threepio

> how horrible the PR from suing is and how pointless it is suing the very rich Bloomberg corporation in an American jurisdiction for nebulous damages

Based on what? This past year, for instance, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News and certain individuals for defamation and claimed billions in damages

Comment · 4 years ago

Bitcoin: by limiting issuance to 21M we have made price manipulation of our currency impossible

Tether: hold my beer

Comment · 4 years ago

> Jack Dorsey ... probably left Twitter to focus more on Block.

I don't think he was fired by the Twitter board, exactly. But given the increasing conflict of interest between being CEO of Twitter and his use of Twitter as a place to promote crypto (thereby increasing the value of whatever interest he personally or Square has in crypto), it's not hard to imagine that the Twitter board told him that it was time to end one activity or the other. Though it looked sudden from the outside, it's clear this was all carefully orchestrated.

Moreover, certain Twitter investors had (rightly) been complaining about the arrangement for a while.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/technology/twitter-silver...

Comment · 5 years ago

From the article:

> The magic is that all Scheme code, by virtue of supporting the capture (and unwind) of delimited continuation

Is that true? I thought Racket was the only Scheme (and maybe the only language in general) that supported delimited continuations.

Comment · 5 years ago

Variable fonts aren't "Metafont-style procedural fonts"

Comment · 5 years ago

Would it be legal for the US govt to take over the renters' leases under the 5th amendment?

That is, they would "take" the leases (just like they might take land) and pay "just compensation" (which I assume would mean reimbursing landlords for all back rent, and whatever the lease rate is going forward). At that point the fed govt would become the tenant, and the original tenant would be a subtenant of the fed govt.

In that case, the fed govt wouldn't be dependent on states distributing federal rental aid, because they would be interceding directly in the landlord-tenant relationship.

(Let's leave aside the fact that politically, this will never happen, and practically, HUD doesn't have the staffing or logistical infrastructure to take responsibility for these leases en masse)

Comment · 5 years ago

1) No, you don't need to speculate. He describes three years of events that all happened in private (with no resolution). Starting from the very first sentence of the piece ("In January 2020, I told two members of Racket’s core team …")

2) The private email is relevant because its message is so starkly at odds with the public statement. It goes directly to the whole thesis of the piece: that bullies gain power through secrecy. He does not owe the bully any secrecy, because the bully has misused secrecy in the past. His attempt to find a principled middle ground is reasonable.

Comment · 5 years ago

Apple is creating a yawning double standard between its "privacy is a human right" [1] refrain and its own profit interests.

If you're skeptical, the pricing says it all. Apple could've sold AirTags for $99 each with a $1/mo service fee to use the Find My network. That would've boosted their profit margin on the initial sale and created recurring revenue, while restricting network load.

As it stands, AirTags are $25 each and free to operate, which means that Apple wants them to be ubiquitous — buy 10 or 20 and put them everywhere.

Apple has gotten a lot of mileage on their idea that "the customer is not the product" but this is a turn in the wrong direction. Despite months of claims that AirTags are impregnable, unhackable, etc. the news is just going to get worse.

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/

Comment · 5 years ago

> Mine report as “With you” so perhaps they don’t advertise themselves in this state.

So you know for certain that AirTags have multiple broadcast states (e.g., "with me" vs. not)? Apple's description makes it sound like they only have one state:

"Your AirTag sends out a secure Bluetooth signal that can be detected by nearby devices in the Find My network." [1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/airtag/

Comment · 5 years ago

What are the practical ramifications of Apple harnessing every existing iPhone as an AirTag discovery device in the Find My network? (I think it's awful from a privacy and device-ownership standpoint, but let's leave that aside.)

For instance, because physics is real, it must take some amount of battery power & data transfer to collect information about nearby AirTags. Suppose I walk into Disneyland on a summer weekend with an iPhone. The place is going to be full of AirTags. Assumedly my iPhone will be very busy reporting on their location. Hour by hour, how does that workload compare to the stuff I ask my phone to do for me (e.g., receive text messages, download mail)? Will it run down the battery / chew up bandwidth caps in any significant way?