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wayfinder

342 karma · joined October 4, 2019

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wayfinder··on Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases
And you start on the journey when you first learn about hash maps or binary trees.
wayfinder··on App store to be 'split in two' ahead of EU iPhone sideloading deadline: report
Expecting people to know what makes an app store safe is like expecting people to know how to change their spark plugs. It’s a niche skill. The only people who are going to know are into the hobby.

Your average person does not have “computers” as a hobby.

In the same vein, I’m not going to give you shit that you don’t know how to change your spark plugs off your head even though it’s so basic.

wayfinder··on Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
A good reliable system pretty much has error handling every step of the way, down to crash-first programming at the very end.

It’s more possible to recover from errors higher in the system but you can’t predict every problem so you need layers of error handling at increasingly lower levels with different recovery expectations.

wayfinder··on Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed
Same. I shut down a ticket last week that would create an “final” error handling path that happened to re-invoke half the code paths that could error.
wayfinder··on Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars
Insurance is not free money. Hypothetically say I was losing a car once per month… then my premiums would reflect that. The purpose of insurance in that hypothetical would be to insure against losing 2 cars per month but I would be paying for that first lost car in full because at that point, it’s not a risk… it’s a consistent monthly cost.
wayfinder··on Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier (2022)
I own the Aranet4 sensor (highly recommend) and I’m in the US with not particularly great sealing and my sensor will read a 600ppm jump in a matter of 30 minutes.

I basically have to keep the window in my bedroom open 24/7, even when it’s cold outside, just to keep my CO2 levels in the healthy range otherwise it will be pushing 2000ppm in the morning.

wayfinder··on Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions
Google is good at making algorithms and tech but product development and long term vision have never been its strong points.
wayfinder··on How meta built the infrastructure for Threads
Instagram has like 2 billion users and I got spammed the shit out of to open a Threads account.

That’s like saying it’s impressive I made a million dollar company after my dad gave me 2 billion.

wayfinder··on Just because you can doesn't mean you should: the <meter> element
Practically speaking, if you have to involve any libraries or tooling one day, if you stuck to standards or de-facto standards, you save yourself some pain because you got a lot interoperability for free.
wayfinder··on Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone
I would be more down if it wasn’t tied to the generation of phone.

Also I’d love a keyboard with more buttons personally. I know I’m in a tiny minority here but I get ~70 WPM on an iPhone keyboard but if I have to do symbols or anything it goes down to like 4.

I know you can buy a separate Bluetooth keyboard but then you need to rest your phone and stuff.

wayfinder··on Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer
If anyone wants to build this by themselves, I recommend using an optimization solver library like OptaPlanner. It basically implements standard optimization algorithms you can read in academic papers (which are interesting to read!) so you don’t have to.

You can probably write a basic planner in under an hour with all the constraints you can think of. You can just continue to fiddle with the constraints and weights until you are happy without having to worry about duplicates or errors.

I’ve used it to solve cost optimization problems for companies I’ve worked with and it works really well.

wayfinder··on AI can find your location in photos
There are people that can do this and you can also do this in the iPhone Photos app.
wayfinder··on Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud
13 GB a lot? What year is it? 1995? If Apple or Google wanted to add 1 TB to their phones, it wouldn’t cost them anywhere near what they charge us to add 256 GB.

A copy of GTA V takes like 100 GB.

wayfinder··on Google's True Moonshot
Unsurprisingly, they already integrated OpenAI into Windows. You can ask it questions and pass it files.
wayfinder··on Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people
I used to work at a medium-sized non-tech company (<200 employees) that had a fair amount of IT staff. Stripe is expensive asf and we always talked with banks and payment processors directly.

We never stored CVVs or any of that insane nonsense though. Our systems only ever saw CC info in transit but they were never stored on-site.

God I miss that company. Working with smart people is great.

wayfinder··on Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted
Google just spends millions of dollars building a product then dumps its own baby on the streets.

Then goes and makes new babies.

wayfinder··on Idempotency
Instead of idempotency you can return a 4xx error too. You use idempotency because it’s logistically less complicated for the client.
wayfinder··on Idempotency
It gave me an intuitive understanding of state machines and idempotency is one solution to transitions.

If you start with State A and a call changes it to State B, what does running the call again do? A->B? But you’re already at B. Shit’s going to break. Redesign your system.

wayfinder··on Idempotency
The only reason I knew about idempotency is because growing up I was a little shit and I learned that you could break a LOT of electronics by getting it to do a second thing midway before finishing doing the first thing.

If it had a screen and buttons, I would try to break it.

So I started striving for highly reliable systems not because there are professional bad actors out there or spammers or to achieve high performance… but because there’s another little shit out there.

wayfinder··on A warrant showing the U.S. government is monitoring push notifications
In 2006, Mark Klein working for AT&T leaked it. It was in the news.

Snowden did his leak way later in 2013.

wayfinder··on The pro-Israel information war
I don’t see how anything you said contradicts anything I said, which was just a more general summary.

