HN user

floatingatoll

10,766 karma

I do not recommend using Keybase; this proof exists solely to maintain claim on my username to prevent impersonation attacks.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/floatingatoll; my proof: https://keybase.io/floatingatoll/sigs/GUvyKD9s8uaWo_slfFKKYdqV-G4X-WUy9hPtZwyDUXU ]

Posts35
Comments3,717
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news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: What is one learnable skill you wish was more common in job applicants?

floatingatoll
17pts29
blog.mozilla.org 4y ago

Improving the quality of publicly trusted intermediate CA certificates

floatingatoll
88pts26
maggieappleton.com 5y ago

The linear oppression of note-taking apps

floatingatoll
2pts0
github.com 5y ago

quicssh: a QUIC proxy for SSH clients and servers without needing to patch

floatingatoll
2pts0
datatracker.ietf.org 5y ago

QUIC-based UDP transport for SSH (draft-bider-SSH-QUIC-09)

floatingatoll
3pts3
www.mothersruin.com 5y ago

Apparency: The app that inspects Mac apps

floatingatoll
2pts0
swiftrocks.com 5y ago

App Attest: Protecting iOS apps from jailbreak tweaks in iOS 14

floatingatoll
1pts0
nathantankus.substack.com 6y ago

Riots, Municipalities and Monetary Policy

floatingatoll
1pts0
www.theverge.com 6y ago

Zoom fixes 'malware-like' macOS installer with new update

floatingatoll
2pts0
nixintel.info 6y ago

Signs you're following a fake Twitter account

floatingatoll
277pts149
www.sfchronicle.com 6y ago

Chiu proposes integrating Bay Area transit (AB-2057)

floatingatoll
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Propose HN: 'Countless' experiment – hiding all karmic integers

floatingatoll
68pts42
www.wired.com 7y ago

Exodus spyware posed as legitimate iOS app

floatingatoll
2pts1
www.deadflip.com 7y ago

How to stream pinball

floatingatoll
1pts1
makingmaps.net 8y ago

How Useful Is Tufte for Making Maps? (2007)

floatingatoll
110pts36
www.nature.com 17y ago

Self-organized helical equilibria and ohmically heated fusion plasma

floatingatoll
1pts0
makingmaps.net 17y ago

How Useful is Tufte for Making Maps? (2007)

floatingatoll
1pts0
googleresearch.blogspot.com 17y ago

Google Research Blog: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken [2006]

floatingatoll
21pts9
www.plosone.org 17y ago

The e-Index, Complementing the h-Index for Excess Citations (2009)

floatingatoll
1pts0
www.collidingparticles.com 17y ago

Colliding Particles (Hunting the Higgs) - documentary films about the LHC

floatingatoll
1pts0
arxiv.org 17y ago

Doves and hawks: An evolutionary quantum game theory-based analysis of financial crises

floatingatoll
6pts2
www.tug.org 17y ago

Father Truchet, the typographic point, the Romain du roi, and tilings (1999)

floatingatoll
7pts0
www.treehugger.com 17y ago

Luxim LIFI plasma light bulb more efficient than LED/CFL

floatingatoll
18pts7
arxiv.org 17y ago

Lorentz violation and black-hole thermodynamics [hep-th/0811.0943]

floatingatoll
1pts0
arxiv.org 17y ago

Gravity from Breaking of Local Lorentz Symmetry [hep-th/0904.0364]

floatingatoll
1pts0
arxiv.org 17y ago

Lorentz violation at high energy [astro-ph/0505267]

floatingatoll
8pts3
arxiv.org 17y ago

Black/White hole radiation from dispersive theories [hep-th/0903.2224]

floatingatoll
5pts0
couchdb.apache.org 17y ago

Apache CouchDB: Technical Overview

floatingatoll
21pts0
homepages.cwi.nl 17y ago

Exponential Lower Bound for 2-Query Locally Decodable Codes via a Quantum Argument (2003)

floatingatoll
3pts0
people.csail.mit.edu 17y ago

Aubrey Jaffer: Optics for Passive Radiative Cooling

floatingatoll
6pts0

Years and years ago, I took a photo set of the Santa Cruz boardwalk and all of its beautifully painted buildings and rides, in the middle of January when it was completely and utterly devoid of people. I think I encountered one person the entire visit. I was thrilled because it let me add a second album to my collection of “places that are gorgeous and deserve photographs taken of them without all those annoying people in the way”, and I celebrated the reactions from people. Which were, more or less, that is was incredibly weird to see it portrayed in perfectly normal lighting and color and tone, but missing the one thing that everyone takes for granted: passersby.

Anyways, I reawoke this old dead account (I have since changed names everywhere, here too) so I can link the album and talk about it. Not because I care about appreciation of my photos, but because as an early adopter of the trend, I found it was possible to create the eeriness of today’s ’liminal spaces’ without the ‘lifeless’ characteristics of the Backrooms, House of Leaves, an so on. It’s a lot easier to create that feeling with decay, with monotonality, with cookie-cutter cubicle mazes; and, the theory tends to connect with people more readily as plausible if you include ‘rotted by time and age’ to justify the emptiness as Horizon Zero Dawn and Last of Is both lovingly demonstrated.

But at the core of all of this modern liminal, is portraying human-dense spaces as human-zero, and then confronting the eternal question that haunts humanity: “What happens in the dark forest when no humans are observing?” Whether it’s a cubicle maze or a carnival ride, as the world grows more and more crowded and lonely, it’s no wonder that we want to spy on our busiest spaces after we’ve all gone home for the day. What do they get up to? Where did all the people go? Is this merely a painting of a screaming person on a wall, or is this space empty because they were consumed?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/floatingatoll/albums/721576328...

