HN user

pfranz

3,713 karma
Posts0
Comments1,913
View on HN
No posts found.

This page probably has the most detail: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

This article is a few years old, but has more of a plain-English, third party explanation: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/01/21/what-apple-surren...

Its fair not to trust Apple or any company, but Google and a lot of companies were scanning the cloud versions without the negative press Apple got. My understanding is Apple proposed scanning on-device because images were encrypted in the cloud. Uploading and have manual review process seems like a big ongoing cost.

Personally, I dont think Apple is doing anything with photos it stores in the cloud.

Like the first article says, technically they could, because they store the encryption key for user-convenience. Turning on Advanced Data Protection should take away their ability to decrypt photos. But there are a whole bunch of caveats if you're talking about all cloud their data and that has changed over the years.

If you look at how Apple detects contraband imagery, they hash every image that gets uploaded into the photos app. Those hashes are transmitted to servers that compare them to hashes of known contraband.

You're spelling out a specific process in detail--which is the only reason I'm picking on details. Do you have anything documenting what you're describing?

From what I remember, Apple's system was proposed, but never shipped. They proposed hashing your photos locally and comparing them to a local database of known CSAM images. Only when there was was a match, they would transmit the photos for manual confirmation. This describes Apple's proposal [1].

I believe what did ship is an algorithm to detect novel nude imagery and gives some sort of warning for kids sending or receiving that data. None of that involves checks against Apple's server.

I do think other existing photo services will scan only photos you've uploaded to their cloud.

I'm happy to make corrections. To my knowledge, what you're describing hasn't been done so far.

[1] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/929-On...

I have no idea about Android, but my understanding is for wired CarPlay a GPS in the dash is optional and for wireless CarPlay its required. The thinking is you can use a larger, better placed antennae. If you're using wireless CarPlay you may have your phone hidden away.

why is obtaining Python separately better than using a Python provided by the image?

I mostly work in a different domain than webdev, but feel strongly about trying to decouple base technologies of your OS and your application as much as possible.

It's one thing if you are using a Linux image and choose to grab their Python package and other if their boot system is built around the specific version of Python that ships with the OS. The goal being if you later need to update Python or the OS they're not tethered together.

The problem is that it just doesn't work on modern, fast displays.

I'm very confused by this. From what I've seen it's been getting a lot better (since transitioning from CRTs). At least for television, frame-rate matching is becoming more of a thing. Higher frame rates really help. Calling everything fps for simplicity; 120 divides evenly by 24, 30, and 60. Lower values wont match and cause issues.

Similarly, (maybe back in the 90s?) projectors in theaters would double-expose each frame to reduce the flicker in between frames. With digital, they no longer have to advance the film between frames.

smooth motion like credits at certain speeds are extremely uncomfortable to look at at these frame rates.

I think scrolling credits are the most difficult use case: white on black with hard text and no blur. DLP projectors (common 10+ years ago) drive me nuts displaying R G and B separately.

Outside of credits, cinematographers and other filmmakers do think about these things. I remember hearing a cinematographer talk about working on space documentaries in Imax. If you panned too quickly, the white spaceship over a black star field could jump multiple feet each frame. Sure films shot today are optimized for the theater, but the technology gap between theater and home is nowhere near as crazy as CRT vs acetate.

Frame size is different from the other parameters, as it is solely a physical practicality.

I'm still struggling to see how its that different. Widescreen meant a lower effective resolution (it didn't have to--it started with Cinerama and Cinemascope), but was adopted for cost and aesthetic reasons.

If some technology somewhere else in the stack causes a change…and soon all content aligns on the format, and the majority of home TV sets will be shaped to fit the majority content it can receive.

And the industry and audiences are really attached to 24fps. Like you say, home televisions adopted film's aspect ratio and I've also seen them adopt much better support for 24fps.

As kind of an aside, I wonder if the motion blur is what people are attached to more than the actual frame rate. I assume you're talking about frame rates higher than 30? Sure, we have faster films and brighter lights, but exposure time is really short. I saw the Hobbit in theaters in both high frame rate and 24fps and the 24fps one looked weird to me, too--I meant to look it up, but I assume they just dropped frames making the blur odd.

I think this would have a negative effect.

How? Disclosure should already be legally required--class-actions and lawsuits should already be a thing. The Have I Been Pwned data sets aren't volunteered by these companies. It's a catalog of leaked data.

The class-action response of "identity monitoring" is nonsense. More companies, if they can't afford to or don't want secure data, shouldn't collect it or should aggressively purge it. User data should be a liability.

Right. Just like the article, HDR is too vague to mean anything specific and a label that's slapped onto products. In gaming, it often meant they were finally simulating light and exposure separately--clipping highlights that would have previously been shown. In their opinion, reducing the fidelity. Same with depth of field blurring things that used to not have blur.

Ugh. I will never understand the obsession this effect.