And there is a significant effort by a lot of people to split California into two or more two states but it’s all talk.

The Jewish relocation happened because of the British Empire.

wayfinder··on Verizon fell for fake "search warrant," gave victim's phone data to stalker
I mean digital signatures have really only been a thing for like 20 years, and barely because people only started caring about it more in the past 10.

While the US has been around for nearly 250 years.

And truthfully, despite a highly technical crowd, how many of y’all have actually ever sent or received a digitally signed email? If you’ve tried, you know why no one ever does it.

wayfinder··on Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns
Well yeah those models would have the most, because people buy way more of them than a Corolla or Camry.

It’s like using an overall statistic versus the per capita statistic.

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2022-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...

wayfinder··on The pro-Israel information war
Hmm I think you’re skipping some major parts of world history.

Jewish immigration to Palestine was not particularly great. Jewish people were not really heavily trying to move to the Middle East where people didn’t like them.

What happened is that Great Britain, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the division of that region between itself and France, decided to make the Israel state, make it official through the League of Nations, and then encourage Jewish people to move there. It was the ultimate solution to the several century old “Jewish Question” that Europeans had. Of course people started moving to a territory controlled and sanctioned by none other but the British Empire.

By sending them to the Middle East, Europe could get rid of the Jews and Britian can get an ally. Win win for Europe. Jews, Palestinians, Arabs and everyone else be damned.

Of course, after hell obviously broke loose, Britain realized that their mandate was not working and they pulled out of a problem that they created.

…And nooowww we’re here.

wayfinder··on Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns
Sedans actually kill more pedestrians than heavy vehicles overall despite there being 4 SUV/truck purchases for every 1 sedan purchased.

Deaths by SUV seems to be on the rise though.

Here’s data from a bike site.

https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show...

wayfinder··on The pro-Israel information war
No, if you read history, Israel had done a ton of stuff to make Europe and America happy.

They invaded the Suez Canal when Egypt tried to nationalize it. They did it for France and Britain.

During the Cold War, they provided of information to the US govt about Soviet assets. They also tell the US information about other countries from their intelligence.

The fact of the matter is Israel’s neighbors hate Israel so they need to get support from whoever they can, so they try to appease Europe and America. America goes along with it because it works out for us. Israel also also economically and technologically in a better spot than a lot of other Middle Eastern countries which are already semi-hostile to America, so they’re one of the better allies to have in that region.

America doesn’t give a damn about Israel anymore than France. It’s the working relationship that keeps it going — for both parties.

The problem right now is that both Israel and Palestine are both run by extreme right wingers. Extremist right wingers are always trying to start wars.

However, US foreign policy generally prefers having a working relationship than caring if a country is democratic or ticking the “is good” boxes. Most countries in the world make terrible allies. They’re weak, or they’re unstable, or every 30 years, their system of government will have completely changed. Despite the shit Israel does, they are consistent and stable, two traits many countries have not figured out.

wayfinder··on Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers
I mean there have always been a market for 48V components. The problem is that the market is much smaller so as a customer, you’re paying a lot more and it’s hard to justify raising the price of your car because you decided to go 48V.
wayfinder··on Building end-to-end security for Messenger
It doesn’t really matter how Apple is doing because the rules of cryptography are set in stone.

- To ensure that you message is unreadable, you must correctly encrypt the data symmetrically or asymmetrically with a key. Well we can assume Apple or Meta can do this properly.

- Second, as the sender or recipient, you MUST verify the authenticity of the key, whether you are using asymmetric or symmetric encryption.

In TLS/SSL, key verification is handled by third parties called certificate authorities.

In SSH, key verification is handled by comparing the key signature that the SSH client displays.

Most of these services right now do not do either (trusted third party or display of a key), therefore it cannot be verified overall. (That said, some people said they are doing what SSH is doing soon.)

I’m happy Apple is doing those things to exchange your own key between your own devices. This is already way better than most services. However, that problem is orthogonal to the problem of key exchange between you and a recipient.

wayfinder··on Building end-to-end security for Messenger
Well these apps don’t even let you verify the keys even if you wanted to, so you can’t even tell if it’s being man-in-the-middle’d.

Some people said they are finally adding key transparency features to let you do that, but it should have been there since the start. Something a lot of people already use called SSH literally has had that since forever. It’s like basic 101 cryptography if you design an encrypted protocol that isn’t using a trusted third party for key verification (like certificate authorities in TLS/SSL).

If you implement ANY encrypted protocol, key verification is extremely important. If you aren’t verifying keys are possessed only by your recipient, you cannot verify who can read your message.

wayfinder··on Building end-to-end security for Messenger
Asymmetric encryption doesn’t change anything. Apple is still the one telling your client whose key to encrypt the data for.

A BIG part of successful encryption is key exchange.

A successful SSL/TLS man-in-the-middle attack exchanges false asymmetric keys.

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