theclaw

I think the Echo may be worth more to Amazon than it is to the people who buy them for use as glorified kitchen timers because it allows them to build a social graph which is very useful, when combined with purchase histories, for targeting ads.

I very much distrust it and am not at all surprised by this news story. I think that people need to learn that privacy is not about having nothing to hide, it's about not being taken for a ride.

The MIT license appears to be on their client-side SDK. They are accusing Otonomo of cloning their API, not their SDK.

It was profits. Airbus did effectively same thing with the A320 Neo in 2010, and it became the fastest selling commercial aircraft in history [0]. Boeing clearly was unhappy with that and needed to do something to compete.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320neo_family#Orders_a...

I don't work in this field. Do you have to publish the findings from this analysis? Is it possible that no such analysis was done because the MCAS system had to be kept quiet?

The article states that MCAS was implemented "on the hush-hush," which makes me wonder if it could even be subject to the same level of quality control as other features of the software.

It might have had to bypass some of the more stringent parts of Boeing's development process to avoid appearing in documentation that the customer or the FAA might see.

Why did this vanish from the front page?

I thought wine is not an emulator:)

If I recall correctly this is exactly what .net’s ‘Distinct()’ LINQ extension method does.

If you're in more than one workspace it can take literally 5-10 seconds to transition between them while showing some BS motivational message.

Because new diagnostics mean new pilot training, meaning the new plane is not economical to buy when compared to the competition, meaning no plane at all.

Those other Boeing jets required costly new training. Boeing were trying to build an update to the 737 that did not require this.

There also exists possibilities for far more danger. As you increase compute, you can run more code, and build more complicated interdependent components that are more difficult to test, especially for the sort of unexpected scenarios that "dynamic" behaviour would warrant. You would basically have a whole new plane - the opposite of what the 737 MAX 8 was intended to be.

It's a moot point anyway - the could not change the UI beyond converting physical dials to virtual ones, because that would have required retraining which they wanted to avoid.

Even if they could have changed the UI they still needed to hide the existence of the MCAS system, again to avoid retraining, so it's doubtful such a clear an helpful error message would be allowable.

> It's definitely a failure in the development process, for the software that is supposed to work in some bigger time frame, and not only shortly.

This is why I've recently started abstracting time/date calls in all my work so that I can test using arbitrary dates/times rather than using the various "now" library calls directly.

This has already had the side-benefit of allowing me to deal with stuff like the time arbitrarily going backwards when NTP synchronises the clock. I don't typically rely on wallclock time for sequencing, this just keeps things a little more robust.

I very much enjoyed this. Got to level 17 before I ran out of enthusiasm. Level 14 was a sly puzzle, had me stumped for some time.

As a driver and infrequent cyclist I’d say the reason cyclists are irritating is because they’re not as predictable as cars or motorcycles, and they’re also way more fragile. When one is around I have to keep one eye on them the whole time to make sure they have space.

One thing I would change is to mandate proper turn signals on bicycles. Some people aren’t good at hand signals, and you have to take your hand off the brake to make them, which just seems ludicrously unsafe to me.

Seems a reasonable assumption to me. If someone is waiting to let someone else pull into a sideroad shouldn’t you wait as well? It’s dangerous to overtake on the passenger side regardless of what vehicle you’re using. You should overtake on the driver’s side so people can see you easily.

I spent some time looking into this and found I was wrong - CRTC does generate linear addresses but the beeb (and possibly the CPC) translates them to the character-based screen format in hardware.

I think both machines must use a Motorola 6845 CRT controller, which is intended for character-based screens. It does not scan the video RAM sequentially, but in the way described by the GP, (all first char rows, then all second char rows, etc, with each chars rows stored sequentially in RAM)

They do ignore the hosts file, it’s true - but they don’t ignore windows built-in firewall. I used it to blacklist a bunch of hosts when I had wireshark open to diagnose an unrelated problem and noticed all my keystrokes in the start menu search box were being sent to MS, as well as details about every application I launched. The search box keystrokes were going to onedrive - presumably to show me files matching from there, but I don’t see why they can’t download a list of files and locally search that. Sending every keystroke in that box is unnecessary.

Why? You are now paying a higher rate than the big guys. 20% across the board would have been the right move, not this.

DarkReader is great if you just want want dark-mode. It automates what used to take me ages overriding CSS in Stylish. I’m fairly confident it’s not spyware.

The youtube video[1] of his defcon talk is super interesting -although some of his concerns about serving malicious scripts from bitsquatted domains are thankfully mitigated by widespread adoption of TLS.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ8s1JwtNas

An eight-colour code does not seem smart for printed codes where most printers use only four inks. A colour code using cyan, magenta, yellow, white and black might be more reliable (although yellow could easily be confused with white). The PDF suggests 256-colour codes are supported, but that would mean luminosity is a factor, and I can't see how that would ever be reliable if the code is intended to be scanned with a camera.

Yep, seems mostly broken for me.

If a pub or cafe had microphones on all the tables and a proprietor who knew the intimate details of every conversation that ever happened there I don’t think it would have a lot of customers.

I think you’re suggesting that the free speech argument is overblown when it comes to online discussion forums, and I agree with that - they can, should and do set house rules.

The problem that Facebook faces is that it has become bigger than government, and so people expect it to obey similar rules regarding the protection of free speech, but Facebook does not have the power to make actual laws, so it is not required to protect free speech on its platform. Free speech is intended to protect democracy from governments that would enact laws to limit dissent. It is not relevant to Facebook.

The argument that a product whose business model is based on artificially weighting communications between disparate groups for profit and engagement should protect peoples right to inject whichever provocative messages they want into it in the name of free speech seems like a perversion of the principal to me, because the result is an erosion of democracy and human rights as we have seen.

They absolutely should ban people for posting stuff that doesn’t align with their brand, and in a free market those people can find another forum for discussion with more permissive rules. Preferably an open, decentralised network that does not rely on ad revenue or have any incentive to automatically promote the growth of groups of algorithmically selected like-minded individuals.

And yes, I am ignoring all the good things about FB here. I don’t believe Facebook has amounted to a net good for society, however good its intentions.

The algorithm found out that people are most engaged when they’re arguing with one another about provocative nonsense, and worked to create as much of it as possible.

The ads are content too and probably need more and better policing than the content they appear next to. Literally anyone can buy a Facebook ad and target it with exquisite precision to people who will agree with it and not report it, and since it’s their main source of revenue they’re not inclined to turn people away.

This is amazing to see - completely unpotted AGC! I've been following Curiousmarc's channel for a while and it's great to see this. Anyone interested in AGC stuff might also want to check out this video from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress that exhaustively explains how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx7Lfh5SKUQ

Be careful with the TTL RGB levels, though. You should add some resistors.

I certainly learned some things today. I didn’t realise ‘open source’ had such a specific meaning, and I understand why it’s useful to establish the definition so there is no ambiguity.

Reading the replies to this thread is like watching hippies fight over the definition of free love.

Open source doesn’t mean anything unless we all agree on one definition, and while idealistic developers might reject the idea of central authorities to uphold the meaning of things now, they forget that it was idealistic developers just like them that realised an agreed definition was required and established the OSI 20 years ago to uphold it.

The OSI is not the man telling you what you can and can’t do - a shared and agreed definition of what open source is clearly benefits all of us, and if you just invent your own definition through ignorance or sheer bloody mindedness then you’re not legally in the wrong, but you could find yourself embarassed, exploited, or otherwise screwed through not understanding what the consensus definition is.