the sand
rickycook··on Judge claims mobile phone is not a computer
because the data on the phone is containing or designed to contain data for use by a phone because a phone isn’t a computer...?
rickycook··on Die With Me – A chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery
upsetting, yet expected
rickycook··on Should You Get a Scary UV Photo of Your Skin Damage?
maybe in america, but in australia we have a huge amount more UV because of the hole in the ozone layer. i was in the US for the first time a few weeks ago, and the first thing i noticed was “huh... i didn’t know that going out in summer, the sun could literally feel different”... in australia it feels, no joke, like you’ve stuck your arm under an oven: you can feel the dry heat and UV. in the US, the sun was just a nice warm heat.

please, it’s a big problem over here... people should go outside (and we have a very “beaches and surf” type culture), but sunscreen is hugely important, and often forgotten.

rickycook··on U.S. Farmers Stung by Tariffs Now Face a $3.5B Corn Loss
for some people it isn’t, but i think he’s referring to the fact that food is pretty damn far toward the base of maslows hierarchy. many people (myself included) believe that a measure of a society is how far up the triangle you can get before needing to do something you don’t want to do to reach higher (eg work in order to improve your hobby skills)
rickycook··on Alarming surge in drug-resistant HIV uncovered
then get a new doctor. there is no medical rationale behind this, and they are letting irrational personal feelings get in the way of your good health
rickycook··on Intro Guide to Dockerfile Best Practices
there is no other behaviour that you’d want for that situation though... garbage collection is necessary, and if your cryptographically pinned content is deleted, you want something to fail rather than change to different content
rickycook··on Choosing the Wrong Lane in the Race to 5G
all concepts you mention aren’t conceptual problems. the world is better with the concepts of technology-assisted taxi hailing, and not having to carry cash (i think you’re basically alone on this one; this is the biggest and best technology change in my life in years)

regardless of your opinions of the specific problems with the current platforms, they’re not problems with the concepts... and those concepts are enabled or improved by high bandwidth mobile internet

and regardless, you’re kinda missing the point: 5g will absolutely enable new businesses (and more importantly new concepts), because it’s happened with every single bandwidth upgrade we have ever been through! you can’t conceptualise them now, because nobody has yet! if you could, you’d have started uber before uber, google before google, etc

rickycook··on Breaking max efficiency of solar cells by activating 2 electrons with 1 photon
from what i understand (and i could be wrong), you could make biofuels using atmospheric co2, alguae, heat from the grid during low demand... when you burn it, it releases that co2, but when you’re not it acts as a big carbon sink

could be totally off base, or very much a “not yet industrialised” process... but the idea is super cool none the less

rickycook··on I Opted Out of Facial Recognition at the Airport – It Wasn't Easy
they have a copy of a static image that they likely already have access to. very different to a high res alternate image, from a different angle, with a different expression, in different lighting
rickycook··on The New HAProxy Data Plane API: Two Examples of Programmatic Configuration
well you’ll be pleased to know that the data plane API is a sidecar. you don’t have to run it if you don’t want to :)
rickycook··on Senate passes bill to decrease grid digitization, move toward manual control
possibly, but what do you consider “write ability”? someone mentioned in another comment that if you control enough high power devices that report status to the grid (eg car chargers) so that the grid can take action (so read only but some other system uses it to take action) you can do plenty of damage

they don’t really have write access, but they kinda do?

rickycook··on Senate passes bill to decrease grid digitization, move toward manual control
does modern nuclear eschew digital controls? i mean... i’m sure they have manual cutoffs and sensors that humans monitor; can’t have some rogue hacker able to turn a nuclear plant into a huge catastrophe from the other side of the world and all...

but i’d think they’d be largely automated to reduce human error?

rickycook··on People Experiencing Hardship Using Tech Don't Need Your Judgmental Bullshit
people experiencing hardship having phones is an incredible thing. it allows people to help themselves, and is the reason services like https://askizzy.org.au/ exist
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