aeturnum

I often see comments like this on encryption related project. Depending on the reader you make what might be an essential point - but I also don't really know how useful it is to say it here. The author makes no claims about what adversaries this should be sufficient against and is completely open about their constraints and decisions (allowing you to make the critique in the first place).

Basically evading a state-level actor is going to be hard. People do get lucky but to evade them in a straight-up contest you need to very clever (if it's possible at all). Given that, I just dunno how useful it is to emblazen warnings on AES-based encryption schemes that it won't fool the NSA. Either the person reading it is not technically equipped to evaluate the claims and may be scared off of a solution that protects against some adversaries while searching for an impossible zero-config state-proof solution. Or the person already knew as soon as they saw 'AES' that this isn't the project they need.

I don't mean to denigrate the inclination to highlight weaknesses like this - good communication around this is genuinely challenging.

Sony is obviously the villain here (and pretty much always) but I think this points to an unsolved problem with our model of digital ownership: it's based on the media company providing a service...forever? People in this thread are saying customers should get refunds and I disagree - customers should get video files!

We need a model of digital ownership that does not involve the media owner forever delivering that media on demand. Doing away with that requirement would be good for all involved. Sony has been a bad actor here and deserves every possible sorrow - and also I would like a model that retains the balance of physical media: companies give you a copy that works 'til it wears out and it's your job to keep it in working condition.

All your examples could be printed and read as books - whatever form they are consumed in. What differences are you seeking to highlight with these examples?

You can look at wikipedia's list of SDRs[1] to see which can do wifi ranges now. I was more thinking about the future because you're right that it's a less common capability at the moment - but if you want a popular hobbiest platform you could check out the HackRF line[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software-defined_radio...

[2] https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/

Neat! SDRs have been available at reasonable price points for some time but the processing power to engage with wifi and other digital signals has been somewhat elusive. Assuming RAM can be purchased in the future, I think we might see a lot more prosumer-targeted devices for doing raw signal analysis in the future.

This is a nice little write up and I kinda feel like the author (sensibly) chose centralization just on a smaller scale. I also think that the algorithm is pretty similar to the og textsecure2[1] protocol signal used (and still uses?) in terms of key generation. It's different in that messages are in a distributed hash table instead of sent through a server and also that there's less cross-verification by chat members, but I'm not sure the author would lose any of their goals by using the signal approach (with distributed storage).

[1] https://signal.org/blog/private-groups/

If comments about how "this blog post could have been a link to this github repo" are in-bounds, so are comments about how "this could have been a link to a LLM session." HN has always tried to work out if a submission is novel and interesting work or is just a slick coat of paint on mundane work (sometimes if good work is obscured by insufficiently clever presentation). Highlighting that content was generated by an LLM and asking if that impacts how to understand it is entirely in keeping with our culture and standards.

what makes a great gaming machine?

A piece of hardware that runs a basket of popular higher-end games at close to 60fps is generally what people look for. If you know you wanna run DF you can use much cheaper hardware, but if you wanna run "games" you wanna check that your target pc performs good enough on a selection of games.

Buying a gaming pc is always a bad deal compared to a PS5! Even though anyone buying a gaming PC is getting a "bad deal" - many people prefer it. You can do lots of things on a PC that you can't on a PS5 - and there are reasons someone might want a 6" cube instead of a full PS5 and a mac mini. None of them are low price but they are reasons nonetheless.

A great example of the target audience are the people who've been playing games on the Steam Deck, but want something with a bit more oomf without the hassle of building a PC. I am not in that demographic! But I have a friend who is. He's quite happy to pay more for convenience. He already has a gaming laptop, but I can see him getting this to replace his ancient Steam Link.

