johnfernow

The Prompt API [0] works in Edge, though it uses the Phi-4-mini model instead of Gemini Nano. [1]

Currently it doesn't work in Brave (at least on my machine), and I can't find anything online suggesting whether they plan on supporting the Prompt API. You can go to brave://flags/ and it shows "Prompt API for Gemini Nano" and "Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input", but it doesn't seem to actually work.

0. https://chromestatus.com/feature/5134603979063296

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/web-platfor...

The Java language specification is open and there are multiple implementations. OpenJDK is the official open-source reference implementation, and many of the alternative implementations pull from upstream, but OpenJ9 is a different JVM implementation (though does currently use OpenJDK's class libraries to form a complete JDK.)

Before Microsoft opened-up C#, Mono was a completely independent alternative implementation.

Python has CPython (reference open source implementation), but also PyPy, MicroPython and several others.

exFAT is widely used but it not being journaled has led to so many thousands (if not more) people losing tons of data, many of which wouldn't have lost so much data had they used a journaled filesystem (or even one with redundant file tables.)

If you need to connect a portable drive to machines of different OS's, there is no safe filesystem that supports read and write on both Windows and MacOS.

Alternatively, cloud storage works until the files are larger than the space you have left on Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive/etc., and local network sharing (on certain networks at least) is more complicated than what the average user is willing to put up with. In practice, many use USB flash drives or external HDDs/SSDs with exFAT. Yeah, people should have more than one backup, but we know in the real world that's not what many do. That requires them spending more time (e.g. configuring local network sharing or setting up an old machine lying around to be a NAS) or money (more on cloud storage.) In practice, having a cross-platform, journaled filesystem would lead to a lot less data loss.

Aside from exFAT, the only alternative with native cross-platform R/W capability is FAT32, but while it has a redundant file allocation table (unlike exFAT), it has a max file size of 4GB, which limits its usefulness for many workflows.

I agree with you. To be fair though, the concept likely seemed more reasonable in 1999. Hardware, browsers, and websites (and their front- and back-end services) were all less complex back then. Also less bloat. Not that things were more secure, but a popular tool may have had more meaningful review.

At times, complexity is worth the trade-offs. Modern C++ compilers are more complex than ones in the 80s and 90s, but the assembly code they generate runs much faster. Rust is complex but provides massive security benefits while maintaining great performance.

At times though, stuff is just bloated or poorly designed.

But it's not always clear how to intelligently design a project. If you add too many features to a single large project, it becomes unwieldy to maintain that large project, and the harder it is to audit this critical piece of infrastructure. Yet, if you don't add enough features, people will use packages from random devs, risking their own security, while harming the maintainability of their own project.

I don't know how we solve that problem. Alternatively, you could ask devs to reinvent the wheel and write a lot more code on their own (which they probably won't, either because they don't want to, or because the employer requires a solution on too short of a timeline to do so), but that could also jeopardize security. Many if not most web devs have to deal with authentication and encryption, both of which (the overwhelming majority) very much should not do on their own. Good luck asking a junior dev to correctly implement AES-256 encryption (or something equivalent or better) on their own without using existing libraries.

The answer is almost certainly some kind of mix, but it's not clear what exactly that should look like.

I agree with you: they'd rather not. If Google's Android became closed source to the public, but Google gave Samsung and other OEMs the right to modify it (including a hard fork later on if they desired), then I agree with you that they'd almost certainly continue with Google's Android — they'd lose nothing and eliminate future competitors.

My comment was in part addressing the higher up comments in the thread stating OEMs couldn't do a hard fork. My thoughts are that they have the marketshare that if Google's terms were bad enough, they could. They'd love to take some of the Play Store revenue, but currently dropping the Play Store would tank hardware sales as competitors would keep it. But if Google's terms were to get bad enough that multiple OEMs wanted to hard fork, that calculation could change. I don't foresee Google ever putting forth that bad of terms though, in part because of the option to hard fork.

Right, but if Google's Android becomes closed source and a well-funded FOSS fork becomes available, that changes the situation. If Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, HONOR, OPPO, etc. all agree to use a new FOSS fork as their base, well Google's new closed-source Android becomes irrelevant. Samsung alone is large enough to be able to maintain a fork of Android, and a large enough percentage of the smartphone market that whatever OS it's running will be supported by banking apps.

