hunson_abadeer

I've been using DeleteMe. It generally works well, with two caveats:

1. They seem to largely rely on automated or semi-automated workflows, and that sometimes breaks down. For me, they removed ~95% of the stuff, but I could still find some breadcrumbs in web searches, and need to file a couple more opt-outs manually. It might be less of a problem if your online footprint is small.

2. They target "frontend" sites, rather than the actual data brokers. This cleans up search results, but doesn't necessarily remove from the commercial databases that are available to commercial and institutional users. Because the frontends come and go, it also means that if you cancel your subscription, you will probably go back to square one in 2-5 years.

> if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.

That's not even true within the ARM ecosystem itself. The chips from Infineon are not source-code compatible with STM, STM is not compatible with Microchip, Microchip is not compatible with TI...

The problem is that the ARM core is just a portion of the architecture. Everything on top of that - GPIO, memory interfaces, timing, etc - is vendor specific, and will stay that way for RISC-V. RISC-V is just an instruction set architecture (with some appendages), not a blueprint for a complete CPU / MCU / SoC.

Not to mention, the chips also won't be electrically-compatible. Your hardware architecture can be as daunting to redesign as the code, if not more so. There's a reason why we try to do as much as possible in software, after all...

It feels like you're making a bad-faith argument here. You can implement 'yes' in a straightforward way in a couple lines of C, too.

  main(int argc, char** argv) {
    while (1) {
      if (argc > 1)
        for (int i = 1; i < argc; i++) printf("%s%c", argv[i], (i == argc - 1) ? '\n' : ' ');
        else puts("y");
    }
  }

The point other folks are making is that it's written differently for a reason. Maybe not a reason that's important, but at the very least, let's try to compare apples to apples.

While I'm sure the FCC has an end game of actually mandating these labels, the vast majority of IoT devices are not exposed to the internet and just aren't a major attack vector in most environments. How much money and time needs to be spent to secure an RGB lightbulb or a wireless speaker?

There is approximately one class of consumer devices that I suppose fall under the IoT umbrella and that are commonly attacked: modems and wifi routers. But these generally get security support. And if you had product labels, would it change shopping behaviors in any way? "This NetGear router will get security updates for 8 years" sounds great. But then, in 10 years, you might have the same router in your closet. Will you even remember the label by then?

It's really no different than people who pay more than they need to for a car or a home.

It's some combination of it being a status symbol and an "I can afford it and it's fun" kind of a deal.

There is a variety of attitudes, as with fancy cars, McMansions, or other "premium" goods. Some people wax their car every week, some people let it rust.

Watch theft isn't particularly common. I have a nice watch, I wear it daily, and I don't think about it much.

It is not common at all. You have maybe several people dying every year, which is in the "hit by lightning" territory. It's very well-publicized whenever it happens, which probably helps keep the numbers low. But this is a very unusual way to die.

People in Germany and France buy about as much cheap junk and have about as much attachment to material belongings. Which I don't blame them for, but it's remarkable that in both countries, it's fashionable to pooh-pooh the "dumb Americans" for that.

Facilities and real estate are among the most significant expenses for any tech company in a prime location such as Seattle or SFBA. If remote work turned out to work flawlessly, there would be a huge financial incentive to shed all that.

I find it frustrating that we always need to come up with some sinister explanation for any decision we don't like. It's always the corporate profit motive, and when it doesn't fit, we try to invent some personal profit motive for execs to act against the best interest of the company, without a shred of evidence.

I know several execs involved in RTO decisions for a public company. They have sincere convictions and some arguably flawed data to back it all. I don't agree with it, but this way of thinking that everybody up to and including my pay level is a good and smart person, and everybody above is clueless and evil... it's just juvenile.

I Can Eat Glass was definitely a thing, but in the late 1990s or perhaps very early 2000s. Sites such as knowyourmeme.com don't go nearly as far back.

High-performance STM32 chips have been in short supply since 2019, with backorder times in the range of years. There's a reason why you don't see a whole lot of hobby boards using them today.

So, as a hobbyist, I wouldn't be getting my hopes up for 2024...

I know a bunch of ex-Googlers who spent 8+ years with the company, and what cracks me up is that they all have some version of this "how the mighty have fallen" story, but it's always relative to their tenure dates.

Some remember Google as being fantastic when they joined in 2005 and then going downhill after. Some think the peak was in 2009. Some in 2012. And I'm sure there are engineers joining now who, in ten years' time, will be reminiscing about the golden days of 2023.

In reality, I think we tend to rationalize our decisions to join a company by imagining it's better than it really is, and then rationalize our decision to leave by imagining it's worse. More often than not, the only real change is that we've grown tired of the workplace and need a change of scenery.

Yes. There's plenty of rodents in urban and suburban areas, but above all, cats have an inborn instinct to murder small critters for fun, and don't need to be taught that.

Rodents are their strong preference, but if bored, they will go after bugs, small birds, lizards... or engage in relentless "murder practice" using pieces of paper or cloth.

This is very different than with dogs, which often have to be trained for specific tasks. Source: lived with 10+ cats (not at the same time).

> People are listening to white noise podcasts when regular white noise is available at a cheaper licensing cost.

There is something incredibly surreal about this statement.

This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), power grid transmission (transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost), or energy storage (LK-99 would likely have a fairly modest current limit before it stops superconducting).

LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown, but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind of instant punditry pretty tiresome.

Does this include line employees who worked at Google or Facebook or Microsoft if the company is found liable for doing something sketchy?

The sums sure are substantial. You can argue they know their employer was no angel, too. OK to claw back paychecks, or do we draw the line somewhere closer to actually participating in a criminal act?