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brightball

17,114 karma · joined September 26, 2014

Brightball (personal company / blog) https://www.brightball.com/

Carolina Code Conference https://carolina.codes

Carolina Code Cast (tech podcast) https://blog.carolina.codes/podcast

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brightball··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
I don't run their business. Just trying to explain.

From what we see above it sounds like the change trips their rootkit detection, which they are probably interpreting as a compromised device.

It sounds like you're expecting them to have a perfect security posture that can correctly identify fraud in call cases and only block the real thing. It's more complicated than that and there's typically some type of scoring system involved with numerous triggers that are higher value indicators of potential fraud. If they think the device is compromised, that's probably a high value indicator.

This is just me speculating.

brightball··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
Yea, years ago I was in the security space and got to talk to some paypal security folks at a symposium in San Diego. The level of stuff that they have to deal with is so extreme.

It's similar to how people don't like sites blocking entire countries or access from Tor, etc. You might be doing it for privacy...but all the people trying to commit fraud are also using those same channels to hide their identity. The blockades are one piece of a holistic security picture that frustrate the well intentioned users.

brightball··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
I haven’t tried installing games on Linux in years, so that’s a gap for my experience.
brightball··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
Why? I watched all of the supposed controversies around him happen in real time and they were all non stories.

“Hey, you can be political on social media but don’t bring it into our work chats. We are here to do a job. If that is a problem, here’s a generous 6 month severance package.”

That was what politically blew him up and he was unwilling to apologize for a completely reasonable take.

Now he’s giving his time and money freely to make a great Linux distro.

It says more about the anti-DHH crowd than it does about him.

brightball··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
It’s a really strong UX that’s rapidly improving without a profit motive and people are excited about it.

Closest thing to the “it just works” experience that Mac was always known for and it runs great on older hardware. Even goes so far as to optimize the install time down to about 1 minute.

I was running i3 when an Ubuntu update borked my entire setup so I made the switch. The difference is night and day in the level of polish.

Small example, running Zoom on i3 caused a tile cascade every time I turned on my Bluetooth headset because Zoom bypassed the main notification system. Issue resolved here.

One of many little quirks that no longer happen.

It’s nice to see excitement around Linux because nothing from the big names was really creating it.

brightball··on Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues
Yea, I don’t get the shade. As many have said, it’s just Arch + a very polished UX preconfigured so you can jump right in without a lot of setup overhead.

Why it’s security would be on a different level than any other Linux distro isn’t clear.

brightball··on The journalist facing an $800 daily fine to keep her sources secret
That is the type of journalistic integrity that created such idealism about journalism itself. We need more of this.
brightball··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
Truth doesn't change with the day.
brightball··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
Yes, absolutely.

And it leads to comments like the parent blaming "capitalism"

brightball··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
gestures at supply and demand
brightball··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
Theory holds so far.

Everything government involvement touches gets more expensive. See healthcare, college tuition, student loan debt as some easy examples.

brightball··on New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro
Capitalism will lead to:

- Lots of options competing on quality, price, user experience, user needs

- Every marketplace innovation that we talk about on this platform

So somebody might offer exactly that and if it's a good option, people will use it. If it's not, they'll use an alternative.

Government regulation will lead to:

- Giant entrenched companies that are difficult to disrupt thanks to insider connections

- Lack of competition, price increases, terrible customer service and pretty much everything that "anti-capitalists" today complain about in regards to capitalism.

brightball··on One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
There are times I’m convinced that promoting the Mandela Effect is to enable stuff like this.
brightball··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
I get that statistics can be manipulated but...

https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/...

> Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in July for the seventh consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report.

> The report was issued today by Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.

> “The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent). The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row.

brightball··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
Whenever my wife wants to visit antique stores, I always look for old books. I have found several 100+ year old gems.
brightball··on The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
If anybody wants to give a talk on this at the 2027 Carolina Code Conference, our call for speakers will be open from January to March. Love featuring languages like this.
brightball··on Being ambitious and being a dad
I think one of the reasons that a lot of successful founders are in their mid-40s is because they combine 20ish years of experience with an empty nest after kids are out on their own.

Nothing to back it up, but it makes sense to me.

brightball··on Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
I use PG without PG Bouncer for non trivial traffic levels using the same type of application level connection pooling I’ve used for years with every other database.

