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phkxon Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

Indeed, that may simply be it. You would want to verify time and date. When coming up with the thought I was looking for ways to crowd verify real world events.

phkxon Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

The functionality included time-based rotation of the identifier that supposedly at least notably increased the effort to identify/track people over a longer time frame. I never dug into the details, but I figure that works better with short-term contacts and may break if you are in contact with many people over a longer time frame. Also, like contact tracking, it should be opt-in, so that you explicitly could act as ‚eyewitness‘.

phkxon Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography

I‘ve been wondering whether the contact tracking features introduced for Covid 19 could be used to verify that pictures of an event where taken by people who were actually around the scene. That way you‘d have some reassurance that a given picture was actually from the event. Combined with pictures from different angles from different people and some kind of verified photography should make alterations harder.

phkxon Feds Fine Durham Energy Efficiency Co $722M

I guess this is popular because of the 'oh-so-stupid-government' vibes. Yet (almost) everybody buys the cheap meat (which the non-alfalfa farmer is also selling in reality) subsidized by not growing alfalfa. And when the subsidiaries eventually are withdrawn and the local farmer cannot compete with some other guy at the other end of the world who externalizes cost, then everybody buys from the other end of the world and complains that the local economy is going down. There would be more to this story, but currently it ends with (almost) everyone buying cheap meat and complaining about taxes.

edit: maybe my story is the same as the alfalfa one

phkxon Feds Fine Durham Energy Efficiency Co $722M

The easy one first: The Matt Levine piece quotes the story linked here, so he's definitely not the original source...

And then, yes: If you can make more money by not using your big resistor than actually using it, then economically you would be better off not using it. If you can make money by not using it, then someone is willing to pay you because they get value out of it or they can avert some damage. If you threatened to use your capacitor without obvious use other than destabilizing the grid, that might just look a little too much like blackmail...

If you believe in markets, then someone coming up with the means to improve grid stability (here: by overall less consumption) should somehow be able to turn it into a profit. The issue here seems to be, that American Efficient didn't actually give any guarantees that they could reduce consumption. So it rather looks like whoever admitted them to the auction didn't do their due diligence. The whole market thing breaks down when there is actual fraud or when the identical thing gets sold more than once (actually, energy savings could probably be sold once for grid stability and once for reduced emissions - I'd say they're disjoint to first order, but might be connected indirectly).

That being said, there should be limits to markets.The whole market thing breaks down when there is actual fraud, when a party/faction has a disproportionate amount of power or when there are externalized costs that are not accounted for in the pricing.

phkxon Understanding the FFT Algorithm (2013)

You softened your statement with 'not always' to which I would add, that different people might be looking for different levels of 'understanding' ;)

phkxon Understanding the FFT Algorithm (2013)

Jake VanderPlas also has an article on Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram [1] which I can recommend if you want to get into the details (it also includes a treatment of fourier-pairs + convolution to explain the 'artifacts' in DFT). There's a module for it in scipy, so it should be rather straightforward to try your analysis using timestamps for x and an array of ones for y. That algorithm is essentially a least-squares fit with sinusoids at pre-selected frequencies.

I've tried to use Lomb-Scargle to reduce the number of sampling points in magnetic resonance experiments, but had another dimension to take into account (similar to doing the analysis for each network port separately in your case). I got some spikes on some of the 'ports' which I couldn't reason about or reproduce when I did the same with periodic sampling and FFT. But the individual periodograms looked reasonable, if I remember correctly. Maybe we have a more regular user of LS around, who can point out common pitfalls. Otherwise you could generate some data from known frequencies to see what kind of artifacts you get.

You could maybe also take a look at the auto-correlation of the packet timestamps to see whether you can extract timescales on which patterns arise.

[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/aab766

phkxon Staying ahead of censors in 2025

It appears that the ruling regarding the rapes was not so straight forward [1], certainly not something that you can use as a one-line argument. There are also other articles describing what presumably happened there in 2020.

Regarding the case of 'Maja R.', here's a summary [2] (e.g. she didn't show up for the first two hearings [3] - that would certainly raise the anger of the righteous if somebody not in their favor did that).

I'm in doubt whether this one case is sufficient to prove the downward spiral that some people claim to perceive (it was also brought up in context of migration here on HN recently, and from the sources which I could find I‘m not sure it fully qualifies there either).

[1]: https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/details-aus-dem-prozess-darum-ka... [2]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/57113 [3]: https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/ehrloses-vergewaltigerschwein-20...

phkxon Staying ahead of censors in 2025

I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;) The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post. On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter. I‘d just like to see better on HN.

phkxon Staying ahead of censors in 2025

Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.

Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.

