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Yeah, from a citizen perspective I agree. C'est la vie. Our governments need to work against this via legislation.

It should not be up to Matthew Prince to decide who to block. He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way.

groundlogicon Cloudflare S-1

It's quite refreshing, right?

groundlogicon Cloudflare S-1

Finally an IPO I want to buy into. Technical fundamentals matter.

Edit: I mean that in the software/service way, not the economical way, in case there was any confusion.

groundlogicon CutiePi – All-in-one Raspberry Pi tablet

That's like a 2-4 year task, it seems.

groundlogicon CutiePi – All-in-one Raspberry Pi tablet

After working with people in Taiwan for the past two years: I love the creativity coming out of there.

Compared to mainland China, people in Taiwan seem more eager to integrate with the world. Open source is popular in mainland China too, but English is not.

This thing they're building seems awesome.

groundlogicon Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

This paper contains some pricing from mid 2018 (including Planet/Dove):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326417596_Benchmark...

groundlogicon 100 Years Ago, a Telephone Tower in Stockholm Connected 5000 Phone Lines (2014)

The switchboard room inside that building is also pretty fancy looking:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allmänna_Telefonaktiebolagets_...

Even more photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tekniskamuseet-telehistoriska/...

groundlogicon Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety

Sure, there are obviously visual warnings in real life, like that. Pretty sure that kind of thing is universal.

I'm talking about something that would pop on the Waze display, like 20 seconds ahead of reaching the crossing.

groundlogicon Tech companies ignore pleas on rail safety

I could certainly imagine that if e.g. Waze warned about railroad crossings that it could prevent some small percentage of almost sleeping drivers/truckers getting hit.

It's a numbers game. 999/1000 will be watching just fine without a warning from their navigation app; that warning might bring awareness to 999.8/1000 or so. Or something like that. That could result in a pretty dramatic decrease of accidents.

This seems like a no-brainer to me - they should add a (visual) warning about this.

groundlogicon What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

I guess you primarily point, rather than type?

groundlogicon What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?

I got RSI like 15 years ago. The only thing that's worked for me long term when I'm actually doing coding all day long, is a combination of:

a) a keyboard holder below the desk - something similar to https://kw.pricenacdn.com/files/images/products/original/14/... - I got mine from IKEA a long time ago - unfortunately they discontinued that product - the key thing here is the get the keyboard as close to your legs as possible, i.e. enabling your arms to be purely horizontally oriented while typing - or ideally even sort of downwards-pointing.

b) Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro - manufactured 1999-2001 (e.g. https://mechanicalkeyboardtryout.blogspot.com/2016/03/micros... or http://www.dansdata.com/nkpro.htm) I have two of these; they're very durable. You'll need to wash the key caps in your dishwasher once a year.

groundlogicon LucidScience – Electronic Projects and Tutorials

http://lucidscience.com/pro-basic%20spy%20transmitter-1.aspx

That takes me back.. that looks very similar to something I built out of an article in an electronics magazine article in ~1987.

I do remember it had remarkably good sound quality from such a simple circuit - it basically sounded like "professional" broadcast talk radio. Lots of fun spying on siblings etc.

groundlogicon Apple Confirms $1M Reward for Anyone Who Can Hack an iPhone

Just noting:

This isn't nearly enough money to stop North Korea, Israel, Russia, US, UK, France etc. Pretty sure a zero-day would be 10-100x more valuable to them than this $1 million reward. (Why is this even controversial?)

groundlogicon 'Brief radiation spike' after rocket engine blast in northern Russia

"They advise everyone to close their windows and drink iodine, 44 drops per glass of water.

groundlogicon Apple to provide iPhones with ssh, root shell & debugger to security researchers

They all probably had all of this already, via informal (jailbreak) means. Perhaps except the debugger... does anyone know what would add?

groundlogicon TV detector van

The current Swedish government is centrist on money issues, and very leftist on cultural issues. The same goes for the public broadcasting.

groundlogicon The market figured out Gitlab’s secret

This seems like misdirection. Gitlab's largest problem is their record of operational incompetence. This will take some time to recover from. Personally, I won't use them for a least two more years, based on their data loss incident two years ago.