Bouncer is a nice option, but definitely not required.

brightball··on How We Pushed CDC into Postgres
Snowflake/Crunchydata comes close to doing that with the pglake extension.

There’s not a mirror function like what Snowflake offers directly but you can come close with a pgcron to upsert changes to the iceberg tables every so often.

You can also purge the table put to the iceberg version every so often too depending on your data needs. Then you can create a query unions the results of both.

brightball··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
That's an interesting view though.

If Walmart employees somebody who's part time and is on Medicaid are they on Medicaid because of Walmart or because they couldn't commit to enough hours to go full time? 9% of 1.6 million employees on Medicaid means they are employing over 1.4 million people who are not on Medicaid, all of whom are taxed for income, payroll, property, sales, etc.

If Walmart decided tomorrow to terminate all employees who were collecting Medicaid so that they could avoid a tax increase for that stat would it be a good thing? Is it better for a company to avoid hiring at all, even part time, if they can't fully purge the employee from government assistance?

brightball··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
That's true to a certain degree, but there's a labor supply factor involved too. If companies are rewarded for employing more people it lowers the available supply of labor forcing companies to create a more enticing environment to attract that labor (prices, benefits, etc).

It compounds if the incentive is aimed at domestic labor.

brightball··on Tax cuts for the wealthy only benefit the rich (2023)
I always like to approach this conversation with a question:

Should business that actually do create jobs in practice get bigger tax breaks?

For example, if I by some miracle create a 1 man company that makes $100 million / year profit and somebody else creates a company that makes $100 million / year profit but has 2,000 employees...should the two companies be taxed differently?

Walmart employees 1.6 million people in the US. 68% are full time. Average salaries range from $18.25 / hr (field associate) to $27 / hr (supply chain). Median $30,520 across all US employees. 156,000 employees are estimated to be enrolled in Medicaid (9.4%).

Amazon employees 1.1 million. $23 / hour average for field / fulfillment. Median $53,211 across all US employees. 123,000 employees are estimated to be enrolled in Medicaid (11.7%).

Both offer pretty extensive career development, training and tuition assistance programs.

Profit per employee:

- Walmart $10,800 / employee (1.6 million employees)

- Amazon $50,000 / employee (1.1 million employees)

By comparison:

- AppLovin $3.7 million / employee (898 employees)

- NVIDIA $2.86 million / employee (42,000 employees)

So what if we actually had a tax strategy that literally was aimed at "job creators" rather than "capital gains"? What would that look like?

brightball··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
This is basically my experience.

I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.

I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.

Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.

brightball··on AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog
The only reason most of my blog posts have an image at all is because social media seems to want some type of thumbnail image to go with the post. If I don't have something, many of them seem to just grab my logo instead which seems...spammier.

I try to find something better when I can, but the need to put something on every post is exhausting.

brightball··on What DMARC Protects You From, and What It Does Not
That is good to know. I thought it was maintained by Valimail?
brightball··on The development pipeline is a production system
This is a highly accurate and unappreciated take.

There’s the system you are building…and the system that builds the system or the SDLC. Both are critical.

Solid read.

brightball··on Ruby Central's Destructive Legacy
That’s a heck of a thing for somebody to go through. I’m sorry man.
brightball··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
> Dave and Busters and other similar arcade/mixed entertainment centers are also way more common now

One thing that I've realized as I have gotten older, arcades have changed a lot. Dave and Busters and other arcades are designed to extract money as quickly as possible. When I was younger, if you were good at a game you could keep playing so my friends and I got very good at these games.

brightball··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
Yea, agreed completely here.

I spent so many hours at our local mall with my friends growing up. It had an arcade, a movie theater, book store, game store, place to eat. Our parents could just drop us there for hours. Skating rinks and bowling alleys were also a solid option.

It's one of the things that make it worth the time investment to follow sports, even if you're typically not interested in it. Getting people together to watch the game, go to games, tailgate, etc is huge.

brightball··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
I talk about this all the time. The experience of going with your friends to Blockbuster or similar, walking around, browsing everything, deciding what you were renting then grabbing pizza made for some pretty memorable weekends.

Just having everything listed on 50 different streaming platforms isn't the same experience. There are things we really lose with efficiency gains.

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