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That sounds fun! I've been rebuilding my wife's gardens and adding drip lines / irrigation. I ended up getting an OpenSprinkerPi[1] board to control the irrigation valves I'm installing. There's also a software project[2] that gives it a little more configurability/utility, including tying it into automatic watering based on the weather and such. I'm just having a lot of fun with it, and it seems like you are too!

[1]https://rayshobby.net/wordpress/ospi/ [2]https://github.com/rszimm/sprinklers_pi

Any clue what the holdup is for production of new Silicon Valley episodes? I just read they're not starting production of the new season until summer 2019, and it's already been a year since the last season ended.

I use Apple Music on Windows daily.

I listen to some relatively obscure music, and Spotify never seems to have what I'm looking for, and if they do it's usually only their latest or most popular album. I switched to Apple Music over a year ago and their catalog seems drastically more complete.

One comic that I'm quite pleased is still being produced is XKCD[1], though it's hard to say how long it'll last.

[1] https://xkcd.com

Hmm. I see your point, that it does seem like I was contriving to use the term "hack" in a situation that might lend it to a (non-nefarious) precursor of the "hacking" term in the topic at hand. But in this case it was actually unintentional, and what I had in my head was more of "hacking things to pieces" as a boy who's found his way into his grandfather's shed is likely to do.

Totally off-topic, but hacksaws are also a favorite tool of mine. There is something totally fascinating to me about cutting through metal - likely because metal is typically strong and difficult to break. I have very fond memories of hacking things in my grandfather's shed when I was young, and to this day I really enjoy hacking through a drywall nail when doing home improvement tasks.

Irfanview seems to handle it decently well

OT: The word "Humaaans" makes me think of the Ferengi from Star Trek.

E.g. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/63716/why-do-the-f...

Thanks for the reply. I figured it was, in reality, a pretty innocuous page view counter. But I also figured since your site is getting some attention on HN right now, it'd be best to make the finding public.

Also, thanks for actually adding a 'do not track' check! Too few sites are doing that, even new ones like yours. I updated my comment as soon as I saw that in there

I'm concerned about the HTTP requests that fire off every time I navigate to a new page. E.g. navigating to my "Thursday 10th Jan 2019" note triggers [1]. It even includes a cookie in the request. Not completely private, it would seem, as you're very clearly collecting metadata about my app usage habits, even though it's not strictly required for the app to function properly.

[1]: POST https://trys-tiny-tracking.now.sh/ {"type":"hit","url":"/2019/01/10/"}

EDIT: Looking through the src [2], it appears the site will respect the user's "do not track" browser preference [3], but that's not supported in all browsers

[2] https://github.com/trys/JournalBook/blob/master/src/utils/be...

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/d...

I think this is a really neat idea, but I'm a little concerned about how they store data.

>My health data is secure and private. Health Wizz does not share my data with anyone. Period.

I get the feeling that I would interpret that claim differently than how they mean it. I would expect that to mean that they either don't store my info on their servers, or they e2e encrypt it such that only I (or anyone to whom I give some access permissions) can access it. I.e., I would expect that Health Wizz employees cannot access my health data, unless I specifically allow them to.

But I'm sure that's not the case. At the very least it's not provably the case that they can't access it - their word is really the only assurance.

Bottom line, if they're storing my data in an unencrypted form, or in an encrypted form where they have the means to decrypt it, I'm a hack away from having very personal details exposed.

Might make a good addition to the "Known Issues" section or somewhere else. Just somewhere to indicate all the little points of human intervention.

Knowing that my 2-year-old son will very likely not even consider participating in Facebook (when he gets to that age) is pretty refreshing. It gives me hope that in the time between now and then, we'll be able to figure out how to communicate effectively in the distributed internet age. In the same vein, it worries me because it's totally plausible to think that the problems of today will be dwarfed by the problems of my son's age.

From my perspective, the very best action that I can take, in order to limit his vulnerability later on in life, is to just start educating him on how to act appropriately online. But I can only base that education on the view that I've built up of these gargantuan and ever-multiplying systems of manipulation, which leads back to my main worry: I know that there will come a time when I can no longer keep my view of these systems up-to-date, and by extension, help to keep my son educated about his and my own vulnerabilities to them. I find myself worrying a lot about his future these days...

> For about 14 million people the hackers accessed information such as the last 10 places that person checked into, their current city and their 15 most-recent searches...

I imagine such information will be very useful for fine-tuning phishing scams. E.g. something like “we saw you the other day at the Baton Rouge State Fair, and it’d be a shame if anyone saw what you did there. Send 0.5 BTC here so no one finds out.”

Wow, what a travesty. Thanks for posting that

Very cool, thanks!

Off-topic:

Googling "complex-valued pixels" didn't bring up anything, but I'm interested in finding out more about that. What pixel-related information do the real/imaginary parts represent? What sort of applications does that have?

