Does anyone actually use select mode?
1,944 karma · joined August 12, 2019
These are the problems being worked on in defi right now and why people are so excited about it.
> in the cryptocurrency future, how will it be easier for a restaurant to use their business as collateral to take cash to do upgrades?
In the idealized future, the restaurant would have their complete transaction history available on-chain for lending contracts to use. Then, instead of a banker making a decision if the restaurant deserves the loan, an algorithm can make that determination and instantly grant the loan. Such a contract might use data points like amount of restaurant supplies purchased, number of customers, average sale price, demographics of the location, all of which would be on-chain and available to a contract.
This is good because it removes bias and discrimination that currently exists in the traditional system, increases the speed at which your restaurant owner can access their capital, and decreases the overall cost of doing the transaction because humans don't need to be involved.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of resources that the traditional system uses to manage borrowing, lending, insurance, establishing ownership, transferring large sums, settling disputes, etc.
The adoption of cryptocurrency and smart contracts would replace a lot of the financial industry with tiny smart bits of code. That is the value being created.
Considering that traditional finance has a long history of predatory practices, anything that decreases their influence is a good thing to me.
> rather than just putting up with it like most would
Whatever that virtue is, I wish I had more of it.
If we do a good enough job, "scrum" will become a dirty word merely by association.
To the Twitter, everyone!
That's right, but it does allow persisting an id through reinstalls of the same app, and sharing that id between apps of the same developer.
> So no, this does not allow an tracking ID usable by all apps.
It effectively does though. For example, imagine a mobile game company with 10 games. With this technique, you can track that user across app re-installs in each of those games.
Now imagine another game company doing the same trick. If both companies send up their independent tracking IDs to a central server along with any other info they can get about the user (email, screen name, IP, whatever), then you can strongly correlate users across multiple tracking IDs. The user has no way to reset these IDs even if they delete and reinstall the apps using them.
You can tell from the code that the "exploit" here is abusing keychain sharing.
iOS has a feature where you can pack a surprising amount of generic data into keychain storage, intended for passwords or auth credentials.
iOS also lets app developers opt-in to shared credential storage, so that if you have multiple apps, the user only needs to login once. Here's a blog post on how to do it: https://evgenii.com/blog/sharing-keychain-in-ios/
A little-known quirk of the iOS keychain is that it persists across app installs. This is useful because if multiple apps share credentials in the keychain, you don't want uninstalling one app to log you out of other apps.
If an American company tried this (looking at you Branch.io), would it be banned by Apple? Maybe? That seems to be the controversy here.
Perhaps Apple needs to rethink its keychain sharing API and make the user opt-in to credential sharing.
Also a keychain management tool would be nice, so users can see what data apps are permanently storing on their devices (even if the app is uninstalled).
Here's a breakdown the changes in iOS 14 that likely caused this:
* https://blog.branch.io/attribution-ios-14-survive-if-you-mis...
* https://blog.branch.io/attribution-ios-14-cannot-wait-any-lo...
"CAID" isn't a public iOS technology, and the article doesn't say what it means.
Some googling returns: https://mmachina.cn/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MMA%E4%B8%AD%...
Apparently it means "CAA Advertising Id", where "CAA" appears to be the "Creative Artists Agency", some sort of Chinese advertising group. (edit: wrong organization, it's actually "Chinese Anonymization ID", not a group. the group behind it is https://trackingio.com/)
Searching "CAA Advertising Id" yields more Chinese PDFs.
From what I can tell here, "CAID" is a partnership between Chinese industry and Chinese government to track users across apps for better tracking.
The issue here does not seem to be that they've bypassed a technical restriction, but that the developers of major apps are using a shared identifier that Apple doesn't like.
In the US, the analogy would be if apps had tracking SDKs in them, that fingerprinted users across apps, in order to better target them for advertisements, and then the US government can pick up that data and do whatever they'd like with it.
The strange part to me, is that this actually is the situation today in the US.
I don't want to shill for China, but why is this a story? This has been a US industry since at least Doubleclick was invented.
edit:
It's a story because they're using the iOS keychain API to persist and share the tracking identifier. As far as I know, this is a new technique in the wild, but has been theoretically possible since iOS launched. It's only now being seen as necessary because of the iOS14 privacy changes.
