ldarby

It seems like the real solution is a law which requires the stations to accept a more universal payment system like credit cards.

No shit, Sherlock? In the UK a lot of fuel pumps have credit/debit card readers built in, and if not cards are accepted everywhere for payment already. But yes electric charging companies here are still wierd about accepting such standardised payments, and we did just introduce a new law about it [0] promising "most" but not all chargers will accept cards.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-laws-to-make-charging...

Just in case you weren't joking, and at the risk of making a fool of myself if you were and still are joking (and/or trolling us now), where you initially said "non-rewritable optical storage media", some people people including me thought you were making a joke referencing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc.

If you genuinely weren't aware of CDs, that's fine, see https://xkcd.com/1053/.

I found it confusing - if a URL is "offline", I'd expect some kind of error message like connection refused or no such domain. The URL here is not "offline", it's the BL that's offline, and the BL isn't a URL.

It would not make sense to train a model for every advertiser and then upload that to the phone.

I was assuming that's what they were doing. Maybe you could combine both ways, with really imprecise models, so the phone captures and upload only words that above average chance of matching (so not that much data), and have heavy servers do the rest?

Yes I don't work in this field, but you shouldn't assume that just because you don't know how something can be achieved, then no one else has figured it out either (especially where they're motivated to keep it secret).

I'm sure it's existed for many years. Ultrasonic tracking apps are from 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applicat...

Let's try to imagine a world where that exists, keyword detection exists as well ("ok google" etc), and keyword detection for targeted ads doesn't exist. Can you? I can't.

I'd assume that this listening functionality only comes with certain apps, that's certainly the case for ultrasonic tracking apps [0]. Probably you have just managed to avoid installing such apps.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-device_tracking#Applicat...

. Nothing stops you from using another phone,

Do you realise phones cost money and not everyone can afford an iPhone?

It's viewable via Nitter: https://nitter.net/SenWarren/status/1733956234200445130

But I agree with the earlier point, that it is a closed platform. If you want to respond, I thought it requires a phone number now in addition to email? It used to at least. And if Twitter doesn't like you, why is your ability to communicate with an official regulated by this private company? And Nitter is likely to get shutdown by Twitter any moment now in the same way as Apple is trying to shutdown Beeper.

No, it's the other way round. You setup this DNS server to serve e.g. evil.com on the global internet.

Then if you can control the client, you can just do regular DNS lookups for <longstring>.evil.com, that goes to the victim's DNS server, and that DNS server forwards it to this DNS server, which saves <longstring> (many of them) to a file.

Edit: looking closer, this isn't exactly how this tool works, this DNS server assumes the client can send directly to this DNS server, I was assuming it didn't need to do that (and if it sends to the victim's DNS server instead, it's a lot harder to block). If you used it as I thought above, the output filename would just be "evil.com".

I'm not suggesting anywhere is actually using brainfuck. Why would you think I was? I was attempting to use rhetoric to point out that you do in fact care about choice of language.

There's something extremely satisfying to me about finding the source of a noise and I love how this one was recorded and analysed. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unexplained_sounds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum, and https://xkcd.com/1590/

So you'd be happy working at a place that required all code to be in brainfuck? That choice of computer language is "just an implementation detail" and you can still solve your interesting abstract problems in it so you should be happy with it.

You're not getting that most employers treat the requirement to use windows like the requirement to wear pants, i.e. they're not going to state it.

I've used Linux as my primary OS for > 20 years. My current job supports Mac and Windows and I accepted it with the understanding that I'd have to use windows, but couldn't get used to it, so switched to a Mac. Maybe I could have gotten used to this, but switching between the Mac UI and Linux at home always felt like switching between a normal bike and one with reversed steering (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0). Luckily Linux is unofficially supported at work so I've switched back to that now.

That is the same thing as preferences. Different things are important to different people, these are preferences by definition.

I'm annoyed when I have to move my hand back to the mouse.

You can bind a keyboard shortcut to a script that copies the primary to clipboard, then can use ctrl-v. Most apps also bind shift-insert to paste the paste buffer, so I bind shift-delete to this script, then to paste the primary it's just shift-delete then shift-insert. Here's the "script":

     xsel -p | xsel -i -b

(3 days later, responding to myself).

