hunson_abadeer

I've been using DeleteMe. It generally works well, with two caveats:

1. They seem to largely rely on automated or semi-automated workflows, and that sometimes breaks down. For me, they removed ~95% of the stuff, but I could still find some breadcrumbs in web searches, and need to file a couple more opt-outs manually. It might be less of a problem if your online footprint is small.

2. They target "frontend" sites, rather than the actual data brokers. This cleans up search results, but doesn't necessarily remove from the commercial databases that are available to commercial and institutional users. Because the frontends come and go, it also means that if you cancel your subscription, you will probably go back to square one in 2-5 years.

> if you go RISC-V, you are free to switch CPU providers.

That's not even true within the ARM ecosystem itself. The chips from Infineon are not source-code compatible with STM, STM is not compatible with Microchip, Microchip is not compatible with TI...

The problem is that the ARM core is just a portion of the architecture. Everything on top of that - GPIO, memory interfaces, timing, etc - is vendor specific, and will stay that way for RISC-V.

Not to mention, the chips also won't be electrically-compatible. Your hardware architecture can be as daunting to redesign as the code, if not more so.

It feels like you're making a bad-faith argument here. You can implement 'yes' in a straightforward way in a couple lines of C, too.

  main(int argc, char** argv) {
    while (1) {
      if (argc > 1)
        for (int i = 1; i < argc; i++) printf("%s%c", argv[i], (i == argc - 1) ? '\n' : ' ');
        else puts("y");
    }
  }

The point other folks are making is that it's written differently for a reason. Maybe not a reason that's important, but at the very least, let's try to compare apples to apples.

While I'm sure the FCC has an end game of actually mandating these labels, the vast majority of IoT devices are not exposed to the internet and just aren't a major attack vector in most environments. How much money and time needs to be spent to secure an RGB lightbulb or a wireless speaker?

There is approximately one class of consumer devices that I suppose fall under the IoT umbrella and that are commonly attacked: modems and wifi routers. But these generally get security support. And if you had product labels, would it change shopping behaviors in any way? "This NetGear router will get security updates for 8 years" sounds great. But then, in 10 years, you might have the same router in your closet. Will you even remember the label by then?

It's really no different than people who pay more than they need to for a car or a home.

It's some combination of it being a status symbol and a "I can afford it and it's fun" kind of a deal.

There is a variety of attitudes, as with fancy cars, McMansions, or other "premium" goods. Some people wax their car every week, some people let it rust.

Watch theft isn't particularly common. I have a nice watch, I wear it daily, and I don't think about it much.

It is not common at all. You have maybe several people dying every year, which is in the "hit by lightning" territory. It's very well-publicized whenever it happens, which probably helps keep the numbers low. But this is a very unusual way to die.

People in Germany and France buy about as much cheap junk and have about as much attachment to material belongings. Which I don't blame them for, but it's remarkable that in both countries, it's fashionable to pooh-pooh the "dumb Americans" for that.

Facilities and real estate are among the most significant expenses for any tech company in a prime location such as Seattle or SFBA. If remote work turned out to work flawlessly, there would be a huge financial incentive to shed all that.

I find it frustrating that we always need to come up with some sinister explanation for any decision we don't like. It's always the corporate profit motive, and when it doesn't fit, we try to invent some personal profit motive for execs to act against the best interest of the company, without a shred of evidence.

I know several execs involved in RTO decisions for a public company. They have sincere convictions and some arguably flawed data to back it all. I don't agree with it, but this way of thinking that everybody up to and including my pay level is a good and smart person, and everybody above is clueless and evil... it's just juvenile.

I Can Eat Glass was definitely a thing, but in the late 1990s or perhaps very early 2000s. Sites such as knowyourmeme.com don't go nearly as far back.

High-performance STM32 chips have been in short supply since 2019, with backorder times in the range of years. There's a reason why you don't see a whole lot of hobby boards using them today.

So, as a hobbyist, I wouldn't be getting my hopes up for 2024...

I know a bunch of ex-Googlers who spent 8+ years with the company, and what cracks me up is that they all have some version of this "how the mighty have fallen" story, but it's always relative to their tenure dates.

Some remember Google as being fantastic when they joined in 2005 and then going downhill after. Some think the peak was in 2009. Some in 2012. And I'm sure there are engineers joining now who, in ten years' time, will be reminiscing about the golden days of 2023.

