abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Meh - flights have USB ports now if your battery is low.

That's because phones and airplanes were operating on the same frequency. They don't do that anymore... in part because there's a dozen phones on every flight that haven't been put in airplane mode.

Norway has a range of subsidies worth up to half the price of the vehicle and home upgrades plus tax exemptions worth another 25% on top of that.

Which can mean a brand new EV is the same price as an old secondhand ICE.

Incentives like that are a lot easier your entire national population is smaller than some cities.

That defence might help if you find yourself standing in front of a jury... but porn is legal so that's never going to happen.

But for blackmail? Presumption of innocence won't help you in the slightest.

some future government that decided to go after, say, LGBT people

That's pretty hypothetical. Sure it's possible... but porn companies having the data is almost guaranteed to be bad news.

Some porn companies will sell the data to the highest bidder. And one of those bidders is going to be organise crime networks that will send an email threatening to share your viewing habits with your kids or your grandma - $1,000 and they'll delete the data - they promise. And then they'll be back six months later asking for $100k.

And the ones that won't sell it? They'll probably be targeted and compromised, with the same eventual outcome.

Reddit used to be open source and the source is still on github as a read only archive.

AFAIK back then edit history was only kept briefly. Enough to roll back an accidental edit (if you have admin privileges anyway) but not far enough back to view old versions of posts.

Of course, they would have backups, and maybe the code has changed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't changed and those backups are impractical (slow/expensive) to access.

Keeping old revisions is a common practice but it's also expensive and in reddit's case totally unnecessary.

Reddit doesn't own that data. The community owns it.

Maybe there's something in the terms of service but that shouldn't hold water because nobody has ever read that document.

Calldav sucks and ActivityPub is really good. I would probably implement both - use caldav for compatibility with other software and ActivityPub for your own internal representation of the data.

But there's another option, also an industry standard, which is structurally very similar to ActivityPub only it provides more than just a network protocol to transmit data, it also provides a storage method and tools to work with it.

I am of course talking about git.

Put all your tasks/etc in a directory, use git to track and sync/backup/share changes. If you want a kan ban board, just have todo/in progress/code review/done directories and move your stuff between them.

Personally I do my note taking in VSCode with an extension that automatically (and almost instantly) commits changes and pushes them to the cloud/my other devices. Plus a few other extension like Foam which which supports linking documents/etc.

Grammarly is a lot more than a spell checker. Here are some screenshots from their marketing page that specifically recommends using their product as a student.

The 2012 Mac mini didn’t have a discrete GPU iirc, just the built in HD 4000

I just looked it up - your memory is correct. Only the 2011 models had a discrete GPU (and only on certain models).

But the HD 4000 is still a GPU and it will be faster than the CPU at certain tasks such as video processing in Plex (I'm guessing that's what OP cares about?)

I’m betting they are following the letter of the law perfectly

Have you read the law, or is that just a blind bet? Spoiler, here's a quote from the legislation (Article 5, item 4):

The gatekeeper shall allow business users, free of charge, to communicate and promote offers, including under different conditions, to end users acquired via its core platform service or through other channels, and to conclude contracts with those end users, regardless of whether, for that purpose, they use the core platform services of the gatekeeper.

I bolded the most obvious point - Apple is charging a core technology fee (50 cents per user per year) even though the letter of the law is "free of charge".

More broadly, there's a fundamental problem that apps distributed are required to be submitted to Apple for approval even if they're distributed out side the store. Apple says they will check less things, but obviously they are still checking some things and will still reject some apps. Developers are also required to a "core platform service" operated by Apple in order to do that submission and pay those fees. Apple can't require that, as I read the legislation they have to allow developers to distribute apps without using or agreeing to any terms with Apple.

The legislation does allow Apple to block apps that are malware/etc - but the company is going far beyond that.

They likely had their lawyers pour over things to make sure they are exploiting every possible loophole.

I don't think that's what has happened. Apple has one of the best legal teams int he world, there's no way they missed that "free of charge" requirement. I think they had their lawyers poor over things to find some way to avoid complying with the law in a way that will require years of ongoing investigations and lawsuits between Apple and the EU. Meanwhile the status quo continues and all apps go through the App Store.

If you legit have an offer from a different company take it.

No way. You might walk through the door at the other company, realise it's a horrible place to work, and hand in your resignation at lunch time.

Take the pay rise. If they fire you a month later, you'll at least get a big severance package to cover your living expenses while you look for a new job. If you quit, then quit again, you're going to be delivering pizza's or something while you look for a decent paying job.

It's not about having FANG in your job history. It's about switching companies three times in three years.