Have you looked into using Macaroons[1] at all for distributed systems? I used them for a client's multi-site intranet a while back, and it made some of the very complicated parts very simple. I'm just wondering why they never seem to have caught on.

[1] http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/05/21/my-first-macaroon/

I appreciate the criticism, but I really don't feel that my child's cognitive development has been devalued in any way due to his occasionally being able to communicate with the Echo. The vast majority of his communication is with other people - which he loves participating in. I'll concede that these devices do probably attempt to sell us stuff, but up to this point, I have not seen anything from the Echo that I would consider nefarious or that seems like it might cause harm to my child's growth. In fact, my experience is that the Echo is basically harmless, especially compared to the behavioral problems that I've seen in children who watch TV or Youtube extensively (which I do not allow).

I put an Echo Dot in my son’s room a couple months after he was born to play music/white noise for him to fall asleep easier and to make the mornings easier when getting him ready (so that, for instance, I can use it to ascertain news/weather/daily travel info). Over the past year and a half since I put it in his room, he has of course been developing rapidly in his cognitive abilities, and he’s finally at the point now where he can wake the device on his own. It’s been several months of trying to talk to it, mostly by mimicking the simpler commands that he hears me say.

It’s interesting to me that he has grown up speaking at the Echo and slowly learning how to communicate with it in much the same way that he is learning to communicate with other people. His communicative learning progress is definitely a lot slower with the Echo than with me, but that makes sense since he spends a lot more time with people than with the Echo. Even still, I was very impressed the other day when he woke the Echo (and then promptly told it to “stop”, which has been in his vocabulary for a while now).

I’m not sure there’s any real point to this outside of just an interesting (to me) anecdote. And I guess it’s probably time I take the Echo out of his room, or at least figure out how to lock it down, so he doesn’t get into anything age-inappropriate or buy 500 cans of tomato sauce or something.

Anybody else have any interesting experiences with their little ones learning to communicate with smart devices?

This reminds me of one of the episodes of the documentary series "Endangered Civilizations". From the description[1]:

> 9. The Books Under the Sand

> During the time of trans-Saharan trading, its strategic location along the caravan route enabled it to prosper. It was also the gathering place for the pilgrims from western Sahara as they began their journey to Mecca. It had already attained the position as a prestigious economic and spiritual center. Chinguetti was considered the capital of the "Land of the Moors".

In the episode, they reference and show a lot of very old texts. If I remember correctly, they mostly came from the days when the area was replete with trading activity, around the 12th or 13th century. One of the things they discuss in the episode is the fact that there aren't enough researchers/scientists that are studying them, so many of the books end up being inadvertently destroyed or buried under the always-shifting sands.

While I was watching the show, I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have some sort-of machine that you could point at the ground and be able to just see what's buried deep underfoot, for a wide radius. There's so much history in that area that is just completely inaccessible to us because of the climate and geography.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B079J3NT2V

Agreed. Thank you for formalizing that ideal more coherently.

This is pretty much where I’m at as well, on this issue. I only wish there were social security numbers contained in the breach so that we could stop considering them as personally identifiable info.

And specifically (and overwhelmingly) males. My own experience would point anecdotally toward it as well, as the four people whom I knew personally who died by suicide were white male Americans.

Thanks for your insight. That’s pretty much what I was expecting in a web framework produced by Red Hat. (Not to completely disparage Red Hat - they do have some good stuff.)

How’s the CoreOS transition going? My buddy worked for CoreOS and it seems like he’s incredibly busy now. It’s upsetting to hear that they’re forcing shitty tech on y’all.

Tangent: USGS is an incredible resource for those interested in the geosciences. Their website has grown a lot in the past few years, before which it was already replete with tons of great stuff!

Seems like a cool place to work

On their "OpenAI Charter", they list several basic principles they'll use to achieve the goal of safe AGI, including this one, which I find pretty interesting:

>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

If I'm reading that correctly, it means that later on if/when some company is obviously on the cusp of AGI, OpenAI will drop what they're doing and start helping this other company so that there isn't a haphazard race to being the first one, which could result in unsafe AGI. That sounds like a well-intentioned idea that could cause more problems in practice. For instance, if there are multiple companies with almost equal footing, then combining forces with one of them would give a sense of even stricter deadline to the other ones, possibly making the development even less safe.

Also, they only mention assisting "value-aligned, safety-conscious" projects, which seems pretty vague. Just seems like they should give (and perhaps have given) more thought into that principle.

This feels pretty historic, and I want to feel like things are on the right track, but I can’t shake the feeling that the world is being deceived. It’s probably just me being biased against a regime that I’ve always believed to have heinous disregard for human life.

The browser compatibility section of the MDN article[1] lists the various browsers and has footnotes that provide further info on each browser's handling of the situation

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...