In reality, I think we tend to rationalize our decisions to join a company by imagining it's better than it really is, and then rationalize our decision to leave by imagining it's worse. More often than not, the only real change is that we've grown tired of the workplace and need a change of scenery.

Yes. There's plenty of rodents in urban and suburban areas, but above all, cats have an inborn instinct to murder small critters for fun, and don't need to be taught that.

Rodents are their strong preference, but if bored, they will go after bugs, small birds, lizards... or engage in relentless "murder practice" using pieces of paper or cloth.

This is very different than with dogs, which often have to be trained for specific tasks. Source: lived with 10+ cats (not at the same time).

> People are listening to white noise podcasts when regular white noise is available at a cheaper licensing cost.

There is something incredibly surreal about this statement.

This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), power grid transmission (transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost), or energy storage (LK-99 would likely have a fairly modest current limit before it stops superconducting).

LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown, but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind of instant punditry pretty tiresome.

Does this include line employees who worked at Google or Facebook or Microsoft if the company is found liable for doing something sketchy?

The sums sure are substantial. You can argue they know their employer was no angel, too. OK to claw back paychecks, or do we draw the line somewhere closer to actually participating in a criminal act?

I'm not aware of any laws in the US or in Europe that generically prevent "phoning home".

There are laws that limit your ability to collect certain types of sensitive information without some quasi-meaningful user consent, but most telemetry goes around this by notionally not collecting PII.

The gotcha is that in practice, most companies don't put a whole lot of effort into making sure there's no incidental PII in the telemetry, and no other way to infer who you are. Browsers automatically collect crash reports that, for a good while, might have contained your cookies, URLs, and other goodies in the logs or memory dumps... cars collect "anonymized" telemetry that shows you driving from your single-family home to wherever you're headed... etc.

I think it's easy to come up with such delineation after the fact, but OP was looking for a more comforting answer. By the sound of it, that was the reason they didn't like the initial diagnosis. It wasn't about facts not adding up.

The reality is that modern medicine is absolutely amazing, but there are also many interventions backed by shoddy science or no science at all. Sometimes, "doing your own research" exposes such lapses. Sometimes, it sends you off the deep end and you end up chasing ghosts. To allow the former, you need to tolerate some of the latter.

And yeah, sometimes the shoddy science involves interventions so basic and so common that you'd think they're sorted out. Consider that Europe and the US take wildly divergent views on topics such as wisdom teeth, colonoscopies, or the value of flu vaccines.

"Science literacy" doesn't shield you from being wrong. Maybe it helps, but there's no shortage of Nobel laureates who believe in conspiracy theories or promote dubious medical treatments. Talking about "science literacy" is usually just how geeks convince themselves that their beliefs can't be wrong.

> You can thank Mel Gibson and industry lobbying

Why do we always need a boogeyman?

Melatonin appears nearly harmless. Isn't it strange that we've grown so accustomed to so many things being restricted that we're taken aback by this sliver of medical self-determination, and we publish hard-hitting investigative pieces about how supposedly terrible that is?

I get it that we maybe don't want to go back to the era of "patent medicine" containing radium, but when we require prescriptions for birth control, eyeglasses, and non-narcotic sleep aids, maybe we've gone a bit too far.

> People do it all the time and to far greater extremes. A mortgage to buy a house to raise a family at 30 instead of waiting until 60 is also a form of consumption smoothing.

I wasn't advocating against risk-taking. I was advocating for doing it purposefully. Homeownership offers compelling and long-lasting quality-of-life benefits, and it's arguably not even pure "consumption" due to the acquisition of home equity.

Borrowing to buy a "status" car in your 20s, on the other hand, is probably a bad plan. Fleeting gratification and most of the money goes down the drain within 2-3 years. And if you get in the mode of living on credit day-to-day, you're probably gonna be making a lot of purchases of that sort.

I mean no disrespect, but this reads a bit like an over-confident take of a person who never went through a financial calamity. A bit like leveraged house-flippers of 2006. The value of your margin loan collateral can plunge suddenly. The rates and the terms of your credit card debt can change overnight. You can get hit by unexpected and urgent expenses - adverse judgments, emergency home repairs, etc - and that's bad news when you're already maxing out your credit lines.

Debt is a useful tool, but it's also dangerous. It's one thing if you're using it to advance some important cause... you know, making a big bet on a business idea, making your dreams come true. But if you're taking risks for, as the author puts it, "consumption smoothing"... there's a good chance of ending in trouble for no good reason.

