Viewing profile — alex-robbins

I'm at https://indigene.app/regions/pnw (on Firefox on Android) and I'm frustrated because I can't find a map of the region's boundary. It's not at all clear to me how far north or…

It seems like "serving advertisements" and "serving intelligence" are antithetical goals. Presumably, the market will recognize that in the long term. Of course, I make no claims a…

No, that's an example of robots/AI not working out. Yes, this means that "making robots/AI work out" is a political and economic problem, not just a technical one.

Care to name them? I use Mullvad, and I love them, but their exit nodes are routinely blocked by Reddit and streaming services.

The use case for this is similar to the cold boot attack, e.g. disk is encrypted but memory is not. (And I don't know how encrypted DRAM works, but I wouldn't be surprised if some …

I'm not a physicist, but I took a class on special relativity in college, and I still remember some of it ... If I'm remembering it right, we still have conservation of momentum an…

You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and fran…

It strikes me as too bad that this API is so imperative. You can see a pattern over and over in the README where they have `do` blocks, in which they clear some global state (`init…

> a sort of homoiconicity of code and data (hence JSON as a data format) I get that "sort of" was an attempt to hedge, but really, this isn't even close. Homoiconicity here would b…

I don't see it in the Android app either, and I find the original claim very hard to believe in the first place, since that would be a weird piece of information for Signal to reve…

A superellipse is only a squircle if a and b are 1. As with squares and rectangles, all squircles are superellipses but not all superellipses are squircles.

Well, if you remove the choice, that can actually sacrifice the ergonomics GP described, because of one of the important differences between stacked and tabbed: directionality. Tab…

Does anyone else find it suspicious that the author was using so many workspaces on sway? I have to wonder if they're not making good use of sway's tabbed and stacked containers ..…

WhatsApp is closed source. They could backdoor it if they wanted to (or were forced to).

It's very possible. Firefox for Android has a "Desktop site" switch in each tab's menu that works fine, including for GitHub.

"Source First License 1.1" is an interesting choice. Sounds like something specific to this developer (so far, at least). I'm not savvy enough to be sure, but it doesn't sound comp…

It's too bad EDN [1] hasn't seen much adoption outside of the biblical paradise that is the Clojure ecosystem. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clojure#Extensible_Data_Nota... …

That happened in Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds (2002), though of course the idea may also have been used before or since.

> A USB DFU function embedded in boot ROM is flatly undesirable in an MCU with no memory protection. Are you saying DFU is not useful without an MMU/MPU? Why would that be?

When you write a procedure that has to maintain an internal state between calls, stopping what you're doing and switching to functional programming makes sense.

The only difference between this and https://xkcd.com/1958/ is that this attack confuses cars from certain manufacturers but not human drivers, and I'm not sure that that distincti…

This is false. It's true that staying at 100% is harder on lithium ion batteries than staying at 40%. However, the wear due to charge cycles is way, way more significant. Your batt…

> the sentiment of this comment comes off as asking what the end game is for any hacker demonstrating vulnerabilities GP isn't asking about the "endgame" as in "for what purpose di…

Does the Pi 4 have hardware video decoding in mainline Linux yet? I gave up on Raspberry stuff after buying a 4 and finding out that the mainline support was so much worse than exp…