All of it (lens flares, motion blur, film grain, DoF, tone mapping, and exposure, frame rate) are artistic choices constrained by the equipment we have to collect and present it. I think they'll always follow trends. In my entire career following film, photography, computer graphics, and game dev the only time I've heard anyone talk about how we experience any of those things is when people say humans see roughly equivalent of a 50mm lens (on 35mm film).

Just look at the trend of frame size. Film was roughly 4:3, television copied it. Film started matting/cropping the frame. It got crazy with super wide-screen to where some films used 3 projectors side-by-side and most settled on 16:9. Then television copied it. Widescreen is still seen as more "filmic." I remember being surprised working on a feature that switched to Cinemascope's aspect ratio and seeing that was only 850 pixels tall--a full frame would be about twice that.

To me, high frame rate was always just another style. My only beef was with motion-smoothing muddying up footage shot at different frame rates.

Stereo film has its own limitations. Sadly, shooting for stereo was expensive and often corners were cut just to get it to show up in a theater where they can charge a premium for a stereo screening. Home video was always a nightmare--nobody wants to wear glasses (glassesless stereo TVs had a very narrow viewing angle).

It may not be obvious, but film has a visual language. If you look at early film, it wasn't obvious if you cut to something that the audience would understand what was going on. Panning from one object to another implies a connection. It's built on the visual language of still photography (things like rule of thirds, using contrast or color to direct your eye, etc). All directing your eye.

Stereo film has its own limitations that were still being explored. In a regular film, you would do a rack focus to connect something in the foreground to the background. In stereo, when there's a rack focus people don't follow the camera the same way. In regular film, you could show someone's back in the foreground of a shot and cut them off at the waist. In stereo, that looks weird.

When you're presenting something you're always directing where someone is looking--whether its a play, movie, or stereo show. The tools are just adapted for the medium.

I do think it worked way better for movies like Avatar or How to Train Your Dragon and was less impressive for things like rom coms.

https://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/thought-for-the-day/

It's crazy that post is 15 years old. Like the OP and this post get at, HDR isn't really a good description of what's happening. HDR often means one or more of at least 3 different things (capture, storage, and presentation). It's just the sticker slapped on advertising.

Things like lens flares, motion blur, film grain, and shallow depth of field are mimicking cameras and not what being there is like--but from a narrative perspective we experience a lot of these things through tv and film. Its visual shorthand. Like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica copying WWII dogfight footage even though it's less like what it would be like if you were there. High FPS television can feel cheap while 24fps can feel premium and "filmic."

Often those limitations are in place so the experience is consistent for everyone. Games will have you set brightness and contrast--I had friends that would crank everything up to avoid jump scares and to clearly see objects intended to be hidden in shadows. Another reason for consistent presentation is for unfair advantages in multiplayer.

Hyperspace 1 year ago

The first option presented is a one month non-renewing subscription for $10. I think the intention is periodically (once a year, once every few years?) you run it to reclaim space. If it was reclaiming more than a few gigs I would do it.

The author talked about being very conservative on launch; skipping directories like the Photo library or others apps that actively manage data or looking across user directories. He stumbled into writing this app because he noticed the duplicated data of shared Photo libraries between different users on the same machine. That use case isn't even supported in this version. He said he plans future development to safely dedup more data--making a one time purchase less sustainable for them.

Hyperspace 1 year ago

If you'd like. In the blog post he says he wrote the prototype in an afternoon. Hyperspace does try hard to preserve unique metadata as well as other protections.

3D Rotation Design 2 years ago

This is unrelated to viewport rotation, but I've always wanted to play with multiple inputs for posing characters. There was always a lot of interest in "full body IK" which seems like a similar idea to me. Both IK and FK imply there's an anchor point and your single (mouse) input is posing the model. With two inputs it would be more like posing a puppet where one hand anchors and the other moves. You would still have to figure out how to deal with interpolation between poses, but I would imagine posing would be more intuitive.

Sooo many forum postings of parents lamented the loss of VHS when DVDs and Blu rays took over because of the kid factor. I saw a lot of people backing up their discs and giving their kids the duplicates because of the cost of (especially Disney) films. I also think slot-load (rare for disk players) is a lot more durable than tray-load for kids.

I think the point the parent was trying to make was that when using ANC you likely listen to things using a lower volume setting--reducing the chance you'll develop tinnitus. Without ANC what you're listening to competes with what's around you and you're likely going to keep the volume higher. I immediately noticed I was using a lower volume when I first used some headphones with ANC.

I've head some people suggest using AirPods Pro with ANC as a form of hearing protection at concerts--I think Apple might have even mentioned that in today's presentation.

The End of Finale 2 years ago

MacOS got a total ground-up rewrite in between versions 9 and 10, and it helps they built the UI on top of an existing nix.

The reason the parent mentioned NeXTSTEP is while MacOS between 9 and X is a ground-up rewrite if you compare those two, Mac OS X was an evolution of the NeXTSTEP codebase from 1989 (34 years ago).

