throwhauser

I don't know anything about Epic Games, but as a huge fan of Bandcamp, this feels like a bit of a drag.

There's something about Bandcamp that seems exactly right. It's an open, fair and creative way to discover and publish music, that is really distinct from the rest of the music business.

I'm struggling to see how that fits into a gigantic video game company. If it has to pull in so much money that it "moves the needle" at Epic at all, I don't see how it can remain anything close to what it is today.

"Fight with" can mean "fight for" or "fight against", which do you mean?

That makes no sense. If Russia had an effective way to conduct its business without SWIFT in the event of sanctions, it would also have a way to conduct its business outside of SWIFT any time it has something to hide.

To follow your analogy, if they had a separate office in a separate building that they could use in the event that they get kicked out of the bugged office, they would already be using it whenever they wanted additional privacy.

The only way SWIFT actually forces Russia to be visible is if it's their only option, so no visibility can be lost if they're cut off.

> ...a Soviet guy decided it was best not to send missiles back

In that case the judgment was whether the telemetry was reliable enough to justify launching a retaliatory strike, with all the grave consequences that produces.

An unambiguous order to launch a first strike might not elicit the same kind of hesitation.

> But it's only valid for US citizens.

The US Constitution is applicable to anyone within the jurisdiction of the US, regardless of citizenship or immigration status (including undocumented).

Good. There was something absurd about having to accept id.me's terms-of-service, which involved "deals, discounts, cash back rebates and employment and educational opportunities", to access government services online.

Didn't think of that. Just saw my iPhone rocket down from 50% to 10% one time too many and instantly ordered the new Android phone.

I just tried saying "OK google" to my phone and it did not summon the assistant. (Hooray!)

I have the generic "Google" app disabled, which I think is the thing that listens on the microphone for that. I don't really know what else it does, so I'm not sure what else is unavailable once it's disabled. I don't expect I'll be missing much though.

The lack of a headphone jack was one of the reasons I was reluctant to get a new iPhone.

It's strange that it has to be this way though. I just retired my iPhone 6s because the battery didn't last very long anymore. I don't really need anything but text/phone/email so I didn't feel like shelling out for a new iPhone. I got a Moto G Power. It's a good phone, except for all the absolute shit loaded onto it. So much to turn off in so many places.

Specifically, needed to get rid of:

- Google Assistant

- Google Location Services

- Avoid accidentally signing up for Verizon's "cloud" and "digital secure"

- Disallow Verizon's app from collecting location when not using the app

- Disable and de-permission Verizon Cloud, which has tons of permissions even though I never accepted using it

- Turn off Google "location accuracy"

- Turn off personal results for ads

- Turn off tracking for ads in apps which is a separate setting

- Change the default messenger from Verizon's "Message+" to normal messaging to avoid having my messages copied all over the place

- Get confused by some weird "premium" upsell in the Voicemail

- Turn off "monthly driving stats" in google maps which is enabled even though I have location tracking disabled, what the hell even is this?

And that's just the stuff I remember.

And I still get a nag screen on maps for having web history turned off.

I guess Google wants everybody's data and Verizon wants to sell "premium" things for more money, but I wish there was just one button to shut all this shit off. There should be a "good Android" option that costs less than an iPhone for people that would pay a little more money for less garbage.

After-hours on-call is a thing that needs to be destroyed. A company that is sufficiently large that the CEO doesn't get woken up for emergencies needs to have shifts in other timezones to handle them. I don't know why people put up with it.

If you're being attacked with a wrench, wouldn't you want to avoid deniable encryption?

If there's no way to 100% establish that all the money has been extracted, an attacker might keep going indefinitely to see if there's more.

What does it do that can't be accomplished with something the size of a remote controlled car?

"To help you fool yourself" seems like a euphemism for "to fool you". It's gotta be tough to go from "scant knowledge of S3" to genuine knowledge if the documentation is doing this to you.

If the docs are misrepresenting the details, who can blame the author of the post?

Writing out the digits gives a more visceral impression of the difference in weight, from roughly one, to a six-digit number, to a nine-digit number.

