35,070 karma · joined March 11, 2008
I'm just going to repeat: there is nothing notable or unique to Christian appropriation of myths and stories from other religions. It does it at least as much as everyone else does, and everyone does it everywhere. So trying to tie this uniquely to Christianity seems needless and confusing. The deeper point is more interesting and more important.
Is there anything in that paragraph you'd like to argue about?
No, that phrase is just filler. And IMHO it's basically wrong. Certainly if the author want to show that Christianity is more likely than other religions to import ideas, the article has a lot more work to do than point out one myth. Literally everyone does this.
Really it's only in the last/final generation of religions, where they started writing them down in canon/scripture/testaments/writs/dogmas/whatever, that you started to see unique stories get associated with specific religions.
Before that? It's all mush. Aphrodite descends pretty clearly from the same line as Astarte/Ishtar/Innana (maybe Isis too), etc... People steal good stories. People get conquered and then confused by retelling the stories their new overlords tell. Again and again.
Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.
Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.
[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
Which is exactly what happened here, as it turns out. This isn't a breakout (or isn't alleged to be a breakout) to the broader OS, only to the sandbox environment.
I still remain confused why people are interpreting this from what I wrote. I'm not "choosing" to use RSA nor advocating for its use. I'm pointing out anecdotally that I have a GnuPG keychain still live with a 1024 bit key from the last millenium (or close to that, honestly I don't know for sure) that everyone was *sure*, 20 years ago, was broken and insecure. And... it wasn't. It's fine.
The xkcd point seems profound to me: the crypto nerds were entirely wrong about their focus and sense of urgency here. Today, it's much cheaper to steal my key with simple violence. It will remain so when I'm on my death bed. Probably when my heirs are too. And I find that interesting. What else are we nerds getting wrong?
If you want to pin me down on something slightly more formal: DRAM density scaling kinda stopped a few years back, systems aren't getting any bigger (much to Sam Altman's public dismay), and there is a superlinear matrix size requirement in factorization techniques that AFAIK no one knows how to fix. We can get the cycles to do it, but not the space.
Probably. Maybe not! But even so, it will remain cheaper to steal my secrets with the proverbial $5 wrench. RSA? It was fine.
This is falling for an xkcd 538 fallacy, btw. Nation states obviously have vast higher capability to subvert individual data than brute forcing its crypto. I stand by what I said: 1024-bit RSA keys are "fine" and will remain so. RSA-309 will not fall within our lifetime.
> it's very much possible that factoring is much easier than expected
And this is sort of toothless? I mean, that's true for ECC too. It's true for all cryptography. It's true for all software. For all engineering. For all math. We'll never know what we don't know. New discoveries tomorrow may upend everything any given property ("safety" is just one) we think our existing machines hold.
But they probably won't. And the moments where that happens are extremely rare. And to be blunt RSA already got hit with that particular lightning bolt.
Like, it really looked like everything was going to fall apart. We all rushed to 1024 bit keys, and then to 2048 bit after what felt like a few months. And... maybe even that wouldn't be enough?
And actual history ended up being the boring version: it was absolutely enough, factorization is seemingly settled math at this point, no new techniques have been discovered.
At the end of the day RSA was just fine and no one really needed to bother with ECC and all of its confusing tutorials.
And the ~23 year old 1024 bit key holding my GnuPG box closed is still just fine, cryptographically. (Though the chances of getting hit with a keylogger or other side channel attack over that period are nontrivially high and I suppose I really should rotate it or something).
And let's be honest here: GMail remains the preferred email client for almost everyone, for a lot of boring but very good reasons (mostly down to reliability and spam filtering).
Basically: people who don't like Google and don't use Google won't be affected and won't care. People who pay for Workspace hosting won't be affected, as those domains still work via Send-As. The people complaining here are in category 1, there are a handful of people (I'm one) in category 2 trying to help explain, and unsurprisingly there are very, very few people here in the actually impacted category of "mail client for external domain" users.
I'm going to push back on one bit though, which I suspect is just a misunderstanding on your part: "yet another high wing puddle jumper" is not remotely dismissive or trivializing! Being "high wing" is purely descriptive, and correct, and a "puddle jumper" is a widely used term for short-range passenger aircraft (like the Dash 8, which I also mentioned), here's a great reddit thread for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/rs7i4m/what_is_t...
I'm not saying this to make the designers feel bad verbally. I'm literally saying they've produced an aircraft that competes poorly in the market with something DeHavilland was selling in the 1980's.
My first sentence was almost 100% sarcasm though and I'll take the hit on that.
Yes, it can go farther if you burn fuel. But so can a Dash-8, very effectively. No one is interested in hybrid range per se, only if the hybrid mode is more efficient.
And sure, there are places in the world that don't have limited access highways. But the 125 mile range is already served very well by piston-driven lightplanes! Again, who's going to buy one of these vs. just continuing to run their 40+ year old Beavers or Caravans or whatever?
Also: if the only market for your high tech electric superplane startup is backcountry work in Alaska, you're probably never going to get funded to begin with.
