AlexanderTheGr8

To add on: a 3% stock shift means that the search-engine deal was worth >=3% of the stock. That is massive free cashflow. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20B (full profit bec negligible costs) while Apple's total profit was around $100B. 20% of Apple's total profit came from Google's search deal. Based on this, I am sure the stock price worth would be much higher than 3% (actual numbers are complicated because stock price accounts for future growth of things).

Apple stock is up 3%, strongly implying that this ruling is good for Apple as well. That is in contradiction to a lot of folks saying that this ruling means Google won't have to pay Apple. While the terms of the deal with Apple will likely change, based on the stock price increase, Apple will likely end up with a different deal (if not better).

Another thing to note, contrary to some comments, is that Google is still allowed to make a deal with Apple to be the default search engine, but with extra rules.

``` Google also would be permitted to pay Browser Developers, including Apple, to set Search as the default GSE, so long as the Browser Developer (1) can promote other GSEs and (2) is permitted to set a different GSE on different operating system versions or in a privacy mode and makes changes, if desired, on an annual basis. ```

Off-topic to the comments here, I am impressed by how the poster has described their issue so eloquently!

They mentioned 6 reasons for why they have an issue with the banner : each of the 6 is a valid concern and put very eloquently and clearly.

I suppose I only noticed this because I am used to speaking/writing/reading/listening mid-quality English in day-to-day life as a programmer.

I followed this case when it happened. It was $16M at the time, not sure how it became $65M now. I suppose it doesn't matter - any number above $100k probably grants the same punishment*

Interesting side-note : the people he took/stole from - they offered him 10% if he returned the rest. He said no in a tweet trolling them.

Contrary to the opinions in this thread, I think he was smart to run away. Remember that he did this from Canada, not the US. Countries don't have the same extradition treaties with Canada that they do with US.

If he had stayed, he would almost certainly be convicted. No court can possibly understand "code is law". Courts' job is only to interpret the law, not make the law. And the law was not written for crypto. You cannot fit a square in a circle without distortion.

What I think would have happened is the courts, rather than introducing novel precedent, would have preferred to just rely on existing case law and declare him a criminal.

Another interesting side-note : the judge presiding the case made a public comment asking the guy to come back to Canada promising him a fair trial. The guy didn't show up - maybe he didn't receive the message.

Overall, even with the benefit of hindsight, we still can't be sure if he was smart to exploit this or not. Forced to live in a few countries but with a lot of money.

* It's because (1) laws were designed when numbers were lower (no one had $16M to steal); (2) humans can't visualize big numbers (individually, $16M is just as big as $65M in my head)

Incredible coincidence. I was making a new tab extension for myself today. Well, more accurately, I was making ChatGPT and Claude to make a new tab extension for me. Wonder if this is frequency bias or just an incredible coincidence.

I think Chrome should include a way for users to customize their home page a lot more - with custom greetings, calendar, tasks, etc integration.

Oh right, it's the year of the fully autonomous car! Or was it last year? Or 2016?

Just because CEOs have been hyping this tech up to raise valuations doesn't mean it will never happen. They said the same about landing rockets - now, it's a regular thing.

It's pretty clear that driverless is coming - exact timeline is unclear. Whether in 3 years, 5 years, or a decade, but it's coming.

Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer

Gross understatement!

1) You can find a cab wherever (almost) and whenever (24x7) - you don't have to hail a cab for minutes/hours (even worse was not knowing when/if the cab would even arrive).

2) Much safer. Emergency support + seeing the route on GPS (can see the path on the driver's uber app) + rating system.

3) Better behaviour, enforced by rating system. Yes, it's not perfect, but much much better than cabs. Cab drivers were regularly abusive, knowing there were no repurcussions. Unfortunately, humans only behave when there's consequences.

4) No scamming vulnerable un-informed people. Cabs were known for scamming foreigners or un-informed people. I can point out a few more things. Calling it `more convenient` is a massive understatement.

but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.

This can be fixed by regulation. Just because a new technology brought a new problem, that doesn't mean we should discard the technology and go to its worse predecessor. Remember : there is a reason the new technology took over its predecessor.

I think we can have both : the benefits of digital ride-share + good regulation for drivers to ensure they can maintain their livelihood.

PS : that's until driverless waymo/tesla take over everything...

I have faced this exact problem with Canadian govt forms. Evince doesn't support them. They are so specific about only adobe acrobat to fill out the forms. I can open them in firefox but can't update them properly The only option is to use my barely hanging on 10-yr old windows machine.

Let's hope that eventually they move on to a simpler web form.

I see a bunch of comments about whether gambling should be banned or not. But what about enforcement : can you ban it?

Nowadays, gambling is on 2 fronts : in-person and online. I am not sure about % distribution between them but I suspect online is not too small. In-person gambling operations should be fairly easy to ban.

But online is a different problem because there will always be some country where gambling websites are legal.

And what's stopping gamblers from bypassing online restrictions (VPNs, cryptocurrencies, etc)?

I think an un-enforceable law holds no value and shows naive idealism. I agree that banning gambling would save the in-person gamblers but eventually, we risk them converting to online gamblers. (If vast majority of gambling is in-person, then maybe it's worth it).

It's an interesting coincidence that gambling laws are becoming more permissive in most places now that online gambling is becoming more prevalent. Another comment wonderfully put it as a possible prisoners dilemma. If place#1 bans gambling, gamblers from that place would go to place#2 that has gambling : now place#1 has both gamblers and less-tax-revenue while place#2 has same gamblers but more-tax-revenue.

A text-to-speech (TTS) model. Most good TTS models are closed-source. I intend on making this one open-source.

All the decent open-source ones are fairly basic with limited fine tuning and no alignment (RLHF).

I plan on adding those things. Although I am not sure if there will be any demand for it. Plus, there's a decent chance meta will make llama 4 speech output making this one obsolete.

I have often wondered : Why don't they attach a transponder on each athlete's center-of-chest (using some objective definition) and use that to time each athlete? That can be much much more accurate than any camera.

We can still use cameras for visual confirmation but transponders are much more accurate than any camera.

those able to decode the still-military-only encrypted signals

How? I was under the impression that military-only signal was encrypted. And if someone breaks that encrpytion, blame should go to the poor handling of encryption rather than the person breaking it? Analogy : if you leave a classified document on the train and a passenger reads it, whose fault is it?

