Posts by doublelayer

'Birthplace of Amazon' on the market for $2.28M

Re: Housing

I'm not sure which two people you're referring to, but I assume I'm one of them. If so, I'm not sure it makes sense. There are lots of problems that living a hard life would have on someone wanting to get into electronics. The most obvious one is that, when you start to work on electronics, you'll break a lot of things. It's one reason I am mostly a software person, not a hardware one. When I was a child, when I messed up a program, at worst I had to restart the computer before I could get to fixing it. I never had to buy anything as a result of messing up. Just working on electronics requires you to have tools and parts that cost money, and each mistake will be more costly still. Another big one is access to guidance, which is much easier if you can find someone to teach you, and you're more likely to have such a person in a well-resourced school than if you don't have that. These are all major problems. House size, however, is less of a problem. I wasn't saying that anyone can get into electronics, but that as hobbies go, it's less limited by available space.

There are lots of ones that are more limited in that respect. Woodworking, for example, will not work very well if you don't have somewhere relatively large in which to store things. The tools are quite large, the stuff you're working is as well, it generates a lot of byproducts that you don't want to have inside. Or car repair and maintenance. You can't do either of those on a bedroom desk. You can do electronics work there. Living a hard life is an obstacle to all of these. Living in a small place is an obstacle to only some of them.

Re: Bezos' parents invested nearly $250,000

I have lots of ideas that could be worth trillions if I can develop them well and everyone turns out to love them. Having those ideas does not necessarily mean it's a viable business. This example is one where it worked out, but you act like that was obvious before it started, something the numerous failed attempts would debunk quickly. The comment was not being jealous about their success. You can maybe argue that it was being jealous about access to seed funding, but it could have just pointed out that Amazon had a larger starting fund than most startups could get when it was one person.

Re: Housing

It is certainly an issue, although your example doesn't work very well:

"Imagine being a teen interested in electronics, but not even having space to store cereal away properly."

Electronics isn't too space-intensive as hobbies go. The person who doesn't have extra space will have to pack up their tools, which is a bit more annoying than keeping them ready for use, but they'll still be able to take them out, do some experimentation, and put them away. There are several hobbies that are much harder than electronics to fit into a couple drawers and a box which might have suited your argument better.

Wait, hold on, everyone – Mozilla thinks Apple, Google, Microsoft should play fair

Re: zero cost

A lot of things don't float on the stock market or incur tax and are still a market. If I trade items with friends, we won't be filing any paperwork and there is no tax to be paid as we didn't exchange things with a monetary value. Yet, there is still a market going on, with all participants valuing and exchanging items. This doesn't change when those items become intangible, such as code I can run and the value of a larger user base.

And it's still not relevant. "Market share" means "the proportion of all users, customers, consumers, etc of a type of thing that use this specific thing", without having to specify other details about how they choose or what the alternatives do. If you won't give up on the idea that without money, there is no market, then I know there are some browsers that do cost money. They are in a market, and they are competing with free browsers, so those free browsers are in the market as well. It so happens that basically nobody uses those paid browsers, but they do exist.

Re: You're asking me to quantify Mozilla's market strategy.

I am a trader. I choose which browser to run, paying indirectly by benefiting the organization that makes it. If I use Firefox, I benefit Mozilla by being part of their user base which they monetize in a few different ways. If I use Chrome, I'm benefiting Google by letting them control web standards. If I use Safari, I'm benefiting Apple by having bought one of their products because Safari doesn't run on anything else.

The browser makers are also traders. They provide me a service of value and compete with other browsers to offer useful features. Google provided automatic builtin translation with Google Translate. Firefox provides automatic builtin translation in fewer languages but it runs on my device and doesn't require me to send any data to Google. They are competing.

Re: zero cost

It has all of those things.

"a 'market' implies":

"a forum for trade,": The set of browsers and the set of browser users, and the users pick their browsers.

"a benefit passing between people,": Yes, I get a browser, Mozilla gets another user which contributes to their licensing fees from Google and someone they can advertise Mozilla VPN and other commercial products to, even if I have ignored them when they do.

