rzimmerman

The article mentions this, but it works on Macbooks as well! You can set up a shortcut key (press the fingerprint button 3x) to enable and disable it. I have a work shuttle I take and this makes it so much more tolerable to use my computer on the bus.

Yeah the solar array on Starlink is held perpendicular to the velocity vector, so the cross section relative to the colliding body will invariably be smaller than the worst case.

Should have said "potential legal requirement". There was a persistent threat of blocking the use of E2E encryption for this exact reason.

I can't believe how uninformed, angry, and still willing to argue about it people were over this. The whole point was a very reasonable compromise between a legal requirement to scan photos and keeping photos end-to-end encrypted for the user. You can say the scanning requirement is wrong, there's plenty of arguments for that. But Apple went so above and beyond to try to keep photo content private and provide E2E encryption while still trying to follow the spirit of the law. No other big tech company even bothers, and somehow Apple is the outrage target.

If your core concern is privacy, surely you'd be fine with "no bytes ever leave my device". But that's a big-hammer way to ensure no one sees your private data. What about external (iCloud/general cloud) storage? That's pretty useful, and if all your data is encrypted in such a way that only you can read it, would you consider that private? If done properly, I would say that meets the goal.

What if, in addition to storage, I'd like to use some form of cloud compute on my data? If my device preprocesses/anonymizes my data, and the server involved uses homomorphic encryption so that it also can't read my data, is that not also good enough? It's frustrating to see how much above and beyond Apple has taken this simple service to actually preserve user privacy.

I get that enabling things by default triggers some old wounds. But I can understand the argument that it's okay to enable off-device use of personal data IF it's completely anonymous and privacy preserving. That actually seems very reasonable. None of the other mega-tech companies come close to this standard.

It's a web of danger for sure. Configuring CI in-repo is popular (especially in the Gitlab world) and it's admittedly a low-friction way to at least get people to use config control for CI (or use CI for builds at all). I think the number of degrees of freedom is really a footgun.

I remember early Gitlab runner use when I had a (seemingly) standard build for a docker image. There wasn't any obvious standard way to do that. There were recommendations for dind, just giving shell access, etc. There's so much customization that it's hard to decide what's safe for a protected/main branch vs. user branches.

I don't have a solution. But I think it would be better if, by default, CI engines were a lot less configurable and forced users to adjust their repo and build to match some standard configurations, like:

- Run `make` in a Debian docker image and extract this binary file/.deb after installing some apt packages

- Run docker build . and push the image somewhere

- Run go build in a standard golang container

And really made you dance a little more to do things like "just run this bash script in the repo". Restrict those kinds of builds to protected branches/special setups.

Having the CI config in the same source control tree is dangerous and hard to secure. It would probably be better to have some kind of headless branch like Github pages that is just for CI config.

I worked for about a year with a consulting firm that handled "Y2K compliance". Unlike this Andersen exercise in legal face-saving, it was a real job. Big companies hired us to do a full inventory of their site equipment (this included manufacturing plants, Pharma stuff) and go line by line with their vendors and figure out which components had known Y2K issues, which had not been tested at all, and which ones were fine/had simple fixes. We helped them replace and fix what needed to be fixed.

Y2K was a real problem. The end-of-the-world blackouts + planes falling from the sky was sensationalism, but there were real issues and most of them got fixed. Not trying to take away from this very interesting story of corrupt cronyism, but there were serious people dealing with serious problems out there. "Remember Y2K? Nothing happened!" is a super toxic lesson to take away from a rare success where people came together and fixed something instead of firefighting disasters.

The Snoo is great and the key feature that actually helps prevent SIDS is the restraints and swaddle, which is not being moved to a subscription here. It's actually FDA approved to reduce the risk of SIDS. The "bonus" rocking and soothing noises just help parents get more sleep.

The Snoo is very expensive and easy to pass down or buy used. I think they probably screwed up by selling it outright. You can rent the Snoo, which is probably a better model for everyone. This is kind of a janky way to pull back some of the rental revenue they lost by selling a durable product that people only need for a few months.

It feels gross, I get it. But it's effectively a $100 per child fee which is quite reasonable given the benefits. And there's no realistic way to charge for that other than subscription for the premium (non-safety) stuff. The alternative is to keep developing new models with new features and adding crap people don't need. One thing I love about the original Snoo is that it works fine without an Internet connection or app. I used the app and it was great, but it's nice to know that when you travel or lose power, it can still rock your baby and soothe them. I hope that's still the case if there's a subscription involved.

I'd argue that even propellent-less deorbit devices are a waste of time. The best answer is what we're doing now: rules about deorbit capability and orbit lifetime, as well as debris production. Even when there are failures, as long as they are a small enough percentage of the pie, debris won't accumulate faster than it clears.

Additionally, all the propellant-less solutions are low-thrust (or ground-based, which is another thing entirely). It's absolutely possible to orbit match, dock, and deorbit an object, but whatever low-thrust device you're using is going to deorbit as well. Maybe it's possible to launch a bunch of small devices like this to do cleanup, but it's not necessary or worthwhile.

This is a great example of a solution that sounds fun and interesting to a problem that's easy to understand at a surface-level. It gets attention and funding, but the real unsexy stuff (tracking, monitoring, collision avoidance) is where the money should go.

Active debris removal (harpoon satellites, magnet arms, whatever) are not a solution to this problem and are a huge waste of money. These missions answer the question "could one dock with debris and deorbit it?" To which the answer is "obviously yes, but at enormous cost" and you don't need to spend 50M euros to prove it.

The answer is exactly what governments and industry have been doing for at least two decades now. Tracking of in-orbit objects, coordinated conjunction response, and rules that require either manual or drag-induced reentry cleanup at the end of a mission. Active maneuverable satellites in orbit (like Starlink) aren't a fundamental problem. The number of objects has gone up significantly, but the big actors are coordinating and following good practices.

Yeah that's an obnoxious take. Having a film about human climate impact in an air-conditioned desert venue is ironic and worth calling out. But not everything ought to be viewed through the lens of "colonialism = evil". It's a big screen.

I went to see the Dead there and it was fantastic. The sound was excellent and they used the beam-forming to have the vocals sound like they were coming from the stage below, while the instruments seemed non-directional. The haptic chairs were killer fun for Drums and Space. The Dead usually do about 10 minutes of improvisational percussion (Drums) and about 10 minutes of sonic exploration (Space). Watching Mickey Hart play the Sphere (seats, visuals reacting to his sounds, and of course the sound itself) was the coolest part.

The visuals were so engaging that I had to look away to avoid motion sickness once or twice. My brain got used to it quickly. Totally worth the trip and fantastic. One complaint was the lack of bathrooms.