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abhibeckert

@abhibeckert@lemmy.world

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abhibeckert ,

humans he can recognize their bias

Can they? I'm not convinced.

As far as i know chat GPT can’t do that.

You do it with math. Measure how many females you have with a C level position at the company and introduce deliberate bias into hiring process (human or AI) to steer the company towards a target of 50%.

It's not easy, but it can be done. And if you have smart people working on it you'll get it done.

abhibeckert ,

Every video ever created is copyrighted.

The question is — do they need a license? Time will tell. This is obviously going to court.

abhibeckert ,

You don't need to "have faith". Just test the code and find out if it works.

For example earlier today I asked ChatGPT to write some javascript to make a circle orbit around another circle, calculating the exact position it should be for a given radius/speed/time. Easy enough to verify that was working.

Then I asked it to draw a 2D image of the earth, to put on that circle. I know what our planet looks like, so that was easy. I did need to ask several times with different to get the style I was looking for... but it was a hell of a lot easier than drawing one myself.

Then the really tricky part... I asked it how to make a CSS inner shadow that is updated in real time as the earth rotates around the sun. That would've been really difficult for me to figure out on my own, since geometry ins't my strong point and neither is CSS.

Repeated that for every other planet and moon in our solar system, added some asteroid belts... I got a pretty sweet representation of our solar system, not to scale but roughly to scale and fully animated, in a couple hours. Would have taken a week if I had to use Stack Overflow.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f34cd984-cd5d-44b1-92bf-93acaf0ff3f8.png

abhibeckert , (edited )

Start with a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. It's a tiny little box that's easily hidden away and forgotten about, with five Ethernet ports (one for the internet, four for your home). The web interface is extensive and has every feature you could ever want and thousands of other features you can safely ignore.

It does not do wifi - and that's fine. Because for wifi to work well, the antenna has to be in a central location where you probably don't want half a dozen ethernet cables, power supplies, etc etc.

You can use it with almost any wifi access point (or even a full wifi router, configured to not do any routing), but I recommen done of these: https://ui.com/us/en/wifi/flagship

They have five current models on that page but there are more:

  • U6 Enterprise - designed to be used by several hundred people at the same time. Forget that one.
  • U7 Pro - the latest flagship Wifi 7 model (you said you don't even care about wifi 6, so probably forget that too)
  • U6 Pro - their previous Flaghsip, with Wifi 6. Probably overkill for you but worth considering
  • U6 Long Range - basically the same device but with a physically larger antenna to extend the range over 2,000 feet under ideal conditions
  • U6+ - a confusingly named cheaper variant that is also smaller. I would buy this one — not because it's cheaper, but because it's the smallest one.

They are all ceiling mounted. Ceiling mounts are the way to go. Put them in the middle of a large central room in your home. It will provide perfect 5Ghz coverage within your home and your devices will seamlessly switch to 2.4Ghz when you leave the home (it'll probably work on your entire back/front yard and maybe even a bit down the street... even if you don't buy the "Long Range" model.

If your house has walls (or floors) that make it a faraday cage, then you will need to buy more than one access point. Often only one is needed but they are designed to work with multiple if you require that (potentially thousands, these access points are used for football stadiums, music festivals, sky scrapers, etc).

If you can't drill a hole in your ceiling, then buy a thin (flat profile) white ethernet cable use 3M adhesive strips to attach it the cable and wifi access point to your ceiling, nobody will notice unless they look up. You might need to patch up the paint when you move out but ceiling paint is dirt cheap and very forgiving (because it's matte paint).

If you refuse to go with a ceiling mounted access point, Ubiquiti has wall mounted and bench top variants. But they're not as good - ceilings are usually made of thin flimsy material while walls are usually solid structures. That makes a big difference when it comes to real world wireless performance and reliability.

It's a bit more than your budget, but I'd argue it's money well spent. My EdgeRouter X and old Unifi access point are approaching 7 years old and they have never even been restarted except when we've had power failures or when I've moved house... totally worth the money. The only problem I ever had is about 5 years in I forgot the password and wanted to change a setting... I had to do a factory reset. No biggie.