Some fair points. Courts have ruled Congress can make laws concerning foreign residents that would be unconstitutional if applied to domestic residents and citizens. They generally can't deny someone their Constitutional rights once already inside the US though. But since deportation isn't a criminal conviction (and rejection at the border especially isn't), it's conceivable that they could deny someone entry for a variety of reasons.

So perhaps not a violation of the Constitution. Though if the scientist's claims that he was denied entry because he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration's research policy, then it certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, and much of what the government claims it stands for. Is it legal? Perhaps. Will it cause long-standing damage to US soft-power and the ability of US organizations to recruit world-class scientists? Quite possibly.

> First Amendment protections are only available for U.S. citizens and to a lesser extent to permanent residents

Nowhere in the First Amendment, or anywhere in the Bill of Rights (or later amendments), does it state, or even imply, that the First Amendment is only applicable to US citizens and permanent residents. SCOTUS has repeatedly interpreted the First Amendment's protections as extending beyond just citizens and permanent residents in matters of freedom of speech and religion. While some rights, such as voting, are restricted to citizens, the First Amendment's protections apply to anyone within the U.S. jurisdiction, regardless of citizenship status.

The amendment is short and clear: "Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Even if one argued "the people" refers only to U.S. Citizens (on what basis, who knows), that would only restrict assembly and petitions. The first part is unambiguously comprehensive and clear: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" (emphasis added by me.)

Having a browser written entirely (or mostly) in a memory safe language.

LadyBird is now using some Swift, but most of the code is still C++. The browser, while extremely impressive (and I’m very thankful it exists), has a ways to go before it’s a true replacement for Chromium/Blink, Firefox/Gecko or Safari/WebKit, and rewriting all the existing code in Swift would be a massive undertaking.

Chromium and Firefox also use some Rust, but re-writing those browsers entirely in it would be an even larger undertaking.

In contrast, a simpler browser spec would make it far easier to create a brand new browser in a memory safe language. Not only would this massively improve security on all operating systems as the browser is a huge vector for exploits, it’d also allow for the creation of new, more secure operating systems. Currently, arguably the biggest blocker for using something like RedoxOS (an OS written in Rust) is that it doesn’t have a web browser that can actually work for a lot of the web. But if the web browser spec were simpler, it’d be much easier to create one and then use that OS.

Obviously we can’t go back in time and make a simpler web-spec, and removing features is a terrible idea as it’d break existing websites. I do think, though, that it’s fair to think very hard before adding new features. I think a complete feature freeze would be overkill — some new features could legitimately make web development simpler and cleaner for many webdevs. I do think there needs to be some thought as to what the end-goal for web browsers is. Is there one? Or will we forever continue to add new features at the current pace? If so, the hopes of building a new, more secure browser are dim. And personally I’d prefer a more secure browser to one with more features.

As a comparison, C++ has been adding plenty of new features, but nearly no devs are aware of the full feature set, and despite the goal of making things simpler, I think many devs are as lost as ever with it, as they still have to interface with code written in old and different manners. On the web dev side, some JS and CSS features do legitimately simplify development and make things easier, but I think it’s fair to say that’s not the case for all new features added.

Gas car ≠ EV charged by fossil fuels.

As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.

As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)

As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.

As far as

> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)

Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].

There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.

1. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/evs-clean...

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

3. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

4. https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

5. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-do-government-subsi...

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...

It may have been at one point, but since then it has been decompiled and ported to many platforms:

- PS Vita

- Emscripten

- Nintendo Switch

- webOS TV

- Android (WIP)

- Nintendo Wii

- Nintendo 3DS

- Nintendo DS

- Nintendo Wii U

- PlayStation 2

- Sega Dreamcast

- MorphOS

- AmigaOS 4

https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball

There is no comparable alternative to the Internet Archive though. They've gotten involved in several lawsuits and their future is far from guaranteed. They're an incredibly important organization, but I think it's too important of a project to be limited to one organization, or even one country or region of the earth. A solar flare could destroy a lot of history.

I don't know that the economics of having multiple Internet Archive-like organizations is currently feasible (I imagine getting funding for one of them is hard enough), but even a partial offline mirror hosted someplace else would be nice. Maybe to save space they could take the oldest version of a page, the newest, and the midmost version timewise, discarding all other versions. They could also heavily compress images, video and audio to save storage space (would increase processing costs, but if willing to throw out quality, could compress quickly and still save a bunch of space. E.g. downscale all videos to 480p and use veryfast preset and CRF 28 with ffmpeg. Even 240p is a lot better than nothing. A pixelated form of history is better than no history.)