[1]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...

phkxon Staying ahead of censors in 2025

Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.

phkxon Unifying our mobile and desktop domains

I use the mobile page on desktop. Less clutter is always welcome.

phkxon Hilbert space: Treating functions as vectors

Now I’m thinking that I have missed the point of the article. I didn’t read it as an introduction to vector spaces, but rather that the introduction served as to give an intuition how functions may be viewed as vectors (going back to the article, it’s even in the section heading). I found the next parts well written and to the point, leading along the steps to show that indeed the requirements for a Hilbert space are met by L^2 (even though those requirements are only spelled out in the end). I’m not actively working with mathematics any more, but I didn’t notice any major corner cutting. It’s not text book rigorous but lays out the idea in an easy to follow way. I took something away from it - or not, depending on whether I missed some inconsistency.

phkxon Free the Internet: The Tor Project's annual fundraiser

Do these donations also support the operation of nodes? If not, how to support the network (other than running a node myself)?

phkxon From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent

I switched from MacOS (from a 12 year old first generation retina MBP) to Arch and started out with hyprland. It was really nice initially while I mostly used terminals, a browser or launched Steam. But when I needed to do some paperwork (taxes, stuff involving wide spreadsheets) I often ran into trouble, e.g. when I needed to read some numbers off a pdf quickly. Rearranging the tiling to have everything in appropriate size was rather slow. I often use overlapping windows in such cases, where I only need to see parts of a document and the floating tiles in hyprland just didn’t work for me (not as easy to arrange and so it felt clumsy). I moved on to KDE and that has been working great for half a year now. Maybe I‘m missing some functionality or just didn’t take the time to get used to it - stuff needed to get done ;)

phkxon Stoop Coffee: A simple idea transformed my neighborhood

Douglas Rushkoff would certainly approve. Go Team Human!

phkxon The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

Then we might have reached the point to discuss whether it’s enough to lift the worst-off to some minimum where they can survive or whether we’re in a position now to also enable participation on broad scale.

Right now it looks like wealth is self-enforcing. Across certain thresholds, you can get an expert or have the network to help with your taxes, legal issues, investment strategy and so on. Maybe you even inherited it all from your parents. There are certainly prominent counter examples of people who crossed these thresholds with their own hard work. The majority of people does not.

phkxon The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

I don‘t get which implications you derive from the changing needs over one’s life.

In all of those phases, safety and health of yourself and beloved ones are likely at the top of your needs. Is there a contradiction to your ideals when you were young (unless you went all in on YOLO)?

edit: Maybe it’s about the inclination towards uprise/revolution which might result in oppression and danger for those you want to protect. In that case: I don’t see why some kind of apocalyptic revolution must be part of the cycle mentioned in the top post. Maybe I’m still naive, but I still have hopes that we will get to sustainable terms on this planet.

phkxon Show HN: Daily-notes.nvim – fuzzy time journal and planning plugin

I’m in the process of ditching vscode and for now settled on nvim as the replacement. Currently, I still use Dendron for taking notes. There are some suggestions for companion plugins at the end of the readme - does anyone have additional suggestions? For example for tagging, linking between notes and visualizing the graph?

phkxon DAGitty – draw and analyze causal diagrams

If you‘re using causal diagrams professionally or privately: What are your use cases?

phkxon An admittedly wandering defense of the SSO tax

I can‘t help to observe that the shapes in the article can be sorted by color and shape, with each resulting stack being numbered from 1 to 4. Problem solved ;)

phkxon Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?

Could you elaborate a little on the traceability part, please? If the different steps of a processing chain are distributed via queues, you rather have an overhead in collecting the information in a central place, I would think.

phkxon History of the PDF

Statisticians beware: It‘s about the Portable Document Format.

phkxon The bash book to rule them all

You might be surprised (as I was), when you consult Wikipedia on this topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_tape

phkxon GitHub Actions Are a Problem

I‘d also rather say that it was about hosting the code for free in the first place and then the pull requests, including the possibility to comment on code in PRs. I use the git cli (instead of some UI / IDE extension) for all interactions with the repo locally. But as soon as it‘s about collaboration, these platforms come into play.

I just quickly scanned, to find that there is the `git request-pull` command, before I wasn’t even sure whether pull requests are a git built-in feature at all.

Side question: does any code hosting platform allow to comment on lines of code outside of pull requests? I‘ve had several occasions where I wanted to ask, why something was written the way it was.

phkxon Proxima Fusion looks to take stellarators commercial

I haven’t been there, yet. A friend recommended it, though. Besides a look at the machine, there seem to be a bunch of stories about things they had to solve along the way to build it, e.g. to achieve the precise 3D positioning of the parts.

phkxon Proxima Fusion looks to take stellarators commercial

Quickly skimming over the links from your profile, I‘m surprised that the non-reality of things might be a challenge to your brain. Cool stuff, will check it out more deeply.

phkxon Proxima Fusion looks to take stellarators commercial

Got it. Yeah, some intuition would make you think that the problem is somehow symmetrical, since other electromagnetic systems don’t have this ‚organic‘ kind of shape.

phkxon Proxima Fusion looks to take stellarators commercial

You can get a free guided tour at the Greifswald site of the IPP in the north of Germany to convince yourself of the physical reality.

https://www.ipp.mpg.de/visitors

phkxon Biohacking Lite (2020)

https://karpathy.github.io/2020/06/11/biohacking-lite/

please use https links