"a benefit that can then be traded on in other contacts of kind/money.": They can trade the money they got from Google because their user count was X for other things, and I can benefit from my having a browser. I am not required to be able to trade my browser for it to be a market. If, for example, you buy a haircut, you cannot trade it to someone else but you have still received value.

"I could go next door and get a better deal": Yes. While you aren't paying in any case, you can get one that has more control over your data, or you could stick with the Google version that prevents you from doing so. Better deals are available. My opinion on the best one may differ from yours.

But whether you understand or agree with these distinctions or not, it's still a mostly irrelevant point. Whether it's a market or not, it's still something that can be divided based on how many users each thing has, and that's what we were talking about. I think you're incorrect about this not being a market, but even if I assume you are right, what difference does it make to anything?

Re: zero cost

Yes, it does make a market. A really small one, and one that won't last, but it is one. You provide value: the stuff you don't like but someone else does. They provide value: they take the stuff you don't want so you don't have to do the work of disposing of it. They would choose between the available discarded items and select which ones they want to take. In this case, it's a market you and everyone else doesn't care about, but that doesn't stop it being one. I'm not sure what the point is of arguing this academic point. If we had said "usage share" instead of "market share", would you have been happier?

Musk lashes out at Biden administration over rural broadband

Re: Just no

Too late, they've already tapped into normal taxes, allocated funds, and now intend to use them to spread into rural areas. They've got the money, and the only question now is how to spend it in order to provide the connections. It wasn't on your bill, but in your standard taxation, but the effect is the same.

Re: Let's go Brandon.

As someone who didn't downvote you, or upvote you, the title suggestion is a distinct possibility, as it's unrelated to the issue and people disagree with that sentiment too, but it's probably not the only reason. Another one is that there are some places that are truly disconnected from all grids, generate their own power, have no old copper phone cabling, etc. It is not most of these places. Most of them do have some infrastructure connected to a house, but good internet is not one of them.

There are some locations that are so disconnected from everything around them that it really doesn't make sense to provide a cable to them, but most of the people they're talking about live in small rural communities that don't have good service, where there are already cables for power and where a local hub could connect many people relatively cheaply if the work of installing that hub is done. The existence of completely off-grid houses doesn't make them the majority. Nor are those the priority for this program, as the program is intended to lower prices for areas where the poorest live. Chances are that if you're using a bunch of solar panels to power your off-grid house, you've probably got more ability to pay for your own Starlink connection than most of the people who don't have broadband.

Re: Let's go Brandon.

It's not about return on investment. If they wanted to do that, people in rural areas could continue to live under the "we don't earn enough from your area so have fun with the microwave link" policy. They've gotten money to add service even though it won't turn a profit, and they're trying to use that money to add service that will last for some time. They could pay Starlink, and a lot of people would get service right now and the service would, while not meeting the speed requirements most of the time, be quite a lot better than what the users had before and useful for most things. The problem is that the money is not a recurring annual budget, but a one-time allocation. When it runs out, the satellites are still as expensive as they were before, they still need replacing every five years, and so there will be a lot of ongoing costs which will return to the individual consumer. With cables already having been installed, the fixed cost will have been paid for and the ongoing costs will be lower, so there's actually some chance that people can continue to run them after the money has been spent.

Apple's on-device gen AI for the iPhone should surprise no-one. The way it does it might

Re: While I'm very skeptical of the AI hype compared to the reality

Whenever I've run models, which admittedly is not often, it writes to memory a lot. It loads a lot of assets into memory, runs conversions on them, and then thrashes the RAM for a while. That's fine when it's RAM it's using, but not so much if it's flash. I agree with you that people don't tend to wear that out now, but that could easily change if that's what the software is doing.

It's not entirely new, either. Some Android phone manufacturers have started advertising massive amounts of RAM, for example 24 GB, which consists of a moderate 8 GB of real RAM, and then 16 GB of swap. There have been some reports of this causing flash-related failures, but that is much more limited use than running a model actively in it, since the swap space isn't constantly being loaded and rewritten. Just because it isn't a problem now doesn't mean it will never be one, especially if we change the reasons why it's not been a problem now.

