Zak

9 ms·

121.
by Zak 6mo ago
Android was very open when it was released and for some time after. Installing APKs directly was easy. Most devices had unlocked or unlockable bootloaders. An Android phone treated its user much like a PC did. More sysadmin-as-a-service typ
122.
by Zak 6mo ago
Recently, both Apple and Google banned apps for reporting immigration raids in the USA from their respective stores. Android users can still trivially download such apps from other sources. After the verification requirement, nothing change
123.
by Zak 6mo ago
> The entire point here is to prevent scam actors from using a false sense of urgency to defraud people. That is a serious vulnerability that needs to be addressed somehow Does it, and if it does, does it need to be addressed by an OS
124.
by Zak 6mo ago
That requires having a PC to unlock basic functionality on your Android device, assuming the change we're talking about is still app installs. I don't think OS vendors should be expected to keep people from doing dangerous things.
125.
by Zak 6mo ago
Privacy legislation by itself does not solve the problem; what Flo did was already illegal. Effective enforcement is also necessary.
126.
by Zak 6mo ago
I need a way to make money too, but we have laws saying I can't do it by hitting you over the head with a club and taking yours. We also have laws saying Flo can't do it by lying about who they sell private data to. I would advise
127.
by Zak 6mo ago
Ahh, I understood "makes sense" as "is a good idea" rather than "is an understandable mistake".
128.
by Zak 6mo ago
The purpose of firing a person shouldn't be vengeance but to remove someone who is unreliable or not cost effective. It's similarly reasonable to drop a tool that's unreliable, though I don't think that's a reasonab
129.
by Zak 6mo ago
Why does using GoDaddy as a registrar instead of one with a better reputation like Porkbun or Namecheap make sense when you're small?
130.
by Zak 6mo ago
> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts. A
131.
by Zak 6mo ago
Being banned from life due to a TOS violation is a real concern because it's already hard to do a bunch of things without a Google or Apple account. If Google and Apple can require a government ID to create such an account, it becomes
132.
by Zak 6mo ago
What he did is lose his civil lawsuits about as hard as it's possible to lose, which is easily explained by his behavior during those lawsuits.
133.
by Zak 6mo ago
Yes, at first. If it was a typical defamation case based on a single incident or short pattern of conduct, and if Jones behaved like a typical defendant, hiring a competent lawyer and mostly complying with court orders, the judgment would h
134.
by Zak 6mo ago
That framing Makes it sound like the app developer has to do something active to keep message cleartext out of notifications. That's not how it is on Android. A Firebase Cloud Messaging push notification contains what the app developer
135.
by Zak 6mo ago
First was hydroplaning on a motorcycle. Fourth was probably a makeshift bridge over a creek collapsing while crossing it as a passenger on an ATV. I was pretty young when that happened.
136.
by Zak 6mo ago
I think the Hexbright's body would be a source of complaints from present-day reviewers. It's bulky and heavy for a 1x18650 light; having to expose the bare LED to the elements to charge or change the battery is risky; anodized th
137.
by Zak 6mo ago
The load-bearing word in my original comment is could . An experienced developer will often have a good intuition about what might deserve attention in the future but isn't worth the effort now. It's also useful for social reason
138.
by Zak 6mo ago
> wouldn't you include all three with the benchmark tests Maybe. If I know that the performance of this particular code path is going to be critical to the project's future success, sure. It's more common for something
139.
by Zak 6mo ago
> Don't build anything of any significance in dynamic languages! Posted on a significant website built in a dynamic language. I tend to disagree. Static typing can catch some bugs, but most serious errors are not type errors, and
140.
by Zak 6mo ago
Your car's ABS is probably programmed in something more error-prone than Python, like C or the assembly language of whatever microcontroller runs it. This gets more terrifying if you've ever experienced spurious ABS activation. It
141.
by Zak 6mo ago
I hadn't thought about Rust that way before, but I think you might be on to something here. Rust and Java both lean heavily into keeping developers from doing anything dangerous with expressiveness and power being pretty far down the l
142.
by Zak 6mo ago
If something could be important and a decision about it was arbitrary, it's valuable to capture that. "There are three viable algorithms here and I don't know which will perform best with our live data so I picked the one tha
143.
by Zak 6mo ago
Wireless charging, on the other hand generates heat, which is bad for the battery. Slow, wired charging is the best combination for battery service life. A basic 5-10W power supply when the phone is going to be plugged in overnight is a uni
144.
by Zak 6mo ago
There are standardized sizes for cylindrical Li-ion cells, and that's often what's inside battery packs. The majority of current mirrorless cameras, for example use battery packs that have two 18500 cells inside, but no two brands
145.
by Zak 6mo ago
It breaks the zero one infinity rule by supporting an arbitrarily limited number of themes: exactly two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule
146.
by Zak 6mo ago
In software architecture, we talk about essential complexity and incidental complexity. Essential complexity is inherent to the problem being solved; it can't be eliminated through better tools, process, or design. Incidental complexit
147.
by Zak 6mo ago
I suppose it depends on what you want out of a flashlight. It's kind of cool that you can flash the firmware over USB, but the rest of it is middling, and there are quite a few flashlights today running open source firmwares with expos
148.
by Zak 6mo ago
I moderate /r/flashlight. Something I've seen a substantial increase in over the past few years is people who are surprised to learn that it's possible to have a built-in charger in combination with a field-replaceable b
149.
by Zak 6mo ago
Pegasus tries to get root on your phone. If it succeeds, it could theoretically read message content or decryption keys right out of RAM and Signal doesn't have many options to defend itself. If it doesn't, it tries to get additio
150.
by Zak 6mo ago
> Does Pegasus help governments read messages from Telegram? Signal? Yes. It attempts privilege escalation and exfiltrates whatever message contents it can from multiple apps. Signal has some potential resistance to that since messages

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