wanderfowl's comments

I find this response (and the class of responses like it) really frustrating, because it uses a (likely feigned) misunderstanding of the scope of the question to attempt to sidestep the real question. My question for the CTO would be, roughly:

You've now answered "Do your lawyers think you can get away with this?". But the questions you're not answering directly, which I think underlie the 'concerns' you're appreciating our sharing, are things like...

- Does the Bitwarden team see no ethical problems with making proprietary a project which many supported and contributed to explicitly because it was open source?

- Given that password management is explicitly a high-trust enterprise, how does your organization intend to navigate the rupture of trust, and subsequent forks and waves of departure, caused by an open-to-proprietary rugpull?

- Is there something that the community could do together which would help your company navigate through the dire situation you must be in to be considering something like this, without resorting to proprietarization?

I know it's his job as CTO right now to be feigning concern, particularly in forums where you can't close the conversation, but the current approach is basically confirming the worst fears ("They believe they can legally do it, and see no problem with their actions"), and that seems like exactly the wrong vibe for a company whose bottom line depends on users trusting the code and the people updating it.

This is wildly impressive. Thank you for doing and sharing this, and the 1337 on either end is just icing on the cake. It's also a beautiful example of just how broken MD5 is. I wish I'd had this to show my students 3 weeks ago when teaching about collision attacks.

Looking forward to your next project: SHA3-512 :D

Yes, but there are now python interfaces to it which make it so you can script in a more conventional language.

I’m disappointed to hear that, just because it’d be very useful for this to be a thing. But I love the science behind it, and this is the way it should be.

Teaching about language in a university setting, we often talk about various forms of evidence for language-like communication among animals.

As I tell students, I would bet that within our lifetimes, as research continues and our instrumentation becomes better at detecting non-human communication means, we'll finally be able to detect and decode 'language' in a non-human animal which is sophisticated and rich enough as to be impossible to handwave away.

But what I keep to myself is that this kind of discovery, and the cross-species conversations it would prompt, has the potential to change the course of the dialogue on animal rights and what it means to be 'human'. But I suspect it will wind up being largely buried outside of certain academic and spiritual communities, mostly because I don't think parts of our society could handle learning the bovine words for 'slaughterhouse' or 'mourning'.

So, a different-but-related question: Putting aside the desired addictive nature, are there any gamers out there who actually prefer microtransaction-driven loot box mechanics to more conventional item drops?

Or is this just a UX element that most people dislike or don't care about, but some people get badly addicted to?

There's so much argument about gambling, etc, but I'm yet to hear a compelling argument for why these should be allowed to exist, from a game design perspective, short of "we can make a lot of money from gamblers".

That was my very first thought, seeing that image: Ray Bradbury would be absolutely beaming to see it.

This just underscores one of the main things I desire from social media these days: Ephemerality. I wish that social media services, Snapchat aside, started treating content as transient. Services like TweetDelete help, but I can't think of anything I'd say on a Microblogging service that I want to exist in 9 years.

Yes, yes, "everything on the internet is permanent". But every one of my social media streams could benefit from a "Automatically delete after one month" setting.

We grow, we learn. Why not let our social media represent who we are, not who we were?

For what it's worth, this only works if the source of hearing loss is conductive (e.g. eardrum or the ossicles). If your cochlea or any sub-element (e.g. inner hair cells) are damaged, bone conduction will be no different. In fact, the comparison between acoustic and bone-conduction hearing tests is a key element of audiological testing.

I'd love to see a norm develop where the 'authoritative link' to an article is expected to be the most open. So, if there's a closed journal and an Arxiv pre-print, Arxiv gets the link, with the journal's publication status considered 'about the article', but not the thing itself.

I think it moves us towards a clearer understanding of Academic Journal publication as peer review's 'stamp of approval', rather than the explanatory event per se. And this will make easier to move towards long-term, sustainable practices for publication and science.

The writing and research following this quake series has again underscored for me both a) how little we actually know about predicting earthquakes b) and how frustrating that is. You can read every article out there about the things, and each one ends with, roughly, shrug. As somebody who derives a sense of control from knowledge, it's extra terrifying to have something with such a huge potential impact on me completely in the dark.