Re: Memory

They don't have much choice for iPhones either. Each model only has one amount of RAM. The current models range from 4 GB (SE 2022) to 8 GB (iPhone 15 Pro/Max).

I think this is only the case when computers can actually do the things you're asking for. In short, the problem is a backend rather than a frontend one. People have been able to talk to their computers and ask natural language queries for some time, but it hasn't been very popular because they can only make it do a few things. People eventually run out of times when they want to ask about the weather, search for music, or have their emails read out to them.

By bolting on an LLM, they can make the frontend more conversational and they've added one more command they can give: write something for me. However, none of the other functions of a computer will be available just because it sounds more like a person when you talk to it. I think it won't be popular for the same reason that existing voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana haven't proven massively popular. After a bit of novelty value, you realize that they can't actually do almost anything you want. I still use the one on my phone, but basically two commands "set a timer for x minutes" and "call y".

Re: While I'm very skeptical of the AI hype compared to the reality

I'm worried about the wear that might cause the flash. Lots of people have decided to use the SSD when there isn't enough RAM, and in addition to slowing things down, it also starts using something that can't take that much writing and is required for the phone to function. It isn't going to bother Apple if using their software means phones start dying of SSD failures a bit faster, since they don't happen enough now to be much of a warranty issue and, when they do happen, most customers will just buy another iPhone to replace it. It does bother me.

Re: Alibi

I considered it, but the sarcasm didn't make any more sense than the literal message did. Most ways the message could be reversed didn't make any more sense.

Re: Alibi

Is this supposed to be a joke? I'm really not getting it.

Imagine burglar goes on the usual sweep. Now they can take a selfie at someone's house, then use AI feature to remove themselves from the selfie.

Then when Police catches them, they can show them the picture "Look guv, I wasn't there!"

Look, you have a picture of the crime scene at the time of the crime, on my phone. I feel like there's something in your proposal that I'm missing. I'm going to need more explanation.

Firefox 122 gets even more competitive with Chrome on translation

Re: platform identification

That is exactly the problem. If you don't want it to claim you're on Android, what do you want to claim to be? You can easily use a desktop user agent, but lots of indicators about your device point to it being a phone and a misbehaving site that's actually looking for them will not have much trouble finding them out. I suppose you could pretend to be an iPhone running Safari.

In my experience, sites that send data specific to the browser and device can either be fooled by presenting the user agent of a browser you would like to use or it's really not worth trying to get anything past them. A site that refuses to show the desktop version even though you're presenting a desktop user agent might be tricked if you patch enough things to not look like a desktop, but it's usually more effort than it's worth, and any site that's bad enough to do that is likely to have something else that makes it unusable should you succeed.

Re: platform identification

You can forge the user agent to say that you're running any browser you like or to exclude it entirely. The reason not to do that is that you're presumably trying to blend in with a crowd, and so you want to look like as many people as you can. If you say you're running Chrome on Windows, probably the largest user agent out there, other fingerprinting techniques can determine that you're lying about that. If you say it's Firefox on Android, but all the users are identified the same way, then it makes it harder to fingerprint you.

Datacenters could account for a third of Ireland's electricity by 2026

Re: when the boom ends?

Then renting computers will just be cheaper and people will still want to. The owners of datacenters have the asset that their equipment can be used by people seeking fads or normal users and either way, they get paid. Even when bubbles burst, there will be demand for servers, even if it dips for a while.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Re: Are these pervy doorbells mandatory?

There are two aspects. One is what benefit they get, or think they get, from having them. I think others have covered this. The other is why they use these in particular, and the answer is that, like most hardware, there is not an available option that includes privacy by default and doesn't require technical knowledge the average consumer doesn't have.

