supernes

I've seen my share of horror stories, but I'm also the type of idealist that believes the people whom a $3T corporation hires to work on one of its core products would know better. It's more than likely that ultimately the decision was not in the hands of a technical (or seemingly even a computer literate) person.

Not the first time something like this has happened. You can try lying about your User Agent next time, it could work!

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/07/microsofts-xcloud-gam...

Widevine kind of works on Linux IIRC, but hardware accelerated VP9 decode is a huge issue still. It was fine for a while, then Google broke support in Chromium and made it work only in their ecosystem (ChromeOS).

You can move the Dock to the side of the screen and in fact many people do. What's the excuse for not copying that functionality?

Convenience and coercion - they don't want to fiddle with external devices just to watch a movie/show, and streaming services deliver content at a higher quality to these locked-down devices. Had this talk with my parents recently, privacy is infinitely less relevant to them compared to the ease of use.

Benn Jordan aka The Flashbulb has been an outspoken critic of the music streaming business and today all traces of more than 15 of his releases have been removed from all platforms without explanation.

The first (and last) time I tried it, I got a mile long GDPR consent form for the New Tab page. The entirety of the product is an ad delivery platform.

Another somewhat recent technique for getting better results quicker is path guiding, as seen in e.g. Intel's OpenPGL: https://github.com/OpenPathGuidingLibrary/openpgl

> Over the past few days we have seen a surge of accounts using bots/AI tools to answer questions on r/askscience. We would like to remind you that the goal of r/askscience is to be able to provide high quality and in depth answers to scientific questions. Using tools like GPT-3 chat not only do not provide the kind of quality that we ask for but they are often straight up wrong.

> As with all bots on this subreddit any account using those tools on /r/askscience will be immediately and permanently banned.

My Spotify playlists export is a 7.5MB (minified) JSON and I don't even have many of them. Cleaned up of redundant entries and formatted it comes out at over 128K lines.

NB: Only decompression in implemented on the GPU (via HLSL compute shader). Compression is still done on the CPU.

... which likely means he's gotten rid everyone who worked on particularly challenging things, like security, privacy, performance, & reliability.

- @mcmillen

This looks like a very early attempt to manually reverse engineer the code. Lots of empty files and TODOs, almost nothing of value yet.

If your spec is entirely up in the air, you can start by replicating the examples. Lack of meaningful examples and/or in-depth documentation is the first red flag. You can also scan the reported issues to see if others are having trouble with core features, which is a sign of project immaturity.

Either way, it always helps to have some basic use case in mind. Bigger than "Hello, World" and smaller than a MVP. The outcome of any evaluation will heavily depend on whether it's a good fit for what you're trying to achieve.

It does seem focused on apps and extensions, but they can already get that data for the latter from the extensions portal (both popularity and actual installs). And the installed app stat is questionable, because it doesn't include any usage information.

I just think they could have gone way broader with the set of reported data, and the people willing to help wouldn't mind.

Another term I've seen jokingly thrown around is "inflation-adjusted effort" and I think it fits pretty well in the current environment.

I wanted to help, but this tool doesn't collect any useful data IMO. Just queries the distribution, installed apps and the default browser. Full list here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/vstanek/gnome-info-collect/#client-...

I don't see how this would actually help improve the parts of GNOME that need improvement.

"Right hand side of subtraction cannot be a date or time." :(

Yes, it's safe to assume that public data is being scraped off Twitter constantly, especially with their history of nerfing the APIs they provide. And for most of the accounts affected by this breach the impact seems low.

But from an engineering standpoint, they failed to audit a somewhat obscure, (presumably) low-traffic endpoint that received an extraordinary amount of attention. It's kind of wild they're willing to admit such incompetence.

> At that time, we had no evidence to suggest someone had taken advantage of the vulnerability.

They didn't notice that someone managed to scrape 5,485,636 accounts, after they were made aware of the issue?

Client-local fingerprinting is not inherently evil, just when you combine it with additional signals and decide to use it in violation of users' privacy. AFAIK it's the most reliable way to distinguish unique visitor agents, and under that use case it's far more respectful of personal information than an IP address.

Thinking about it a bit more, systems like mCaptcha and Botpoison aren't really CAPTCHA in the strict sense - they solve a somewhat different problem than telling if there's a human at the other end, and IMO that's an important distinction to make (and doesn't necessarily make them inferior to other solutions.)

I still think PoW alone is not enough as it can be automated, albeit at a slower rate. Most of the time I worry more about low-volume automated submissions than high-frequency garbage. The real value is in the combination of factors, especially what BP call the "session and request analysis" and other fingerprinting solutions.

The goal of CAPTCHA is to tell computers and humans apart. I appreciate the effort towards better UX, but there are already "invisible" CAPTCHAs like Botpoison that discriminate better than this. PoW solutions are just more energy-intensive rate limits.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10117297

Running "Magicul" through it does indeed give a warning for the french meaning.

It's not just the amount of money they try to get people to spend, it's some really obnoxious tactics, like NPCs telling you they "don't run a charity" (i.e. steering you into spending real money) and paid bonuses that you lose if you don't login daily (as opposed to free ones in most other games).

Fans have dubbed it "Diablo Immoral" and say that it goes far beyond what other mobile titles infamous for their monetization have done.

If there's a backlash, then it's a bug. If no one cares, then it's a feature.

"We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more."

Harmful to whom, Twitter?

I don't mean to sound rude, but Tesla engineers can't even distinguish the moon from a stoplight. Human interaction and defending against a naturally intelligent adversary are not so simple.

AFAIK they're impossible to pre-render on the server, and the CSS tricks mentioned in the docs to hide content before components are registered may cause Google's crawler to ignore them. Haven't looked in depth at the React implementation, but the answer seems to tend towards "no".