The mac mini is a wonder but it's not a great gaming machine[1]. You can see that these stats are about 1/2 of what the Steam Machine does, so I think the comparison is pretty apt.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/mac-mini-m4-gaming-hands-on/

This device does sit between mac-mini-esq lower power devices and compact enthusiast builds and, like the Steam Deck, it's an attempt to build a new segment. That said, if you think paying $1000 for this kind of hardware is some kind of exception, I think you should go take a look at what you can get on the prebuilt gaming PC market. You get a little less because the Steam Machine has a small footprint, but if you're looking for a nice little machine you don't overpay by much.

That's fair and I'll admit to using a bit of hyperbole with that number. My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.

This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?

So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.

I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.

I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).

That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!

The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2432/ML24320A014.pdf

My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was some conflict with overlapping systems deep in the map bowels - and the bar is visible again. It's just good luck that the owner happened to talk to me and I happened to know someone who looked into it!

I don't think it's worth going through and providing you links about the mischaracterizations in your post - as you seem to have your own sources - but your depiction of the history of scientific consensus is not accurate. As you say problems caused by sweeteners around weight gain, insulin regulation, etc are long documented. As are the many studies showing that sweeteners cause cancer at doses (100x+ iirc) far above those consumed by average humans.

That said, the topic here was on cancer, and even the WHO announcement about aspartame being possibly carcinogenic clarifies it's not for normal ranges of consumption. I think you're trying to make a boogie man out of scientists and researchers by mischaracterizing the complex work they do. If you feel that things have suddenly reversed course it's because you haven't been following the research.

Without counting anything out it's worth saying that artificial sweeteners are some of the most-tested food ingredients because of concern about their health impacts. It's possible that we missed something, but you have to weigh that against the chance we missed something about every other possible food ingredient (all of which have been tested less).

I suppose I am reacting to lines like these in the article:

Now I don't even need to blog. I just talk to Alex and I feel satisfied.

In our household, we are now doing Friday demos, just me and Alex. We're each sharing something we shipped the previous week.

For example, when we exercise, we each have different goals and needs but we still try to go to the gym with each other if we can and it's not too much hassle.

These are fine - and like I said it could be real - but often this is how people describe codependency.

I want to highlight a "mixed" passage part way through where the author restates their thesis:

The best relationships truly are all-encompassing, and it's okay to talk about your deepest, darkest inner things

The first half of this sentence talks about being all-encompassing - i.e. the ways in which the partnership has come to be central in all things it can be central in. That is what feels codependent-y to me. The second half of the sentence describes intimacy and it has nothing to do with shared activities. You do not need to have any sort of "encompassing" relationship to comfortably discuss your deepest darkest feelings - you just need trust and an appropriate interlocutor. It's the conflating of "doing everything together" with "intimacy" that makes me worry.

But again - the author could be right! I suspect this is real sometimes.

Like true love, I somewhat believe this can exist, but most of the people who talk like this are in a codependent relationship. It's just extremely unlikely that a person you're seeing romantically is also interested in all the other things you've got going on. They should support you in your endeavors in general, but often in the way parents might ("ya winning son"?).

Instead, the best relationship for most people will not be all encompassing. Your partner will love you for you and encourage you, will know what you're up to and keep track, but will also have areas and interests that you aren't into. For me, a lot of my growth has come from the areas where partners are into things I'm not: I don't change to be like them, but through their eyes I learn to see things in new ways (while still liking what I like). It can go too far in the other direction - but for most people having parts of your life your partner is not very involved in is a sign of maturity and strength. A strong relationship is a base from which you can set out into the world on your own terms, free to return to that relationship in the future.

I also think cine lenses have the budget to continue making high quality mechanical interfaces. Consumer lenses must have AF and so are incentivized to reuse that functionality if it would reduce the BoM.

I do think that pasting AI responses gives "reading the encyclopedia entry at someone", which is quite rude and crass, but you can't open peoples' eyes with similar levels of rudeness. Especially when it's an accurate description. I appreciate a good screed and also think we are looking for a subtler tool.

