HN user

sanityvampire

83 karma
Posts0
Comments18
View on HN
No posts found.

I'm a fan of the X1 Carbon line; my current home laptop is a 3rd-gen that I grabbed on eBay for cheap a while back. Might leapfrog to the next model when it's released, but the "Alexa for PC" integration is kinda sketching me out.

I know it's just factory-installed bloatware at this point, but I'm concerned that before long Amazon's going to be paying off OEMs for physically integrated spy hardware, and while I love my ThinkPad systems, Lenovo's willingness to include Alexa makes me nervous.

Ubiquitous WiFi kiosks with inbuilt cameras, huh? Ostensibly, they're not allowed to track individual user locations, but the combination of functions present in the devices means it would be trivial to start connecting independent databases and building profiles on users. If you were a malicious actor, how would you go about it?

The PoCs on tracking individuals with MAC addresses are old news (and, in fairness, newer iOS devices use random MAC addresses for WiFi probe requests), let alone the user fingerprinting you could do on browsers when people actually use these things. So you've got a database of devices, and then on top of that you start doing facial recognition and gait analysis to collect another set of individual data points. Then you connect devices to people, and you have a pretty nice system for tracking individuals moving through the city, even those with location services and such disabled.

Paranoia? Maybe, but it wouldn't take much for say, Amazon, to start doing this. And Bezos wouldn't be bound by city regulations on citizen privacy.

Vim's commands and keybingings interface (not the UI).

I recently decided to finally get good at Vim, but the UI, being text-only, can be charitably described as "awful."

Solution: Sublime Text 3 with the NeoVintageous[1] plugin. Takes a beautiful, highly customizable, extensible editor and adds most of the Vim bindings. I can do all of my main development work in a gorgeous editor, and when I have to hop onto an unfamiliar machine, I'm still good at using Vim.

[1] https://github.com/NeoVintageous/NeoVintageous

Do you think fluid simulation is advanced enough at this stage to simulate something like, "Assuming sea level rises 6 feet at the coast, this is how the surge will propagate across the landscape"?

Or will it be more like "If 6 feet of water is in this (fairly localized) area, this is how the local region will be affected"?

Uber Rebrand 8 years ago

I'm just thinking of all the windshield stickers they're gonna have to hand out...