If Tesla said “working as designed”, then that would definitively confirm that it’s not a bug. Apple has said “working as designed, not a bug” about the most common feature requests (such as “uBlock support” and all the underlying capabilities to deliver that), leaving no uncertainty about them. So I do appreciate your point in the generic “any” case, certainly, but that uncertainty can easily be voided in specific cases — yet we’re ignoring that when it occurs. (I assume this is because framing feature requests as bugs is a common persuasion tactic, as any software maintainer would confirm, but I don’t have any certainty on that view yet.)

Bungie, another tech company, has been making this exact request of its community for years now, and their community has for years now found every excuse under the sun to ignore it. Bungie asks “tell us what’s broken, tell us what feels wrong”, and their community responds instead “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”, and then complains that bugs aren’t getting fixed in Bungie’s products. This self-fulfilling prophecy of refusal, complaint, and outrage repeats on an annual cycle, and yet these users continue to ignore pleas for useful feedback.

As of when I posted this comment, most of HN’s discussion of this post is a stellar example of this Internet forum social behavior. Safari asks “tell us what’s buggy and broken, not about recurring feature requests”, and this community is responding with “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”. There are three or four actual real bug reports in this discussion, but they’re drowned out by the non-curious ‘feature’ and ‘cynical’ repetition.

I’m kind of disappointed that they got a hundred plus viable bug reports on Twitter, but only a couple from HN. Given how much so many of us sneer at Twitter, it’s upsetting to see Twitter dramatically outshine us technically. We’re Hacker News, this ought to be a piece of cake.

For example: I wish that Elon Musk wasn’t prideful and troll-y online (these are feature requests that his personality team has refused us), but if he asked me to name a bug in Tesla’s cars that he isn’t aware of, I’d point out that Tesla cars allow you to drive at unsafe speeds when the fog lights are turned on, which is wasting untold megawatts of Supercharger time per year because drivers either don’t know that fog lights aren’t effective above a certain speed and because there’s no chime or automatic-off setting to prevent energy waste. Yes, Elon’s a jerk, and yes, I have feature requests and cynicism about that — but I’d leap for the opportunity to even have a chance at posting one paragraph that cuts all Teslas’ watts per mile by any amount at all. I wish others here found that as rewarding as I do.

I'm not restricting my considerations to "the technology that is implemented and available to Tor users today", given that what's available neither meets the needs of sites, nor the needs of users. If you think that the idea is inappropriate, please state so and make your case for why you believe in your viewpoint. If you think that the idea is impossible, please note why you believe that — and then consider the idea as if it were possible.

Reputation is a feature of identity. Tor users are, by definition and intent, unidentifiable. Opting out of identification naturally opts one out of reputation, as is the case in reality as well — for example, Anonymous using Guy Fawkes masks to prevent reputation from being associated with their citizenship identity.

I don’t understand why Tor users would be interested in reputation at all, given the implicit identification it requires.

Would a plasma cutter be able to permanently destroy the engines in each truck rapidly beyond repairability, so that they’re “disarmed” and can be relocated safely without malicious driver interference? I assume these are going to be taken out by demolition crane anyways, and it would provide a simple and immediate on-site tool to turn them into worthless scrap metal.

Not deanonymise, no.

Come up with a way for siteops to block someone and all their sockpuppet accounts, without knowing the underlying identity, and you’ll become a billionaire.

Without that, the only option we have today is deanonymization, which is a terrible option. We ought to do better.

Tor provides anonymity without accountability; having some doors closed to all Tor users is the price paid for that anonymity. If that price isn’t acceptable, either modify Tor to allow more granular accountability in some privacy-protecting way, or don’t use Tor when accessing services that are closed to it.

Firefox 97.0 4 years ago

You can download a prerelease binary early from FTP, but until they release it, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the same code that’s released.

In what way are any of these jerking the regulators’ chain? You list four facts, and you claim that these four facts are insufficient to regulators. Please provide the remainder of your viewpoint, so that we who don’t understand you yet can have a chance to consider it and be persuaded by it.

For example, here’s a question I can’t answer from this tweet or from this entire HN discussion:

“In what way do each of these four facts conflict with one country’s regulators’ decisions, characteristics, or historical tendencies?”

(However, if your goal is simply to preach to the choir, then your comment is certainly sufficient for that purpose — so long as it’s acceptable that it won’t persuade anyone that doesn’t already agree with whatever viewpoint is left unexplained here.)

Correct, in the 5K case the entire display is rendered at 5K, and ditto 2K etc. (I believe the internal canvas caps at 32K, but I don’t have the tools to find out for sure.)

Whatever-sized display viewports are just crop windows into it, and the crop window in internal canvas terms is scaled as necessary, and then it renders the vector canvas onto the raster viewport.

In macOS, the entire display is rendered at 4K no matter what you pick from the resolution box. Most apps have learned to provide 2x-3x “retina” icons so that their bitmap resources look crisp alongside the system UI resources at user-selected “resolutions”.

The Windows UI scaling slider behaves in exactly the same way, though fewer apps include 2x or 3x bitmap resources.

If Safari didn’t aggressively cache favicons, websites trying to overcome Apple’s objection would immediately start trying to use window.reload() and server-side dynamically generating favicon paths, for random “I made this up before coffee” example, which would burn more battery power on Apple devices for endless page reload events. Caching aggressively makes it a non-starter to try and engineer workarounds, and comes at zero impact to users (who are either accustomed to the old favicon and don’t care about rebranding, or ignoring it).

That would allow websites to override Apple's objection, and therefore they can't allow it, even if it will cause occasional problems for websites that think they can do a total branding pivot including favicon overnight.