Maybe this was bad advice, this approach is like trying to learn a spoken language by listening to a recording and looking up each word at a time. Probably it'd be better to get a deep understanding of how CPUs work in general, I can recommend the book Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson for this. I agree with the other commenter that 15 years is more realistic so maybe just start by getting a 4 year degree in CompSci (and that book will probably be required reading).

You just need to understand assembly. Maybe there are books that can help, I'm not aware of any, but to get started I'd recommend taking a binary of any open source software (preferably a non-optimised build, or just your own hello world with some loops etc), run it in a debugger, and step through each assembly instruction at a time and figure out what it's doing, with the corresponding source code. Eventually you may be able to do this without needing the source code, which is the goal. I think this is about the same effort as learning a new language (spoken, not programming), i.e. it'll take months of being immersed in it to get good at it.

On the other hand, maybe your binary can be decompiled to source code (e.g. CFR can decompile java classes, I've used that a bit but haven't checked if that's useful for Android apps).

Also the film Conspiracy Theory - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118883/plotsummary/

Jerry tells her that NASA is trying to kill the President using a secret weapon on the Space Shuttle that can trigger earthquakes.

Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it.

This is straight from the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html.

I don't develop or support anything on Windows. Sure that excludes 99.9% (I guess) of career options involving a computer, but I've still found employment that doesn't require Windows. But once either Microsoft finally succeeds at banning Linux from running on desktop PCs (which is basically what this is about), or every single employer requires everyone to run Windows, then I guess I'll switch careers to farming or something.

If Windows is required for work then you've already lost. Seriously I'm unable to be productive in Windows (or Mac, I tried). I don't know what the stats are on employers requiring Windows but my current one doesn't (mainly because of a sizable chunk of Mac users, not that there's any support for Linux).

I highly recommend the podcast It Could Happen Here, they are good for bursting such bubbles. Last update they had on Myanmar is here: https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-junta-s-sham-... (or anywhere else you can find podcasts).

Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them

You completely misunderstand. Windows and Mac are different enough from every linux distro that the argument isn't about them.

And if you're going to start talking about copy-rightable works of entertainment, then yes if you write a book based off another book just with 1 extra character (analogous to "install <major distro> and do apt install X") then that book would violate copyright and should not be written. It's the lack of copyright in FOSS that allows all the pointless duplication of effort with all the almost identical linux distros.

Debian and Arch are different enough that the argument isn't about them. The issue is the 100's of distros that could be replaced with just "install <major distro> and do apt install X" (or some other trivial thing like changing the default to KDE instead of Gnome).

I wasn't even aware of the artificial limit (I'm in the UK), that's absurd... By "tea cup size" I meant the unrestricted 9 L tank.

They haven't published the fuel tank size or non-electric range (at least, I couldn't find this info easily), so I'd expect it to be similar to the BMW i3's tea cup sized fuel tank.

No it doesn't say that.

That morning, a software bug in an update to the DynamicSource tool caused ...

This says when the bug happened, not when the update was made.

If the automatically loaded data strikes either pilot as not right, they can make a manual request for takeoff data from the airline operations center. “But 99.8% of the time, the data is accurate,” he said.

Alaska’s Peyton said “several crews noticed the error and notified dispatch.”

The pilot at American Airlines said “requesting manual data is not standard” and that if there’s a glitch, naturally some pilot somewhere is going to miss it.

“Not everyone gets eight hours sleep the night before. Someone is going through a divorce. Someone is not so sharp that morning,” he said. “The sanity check isn’t perfect every day of the week.”

So they already knew (or should have known) about this glitch, and did nothing about it until it started causing damage to aircraft. I would have thought the pilots who reported it earlier would have also predicted the outcome and got it fixed then. From my lay perspective, it's obvious that if aircraft is heavier than the flight computer was told it is, then something bad is going to happen (e.g. could have been complete failure to take off and crash at the end of the runway).

Well, maybe such incidents where pilots do make the prediction, and get it fixed before it causes the problem they predicted, never make it to the news...