It seems somewhat strange that a company selling a service to EU customers might be in trouble for using Google Fonts in a jurisdiction (e.g. Germany) where there are ways to identify a user by means of IP address [0]; but a weblog that was using Google Fonts might not be, since it's a blog and not a goods-and-services site. Google ends up with the IP address equally in both cases.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264

> The issue is if a person visits a resource from a company in the EU

Does it have to be a company in the EU? I thought the GDPR covered any website an EU citizen, resident, or visitor might use, in which case US-based websites might have contradictory obligations to the GDPR and US law.

> The IP Address is NOT the only thing that makes this data into personal data.

Can you cite a reference for that? I fully believe that Google is using cookies for this, but that doesn't mean that the legal authority here isn't making the judgment on IP address alone. I believe a recent GDPR decision against Google Fonts was based on IP address alone. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135264

If a lockdown and travel restrictions, with limited duration, could have contained the spread of COVID or some other disease, I don't think it's an unreasonable impingement on civil liberties. Practically speaking a few weeks of restrictions every few decades shouldn't be problematic, or at least much less problematic than something like wartime restrictions.

Of course the value of any lockdown policy is contingent on the practical ability to correctly assess the threat of a new disease early enough that such short-duration, non-pharmaceutical interventions could work. But I don't think temporary restrictions are incompatible with basic civil liberties.

EDIT: Removed amateur-hour epidemiology, restated "philosophical" argument contingent on NPIs being effective.

The author of the piece seems to be taking the tweet about half the journalists under 40 living in that area pretty literally.

I don't know if the author of the tweet intended it that way (and if he was speaking figuratively I wouldn't fault him, it's just a tweet), but I don't quite buy that anyone could really estimate the number of journalists in an area drawn by someone else by eyeballing a map on Twitter. I also don't quite buy that half of the journalists under 40 live in a specific part of New York City, when Washington DC, Los Angeles and (for nerds) San Francisco also have their own share of that population.

The police wouldn't have to raid the family members, they'd likely give up what they know immediately, to avoid become accessories to whatever crime the police were alleging.

> If you want good online validation for the public, you need a third party right now.

I should not under any circumstances need to enter into a direct agreement with a private entity like id.me in order to access public services. The government might reasonably subcontract out some of the work, but public services need public accountability. The government service itself needs to be the direct counterparty to the public.

It's not just the potential for a breach. I didn't want id.me itself to have my information. It's ridiculous to have a private company, not accountable to the public, gatekeeping government services, regardless of how many certifications they have.

Hopefully id.me will get booted from other government agencies as well.

What a bizarre essay. It has a Modest Proposal vibe, but since "Poe's law" is a thing now, I can't tell if it's satire or not.

Morality is conspicuously absent, but I'm concerned that devoting any thought to this counts as taking the bait.

I don't think improvised desks are inappropriate for early-stage startups, especially in the 1990s. Apple started in Steve Jobs parents garage.

> it was the anonymity that was the civility

I've noticed this as well. People fight like animals when their reputation is at stake. The way that the internet lures people into making public, attributable statements means they can't back down in any disagreement without serious loss of face.

> you trade a crypto with "bad history" for a crypto without bad history and just like that even the strictest exchanges will happily give you an off ramp into fiat

Who is on the other side of that trade? If it's an identifiable DEX then doesn't that only work until cryptocurrencies from that DEX are defined as "bad"?

> We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.

I was with you up to here:

> And Zuck is very smart. The moment I saw the rebrand to Meta I knew that he saw this day coming perhaps years ago. He knows the next frontier is the meta verse

Zuckerberg has been a surprisingly good steward of the one successful idea he came across, the social network graph. His acquisitions (Instagram, etc) worked very well to supplement the social network graph and keep it going longer than it otherwise might have gone. But now that no one gives a shit about what anyone else is doing and just wants to see some jokes, that graph is getting less and less complete.

The "metaverse" is an idiotic, last-ditch attempt to lock people back into the grid by turning them into cartoon versions of themselves in a private-sector universe. It's ridiculous. Facebook is flailing.

Isn't it Jump Trading that is out $320M? Didn't they put up the money to make sure the maliciously created Solana tokens were backed by [whatever they're supposed to be backed by]? Jump doesn't own the tokens now, do they?