But if that's too expensive, you should be able to find older models of the same hardware (especially predecessors to the U6+). Like I said, mine is 7 years old and working perfectly. I could see myself still using it in another 7 years - anything where I need really high performance is connected to the EdgeRouter X with an ethernet cable.

PS: one of the ethernet ports on your EdgeRouter X is a "PoE OUT" port. Plug your Unifi wifi access point into that port, and you can toss the power supply that came with the access point in a drawer or just the rubbish bin. The EdgeRouter X will provide power over the ethernet cable.

Note: some Ubiquiti hardware is garbage, and the company seems to be going downhill lately. But they still have excellent products

abhibeckert ,

WAN throughput limit is nearly 1Gbps

In my experience, exactly 1Gbps. It has 1Gbps network ports, and it maintains that throughput even with "advanced buffer management" / etc enabled.

I'm sure it slows own if you have thousands of people using it, but OP isn't planning to do that and anyone who is should buy one with more than four LAN ports anyway. This is a $60 router. If you're working with thousands of people, you should spend more than that.

abhibeckert , (edited )

A couple corrections:

  1. China also blocks TikTok (I shit you not)
  2. The US isn't "blocking" TikTok, they are forcing the parent company to sell it

If they refuse to sell, then sure the US will follow through with a block... but that's not the intention. I guess the question is how much does Bytedance care about their US market? The US is TikTok's largest market, but it's still only about 5% of TikTok users. There are almost as many Indonesian users, and Brazil isn't far behind. Plus Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Phillipines...

And some of those countries might not want a US company to control TikTok.

Zuckerberg has said he doesn't think it's possible for any social network to operate (with significant marketshare) in every country, which is why he's interested in the Fediverse. If there has to be a wide ecosystem of social networks, then users should be able to access content posted to other networks.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Way back in the day, the best browser was OmniWeb. It was truly awesome but quite expensive (I think a license was about $60?). Unfortunately they didn't have the resources to keep up as CSS/JavaScript became more complex. It still worked for the vast majority of websites when they gave up on development, but the writing was on the wall and they weren't selling enough licenses to hire a large team. Also back then the only open source browser was FireFox and it's always been a really complex rendering engine to work with (there's a reason everybody uses Blink or WebKit as the foundation for their browser).

As far as I know, OmniWeb is the only (major) browser that was exclusively designed for the Mac (and NeXT before that). Even Safari historically ran on Windows and the current version borrows quite a lot of UI conventions from the iOS version. OmniWeb was a proper Mac browser. In fact back in the early days of Mac OS X OmniWeb wasn't just the best Mac Browser, it was arguably the best Mac App in general. They'd been working on it for decades when other Mac apps were either brand Cocoa apps or else still using Carbon (the compatibility layer between MacOS 9 and MacOS X).

OmniWeb is kinda-sorta-alive as a side project, using WebKit now instead of their proprietary engine, and the latest "test build" was released just a couple months ago. But the last stable/officially supported version of OmniWeb 5 shipped twelve years ago. It's somewhat dated now, for example the URL bar is the full width of the window and you can't change that - a hold back from the days when even desktop computer screens were only 800 pixels wide or even less. https://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

One of the early developers of OmniWeb (retired a long time ago) once claimed OmniWeb is older than World Wide Web (generally recognised as the first ever web browser) but given the internet didn't exist back then he wasn't able to point to any strong evidence. Wikipedia lists 1995 as the release date for OmniWeb, however he said that date is wrong and it was distributed years earlier (obviously not on the web — there was no other web browser so you had to get it some other way).

These days, I think the best web browser (and therefore also the best Mac browser) is Arc. It's not exclusively a Mac app, but it is written in SwiftUI and the iOS/Windows versions are quite different - Arc respects platform specific UI conventions and different use cases (especially on a phone).