It's curious that American ad companies seem to understand Apple's intent and are opting not to risk their business by expanding their SDKs to use keychain sharing techniques, even though they're surely aware you can do this. Chinese ad companies seem ok with risking their clients apps being banned on the app store.
Apple can mitigate this by giving users control of the data and sharing related to keychain services.
In the last 24 hours, there's been $108B traded.
Both marketplace types are useful (especially for books), but consumer goods need some kind of notice when you're buying from anyone other than Amazon.
I actually interview for this skill specifically. I stress to candidates that they can and should search the web in whatever way they would when tasked with code in real life.
The speed at which someone can process search results and stackoverflow responses to filter out crap and find the solution is the best proxy I've found for developer productivity.
Some people don't search for anything, even after prodding them 3 times that it's 100% fine to search and they definitely won't lose points. They still won't do it, because it's just not how they reason about problems.
Other candidates will immediately identify the problem, search with good queries, quickly navigate through a bunch of sites, find the relevant info, copy/paste, and solve the challenge.
Used to be. Now "literally" literally means "figuratively". [1]
It actually does. I'm going to respect the opinions of serious scientists, doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc on topics of their expertise.
> But that requires careful, critical examination.
That was my whole point. By stating claims as an elaborate story that requires time investment as a reader, with a lot of flourish from a professional writer, you're undermining careful and critical examination.
You're also risking the story being memorable and sticking with you, in the same way that people watch historical movies and then internalize that as what actually happened. Even though you know most movies are fictional, if it's the reference you feel an emotional attachment to, you'll justify it as true to yourself.
Humans aren't good at purging information once they've been exposed to it, especially if it resonates with them.
> I'm perplexed by this reaction, as if reading something with a critical eye is impossible.
It's not impossible, it's just impractical. If I read something by a well-respected person with expertise, then the point of reading is to retain as much shared knowledge as possible. If I read pieces like this, then I get to live in their narrative for a little while, but I have to be careful not to absorb too much of it or take plausible sounding things as true, at least pending fact-checking.
> Or, worse, that reading something by someone without a particular status or pedigree might become as infectious as SARS-2 itself and turn us into zombies or something.
Indeed, that is what's happening. We used to value expertise. Now everyone's opinion is equally valid.
This long-form stuff is particularly sticky. If the story is told well, you're likely going to remember it as true (or at least credible) even the story wasn't credible in the first place.
If I was a teenager interested in biology, and I wanted to maybe build a "harmless" virus just to see if I could do it, how achievable might that be?
I watched computer viruses go from:
researchers -> tinkerers -> vandals -> criminals -> governments
At this point we just assume every computer is compromised, and we carve out enclaves of varying security for whatever risk level we're willing to assume.
I can imagine a future where pandemics happen at the same frequency as school shootings do today. How far away is that?
Madvillainy is maybe the best hiphop album of all time. I go back and listen to it often and always find something new.
+1 on changing the post title to all caps. This news also probably deserves a black bar. MF DOOM was the greatest lyricist in hiphop and influenced a generation or more of artists.
RIP MF DOOM, Viktor Vaughn, and King Geedorah.
Please realize that the cohort of people we're talking about have supported policies of enslaving "others" through laws for decades and that they continue to do this today.
These policies have and are destroying communities, families, careers, lives, and to some extent, the fabric of the nation.
It's also not a coincidence these are the same people that just lost an election and are trying to overturn the result by any means.
Remember that story about raiding the home of a scientist in Florida a few days ago for doing science? That's the same people as the "anti-drug" people.
It turns out that the anti-drug, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, anti-education, anti-environmentalist, anti-healthcare, anti-mask, pro-police, pro-prison, pro-corporation, pro-pollution, pro-inequality, pro-torture, pro-religion group are all the same people.
The anti-drug laws are just a symptom of a much wider societal corruption.
We can't be handing out forgiveness to our oppressors while they are still actively oppressing.