If I decide I would like a camera on my door or a remote intercom, I can buy some stuff to build one myself, host the server on my own infrastructure, and set up the networking. Even then, I'm likely to have to deal with hardware that's not built to take the conditions that the consumer stuff is, for example how much weatherproofing the case has. Still, I can do it and I know many people here who have, often involving a Raspberry Pi. If someone who has less knowledge than I do wants to set that up, it's quite difficult for them. Self-host on your own Linux server is not a convincing selling point for most people who don't have any servers and don't really want to learn how to use them. Activate by installing this app on your phone and holding your phone and the camera near each other makes setup really simple. However, all of the places that have such a thing have fifty pages of privacy documents that have lots of holes through which data can be taken. I'm not sure whether you could successfully make a business selling privacy-respecting devices with ease of use, but I am sure it's not been tried much.

Russia takes $13.5M bite out of Apple over in-app purchases

"They could buy radios from the chinese, but hey what makes you think they actually care ?"

The fact that using personal phones would a) not work, b) introduce several security problems, c) cause chaos for the commanding people and therefore d) slow their ability to invade the place they're trying to invade. They don't have to buy radios because they care about the soldiers. They need to buy radios because, if they don't have them, they can't run their war as well as they want to.

Our differences come down to one central point. You think they are using personal iPhones for battlefield communication as the only option, but I have not seen any evidence indicating this. Just because the Russian military have done some things badly doesn't mean they will do everything badly, and even if they did do everything badly, it doesn't mean they'd necessarily do it badly this way. Your suggestions also don't fit very well with the way they've used military equipment. So far, they have had a lot of equipment, but it hasn't been great because a lot of it is old. At one point, Russia built and stockpiled a lot of stuff, and I don't see many reasons why communications equipment wouldn't have been included. Radios don't get used up like drones do, so if they once had them, they probably still have most of them.

Do you have a source for the Russian military not having any communications equipment? It doesn't seem that plausible since they have a lot of equipment they've been burning through. Radios are not that expensive to make and don't get used up as quickly as weapons. Meanwhile, they keep blowing up infrastructure including electricity and communications systems, so if they were using their own phones, they'd frequently drop out. They can also buy radios from any number of Chinese manufacturers who make radio equipment all the time.

And, even if it were true, Russia could also get a lot of cheap Android phones for their military if they needed them. I'm not seeing facts here, but supposition and wishful thinking. It would be great if Apple could push a button and throw the Russian invasion into chaos, but they can't.

I'm not sure that bricking iPhones would have much effect on the war. Paying the fine will, but most iPhones are in the hands of consumers, not government leaders who have their own phone system, at least purportedly, and could easily switch them out at little cost. There's a good reason for them to refuse to pay the fine. There's not a great one for breaking phones that have already been sold.

US judge rejects spyware slinger NSO's attempt to bin Apple lawsuit

Re: Interesting argument from Apple

You already know what they're arguing and that they're going to patch holes whether NSO found them or not, because if NSO hadn't found them, the people who did would have used them to jailbreak and Apple hates that. That doesn't change the fact that it does cost Apple to respond, that they respond more quickly when it's an active attacker, and that you also know full well why Apple is doing this. Apple is doing this because what NSO is doing is wrong and is causing harm to them and their users, and this is an argument that allows Apple to do something about it. It happens to be true, but you don't need to look for weird interpretations to understand why it's being used.

Re: Apple spokesperson speak to The Register

I think Apple will respond whenever there's a statement that's already been written for the situation. They can just send the same block to anybody who asks. When there's a specific question, that's when El Reg gets ignored.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: Efficient interface

That's actually a feature I value a lot, but I value it in Notepad++. One of the major reasons I like that editor when I'm on Windows is that it has a good regex system in its find and replace system. The GUI is still helpful, but I like those facilities as well.

Re: GUI Standards?