Right - but you are not considering that it's possible for a police department to be so bad as to be uninsurable. Even if the police continue to do misconduct, bad departments would get into situations where no insurer will cover them, and they are forced to make changes. It's not a perfect fix at all, but it would be a nice end-around for qualified immunity.

Historically, Plex was the only show in town - and the only non-DLNA server you could access from most streaming devices. That's changing now, but it's not changing that fast. I believe our older google streamers still don't have a jellyfin app (though I could be wrong). We simply run both services in any case.

When I was a masters student in STS[1], one of my concepts for a thesis was arguing that one of the primary uses of software was to shift or eschew agency and risk. Basically the reverse of the famous IBM "a computer can not be held responsible" slide. Instead, now companies prefer computers be responsible because when they do illegal things they tend to be in a better legal position. If you want to build as tool that will break a law, contract it out and get insurance. Hire a human to "supervise" the tool in a way they will never manage and then fire them when they "fail." Slice up responsibility using novel command and control software such that you have people who work for you who bear all the risk of the work and capture basically none of the upside.

It's not just AI. It's so much of modern software - often working together with modern financialization trends.

[1] Basically technology-focused sociology for my purposes, the field is quite broad.

I've always had an easy time talking to strangers and striking up conversations. I think this line is the key one:

But over time, I came to accept that it’s ok if they didn’t want to talk to me. That’s just one of the things you have to expect when you do something like this.

People are complex! They have a lot going on. You almost never get someone responding with the same attention you are giving. That's just how it is.

What he is doing is developing a practice of friendliness. This won't develop close friendships - close friendships are what happen after you're successfully friendly to people who are good fit. But it will set you up to do well in semi-public spaces like the gym or your friends' party where you don't know anyone. It's an extremely good skill to practice and, unlike what I would have said at twenty, it does not reflect a lack of depth. Understanding that not everyone wants to have a deep conversation at every moment is maturity - doubly so if you can recognize it in yourself.

Hah - yah a "new" panoramic camera. I'm glad to see we are seeing production on the kind of cameras that take full advantage of films' qualities. This both has an eye-watering price tag and it fits well into the "panoramic ecosystem" of older wideluxes and X-Pans ($1.5k - $3k and $4.5k+ respectively). The xpan 30mm is pushing $6k now (oh how I wish I would have paid $2k back in the day! It seemed crazy to spend the price of the whole kit again for one lens but it turns out it wasn't).

Also happy to see more enthusiast camera companies. I dunno that they'll manufacture the best stuff, but in the age of "financialize everything" I'll take Jeff or the Mint Camera folks over some multinational conglomerate any day.

This American Life had a good 2013 episode on the tricky dosing of acetaminophen [1]. It's also worth saying that capsaicin is used for pain relief[2]! Especially for things like muscle and joint pain.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/505/use-only-as-directed

[2] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/18080-capsaicin-...

It's hard to know what to make of this. It feels like it's listing stereotypes and superficial guesses. The tool accurately detected my age, my ethnicity and my location. Then it just kind of "vibed out" a bunch of things. Some of those vibes are strangely accurate on their own, but taken together the set of guesses is laughably inaccurate.

It would be interesting to do a similar with a series of photos. You could maybe interface with a users' photo library and select photos grouped by facial recognition. After all, none of these tracking companies are using just one point of data.

Zero emails is not low noise - it's zero noise. I agree that I sometimes want zero noise from companies whose products I am using...and also it depends on what is in the noise? Sometimes I find unexpected signal.

I would say that email is inherently a somewhat noisy channel. You have little meta-data about how appropriate and timely a message is, so often you are sending in the dark. There are many downsides to the protocol and its place in our lives but it does carry a lot of important communication.

Basically...I just don't know what communication medium would allow a company that makes app icons to keep their customers in the loop about updates & concerns related to the product. Are you gonna install a Font Awesome app?

I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.

Edit: I am genuinely interested in why you think I am a bootlicker but we can't dig into it if you won't actually talk about the particulars of this situation.