user234683

I rarely get focus stolen on Windows 10. They now make it very difficult for applications to do this (see the allowed conditions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... ). In contrast, focus stealing is a way of life on XFCE, and I just have to put up with it. The settings they recommend to fix it don't actually help.

I use gnome evolution. It's not great but it gets the job done; much better than Claws.

Here's an additional problem with using your own domain: some websites (Discord for example) require you to contact support using the email tied to your account. Many corporate systems will reject emails from "untrusted" domains, so you won't be able to contact them.

What is the best approach to dealing with this problem as an individual?

Gmail? You might randomly get locked by some AI algorithm (or you might get banned!), or something else goes wrong, and there's no recourse.

Yahoo? I recently lost access to mine because they decided to start demanding verification with a deactivated email I haven't had access to for 15 years in order to login. Luckily, I had access in an email client, so I was able to migrate all the important accounts off of it.

Yahoo/AOL/Tutanota/Protonmail/Many others? These ones will auto-delete your account if you don't login frequently enough (not protonmail yet, but they allow it in their TOS)

Self-host? All self-hosting infrastructure requires an email in the first place. Lose access to that email, lose access to payment reminders, potentially your hosting account. I nearly lost my domain since the payment reminders went to an email that I rarely check because it doesn't support IMAP. And there is a greater increase of hacking unless you're a professional sysadmin and have plenty of time for maintenance.

Duo push? Your phone breaks.

SMS verification? Phone breaks, lose access to your plan, compromised employee gives your codes away, etc.

I've settled on using my university gmail address since (1) they promise alumni can keep it and (2) if something goes wrong with it (likely losing 2-factor by losing my phone), there is a good alumni support center. There really needs to be a human I can talk to somewhere. Still not sure if this is the best approach; am I still at risk from Google here?

My project here is similar: https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local

It keeps everything in the browser while still being local to the machine

The term you want to search for is "Telematic Control Unit." If there's a fuse for it (or if you can remove it entirely), that should take out most of this stuff. I found this thread[1] where people reported pulling the fuse for it in a Ford truck and the rest of the vehicle still working properly.

In good news, if your car is old enough and came with a 3G transmitter, data transmission won't work anymore since most 3G networks have been shut off [2]

If someone knows of a wiki somewhere that lists the years/car models and what types of tracking they actually perform (not just what's theoretically in their privacy policy) that would be much appreciated. It would be nice to know if, when I get in someone's car, the conversation might be recorded and sent somewhere. Or which car models are sending the recordings of the cameras installed on the outside (or inside?) that can be viewed by the employees and shared around the office (not theoretical) [3]

[1] https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/experience-w...

[2] https://jalopnik.com/here-are-the-ways-shutting-off-3g-is-go...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

Somewhat related self-plug: Self-hosted browser client for watching YouTube anonymously (Python):

https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local

It supports downloading all the raw formats (the video only ones, audio only ones, and the 360p & 720p integrated formats). More meant for watching than downloading, but some more advanced downloading features, such as merging audio+video with ffmpeg to get more downloadable qualities and auto-downloading options for playlists are planned.

This is a good time to consult Chesterton's fence [1]. If you go up to something that's existed for thousands of years, and find it tempting to declare it pointless cruft that should be swept away in the march of progress, maybe there's something you're missing. I don't have time to make an extended argument but one idea is that the most important part of marriage isn't for the happiness/benefit/pleasure/romance of the couples, but for the benefit of children. Studies demonstrate that children of single-mothers have worse outcomes, such as worse mental health outcomes. A marriage is supposed to be difficult to get out of, to disincentivize broken families. Not that this is anywhere close to a full answer; cultural evolution [2] means we may never get to a full understanding of whether/why the customs we have are beneficial, simply because societal dynamics are extremely complicated and still beyond our understanding.

[1] https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

> Toyota couldn't push out a fix. They had to issue a recall and have a technician update the software whenever that car ended up being serviced.

This gives all the more incentive to get the software correct in the first place. The model of "get the software as bug-free as possible upfront using stringent processes, testing, formal methods, and not using software in the first place when it's not actually needed" is better than the model of "put software into as many components as possible to make it shiny and get the software good enough to release before our competitors and play whack-a-mole on the bugs later through updates". Instantaneous updates make it easier for an attacker to take control of the update infrastructure and push an update that will trigger a mass-crash of cars during rush hour. When people have to asynchronously take the car to dealerships over many months, it makes this attack harder to go undetected.

> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing?

Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember.

> Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client?

They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions.

Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say:

mps-youtube (terminal-only): https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer

FreeTube (which uses the invidious API): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

Invidious: https://invidio.us/, https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

youtube-local (my project): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local

smtube: https://www.smtube.org/

Minitube: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube, https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube

> "For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed."

Relevant to this is the analogy by Phil Goetz of reason as a memetic immune disorder [1]:

> The reason I bring this up is that intelligent people sometimes do things more stupid than stupid people are capable of. There are a variety of reasons for this; but one has to do with the fact that all cultures have dangerous memes circulating in them, and cultural antibodies to those memes. The trouble is that these antibodies are not logical. On the contrary; these antibodies are often highly illogical. They are the blind spots that let us live with a dangerous meme without being impelled to action by it.

