michaelt

12 ms·

211.
by michaelt 6mo ago
I feel this is an inevitable consequence of a move towards languages with a culture of many small and transitive dependencies. If my project has 100 dependencies, the release of an updated dependency will inevitably be a daily occurrence.
212.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> idiot friendly tooling is somewhat lacking for projects which start as hobby/amateur code but end up being a dependency in many other projects. Historically, extra-security-scanned artefact handling has been a paid enterprise op
213.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> Blocking transparent ads is not a good idea. The consequence is that you will be fed opaque ads. Doesn't history show us you just get both? You pay to get into the movies, then they show you adverts before the film, then the fil
214.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Writers have many options to deceive their audience without outright lying. If a journalist is given an all-expenses-paid trip to an exotic location for the launch of a new product, and they review the product and say it's great - are
215.
by michaelt 6mo ago
The ideal is "It would be ideal if everyone on the planet voluntarily paid me $20/month" Most billionaires are idealists when it comes to this one particular ideal.
216.
by michaelt 6mo ago
The federal government doesn't need a row of cars to make a no-fly wall. As we learned in El Paso in February, if the federal government wants a no fly zone, it can just create one.
217.
by michaelt 6mo ago
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health-a... > The quick cuts and dazzling montages, as well as the dramatic shots of Harris absorbed by a document he’s unearthed, highlighting it suspensefu
218.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above? PCs happened by accident. Before the PC, people had TVs - devices not for creating, but for passively consuming content made by big corporations and the state. And w
219.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> How such critical knowledge can get lost in university training these days just amazes me. It will probably have been taught.... but very briefly. Before going go back to analysing circuit schematics, where connections between compon
220.
by michaelt 6mo ago
A lot of the salary figures I see thrown around for tech employees in the US are pretty wild [1] - $200k, $400k total compensation without even getting 'Senior' in the job title. That's in a country with a median household in
221.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Some historically powerful unions have enjoyed their power because their strikes not only stop their employers making money, but also impose great inconvenience on many people downstream of them. If truckers or dockworkers go on strike th
222.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> Could it be as simple as measuring the delta in median marathon performance? The popularity of running waxes and wanes - and the performance of the median runner varies with popularity. Back in the 1980s the average half marathon fin
223.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> With modern technology, you can 3D print whatever you need, generate software, and run advanced manufacturing all in a small workshop just by yourself. I assure you, you cannot. Go ahead and make a USB A-B cable from scratch. A 30-ye
224.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> What exactly is your gripe with MV3? Running an adblocker is the defining feature of the extensions API. ublock origin has 5x as many users as the second-most-popular extension [1] Supporting ublock isn't just a nice-to-have add
225.
by michaelt 6mo ago
There's working, and there's working. 20 years ago your Linux installation might not include wifi drivers, bluetooth support, decent GPU drivers, fat32/ntfs drivers, or the widely used video/audio codecs of the era. And
226.
by michaelt 6mo ago
The oppression of people in China like Uyghurs and Hong Kong, the complete lack of free speech, the saber-rattling at neighbours, and the lack of respect for intellectual property are indeed all well documented. But for folks on the oppos
227.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors. If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US comp
228.
by michaelt 6mo ago
It's exceptionally difficult to avoid the data being de-anonymised. If an 'anonymised' medical record says the person was born 6th September 1969, received treatment for a broken arm on 1 April 2004, and received a course of
229.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
230.
by michaelt 6mo ago
> It has given 20,000 researchers around the world access under strict agreements that prohibit sharing data further. To me it seems rather naive to have done that. After all, you can't un-leak medical data. So even if the "s
231.
by michaelt 6mo ago
I'll tell you another thing that will risk their cash cow - a reputation for not paying out when gamblers win big, because of vague and specious accusations of fraud (which the gambler denies)
232.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Browser fingerprinting is an unintended side-effect of things it's sorta-kinda reasonable for browsers to provide. A user agent that says the browser's version? Reasonable enough. Being able to ask for fonts, if the system has the
233.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Several reports say even a mid-ranked engineer at Meta can earn $200k in salary and another $100k in stock and bonus, every year. And that's not some rare, mega-senior E8 architect either. Is there any point where a person stops being
234.
by michaelt 6mo ago
The median household income in the US is $83,730 [1] - half of households are on less than that. If you earn $100k and are willing to have the median lifestyle, and you can find a spouse that's willing, then the numbers work just fine.
235.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Among Linux users, long battery life is for in-office workers (who leave their desk to attend meetings) in hybrid companies (where no meetings are laptop-free) in roles that sometimes involve back-to-back meetings.
236.
by michaelt 6mo ago
A lot of office workers these days spend a lot of time in video calls. So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding. Linux is something of a second-class citizen for
237.
by michaelt 6mo ago
It is indeed common! But a keyboard flashed with malicious firmware becomes an undetectable keylogger, a USB rubber ducky, and a virus-laden USB stick all in one. The concept that someone would want to reflash their keyboard firmware, but
238.
by michaelt 6mo ago
My USB wireless keyboard and mouse work just fine without vendor software, but if I ever lost the dongle and had to re-pair them with a different dongle, I'd need the vendor's software to do it. My bluetooth headphones work just f
239.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Buddy if your "sandbox" lets code inside it replace your keyboard's firmware you don't have a sandbox.
240.
by michaelt 6mo ago
Consider the fact this is a satirical news website; a fictional CEO; an imaginary corporation; and it literally proposes a vision of "Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object [...] A digital platform where, ever

More ›