The physical card has a chip, which is digital.
The point is that the ticket has a unique ID which is tied to the owner.
Normal non-digital paper train tickets just indicate "someone paid this" but aren't tied to a unique personal identifier.
633 karma · joined May 5, 2022
The point is that the ticket has a unique ID which is tied to the owner.
Normal non-digital paper train tickets just indicate "someone paid this" but aren't tied to a unique personal identifier.
Movement on the other hand is a mandatory thing for many people unless you want to sit at home all day...
In other words: You cannot get a plain old paper ticket without personal information, the ticket is like a cookie which identifies you as a user and thus allows you to be tracked.
Disclaimer: Not a resident of Germany.
So some people have voiced concerns about that being used to profile the movement of Germany's citizens.
IIRC the tracking is being justified by the government "to gather statistics so we can improve the service", or something like that.
Disclaimer: I don't live there, I don't know the details.
- At least for me that's it, it would be stressful to deal with that so I go elsewhere to discuss the technology.
And this is probably precisely how an echo chamber can be created even without recommendation algorithms.
The "in-group" harasses the "out-group" until all of them leave - or not dare to speak anymore - and only the "in-group" is left.
When being in a random conversation on the "normal kind-of-average people Internet" (Twitch chat), discussing a subject where the host doesn't know a certain word, people already are pasting ChatGPT definitions of the word into the chat, believing it's some kind of dictionary or whatever.
If you tell them it could be completely making things up they'll be like "yeah dunno but it can be a nice overview of the topic".
So people will treat it like the new Google, with no idea (or no concern?) that all it does is mash words together because they're likely to occur next to each other in an arbitrarily defined reference dataset of text which was likely downloaded from random places all over the Internet.
Why is 1% low when we're talking about lifelong pain?
- which we don't even have to discuss, because there is statistics about this, and their failure rate is quite high, as said between 2% and 12% (I suppose it's a range because usage errors and quality vary).
Google "Pearl index".
Or to put it in more visual words:
If you had $ 200 000 in cash (that's the cost of a kid), would you secure it against theft with a 0.07 mm piece of plastic?
It's insane that this is expected of men.
The failure rate of that is in the double digits percentage AFAIK !?
Besides, as long as you are still fertile and relying upon someone else not being fertile that is not self-determination. Men can also be victims of violence.
And as soon as multiple $100k in potential alimony payment (raising a kid for 18 years costs that much!) get involved some (not all!) people will lie to your face as much as humanly possible.
Some even say they've been fine for quite a bit of time and then suddenly the pain starts.
Which in total makes me absolutely NOT want a vasectomy even though I have zero desire to reproduce.
Because it does feel plausible that it can cause trouble to lock something up in the body which is meant to be released once in a while.
I hope some day men too will have real and reliable (condoms fail a lot) self-determination in terms of reproduction, not only "suffer abstinence your whole life or risk getting financially gutted for decades."
The slot for the box at my printer is at the back of it, not at the ink head, so the ink can only get there by pumping it.
(Not defending Epson's design choices here, just trying to explain them.)
When I turn the Epson one off, it audibly parks the head. I would suppose it is parked onto a gasket which would prevent it from drying out.
Personally, I don't buy laser printers because I cannot imagine that toner dust isn't unhealthy, and I would be scared of it leaking into the air I breathe.
Feel free to prove me wrong with studies, I would appreciate being less scared about it for my next printer in case the Epson does die some day.
To me it rather looks like consumers have been so thoroughly conditioned to distrust printers that they aren't even capable of trusting the good ones anymore maybe - and thus unfortunately keep buying the garbage ones, thinking it doesn't make a difference.
I.e. whenever one of the actual solutions is discussed there's this gossip of "nah, they're also ripping you off" - but I have the thing right behind my desk and it works just fine.
Ink for those is available in *bottles* from Epson, it's dirt cheap. No more cartridges!
Make sure to get one which has a user-replaceable "maintenance box", the cheaper ones have a fixed one. You can find that out by e.g. looking at the supplies list on the Epson website, see if the maintenance box is listed alongside the ink.
The box contains the sponge where ink goes to during the cleaning procedure. It needs to be replaced every once in a while. Replacing it is very easy on the user-serviceable ones, the other ones would require mailing it to Epson.
I typically use su to run some program in its own user account to ensure:
- it has its own homedir and doesn't fill mine with garbage.
- there is some level of isolation from the rest of the system for security, a basic "jail". I'm not trying to protect against targeted attacks from extremely competent threat actors here, but rather trying to stick software into its own user account so it can only access that account, with isolation of the same level as if I had manually logged in to a secondary account.
Can such programs break out of their "jail" when using su?
Or is the author of the article just angry for other reasons?
- which completely bypasses end-to-end encryption by putting plaintext chat history into the hands of Google et al.
(Not a WhatsApp user myself anymore, don't know, sorry, if someone can confirm this in the comments would be nice.
But it had been nagging to enable cloud backup long after they have been advertising "encryption" already.)
The alternative of not paying that tax by using WASM means "I want native performance but I don't want to pay the price of having to do native development."
So what developers are doing here is creating an externality - external cost which other people have to pay:
Browsers for the average internet user who just wants to read some news get worse in terms of security because some people want to distribute their software more conveniently at zero cost.