Hers's a link to download it: https://arc.net/gift/70d85b6 (unfortunately you do need to sign up with an email account, since Arc is "software as a service" and (like OmniWeb did) they eventually plan to start charging for certain features. I'm OK with that personally, you do need an account to sync tabs between devices which I see as a must have feature).

abhibeckert , (edited )

With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all modern browsers do a great job of that. It doesn't really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.

I'm glad we have three rendering engines, especially since the largest two are backed by companies who don't always do what's right for the web... but three is enough. More than that would honestly be a waste of effort, I prefer the current situation with hundreds of browsers who pool resources and work together on a rendering engine that is shared by other browsers.

What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don't provide any of that.

abhibeckert ,

Google might be the primary maintainer of Chromium, but they don't really control it. Literally hundreds of other companies and thousands if individual developers contribute to Chromium every day and if Google did something they don't like the engine would be forked in a heartbeat.

In fact it has been forked — thousands of times (according to GitHub). It's just none of those forks have gained much traction. If Google really messes things up, such as if they actually go ahead and remove cookies as they've threatened to do for years, then one or two of those forks will gain traction. Likely enough traction that Google themselves would struggle to keep up and could end up killing Blink and basing Chrome off one of the forks.

If you don't trust Google (I don't), then don't use Chrome. But I wouldn't write off all Chromium based browsers, some of them are awesome. And the main problem it used to have (battery life) isn't an issue anymore. My M1 MacBook Air lasts forever on battery power and I always have a chromium based browser running.

abhibeckert ,

I've done iOS/Mac app development — Apple doesn't "sell" data to me, but they absolutely provide me with extensive user tracking data for free (well, for $99 per year, but that's effectively free). As far as I know they also provide data to other third parties, such as in the news app But app developers is the big one.

The data is anonymised, but I assure you it's very detailed. Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.

Thankfully the tracking is opt-in, but users are forced to make a choice and encouraged to enable tracking and I'd argue they really aren't being educated properly on what they're handing over before making a decision. I can't really blame Apple for that, who wants to spend hours learning how Apple's tracking methods work? But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share it.

Personally I have spent hours doing that research and I'm not OK with what they track — I opt out. And while my own software does have some tracking, it's a lot less detailed than the tracking Apple does. It's just basic analytics (roughly how many users do I have and what country are they from?) and crash reporting which is (thankfully) rare with my software and therefore useless for any invasive tracking. The vast majority of people using my apps never experience a crash (and that's only possible because I track crashes).

abhibeckert , (edited )

don’t put all your eggs in one basket

That's a good approach - but there's a better one. If at all possible stick to software that uses standard data formats and is able to interact with other software. For example Lemmy uses Markdown (a standard) and it can interact with other software (on the fediverse).

If we ever decide to stop using Lemmy, there's a good chance all of the valuable content we're writing — like this discussion — will live on in whatever other software we decide to switch to instead of Lemmy. Because being Markdown, it's easy to import, and being on the fediverse, it will be easy to transition to a replacement gradually over time with the new software and lemmy both being used at the same time during a potentially years long transition period.

Unfortunately I don't know of any (good) web browser that does that. It's certainly possible for bookmarks/tabs/settings/etc to be synced between browsers, but in general browsers only ever support once off imports, they never actively maintain a shared set of data between browsers.

But there's an out — extensions. For example I don't use the password manager built into my browser. I use a browser extension for passwords and my password manager has an extension for all browsers. Obviously as locked down as passwords need to be, I don't want my passwords accessible outside that app/those extensions, but it does have a good import/export feature and I have used it to test other password managers. I should really look for a good extension that manages bookmarks well and syncs them between browsers.

I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox

I dunno if that's true. There are some really good browsers on the Mac that I suspect don't run (or don't run well) on whatever operating system you do use. Access to awesome Mac only software is the reason I use a Mac, even though I don't particularly like the company Apple has become (they were a wonderful company 20 years ago in my opinion).

abhibeckert , (edited )

It sounds like you’re saying that they don’t.