I never really thought of that. That's a pretty interesting restriction. Although any party with access to warheads that can fly 1000+ mph probably can bypass the GPS restriction, no?

Can you explain what you mean by that? The only thing I can think of is that GPS has 2 modes : one civilian and other military use. But military use-case uses encryption so civilians can't use that mode anyway.

Nice reverse engineering! As a hacky way for the non-tech-savvy, couldn't you use a temp account to create ticketmaster account and then buy the ticket and then sell the temp account information to bypass their rules?

This reverse-engineering also breaks if ticketmaster forces venue staff to only scan if the barcode is in the ticketmaster app. Unless you create a lookalike app to trick the staffers.

The article and comments debating best practices in notebooks remind me of the time I hosted a website from a jupyter notebook.

Technically, I was using gradio to create a localhost webpage and then piping it through cloudflare. The website would only work when the notebook was running on the cmd line of EC2. Hey if it works, it works! Notebooks allowed me to do a 2 week project in 2 hours.

Like most things, notebooks have their pros and cons. One of the biggest adv is very rapid experimentation. Even a regular script takes a while for python interpreter to run and that time (even if only a few seconds) adds up in lack of creativity ("Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle" [1]). And if your script is loading a big database, then notebook is a no-brainer.

One of the biggest disadv of notebook is mis-ordering. You are allowed to declare a variable in cell 3 and then go and use it in cell 2. Even worse, you can declare a variable in cell 3 and then delete cell 3 and still be able to use that variable. That I believe is the biggest dis-adv of notebooks. It adds way too many subtle errors. One way to bypass this is to write everything in functions - no global vars.

I am willing to accept the issue of mis-ordering in order to get rapid experimentation. It's subjective whether you think the pros outweight the cons. I definitely think they do.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&t=4s

"Interestingly, the only thing stopping civilians from using the P code is the knowledge of the value of its chipping sequence. If the formula to generate the P code was publicly known, there’d be nothing stopping civilian GPS receivers from locking on to it, with the exact same techniques as are used for the C/A code."

I didn't finish reading the whole thing but was curious. Is there any way of brute forcing it or some other trick to get the chipping sequence to get the P code for more precise GPS?

"Interestingly, the only thing stopping civilians from using the P code is the knowledge of the value of its chipping sequence. If the formula to generate the P code was publicly known, there’d be nothing stopping civilian GPS receivers from locking on to it, with the exact same techniques as are used for the C/A code."

I didn't finish reading the whole thing but was curious. Is there any way of brute forcing it or some other trick to get the chipping sequence to get the P code for more precise GPS?

On the other hand if my country was invaded I would probably watch those videos with popcorn

We don't even know which country the soldier belonged to. And realistically, if your country was invaded, you are unlikely to be in a position to relax and eat popcorn but I get your sentiment.

I agree how weird this war is. The first war being live streamed. That increases the horror since watching videos of something happening is much worse than just reading about it. And most people don't read but will intently watch a drone following a soldier and exploding.

Every time Ukraine is glad they shot a $50k drone with a $1m patriot missile I wonder where this war can possibly go.

More drones and more missiles. Until someone figures out cheaper ways of stopping drones. My gut feeling is that in 1-2 years, we will have proper industrial ways of stopping drones en masse. And then drones will become just a part of the commander's arsenal like any other weapon.

I understand I am making assumptions bec of lack of information in the article.

Re shooting them down, if you can't shoot them down, whats the point of detecting them? And a drone being kamikaze only matters IF you can shoot them down. Because then it's a race between the drone rushing to kamikaze vs you shooting it down.

I will admit that I am just speculating here because I have a strange interest in militarized drones and little technical knowledge.

PS : Defending your position by saying that a company doesn't fuck around is not a very good argument.

Does anyone have a comparison of Airtag vs "Bluetooth tracker tags from Chipolo and Pebblebee"? I imagine Airtag is superior due to non-reliance on Bluetooth? Can Chipolo/Pebblebee tap into the Android network without Bluetooth? And is their tech comparable to Apple's work?

What if you cover the drone with non-reflective material? Or does it care about the reflective nature of the core of the object rather than just the surface?

I read the article but couldn't find any mention of how a radar detects drones? A drone is much smaller than an aircraft, can be confused with birds and can have 0 communication with a command & control station due to AI. So how can anything detect it?

Plus, even if you detect it, it's coming towards you at a speed of 100+ kmph with the intent to crash into you and detonate the payload. Any missile you use is way too expensive relative to the price of the drone. So what to do?

I say this bec the drone footage coming out of Ukraine is shocking. I saw a video of a drone just following a soldier for 30 seconds while the soldier was trying to run away from it. The drone crashed into the soldier and exploded. That is absolutely black-mirror dystopian stuff.

I really don't care if you were running around dealing drugs, robbing banks, stealing cars or whatever two decades ago. If I found out one of my coworkers was a career bank robber I'd just want to get a beer and hear the crazy stories.

I am glad you are trying to put skin in the game. But your examples are all non-sentimental. Let's pick a different one. If that guy used to touch children in public swimming pools (not rape) decades ago, would you let him babysit your child? Or what if that guy just used to flash himself to children?

I agree that people change. And I am willing to take the risk of working / hanging out with someone who has dealt drugs or stolen cars or even robbed banks. That's bec no one was hurt (at least intentionally) during these activities. But what if he intentionally hurt someone? Would you feel comfortable with that person roaming in the streets where their next target could be you or your family?

Is there any progress on identifying the attacker? This would make it much easier to find out it this was really a state-sponsored attack.

If this backdoor can be classified as a crime, github logs can identify the IP/location/other details of the attacker which is more than enough to identify them, unless their OPSEC is perfect, which it almost never is (e.g. Ross Ulbricht).

Fleecing them out of money is bad, but we can (literally) print more of it. Once someone is dead we can’t bring them back.

The math of my argument was that with money, you can save lives, i.e., prevent people from dying. I don't believe the govt can print as much as it likes without hurting the economy (and thus people) in some other way.

The core of my argument is that defrauding billions of dollars causes deaths of dozens of people indirectly. Is that better than directly causing a death? I am not accussing anyone; just asking what I think is an interesting question.

Reposting one of my comments that wasn't particularly liked when i originally submitted it but i think becomes more relevant now.

