cvwright

It’s this belief that engineering and public policy are exactly the same, that keeps getting us in trouble.

I would be fine with slow, if the Swift compiler could actually compile all valid Swift programs. It’s pretty commonplace for me to have to break a large or complicated function into smaller bite-size pieces because the compiler can’t type check it all at once.

A hell of a lot better than in most places that have tried a “moonshot”. Russia in 1917 being the major example.

It’s like the book “Why Nations Fail”. The elites wind up wrecking things as soon as they can consolidate all the power.

They (stupidly) would rather have all of a small, shrinking pie, rather than sticking with a smaller slice of a much, much larger pie. Even if they themselves would have been better off taking the smaller proportion.

His “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”, from a few years prior, is right up there too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Theory_of_Secr...

IMO Shannon does an amazing job laying out the foundational ideas behind cryptographic security in a way that is very accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of probability.

The clarity and simplicity that he achieves is especially striking when you compare his approach to what you’ll see from modern cryptographers. No offense to those guys - they’re amazing - but accessible their stuff is not.

Defensive arguments like this are good, too.

But it feels like to really achieve successful political pushback on something of this magnitude, it really requires going on offense.

Like, why are all the headlines not "Dudes in law enforcement demand access to millions of young women's intimate photos"?

The most amazing psy op I’ve ever seen is this convincing the public that it’s people who use encryption who are the perverts, and not the people who literally want to creep on other people’s private photos of their kids / spouses / romantic partners.

This is exactly the opposite of how it works in the real world.

I think it’s much easier to take a system that has working, audited E2E encryption, and add photo management on top of that.

In other words, I think the E2EE is the bigger lift, and the photo stuff is the easier piece to re-implement.

This is why I like https://github.com/mother-of-all-self-hosting/mash-playbook and its associated Ansible roles for configuring various services.

All the portability of Docker, plus (something close to) the ease of use of installing a distro package like an .rpm or .deb.

AFAIK PhotoPrism itself is open source, but the PhotoSync tool that they suggest for syncing your photos to it is not.

Let’s hope it stays shelved then. In my experience, things are much easier to sneak into the details of some random update once the key functionality has been built and deployed. The root issue here is a loss of trust.

I’m currently using iCloud. It’s great, but the E2EE comes with the huge caveat that they scan your photos before encrypting, against a giant unaccountable database of hashes for bad stuff.

Even though I totally believe that the current set of hashes really does represent truly horrible stuff, I also suspect that it will expand over time to include anything that threatens those in power. In other words: they are coming for your Bernie memes.

So I would like to have a more secure option that doesn’t depend on the whims of the powerful to decide which images I’m allowed to own.

I’m working on building something similar.

From what I can tell, Immich, Ente, and PhotoPrism are the best of the batch when it comes to open source photo storage and management. They are all good, but it depends on what you’re looking for.

Personally, I want: E2E encryption, on-device face recognition, and the ability to self-host as well as a paid option for people who don’t want to manage their own server. The existing options each hit about 90% of that, but it’s a different 90% for each one.

Overall I really like SwiftUI. As a total iOS newbie when it was new, I don’t think I would have bothered if the only option was to slog through UIKit.

But all the complaints about its incompleteness are spot-on. How did they think it was ok to launch without basic stuff like NavigationStack? Standard Apple “piss on my head and tell me it’s raining”.

Wasn’t QNX itself open source for a short time?

I seem to remember eagerly grabbing a copy from Github around 2010-2011, but unfortunately that was on a work laptop from a previous job.

I used to loooove KDE 3.5 before the mess that was 4.0, so I was very excited to try this.

Unfortunately it fails with some DCOP error on Rocky 9. :(

> There are fun, technical, “control your own destiny” reasons to rack hardware instead of layering on top of commodity clouds. But it's really just economics. ... Hardware is what makes the margins work.

Amen to that.

Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is still being smart with it.

But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's potential customers also run their own hardware?"

One helpful tip to avoid most of the sketchy cheap cameras that try to send your data to China: Look for "NDAA compliant" cameras that are approved for use by the US government.

There's a Taiwanese brand Vivotek that makes some relatively affordable NDAA cameras. I'm hoping to try them out myself, but unfortunately haven't had time yet.

I used to live in PDX, which is generally regarded as having very good public transit for the US. My experience was pretty close to what the poster describes.

This is like going on a forum for athletes and complaining that people want to be like Jordan.

Maybe you just want to play pick-up games at the local Y. That’s totally cool. I’m not even that athletic.

But for the people who want to play competitively and win, it’s important to understand that even the super-talented people like Jordan and Carmack still have to work extremely hard. If you want to keep up with those guys, it’s not enough to skate along based on your raw talent.

This was a lesson that I wish I had learned sooner.

Carmack is a beast. Here's one of the first articles I ever read on HN, written by a guy who used to work with him:

Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html

> Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.

Yes, that's usually how it starts. It ends with invisible tracking pixels and flashing X10 ads everywhere. That or stealth ads disguised as content.

This isn't some hypothetical. We have 30 years of history now to tell us exactly how this plays out.

> Just like forums used to do.

That era was great while it lasted. But since the "adpocalypse", it's very very difficult for sites to make money without targeted ads and the requisite tracking. We lost a lot of high-quality sites like Dr Dobbs Journal in the adpocalypse, and all we have to replace them are SEO content farms and blogspam.

Unfortunately, if you don’t want your data “monetized” through creepy tracking and annoying ads, and you’re also completely unwilling to pay, then you’re going to have a bad time.

Storage, compute, and bandwidth all cost money, and it has to come from somewhere.

Neither is iOS

What are the creative apps on Android that Apple is not allowing to exist on iOS?

The article clearly states that they had to get clearances before they could start the job. Everything they created was top secret.

Therefore it was not necessarily in violation of any rules to tell them the outcome after they had finished their project.

Apply again if you're still interested. We're taking applications now.

OTOH their hardware tends to get the best support in alternative Android flavors like Lineage and Calyx.

> No, you pay to continue having hegemony over multiple continents.

Sure, it's that too. It's both.

Regardless, it should stop.

Helping an impoverished country that has been actively invaded is one thing.

Providing decades of national defense as a service is quite a different thing. Especially when the beneficiaries are some of the richest nations in the world.