Right, archive.org is very useful if you have a URL, but if you're searching for a question that was answered in a forum, and that forum post no longer exists and no longer shows up in search results, then it's effectively undiscoverable as far as I'm aware.

It amazes me how companies will have free volunteers help people to use their (often expensive) paid subscription products, and then delete all that info those volunteers wrote up. Don't they want people to use their products?! They're less likely to renew their subscription if they struggle or are unable to use the product for their particular use case.

Unaffiliated forums not ran by the company are better in that the company can't decide to just delete all old posts one day (and while the owner could, certain types of unaffiliated forums are usually a bit easier to clone and republish.) The downside is you don't get assistance from people who work for that company, but often you rarely get that in official forums. The usual reason to use official forums is just that they have significantly more users asking and answering questions than unofficial ones.

Sure, but you can't search for the forum pages on archive.org as far as I'm aware (or at least as easily as searching on Autodesk's website or Google/Bing/etc.) For the time being, old forum posts will likely still show up in search engine search results, and you can take those URLs and look them up on archive.org.

Eventually though they'll likely no longer show up whenever the search engine's crawlers revisit and it's a redirect, in which case the pages are undiscoverable.

BBC reports "The South Korean military says it will maintain martial law until it is lifted by President Yoon Suk Yeol, despite the nation's parliament voting to block its enforcement, according to the country's national broadcaster." [1]

They previously wrote that "The National Assembly speaker has just said that South Korean troops are leaving the parliament building, the Yonhap news agency reports."

So I'm not sure if the military isn't unified in what to do, or if certain troops are just not enforcing the President's near certainly unconstitutional order. The Constitution gives the President many powers under martial law ("Under extraordinary martial law, special measures may be taken with respect to the necessity for warrants, freedom of speech, the press, assembly and association, or the powers of the Executive and the Judiciary as prescribed by law"), but it appears to give the President no powers over the National Assembly, so the "All political activities, including the activities of the National Assembly... are prohibited" part of his martial law declaration appears to be blatantly unconstitutional.

According to the constitution, "When the National Assembly requests the lifting of martial law with the concurrent vote of a majority of the total members of the National Assembly, the President shall comply." [2]

Some are saying the constitution doesn't give a timeframe for when the President has to comply, but if he doesn't soon, it definitely appears to be a self-coup. [3]

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn38321180et

2. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Republic_of_K...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup

Subsidies for oil, coal and natural gas currently cost us about 7.1% of global GDP. [1]

I imagine if we were willing to spend 2 to 5% of global GDP on fighting climate change, we'd also be cutting those subsidies. So in that scenario we'd be reducing government deficits and reducing the rate at which we print money, not increasing it.

1. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

What you're saying is correct, but I can't think of many scenarios where it's relevant to human actions in the present, with the exception of freight ships' sulfur emissions. [1]

For the most part, burning fossil fuels is leading to both air pollution and GHG emissions. Sometimes you can in theory choose an option that leads to less global warming than the status quo but is worse for human health (e.g. burning biomass for energy instead of natural gas, or using diesel instead of gasoline engines), but usually there's an another option where you can reduce both undesirable outcomes (wind, solar, hydro or nuclear energy, electric vehicles, etc.)

Even from an economic standpoint I can't think of too many scenarios where clean energy isn't the better option long-term. An EV will have a higher up-front cost but definitely will be cheaper than a diesel vehicle across it's lifetime, and most areas I imagine solar or wind would be cheaper than biomass. Freight ships are the only thing in 2024 where I think we don't have an option that's better in both regards and cheaper -- there we do have to choose between more global warming or more particulate matter harmful for human health. But I think that's the exception more than the rule for human activities.

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaned-up-shippi...

Right, fossil fuels cause around 8 million deaths a year from air pollution [1], so regardless of climate change it'd be worth making a dent in those numbers.

And no, air pollution isn't just a problem in places like India and China, it kills over 100,000 Americans a year and costs society $886 billion. [2]

The evidence of anthropogenic global warming existing is extraordinarily strong [3] [4], but you're right, even if somehow 97% of climate scientists with studies published on the matter from 1991 to 2011 and 99% of them from 2012 to 2020 were wrong (in addition to NASA, The European Space Agency, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the national academy of science (or equivalent organization) of basically every country that has one), it'd still be worth avoiding millions of deaths a year and having established independent energy security.

