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throwawayapples

154 karma · joined October 16, 2021

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throwawayapples··on DDG founder says Google's phone, manufacturing partnerships thwart competition
> I wouldn't hold up GrapheneOS as a good example of more freedom compared to Apple or Google tbh.

I don't see why we can't have both, but this doesn't really a fair criticism of GP's comment. The specific word GP used was 'privacy', not 'freedom', and you are attacking GrapheneOS's stance on the latter, not the former.

GrapheneOS is more focused on privacy over freedom, as you said ("their stance on user privacy is so extreme that it gets in the way of user freedom"). They have chosen to prioritize one over the other.

> For freedom, I'd moreso point towards projects like LineageOS.

This might be true, but LineageOS doesn't have access to microcode either, and certainly GrapheneOS is more 'private' than Lineage, assuming that GrapheneOS hasn't been compromised either internally or at some point in the AOSS supply chain. Except for niche mfgs like PinePhone et al, Google is probably the most free of the major manufacturers (ironically, less private but more free).

I agree that we should aim for both freedom (as in free speech, not necessarily as in free beer although it'd be nice!) and privacy.

Both are critically important, and the efficacy of the latter depends in large part on the former.

throwawayapples··on Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
We're commenting, not stating something as fact.

And if that's the closest we'll get to a fact, then what if it's not? .. it's actually worse than no fact at all.

throwawayapples··on OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
no way even ChatGPT is this nuts.

Ok, well, maybe it is. but a magic 8-ball would have been better than this.

throwawayapples··on OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired
and the Apple (II etc) vs Mac teams warring with each other.
throwawayapples··on Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?
Kara Swisher gets in big public fights with CEOs and wears dark sunglasses in order to be cool.

In other words, she's definitely not immune to bias and might easily want to shape the story to her own ends or to favor her own friends.

We're not really talking about facts here.. it's really just speculation and hearsay, so who can say if she's just talking?

throwawayapples··on Is Delaware the cheapest place to incorporate?
Texas has a larger up-front cost (about $300 one-time), but no annual fees at all, no income tax for corporations or individuals.

Unlike Wyoming and Nevada, Texas does have franchise tax, but that is 0 until you exceed $1.23M in revenue, and it maxes out at .331% or .75% after that (https://comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/franchise/).

Delaware has all of these (personal, which wouldn't apply if you live elsewhere, corporate income tax, corporate franchise tax, minimum $400 annually). Wyoming costs only $50 to incorporate but has a $50 annual filing fee.

Also, you'll probably need to file foreign corporate status if you have employees in Texas but are incorporated elsewhere, which is about $700 (one-time).

throwawayapples··on Is Delaware the cheapest place to incorporate?
The Court of Chancery nearly always rules with the board (VCs) over shareholders (founders). VCs like that.
throwawayapples··on Munich court tells Netflix to stop using H.265 video coding to stream UHD
Oh, no, that's not true at all. An invention might not even be possible, let alone having a clear and (literally, provably) correct specification of inputs and outputs. Just seeing that it exists, to say nothing of getting the correct proportion of inputs and outputs, could shave a decade off your invention cycle.

Take, for example, the nuclear bomb. Just knowing that it could be done put you ten steps ahead. What if cold fusion or a warp drive were known to be possible because you could see it (even if from a great distance with little detail)? Airplane manufacturers leapt ahead (literally) after the Wright Brothers.

A tremendous amount of effort for worthy inventions is often involved simply in proving that it can be done. Once you know it can be done, you don't have to prove it anymore, and also large companies will throw buckets of money at a clone of something that's proven to work.

A patent (sometimes) prevents that -- at least, when everything is working as it should be. (In this case, clearly not!)

throwawayapples··on We've learned nothing from the SolarWinds hack
I'd settle for a source analysis and reproducible builds for just our myriad open source dependencies. All it takes is a single developer to be compromised in the thousands throughout a typical stack..
throwawayapples··on Thiel's Unicorn Success Is Awkward for Colleges
> If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.

At the highest-level universities, nearly every applicant is already exceptional before they're even accepted, and yet:

Even if you carefully selected 100 or so people out of nearly any university, it's statistically unlikely that a Fields medal winner, Nobel prize laureate, or unicorn founder would come to fruition out of any of them, even if we allow more than a decade.

throwawayapples··on Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes
Yes; you might have seen mosquito "dunks" that are small donut shaped things that you can drop into flower pots or other areas that don't drain properly. They dissolve over time. There are also mosquito traps (bird-house sized or even just small plastic bags that you cut open). They can be filld with water to activate.
throwawayapples··on BoringDB: A high-performance key-value store built on SQLite
Here's what it's focused on, targeting Themelio cryptocurrency's requirements:

> In a blockchain, the behavior we almost always want is for all transactions on the database to be serializable and for database integrity to be guaranteed — that is, a transaction either happens completely or not all, and crashes/power failures cannot cause inconsistency — but we do not need strong durability. We don’t need to ensure that a information saved to disk is still there if the system crashes immediately, since generally Themelio will tolerate “traveling back in time” a few seconds.

