Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Do you mean it sounds like it could be a Yiddish word? Because it doesn't seem to be an actual Yiddish (or German) word, as far as I can tell.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is really sad news. MacUpdater is an absolutely fantastic tool for keeping your software current and making sure you are not running outdated versions of apps with unfixed security holes.
Comment · 2 years ago
> I think vibes are underrated. The smart people can easily mislead you because they're smart. So you can cover things up with "official statistics", maliciously or by accident.

> For instance, inflation is a big one. I remember during the first spike in inflation (2021 I believe), I started nothing prices have gone up between 25-50%. We've been told at the time inflation was something like 7% but that would mean paying $5.35 for something that used to cost $5, which was obviously not what was happening. In short, they play games with the numbers.

When there is a mismatch between your personal gut feeling and some official number or alleged fact in the world, there are different ways you can react:

A) You could think "Hmm, that's weird, is it possible that I'm missing something?"

B) You default to thinking that clearly you are right, so this is just another case of those so-called experts lying to you.

Had your response been A), you would have looked a bit more into it and realized that the overall inflation number is not based just on a subset of a few grocery items, but based on all different kinds of living expenses that people have. Many of those prices increased much less in 2021 than the overall 7% inflation rate (e.g., prescription drugs, cell phone plans, airline fares, motor vehicle insurance), so naturally, inflation in other categories was much higher to result in an overall rate of 7%.

If your gut feeling also tells you to doubt the inflation numbers for individual item categories released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ([1]), you can get the raw data for those too, if I remember correctly.

One problem with your gut feeling is that it's very susceptible to various biases. For instance, the price of one grocery item increasing by 30% will be much more noticeable to you than the price of another item staying the same. It's also very easy to not realize that you are comparing the current price to the one from two years ago or so, thereby dramatically overestimating the yearly inflation rate.

I didn't mean to single you out, but the tendency by so many people to have overconfident knee jerk reactions to various information, instead of at least considering that they might have unknown unknowns or things they don't fully understand, is something that really concerns me.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/consumer-price-index-2021-...

Comment · 2 years ago
...and Vivaldi had vertical tabs as native functionality before Edge even existed (and about six years before Edge implemented it).

The only other browser (to my knowledge) that had native tabs earlier than Vivaldi was the original Opera browser, which was eventually killed, which in turn led to people leaving the company and creating Vivaldi.

Comment · 2 years ago
> Presumably, Crowdstrike runs on macOS without a kernel extension?

That's correct: CrowdStrike now only installs an "Endpoint Security" system extension and a "Network" system extension on macOS, but no kernel extension anymore.

Comment · 2 years ago
Yes, exactly. There is too much romanticizing of scary fairy tales as useful educational tools. It's important to remember that the pedagogical model behind these stories was the same that lead people to believe that harsh corporal punishment was a crucial component of successfully raising a child.
Comment · 2 years ago
Have you tried rebooting your Mac? Because on both of my Macs (a MBP 2020 and a Mac mini 2018, both running Ventura), the involuntary Sonoma upgrade only started once I manually rebooted the machine. Before the reboot, everything seemed normal and there was nothing indicating that the upgrade would take place.

After experiencing the issue on my MBP, I actually waited a couple days before I rebooted my Mac mini, and before I did so, I checked whether there was an "Install macOS Sonoma" app in the Applications folder (there was not). My (now proven incorrect) assumption was that the Sonoma installer would always come in form of such an app, like it did for previous versions of macOS.

For the past 5+ years, I've always waited at least 6-9 months before upgrading to a new major macOS version, and I am generally very careful about not upgrading accidentally. There is zero chance that I twice missed a notification or accidentally initiated the Sonoma upgrade myself.

Comment · 3 years ago
Exactly. Typically, exfiltrating this kind of information is only the first step. Once enough high value targets are caught in this net, the actual malware is deployed.
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
> alias rm='trash -i'

This can really backfire. Ages ago, I used to have exactly the same alias for 'rm'. After a year or two, I got so used to 'rm' not really being destructive that one late night when I was really tired, I used it on a remote system without feeling the need to carefully check the file name. That remote system, of course, did not have 'rm' aliased to a safer version...

Long story short, I strongly recommend using a different alias name (e.g., 'rem', 'rmi' or so). In this case, the worst that can happen is getting a 'command not found' message, when the alias is missing.

Comment · 3 years ago
It sounds like you are unfamiliar with the concept of a protected class. Those characteristics that are protected by (US) law are generally the ones that companies focus on in this kind of data collection.

So rest assured, companies won't treat chin diameter the same way they treat race and gender in an imagined "agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life".

Comment · 3 years ago
I find the language itself to be pretty clear, but since it would be absolutely insane* if crossposting the same content was prohibited, you think that they simply must have meant something else with that statement. Hence the confusion.

[*] To us, but apparently not to them, so let's see where this train is headed next.

Comment · 4 years ago
> Ex: we have a pretty clear innocent until proven guilty justice system.

The high bar of "innocent until proven guilty" (and "beyond a reasonable doubt") only applies to criminal cases, though, and not to civil ones. The present situation is much more analogous to a civil case where you have to weigh the interests of two parties (i.e., Kiwifarms and their victims) against each other.

Comment · 4 years ago
It sounds like you have never been a moderator for an online community of at least moderate size.

If you've never been in that role, it's easy to not only underestimate the sheer amount of garbage that you need to remove, so regular users won't be turned off and leave, but also the dedication and finesse of some of the trolls, who love nothing more than asymptotically approaching that line, without ever fully crossing it.

What you propose is effectively giving these guys a doomsday device (i.e., "if you censor me erroneously, your platform will be dead"). In that scenario, there is a 0% chance that a place like Facebook would not turn into an absolute cesspool.

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