So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.

I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.

Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT

I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth

So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.

on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.

you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.

Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/

It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/

We just launched a fun little tool called Phantom Analyzer. It’s a 100% serverless tool that scans websites for hidden tracking pixels.

I want to talk about how we built it 👇

The idea came about early this year after @mijustin gave us an idea about badges/certification, which developed into “what if we could scan websites for Google Analytics?!”. But we left the idea in Basecamp for many months.

Fast forward to Halloween, we’re thinking about fun ideas we could do to entertain people. We discussed “Phantom Analytics” in response to people getting confused with our product name, and had various ideas. And then we landed on the URL analyzer idea.

Once we’d finalized the spec, Paul got to work on our Halloween themed product and then coded up the HTML/CSS for it all. I then took it, put it into a Laravel application. Nice and easy.

Off the bat, I already knew the base stack I was using.

> Laravel Vapor
> ChipperCI for deployment
> SQS for queues
> DynamoDB for the database

We went with DynamoDB as we don’t want to worry about our database scaling!

The @Uber-@Postmates merger will ONLY benefit monopolistic pandemic profiteers focused on growing their power at the expense of restaurants, workers, and consumers.

2/ Both @Uber & @Postmates’ business models are built on trapping restaurants & workers in a predatory payday loan cycle of dependence and destitution.

And both @Uber & @Postmates use the “Break it till you Make It” approach to the law.

3/ @Uber was a vanguard in the business of providing illegal taxi service and misclassifying workers as “contractors.”

@Postmates pioneered the predatory practice of stealing menus and offering unauthorized delivery service from restaurants without their knowledge.

4/ Now, unauthorized deliveries are one of the apps’ favorite bait-and-switch tactics for convincing restaurants to pay 30-60% commissions.

When COVID-19 shut down dining rooms & dozens of cities capped fees to help restaurants, both @Uber & @Postmates lobbied hard to stop them.

5/ @Postmates, in particular, was not subtle about breaking the

Each year, @freedomhouse publishes "Freedom on the Net," an annual snapshot of internet policy and outcomes in different countries, from #netneutrality to internet shutdowns to domestic surveillance.

This year's report is a grim read.

https://t.co/OVoaYjJz5n

1/

The new report, spanning Jun 2019 to May 2020, tracks the steady (pre- and post-pandemic) march to a locked down internet robbed of its liberatory power and perverted in service to control, censorship and

Even before the pandemic, things were bad, but the pandemic accelerates everything: inequality, monopoly, and internet crackdowns. In the name of epidemiology, the world's governments have criminalized some online speech and then arrested journalists and activists.

3/

These speech restrictions also created a simple pretense for national website blocking and site takedowns, used to remove "unfavorable health statistics, corruption allegations, and other Covid-19-related content."

4/

The Chinese model of tech as an autocrat's dashboard and control panel is surging around the world, and exposure notification apps are a powerful accelerant for the model, with mandatory location tracking, call-record harvesting, even mandatory quarantine "selfie checkins."

5/

The other day we shared a thread on the 5 types of work a Hotspot can perform to mine $HNT. Today we take a look at the work of a Challenger in Proof-of-Coverage (PoC).

Challenges are used by PoC to validate wireless coverage. As a Challenger, your Hotspot is chosen by the network to create a challenge, or encrypted multi-layer packet, over the Internet.

The challenge process begins with the Challenger selecting an initial target Hotspot, followed by a group of Hotspots known by the @helium blockchain to be within range of each other as a result of RF witnessing.

These Hotspots are given a multi-layer packet (think an “envelope of envelopes”) that only they can decrypt to prove they are providing legitimate wireless coverage.

The Challenger could be anywhere in the world and does not need to be co-located near other Hotspots. Challenge requests occur every 120 blocks, and if the consensus group accepts the challenge transaction as being valid, the challenge proceeds.

Big changes are happening and bigger changes will happen soon all due to technology. The information age helped us reach what is being seen as a technological revolution and we are currently living through it. 1/6

More 👇🏻

Within a few years, there's going to be major changes in how we live our lives:

Public transportation being replaced by the likes of Uber.

Apartment and hotel rentals being replaced by the likes of AirBnB. 2/6

More 👇🏻

Restaurants being replaced by the likes of Deliveroo/Zomato.

Retail shopping being replaced by the likes of Amazon.

Traditional vehicle driving replaced by autonomous vehicles.

Internet file sharing being replaced by the likes of Bittorrent. 3/6

More 👇🏻

Traditional farming being replaced by robots.

Paralegal and medical research/diagnosis being replaced by AI.

Manufacturing being replaced by 3D printing.

ISPs being replaced by free worldwide wireless Internet. 4/6

More 👇🏻

Wholesale shipping being replaced by the likes of Alibaba.

Movie theaters and movie rentals being replaced by the likes of Netflix/Hulu.

Finance being replaced by #bitcoin.
5/6

More 👇🏻

So is Apple's anti-theft security a wonderful boon to users?

Or is it just another evil corporation strengthening it's monopoly power?

I had the misfortune of buying a 2018 Mac Mini on ebay a few days ago. Unfortunately, it had not been wiped, and it's security defaults had never been changed.

This essentially turns it into a very shiny paperweight.

And this is where everybody jumps to blame the victim. "But everybody knows you have to make sure the seller wipes the Mac."

My how the corporate overlords have trained us to be their apologists.