I do wish them luck. Github/Microsoft should have a credible competitor.

groundlogicon TV detector van

Danish public service bias to the left: ~ 0/5

Norwegian public service bias to the left: ~1/5

Swedish public service bias to the left: ~4/5

groundlogicon The Fed says it will build a Real-Time interbank payments system

Welcome to the 21st century, America!

Jokes aside, I'm still amazed every time my monthly consulting fee arrives from Taiwan into my Swedish corporate banking account more or less instantly.

This must surely be the same for e.g. Taiwan to US? Is it just US to US that is so slow?

groundlogicon TV detector van

Swedish public service transitioned from a per-household fee (for households that held devices capable of showing RF broadcast TV) to a per citizen tax January 1st this year. Of course, they go to great lengths to avoid calling it a tax, but... well, it is a tax.

I don't really like it. There's no opt-out any longer. And the content is predictably all-consuming leftist.

groundlogicon Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

> Perhaps they couldn't stop it

Pretty sure they could, at least early on. Come on, they had absolute power over company strategy. The most important people (their smartest developers, like Jeff Dean etc, by all accounts, didn't care much about stuff like this.)

> or felt that tamping down on employee discussion would cost more than it would benefit?

No-one apart from you is calling this tampering.

> Or maybe they've realized that Google cannot be neutral

Or maybe all of this bias is accidental because all they cared about was freedom, and while the two founders were away jetskiing, the company grew in a very particular political direction?

groundlogicon Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

...no?

I think you maybe don't get the whole "don't be political at work" thing.

groundlogicon Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

I.. disagree. At least here in Sweden, the workplace was and is a neutral place when it comes to politics (basically, it's considered extremely impolite to push your private political view at work.). Is it different in the US?

groundlogicon Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

In hindsight.. it seems like it could become their downfall.

It also seems so counter-productive for a company that basically controls large parts of the web traffic to become so politicized. What was Larry, Sergey and Eric thinking?

Edit: Seems like I can't create new posts - I'm being rate limited. Editing this comment instead as a workaround.

I think Google's stated mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful") relies on the staff being politically neutral.

groundlogicon Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo

12-20 years ago, one of my largest life goals was to work for Google. (It's not anymore. I found other fun and rewarding jobs.)

I don't get why the Google management team allowed their team to get so... well, violently politicized.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but.. keeping politics out of the workplace worked very well for a very long time.

groundlogicon Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

The difference between Sweden and Germany in terms of RF spectrum license auctions has typically been:

Sweden goes for "beauty auctions" - a balance between coverage and government revenue.

Germany goes for government revenue alone.

groundlogicon Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet

Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started...

The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where every employed person had this opportunity to buy a computer to get online at like half price, since all the taxes (income tax, employment tax) were waived. I used that scheme to buy an outrageous $5k PC at "half price". (Dual Pentium 333 Mhz, Dual Voodoo2 - those are the specs I remember.)

Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early.

In parallel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget was started, with the goal of providing high bandwidth connections to people. Cisco invested very, very heavily into this company, as well as a bunch of american pension funds. When I moved into an apartment in a mid-sized city in 2000, it had a 10 Mbit/s ethernet socket. I heard they invested so heavily, putting $1M routers into the basements of like 20-30 apartment buildings. Maybe that's why we got upgraded without an extra charge to 100 Mbit/s just a few years later. (It's now 250 Mbit/s, and we're still just paying $7/apartment/month in our co-op.)

It pains me a little to do so, but I credit the late 1990s social democratic government for the foresight to create the market by basically flooding the country with tax-free PCs.

And, oh, yeah, there was a lot of proactive fibre-laying going on, very early. Not quite sure how what happened. That backstory is probably quite important...