I just want to be able to group tabs on mobile 🥲

Yeah I just can’t stop getting ragebaited by the Electron hate. All Electron haters are free to develop their own efficient, pleasant looking, cross-platform native app instead since it’s so easy

Parkour fans rejoice as skill finally becomes useful

Yeah this is the kind of thing where you really need statistics. This sticks out because it’s a prominent example of something new, an autonomous vehicle, doing something notable - killing an animal for the first time (or at least one of the very first well-publicized times on record).

For people’s reaction to this to be that this is because it’s an autonomous vehicle is the same sort of cognitive bias that causes things like, " The first person to get a math problem wrong in class was a girl so it seems like girls are bad at math". When of course it could be that the probability of boys and girls getting problems wrong is equal, and that the girl was simply the first one to get a unlucky roll on the dice of the universe. It could even be that boys are more likely to get problems wrong, and the girl was especially unlucky. It could in fact be that girls are more likely to get problems wrong, too, but this single instance doesn’t give us enough evidence for that. It could be that boys actually have gotten more problems wrong, but we only hear about the girl getting the problem wrong due to sociological biases, or vice versa. Etc.

I get that we shouldn’t trust corporations, and it’s not fun to defend a corporation, but it is important to defend rational thinking. And the rational way to approach this is to employ statistical methods to judge whether a vehicle being autonomous truly makes it a bigger risk to animals in the road or not. Any other line of reasoning is not right for this kind of problem.

It kind of sounds like you’re talking about it purely as a thought experiment or as something to inspire other philosophical thinking. But I think the issue most people have with the simulation theory is when people think that it’s actually the way that the world is or think that it’s worth investigating the way that the world is just because it theoretically could be the way the world is. But theoretically the world could have been created by the god of the Bible or any of the other million explanations proposed by the million other religions that have existed. Almost every religion proposes a hypothesis that could indeed explain reality, but just because it could explain reality doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to investigate it.

I agree with you that all the questions you raised are interesting and worth thinking about, but none of that really relates to thinking that we actually live in a simulation. You’re just using the idea that we live in a simulation as inspiration to start thinking about these other ideas. But actually thinking that we live in a simulation is much less reasonable.

Yep, even on the side of the right ideas, half the people still got there via the same wrong methods that the people on the wrong side use. They just coincidentally happened to land on the right side instead. It is quite disheartening, exactly

Not sure. Google patched it by just limiting the amount of blurs an app could request: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/native/+/20465375a1d0cb71cdb891235a9f8a3fba31dbf6

"Our end-to-end attacks simply measure the rendering time per frame of the graphical operations… to determine whether the pixel was white or non-white.”

This is a prime example of something that is so simple, yet elegant, and brilliant. Fantastically cool and scary.

All politicians are united in their love of surveillance, as it allows them to subjugate the population via panopticon-induced threats. “We are always watching, so don’t try anything”

My issue is that the ones who aren’t bothering you with it are essentially not doing so because they know other people in their group are already handling that for them. Religions, especially those you named, come with a mandate to spread themselves and force others to comply with their standards.

It’s kind of like a really selfish kid who would steal all your lunch every day, but he’s not strong enough to do so, so instead he’s just nice and kind and smiles at you and lets you be. But if he ever gets strong enough, he’ll start taking your lunch every single day forever.

The religious people who aren’t forcing it down your throat either (1) think someone else is doing it for them so they don’t have to, or (2) don’t think they could get away with it without being counterproductive to their cause, and are waiting for a more opportune moment.

These are people who believe that they factually know what constitutes objective good. Imagine if raping children was legal and you knew your neighbor was raping children. You might just leave him alone about it because, what can you do? But the moment you have an opportunity to vote for a law to outlaw it, the moment you have a chance to kill him and get away with it, etc. you’ll try to act against him. Your polite indifference to him is a lie, because from your perspective he is committing an absolute and unforgivable wrongdoing that MUST be stopped. This is how religious people are to you, except for instead of it being about reasonable things like raping children, it’s about stupid bullshit that makes no sense, like the fact you don’t pray every day at a certain time, or the fact that you’re attracted to the same sex, or the fact that you don’t want the ten commandments posted in schools.

Ahhh I see, I was confused about what you were getting at. My mistake. And yes that’s very true…hmm. More dire than I was even thinking then…

Honestly this is exactly the kind of thing that taxes and governments are supposed to be good for handling. Failures within failures I suppose!

Yes, it does apply to every operating system - hence, the differentiator becomes whether the operating system has hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on dedicated security development. This is why a lot of companies now don’t even let you use Android devices for BYOD aside from Google or Samsung, because they’re the only companies with the resources to keep their security really up to date.

I think the big problem with this, as far as I know, is that this code needs pretty rapid security updates that require a fairly huge and experienced team of people to both find, understand and implement the security changes. Otherwise it becomes very insecure very quickly. So yeah we can always use 2019 Android, etc. But it would just put you at a huge security risk.

But people are talking about it on Twitter, and what happens on Twitter is more real than reality itself!

If we’re lucky they’ll do something that speaks to the youth, like doing Tiktok dances in protest

Senators: You are doing something very bad

Bezos: No

Senators: Yes

Bezos: What are you gonna do about it?

Senators: …

This concludes today’s session

We need to start badgering our local politicians to remove this shit. This is one area where local action could feasibly make a big difference. If a few towns start becoming “flock dark zones” then the network, and value prop of the company, as a whole loses efficacy.

Also, I suspect there would be bipartisan support for this among the people.

Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It’s less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there’s a real movement there with tech literacy.

Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source

This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…