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_gtly

727 karma · joined February 28, 2011

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_gtly··on Huawei replaces Android with HarmonyOS, which is also Android
more details here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/huaweis-harmonyos-wi...
_gtly··on The data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information
Yes, check out https://privacybot.io It's a graduate student project from the University of California, Berkeley. It's open source project and you execute its code from your own computer so you can have confidence in it keeping your data private. It was also written up in Consumer Reports[1].

1. https://digital-lab.consumerreports.org/2021/05/12/new-open-...

edit: Privacybot was also previously discussed on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27146828

_gtly··on Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen
The danger of using hydrogen gas in a vehicle may be on the same order as compressed natural gas (CNG) which is used for e.g.: some busses. Hydrogen is stored under very high pressure in tanks, which if ruptured in an accident can cause a physical explosion.

A study on CNG in busses says: "One can therefore conclude that CNG buses are more prone to fire fatality risk by 2.5 times that of diesel buses, with the bus passengers being more at risk by over two orders of magnitude."

source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15876211/#:~:text=One%20can%....

_gtly··on Google Says Everything at Stadia Is Fine, as the Water Reaches Their Noses
I agree with your points, though re: hardware and cloud-gaming in general: I wonder if its availability and cost issues would serve as a driver for _consumers_ - where they would seek a cloud-streaming solutions (so _they_ don't need to find/buy the scarce high end GPUs or consoles themselves -- and let Google Stadia or Shadow.tech or GeForce Now or xCloud or whoever take care of that).
_gtly··on M1 MacBook Air hits 900 GFlops in the browser with Safari's experimental WebGPU
The one thing I'm concerned about are reports of potential SSD overwear e.g.: [1].

1. https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-ex...

_gtly··on Amazon Co-founder Mackenzie quietly gave over $4B to 384 organizations in 2020
It's a bit cynical, but you may find Larry David's bit on anonymous giving amusing https://youtu.be/De90ozOOquY
_gtly··on I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee
I'd encourage you to read the Attorneys General allegations by searching for 'amp' in the link shared (https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...)
_gtly··on I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee
The attorneys general case led by Texas [1] asserts that Google created AMP so that Google could stop "header bidding" (which subjects them to competition):

> To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with JavaScript and header bidding.

1.https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

_gtly··on Rails 6.1
The beginning of Horizontal Sharding support is great to see.

More refined release notes here: https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/6_1_release_notes.html

And yet more release notes: https://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2020/12/9/Rails-6-1-0-release...

_gtly··on Full text search on 400M US court cases
https://www.courtlistener.com has more useful features and is part of the Free Law Project.
_gtly··on 16-inch MBP 2x slower than M1 MacBook Air in a real-world Rust compile
The title is wrong. Tweet Author issued a correction - he tested an i7, not an i9:

"Ok twitter sucks for corrections BUT: The chip i tested is the: Intel 9750H and this is an i7 NOT an i9. However the single core compute is about the same, and i'm not maxing out on cores. So the ballpark speed increase is quite similar."

https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1328796685280088065

_gtly··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Synching with GDrive for me has been painfully slow. I thought it would be a drop-in replacement for Dropbox, but deleting files in particular seemed to take forever. Probably just some growing pains, but I've never experienced that with Dropbox.

EDIT Also I had an issue with my mac pinwheeling google's 'Backup and Sync' agent. It's fixed now after a couple months, but there was nowhere I could find to report the problem to Google.

_gtly··on Forecast, don't guesstimate your software projects
FYI: Scrum.org changed its Scrum Guide in 2011 to use the term "Forecast" instead of "Commitment":

source: https://www.scrum.org/resources/commitment-vs-forecast

_gtly··on Smart Algorithms beat Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning
People using 'further' instead of 'farther' (used for distance) used to get me upset, but people mistake them so often that I realized I was getting upset for no good reason. I know what they meant even if they were ignorant of the grammar. I agree that in an academic paper you don't want to see grammar mistakes, but in many other contexts if you understand what is meant, it's no use getting bent out of shape.
_gtly··on Smart Algorithms beat Hardware Acceleration for Large-Scale Deep Learning
People using 'further' instead of 'farther' (used for distance) used to get me upset, but people mistake them so often that I realized I was getting upset for no good reason. I know what they meant even if they were ignorant of the grammar. I agree that in an academic paper you don't want to see grammar mistakes, but in many other contexts if you understand what is meant, it's no use getting bent out of shape.
_gtly··on Tracking Sex: Implications of widespread data leakage and tracking on porn sites
Easy to enable, but in practice not much help yet: For me, at least, I enabled resistFingerprinting and tested on https://panopticlick.eff.org. A unique fingerprint was still present. Test it yourself.
_gtly··on Robert M. Pirsig has died
I'm a huge fan of ZMM and I enjoyed Lila - where he elucidates a metaphysics of quality. His writing is brilliant, but my theory is that he may have experienced mental distress, in part, because quality is actually _subjective_, not objective. He attempts to elucidate and objectify something that fundamentally depends on a point of view / perspective.
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