I think chrome is intentionally providing shitty user experience for the blocking of HTTP downloads on HTTPS pages, in order to push developers to fix it faster.

It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974.
This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate.

When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes yet because they'd just been invented.
Back when this mistake was made, There was only one Phone Company, because they hadn't been broken up yet. Ted Bundy was still on the loose. Babe Ruth's home run record was about to fall.

When this bug was developed, Wheel of Fortune hadn't yet aired. No one had seen Rocky Horror. Steven Spielberg was still a little-known directory of TV films and one box-office disappointment. SNL hadn't aired yet. The Edmund Fitzgerald was still hauling iron ore.

WHEN THIS STUPID MISFEATURE WAS INVENTED, THE GODFATHER PART II HAD JUST OPENED IN THEATERS.

So, why does this happen? So Unix (which was only 5 years old at this point) had the good idea of "everything is a file" which mean you could do things like write to sockets, pipes, the console, etc with the same commands and instructions.

Lockpicking Floppies!

I don't know why twitter is refusing to insert a card for this one. In any case, It's the @LockPickingLwyr, and it's a floppy-drive-lock.

so I've been meaning to do a video or thread on these sorts of locks myself. I have several, of different designs.

generally they're all designed vaguely like this one: it's a plastic insert that goes into the floppy drive, then it has some bit that rotates with the key to hold itself inside.

and they pretty much universally use super-cheap low-security tubular locks like this. You can probably pick most of them with a ballpoint pen

I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...

but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!

and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.

It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.

The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.

I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.

The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"

gonna get in line for the vaccine because I've heard all these urban legends about tracking microchips

and I think I might be able to root it and install Doom

supposedly bill gates is involved, right?
so it's probably like a miniaturized 386 running ROM-DOS.

the doctor walks in, looks down at my charts, and sighs.
"well, the bad news is that you've got the virus. I'm sorry..."
"and the good news?"
"well..."
*at doom's gate starts faintly playing from my

it took them four tries to figure out that I had the virus, because every time they did a nasal sample, the diagnosis machine kept glitching and playing a youtube video

I laugh in the hospital bed while they're like "ma'am sir ma'am sir, please, this is serious: we can't treat you. Our ventilator keeps trying to reboot in to Windows 3.1 and play skifree. we're quarantining you here so you don't spread this DIGITAL VIRUS to other patients"

it's done.

a visual enigma machine simulator: https://t.co/eLE4Sb97HW

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇

By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏

We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.

1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.

There are only 3 real challenges to free speech at the tech level a) the need for CDNs at scale b) distortions of net neutrality c) nation-state firewalls.

All other claims are about social governance on private sites, where applying free speech doctrine is a stretch at best

Baseline free speech has expanded modestly since 1776 or whatever your reference point is.

About 20% beyond core case of government-critical speech in formally public spaces and media I'd say.

You can (for example) have more kinds of conversations in a bar without getting punched or kicked out by other patrons or management. You can teach more things in colleges than 100 years ago.

That's a genuine de facto increase in practical, informal free speech/expression.

But online free "speech" is, as @reneed has pointed out, not an expansion of free speech at all, but an expansion of reach. It is like the secondary freedom of the press to print as many copies as they can afford, not primary freedom to say what they want

If a newspaper wants to print more copies it has buy more printing equipment and front more upfront costs. Reach for a paper publication is not "free", but a function of desired circulation, which in turn is a function of demand prediction etc. But that logic is obscured online.

The vast majority of images are jpegs, which are internally 420 YUV, but they get converted to 32 bit RGB for use in apps. Using native YUV formats would save half the memory and rendering bandwidth, speed loading, and provide a tiny quality improvement. It would also be \

a good path to supporting better video codec still image formats and 10 bit components. You can do it today, but you need to do the color conversion manually in a shader, which can be a big ask for some devs. Defining a FMT_JPEG_YUV that does driver injection akin to the \

external image support on Android could make it much more of a drop-in. Even doing it the hard way seems like it would be worthwhile for web browsers today.

I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.

You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.

Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.

What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.