robryk

13 ms·

121.
by robryk 5y ago
I can run a reverse-engineered client that just logs all the messages I ever receive, if I don't care about TOS.
122.
by robryk 5y ago
Note that I didn't mention GDPR or any regulation. Data export is for me a feature that makes it easier to walk away from a service (and, as a side effect, makes it easier to use the service by performing the export periodically and ke
123.
by robryk 5y ago
The message is still accessible to anyone using the blessed client, and is available in perpetuity to anyone willing to violate TOS by using a reverse-engineered client.
124.
by robryk 5y ago
If I had no right to see messages others send to me, then sending messages would be pointless -- the recipient would not have the right to read them. Every other chat service I have requested data export from gave me all the messages in con
125.
by robryk 5y ago
A piece of functionality that's missing/broken by design in Discord is data export. Discord client can show me all the conversations I've taken part in. When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get on
126.
by robryk 5y ago
Similar incident: in 1985, political opposition in People's Republic of Poland "hijacked" TV by broadcasting in sync with the actual TV signal. This allowed them to superimpose things on top of the image (within some range ar
127.
by robryk 5y ago
Regarding storing files: They either are using https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/app-spec... and other apps would not be able to access those files at all, or they should be using it instead of j
128.
by robryk 5y ago
That's true and it's one reason I'm not too comfortable with Signal's access to metadata (even though they are the best nonfederated communicator in that regard). There are a few reasons why I would prefer them to provid
129.
by robryk 5y ago
Every time you send a message with Signal, you inform the server which user the message is for. Thus, the server can remember (sending IP, target phone number) pairs and, for similar reasons, (phone number, IP of the user when retrieving me
130.
by robryk 5y ago
I managed to kill one PC floppy drive by switching the motor that rotated the disk and not switching it off (because my crash handling was nonexistent and floppy read routine I was writing crashed somehow). I guess the disk rotation motor (
131.
by robryk 5y ago
That program, at least when it was introduced, required participants not to report security vulnerabilities publicly until Apple allowed them to do so, with no limits on how long that can be (see https://news.ycombinator.com&#x2F
132.
by robryk 6y ago
This is first I'm hearing about the lang attribute (edit: for something smaller than the whole document), so I'm curious how commonly is it used in the "web at large". Do you know?
133.
by robryk 6y ago
I was told once that the reason for that was stiffness: apparently aluminum forks are stiffer, so unsuspended ones are way less comfortable (in terms of vibrations being transmitted to the frame and handlebars) than steel unsuspended forks.
134.
by robryk 6y ago
The Web does not really have any such mechanisms (and certainly didn't have them back in the times where we had more search engines). Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not require them, or that it suffers from their
135.
by robryk 6y ago
GP doesn't want to store the data on the satellite, but rather use the space in-between as a Friday line storage. The satellite would be a repeater that retransmits what it receives. If it was 20 light minutes away, there would be 40 m
136.
by robryk 6y ago
They used to be quite popular for cargo (IIUC trucks displaced them) and apparently they are becoming used again: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01/aerial-ropeways-auto...
137.
by robryk 7y ago
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein and many of the stories by Greg Egan and Hal Clement. They show people who are curious about the world, care about the fate of others and try to be open-minded. They also show (perhaps somewhat id
138.
by robryk 7y ago
> By the way, you can prevent a malaria death for about $50 in Africa. Could you point at a source of that? Last I've seen the Against Malaria Foundation was estimated to save 1 life for every couple thousand dollars.
139.
by robryk 7y ago
12% of _COVID ICU patients_ in Italy are below 50 years old. Note that this doesn't let us answer the question of how common are ICU cases among young infected people.
140.
by robryk 7y ago
I am ignorant as far as the use of inhalable medications is concerned. However, I find it weird that you'd want to recycle oxygen: carbon dioxide removal is either hard or requires consumables, while oxygen can be concentrates from air
141.
by robryk 7y ago
What are the settings that you twiddle for better audio quality?
142.
by robryk 7y ago
I assume that you mean parallelizability of decoding and not of encoding. JPEG's decoding is poorly parallelizable: the entropy decoding is necessarily serial; only inverse FFTs can be parallelized. Sharing the data about boundaries ne
143.
by robryk 7y ago
Ah, thank you. I misread the GP. It seems that he is saying nearly[^] exactly what I wanted to say in the edit. [^] the property should hold not only for single-bit changes, but all length-preserving changes -- it's perfectly fine for
144.
by robryk 7y ago
If a scheme had something like that property and satisfied some simpler conditions, I would wager that it necessarily is a good compression scheme. However, this is very much not required of a good compression scheme: Imagine that a compres
145.
by robryk 7y ago
Another inefficiency of JPEG is that each block (8x8 pixels in size) is compressed independently[^]. This means that the correlations between pixels that are adjacent across a block boundary are not used. If I were to take a JPEG image and
146.
by robryk 7y ago
Given that it's scanning the duty cycle as seen by any part of the eye is very small. If the perceived brightness was a function of power density averaged over time, then it would very obviously have to be able to be much brighter than
147.
by robryk 7y ago
In the normal operations, the laser will scan across the retina without long dwell times at a single spot. Software is likely able to cause the laser to track a single point on the retina (I expect that the device needs some sort of an eye
148.
by robryk 7y ago
The vacuum cleaner would have much larger airflow though. Would it still have higher energy usage per unit volume of air pumped? If not, then cycling the vacuum on and off would actually Dave energy compared to the small fan setup.
149.
by robryk 7y ago
> If that's true and you're in a nursing home and not a hospital or hospice, it's probably because the thing incapacitating you is mental — dementia. You can have musculoskeletal issues that prevent you from performing eve
150.
by robryk 7y ago
E.g. there could be a cache that (incorrectly) returns a reference to a cache item without any locks being held by the client and reuses cache items on eviction. Then if an eviction happens before the client is done with an item, there is

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