Honestly, I think you're really arguing over the technical definition of "sell".

get popups on a fresh install of an Apple OS and on first launching certain apps that asks me outright if I want to send usage data to Apple

Yeah but do you know what data is being sent? Most people have no idea (you might, I'm just saying most people). My position is if people don't know what's in the data, then they aren't really agreeing to it with full knowledge.

Do you haven’t any evidence for this?

I've seen the data (from my own apps), and I can see how easy it is to link crash reports to users. Crash reports include a unique device identifier and also loads of information about the device the moment it crashed. It's trivial to compare all of that data to other data the app collects and find out which user the crash report belongs to.

I doubt that’s something Apple would be happy about.

I'm sure it's a violation of the terms of service, but developers violate those all the time and enforcement is almost unheard of. When Apple catches an app breaking the rules, they usually just tell the developer to stop. Damage is already done by then.

Have a listen to this to get an idea how widespread this is: https://subclub.com/episode/app-store-ethics-dark-patterns-and-rule-breakers-steve-p-young-app-masters

abhibeckert , (edited )

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/AUTHORS

The vast majority of names on that list are not google employees. And that's nowhere near a complete list. Chromium dates back to kthmlw almost three deacdes ago. The vast majority of the code in Chromium was not written by Google.

abhibeckert ,

Game engines are a lot simpler than a web rendering engine, so I'm not sure it's a good comparison.

Gecko (the FireFox rendering engine) dates back to 1997. And KHTML — the common ancestor shared by Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) is maybe one or two years younger - I wasn't able to find a source. An insane amount of work, by millions of people if you include minor contributes, has gone into those rendering engines.

Creating another one would be an insane amount of work... assuming you want it to be competitive.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Someday the AI will get good, and I’ll want to chat with it securely.

GPT4 is pretty good now. I'm not convinced it will be secure until we can run it locally on our own hardware.

As soon as we can run it locally, I plan to do so. Even if it means using a GPT4 quality LLM when far better exists if I use a cloud service.

Sure it would be nice to have something that hallucinates less than GPT-4, but I kinda feel like striving for that is making perfect the enemy of good. I'd rather stick with GPT-4 quality, and focus on usability/speed/reliability/etc and let people keep working on the fancy theoretical stuff in the background as a lower priority.

A Steve Jobs said, Real Artists Ship. They don't keep working on it forever until they can't think of any more improvements. You'll never ship.

The habit of sending tokens right as they generate is a dumb sales gimmick

Seems like it would be trivial to just place tokens in a buffer on the server and send output to the client in say 1KB chunks (a TCP packet can't be much bigger than that anyway, and it needs a bit of space for routing metadata).

And if the entire output is less than 1KB... pad it out to that length. Pretty standard to do that anywhere you care about security... e.g. if you were to dump the password table databases... they're all 256 bits. That's obviously not the real length - most will be shorter, some will be longer. Whatever they are it's cryptographically expanded (or shortened) to 256.

abhibeckert ,

My understanding is China's rules are pretty wide open and effectively boil down to "if we don't like your use of AI, we will shut you down"... which isn't really much of a law. China would've done exactly the same thing without that law. There is some stuff in there about oversight/etc but that's about it.

Most of China's AI legislation is actually focused on encouraging companies to invest in AI, it's not really about regulating it. The US also has a bunch of AI laws in the same vein as China.

The EU legislation is much more specific and specifically prohibits AI in a bunch of specific situations. For example they have made it illegal to use AI for face recognition in "public spaces".

Firefox saw an increase in users (~50% in Germany and ~30% in France) following Apple’s default browser changes in the EU, as did Brave. (www.theverge.com)

Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France....

abhibeckert ,

30% of increase in daily installs ≠ 30% increase in users.

Yeah the lemmy headline is poorly written (the source article is pretty clear).

Still 30% is a substantial jump and will eventually turn into a bunch more money for FireFox - a good thing if you ask me.

If I my sandwich shop sells 30% more sandwiches one day, that doesn’t mean I’m certain to make 30% more money at the end of the year. I might make more, I might make less.

