TheOperator (u/TheOperator)

TheOperator commented on Rust for Windows github.com/microsoft/wind... · Posted by u/dsr12

bezout · 5 years ago

OT: I must agree about your comparison of macOS and Windows. IMO Microsoft is doing a lot to improve the developer experience. WSL2 is so freaking good. It has its quirks and it has issues with some workflows, but I’m thinking about moving out of macOS after having tried it.

Apple may have the fastest processor, but Microsoft has the most comfortable tools. Both companies are not perfect, but if we must choose the lesser evil...

TheOperator · 5 years ago

Buying Microsoft for it's OS and Apple for it's hardware? What is this opposite day?

TheOperator commented on China wants to build an open source ecosystem to rival GitHub restofworld.org/2021/chin... · Posted by u/donohoe

temporalparts · 5 years ago

The money would only flow there if the services Silicon Valley is producing is worth the money to the purchasers.

None of these transactions are zero-sum and tech isn't the only thing in the world that matters.

TheOperator · 5 years ago

Silicon Valley is infamous at this point for running loss leaders to lock people into their ecosystem with the expectation of being able to milk people dry later. The fact that the services are "worth the money" doesn't mean it's economically in China's interests to allow for easy access to them.

TheOperator commented on Intel Problems stratechery.com/2021/inte... · Posted by u/camillovisini

mountainb · 5 years ago

The US decided that it didn't like all the political disorder that came with managing a large proletariat. Instead, it decided to outsource the management of that proletariat to Asia and the 'global south.' Our proletariat instead was mostly liquidated and shifted itself into the service industry (not that amenable to labor organization) and the welfare/workfare rolls.

There are so many things that the US would have to reform to become more competitive again, but we are so invested into the FIRE economy that it's not unlike the position of the southern states before the Civil War: they were completely invested into the infrastructure of slavery and could not contemplate an alternative economic system because of that. The US is wedded to an economy based on FIRE and Intellectual Property production, with the rest of the economy just in a support role.

I'm not really a pro-organized-labor person, but I think that as a matter of national security we have to figure out a way to reform and compromise to get to the point to which we develop industry even if it is redundant due to globalization. The left needs to compromise on environmental protection, the rich need to compromise on NIMBYism, and the right needs to compromise on labor relations. Unfortunately none of this is on the table even as a point of discussion. Our politics is almost entirely consumed by insane gibberish babbling.

This became very clear when COVID hit and there was no realistic prospect of spinning up significant industrial capacity to make in-demand goods like masks and filters. In the future, hostile countries will challenge and overtake the US in IP production (which is quite nebulous and based on legal control of markets anyway) and in finance as well. The US will be in a very weak negotiating position at that point.

TheOperator · 5 years ago

An IP based economy just on its face seems like such a laughable house of cards. So your economy is based on government enforced imaginary rights to ideas? The proliferation of tax havens should be a sign that the system is bullshit - it exposes how little is actually keeping the profits of IP endeavors within a nation.

There is incredibly little respect for the society owning the means of production in a tangible real sense, instead we have economies that run on intangibles, where the intangibles allow 600lb gorillas like Oracle to engage in much rent seeking while simultaneously avoiding paying dues to the precise body that granted them their imaginary rights. The entire status quo feels like something some rich tycoons dreamed up to sell to the public the merits of systematically weakening their negotiating position on the promise that one day a Bernie Sanders type would descend from the heavens and deliver universal basic income fueled by the efficiency of private industry through nothing but incorruptability and force of personality.

China seems to be successful in part because they have no qualms with flexing dictatorial power to increase the leverage of the state itself. This may be less economically efficient but it means they actually get to harvest the fruits of any efficiency. Intellectual property law? They just ignore it and don't get punished, since punishing them would be anti-trade.

TheOperator commented on Intel Problems stratechery.com/2021/inte... · Posted by u/camillovisini

heartbreak · 5 years ago

> could really hammer the backend dev market

That's worth, what, a few thousand unit sales?

TheOperator · 5 years ago

The point wouldn't be to sell laptops.