1. https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784

2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816102116

3. https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

4. https://doi.org/10.1088%2F1748-9326%2Fac2966

Unfortunately not. Looks like you can set the time (or choose sunrise or sunset), and then you can set it to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. No option based on inactivity.

However, you can set it to shutdown or reboot if it receives an email that contains a specific string in the subject line. So you could have a computer that sends it a shutdown email. You could base it off of inactivity of that computer, or you could have it listen for a cancel-shutdown email, which could be sent by the iPhone when it connects to WiFi (assuming you don't live someplace like a university campus where you're always connected to WiFi even when you leave home.) If the computer doesn't receive the cancel-shutdown email within the set period of time, the computer would send the shutdown/reboot email to the iPhone.

However, like another commenter pointed out [1], the action doesn't even seem to work currently as of iOS 18.0.1. If you set it to "Run Immediately" with "Notify When Run" to off, it just doesn't run. If you turn "Notify When Run" on, the action runs, but still requires you to confirm it manually with a tap, which defeats the purpose of the automation. Who knows, maybe a future update will fix it.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42144044

"The following OEMs equip some of their laptop series with SD card readers manufactured by Realtek:

- Dell

- HP

- Lenovo

- MSI

The list may be incomplete. Basically, if your laptop or desktop has a card reader managed by RtsPer.sys, make sure that the driver is up to date."

...

"The version of RtsPer.sys that is free from all these vulnerabilities is 10.0.26100.21374 or higher."

The article goes into depth and shows proof of concept for the following:

- CVE-2022-25477: leaking driver logs

- CVE-2022-25478: accessing PCI config space

- CVE-2022-25479: leaking kernel pool and stack

- CVE-2022-25480: writing beyond IRP::SystemBuffer

- CVE-2024-40432: writing beyond IRP::SystemBuffer

- CVE-2024-40431: writing to arbitrary kernel address

What do you foresee not working in the future?

If future versions of Proton break compatibility with older Windows apps, you can use different old versions of Proton for individual games. Steam makes this very easy on Linux, but rarely is it necessary.

I don't foresee many Linux distros breaking compatibility with Wine, which is good, as some devs argue Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux. [1]

I don't foresee legal issues either, as Wine has been around for 31 years, and its corporate sponsors have included Google in the past. I've seen no indication that the project is on shaky legal grounds.

Microsoft could always create a new API that Wine doesn't yet support, but good luck getting developers to use it -- they've tried many times, but not much has stuck, and most devs just stick with Win32. [2]

1. https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36060678

We don't have to imagine what Linux gaming would be like without Proton.

- CD Projekt Red: released Witcher 2 on Linux, didn't for Witcher 3.

- iD Software: released Doom 3 on Linux, didn't for Doom (2016) or Doom Eternal.

- Epic Games: released Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux, but didn't for Unreal Tournament 3 or Fortnite. (A Linux port was being worked on for UT3, but it ended up getting cancelled.)

- Larian Studios: released Linux version of Divinity: Original Sin, didn't for Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Baldur's Gate 3

Many studios over the years have made native Linux versions, and many studios stopped because the cost of porting exceeded the revenue it generated. Proton didn't exist when Unreal Tournament 3, Witcher 3, Doom (2016), or Divinity: Original Sin 2 released, so Proton wasn't the reason those studios stopped developing Linux titles -- they stopped because it made no financial sense to continue to make them.

Now, with Proton, 79% of the top 1000 games on Steam are gold or platinum rated on ProtonDB. If you're fine with minor issues, 88% are silver rated or better. For the Steam Deck in particular, there are 5,500 verified games, and 16,526 verified or playable games. So I'd argue Proton is doing quite a lot for people gaming on GNU/Linux machines, since they now have access to a solid majority of the top 1000 games on Steam, both on a Linux desktop and on a handheld.

I'm not sure, outside of my expertise, but I think it might not help.

The attack takes place after boot, so maybe at best UEFI secureboot could prevent persistence of the malware, but I don't think it'd even achieve that, as the malware adds popular Linux utilities that were modified to serve as user land rootkits, and runs them by modifying the ~/.profile script. That script is ran when the user logs in (it starts the malware first, and then everything that's supposed to run on the server after), and I don't believe UEFI secureboot has any protections against ~/.profile script modifications or rootkits ran after boot.

