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tolmaskyon Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana

> It's a stroke of a pen. There's no process or negotiation involved; he just methodically slow-walked it for electoral considerations.

Right, my point is that while you bemoan what this says about Biden, I am encouraged about what this says about the electorate. Who would have thought that this would be a politically savvy move 10 years ago? I will gladly take every other October becoming “get rid of laws we should have gotten rid of 50 years ago” month.

I cannot wait until someone says that future President X doesn’t really believe in copyright and patent reform, and that they’re only strengthening fair use protections and eliminating software patents because it’ll help them in the future election.

tolmaskyon Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana

Biden signed 30 executive orders his first week in office. In everything from climate change to the pandemic. Not sure anyone remembers but that was a big deal back in 2021.

We’ve wanted this for 50 years, Biden getting it done in under 2 years isn’t too shabby. Was it for political reasons? I hope so! It would be nice for the politically expedient thing to start lining up with what’s actually right and what people want for a change. As Milton Friedman used to say, “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”

tolmaskyon US Government building AI tech to unmask anonymous writers

OK, so before you publish something you give it to GPT-3 with the prompt "write the following in the style of $X". Run the resulting text through a few AIs to confirm it says that it was probably written by $X.

So, either to anonymize the text or to implicate someone, it seems like we're just in an arms race now.

tolmaskyon Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.

tolmaskyon The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps

> Look, when you are committed to fighting, you'll reach for any tool at hand.

I think this makes sense if you are trying to fight this, find this solution, and determine it is right for you. However, it feels like the "tool chooser" in many of these scenarios is different from the "tool user". A world that was geared towards individuals that wanted to fight their own impulses might create an app that just shut down your phone when you looked at questionable material, or charged you (like a "cursing jar" app). These apps instead seem to be "observer-centric", not "observed-centric". As such, it appears that oftentimes this is not the tool someone is reaching for, but the tool that is being handed out, if that makes sense. Clearly there exist other solutions to these "problems" (without getting into arguing whether this should be considered a problem or not). This honestly just feels like a lazy means of enforcement for the "accountability partner". In other words, the problem being solved here doesn't necessarily feel like it's "help me get over this", but rather "make helping me less of a burden on someone who's job is to help me, by letting them just look at an email at the end of the day."

tolmaskyon The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps

> Fortify’s inclusion of Facebook’s Pixel isn’t just a privacy issue, it’s a security problem. While testing the app, we also noticed that the password to our account was sent in plaintext to Facebook in the URL of the tracking requests. Facebook claims to have filtering mechanisms to prevent its systems from storing this type of personal information, but Fortify’s apparent oversight is still concerning to experts like Galperin. “That’s a huge vulnerability,” she says. “It’s the sort of behavior that makes me feel like they don’t have security experts reviewing the app or its policies.”

> After being notified of the password issue, Olsen said Fortify would stop transmitting users’ unencrypted passwords to Facebook. As we went to press, the issue had not yet been addressed.

Oftentimes lost in these discussions (even in the posts here so far), is the fact that what is discussed is often done so under the implicit assumption that these tools are written perfectly. But a key consideration with regard to privacy is precisely that that is rarely the case. Even if you think these tools are hypothetically useful, you have to bake into the equation the relatively high probability that all this information will end up hacked and leaked to the public. Under those conditions I feel that it becomes pretty hard to defend these apps.

tolmaskyon Pennsylvania County Sued over Illegal Ballot Drop Box Usage Captured on Camera [pdf]

A fair number of these are someone dropping off two envelopes from a car and you can’t really see if there is another person in the car. Honest question: is it actually illegal if two people drive together to the drop box for the person in the drop box side to drop both envelopes off? Is the other person supposed to technically open the door, walk around the car, and drop their’s off separately?

tolmaskyon CSS calc(100% – 0) is invalid, but calc(100% - 0px) is valid

Especially because, as TFA points out, you might have even yourself written "0px" but your CSS linter "compressed" it to 0, thus making it invalid after compilation. This seems like an annoying thing to have to account for CSS compilers.

tolmaskyon Why kids are afraid to ask for help

> I've always scratched my head at this, since to me it's no problem to admit ignorance, but I've come to learn this isn't the case for most people, especially in front of others (i.e. a meeting).