Where I work, we tend to lose money on new hires for an average of the first six months. That's time where not only the new engineer isn't very productive, but other engineers on the same team aren't very productive. They're sinking time into difficult conversations like "yeah you need to go back and redo the last two weeks of work — it's perfectly good code, but you used library X, and we decided four years ago to is use library Y because X has this rare edge case issue when combined with library Z which we also use...".

If someone only works with us for a year... we haven't made enough of a profit to cover the losses in the first half of their employment with us. If you want to work for us, we're not going to force you into a multi-year contract but we do want to be as confident as possible that you're going to stay here long term.

I wouldn't turn someone down for changing jobs three times in three years... but I would definitely ask what happened. And they better answer with something that will happen at my company.

I’m trying to imagine a scenario where having needed to hire 500 people, personally

It takes, what, 10 minutes to read a resume? 30 minutes interview someone? Lets round that up to one hour to cover discussing two promising candidates with a colleague... it's still only 500 hours of work. Or 12 weeks. Obviously you also need to read all the resumes and do interviews with people who were turned down but over an entire career working in HR for a large company... 500 people isn't that many at all.

I'm hoping for something like:

• 2024: Elon is found guilty of failing to uphold the obligations imposed on Twitter back in their 2011 lawsuit around misuse of information; Former Twitter staff are found to have heroically attempted to follow the law but were fired for doing so; Elon is ordered to sell X
• 2025: Mastodon buys it for five million dollars; Elon is forced to sell all his shares in Tesla/SpaceX to pay a $200b fine to the FTC (his net worth is $201b, so he'd still be filthy rich - important to make the fine actually payable so he can't declare bankruptcy);
• late 2025: Mastodon rebrands X to Twitter which becomes just another Fediverse instance. One that is popular among high profile celebrities who can pay a fee to have their identity verified. One where posting discriminatory content gets you banned, permanently. Anyone who retweets your post is also banned for a month.
• 2026: FTC sets gets to use all $200 billion on their own budget in order to hire more staff and do their job properly going forward
• 2027 into the foreseeable future: every company in America suddenly starts pro-actively obeying FTC regulations instead of waiting for enforcement actions that almost never happen due to a lack of funding.

... sure ... but you don't prepare a kid for racism with a sheltered upbringing in a pretend world where discrimination doesn't exist. You point out bad behaviour and tell them why it's not OK.

My son is three years old, he has two close friends - one is an ethnic minority (you could live an entire year in my city without even walking past a single person of their ethnic background on the street). His other close friend is a girl. My kid is already witnessing (but not understanding) discrimination against both of his two closest friends in the playground and we're doing what we can to help him navigate that. Things like "I don't like him he looks funny" and "she's a girl, she can't ride a bicycle".

Large Language Model training is exactly the same - you need to include discrimination in your training set. That's a necessary step to train a model that doesn't discriminate. Reddit has worse discrimination than some other place and that's a good thing.

The worst behaviour is easier to recognise and can help you learn to recognise more subtle discrimination such as "I don't want to play with that kid" which is not an obviously discriminatory statement, but definitely could be discrimination (and you should probably investigate before agreeing with the person).

That way all it will take to infect my parents’ phones with malware capable of scraping copious amounts of my data will be normal phone usage that Apple can’t protect against!

Um... What? iPhone apps run in a sandbox. They can't access anything. They can't even run at all unless the user launches the app or interacts with a notification. Background running is strictly limited to things like music playback with very few exceptions (exceptions which are taken away if the user never launches the app).

And for the record, I don't own an android phone and never have.

The DMA does not protect consumers. It protects other companies that sell products within the gatekeeper's market.

Both Meta and Microsoft have apps on iPhone and therefore the DMA is designed to protect those two companies. If they're not happy with the level of protection, they should absolutely tell the EU.

It's not a civil matter. The Digital Markets Act requires the EU to monitor competition and that means they will rely on input from other competitors in the same space. The DMA gives the EU powers that no private company has including the ability to issue specific directives to individual companies.

Those directives could range from "remove this clause from you app store contract" to "stop selling phones in Europe". No civil court case is ever going to have an outcome like that.

The NSA is apparently collecting and storing thirty petabytes of encrypted data per day and that's likely to include every iMessage sent worldwide. When quantum computers arrive, they will be able to decrypt that data and some estimates put that future uncomfortably close. Real breakthroughs in quantum computing have been made the last year or two.

It's good to see something is finally being done about that threat. I wouldn't count on the NSA being the only people with the data either - it's a goldmine and surely other governments are trying to gain access.

There is no way they started working on this a couple months ago. It would have years of work.