If I knew in college what I know now, I would have 100% had all the paperwork to be considered "disabled" by the government. I tried to do the right thing and emulate a successful adult life, but it's been a pretty miserable experience so far.
At this point, after so many years in tech, there's no way I could convince the government that they should cover my health care and pay me a stipend because I'm so disabled that I can't work.
There's not much else to do at this point besides push through to retirement, one day at a time.
> auto reported crashes and support tickets (most gfx driver related)
I wonder if open-sourcing the game would see those same support tickets come in with patches.
Part of linux has always been about patching it up yourself. Rather than being a time sink for the developer, these linux bugs could actually be a way to crowdsource code improvements.
I know there are intellectual property concerns that prevent open-sourcing commercial products, but maybe there's some sort of hybrid solution to be found.
> The message stated, "it's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead," according to member station WFSU, citing the probable cause affidavit.
> As the agents enter, one points their weapon upstairs. Jones says the agents pointed a gun at her and at her children.
It's hard to convince me that we're the "good guys" when we're pointing guns at children because their mother spoke out against the official government position.
I'm sure she'll get off without a conviction after draining her life's savings to defend herself. Hopefully it launches her career, if there's still a democracy left. At least they didn't execute her.
The wealthy in the US don't care, because they can and do invest in chinese tech companies.
The US government doesn't gain anything by banning TikTok. China can get most of the same data by scraping from other sources. I'm sure the US government can also get the data from Chinese companies if they want.
US tech competitors don't benefit from the TikTok ban because it shakes confidence in the laissez-faire attitude the US has had toward tech.
US citizens don't care because their interests are currently being represented by Facebook. I think I'd rather have China own my data than Facebook.
It all seems very confusing, until you recall that the TikTok ban happened because a bunch of kids organized on it to mess with the pre-registration for a Trump rally. https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/08/03/tiktok-ban-trump-is...
There is no pro-US or pro-democracy policy making happening. This is really just trying to graft meaning onto the actions of a childish narcissist with a lot of power.
That's actually not a good thing. Something is seriously wrong if we don't value efficiency. Having many separate retail shops creates massive inefficiencies, especially for commodity products.
Amazon can get most products to my house at near lowest market rates in a day or two. Sometimes the same day.
The problem isn't Amazon, it's our reaction to this newfound efficiency. We're eventually going to end up in a place where having humans doing most work is objectively worse than having robots do it.
What we're doing now can't sustain, but going back to a pre-Amazon model of retail is not a viable path forward.
Also, working retail sucks. We should be glad when it dies entirely.
Actually lots of us called them exploitive. It might not change anything, but it's worth noting that a lot of us knew that facebook would grow into the great evil that it is today. It was also obvious that Amazon would eat all retail stores, and it pretty much has.
Being an excellent employee?
I understand your point, but I actually have been doing this for about 10 years now, and I consistently have improved my "career trajectory" by switching jobs when I start to feel that my coworkers are overachieving and throwing me under the bus. I look at it like a forcing function to switch jobs and get a raise.
I already had a decade of pre-work experience just from being a lifelong hacker, so it's not like I'm relying on my job to learn new technology. I don't have a fear of falling behind. If anything, I've noticed a huge decrease in SWE competence over my time in industry.
Some of my most "successful" friends at FAANGs are bad developers that just devote more time to playing the system than I am willing to do. I find the social con-man stuff to be really draining and I hate doing it. I also hate interviewing, which limited my career more than I'd care to admit.
Also, I've opted to not support a family or carry a mortgage. I'm doing something similar to FIRE. I'm hoping to be FI with a total of 15 years as a tech employee.
"But do you really hate working so much that you would sacrifice having children!?". Yes. Very yes.
It's also likely that tech workers are "overpaid" right now, as we're compartmentalizing more work, lowering the skills required to join tech companies, and remote work is now the norm. It's a race to the bottom, and I want out as soon as possible.
One of my biggest fears is that by the time I can stop working, I won't have any will left to pursue passionate endeavors that would benefit society.
Even if I just didn't need to worry about health insurance cost, that would be enough to shorten my financial independence timeline by years.
If I had sufficient UBI to cover basic expenses for the year, I would quit right now.