hiisukun

This argument reminds me of when I dealt with telecommunication providers in a law enforcement context.

Their argument was often that the complexities and volume of data, messages, devices just made it impossible for them to help law enforcement even when justified. Almost as if they were apologetic -- they simply cannot help!

But I was in a room once with a very senior police official, prosecutor and several telco reps when the simple question was asked: why is it not impossible then also to do billing?

Every time the conversation moved away from this point, it was forced to return by the non telco members: they knew it would cost money for the telco to help. And any argument against that was simply foregoing that cost at the expense of the safety or well-being of the public, and was unacceptable.

You may feel (in my example) their are many arguments against state surveillance, but the core truth is that all of these ad providers could indeed have systems that at least attempt to prevent this kind of activity -- it would just reduce profits to do so.

Lastly on the zero click lack of detail: it's kind of irrelevant. The exploit might be complicated, but the vector is clear -- the ad network.

I've been reading on an X3 (small eink display driven by esp32), and although I don't need better display performance, it would be cool! I wonder how long until these sort of driver improvements for e-ink filter down to other devices.

Great stuff.

He's the only one on the couch. The only one at the sports game. The only one at the movie theatre.

At the office, it was nice to see him put the glasses down and shake hands with the person who rocked up. If that person had arrived 'in VR' I think I would have been completely turned off.

I guess if you want to be alone, it's a good device -- but the best times for me with modern technology have been when it brings me closer to other people. Online games were better on LAN. Couch co-op as a genre is one of the best console experiences I think. Meeting people in real life, who I spoke to on IRC -- again, a great moment.

I'm not anti-tech, and the device form factor sure looks amazing -- but I can't imagine any moment I would use something like this at home while anyone else in my house was here.

They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.

I think the target of the anger here should be (at least in part): OneDrive.

My understanding is that a modern, default onedrive setup will push all your onedrive folder contents to the cloud, but will not do the same in reverse -- it's totally possible to have files in your cloud onedrive, visible in your onedrive folder, but that do not exist locally. If you want to access such a file, it typically gets downloaded from onedrive for you to use.

If that's the case, what is Backblaze or another provider to do? Constantly download your onedrive files (that might have been modified on another device) and upload them to backblaze? Or just sync files that actually exist locally? That latter option certainly would not please a consumer, who would expect the files they can 'see' just get magically backed up.

It's a tricky situation and I'm not saying Backblaze handled it well here, but the whole transparent cloud storage situation thing is a bit of a mess for lots of people. If Dropbox works the same way (no guaranteed local file for something you can see), that's the same ugly situation.

In the sci-fi film Arrival (also based on a short story), humanity are kind of like irresponsible young students. If we get past our focus on war/conflict/us vs them perhaps we can learn new things from the aliens.

I think that breaks the style a little of 'humans bad for aliens' enough, right?

Either way I enjoyed Arrival (and the short story).

It doesn't need a small number -- rather it relies on you being able to find a pairing amongst any of your candidates, rather than find a pairing for a specific birthday.

That's the paradoxical part: the number of potential pairings for a very small number of people is much higher than one might think, and so for 365 options (in the birthday example) you can get even chances with far fewer than 365, and even far fewer than ½x365 people..

I view this a little like those Nigerian prince email scams. True or not, once upon a time I heard that they deliberately did not fix the obvious spelling and grammatical errors in the scam emails -- they acted as an excellent first pass filter to exclude scam effort against targets who wouldn't fall for it anyway.

When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.

Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.

It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.

N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.

This is a good comment! But I'll add that many classical learners use tab, and I think there's absolutely no shame there. The music is what counts, and I think rarely would someone look down on a learner.

Guitarists love other ppl learning or playing guitar!

I watched the lecture and did not find it compelling. It was a very literal interpretation, discussed alongside the evidence presented in the text of what was and wasn't more or less traveled by.

There was an interesting series of points made about American culture, and their sense of need for an affirmation / self-deception -- but I don't find his actual critique of the poem's words particularly enlightening.

So if you are interested in American cultural thought, involving over-rationalisation of choices, the lecture might have value. If you are particularly interested in the poem itself outside of that context, I don't recommend viewing.

I would love a way to regularly discover and watch some top, 'hit' TV shows or movies from outside of America or Australia (my home country), or sometimes England. I have no issues watching things with subtitles, but it is quite difficult to organically find things to watch, that perhaps have 'not English' as their primary language.

For example, I will now look up the UFO Sweden show to see if I might like to watch it -- because I discovered it through here.

I have tried subscribing to a few different regular streaming services, but none seemed to work even if I pointed them in the right direction. I'm really not particular about which country of origin the production has, so long as it's "the best" or "very popular" in recent times from that place, it's worth me checking the genre and style to see if it piques my interest.

Any advice on this? [ nb. I have a similar issue with podcasts! ]

I'd love for a half half solution here.

Where the phone collects notifications silently for an hour, then if there are any meeting the "alert" bar, it just buzzes or tones on the hour. Or whatever interval I choose.

I think a few times a day is plenty for my notifications, except for a couple of close friends and family -- but they're all in the same bucket. An app I installed yesterday who's messages I need but are not urgent, and a lifelong friend? Same value to the phone OS.

I'm thankful for the star contacts on Android working through dnd, but would love an aggregate/timed system for bulk stuff.

I clicked this by accident, but then read the full thing after noticing the author was Matt Levine! I'm sure there are other readers here who might appreciate his knowledge and writing style, so I mention it.

[ To those who post opinion pieces: Is it against the site rules to have the author listed after the actual title? It would help me in this case and others ]