Plus, we're not hyper-rational robots. Spending money is habit-forming. It's often about gratification, about social standing, about competing with peers. Especially for younger folks, and especially for people in the Bay Area, where we often look up to people who essentially won the startup lottery or ended up getting lucky in some other way. Instead of "consumption smoothing", it's often better to ask if that consumption is useful to begin with.

Mandatory? Unless I'm seriously out of the loop, I don't think there are mandatory annual wellness checks in the US?

I think the argument rings hollow to me mostly because it's not that Harvard has to charge this much. I'm sure they could be providing the same quality of education for 1/5th the price. In fact, with the endowments many of these schools have, they could probably go tuition-free for a couple of decades and still be fine.

They charge this much essentially because they can (govt-subsidized loans), and because it helps them maintain a certain reputation.

Yeah, it would be sad for Harvard to get unaffordable.

> With the end of affirmative action, legacy status in admissions becomes much harder to justify.

I've heard this repeated nearly verbatim in a couple of places, and it's such a puzzling framing. Why was this practice any less ethically challenged prior to the SCOTUS decision?

Right, but that voltage modulation scheme can be distorted by the changing electrical characteristics of your car. Again, imagine a diesel heater kicking in, or windshield wipers, or some other variable load (phone charging)... you can have a clever fault-tolerant modulation scheme, but probably not if you want to also support "blink headlights" as a backup input method?

Beyond that, I don't see the "simplicity" argument for analog. You're already messing with the vehicle's wiring. CAN bus is easily accessible from the passenger compartment. Or, running an extra data wire takes 10 minutes. Short-range RF can be easily secured in this application too.

Plus, on many newer cars, USB charging ports are displacing 12 V outlets, so it's not even all that future-proof.

It's not that I'm desperate to dislike this design, but I'm struggling to see the qualitative improvement over a billion aftermarket designs that most people just kinda don't use...

Sugar alcohols are abundant in nature and have been a part of our diets for pretty much all recorded history. They are well-understood and probably don't warrant the kind of intensive inquiry that is appropriate for a completely novel synthetic compound, such as aspartame.

There are more papers on aspartame than on potatoes, but that's not a reason not to avoid the latter, right?

It's actually not that black and white. Wood dust is linked to a statistically significant increase in the occurrence of a very rare nasal cancer. But the thing is, in woodworkers and in the general population alike, it's still a very rare cancer. You're orders of magnitude more likely to die of other cancers, whether you work with wood or not. This should be way, way down your list of risks.

There is a simpler reason to avoid wood dust: it causes allergies, asthma, and other non-cancer respiratory issues in a fair number of people.

Sugar alcohols such as xylitol and sorbitol are very unlikely to be harmful. That said, they aren't drop-in replacements. Xylitol cools down when it dissolves, so it gives some candy their trademark "cool" feeling, but it's not something you always want. Plus, when consumed in larger quantities, it has a laxative effect.

There's a lot of people remarking about this not being novel or the grant being too high, but I'd make two other critiques.

First, what happens if the electrical characteristics of your vehicle change in some way? New vs old battery? Busted headlight? Phone plugged into an outlet? Diesel air intake heater grid kicking in on a cold day? What if you need to jumpstart your vehicle? It just seems so finicky in the real world.

Second, what's the point of using this analog signaling system to begin with? I don't see the supposed simplicity of it. Both the transmitter and the receiver are more complex than would be needed for digital. The other argument is that it is somehow more "hacker-proof", but using analog signals doesn't make it so. You can have a similar scheme operating on the CAN bus with no added risk. In fact, I bet there are devices on the CAN bus that can both measure and modulate battery drain, so the isolation may be illusory.

Ultimately, it's not about not having the technology. It's just that your average customer favors convenience features over having a fortress on wheels. Plus, the returns on sophisticated defenses are diminishing, given that a car can always be loaded onto a tow truck, the hood can be popped open, or the whole thing can be stripped for parts with a Sawzall (as catalytic converter thieves tend to do).

> there is a non zero risk with taking something like this that should be discussed with a doctor first, IMO.

This costs money in the US. And it costs time and effort everywhere in the world, with doctors frequently using this as a hook to force you to visit them regularly and bill you or your insurance for that. And it's just disempowering bureaucratic bullshit when the risk is far less consequential than most other risks we take in life. Do you have a permission slip from your doctor for sitting in front of the computer all day? That's far worse to your health than oral contraceptives.