``` I find such white-collar crimes very interesting because of the math between crime and punishment. For the crime that SBF is alleged to have committed, we can reasonably expect 20 yrs (he will be out in 10-12). But if he had committed a murder, he would be in prison for life (no parole).

Mathematically speaking, this implies that a life is worth more than fraud worth 8 billion dollars. We can make a very reasonable assumption that the govt can save 1 additional life using a million dollars (giving necessary treatment to drug addicts / suicidal people / etc). Out of the 8 billion dollars from SBF, government would have got at least 50 million dollars from taxes (this is a lower bound). Out of that 50 million, maybe the govt puts 10-20 million back for public good. So the govt could have saved at least 10-20 people from the money that SBF is alleged to have defrauded.

Based on the above, can we say that SBF indirectly killed 10-20 people? What would be the punishment for someone who kills 10-20 people? Surely more than 20 years.

This balance between the scale of crime and the severity of punishment can be very interesting. Should someone defrauding 2 billion dollars suffer twice the punishment of someone defrauding 1 billion dollars? What about 2 murders to 1 murder? What about numbers on scale that can change an economy (what SBF did)?

More fundamentally, is our legal system scalable? ```

You don't need to use the previous, present, and next code. Most decently implemented TOTP servers take time-sync-issues into account and accept codes a few seconds here and there. They do this also bec the time for a packet to move around the earth can also sometimes take a couple seconds.

Your setup on raspberry Pi sounds complicated. Mine was simpler. Just a CLI showing totp. Less secure but more convenient.

Unrelated but you are a great writer! "user agency lives in the very long tail of any software usage" "agency drives the birth of tech but dies in the scoreboards" "scale to species level adoption discover that the ethos of creation is lost in the swarm of consumption"

You remind me of the writing of Antonio Garcia Martinez in the book Chaos Monkeys.

Can you elaborate on the hell you get put through when SWATting happens?

My understanding was that SWATting means someone calls the police and says that you have a bomb in your house or something to that effect. I imagine that the SWAT team breaks down your door and arrest you and everyone else in the household.

Soon enough, they must realize that you are all good, right? SWATting is common enough that they must be aware of it and take it into account. If they started arresting and prosecuting people who were victims of SWATting, there would be big court cases against the police.

To clarify, I am not trying to underplay what you went through. I just want to understand what you went through that made you describe it as "hell".