Yes, my wife and I have gone through three keyboards among our two iPads. The first two I had to pay to replace, the last one, failing less than 6 months after purchase, Apple replaced themselves. Not been a great experience.

Overleaf's fine, but lack of offline editing, and more crucially, trusting my main working copy to live only on somebody else's computer, is a bit of a non-starter for me.

Plus, call me an idealist, but it feels like a huge step back when a device requires a paid web service to do something that's completely free on a real computer. I don't know that "pay somebody else" should be hailed as the solution to "good software doesn't work on this device".

This is great to see, but also really frustrating. I see Apple pushing to make iPadOS feel more 'real computer', but these sorts of basic Unixy workflows still feel very hacky, particularly when it comes time to save things to the 'File system', as it were. I look forward to a day when I can someday actually use things like XeLaTeX and Pandoc on an iPad to accomplish my actual work, but for now, I'm finding myself editing Markdown and TeX now, and compiling later. Not great, but good enough.

I've often wondered whether Apple could do well by doing something similar to Crostini on ChromeOS, to allow these things to actually work as intended, but without impacting security. But that also probably doesn't sell software as effectively, as free software doesn't pay Apple's cut.

We don't know this for sure, certainly, but given that things like social group, race and gender are fundamentally sociocultural phenomena (albeit with some physiological basis in some cases), I would assume that humans will have a considerable advantage. We are natively social beings with decades of social knowledge and learning, whereas these sorts of algorithms are at best seeing these things as epiphenomena in large datasets.

Plus, we have the advantage of understanding what social cues certain speech traits directly 'index', or serve to mark. For instance, I'll bet you can picture a voice of somebody who you could clearly identify as white and male, but who would be exceedingly unlikely to have a long, bushy beard and wear a camoflauge jacket. This is not anatomical, but social, and are not coincidence, but broadcasted social information. Sure, with enough data, we might be able to pick up on these as sort of emergent stereotypes, but we're attuned to such cues through our social experience. And these things are culturally specific, perhaps moreso than a YouTube dataset would be.

I view this as a similar situation to using ML for evaluating things like humor, irony, or aesthetic beauty in cloudscapes: They might be able to bootstrap a model which starts with human judgements, or cluster things in such a way that a 'funny' category emerges, but they're a ways off from understanding the categories themselves, and I think that's relevant.

In both cases, there are a lot of hidden variables. With voice, you miss out on non-acoustic things like beards, cheekbones, and other sorts of face-distinguishing features

With just a face, you miss things like the fundamental frequency (pitch) of the voice, dialect, and other linguistic variables.

In both cases, much is missing, and impossible to reconstruct beyond a stereotype.

This feels very unlikely. Hairs are thin, non-absorptive, and spaced far enough apart to avoid much absorption. Unless it were an exceptionally bushy and thick goatee, I don't imagine there's much effect.

I'm a speech scientist. This paper is a neat idea, and the results are interesting, but not in the way I'd expected. I had hoped it would the domain of how much person-specific information this can deduce from a voice, e.g. lip aperture, overbite, size of the vocal tract, openness of the nares. This is interesting from a speech perception standpoint. Instead, it's interesting more in the domain of how much social information it can deduce from a voice. This appears to be a relatively efficient classifier for gender, race, and age, taking voice as input.

I'm sure this isn't the first time it's been done, but it's pretty neat to see it in action, and it's a worthwhile reminder: If a neural net is this good at inferring social, racial, and gender information from audio, humans are even better. And the idea of speech as a social construct becomes even more relevant.

One thing to remember is that as of a month or so ago, there are serious limitations on the functionality of Linux apps. For instance, accessing your Google Drive files with Linux isn't straightforwardly possible, and another big one for me being that Linux apps cannot record audio. Additionally, backing up the Linux partition wasn't straightforward and wasn't a part of the normal 'Powerwash it and it restores' backup element of ChromeOS.

I tried to use this to reduce my dependence on a MBP, but found a number of these little gaps that just couldn't quite be filled. I'm hoping these get improved with time, but as of right now, it's promising, but not delivered.

Yep, that's fine, but it's not much of a firewall. And unless I'm mis-reading this, this doesn't allow you to combine multiple domains.