It costs money to make sandwiches. Mozilla doesn't even pay for bandwidth (Apple has that covered) - so the FireFox iOS app essentially only has overheads. Which means more users will be pure profit.

abhibeckert ,

Apple does allow other engines in Europe. Wether or not FireFox chooses to create one remains to be seen.

There's nothing wrong with WebKit, so not much incentive for FireFox to do all that work.

abhibeckert ,

The APIs are similar but the hardware requires a different appraoch.

For example touch screen input is very different to mouse input - you need to decifer imprecise user input... and then provide precise input to webpages that are designed assuming the user has a mouse. There are touch APIs on the web, but developers tend not to use those APIs because dealing with imprecise input sucks. For example press a link with your thumb, it will highlight. Lift your thumb, it will go to the link. But if you press, then move your thumb, then release... instead of clicking the link it scrolls the page. Unless you move only a little bit - then it does click...

And the only way to get "all day" battery life out of a 10Wh battery is by keeping the CPU powered off most of the day. Figuring out how to maintain the current state of the webpage, so it can be restored if the CPU is powered off and back on again, without breaking things like JavaScript timers/etc.

FireFox has solved those issues (and others) on Android. But while Android has similar hardware, that operating system is nothing like iOS.

All the work to get Gecko working on Android made sense back int he day, when Android didn't have a good rendering engine. It would have also made sense back in the early days of the iPhone when WebKit was nowhere near as good as it is now. But today, when someone else has already figured out solutions to every problem? Is it worth reinventing all those wheels?

abhibeckert , (edited )

Uh, no they're not. They have the core operating system.

The only real difference is the security model (as you say, tightly locked down), but MacOS has been gradually adopting a lot of that over time. For example / used to be an ordinary volume - these days it's mounted read only and can't be written to even with sudo. iOS has always been like that.

They are different operating systems, but only because it's easier to make a change on one of them, then port that change to the other one later. Possibly years later. In general, they're pretty close. The main difference is the hardware, not the operating system.

abhibeckert ,

If your taxes for the rich are too high, they will all take their ball and go home - to one of their many homes in a country that doesn't have high taxes. Or just declare their superyaught anchored in international waters as their "home". With "business travel" as their reason to spend time (maybe all of the time) on US soil.

When you have that much money, there's not really much society can do to touch you.

abhibeckert ,

A jump from 8k to 11k installs is nothing.

It's about a third. Imagine if your income went up by 30% in 24 hours, I reckon you'd be pretty happy about that.

Also - it tends to take months for a new version of iOS to reach a large number of users, and years to reach everyone. So a rapid growth rate (probably not 30%, but still fast) is likely to be sustained over quite a while.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Generally there are few privacy friendly/Foss browsers on IOS.

Um, Safari is so privacy friendly that Google regularly asks me if I'm human. For example it has "private relay" which is similar to TOR* so trackers don't even know your IP address — combine that with blocking third party cookies (and even some first party cookies) by default and providing false data to fight fingerprinting even if you don't block trackers entirely - and blocking them entirely is as simple as installing an extension. Private Relay also adds a layer of encryption on top of DNS queries and otherwise unencrypted http traffic.... so your ISP/Cellular provider/Work/School/abusive husband/etc can't track you

99.99% of the Safari's code is FOSS — dual licensed under LGPL and BSD.

It's not the browser I use - pretty lacking in the feature department, but it's definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I've never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

(* if anything, it's better than TOR... with that service there's a risk your entry/exit nodes are tracking you. With Private Relay it's always one of Apple's servers for the entry node and a reputable cloud company like Akamai for the exit node. Both would have to be compromised in order to identify you... maybe a nation state can do that, but a big data tracking company definitely can't)

abhibeckert ,

It was banned with an exception for common rooms and the entry door/hallway. Now those are banned too.

abhibeckert ,

I wonder how they’ll enforce it.

AFAIK if a customer has a serious complaint, AirBnb will do everything they can to find somewhere else for the customer to stay. And of course, they'll kick the host off the platform.