It's about what you can do after learning to use one tool. If everything is different, you know how to do the one task that tool is for. If things are standard, then you can probably figure out how to use other ones. So, for example, if you need to use a new piece of software for a bit, you already know the basics of how to open it, how to close it, where the settings are, what stuff you can click on and what stuff you can't, and you skip right to figuring out what you need to do inside it. If you might have to relearn the concepts, it's a lot more frustrating. For example, if you're used to ctrl+c copying and ctrl+v pasting and you also have options in the edit menu for those functions, but your new program has no keyboard shortcuts and the buttons are revealed by clicking a toolbar button with an unfamiliar icon, you spend more time learning that.

People who frequently have to pick up new applications will find this annoying. I imagine you've experienced it at least a couple times yourself. The worse situation is for those who don't do this frequently. How many people have you met who resist any change. An update might move one button and they panic? That's often because they've experienced something which completely changes their workflow and they need to spend a while re-learning things for no reason. There are times when that is necessary, but generally, if people already know some paradigm and yours doesn't offer a specific benefit that you can concisely explain and prove correct, it's best to stick with the working one. This is a lesson that many companies, especially Microsoft, would do well to follow. I wonder whether people would stick less to old Windows versions, even as they go out of support, if the next one looked familiar.

Re: Efficient interface

That claim requires some evidence. I'm sure you can use vi quite efficiently, but is it automatically the case that it's more efficient than an experienced user in a different editor? I think that depends a lot on what the user is trying to edit with it.

I know the basics of using vi for systems that have nothing else, but I came along when text editors could do more things and so I've never taken the time to use vi instinctively rather than deliberately. It's perhaps unsurprising that I find it to be slower to use than editors I've spent lots of time in. However, I also think that may be true if people find certain features to be useful. A typical GUI editor tends to have more builtin features than vi does, partially because there are other programs that can be used to get the same effect on the CLI. The more of those the user finds useful, the faster the editor with them included will be to them.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

Re: Rust and Mozilla

It is at least partially the other way around: Mozilla wanted to have better tools, so they made one. Others then took it over. It's embodied the successful aspect of open source, because people improving Rust also improve a tool that Mozilla relies on. Unfortunately, it doesn't make the negative aspects of a lot of people burning out go away.

Re: They don't want excellence

Maybe because you're both assuming that the speedup was both completely unnecessary and wasting time. Neither is proven, and if we believe their statements, both are false. Even if we don't believe them, both could easily be false.

Why write a replacement for an API at all if it's already fine? It sounds like some speedup was necessary. If you're writing a replacement from scratch, then doing it efficiently the first time is the best policy as long as it doesn't result in taking a really long time. If you write it to be faster, just enough to meet the number they provided, then that number will eventually increase and you'll have to write it again. If you significantly exceed that number, you may never have to do that. There is a possibility that this did result in wasting time, but if the manager said "we don't need the speed" rather than "you didn't need to spend so much time", it doesn't sound like that was their complaint.

Re: "Burnout"

And that you could do so was obvious from the start. If I or anyone else with an open source project want to make it impossible to make money from it, we can manage it. We don't want to prevent that. My measure of success in my open source code is not "I'm sure nobody can make a profit using this". If someone manages it, that's fine with me.

Re: "Burnout"

Part of it is defining all open source work as an unpaid internship. It's not, and we all know it's not. I've been employed full time for quite a while now. I'm no longer doing internships, but I still contribute to open source. If every line of open source was being written by people who had no other experience, the quality of it would be a lot worse.

The other problem is trying to pretend that open source work is a requirement to get a job. Yes, it can help to prove experience, and people will take that into account, but other types of experience work as well. I was not required to show open source contributions to get my first jobs in programming. Since I had less experience, it took more work to prove that I knew what I was talking about and I got more rejections, but I and many like me still managed to do it.

Two incorrect statements about what open source is and how it works don't help make a point, especially when the point is unclear and slightly insulting. As far as I can tell, the problem the rant is trying to point out is that open source software is written primarily by people who have the time to do it well, and those people generally already have money so they can afford to spend the time, and I'm not sure what the solution to that was supposed to be. Yet, by not doing whatever we were supposed to do, working on open source is propping up some system of racism and sexism by corporate proxy. It's a garbled complaint that relies on incorrect assertions.

