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There are nearly-century-old journalistic guidelines and ethical codes about what you do and do not put into widespread news media.

Posting explicit details about methods used in a celebrity suicide encourages copycats.

Posting explicit details about a shooter's extremist philosophical beliefs brings those beliefs closer to the mainstream AND encourages copycats.

There was a certain recent college debate that I was very surprised to see proliferate across social media, because of the fact that We Do Not Publish Snuff Films.

I actually assumed it was a deepfake, doubted AP News Wire and Reuters, and finally bought it when I saw a tiktok from the TMZ cutting room floor. The fellow in charge didn't believe it either... until he did, and then it was an all-hands-on-deck moment steadied by someone clearly experiencing a huge surge of adrenaline but keeping their cool while operating in their element.

If you see this sort of thing happening in the U.S., the place to complain is your state's insurance board.

Medicine is hard enough without people TRYING to do harm.

And actuarial science is brutal enough WITHOUT glossy justifications for assuming that healthcare providers are bad actors.

Despicable.

Flood insurance protects against the rare disaster where there's a flood.

Health insurance protects against the rare disaster where somebody's actually able to get healthcare.

At time of writing (2025-09-27, plus or minus a timezone), there does not appear to be any serious attempt to secure application-layer message contents. (At least, not yet)

My hope is that this cool new radio link option will still gain traction and grow and develop without painting itself into a corner, security-wise.

To wit- security hints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model have improved substantially since my last readthrough.

Every single other engineering field has gone through it. "Regulations are written in blood".

"Well, let's build a list of attacks that I can think of off-the-cuff. And then let's iterate through that list of attacks: For each attack, let's build a list of 'useful' things that attackers could possibly want.

Since I'm the smartest and most creative person on the planet, and can also tell the future, my lists of ideas here will actually be complete. There's no way that any hacker could possibly be smart enough or weird enough to think of something different! And again, since I'm the smartest and most creative --and also, magically able to tell the future-- and since I can't think of anything that would be 'worth the cost', then this must be a complete proof as to why your security measure should be skipped!"

I mean, it's an additional layer.

Defense-in-depth is about having multiple.

IDK about you, but I went from "die-hard Nexus lover/Pixel preorder" to ungoogling everything in my life (including every piece of "family tech support" hardware for which I do tech support and periodic maintenance).

For the uninitiated: The Google Pixel had a factory defect in soldering that made the chip housing the audio codec flat-out fall off. For me, the issue manifested at month 13 into a 12-month warranty, with the symptom that I could receive phone calls or play music, but no audio in/out of any kind was actually reaching the device, no matter whether I used 3rd party peripherals, wired headphones, native speaker, the works.

Google's "solution" for the factory defect --which they acknowledged in a thousand-person google group dedicated to debugging the issue-- was the following inane reasoning: "Well, these are cell phones, which means that we have your cell phone number... so how about we just call you?"

Keep in mind, this required me to keep my SIM parked in a non-functional device for the prospect of receiving a phone call which I would not be able to hear or respond to.

I still remember that bug nearly a decade later and will NEVER use a Google Pixel, Google Fiber subscription, or Waymo vehicle unless I see substantial convincing evidence to suggest that anyone at the company understands that "reliability engineering" includes building a support and repair model for paying customers.

Until then, Goodbye, Google.

You cannot call it that.

I will not be entering the workplace and suggesting that we use a product whose name is very easily mistaken for "the F word". It is an immediate non-starter.

(I'm sure it's a great project, and you probably meant for people to pronounce the name as "folks" rather than... y'know, the other way. I'm telling you this in a spirit of kindness so your project can be more successful and see increased adoption)

It's not about being picky. It's about communicating needs, and setting boundaries that are designed to satisfy those needs without overwhelming anybody's system to the point of saturation and degraded performance.

There is something wrong with adding a "fancy" feature to an off-the-shelf option, if said "fancy" feature is realistically "a complicated engineering question, for which we can offer a leaky abstraction that will ultimately trip up anybody who doesn't have the actual mechanics in mind when using it".

