Aaargh20318

> They will argue that the decision was politicized,

It’s not ‘politicized’, it’s the gateway to all Dutch government services and as such it is inherently political.

> insufficiently reasoned, or disproportionate because binding technical/legal safeguards would have solved the risks...

There are no legal safeguards against the CLOUD act. There can be no technical or legal safeguards as long as the physical hardware is owned by a US company.

I still haven’t read Raising Steam. One last time to experience a new Discworld novel, I’m saving it for a rainy day.

> we show that cyclic voltammetry can be used without any additional sample preparation

Even if it offered no additional data over a refractometer just the fact can be used directly without any sample preparation would be a huge win. Refractometers are a PITA to use.

Exactly, so that problem needs to be solved. Labour and income should not be linked.

> What AI is being sold as right now is not really productivity. In many domains, productivity is already sufficient. What’s being sold is workforce reduction.

And workforce reduction is a nobel goal. In fact, I think it's one of the most important things humanity should focus on. We should strive for a workforce of zero. Humans currently was an enormous amount of their life working instead of more worthwhile pursuits.

I despise the rhetoric around this, we didn't "lose jobs" over AI, we saved ourselves a lot of work. What it does do is highlight a problem in our current society: the link between labour and the access to resources (e.g. money).

I don't think that AI is the ultimate answer to the problem of work, but it can contribute to it.

If you, like me, are not a baby cow and don’t drink milk I can recommend the ECM Puristika. It’s a tiny, single-boiler E61 that’s just purely for making espresso (no steam wand, no hot water spout). Heats up in about 15 minutes.

I’m missing Curly’s Law: https://blog.codinghorror.com/curlys-law-do-one-thing/

“A variable should mean one thing, and one thing only. It should not mean one thing in one circumstance, and carry a different value from a different domain some other time. It should not mean two things at once. It must not be both a floor polish and a dessert topping. It should mean One Thing, and should mean it all of the time.”

I don’t know this specific law, I just know how it works in the EU with the GDPR. Of course any company that has your PII has to follow the law, but it matters which entity is the one that has is the end customer for your data. They are the one that has to have a legal basis for even collecting that data and they are the one you as a use deal with. If they use a sub-contractor then that’s an internal matter for them and not something you as the subject has to deal with. Of course they have to have a DPA in place with the sub-contractor and they have the responsibility to make sure the sub-contractor follows the law. Likewise the sub-contractor has to make sure that their client has a sound legal basis for processing the PII.

For example: if a bank outsources part of their KYC process to a third party, that’s not something you have to concern yourself with, you only deal with the bank.

Yes, I’m a huge proponent of global unification. It’s ridiculous that we have different cultures, languages and laws based on between which imaginary lines on a map you live.

Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.

It’s the other way around. Flock is the subprocessor for whoever hired them to collect data. If they are collecting data on behalf a city or municipality, those are the entities you need to address.

I’m a Dutch native and if it were up to me we’d switch to English. I think it’s dumb that small country like us feels the need to maintain its own language.

It is a massive disadvantage. It means that we’re always late with new stuff because the Dutch market is so small no one wants to make the effort of building Dutch versions.

A problem with this approach could be that you're now only testing the feature with the kind of people who would sign up for an A/B test. This group may not be representative of your whole user-base.

Exactly. This need to be social is being used against us. Not just to sell yoghurt, it’s weaponized by the social media networks to manipulate entire countries.

There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t.

I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.

Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.

To learn, to create, to grow? None of these things necessarily involve other humans.

Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.

Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.

Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.

The problem with a $200 laptop is that you get a laptop that's worth $200.

I use my 13” iPad Pro M4 almost as much as my MacBook Pro. I’m typing this on it right now. It is by far more comfortable for consuming any kind of media than a laptop.

If I’m researching something and I need to read any significant amount of text I’m going to grab my iPad and find a comfortable spot instead of sitting at my desk. Even though I have 2 big monitors.

I also have a Magic Keyboard that I can simply pop on if I need to write any significant amount, like this, and pop it off again for pure consumption.

It’s an amazing device for watching video (the tandem OLED looks incredible) and I often use the pencil to sketch out ideas.

