News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rz2k

Re:Apple Watch Series 12 on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @11:36PM (#49638094)
I think they gave us enough information to understand their legal strategy. They will argue that the watch has sufficient processing power to transcribe the text in real time, and a plain text transcript is not a recording.

It likely stretches the definitions compared to what most people who do not want to be recorded think the laws should prevent, but on the other hand at least it couldn’t be used as legal evidence. It sounds intended as a memory aid, where passing a transcript for gossip purposes will hopefully be met with automatic skepticism as something that isn’t authenticated in any way and could be made up entirely.

They probably spent enormous amounts of time weighing how much legal jeopardy it would create for their customers.

Re:Shutting down our public encrypted DNS on Sunday September 06, 2026 @10:11AM (#49586718)
There’s a reasonable solution. Banks and vital services that use Cloudflare need to win an injunction that enjoins LaLiga from playing matches.
Re:Tail-Call Interpreters in Rust – Jimmy Ostler on Monday August 10, 2026 @09:11AM (#49243162)
It must depend on what you’re using to read it. It’s also readable for me on an OLED iPad, and gives me ideas about what I actually want when I wish I could turn the contrast down while reading it with low ambient light.

Bringing the brightness levels of the background and text closer together doesn’t ever seem to work, but being able to add a slight blurry dropshadow behind behind each character might be a way to reduce the artifacts OLEDs seem to create when my eyes are tired.

Re:Saying 'Google It' Makes You Sound Old on Sunday August 02, 2026 @07:44PM (#49149546)
Zip it!
Re:Elevators on Saturday August 01, 2026 @10:46AM (#49134920)
There’s also a strategy to jump the line. Say there’s a talk that just took place on the top floor roof deck of a small ~20 floor building. People who don’t want to wait in line with a hundred people, can take the stairs down one level, call the elevator on the way up to enter the car before it is filled, ride it up one level*, and then ride it all the way down to the ground floor.

To prevent a riot, the building should probably deploy an employee with a fire key to manually operate the elevator.

* Elevators will answer an up button call while it is going to meet a down call from the top floor, but they will answer that call before filling any new down instructions, so you do have to ride to the top first.

Maybe it looks more amazing in person than in pictures. If not, and the point is a message about waste, then the 80% increase could be cast as part of the message.

Let’s say every month the artist repurposes the last pile of plastic with more glue. At the end of one year, the 10lbs would turn into 1100lbs. At the end of two years the original 10lbs would have turned into 1.3 million lbs of plastic waste. Surely that would frame a very powerful message about plastic waste and green washing misleading public policy.

Obviously it weighs 10,300 baseballs, which are 26 football fields long.
Re:My burner email blocklist blocked me on Friday July 10, 2026 @12:15PM (#48861957)
I couldn’t figure out why US Bank business card applications using a sole proprietorship EIN kept disappearing into a black hole or being denied. Eventually after a few phone calls they complained about the email address.

The other was ferguson.com, so that I could order specialized furnace parts and larger diameter plumbing fittings than I could order from Home Depot. I don’t remember the details, but I think the Ferguson business application kept trying to autofill an address for me. It probably would have required a confirmation from the person who had been turned into the administrator of “fastmail” before I could have been added to their organization and been able to make purchases using their account.

It might not be a problem at larger suppliers like Grainger or Digikey, but it does suggest a vulnerability if you set up a corporate account at a small supplier using a fastmail address. Their backend could assume that anyone able to receive emails on “your” fastmail.com domain is at least authorized by your IT department to use email. If they assume your IT department has an email retention policy, then they might default to treating it like your problem if one of your employees makes an unauthorized purchase.

That's an interesting way to investigate how much public policy surrounding schools is actually focused on student education. I think you'd find that there would be significant fear around crime in an environment that already has a heightened risk of riots. For younger students the debate would shift to burden of additional childcare.
Re:My burner email blocklist blocked me on Friday July 10, 2026 @11:25AM (#48861252)
I’ve surprisingly found that I have started to have to use mydomain.com with Fastmail. Sometimes banks used for a business account, or accounts at b2b companies don’t treat fastmail.com as a large email provider, and otherwise try to associate me with other fastmail customers as though we are colleagues at Fastmail.
Samsung can increase its prices until they can’t sell all of their output, or they decrease their prices until there are shortages. Anywhere in between is just about allocating the surplus value to Samsung shareholders, executives and workforce or to consumers. If the chips are selling when Samsung is asking 40x profit then the chips are even more valuable than the price they’re charging.
Some people have claimed to hear an improvement with an external clock on a Wiim Ultra, but I do not think it is possible to re-clock the WiiM Amp Ultra with an outboard clock.

When I play from the computer, I'm not sure whether it is using the clock on my Mac, the clock on the optical interface, or the WiiM's clock. However, I do not notice any difference in fidelity when I use the Qobuz software player on my Mac or use Qobuz Connect to allow the player to directly stream from the source, so either it isn't a difference that I can hear, or the WiiM's internal clock is used for both sources.

My good enough amplifier and DAC combo claims up to 24bit/192kHz, I use a cheap optical interface from my computer that claims up to 32bit/192kHz, and the streaming service I use serves most albums at 24bit/44.1kHz.

It would have cost the same for the entire stack to be 16bit/44.1kHz at every step, but with excessive resolution I can control the volume anywhere. The bits right before the analog conversion at the end are essentially the same whether I turn down the volume in the software player, the operating system, or the DAC/amplifier.