(anybody else do "Lock-in" drills in school where we all had to be SILENT?)

Some of us are just like, really particular about schedules.

(The internet is full of weirdos, sorry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chosen-plaintext_attack#In_pra... comes to mind.

(Not sure what attack scenarios OP had in mind -- iust sharing the usual CPA example)

The "Apple Critical Alerts" API is clearly intended as a replacement channel for cellular emergency alerts[0]. (If not a "replacement", then perhaps a "supplemental" option. Redundancy is good when we're talking about whether "911" works).

The "Apple Critical Alert" API policy, restricting who's allowed to call the API, is a good thing. You just do not get performant public notifications if you allow just anybody to broadcast. (Milli)seconds count, people.

I hate Singleton patterns as much as anybody. And I hate when business happens behind closed doors, with limited public access, and restricted opportunity for public comment.

But again, if we're talking about the choice between """ locking down this one special channel, because it's responsible for real-time public safety alerts """ vs. """ asking how many broadcasters can possibly share that channel, before contention and congestion result in human-perceptible delays to alert delivery. """ Then I would opt for the former.

--- [0] You know how your phone will buzz REAL loud if there's like, an Amber Alert or Tsunami or something? That's a feature of the cellular system. To my knowledge, emergency alerts and 911 calls go over a separate dedicated mini-channel, which has gone by various names through POTS/2G/3G/5G and beyond. A.K.A.s: - Public Warning System (PWS) - Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) - CMAS (Commercial Mobile Alert Service)

If by "interfered with",you mean "corrected to adjust for an otherwise-torturous feedback loop where the brain is hardcoded from birth to interpret the body itself as pain", then yes, this is an accurate statement about dysphoria.

Zhou et al (Nature, 1995) is my favorite study where this fact about trans people has been confirmed via brain scans or postmortem dissection, but I've got about 20 more if anybody's got questions about whether gender dysphoria is actually a thing.

One could also defer to the piles of statements from medical organizations attesting to the scientific fact that trans people exist and are born like that and are merely receiving medical treatment for a bona fide medical condition. For some inane reason, this extremely painful condition is politically-incorrect to discuss in plain terms, because it is literally so bad that people will "turn pain into a contest" when talking about it.

We see this in the statistics.

41% is the lowest suicide attempt rate statistic that you will find in any respectable study on the amount of suffering involved here.

That particular statistic has a tendency to go down if people are allowed to receive medical treatment for their medical condition, but I need people on the internet to understand that gender dysphoria is absolutely worth killing oneself over.

P.S. For the woke kids in the audience who would accuse me of "transmedicalism" because I'm willing to mention that this stuff literally shows up on brain scans, please refer to the opening discussions in "Comprehensive Care of the Transgender Patient" regarding DSDs and the large diversity of known etiologies for gender dysphoria.

Just because your dysphoria doesn't show up in the bNST doesn't mean that it's not there, or not measurable. Nobody is excluding your pain by acknowledging that diagnostics and imaging are literally part of medicine. Cancer patients also get tests, and if their cancer doesn't show up on one particular screening exam, it probably shows up on another.

If your scan hasn't been invented yet, you can in the meantime defer to psychometrics like GIDYQ-AA, UGDS-GS. Those instruments are also options to measure clinically-significant gender dysphoria, and if your clinician is uneducated or unwilling to use established psychometrics, find a doctor who follows AMA recommendations.

Doctors who don't oughta lose their license.

Catch-all HTTP 401s and 403s are there to thwart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_attack - unfortunately, servers cannot afford to be "helpful" when it comes to unauthenticated clients.

!=

"I don't have to worry about $PARTICULAR_DISASTER_SCENARIO because I'm generally organized and well-situated above a certain threshold: If you picked a random disaster scenario $x out of a hat, chances are pretty good that I'd already be equipped to handle it."

P.S. Not trying to "counter-argue", just sharing a different perspective.

It took me several months of strictly non-4G-related work to recognize vanity license plates again.