3,465 karma · joined August 28, 2015
I love that when I’m traveling for business everything is arranged for me, but I hate that I get put in situations where I’m booked into big hotels with policies like this.
Increasingly it seems like there should be some kind of regulation that (with exceptions) if a good or service costs money, you should be able to buy it in exchange for money, and refuse to provide personal information even if requested.
Selfishly, I’d be happy with banning a lot more food stuff. I love salt, sugar, and saturated fat, and like that they are well understood.
Most of the newer riskier things are ways to improve margins for companies that mass produce food, either by letting it sit on a shelf longer, or to make processed cornmeal taste more interesting.
Reading blogs and review sites talk about the personality of DACs has started to grind on me. Surely it’s just a question of accuracy which can be summarized in a metric?
(I’m currently probably going to get a NAD D 3045 integrated amp/DAC, mainly for the specs, and fond memeries of being a teenager with a 3020).
It’s how I’ve felt most useful outside of my day-job, and also how I’ve gained a broader perspective on the culture, values, and practices at other companies.
Being able to do these things thoroughly and quickly, has (in my experience) been the most important technical skill for getting data science right, regardless of the language production models end up getting deployed in.
Why aren’t the infrastructure parts taken over by the state (or managed by an accountable non-profit body), and competition encouraged for the customer facing parts? Or maybe just do that via the state too, if there’s little commercial interest?
I work at a FAANG, and there’s pretty much a hard ban on any copyleft code being a dependency outside of stuff installed via distro packages. The lawyers are tough about it; the advice is always to get an enterprise license (or of course, make your own cool BSD+patents library to ‘open source’ as marketing).
I hear similar things from friends at other FAANG companies.
Do you see/hear of this more from startups based around a specific technology, containerizing copyleft code and calling it exempt? Any examples you can share?
P.S. Great blog!
They think it’s a great idea, and would love if they could do everything they do currently with FOSS, and no extra time-investment. But, with few exceptions, that’s rarely possible, especially as more and more computing happens on phones.
Of course, the people I speak to about FOSS are by no means wholly representative. But IME it’s that software freedom tends to end up being considered a nice idea but a very low priority, rather than an idea with no benefits.
From: Whoops we gave a loan to a stranger because they tricked us!
To: You owe us money because someone stole the core of yourself, from yourself, without you noticing
The police get to move a whole load of theft out of their crime statistics as it modernizes, and the banks get to avoid lots of ‘red tape’ and can decide how nice they want to be to each victim (or rather, how profitable being nice is).
The game done changed.
(Even if every deprecated end-point was described having a faint smell of boiled cabbage.)
The nice thing about flatpak for a phone is that it could in the future offer something like the Android/iOS permissions interface.
If this policy is truly counter-productive wrt its stated aim, I’d be interested to see that in the thoughts of people who have consistently given a damn about female representation on boards.
It’s less convincing when people who bark “regulation is evil” for a living find that “regulation is, once again, evil”.
I have no interest in a long thread about how the policies make people on HN feel. But it seems worth pointing out that the ‘precariat’ are a primary issue for Her Maj’s shadow cabinet.
Hint: it pays off both mortgages and bar tabs.
At the moment, most of it’s controlled by Tazer, who have an interest in keeping cops happy.
It’s not that implausible; the situation has improved considerably since 2014. They’ve managed to reduce the size of the blob on the ME processor considerably, to just that required for boot. That’s a pretty large increase in freedom, and a decrease in attack surface.
Even better, by getting those devices on the market, other vendors like System76 have been cajoled to follow suit in disabling the ME.
It’s not good enough for RYF certification, but it’s the best that you can buy on a laptop, outside of Librebooted ThinkPads from 2008.
I think a lot of people get annoyed by Purism’s lofty marketing and press releases, but they are actually doing great work.
Dell sold laptops with this as an option until they were asked not to.
It would be pretty easy for a sizable country or even a wealthy US state to demand that these ‘secure’ co-processors can be disabled at the user’s discretion, via regulation.
From the NSA’s perspective, having the keys to the backdoor is an asset, but having a backdoor at all is a huge liability, now they’re not the only game in town. US businesses and citizens simply have more to lose.
Honestly, I think it’s laziness and inertia more than conspiracy.
Same deal for the California Consumer Privacy Act.
These are laws which people hoped for, and got done.
Ultimately, it increasingly seems like advertising-surveillance as a business model may not be one we want to live with. The costs are externalized very effectively, and it’s kind of hard to know what to do with them.
But it’s pretty slick. It’s now the app I turn to (not my calendar) when I’m wondering what I’m supposed to be doing today.
Or, have the former earned a monopoly on the latter/our-species?