Interestingly this was sort of the beginning of the end of digital computers as an operator-centered environment. So, the LOAD command took three arguments: the first was a filename (which was typically the first/only file in the directory for commercial disks, so the wildcard "*" was typically used); the second was a device number on the bus (8 was the first floppy drive by convention, though you could set things up differently if you knew what you were doing), and the third was a flag that specified the file format (0 was a BASIC program, 1 was a binary file to be loaded at an internally-specified address).
Not too weird, but that's all you got in Commodore BASIC. Unlike other platforms, there was no "autoexec" or "boot sector" or whatnot to get the system/disk to do the right thing at power-on. You had to do a little work at the start to bootstrap the system, not unlike the console of a PDP-11 or whatnot.
But everyone hated it, no one wanted to learn it, and everyone just ended up typing the "incantations" in from the manual without bothering to learn the specifics, which obviously weren't important. The C64 was probably the last such system (or last popular system) shipped, where an "operator" was expected to do bootstrap work.
So were you though, if you're still standing by "just some nerd programmers". They want to take donations through an outside payment processor, which they simply can't do and you know it. Like, seriously, give me the one sentence summary of what Google is doing wrong here that wouldn't enable essentially arbitrary fraud.
Apps can't put up donation links except in extremely limited circumstances, and this isn't one. And, again, you know it.
Genuinely sorry for being rude, if this seems rude. Doesn't seem rude to me though in context. You were the one who started with the aggressive rhetoric ("harping on", yada yada). We're just flaming, things get hot.
...Irrelevant? That's the whole point. "Taking donation via a separate website (emphasis in original)" is explicitly dissallowed in the Play Store (and App Store on iOS)! There happens to be an exception carved out for federally-registered charities. But no, you don't get to just hold out a link to a tip jar.
Does this link count as a charity? No, per the structure of federal tax law. Also no, per the set of rules of the app store it's trying to be listed on. Should it count? Well, maybe I guess? Open source projects are like charities in some cases. We should all want to support them. But doing it like this, through a middle-man organization that isn't a charity, just plain smells like fraud to me. Who's doing the auditing that this is just supporting development and not profit centers? Is the IRS doing it? Not as far as I can see.
I mean, come on. Just read their page. They're not a charity, at all. They're a "fiscal host" (which is a weird term right out of the gate) designed to solicit donations on behalf of other projects. They're literally a payment processor in competition with Google and Apple, and taking a cut of their own.
I mean, fine. They can do that. But that's not charity.
So... why is one soliciting donations on behalf of the other?! My Fraud Meter is rising, not falling here.
> It's also just some nerd programmers who ported Anki to run on Android. It's not some org with a revenue stream and attorneys.
"Just Some Nerd Programmers" don't, very obviously, have standing to solicit tax exempt donations. Rising further still...
I think a lot of people here are operating on the assumption that apps have the inherent right to ask for money on a proprietary platform that gives them a monetization path. They don't, on any such platform, and never have. There are specific carveouts allowed by the platform vendors for cases we all agree are valuable, like charitable donations. It's just really clear that Anki is playing games here and frankly I really doubt they qualify.
Indeed, those are structured as corporate-funded consortiums of exactly the type you'd be very suspicious of if, say, your kernel or compiler logs started stuffing a donation link into the stream!
Note that GNU software does historically mention donations (not in the logs AFAIK), and indeed the FSF is a 501(c)(3).
The app in question declares itself this way: AnkiDroid is a free, open-source flashcard app for Android with over 10 million installs, used worldwide for various purposes, primarily in medical education and language learning.
But it's registered as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, which is a designation for a "business league or industry association". This is what you use if you're a Chamber of Commerce, not a flash card app!
Obviously we're all reading this expecting that Anki is a 501(c)(3) charity, like most open source organizations, and it's just not. And the distinction is definitely impactful for tax purposes, something a payment processor is going to care about. Both organizations are exempt from tax themselves, but charitable donations are also deductable, and Anki isn't a charity. Likely Google isn't set up to record the distinction in an auditable way.
The bottom line is that Anki's lawyers messed up. Or plausibly are running some kind of scam (e.g. they take the "donations" and then hand them over to a for-profit "member" company). They need to fix their registration if they want to take money from people, this isn't how you do it and this is surely not the only problem they'll have. Seriously, my Fraud Meter is dinging at about 19.6% here...
That said, the author might also consider installing an actual doorbell, which is a device their home should have had decades ago. You'll also want something to provide power to the Nest, so this is almost free.
From the space between the lines in the article, it seems pretty clear that Google denied the request, and its employees were the source for the claim being reported at all. Yes, they absolutely could be evil in principle. They appear to have been good in practice.
And in times of extremis like this, maybe it's important to call out those little victories and find allies where you can. Even if you happen to be a HN Apple stan.
And FWIW, "redcoats" were a pun on the fact that I'd introduced americans into the argument (to spell it out, since that's seeming more necessary at this point: redcoats are the bad guys in american revolutionary mythology). But that said, if your argument for the British Empire being a christian totalitarian cult hangs on the fact that the infantry and marines wore different uniforms...
We're done, basically. You're wrong, but I won't be able to convince you here.