To be clear, I'm a software engineer. Part of my job is supporting Mac users. Where I work, people hold on to their computers for several years generally, and the T2 chips are only a couple of years old, so I hadn't run into this situation at work.

Of course, I'd read about them, but I was confident that whatever condition the computer arrived in, I'd likely be able to deal with it.

Unfortunately I hadn't read up enough to be an expert on their T2 chip and Activation lock.

South Korean carmaker Hyundai on Wednesday presented the first 7 hydrogen-powered trucks to customers in Switzerland, out of 50 such vehicles scheduled this year to bring zero-emission commercial vehicles to European roads


For long haul, proponents say hydrogen-powered trucks have an advantage over electric rivals as they have a greater range and require less charging times but their uptake and mass production has been slow because they are expensive

However, a McKinsey study in January said that once relative efficiencies of the power sources and lifetime costs of a truck are factored in, green hydrogen could reach cost parity with diesel by 2030

PARITY WITH DIESEL ???

Hyundai has been partnering with Swiss companies to build a value chain covering the production of green hydrogen from hydropower, hydrogen charging stations and the service and maintenance of the trucks

The customers, which include supermarket chain Migros, will be leasing the trucks from Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility HHM to transport goods around the country, backed by the new hydrogen infrastructure

"Working software is the primary measure of progress" is an enabling constraint. Sometimes, managers use the phrase as a club to get people coding. Coding, however, is a necessary driver of creating software, but it's not the only thing you have to do. 1/5

Standing in front of a whiteboard and discussing design, creating and running tests, just staring out the window and thinking, are all necessary parts of the development process; but if you don't get that software into your customers hands, you've accomplished nothing. 2/5

Using working software (the result of the process) as your measure of progress, puts natural limits on the entire process, including the staring-out-the-window parts. It forces you to work small (thus the "constraint") enough to deliver frequently. 3/5

I'll add that sometimes, progress does have to slow down so that you can think things through. That's fine. That's natural overhead in the process. Incorporate it into your planning. 4/5

But, if the overhead overtakes valuable work (creating "working software"), then you need to take a long hard look at how you're doing things. 5/5

NEW INTERVIEW: Former Chairman of Sony Entertainment on Nintendo's Everlasting Intellectual Property

'Mario is probably impervious to extinction'

$NTDOY

https://t.co/MI0mMmSDsf

Nintendo has 100 years of experience in gaming.

'They are the masters in this field'

'As a platform holder, our job is to create a wider audience, continually.'

'I think Nintendo really understands the game design maxims for a handheld platform and then how to leverage their very powerful IP vault in that medium.'

It seems Fortnite and Roblox is additive to the industry and not exactly zero-sum vs AAA games?

1/ Now that the election has been called and voter fraud dismissed, it’s time to search for other frauds. Let’s look at $TSLA Full Self Drive. About 3 weeks ago, Tesla released its Beta version to a limited audience of Tesla influencers.

2/ The influencers were supposed to flood social media with praise and testimonial videos. Instead, FSD performance was so bad that every video contained errors, many requiring driver intervention.

3/ Excuses were made. “Remember, this is only Beta”. “I’m teaching it to drive down this street”. But the reality clear to everyone was that Tesla’s Beta FSD is anything but Full Self Drive.

4/ Beta release – what does that mean? It means that the software is a candidate for production release. It means 100% of the specification has been implemented. It means only clean-ups remain.

5/ So how is it possible that FSD performs so poorly after all the hype? Certainly, there’s an element of time pressure to fulfill the Robotaxi proclamation. And similar pressure from Waymo’s competition.

Thank you members of the Commerce Committee for the opportunity to speak with the American people about Twitter and §230. My remarks will be brief to get to questions. §230 is the most important law protecting internet speech. Removing §230 will remove speech from the internet.

§230 gave internet services two important tools. The first provides immunity from liability for user’s content. The second provides “Good Samaritan” protections for content moderation and removal, even of constitutionally protected speech, as long as it’s done “in good faith.”

That concept of “good faith” is what’s being challenged by many of you today. Some of you don’t trust we’re acting in good faith. That’s the problem I want to focus on solving. How do services like Twitter earn your trust? How do we ensure more choice in the market if we don’t?

There are three solutions we’d like to propose to address the concerns raised, all focused on services that decide to moderate or remove content. They could be expansions to §230, new legislative frameworks, or a commitment to industry wide self-regulation best practices.

The first is requiring a service’s moderation process to be published. How are cases reported and reviewed? How are decisions made? What tools are used to enforce? Publishing answers to questions like these will make our process more robust and accountable to the people we serve.

I think the most common question I get asked is what exactly is a Technical Experience Designer? When we say Experience we’re referring to UX or User Experience, so let’s break it down. 1/8

When we talk about experience design, the majority of the time we are talking about UI. Examples are things like the HUD, or the settings screen. However this discipline also extends beyond UI into things like user flows, first time boot ups, and such. 2/8

To make a UI in a game the following people typically are involved: Experience Designers, Technical Experience Designers, Programmers, and UI Artists. 3/8

An Experience Designer is likely the one you’re most familiar with. They create wireframes and design documentation for features. They also may work closely with groups like user experience research, data specialists, and various feature owners. 4/8

Okay but what exactly is a Technical Experience Designer then? Well they take those wireframes and design documentation and create it in game. They work with the Experience Designer and try to implement the most performant and best feeling version possible. 5/8