It's pretty common these days for guests to look for cameras.

abhibeckert ,

My comment was about the low power models which only works for few feet

There's no such thing.

abhibeckert , (edited )

It doesn't work like that.

They broadcast a powerful radio signal on the GPS frequency. You might have to be within 10 feet for it to completely drown out the real GPS frequency, but the waves don't stop they just spread out and get "thinner" with distance. If it completely blocks the signal at 10 feet, it will severely reduce accuracy further out than that. Likely everyone within line of sight of your car will lose accuracy on their GPS.

And that would include airplanes, line of sight is a really long distance up above your car. Airplanes use GPS for critical functions including making sure they don't crash into the ground when they're flying through clouds / rain / fog so you could potentially cause serious problems. Most likely force the airplane to land in a different city — because they will not land if their altitude equipment isn't working... yes they have other ways of measuring altitude but all of them are unreliable, which is why they have GPS. You're taking away one layer of their patchwork system of landing safely and if too many layers are gone then they abandon the landing and fly elsewhere - happened to a friend of mine recently, turned a quick 2 hour flight home into an 18 hour trip.

abhibeckert ,

This article was written by an Australian ABC journalist - they are primarily government funded and the News Media Bargaining Code doesn't apply to them.

(their non-government funding mostly comes from creating content which they sell, for example Bluey).

abhibeckert , (edited )

I disagree - it's definitely a win.

There's still more work to be done (you shouldn't need to first deploy an app with a million downloads on the Apple App Store in order to deploy outside of it for example...) but I expect the EU will force them to change that rule.

It will be interesting to see where they land on the Core Technology Fee. At face value it seems pretty clearly anti-competitive to make developers pay more if you don't use an Apple service. But at the same time, the government can't force Apple to give things away for free.

I expect a middle ground will be reached with much lower prices and hopefully a per-app price (e.g. pay once to have your app go through an anti-malware scanning service) rather than a per-user price. Or even better, in my opinion, is to make users pay a fee to have their device scanned for malware by Apple. A cost that could be built into the price of the hardware.

abhibeckert , (edited )

“Non-profit organizations” that sounds like the minority of developers

True but if you're a for-profit developer, you can probably afford 50 cents per customer. Facebook, for example, has a "free" app that earned $134 billion last year. I'm not defending Apple, I think the Core Technology Fee is anti-competitive and I hope the EU tells them it's illegal - but 50c is pocket change for nearly any for-profit app developer.

Small apps with less than a million users don't pay any fee either.

A million users is a big open source project and I think you'll find most of them already are non-profits. Or they're part of a larger non-profit that runs a bunch of projects such as the Apache Foundation, which provides funding and resources to almost 300 open source projects and could easily grow that number by a significant margin if there was much need for it. This potentially creates that need.

The main thing I have a problem with is the requirement to be an established "good standing" developer in order to deploy on the web. Apple's definition of "good standing" is clearly anti-competitive... I expect the EU told Apple they can deny distribution rights to developers who can't be trusted, but based on recent history (e.g. Epic) it's pretty clear that Apple and the EU don't agree on who can be trusted. They are surely going to have to change that rule.

I do think Apple can charge a fee to use their service. The EU is not banning fees and they never will. A government can't force a company to give things away for free. What I personally hope to see is the EU telling Apple that all fees must be optional. That way if Apple wants to make money, they need to offer something people are willing to pay for. If I was CEO of Apple, I would make the "Core Technology Fee" built into the price of an iPhone and make customers pay it.

That used to be Apple's business model by the way — and it worked. It wasn't as profitable as "give nearly everything away for free but force everyone to use this overpriced service", but Apple was still very profitable under the old model. And both customers and developers were happy with how it worked back then.

abhibeckert ,

This is new territory and it's changing every week.

Historically, the way it worked is Apple gives almost everything away for free except for a $99 per year fee developers have to pay. But developers who have certain business models (especially game developers) have to pay Apple a huge percentage of their income.