> A little reason can be a dangerous thing. The landscape of rationality is not smooth; there is no guarantee that removing one false belief will improve your reasoning instead of degrading it. Sometimes, reason lets us see the dangerous aspects of our memes, but not the blind spots that protect us from them. Sometimes, it lets us see the blind spots, but not the dangerous memes. Either of these ways, reason can lead an individual to be unbalanced, no longer adapted to their memetic environment, and free to follow previously-dormant memes through to their logical conclusions.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-...

> applying a tax to people in Denmark won't result in the externality being internalized in Nigeria

What if Denmark imposes a tariff equal to the tax on imported plastic goods from any countries not implementing such a tax?

More broadly, even in systems such as Windows, arbitrary programs have way too much access to the system, especially the filesystem. A lot of effort is put into patching exploits that allow for a program to gain root, yet this is largely irrelevant for desktop users [1]. If malware takes over system files, the operating system can just be reinstalled. The relevant threat is malware encrypting or stealing personal files (which every program can access), such as pictures, documents, browsing history, etc. Currently, all it takes is a single sketchy freeware utility without admin access to destroy/steal all of your personal data.

I would envision a whitelist system where programs by default can only access files in their own directories, but the file explorer would mediate access to files opened in the program. So if a file is double clicked in explorer, the corresponding program gains access to that file. Likewise, the "Open" feature in the program would have to call the explorer API for the file selection dialog, which would also give it permission. There are certainly lots of edge-cases that would have to be ironed-out.

Another nobrainer is to put permission for network access on a whitelist, in addition to other permissions. It could work similarly to the permissions found on mobile, but it should be possible to install the program anyway without granting it permissions, so that developers don't simply ask for everything as is standard on mobile. Of course, this system would introduce UX headaches for non-technical people which would need to be worked on, but it should at least be an option for security-conscious people.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1200/

uMatrix can protect against this if you block third party everything by default (which I do).

As you demonstrate, there's not always a clear-cut distinction between OOP programs and non-OOP programs. Sure, the Linux kernel uses some OOP concepts, but it couldn't be described as fully OOP in aggregate. In my opinion, the best paradigm is no paradigm at all: use the right tool for the right job.

I've had this question in the past and I found this post helpful:

> The fundamental answer to all of this is that the profits must be shared with shareholders at some point. This is what terminates the infinite regression. If a company believes that they can retain their earned profits to further grow and generate even more profits, they will do so. However if a company continues to grow and do well, eventually they will accumulate so much cash in the bank that they can’t find good use for all of it. At this point they will have to pay it out to shareholders through a dividend or stock buyback. If they refuse to, at some point the shareholders will band together and vote for new management that will pay it out.

https://stuffexplained.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/why_buy_stoc...

So even if the company does not pay dividends currently (reinvesting it instead), there will eventually come a point at which their growth flatlines, and they will start paying out dividends. If the market is rational, it will have forecasted this flatlining and the stock price will have taken that into account.

> I really love the idea that pure mathematics and nature are the same thing

This might not be what you mean, but there is a philosophical position that holds that all mathematical structures exist, and that our universe is simply one of these structures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

> Google gives me bad results. It ignores some of the words in my queries

This is the problem I've been having with DDG, where it will aggressively rewrite my search into something completely unrelated

How much more secure would it be for precincts to phone in the results? Phone numbers are trivial to spoof. Perhaps the party headquarters could call the precincts instead of the precincts calling the headquarters. But that still leaves questions about the security of the telephone system itself, even with the spoofing issue out of the way. Are there any alternatives other than phoning in the results?

>A competent developer will show you a blank page and explain that you need to enable Java Script

I completely disagree with this, if I'm understanding you correctly. As someone who disables Javascript, I don't want you to purposely break a page that previously worked (in the sense of being able to read the content of the article) simply because a portion of it which I might not even use doesn't work.

The fully competent solution would be to use progressive enhancement[1] (i.e., use functioning anchor elements initially, and use Javascript to add the Javascript-only functionality on top of the HTML solution).

If you don't have time for that, the somewhat-competent solution for alerting non-technical users that Javascript is disabled would be to add a banner at the top of the page (like Stack Exchange does) stating that some features will be broken without Javascript.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

The ISPC language by Intel is designed to give enough information to the compiler so as to allow auto SIMD-vectorization of programs [1]. It opts for an explicitly parallel model of programming, unlike C [2]. It also has easier support for SOA and AOSOA [3].

[1] https://ispc.github.io/

[2] https://ispc.github.io/ispc.html#the-ispc-parallel-execution...

[3] https://ispc.github.io/ispc.html#structure-of-array-types

Newpipe (app for android): https://newpipe.schabi.org/

mps-youtube (terminal-only): https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer

FreeTube (which uses the invidious API): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

youtube-local (my project): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local

smtube: https://www.smtube.org/

Minitube: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube, https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube

I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried

I use the HTML version instead to deal with this issue

I've never heard of that rule. Ambiguous pronouns like this are pretty common in English. In fact, figuring out what the ambiguous pronoun refers to is the basis for the Winograd Schema, a challenge for AI especially relevant to translation tasks [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_schema