TheOperator commented on The Dark Past of Algorithms That Associate Appearance and Criminality americanscientist.org/art... · Posted by u/nkurz

TheOperator · 5 years ago

This article was eye rollingly heavy on moralizing ultimately to only eventually hit on the point that what the algorithms are measuring is the odds somebody will be convicted and not the odds somebody does illegal things. Appearance is known to dramatically affect your chances at trial.

TheOperator commented on Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far? · Posted by u/robotcookies

ATsch · 5 years ago

This reads like an apple user parody.

TheOperator · 5 years ago

I know exactly what he's talking about as somebody who ran a win7 and Linux VM on a 4gb MBA. I had to be incredibly choosy about what I kept open at any given time or my system would keel over. It enforced discipline that I just didn't have normally which helped keep me organized.

TheOperator commented on Signal is having technical difficulties status.signal.org/... · Posted by u/tonymet

ardy42 · 5 years ago

> Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.

Obviously, The Signal team should have done a better job of coordinating the mass user migration with the WhatsApp team at Facebook. Such a failure. /s

I don't get why some people see the need to bitch about Signal at every opportunity. The criticisms are usually unfair (like this one), missing the point, or a self-centered whine that Signal didn't decide to focus on catering to the whiner.

TheOperator · 5 years ago

I have made one complaint about signal in my entire life after the outage hit 9 hours. They did fail. It's just an inconvenient truth thus the character assassination and apologism.

TheOperator commented on Signal is having technical difficulties status.signal.org/... · Posted by u/tonymet

nimbius · 5 years ago

I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this opinion but it needs to be said. Signal has been down for nine hours. the vast majority of people who turned to this platform today as an alternative to Whatsapp or Facebook probably quit looking into it after the first two minutes of that outage.

for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture.

Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting.

Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006.

- Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement?

- Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios?

- Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week?

It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture.

Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS.

A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back.

Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.

TheOperator · 5 years ago

Yup they're already under 99.9% reliability for the year. Never mind WhatsApp this makes them a questionable replacement for SMS. Not only "was" it a disaster for signal the disaster isn't over.

Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.

TheOperator commented on Ask HN: Signal Down for You? · Posted by u/Multicomp

bitcharmer · 5 years ago

Well, this sucks. I just switched from WhatsApp and few days later this. Can anyone here recommend something more reliable?

TheOperator · 5 years ago

Go back to WhatsApp. Signal is crashing because it appearantly went up 5x in userbase. I can't guarantee any other service would cope with such a rapid expansion of their userbase other than WhatsApp.

Or stick it out a little and sms people.

TheOperator commented on Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute button appears to be real and functional electronupdate.blogspot.c... · Posted by u/picture

KraftKacke · 5 years ago

To me it's unfathomable to have such a device around. I even feel uncomfortable with my neighbor having one (which I _hear him talking to).

I assume it's like reading the side effects of medication and think they are other people's problems somehow. How do people trade core privacy for setting the alarm or getting the weather report by voice command. I don't respect them. Same with off the shelf IP cameras in one's bedroom. Hello?

Air gapped speech recognition and FOSS, or this should never, ever become a thing.

TheOperator · 5 years ago

For me what made me give in was realising how useful the features would be in regards to ADHD, allowing for a new input modality that just straight up reduces the friction it takes for me to set a reminder.

It's routine that I will just leave an item and forget where it is several times a day that I take it almost for granted up until it causes me to be late going out the door. Now I can yell "Find my phone" (or wallet, keys, etc) and my phone is there. Yes I could go to my computer, go to the find my phone page, but there's just more friction and these issues happen to me all the time. The more things I link up to voice control, the more options I have in regards to accomplish a task, and sometimes voice is the most efficient means of going about it.

I can get entertainment like a podcast or music without a single screen being involved, which given that I inherently have low impulse control, is a nice separation of things. Or I can again, find my stuff without looking at any screens. Voice input can act as a lesser evil to screens.

Saying to just use FOSS and air gaps, because of how immature such solutions are, is effectively saying you shouldn't use these systems at all. The benefits of using the systems that exist today makes it so that the average person, like yourself, judge me less because I appear more punctual and less forgetful and more productive and better rested and so on. Being human, you are likely to disrespect me for being late and disorganized no matter what my excuse is, whereas you'll only disrespect me for using voice assistants if you know I'm using them, so it's a winning tradeoff. Just like how some will judge me for taking medication but only if they know I'm using it.