davidcamel's comments

Two thoughts from reading this article:

1. Yes, "porting attacks" (where an adversary convinces your carrier to port your phone number to his/her own) are a real threat. You can mitigate these somewhat by choosing a carrier that has a relatively strong porting procedure. Project Fi (Google) requires a temporary PIN generated by the user's Fi app, as well as logging in to one's Google account. I don't know what the other carriers require today, but this is less than what I experienced when I ported my number from Sprint years ago for example.

2. The author says that 2FA is overhyped, which is maybe true, but why don't more services allow physical devices (e.g. Yubikeys) to be used for 2FA? Often the phone number is the only choice offered for 2FA.

Similarly, I read the headline and thought, "What kinds of workloads do restaurants run on servers?". Oh boy.

I got really excited about Taskwarrior and set up a server and accounts for all of my teammates. But we quickly found that we were spending more time logging our tasks than we were actually consulting TW for what to do next.

Example:

task add project: support_customer_migration priority: H -- support#XYZ - analyze dependencies for customer X - github.com/repo/issue/number

And yet the comments from her lawyer detail reveal how much money she's donated to which charities. So much for anonymity! Between that, her gender, her home town, and even the name of her lawyer, there's WAY too much PII to pretend her identity is a mystery.

Your comment is super important, I don't think everyone who read it realizes how elusive its warning is.

I'm young and already excuse myself by saying that I don't mind having just one or two close friends. But this is how it starts: we tend to think we can handle being mostly friendless, and yet, as we age, it seems that many of us can't.

Not sure what the solution is, but you've definitely underscored a big problem that I've (till now) underestimated. And I'm sure others have too.

I love how simple this is, but does it support including email attachments? I couldn't determine that based on the content of the website.

EDIT: similarly, does it support MMS in addition to SMS?

This is awesome, I've always wanted something like this. Zoom is the killer feature.

I spent about 15 minutes just having fun with the mood, theme, artwork, and "feel" of the game. I had intended to spend two minutes tops. This is an engrossing and genuinely wonderful game :-).

Weizenbaum's rhetoric is powerful, especially during his takedown of "if I don't do it, someone else will". Although I think his view is from a pretty "high" technological perspective . . . his warnings probably don't apply to those of us who are working on less impactful software/engineering pursuits than the ones he describes.

Also, his argument that computers have been a force for conservatism is new to me. I'm not sure how true that is today.

When I look at downloaded minified JS files in my browser's dev tools, there's a button to de-minify/pretty-print the JS.

What is the advantage of the source map?

I majored in math in undergrad, and I always daydreamed about solving difficult mathematical problems despite a lack of formal training. I even had a teacher that I had to "pretend to understand".

Seeing a real-world example of this fantasy come true is fascinating. The article was also surprisingly well-written; most mention of higher mathematics in the media is oversimplified to death, but this was an honest and yet approachable presentation of the Rota conjecture (now theorem).

By the way, here's another result on chromatic polynomials (proved first by I don't know, but re-discovered by my combinatorics class):

Define a "gluing" operation by taking two graphs and connecting them along a common vertex.

The chromatic polynomial, h(x), of the new graph, is the product of the chromatic polynomials of the subgraphs over x: h(x) = f(x)*g(x) / x.