Re: "Burnout"

And Java was not open source and still isn't. There are some open source versions like OpenJDK, but the Oracle and Sun versions are not. There are lots of open source language tools. GCC, for example. How much to buy that? Or databases, how much would it cost me to buy PostgreSQL? There are companies that make a product that you can see the source of, and they can be for-profit companies, but most projects are not run like that and, even if they are, my choice to contribute to those projects is not the same as getting hired by those companies with a salary of $0.

Re: "Burnout"

"you can't actually decide to work for free at for profit organisation (with some exceptions). It's illegal."

Which you will not stop saying until you eventually recognize that open source work is not for profit. Someone might take it and make some profit of their own, but my work is not for them. It is for me, or the group of developers (not an organization at all, let alone a for profit one), or for the organization that organizes to write it (probably a recognized nonprofit organization). Someone else making money does not mean I am working for them. If they tell me to do something and I don't want to do it, I don't do it, which is a pretty different situation from a working environment.

The types of people who work in open source are the result of a lot of different factors, some of which are important to do something about, but none of which will be fixed if you keep telling us how the entire concept is or should be illegal for incorrect reasons. Your reason, which is not the only one, is that some people have more money, and therefore more free time, to spend on their choice of activity. Of the various reasons why imbalances exist, this is one of the least important. Differences between who gets related education and cultural problems in some projects resulting in people feeling unwelcome are both more important problems and, crucially, problems we can actually try to fix without causing more damage than we avoid.

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

The legal agreements on that software are not at all ambiguous about you needing a legally purchased Apple computer to be allowed to run it. You may be able to break those agreements with sufficient effort, but it is not what you're supposed to do any more than I'm supposed to break the Windows license check system. So no, it is not free as in beer or in speech.

Try again. First, you know Apple reduced to 15% relatively recently to try to counter accusations of monopoly behavior, right? And you know that Google followed suit very quickly. From 2021:

Google is lowering commissions on all subscription-based businesses on the Google Play Store, the company announced today. Previously, the company had followed Apple’s move by reducing commissions from 30% to 15% on the first $1 million of developer earnings. Now, it will lower the fees specifically for app makers who generate revenue through recurring subscriptions. Instead of charging them 30% in the first year, which lowers to 15% in year two and beyond, Google says developers will only be charged 15% from day one.

The company says 99% of developers will qualify for a service fee of 15% or less, as Google is also further reducing fees for specific vertical apps in the Play Media Experience Program. These will be adjusted to as low as 10%, it says.

Source

Re: Windows is no longer a necessity...

By definition? Definition of what? Software, in order to be scientific, must run on Linux? I don't understand what you're trying to say, but I'm pretty sure whatever it is is wrong.

Re: applications that aren't easily replaceable on Linux or the MAC

However, emulation of X86 Windows is a bit easier on ARM Windows that has all the same calls as X86 Windows, rather than running through Wine which has some gaps. If the emulation continues to exist, a lot of things can be used if X86 dies. Of course, given the performance differences between current X86 and ARM chips, I wouldn't expect X86 to be dying any time soon.

Re: It isn't Microsoft not "allowing" users to run on bare metal

The same reason that people try to run Linux on them: they want to do some Mac OS stuff and some stuff in a different OS, and they don't see why they should need two computers to accomplish it. It works for my laptop which runs Linux, multiple versions thereof, and Windows and I can pick whichever I want at the time.

Think tank warns North Korea uses AI for battle planning, maybe using cloudy resources

Re: Tough calculation, even for the best

They don't have very much experience, but what they do have is a lot of people, a willingness to see them die, and a lot of organized training. Most of the population is either in a long period of military service or has already gone through it, and while that service mostly included being used as really cheap construction and agricultural labor, it also included training on how to attack things. I'm sure they'd lose many of those people if they started to use them to attack, but they won't be too worried just because thousands are dying unnecessarily. They also have some more powerful weapons to resort to when they inevitably start failing. Those weapons may not be plentiful, but they are serious. So it's really best for everyone if we can somehow prevent them from starting a war at all, even if we would eventually win.