Leaving ego aside, there's plenty of societal conditioning that explains this too. The negative feelings you may feel by not knowing something (i.e. in a meeting, or in a class...) can certainly plausibly be connected to being reprimanded for not knowing something. It's definitely the bizarre case that not having an immediate answer for something can result in "losing" an argument. Obviously this isn't the way it should be, but it certainly is the way it is many time, whether that be in low stakes argument about a TV show in a bar or a high stakes discussion about what technology you should use. But it goes back even further than that I think. In many ways, our entire school structure is designed around the idea that your success is tied to your ability to answer questions on the spot. Political debates are the same way, right? The reality is that the answer to every question in a debate should be some version of "well, I'd go and ask my cabinet and consult experts in this area..." So I don't think it should be that surprising that it makes people uncomfortable to not know something.

tolmaskyon U.S. appeals court rejects big tech’s right to regulate online speech

Then, as an optimization, you change the text to “submit 100 times”, and now it’s you that posted 100 of those tweets. Also, a little timer field where you tell it how long to wait until it tweets it. Perfect.

tolmaskyon Interactive Docs with Markdoc

I think the point is being able to then use markdown inside of that block, since many people seem to think that "**hello**" does look better than "<b>hello</b>". That being said, it would perhaps have been better to allow for HTML tags inside the markdown that themselves can have markdown inside of them (I'm not sure if this is the default behavior of markdown or not, or whether there are any weird parsing pitfalls in allowing this).

I think that perhaps there is also a contingency of people that have been using templates for ages that have the "{% %}" style, so this is maybe attractive to those folks?

To be clear, I agree with you, but I am just trying to figure out why this syntax would be chosen.

Edit: Perhaps there is also some sort of HTML injection argument against using real tags? That is to say, if you have an interface that allows users to input markdown, then with "{% %}" you can easily filter the allowable template tags, but perhaps it is just more error prone to try to handle "<>" tags that might then themselves get inserted into live HTML. I haven't thought it all the way through but just wondering if there is a non-stylistic argument for it.

tolmaskyon Woman sues after DNA from rape kit used to arrest her

It’s an invasion of privacy because it’s not neutral info. It may for example contain information about genetic diseases or other things that could be used to discriminate against you. It doesn’t matter if it’s not the police’s intent to use it that way, since by collecting it they create a huge target for hackers to get a large amount of this info. The information it contains should be considered closer to CC number than a ID picture (or arguably even worse, since you can’t change it).

tolmaskyon Woman sues after DNA from rape kit used to arrest her

> It's burglary this time, what if it was homicide?

Magnitude of a crime can always be expanded to justify anything. We have plenty of things we could do to catch more criminals (even murderers!), but we don't. As an example, why not run a DNA check on any blood draws at the doctor's office? Sure it's an invasion of privacy, but what if it catches a murderer!

I get it. Here the argument is that the person approached law enforcement on their own, and thus opened themselves up to this. But this is incidental -- it happens to be that reporting this crime requires handing over DNA. But police could require everyone to do a blood draw when reporting any crime, right? I think most people would have a problem with that and think it is obviously an invasion of privacy. But OK, you can argue that the real problem there is that it is too tit-for-tat. How about instead every time you walk into a police station someone watches you and collects any hair that falls off of your head and runs it through the database? No coercion, no one can argue that they had to give their DNA in exchange for services. Still seems like it would still have a pretty negative effect on trust between people and police.

The only thing that makes this case "confusing" is that a bunch of different actors are bundled together. If the administration of a rape kit was 100% done by a doctor (as far as I know it is done by nurses but then handed over to police, currently?), and they could then trivially separate out the two genetic materials and hand over only that which didn't belong to the victim, then I think most people would find it distasteful for the police to demand both sets of DNA, right? Why do you need the other one (the doctor could confirm it belongs to the victim if that is the concern)? Just because it happens to be that the way we happen to administer this today makes it convenient to check both (and perhaps even easier than not checking both), does not in my mind introduce any sort of new ethical consideration. It still feels an awful lot like "well, if you want us to look at your crime, you have to be willing to have us check you for any crimes first".

The job of police is difficult, not as an accident of history because they didn't have the right technology when we wrote a lot of these laws, but because it's supposed to be difficult because we understand the value of what's lost if it isn't.

tolmaskyon Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says

But the original argument was that it was intended to tell me how generic it was? I'm just saying that I have no idea of that from that number since I don't have appropriate context. It's like a teacher telling me my kid got 10 questions right on a test. OK... out of how many? Out of 10? Or out of 100? And then that teacher being like "hey hey hey, I didn't know this was such a touchy subject. I'm just telling you your kid got 10 questions right. It's a number with some utility. If you don't like it, just ignore it." It's separately weird that the number means something different on page 1 than page 2. It's not like I lose sleep over this, I honestly wasn't even aware that the intended purpose was for it to be a "how generic is this query" marker until you posted that, so I guess I am already ignoring it. I'm just saying that if that is the intended purpose, it fails completely.

tolmaskyon Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says

> It’s a signal that your search is generic. You can refine down more and get some hint of that.

1. I doubt the common person infers this from the “X results” UI, especially considering this has a literal meaning in most other search interfaces where they encounter this terminology. In fact, you don’t even have to compare it to other services, as apparently on the next page of Google results the meaning changes to the traditional literal interpretation. So on page 1 it is a weird hint, but on page 2 it is a precise count?