From the article:

> "Aqua Nautilus researchers aim to shed light on a Linux malware that, over the past 3-4 years, has actively sought more than 20,000 types of misconfigurations in order to target and exploit Linux servers. If you have a Linux server connected to the internet, you could be at risk. In fact, given the scale, we strongly believe the attackers targeted millions worldwide with a potential number of victims of thousands, it appears that with this malware any Linux server could be at risk.

...

- It utilizes rootkits to hide its presence.

- When a new user logs into the server, it immediately stops all “noisy” activities, lying dormant until the server is idle again.

- It utilizes Unix socket for internal communication and TOR for external communication.

- After execution, it deletes its binary and continues to run quietly in the background as a service.

- It copies itself from memory to various locations on the disk, using deceptive names.

- It opens a backdoor on the server and listens for TOR communications.

- It attempts to exploit the Polkit vulnerability (CVE-2021-4043) to escalate privileges.

In all the attacks observed, the malware was used to run a cryptominer, and in some cases, we also detected the execution of proxy-jacking software. During one of our sandbox tests, the threat actor utilized one of the malware’s backdoors to access the honeypot and started deploying some new utilities to better understand the nature of our server, trying to understand what exactly we are doing to its malware."

The article goes into more depth of the attack flow, what the malware does, and how they detected it.

It's a Sony patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454?oq=8246454

But yeah the 10th image in the patent literally has

> Say "McDonald's" to end commercial

with a picture of a man standing up and shouting "McDonald's!" as an example.

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b4/2e/a1/779dd8d...

Looks like Obsidian uses Capacitor for iOS https://forum.obsidian.md/t/what-technology-obsidian-mobile-...

https://capacitorjs.com/

Windows user accounts used to work locally. At some point during Windows 10's life it became a hassle to use a local account on a new computer. Now in Windows 11, short of modifying the ISO or using other unintuitive workarounds (some of which Microsoft has patched out), you are required to be connected to the Internet and use a Microsoft account when setting up your new computer (even for Windows 11 Pro!) If despite that you choose to work around that requirement, several features are disabled, including ones that enhance security!

Notably, you lose out on full-disk encryption on Windows 11 Home. On Home and Pro you lose out on facial recognition login (Windows Hello), which can be a useful tool for avoiding shoulder surfing attacks in public. But by using a Microsoft account, your computer's password can be reset remotely. There's no way (official or otherwise) to maximize security on Windows 11. Outside of Enterprise, there's not even an official manner to setup an air-gapped Windows 11 PC!

Until they received massive backlash, Microsoft planned on requiring Xbox One users to have a Kinect (camera, mic, and motion sensing device) connected at all times when the console is on, as well as connect to the Internet once a day to use the console. https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-xbox-one-wont-require-k...

To an extent the theoretical concerns that people are stating about Recall sound like paranoia, but the examples above show Microsoft has a bad history when it comes to privacy. Connecting Recall to the Internet sounds like a terrible idea, but so does restricting/limiting local accounts on Windows and (planning on) mandating that your home game console has a camera and mic connected and is connected to the Internet each day.

Unfortunately, they also have a bad history when it comes to security. Recent example: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/24119787/microsoft-cloud-e...

From the article, the US Department of Homeland Security claims that Microsoft has "a corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management."

So while on the surface the concerns about Recall seem unreasonable, I think the fear is more understandable given Microsoft's many previously unthinkable actions, in addition to their poor security.

To make it even more confusing, the Xbox One had the mid-generation updates called Xbox One S (slimmer, a few additional features) and the Xbox One X (more powerful.)

So from oldest to newest it's

- Xbox

- Xbox 360

- Xbox One

  - Xbox One S  

  - Xbox One X  

- Xbox Series X and Series S (released simultaneously: S is smaller, X is more powerful)

So for a period of time in stores you might see a One S, a One X, a Series S, and a Series X. If you aren't a gamer, it's a complete mystery which is the newest and most powerful. I'm sure some kids got the wrong console for Christmas, as the One X was at times more expensive than a Series S, despite being an older console that would later not support many games that the Series S supports. This would be even more likely to happen if the Series X was out of stock (so the most expensive Xbox console at the store might be a discontinued model that won't support all the new games.)

In contrast, it's pretty obvious that a PlayStation 5 is going to be better than a PlayStation 4. Yes, a quick search will show which is the newest and most powerful Xbox, but if people have to do research to find out which is your best console and they don't have to do that for your competitor, then you have a confusing naming scheme.