The cost is paid by the users who all now have WASM in their browser, even if they don't need it.
But isn't it a case of XKCD 927? https://xkcd.com/927/
I.e. I would say the probability is zero that because WASM exists other existing complexity of browsers will be removed.
Because the web is so vast, if you once add a feature to browsers you can never remove it because that would break an unknown amount of websites, or even intranet sites.
So now we have wasm + N other subsystems, so N+1, and the security of N+1 systems is less than that of N.
The industry has barely finished debugging the monstrosity that was browsers before - XML, JavaScript, CSS, WebGL, WebRTC, ... so now let's add another giant source of security issues to them!
When will this madness stop? When will browsers actually be capable of doing enough and be moved into maintenance-only mode where only security issues are fixed and no new code is added?
Surely some will say "well, WebAssembly will deliver that precisely - browsers now can run all the code".
But wasn't this the promise with JavaScript already, a Turing-complete language in the browser to end the need for more features of HTML?
Anyway, to deliver some value by this comment:
To disable WASM in Firefox, set "javascript.options.wasm = false" in about:config.
Some websites say you also need to set "javascript.options.wasm_baselinejit = false" and "javascript.options.wasm_ionjit = false" but I don't understand what the point of disabling JIT would be if the whole of WASM is disabled anyway?
Around every corner there is a dialog which asks for permission to store extremely personal data, such as your GPS location or browsing history, indefinitely.
See how much Google values its users safety vs. its own safety...
The answers to the questions are of interest to the community so why not have them see them? :)
> these are questions for the admins that actually run this place, and there's little to no guarantee they'd even see this post, whereas an email to them would get seen by them.
If the admins dig deeply enough through comments inside threads to rate limit me, surely they will see a top-level thread.
And indeed: They saw the thread and replied. (dang is their name)
> If you believe your phone is going to ring all day because you have an email address, I'm not sure anyone here can help you. You may need a refresher on how phones work.
You skipped over the part where I said that nowadays it is impossible to get an email account without telling the provider your phone number.
They all want your phone number nowadays, they demand it during registration.
Thank you very much for taking the time to try to clarify things! :)
I say "try to" because your statement still does not tell me what I precisely did wrong?
I unfortunately cannot guess it as I stand by my opinions, like most people do probably.
> I recognize that the current system is limited and when you say it makes you angry, I get it. I'd feel angry too.
Thank you very much for the empathy! Good to hear! :)
> I guess in our defense I'd plead that it's almost impossible to keep this place from collapsing, we don't really know how to do what we need to do, the pressures are enormous, and we're limited in resources. (That's mostly my fault, by the way—not YC's—but that's another story.)
I hear your struggle and thank you very much for the effort you're putting in! Don't be too hard on yourself.
You kept the place running for many years, so it's not collapsing!
How about these ideas:
1) If you want people to change their behavior, you have to tell them whats wrong. All I have been told up to now is that I cannot post quickly anymore. This changes zero about my opinions and how I intend to behave. Because I have no crystal ball, I cannot blind guess what HN disliked.
This isn't even an issue of the Internet, it's a general concern of regulation: If humans do not understand why a piece of regulation is imposed upon them, they are more likely to not accept it.
And don't forget: Moderators are humans too, it is entirely possible that you misjudge something to be low-quality even though it is not - but you will never get a chance to learn why you were wrong if the person you judged cannot correct you because you don't talk to them but just rate-limit them :)
2) Use the tools you have already. You could have commented my original post(s) which caused you to rate limit me, and there told me why my comments are "low-quality" or "flamewars" in your opinion.
Also, HN does have a system which is meant to rate content in a community effort, so precisely what is needed to ease the moderation burden - the voting system! If people don't like my posts they could just have downvoted them.
No need for manual intervention.
And more democratic.
3) This is a matter of personal taste, not necessary a strict recommendation, but: Tell people to change before you punish them. I know it's the new normal on the Internet to punish people right away - I just think this is rude.
I'm not sure if that was meant to sound positive? :|
> > HN is the only place where it is possible to talk to the people who build the tech infrastructure which dominates and changes our daily lives.
> Here I start to lose the connection. I don't feel like HN admins are building that. We're just trying to run a web forum. It's true that YC owns HN and YC invests (or tries to!) in the most important world-changing startups, but there are several layers of indirection between us and that.
> > Internet politics is made here.
> Oh god that sounds absolutely awful. Let's not and say we did?
Oh I was not talking about what HN intends to be, but rather about what it factually is just by the question of who hangs out here.
Factually, it's the place with the highest probability of FAANG people hanging out that I know of.
So as a "civilian", here I have the highest chance to get heard by them.
And here they discuss new technologies and all kinds of aspects of technology which affect people, *and* their opinions on how things should be get influenced here, so this is the "political" aspect.
Sure, they are not legally entitled to decide Internet law, but the way their software works has consequences which can be considered as political and even as "the law" in terms of areas where there is no governmental regulation yet.
Thus HN is the place where a regular person has the highest chance to influence Internet "politics".
And to get to the point: That's why it is so annoying to get locked out of it. It feels kind of similar of losing a small part of Internet "voting" rights.