CISA boss swatted: 'While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique'

They probably aren't using one directly, but a local VOIP provider. It might be a giveaway if it's all coming from international numbers, but if it's a number from that country, there's less that can be done to identify whether it's being proxied for an international origin. In addition, it's probably not being proxied in this or many other cases. The people who want to attack a US election official are probably in the US to begin with, so wherever they're calling from, it's in the country. You would have to use geolocation data to identify where the caller was, and I don't think the systems for collecting and reporting it are fast enough to let them filter it. With all of these obstacles, they probably send the calls to the local authorities rather than deal with the risk that someone actually has an emergency and they ignored it.

Australia imposes cyber sanctions on Russian it says ransomwared health insurer

Re: Linked to ten-million-record leak

"Whatever happened to being put on trial before a jury of ones peers."

If he ever ends up in Australia or a country from which he might be extradited, that's exactly what they intend to do with him. It's always been quite normal to name people you intend to charge but can't arrest because they're not available, ask for information related to their capture, and put restrictions on people dealing with them. If he turns out to not be involved, those moves will be rescinded, but your contention that this is somehow new is incorrect.

Florida man slams 'tyranny' of central bank digital currencies in re-election bid

You may have misinterpreted my comment. I did not say whether I think cryptocurrency is a good currency. For many of the reasons you stated, I think it is a bad one. However, I wasn't rating the four options (cash, banks, CBDCs, other cryptocurrencies) as best currencies, but only on the "how easy is it to take from you by force if you assume that the force concerned has complete legal authority" index. I don't think that's a very important index, but it was the point others brought up, so I was using that metric.

I don't have or want any cryptocurrency, but some of your criticism isn't global to the concept. For example, the energy requirements and privacy problems are both entirely accurate descriptions of Bitcoin and many ones like it, and both are big problems to making them useful for anything. However, they do not cover all currencies. There are privacy-focused ones like Monero which don't make it easy to track transactions the way that Bitcoin does. Monero is also easier to mine on commodity hardware, which is usually considered a bad thing because it's what cryptomining malware tends to be mining. I'm not sure how well Monero scales because, since I have no interest in owning any, I haven't bothered to learn all the details. It's possible that it would also fail badly if it became more popular. However, it's useful to keep in mind whether the complaints you have are intrinsic to the concept of cryptocurrency or not.

For example, the dodgy exchanges are a big problem, but that's a legal thing. If some government chose to regulate them like banks, including mandatory insurance programs like the FDIC does, they could have similar security to banks. The exchanges don't want it because they want to get as much money as fast as possible, but they could be required to take those steps. Whether the companies handling the commodity are trustworthy isn't related to what they're storing, but the oversight of their operations, regulations they must follow, and their accountability for failure to follow them.

In their defense, there are significant differences between the options which make one harder to take than the other. If you are concerned that someone will use legal authority to take your money, some systems would be preferable to others. I am not concerned about my government doing that, so it's more academic to me, but the differences aren't minimal. My reasons for opposing CBDCs are more related to privacy and security than to fears of confiscation.

For example, if we assume the willingness to use violence to get your money, then any system can allow it to happen, but systems that require individual attention on you would add some difficulty, and systems that make it feasible to hide some value make it more likely that you can avoid giving all of your money to the attacker. Cash and non-centralized cryptocurrency have those abilities. A CBDC probably doesn't, depending how it's implemented. Modern banking systems do not have it very much.

The conversation included discussions of physical cash and of banking systems. I agreed with you that physical cash is relatively difficult to confiscate and stated that money in banks is no harder to confiscate than a CBDC would be. I think my use of the terms made it clear which one each statement was about.