> The combination of extremely robust serializability and integrity with eventual durability is hard to find. SQLite in WAL mode with PRAGMA synchronous = NORMAL is close, but directly using SQLite still has relatively poor performance with the extremely fragmented reads and writes Themelio nodes create. LMDB and friends simply give no option besides either synchronizing every transaction or leaving database integrity up to chance every time a power failure might happen.

> ... We actively encourage use of BoringDB outside of Themelio; we think it’s the perfect choice whenever you need a single-process, embedded key-value database with extreme reliability but also reasonable write performance.

It's written in Rust with a permissive license.

throwawayapples··on NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles
>>> you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence. What you say publicly can & will be used against you in the court of law.

"spouting off..used against you in a court of law"

But, even if the OP didn't intend for these two to be tied together in this way, then a very strong constitutional right still exists for spouting off, so whether conflation occurred or not is moot.

throwawayapples··on NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles
"Spouting off" is an idiom that means, essentially, "angrily complaining". It does not mean publicly confessing to a crime.
throwawayapples··on NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles
Of course, if you incriminate yourself while spouting off (or while engaged in any other activity, like writing in your diary), then you are producing evidence of a different crime, but spouting off is not a crime in itself.
throwawayapples··on NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles
The next sentence: "What you say publicly can & will be used against you in the court of law", so governmental consequences is what the OP was referring to.

It seems like the OP might have been conflating free speech with admissions of guilt for other crimes, but "spouting off" is not, and must never be, a crime.

throwawayapples··on NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles
> you do not have a constitutional right to spouting off in the public square without consequence

Actually, in the U.S., you literally have that specific constitutional right.

The First Amendment protects "spouting off in the public square without consequence" via the Freedoms of Assembly (the right to gather), Speech (say what you like without consequence), Religion (believe what you like), and the right to petition the government.

Loud complaining or even vague and non-specific threats (such as "I'll make you pay for this!") are actually protected by the First Amendment.

There are very rare and limited exceptions, such as "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

throwawayapples··on Texas just got closer to blackouts than it has since 2021. What happened?
Unpopular opinion (and so strange that a red state like Texas did it this way), but: Texas is far too dependent on wind power, fossil fuel plants (even natural gas!) being shut down at the behest of the federal govt, and definitely not enough nuclear, although those can take quite a few years to come online.
throwawayapples··on North Korean campaign targeting security researchers
North Korea is a nice foil, because then you don't have to cast aspersions onto trading partners.

"Look, see? NK. We even copied some Korean words into the comments."

throwawayapples··on North Korean campaign targeting security researchers
> Upon discovery, all identified websites and domains are added to Safe Browsing to protect users from further exploitation.

dbgsymbol.com is NOT showing up with warning in Safe Browsing on my Brave browser. (warning, unknown vector)

throwawayapples··on Molly Holzschlag has died
Extortionist medical insurers coupled with regulatory capture.
throwawayapples··on OpenTF repository is now public
Terror Form has a nice ring to it.
throwawayapples··on Ask HN: Are SaaS free tiers disappearing?
> Most companies with 20 servers aren't going to turn into 2000 server companies.

But companies with 20 servers might actually turn into 2000 server companies once they close their seed round or series A, and you risk throwing out those lottery tickets.

It might follow a power-law distribution like with venture capital in general - one blow-out success to cover the ten lesser investments.

throwawayapples··on AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing customers' clouds'
Pets aren't that bad if your pets are a few elephants.
throwawayapples··on OpenSSH versus SSH
only this one instance? what about port randomization or Curve25519?
throwawayapples··on AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing customers' clouds'
Yep. It's not like either sysadmin or devops are harder than or easier than the other... they're just different.

Actually, seems like managing k8s is an order of time expenditure greater than managing an old-school F5 with a bunch of Unixy web servers behind it.

throwawayapples··on The FAA has granted SpaceX permission to launch its Starship rocket
Matamoros is.. not in Texas?

The Texas side of the border is way safer than Matamoros.

throwawayapples··on GM’s decision to ditch Apple CarPlay, Android Auto sparks backlash
> I'm not sure which I want less - the phone company getting data from my car, or the car company getting data from the phone.

Insane and creepy. but at least Google knows something of security. Most car manufacturers do not.

throwawayapples··on GM’s decision to ditch Apple CarPlay, Android Auto sparks backlash
I guess I'm a Luddite. I drive old (but still nice!) cars for security reasons, and they typically have only basic radios+bluetooth (or I add bluetooth or Avantree Roadtrip) and lighter plug chargers, so I can run audio through the car speakers. I don't care that much about nav except when I'm traveling, and then a Garmin GPS stuck on the dash works out pretty well.
throwawayapples··on Libreboot: HP Elite 8200 SFF support added (plus more desktops coming soon)
Actually that's a good question. Perhaps an answer is that they are looking for still-supported firmware or needed WOL as such a core feature and perhaps apps couldn't just run on just Linux, but it is still a good question: why run a closed-source (some might call spyware) operating system on top of libreboot, the opposite.
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