I hear this commonly about using the words "male" and "female." I think it's unfair. For one thing, the military uses them frequently, and so would veterans. Another reason is that their meanings are age-agnostic which helps to emphasize the intent of the speaker--to differentiate on sex alone, not sex plus age.
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edgineer commented on “Are you the one?” is free money blog.owenlacey.dev/posts/... · Posted by u/samwho
edgineer commented on Therapeutic use of cannabis and cannabinoids: A review jamanetwork.com/journals/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
it is very important to also remind - no amount of alcohol is ever prescribed or sold in the pharmacies. the alcohol was legalized in order to a) reverse the ill effects of prohibition which led to birth of large-scale organized crime; b) to allow regulation of substances innit, as people were dying from bad booze.
likewise, nations may have to legalize in order to regulate the contents of whatever-white-powder users may stumble upon on the street. and let us be honest - no bombs can stop the Fentanil (or rat poison for all I care) from being mixed in.
Doctors sometimes prescribe alcohol and in these cases pharmacies do fill these orders.
edgineer commented on EFF launches Age Verification Hub eff.org/press/releases/ef... · Posted by u/iamnothere
As much as you (and I as well) don't want age verification to involve discussion about kids' access to content because we're more concerned about the surveillance push riding the popularity of that, repeating "it isn't about kids" loudly 3 times doesn't make the (extremely large) group of people pushing age verification for kids disappear.
Telling that larger group their interest just isn't part of the conversation at all excludes _you_ from the conversation rather than changing the focus of the conversation to the other downsides instead of the primary interest others might have.
There are also, concerningly IMO, an extremely large amount of people willing to accept severe surveillance or privacy downsides so long as it helps achieve the goal about kids. To them, the same would in reverse would be "why are you talking about surveillance, the real issue is the kids. Say it 3 times loud, for those in the back!" and the conversation gets nowhere because it's just people saying how they won't talk to anyone who disagrees what concerns should be considered.
I'm sure those people exist, I just never happen to see anything they write online nor meet any of them in real life.
edgineer commented on CATL expects oceanic electric ships in three years cleantechnica.com/2025/12... · Posted by u/thelastgallon
Those are some big numbers. It makes me think of a crazy thought experiment:
How many MW could a container ship carry by literally shipping energy stored in batteries?
As in they fill up entirely with batteries, sail to a desert, plug into a cable to charge on cheap solar, charge up, sail to a population center, plug in to discharge. Repeat.
Ha, that's like the quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
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A proof (visual or otherwise) shows "how" some statement is true, as in how it is built by the preceding truths. But I always wanted to know "why" something is true. For example, a biological cell grows and division happens. I could find tons of literature which talks about "how" this happens, but not "why" this happens. What's the motivation or goal? And why that goal is pursued? What is the force behind seeking of that goal?
On the topic of biology specifically, you might like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
He argues/explains how evolutionary forces become dominant, with much more focus on the why. Why it has come to be that living things grow, multiply, and over time changed in ways that out-succeeded the prior ones, down to the level of DNA--and that these driving forces are manifested by individual genes.
There are countermeasures you can take against timing attacks, pattern analysis, and other capabilities an attacker may have if they control many relays. If you're trying to exfiltrate military secrets to the Russians, you can probably do it, but you'll have to be extremely careful. Your behaviour is as important as the network you use to communicate over, if not more important.
There is no single state actor that has access to all data centers in the EU, though. For some countries, there's barely a state actor that can access all data centers within a single country.
There is no tool that will let you become immune against a theoretical hyper powerful super government that controls all data centers, just by clicking a button. There never will be.
There's some neat math that shows how one could send (radio) signals which are undetectable to an observer. Last I read, the research was in specific, purely theoretical scenarios but the idea is that you could send bit impulses which stay within the noise floor. Transmit with a power less than R^2 (in discrete time and ignoring triangulation and you have to pre-coordinate the timing of the transmissions with your partner via pre-shared one time pad and use plenty of error correction) the enemy observer cannot prove that someone is sending signals at all.
Maybe no such techniques could ever apply to the internet, but I'm not sure it's proven impossible. You would need a well defined threat model but if you can show that your enemy is working with noisy data and strictly in the digital space, I don't see why statistical de-anonymization couldn't be foiled.
edgineer commented on Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago? · Posted by u/ferguess_k
I have never understood why some people want to avoid switching off their computers.
I have stopped using Apple laptops more than 15 years ago and since then I have used only Linux laptops.
I have no idea whether hibernate worked on my laptops, because this is a feature for which I have never felt any need.
I always take care to optimize the boot time on my computers with custom built kernels and carefully selected daemons (and I do not use systemd). For decades, the boot time on my laptops had been of perhaps twenty seconds at most and the biggest delay in starting to use the computers after being powered off is entering a password to unlock them, not the start-up of the OS. Using something like hibernation instead of complete power off would speed up negligibly the process of beginning to work on the computer.
Sleep is just different from shut down. With an unplugged laptop, after an idle period or by shutting the lid, I'd like the machine to save energy. I haven't always taken the steps to prepare for a shut down, saving open documents. I wouldn't like to wake back up an idle machine to see that my programs had all been closed.
And sometimes I'd like to quickly put a laptop into a bag without waking it up just to shut it down first. If I had a way to transition from sleep to shut down I'd use it, but also... this is where I see that if the sleep state were more perfect (used zero energy, zero unintended wakeups), it would obviate my need to shut down most of the time.
Talking about “superior sound quality” in the context of mobile phones isn’t controversial, it’s not like a home-stereo audiophile snake oil debate. It is well known that DACs are an area where mid-range and low-end phone makers have cut corners, choosing chips that are quite flawed for anyone who uses their phone to listen to music where pristine sound quality is valued.
The elephant in the room for me is "microphonics" or the noise piped to your head via the wire any time anything touches it.
You demand higher quality, yet don't care about the loud noise created with every small movement of your body? I have heard this dismissed before as "doesn't bother me" and it's hardly ever mentioned in discussions about good audio vs Bluetooth.
I'm bewildered why wireless audio isn't praised for completely eliminating this source of noise that plagues every wired headphone, earbud, and IEM.