I can't remember where I read it, but it always stuck with me: most cases of depression can be solved with a one-time deposit of $20 million in the patient's bank account.

A lot of the time, what is diagnosed as depression is actually a very valid reaction to being in a shitty situation. I myself ended up at a psychiatrist due to being stuck in a shitty job with me being too exhausted and anxious to do anything about it. What eventually 'cured' me wasn't any of the sessions with the shrink but being laid off in a company restructuring with a nice severance package that allowed me to take a couple of months to decompress and look for a job that was a better fit.

Ever done BlackBerry development?

It’s so funny when people complain about the $99 fee for the Apple development program being developer-unfriendly. Back in the day, RIM/BlackBerry wasn’t so much developer-unfriendly as much as actively hostile towards developers. Basically, if you weren’t a fortune 500 company you could fuck right off.

> (Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode).

Since you’re pretty new to mobile dev, count yourself lucky with the amazing dev tools you have today. Nothing like doing a bit of J2ME, Symbian S60 or BlackBerry development to learn to appreciate how far we’ve come.

I remember doing something similar with Lemmings 3D. You could simply NOP over the JMP into the copy-protection subroutine. It was surprisingly easy.

Made me feel like such a badass hacker at 15 years old.

Or alternatively: Apple could finally add support for bitstreaming to the Apple TV.

I'm kind of envious of how smooth and slick the ATV's UI is compared to the clunky UI on the ShieldTV, but I can't switch due to lack of bitstreaming support.

I wish phones supported continuous re-authentication. Like an in-screen fingerprint reader that authenticates every single touch (even better if you could also use it to assign different actions to different fingers), or to have FaceID immediately lock the phone if someone other than the owner is using it.

Never noticed this change, but unlike the blogger I never try to grab the window inside the corner. I tend to aim for the edge itself.

> I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around

I don’t understand this argument, as they seem incredibly impractical for that. There is very little space for ‘stuff’, there is only the uncovered bed which is relatively small. The bed is also at an awkward height so very impractical to get stuff in or out. Since the bed is open, you always have to take all your ‘stuff’ out, you can’t leave tools in there or anything of value or it will get stolen. If you put a hard cover on. it leaves even less space. And since a large part of the vehicle has no roof you cannot have a roof rack.

You do not see these used by people in construction or other trades here in Europe. They use vans. An (extended) van has an ungodly amount of lockable storage space, easily accessible with side and back doors, with a floor at a reasonable height and if that isn’t enough you with a roof rack you can strap a lot to the roof as well.

I really don’t see how something like an F-150 is more practical for ‘hauling stuff’ than something like a Mercedes Sprinter.

I did look up some numbers (used the most capable configuration I could find for each of the vehicles):

Max bed length for an F-150: 247cm Max cargo space length for a Sprinter: 481cm

Bed/cargo width: F-150: 126cm, Sprinter 178cm Bed/cargo height: F-150: 54cm, Sprinter: 200cm

Max. payload capacity: F-150 : 1106kg, Sprinter 1477kg for the extra-long version, 2447kg for the long version.

> Even the government themselves went full digital...

Not really. There is the ‘mijn berichten’ (my messages) app. You can indicate which government services should send messages through the app instead of by physical mail. I have checked everything, including the tax service. So now I get anything related to taxes through the messages app. And then they send a physical letter anyway which arrives 2 days after the digital one. Every. Single. Time. As far as I can tell it’s only the tax service that does this.

They claim the app is meant to save on paper waste, but if they keep sending things by mail anyway then what is the point.

> Should it be illegal to fire employees that recent took mental health leave?

In civilized countries it is illegal to fire someone on sick leave, and I highly doubt you’d get a permit to fire someone who just got back from sick leave.

Do you happen to have an app on this list open (https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/) ?

There is a bug in Electron caused by the use of a private API that slows down macOS 26 significantly. It’s fixed in Electron but not all Electron apps have updated to the new version yet. Apparently it’s fixed in macOS 26.2

> The problem with "blind trusts" is that even blind men wink and nudge.

They should only be allowed to invest in a fund that is open to public participation. This should also be public information. You should be able to pick a congresperson and invest in the exact same funds that they do.