For the average person, the distinction is important. Most of my money is in a bank. Most of my payments either access the bank directly or through a credit account. Thus, my money is available to be confiscated by the government. I don't store much money in cash form, nor can my important bills be paid, either easily or at all, in that form. Most of my bills don't have a facility to take payment in the form of cash, nor does my employer offer me the ability to be paid in it. Thus, should my government decide to attack my assets, I would be vulnerable to that attempt, CBDC or not. Of course, I could withdraw my money for physical cash to get around some of that, but it would not work forever due to the previously mentioned reasons.

You also appear to be misinterpreting what a straw man is. I did not argue that physical cash is vulnerable because banks are, in fact I specifically stated otherwise. The discussion as a whole, however, is about CBDCs which replace banking systems and possibly, but not certainly, physical cash. Thus, discussing the privacy differences between private banks and a CBDC is relevant.

Huawei prepares to split from Android on consumer devices with HarmonyOS Next

Re: It’s Linux

Mobile oses aren't synonymous with kernels. Tizen is not a kernel; it's using Linux. WebOS uses Linux. The only one on that list that doesn't have Linux at the base is QNX, and that's the one that's no longer used on basically anything.

Of course, anyone can write a kernel if they put some time into it, but it's much harder to write a kernel that has anything like the ubiquity and stability of Linux. That takes a lot more work, and it's unlikely for any particular company to be motivated to do that work when using stuff that already accomplishes some of the goal is free. They can prove us wrong, but I'll believe that they have when I can prove it for myself.

Robocaller spoofing Joe Biden is telling people not to vote in New Hampshire

Re: Loophole

No, I think they're saying that it's illegal for a politician to use it to impersonate their opponent, but if you do it, the law might let you. I think using it to impersonate yourself would still be allowed, but I can't see why you would want to.

How artists can poison their pics with deadly Nightshade to deter AI scrapers

Re: Let the AI wars begin!

The camera's output kind of has to be the attack vector. You can poison the model in training, but it won't do anything useful unless you can get it to fail during use. If you can poison the training data to identify some specific input as something it's not, it won't help you unless you can also get the camera to properly recognize that thing in production. So, for example, if I feed in images of stop signs with pixels changed and convince the model to identify them as detour signs, but I can't get the camera to identify tampered stop signs in reality, then I haven't obtained any result. If, instead, I manage to get it to frequently mistake stop signs for detours, then it won't work during testing and won't get to production. Thus, to make malicious use of this, I need to be able to poison it in a specific direction and later invoke the behavior.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

Re: They fail...

"I agree, but skill without passion is not talent."

Why not? If your building needs running water, do you refuse to accept a plumber who doesn't plumb for fun? If you need something driven somewhere, do you only hire racecar drivers, who clearly love driving, rather than someone who can do the task correctly and does so just to get paid?

I admit that there is a correlation between the people who do the best work and those who have a passion for it, primarily because their passion means they've gained a lot of experience that people who don't have the passion don't tend to have, but there are two provisos to that. The first one is that this is not always the case. Programming tends to have more little details that take a lot of time to learn, and passion helps with that. There are other fields where it doesn't take so much passion to learn the required things to do the job well. The second is that someone is still capable, even in a detail-rich field like programming, to learn how to do something well without having a passion for it. If someone just writes code to get paid for it, but they spent the time needed to know how to write that code well, then they are as capable of making something good as someone who learned that because they enjoyed doing so. I've seen a lot of people who chose tech because they wanted something well-paid, not because they enjoyed it. Many of those people were bad at it and left because the hill of knowledge you have to climb was just too high. However, some of them didn't have any problem climbing it, go to work as programmers and produce excellent output, then go home and do something unrelated with the rest of their time. They are no worse than you or I.

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

This sounds like a change made without a spec at all. The fact that the local end got one day of work before the external provider started work suggests that someone came up with the idea and expected that everyone involved could begin work right now. I've worked for plenty of people who prefer to skip the planning stages because they don't understand why I would need any time. After all, they've just told me what they want, so why should I waste time planning when they've already done the planning? It often takes a lot of explaining to get them to understand that their idea is not a complete plan for its implementation, or more likely just that I'm not going to deliver what they want until I've done whatever it is I'm going to do.