2. Even if that’s the purpose of this blurb, I actually still don’t know how generic my query is. I have no idea what the average result count is, so I don’t know if this is a lot or not. It’s certainly not the case that my “successful queries” are ones where there’s exactly one result, or just a few. Ironically enough, it’s the opposite: I only get so few results when I’m searching for something that’s really hard to find and Google is giving me a couple wrong results (in fact Google uses “no good matches” language in this case). Usually when I find something quickly it is merely the top result of many results.

3. If the intent is to tell me my query is pretty generic, then just say that, don’t imply it through language that has a literal meaning in all other interfaces I encounter it.

Note that my gripe with this UI is not about whether it is misleading or not, but merely that if its intended purpose is to give me some hint as to how good my query is, it is not doing a good job of that.

tolmaskyon The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube

You should put a link to your stuff in your Hacker New profile.

tolmaskyon The Great American Tax Migration

> when it comes to SALT, the real winners are the wealthy, not the poor.

Right, which is why it happened parallel to the wealthy tax cuts. This "protected" that constituency from the effects of removing SALT (plenty of high earners in CA still ended up ahead if I recall correctly), went largely to offset other tax cuts (meaning no meaningful "programs benefits"), and thus ironically enough arguably negatively affected the middle class beneficiaries the most -- the kind of people that would have most benefited during specific rare events, for example when selling their home.

tolmaskyon The Great American Tax Migration

Those states however have disproportionate representation in both the House and Senate. So it’s not as simple as one having a say and the other not. Additionally, SALT isn’t exclusive to CA, any state with income taxes benefits from it (and most states do have income taxes). I think if you were to zoom out to the country level in a hypothetical international tax sharing scheme, where the voting mechanics were similar to the Senate and House, you’d probably flip sides, thinking of course it makes sense that a country should have some flexibility to protect its revenue (while still for the record delivering the highest contribution) vs. having a vote that isn’t really representative of its population nor contribution to some international tax pool. Because again, even without SALT, these states were often still providing the largest contributions, and often paying the highest taxes. This was fairly obviously a vindictive move here, that passed in the same bill that had massive wealthy tax cuts. It’s not like this money was now “finally able to get to the poor citizens of wherever” or something.

tolmaskyon The Great American Tax Migration

There are plenty of poor people in these “wealthy” states. It’s not all just wealthy people that live in California, what a shocker. There are 40M people in California, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more poor people in absolute terms in California than, say, Mississippi with a total population of less than 3M. The “state welfare” programs that are for some reason maligned (whereas Federal welfare programs aren’t for some reason) largely go to help poor people in these states. That’s my point about balancing: I’m not saying either is necessarily good or bad, both are trying to theoretically help people in need. SALT allows CA more wiggle room to help it’s own poor given that it is net negative on Federal money out vs. in (in part because people think that that somehow magically means everyone is fine there).

tolmaskyon The Great American Tax Migration

> "Republicans felt that residents of the least socially protective states should not indirectly fund the welfare state and the spending implemented by Democrats in the coastal states."

Perhaps they "felt" that way, but the reality is that tax money generally flows from these coastal states to the red states. If anything, one could argue that SALT was a tool to help balance that out.

tolmaskyon Flat-to-curved screens have an identity crisis

That says it has a brightness of 2400 ISO Lumens, which roughly translates to about 600 nits according to this site[1], (although my back of the napkin math of 3.426 nits to lumens would give a worse 408 nit rating, but I think this page probably did a better job, so we'll go with that). This seems pretty low compared to even OLED TVs, which are of course worse than LCD TVs. I may be comparing peak brightness to average brightness though, hard to get a clear idea here. But, if my understanding is correct, with a project you'll also miss out on true blacks, right?

1. https://cybershack.com.au/cybershack/nebula-cosmos-laser-4k-...

tolmaskyon The Trouble with 5G

Is 5G good for super-short distances that you can’t for whatever reason use a cable for? Imagine needing to go through a solid wall, (of wood and drywall), and only 2 to 5 inches thick, then Ethernet on either side of that. Would 5G be the ideal way to not drop too much in speed, or is there something better for that sort of scenario?

tolmaskyon Interest in heat pumps has increased dramatically in recent years

One of the differences is how hard you have to push against a regular MERV 16 filter vs. this one. You can generally install a Perfect 16 into an HVAC without having to adjust its settings and thus how much energy is required to run it. I haven’t looked at the April Aire stuff in a bit, so don’t know if they happen to do something similar, but I was looking at a number of different options for a much larger building install, and you can generally price the P16 without having to factor in energy price increases.

