Zak

Framework is definitely premium-priced, but I don't think most people are cross-shopping the Framework 12 (a 12" convertible tablet) and the Thinkpad E14 (a 14" dedicated laptop).

I imagine that is one of the reasons. It probably also lowers costs a little.

Sometimes the market rejects making products worse to lower costs or discourage user error. I wish that was the case here.

This is my pet peeve about USB-C laptop docks. The vast majority of them have a captive cable, usually about 10cm long. It's a failure point, often an inconvenient length, and makes them much harder to pack.

Regularly experimenting with AI tools as they improve and relying on them where they provide an advantage is a good idea at both individual and institutional levels. Maximizing usage for its own sake is not.

I find it shocking that anyone ever thought tokenmaxxing was a good idea.

AI maximalists like to compare the technology to electricity. Imagine if in the early days of electrification, a CEO had rewarded staff for increasing the amount of electricity they consumed rather than finding ways to use it for business impact. Institutionalizing people who showed signs of mental illness was popular in those days, and I suspect that would have been the outcome.

If I was being rewarded for using more tokens, I would feed LLM output back into the model. That's probably not very useful training data.

> What OSs can they safely trust?

None. The first rule of network security is you can't trust the client.

All attempts at remote attestation of consumer devices are someone wanting to break this rule. It's always a mistake; the OS being on the blessed list raises the difficulty level for fraud a little, but serious fraudsters have already perfected workarounds.

Another feature that plays well with agentic coding is REPL driven development. I don't know why that approach hasn't caught on in more languages that could theoretically support it.

They don't. The screws are outside of the gasket: https://rmdd.net/writing/2023/sensor-watch/2.jpeg

1969 Pontiac Grand Prix - maybe not actually aerodynamic, but it does have flush door handles:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/1969_Pon...

Airplanes have had fully manual flush door/hatch handles for decades, and a handful of cars have imitated them. The electric retracting handles are pure gimmick.

I suspect there's a reason brown is Noctua's signature color.

I imagine a white PC fan would look terrible if not cleaned daily or used in a room with very filtered air.

People keep framing it as tinkerers versus normies. That's not the real problem.

The real problem is that prior to verification, Google can't ban ICE tracking apps (or whatever the next problematic government doesn't like) from Android, and after verification they will be able to for most users.

They say they won't do that. I might even believe the people currently running things won't do that, but they will be incentivized to do that in the future, and incentives are much better at predicting outcomes than intent.

Android was very open when it was released and for some time after. Installing APKs directly was easy. Most devices had unlocked or unlockable bootloaders. An Android phone treated its user much like a PC did.

More sysadmin-as-a-service type stuff is fine as long as the opt-out is easy. This isn't. I'm upset about the rug pull.

Recently, both Apple and Google banned apps for reporting immigration raids in the USA from their respective stores. Android users can still trivially download such apps from other sources. After the verification requirement, nothing changes as long as the developer has a permission slip from Google. If they don't, users have a waiting period that could be a critical delay in an emergency like a crackdown by an oppressive government.

Google has stated that it will only withhold such permission from developers who distribute malware. I imagine they'll stick to that promise at first, but long-term I think they won't. Once it's possible for them to impose partial bans on developers, governments have every incentive to pressure them to do it.

> The entire point here is to prevent scam actors from using a false sense of urgency to defraud people. That is a serious vulnerability that needs to be addressed somehow

Does it, and if it does, does it need to be addressed by an OS vendor creating a mechanism to ban developers for most users? I'm not convinced of the former, and I'm certain the latter is bad. I predict within ten years, we will see this used against something that is not malware.

That requires having a PC to unlock basic functionality on your Android device, assuming the change we're talking about is still app installs.

I don't think OS vendors should be expected to keep people from doing dangerous things. A warning label saying "hey that's dangerous because..." is reasonable, but anything more and they're trying to be my sysadmin against my will.

Privacy legislation by itself does not solve the problem; what Flo did was already illegal. Effective enforcement is also necessary.

I need a way to make money too, but we have laws saying I can't do it by hitting you over the head with a club and taking yours. We also have laws saying Flo can't do it by lying about who they sell private data to.

I would advise anyone tracking medical data with an app to use something open source and local-only or network-optional if at all possible. I know there are open source cycle tracking apps, but I do not know if they're any good.

Ahh, I understood "makes sense" as "is a good idea" rather than "is an understandable mistake".

The purpose of firing a person shouldn't be vengeance but to remove someone who is unreliable or not cost effective.

It's similarly reasonable to drop a tool that's unreliable, though I don't think that's a reasonable description here. Instead, they used a tool which is generally known to be unpredictable and failed to sandbox it adequately.

Why does using GoDaddy as a registrar instead of one with a better reputation like Porkbun or Namecheap make sense when you're small?

> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.

Aircraft engines are subjected to both.

Being banned from life due to a TOS violation is a real concern because it's already hard to do a bunch of things without a Google or Apple account. If Google and Apple can require a government ID to create such an account, it becomes very difficult to evade a ban.

Options to get around that problem include regulating Apple and Google or mandating that essential services not require accounts with third-party providers.

What he did is lose his civil lawsuits about as hard as it's possible to lose, which is easily explained by his behavior during those lawsuits.

Yes, at first. If it was a typical defamation case based on a single incident or short pattern of conduct, and if Jones behaved like a typical defendant, hiring a competent lawyer and mostly complying with court orders, the judgment would have been a few million dollars. That's not what happened.

Instead, Jones repeatedly failed to comply with court orders and attempted to delay the trial. He lied under oath, broadcast lies about the plaintiffs, and mocked the plaintiffs on his show after losing a case. He additionally broadcast his intent to continue spreading disinformation about the Sandy Hook shooting.

The long-term pattern of treating the court with contempt and clear intent to continue his illegal behavior are an extreme level of noncompliance for a defendant in a lawsuit, and they added up to an extreme penalty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones#Sandy_Hook_Elementa...

That framing Makes it sound like the app developer has to do something active to keep message cleartext out of notifications. That's not how it is on Android.

A Firebase Cloud Messaging push notification contains what the app developer's server puts in it. That could include the message body or it could just be an instruction to the app to poll the server for new messages. It has nothing to do with the notification that's displayd on an Android device. Those are entirely local.

An app that cares about privacy wouldn't send anything more than a poll instruction over FCM.

First was hydroplaning on a motorcycle.

Fourth was probably a makeshift bridge over a creek collapsing while crossing it as a passenger on an ATV. I was pretty young when that happened.

I think the Hexbright's body would be a source of complaints from present-day reviewers. It's bulky and heavy for a 1x18650 light; having to expose the bare LED to the elements to charge or change the battery is risky; anodized threads between the LED and outer body are bad for heat transfer.

LEDs with higher luminous efficacy than the XM-L2 exist now, but for a large increase, they usually have a larger light emitting surface. That means a less focused hotspot and less useful beam distance with the same power input. On the other hand, it's possible to achieve a more focused hotspot and more beam distance without giving up more output with some newer LEDs optimized for high output from a smaller surface. It's also possible to greatly improve color rendering.