jpab's comments

I posit that whether a search should be "local" or "global" is much more a factor of what is being searched for than who is searching. If I search for a barber I want local results, and I expect that that would be true for most people. If I search for a weird error message I saw while using my computer I want global results, and again I expect that is true for most people.

If true, then DDG could apply the same heuristics about location-sensitivity for everyone's searches and improve the results for everyone, without any tracking of detailed individual preferences.

You referred to it as "the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research". I don't think it's so surprising that people are interpreting that to mean you think LaTeX is a bottleneck in the research process.

I guess you intended emphasis on the "cost effective" part of the statement, but not everyone will read it like that (I didn't).

For what little it's worth, I had the same reaction as SilasX here; I've just never encountered this usage before, only the "in debt"/"late payment" usage.

Google Drive is a consumer product (+), not really the same use case or target market as S3. Consumers probably don't want to deal with variable charges on their card depending on how many people they shared a file with. Certainly I (as a consumer) wouldn't want to deal with a complicated price model like that.

(+) And business productivity suite product, but I think the same mostly applies there.

I found that curious. Why were the Amish living so much longer than others in colonial times?

From my perspective here in the UK, where the health secretary is making threats to ban all outdoor exercise [1] because some people aren't following the social distancing rules, the Swedish approach sounds far better. At least in Sweden the citizens are being treated as adults, given the data and allowed to use some personal judgement.

Note that I haven't seen any claim from the UK government that the existing rules aren't sufficient as long as they're being followed - a claim which I might find hard to believe but at least would be consistent with threatening a broader ban on outdoor activity. The quote from Matt Hancock is: "If you don't want us to have to take the step to ban exercise of all forms outside of your own home, then you've got to follow the rules." As though we're all school children being told that we'll all get detention if the trouble makers in the class keep acting up.

It feels like the purpose of the lockdown - to reduce transmission rate of the virus - is being forgotten and there is increasing focus on having a list of Allowed Activities and Forbidden Activities, rather than trying to make a consistent trade-off between cost (risk of transmission) vs benefit (health - including, very importantly, mental health effects of retaining or losing freedom, not to mention the more ideological desire to keep some semblance of civil liberties).

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52172035

Oh, and apparently there is something vaguely along these lines already:

https://github.com/rust-secure-code/safety-dance/

I would prefer to see a positive badge for "this project doesn't directly use unsafe" or similar, which maintainers can choose to put in their README in the same way that they currently put build-status, test-status and other badges. The actual badge state is produced by tooling (a CI system) so it stays up to date and you can follow a link to a (tooling generated) report with more info, so it's relatively easy to verify.

Maintainers that don't care don't have to use the badge (even if their project does in fact avoid unsafe), but the choice to include the badge acts as an implicit signal of intent. When I see a crate with green CI status badges (or in this case a green safety badge) that's a signal I can use to help judge whether I want to depend on the crate.

No one needs to be flagged or called out if they're not interested in that aspect of maintainership.

I think the hard part is that actual quality is a spectrum and no-unsafe-at-all isn't necessarily the best goal for many crates. So ideally the badge would show some more granular safety score. But scoring effectively is difficult, and the so is correctly interpreting a heuristic score.

You can't make a sphere entirely out of hexagons; the math doesn't work [1]. In the article they note that they include 12 pentagons too, to solve this problem. Neatly, they arrange to have all the pentagons in areas of water where they presumably won't have to analyse traffic patterns for a while.

(I mention it mostly because I think it's an interesting little mathematical factoid.)

[1] https://math.stackexchange.com/q/2121175

I assume the data storage is on a separate chip which - in the context of this attack - is untrusted. That is, the firmware could try to wipe the data storage too, but that would be relatively easy to bypass and doesn't really gain you anything anyway.

Or from the opposite direction: Only the keys are stored within the trusted part of the hardware; they're the only thing you can reliably wipe.

For #2, how do you avoid recording all the things people around you are saying throughout the day? Custom microphone to minimise picking up surrounding sounds? Some kind of speaker recognition to identify and isolate your own voice (does that work when you have a cold)?

And if you're not avoiding recording other people, how do you succinctly notify everyone in capture range that you are recording them?

This seems problematic from a standpoint of social norms and etiquette. In public/shared space contexts people know they can be heard by bystanders, but that is very different from being recorded and having your utterances indexed for later retrieval.

I agree wholeheartedly with this concern, but I think there is also a counter-argument too. If you assume we're starting from a situation where there is bias, then you probably want to look for ways to reduce that bias. The software may have an advantage here too.

It may be easier to objectively measure and correct for undesired (racial, or otherwise) bias in an automated system than it is to objectively measure and correct for bias in human judgement. And even if it's more difficult to correct for undesired bias in an automated system, at least that correction is more likely to be permanent and applied uniformly, compared to things like giving training courses for humans, which will vary in effectiveness across the recipients of the course, and will need to be refreshed frequently.

There are a lot of qualifications and "maybe"s in that argument though.

I don't think California is the relevant jurisdiction here.

The quote from ZeniMax in the article is "With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas [...]"

Carmack lives and works in Texas. In fact I think (though I don't have a citation for it) Carmack's choice to stay in Texas is the reason Oculus has a Dallas office. Of course Oculus and Facebook headquarters are in California. ZeniMax headquarters (according to Wikipedia) are in Maryland.