My main gripe with the Perfect 16 is that it doesn’t do any of the multi gas stuff ( https://www.iqair.com/room-air-purifiers/gc-multigas ), and is more like running a HealthPro ( https://www.iqair.com/air-purifiers/healthpro-series ).

tolmaskyon Interest in heat pumps has increased dramatically in recent years

We installed something like this, but for the purpose of getting fresh air into the house (instead of circling stale air over and over and increasing the CO2 levels). Our setup is:

Fresh air / circulated air -> Perfect 16[1] -> HVAC

I highly recommend it. You can also get an ERV or HRV to utilize heat/humidity when bringing in outside air.

1. https://www.iqair.com/us/whole-house-air-purifiers

tolmaskyon WebKit on GitHub

Funny story: my first task when I joined the original iPhone team was to merge our forked WebKit with master. It was a sort of hazing ritual slash "when else would we do it but when someone new joins?". Anyways, we used a tool called SVK[1] in order to get very primitive "git-like" abilities. It was basically a bunch of scripts that used SVN under the hood. For example, in order to get the "local everything"-style behaviors of git, the very first thing it did was checkout every single version of the repository in question. For WebKit, this meant that the first day was spent leaving the computer alone and letting it download for hours. I made the mistake of having a space somewhere in the path of the target folder, which broke something or other, so I ended up having to do it all over again.

Anyways, I distinctly remember one of the instructions for merging WebKit in our internal wiki being something like "now type `svk merge`, but hit ctrl-c immediately after! You don't want to use the built-in merge, it'll break everything, but this is the only way to get a magic number that you can find stored in [some file] after the merge has started. If it's not there, try `svk merge` again and let it go a little longer than last time." A few hires later (I think possibly a year after) someone set up a git mirror internally to avoid having to do this craziness, which if I remember correctly, was treated with some skepticism. This was 2007, so why would we try some new-fangled git thing when we had svk?

1. https://wiki.c2.com/?SvkVersionControl

tolmaskyon Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam

Do any password managers support you having your own email domain and automatically creating an email address when you create a new account (ideally not just using the company’s name but something random perhaps to not give this away)? Like in a sign up form it could generate “helloworld99@domain.com” as well as a password.

tolmaskyon Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

The only caller of said API would be the SFSafariViewController itself, the same way the Share Panel can see your Contacts despite you not having given the app that opened the Share Panel Contacts "access". This way, only organic page navigations get recorded (or at minimum is equally susceptible to any history pollution as a normal web page that you encounter). The idea was not to have SFSafariAddURLToHistory(), apologies if that's the way it came off.

tolmaskyon Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

Right... by "none of these things" I meant... the stuff I listed, which for the record is not incompatible with isolating the browser from the initiating app. It would be totally viable to give SFSafariViewControllers "write only" access to your history (implemented as just an API call that SFSafariViewControllers makes to notify the OS of a page navigation, which it can then store the URL of in your history, so that when you go to history in Safari later, it would show up there). Similarly, there could be a very nice "adopt as tab" button that would "rip" the view controller out of the enclosing app and just plop it into Safari proper, complete with it's back-forward list/history, and make it really easy to transition from the app to Safari without the much less ideal "open in Safari" button that loses navigation/page-state/etc. In other words, the way SFSafariViewController could work is that you are in Safari (forcing the full screen experience), just with a "Done" button that takes you "back" to the app (or an adopt button that "solidifies" the app switch. Think something more akin to the "app banner" that Safari shows when you go to an app's page, just with a nice transition of the webpage coming in from the app, kind of like the old Mail animation from iOS 1). This actually accommodates both goals: you get the real "full Safari" (again, you have effectively opened the link in Safari), but a nice little "Done" button to let you get back to what you were doing in the initiating app, which is the only "good faith" thing the app should care about (obviously we don't care about accommodating tracking/etc.).

tolmaskyon Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

On everything other than iOS (desktop and iPad), I either use Twitter in the browser or it is reasonable to just have links open in the main browser. Using Twitter in Safari on iOS (on the phone, to distinguish it from iPadOS), you end up with kind of the reverse problem of needing to fish around for Twitter in tabs. If Safari on iOS had a better "save web app"/site-specific browser story, then this could possibly remedy some of these problems (or if they implemented some of the basic ideas I described, like storing history).

tolmaskyon Instagram can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser

Right, I know. I mentioned SFSafariViewController in my post. I am saying, in the 9 years since SFSafariViewController was introduced, Apple could have made the experience with SFSafariViewController better, for example by having pages you visit in a SFSafariViewController get saved into your normal browsing history (this can be done without giving Twitter access to anything, it can simply notify the OS of an internal navigation, and then the OS can add that item to your Safari history. If SFSafariViewController runs out-of-process, then it can be even simpler than that). I then wouldn't have to keep a weird mapping in my head of what "app" I read an article in to ever get back to it. This would go a long way in closing the gap with the benefits you get from opening a link in Safari proper instead of viewing it in-app.