I've been an Apple developer since the 90's - if you go even further back in Apple's history... Apple didn't have a walled garden approach. They simply charged money for all their software and that was very successful. Not as successful as the walled garden but still healthy profits.

abhibeckert ,

Euros* which are worth more than dollars

1 Euro is currently 1.09 US Dollars. So technically "more" but realistically they're about equal.

abhibeckert ,

The "good standing" rule is the most problematic one - but I don't see it lasting.

Keep in mind just last week Apple described Epic Games as "verifiably untrustworthy"... only to immediately backflip and decide to trust Epic. I can see the same thing happening here.

Two continuous years and a million existing customers is way too high a bar. It's literally impossible for any new developer to meet that criteria unless they first spend years deploying apps inside Apple's walled garden and the entire point of the DMA is to get rid of that wall.

Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU (with restrictions), in compliance with the Digital Markets Act (www.pcmag.com)

Developers interested in distributing iOS apps on their websites also have to cross a high bar. This includes being registered or incorporated in the EU, being a member of “good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more,” and having an app that received “more than one million first annual...

abhibeckert ,

my team is always right, the other is always wrong

Um... that's a perfect example of why you need to avoid cultural references when use analogies.

When you said "like football" I thought you meant "any time you face a challenge, pass the ball to someone else". Where I come from, that's what "like football" means. And it's not necessarily a negative thing, maybe the new person with the ball won't struggle with the same challenge... and when they inevitably face a challenge of their own they might pass the ball back to you... with your original challenge now long gone.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Yeah I agree pretty confusing - talk about moving the goal posts.

Having said that, I do think dustyData highlighted the two defining flaws in the US government:

Money has too much influence over politicians. Many other countries have laws that limit how much funding a politician can receive from the private sector. Some countries that don't have those limits are adopting them.

The critical difference between "Congress" and "Parliament" is the separation between Congress and the President does not exist under a typical parliamentary system. Under that system the Prime Minister is just the person parliament voted to be in charge and make individual decisions where you can't afford to wait for hundreds of people to get involved. I think your presidential system is the reason your government can't pass any laws lately.

It's quite rare for a parliamentary government to struggle to pass laws - it does happen, because there are checks and balances, but it tends to be more functional than the current US government. Under a parliamentary system, if the parliament isn't happy with the prime minister... they just vote to kick them out and put someone new in charge. They don't shut down the government by refusing to let anything get done until the next election (which might leave everyone in the same position).

abhibeckert ,

If history is anything to go by, the initial report is often the tip of the iceberg.

I wouldn't be surprised if they announce next month that oh, actually, all 80 million were compromised.

And then they'll come back a month later and say "oh, and another 500 million users, who don't have an account with us and didn't even know we were tracking them, yeah they were also compromised".

Of course, that doesn't happen every time, but it's pretty common. I wouldn't trust Roku to fully know what's going on yet. There's a good chance they are assuming it was credential stuffing but don't actually have proof of that. Hackers usually try to cover their tracks which makes any investigation difficult.

abhibeckert ,

As fast as the web is now, I'm no-longer a fan of pressuring browser developers on performance. What we really need is to improve browser interoperability.

Rendering engines are constantly adding support for awesome new features... but those features can't really be used until all the other browsers decide to implement the same feature - which tends to be years later. I'm a huge fan of the "Interop" project, which maintains a list of web technologies everyone agrees should be cross platform and pressures rendering engines to implement those features. The list of features changes every year.

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024?stable

abhibeckert , (edited )

Sorry but there just isn't that much to figure out. Cars have had electric motors and batteries for as long as cars have had motors (literally - early cars didn't have a combustion engine).

You take an ordinary car, bolt a big ass motor and battery to it somewhere, and you're done. Nothing innovative needs to happen and there should be no repairability compromises. If anything they should be easier to repair.

Tesla's obsession with complex body parts is inexcusable. I used to work in the car crash insurance industry - we put Tesla in the same category as Bugatti/McLaren/etc. They're that expensive to repair... and unlike those supercars, nobody is going to be willing to spend the money get a Model 3 back to show room condition.