I went to the Maya developer’s conference around maybe 2002 and the devs were complaining about it being hard to maintain.

I'm not surprised. I'm a bit fuzzy on the pre-history of Maya, but I believe it incorporated software acquired from Alias, Wavefront, and TDI. However, I think part of the performance and bugginess might be from launching on expensive IRIX-based systems and transitioning to commodity hardware an Linux in the early 2000s.

The End of Finale 2 years ago

I think part of the reason apps like Photoshop and Word got bloated is that their audience got watered down and are fairly mainstream software.

I'm sure there's a lot of old niche software that feels modern and unbloated. Nuke[1] is 31 years old and Houdini[2] is 27. Maya[3] is 26 years old. I would say Maya feels bloated--but at larger places I've worked, people have avoided the newer viewports with more features because the "legacy" viewports are so fast.

It may be hard to make it feel "modern," but I love how optimized "old" code can be if they've been able to resist rewriting it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_(software)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini_(software)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_Maya

They're not copying or spoofing the chip on the card, they're skimming the mag stripe and getting the fixed credit card number, right? Then stealing your pin (second factor). I'm not 100% sure what methods they use for purchasing after collecting this info.

Couldn't we stop this today by rejecting transactions that use a mag stripe? Or just severely restricting them? My understanding is less secure transaction types have higher fees specifically because of fraud.

Mandating tap-to-pay (which has been in wide use for something like over 20 years now) eliminates this capture vector. I would love to opt-in to totp as a pin...while its used widely in tech I can see concerns with mandating it widely.

I feel like making this way more secure can be done with the tech already out there. It's the incentives that are preventing that from happening; i.e. the user is on the hook or it's "cheaper" to let the money get stolen.

iPhones have had Power Reserve for a few years now. For up to around 5 hours after your phone turns off due to low battery you can still use things like Find My or Express Card transactions (payment, transit, car home hotel keys, student ids). Unfortunately, Latch doesn't support this. Oh, and Latch automatically locks the door behind you. Don't forget your phone when you take out the trash, get the mail, or pick up dry laundry.

That's true, but just like adults, what kid's brains "need" isn't always the same thing they're most stimulated by. I also think since adults are often around it's very very appreciated to not be obnoxious to adults.

Taking Bluey as a specific example, it's really nice to model positive family relationships. Sesame Street's original goal was to "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them."

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. Like others have said, “Water can’t be free anywhere” seems to be inevitable at a commercial level--but dystopian on an individual level. If you had neighbors in your rural area aggressively pumping water out of the ground your well would dry up...and you'd be paying "market price" for it.

Just looking at water usage when I owned a house, irrigation uses a ridiculous amount of water relative to everything else individuals use to live--including laundry, bathing, dishes, etc. If memory serves, sewage costs are significantly more than the water itself (and sewage as metered off of water consumption--so you're likely paying sewage feeds on water you're irrigating with).

The actual cost of enough clean drinking water for people is very small. Enough that drinking fountains are common and people shouldn't need to ration drinking water.

Similarly, on pages like GitLab you can link to specific line(s) of code in a file...but it often is the head of that branch. The URL will resolve in the future, but its pretty common that the chunk of code has moved.

I wish it was easy to grab a URL for that specific version, with a banner at the top saying it's not the newest version of the code (something I sometimes see with documentation). I don't see why Figma couldn't do this, too.

I have the opposite problem. I'll drive from LA to SF for a conference or to visit friends and I have no place to ditch a car I don't need. Finding parking is miserable and hotels will charge $50-70/night.

Heck, I saw a post last night about getting dropped off at LAX. It was taking hours to get close to the airport so they got out of their car and walked the last mile or two to the airport with their luggage. I just can't imagine the scale of what would need to change to accommodate cars.

If out of pocket cost and having your car are the two things you value, do you never plan on flying? The out of pocket cost is often comparable and even with security, it's faster. It's also nice to be able to not have to focus on the road for hours.

Hard-won experience? I vaguely remember when Sudafed got put behind counters because it was used to make meth. I don't frequently get sick. Often, the last medication I bought is expired by the time I need it again. One year, I found something that worked for me. Another year, I thought I bought the same thing, but it just didn't work. The one I had originally bought (same brand) had a behind-the-counter version that worked. It's annoying to catch the pharmacy when it's open, but now I just ask the pharmacist for generic Sudafed with the smallest-lasting dose (so I can decide if I want to take more).

I've found with most medications looking for an active ingredient and an amount is helpful. You can search for effectiveness or side-effects. The brand I got last time isn't always available and they'll have 3-hour or 12-hour versions with warnings about exceeding recommended dosages (or mixing medications). Or company annoyingly package similarly-branded things that just aren't the same.

I was kind of expecting some magic button combination, too, but was told there wasn't one.

The car was actually a manual transmission and the thought did occur to me. My worry was something like steering lock or some other issue while trying that while driving down the road would cause a horrible accident.