Re:Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI on Monday June 22, 2026 @07:15AM (#48628646)
It’s rare to find an example in English that demonstrates the difference in meaning between subjunctive and conditional.

Was it a two part question converted into one with a gate at the beginning, or was a general question about occupations and abilities?

Re:Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants on Thursday June 18, 2026 @11:35AM (#48587019)
I wonder if they’ll stagger their waking hours so that electric power consumption matches the inflexible output of nuclear reactors.
Re:Michael Keating has died on Thursday May 21, 2026 @11:01AM (#48223913)
I assume it was changed so there wouldn’t be a name collision with Issur Danielovitch’s son?
Re:Coursera and Udemy are now one company on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @10:48AM (#48109115)
So much of the content is extremely stale, and it even matters for languages that you would think are relatively unchanging.

It seems like they must have put almost no incentives in place for the instructors. Setting up a course must take even more effort than running a full semester course in their own school, but since no one is making new versions Coursera must not be paying them like it, or offering equity in the platform. I imagine that teaching students in person is also a lot more rewarding,

I haven’t taken any recent online courses, but EdX looked like it might still be good.

Re:Coursera and Udemy are now one company on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @10:42AM (#48109037)
Didn’t the gamification course have one of the relatively few well done peer assessments? The course was good, but it’s interesting now that gamification features completely turn me off now on any platform or program attempting to motivate me toward a specific end, regardless of whether that goal is in my interest or the interest of someone else trying to make money.
Re:Coursera and Udemy are now one company on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @10:39AM (#48108988)
The model thinking course was interesting but it should have had a follow up that was much more than a freshman survey course treatment of each model.

Reading online it seems like most people got the impression that it was establishing that all models are essentially useless. Instead it was showing that each of these models were an extremely efficient way to understand some dynamic situations, but that it’s still absurd to focus on only one model when trying to understand the world.

Re:Emerich Juettner: The One Dollar Counterfeiter on Sunday May 10, 2026 @04:22AM (#48082025)
Since they were silver certificates he could have redeemed them for a 26.73g coin composed of 90% silver and 10% copper. In 2026, the value of the silver has fluctuated between about $46 and $94 (and the value of the copper content has stayed a little over 3 cents).
My dad had a class in medical school where the professor dipped his finger in a beaker, talked about mechanisms for sugar in diabetic patients’ urine, and then proceeded to stick his finger in his mouth. He had all of the students do the same, who noted that the sugar was apparent.

He concluded the class by talking about the importance of observing patients, and pointed out that he had tasted a different finger than the one he had put in the beaker.

Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs on Thursday April 16, 2026 @03:55AM (#47790005)
Kagi Assistant has a five point scale of estimated privacy levels of models hosted on different providers.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llms-privacy.html

I don’t really understand this response. I thought the entire business model of Flock was about circumventing the Fourth amendment by posing as a separate vendor selling information it has collected, rather than acting as an agent of the government.

Are they describing third entities that are between Flock and the government end consumers, when they talk about customers that own the data?

At least around 370 BC, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates expresses a strong opinion against writing of any kind through a conversation between the Egyptian gods Theuth and Thamus discussing the invention of writing.

Thamus:

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3894

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/#Pha

I am pretty skeptical about the value of learning to build websites. I think it is too tempting for students to devote significant time to something that is not foundational knowledge and where they won't get any valuable feedback anyway.

It makes me think back to my writing assignments in grades 6-12. I spent considerable time making sure the word processor had the exact perfect font, spacing, and formatting with cool headers, footers, and the footnotes, etc. Yet, I wouldn't even bother to proofread the final text before handing it in. What a terrible waste of a captive audience that could have helped me refine my arguments and writing style, rather than waste their time on things like careless grammatical errors.

Anyway, I do agree with the idea of incorporating Excel, and even RStudio for math and science as tools, especially if they displace Ed-tech software that adds unnecessary abstractions, or attempts to replace interaction with knowledgeable teachers. One other exception might be Anki or similar, since they might move rote memorization out of the classroom, so that more time can be spent on critical thinking.

On my computer, with Firefox it uses 14 CPU cores, consumes an extra 35 Watts, and the progress bar barely moves. Is this site mining cryptocurrency?

On Safari or Orion it is merely extremely slow to load.

I definitely wouldn't use any of this on a site that you don't want delisted for cryptojacking.

Re:LibreOffice and the Art of Overreacting on Thursday March 26, 2026 @09:54AM (#47530503)
How does LibreOffice save people hundreds?
Re:“This is not the computer for you” on Friday March 13, 2026 @01:16AM (#47360971)
I'm confused. Isn't coreutils a just small subset of even macOS's current zsh's builtins? What do you prefer about systemd to launchd? defaults seems like a convenient way to manage settings. Is it confusing for people from other operating systems?
I think it’s a great reaction to news stories to imagine how you could have made the same bad decisions. Furthermore this public confession of being able to imagine making bad decisions might encourage a similarly minded to 20-something to wonder why an older version of themself is so afraid of even having such a dataset. It might even prompt someone to destroy some long forgotten cache of data they exfiltrated a long time ago.

I don’t think there’s a risk that it will influence a rare person in power to enforce the rules to go lighter. I just think it encourages people to be less reckless with hoarding data who might otherwise put themselves in danger.

The maximum memory configuration for the M3 Max MBP was also128GB.

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