Get yourself in a minor fender bender like the one below and your insurance company is going to buy you a new car (the owner of this car was given a $45,000 repair quote):

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8b8e8add-2183-451c-8a9c-1043e52fa927.png

With a conventional car, those panels would have likely been plastic (cheap to replace) or else metal but simple designs that can be bent back into shape by someone who knows how to use a panel beating hammer. What you don't see on the photo is all the weld joints that have been stressed and failed on the Tesla. It can potentially be months of work to get that car fixed and the insurance company doesn't want to provide a hire car for all that time - so they just pay out the value of the car and leave you to buy a new one.

abhibeckert ,

just be prepared that the “default” YouTube recommendations are all clickbait

That's not what Google is doing. They're literally showing an empty page with a search box (and a sidebar of categories). Similar to going to google.com.

It's clearly being A/B tested though - I only see the empty page sometimes. Other times I get the usual Mr Beast recommendations (this is with no login, not with a login but watch history disabled).

abhibeckert ,

I don't know what these chips are like, but x86 software runs perfectly on my ARM Mac. And not just small apps either, I'm running full x86 Linux servers in virtual machines.

There is a measurable performance penalty but it's not a noticeable one with any of the software I use... ultimately it just means the CPU sits on 0.2 load instead of 0.1 load and if it spikes to 100% then it's only for a split second.

abhibeckert ,

Is it actually emulation? Macs don't do that.

They convert the x86 code into native ARM code, then execute it. Recompiling the software takes a moment, and some CPU instructions don't have a good equivalent, but for the most part it works very well.

abhibeckert ,

Sure - but apple has been "working on" ARM since 1981. Microsoft is definitely on the back foot here.

abhibeckert ,

For example Apple uses HBM instead of DDR5. They also give the CPUs heaps of L1/L2/L3 cache to avoid memory access as much as possible. And some of the stuff they do with flash memory is just as expensive.

That's the real reason Apple Silicon Macs cost so much and I'm more than willing to pay that price. But it's also the reason those Macs are so fast.

How does Qualcomm compare? I have no idea.

abhibeckert ,

It’s more like charging the iron ore mining companies over gun murders.

NVIDIA doesn’t have any say over how their GPUs are used.

abhibeckert ,

Certbot is so problematic we still pay for most of our certificates because it’s more reliable.

I’m not sure if Caddy/Traefik is the answer but it’s clear the work should be handed over to a team with a proper focus on reliability.

abhibeckert ,

Certbot is supposed to automatically renew certificates. It doesn't do that reliably in my experience.

We use it on non-critical systems and every few months I need to go in and fix things... that never happens with traditional certificates - those are setup and forget.

As for the exact problems, I don't think we've ever had the same problem twice. It's always a once off thing but it's still an hour of wasted time each and every time. If it happened on a proper production system it'd be a lot more than an hour, since whatever change is made would need a full gamut of testing / reporting / etc.

abhibeckert ,

How big is your TV? Smaller than 1200 inches I’m guessing? How portable is it? Good luck carrying a building sized TV in your backpack.

Vision Pro is too expensive for me but I totally get the attraction for TV alone. Some people spend a lot more on a worse viewing experience.

More compelling content and software use cases will follow. As good as a movie theatre is - it’s still not 3D. Even if you wear glasses the fact they send the same image no matter where you are in the room or where your head is turned makes it basically 2.5D.

Cheaper/better hardware will come too.

abhibeckert ,

What the corrupt US departments couldn’t - and refused to - do.

I heard an interesting podcast interview with someone from one of those departments.

It sounds like they just genuinely don’t have enough funding, as in enough staff, to do their job properly.

Nothing corrupt within the departments - they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given . Congress needs to raise taxes and fund the departments better and then there will be proper regulation in the USA.

If course, congress can’t do hardly anything at all so that’s never going to happen. At least not at a federal level.

At a state level though? Maybe that could work.

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