eduction (u/eduction)

eduction commented on Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn't Be So Difficult inessential.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/mgrayson

criddell · 3 days ago

I think everything Brent says applies far beyond Mac and iOS apps. The engine + interpreted DSL architecture just makes so much sense.

Are there other examples of software built this way?

eduction · 3 days ago

Electron.

Brent seems to have something else in mind. I think many people would appreciate some other engine+DSL options.

eduction commented on F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/ala... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

jasonlotito · 4 days ago

From the Report:

> The MP initiated a conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers through the on-duty supervisor of flying (SOF). The MA held for approximately 50 minutes while the team developed a plan of action.

"though the SOF" implies a middle-man, but I imagine that's because you don't want literally hook up a conference call directly to the cockpit. That being said, seems like the pilot was effectively on the conference call.

Unless you want to suggest I don't trust the report?

https://www.pacaf.af.mil/Portals/6/documents/3_AIB%20Report....

eduction · 4 days ago

What I said is he was not on the call /directly/.

You can argue over whether he was “effectively” on the call because someone was summarizing it for him per what I quoted.

I just think it’s worth nothing he was not “on” the call the way someone is traditionally on a conference call.

eduction commented on F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/ala... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

SalmoShalazar · 4 days ago

I’m guessing you also didn’t read the report given that he was indeed on the conference call.

eduction · 4 days ago

One clear indication he was not, from PDF p14 (8 as numbered) ("MP"="mishap pilot"):

"At 21:12:52Z, the SOF informed the MP, “Alright the engineers uh are not optimistic about this COA but, extremely low PK [probability kill, meaning the probability this would fix the issue], but we’re going to try anyway is a touch-and-go on the runway, mains only, do not touch the nose gear, uh lift back off in all cases and have the uh have Yeti 4 reconfirm the nose gear position once your safely airborne.”"

No need for this if the pilot was on the call directly.

eduction commented on The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years sigwait.org/~alex/blog/20... · Posted by u/henry_flower

maxloh · 6 days ago

Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though.

I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.

I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.

eduction · 6 days ago

100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.

So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.

eduction commented on Burner Phone 101 rebeccawilliams.info/burn... · Posted by u/CharlesW

schoen · 7 days ago

When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it".

It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see which base station a device is connected to, and which other base stations can see it at a given moment.

If you aggregate all of that data, then you know a (geographically moderate-resolution) complete history of where almost all people have been at almost all times, and patterns of their habits and whom they probably recurrently spent time with.

Not all of this data has to be collectable, because these things could be disaggregated by introducing different protocol layers. For example, you could pay the mobile company for data connectivity, but use cryptographic blinding mechanisms so that it doesn't know which specific subscriber obtained connectivity at a particular place and time. (Those blinding mechanisms could be implemented inside of SIM cards, so the SIM card's task is to cryptographically prove "I am a SIM card of a current paying subscriber of carrier X" rather than "I am SIM card number 42d1b5c0".) You could have device hardware IDs be ephemeral rather than permanent. Actual messaging and call services could all be "over the top" (as phone industry jargon puts it), provided by people who are not the phone company itself.

This disaggregation is a straightforward improvement from a privacy point of view because it prevents companies from knowing things about you that they didn't need to know in order to provide services.

Meanwhile, in the world we live in, we see governments trying to make it harder to make phones less trackable, by putting legal restrictions on changing hardware addresses, or requiring legal ID in order to establish service. I imagine that an additional cryptographic indirection layer in SIMs to prevent carriers from linking a permanent identifier to a network registration (or specific data use) would also be banned in some places if it were invented.

This shouldn't be inevitable. One thing that made me think about this was when there was a little scandal (which I was a small part of) about companies tracking device wifi MAC addresses for commercial purposes. There was a little industry that would try to recognize people and build commercial profiles based on recognizing that the same device was present (in fact, at the time, even if it didn't actually connect to the wifi -- because a typical wifi-enabled mobile device was sending broadcast wifi probe packets that included its MAC address). So Apple was like "this is a bad use of MAC addresses, which only exist to distinguish devices that happen to be on the LAN at the same time, and perhaps to allow network administrators to assign permanent IP addresses to specific devices", and they made iPhones randomize wifi MAC addresses for some purposes, mostly fixing that particular issue.

We could think just the same way about GSM networks: "these identifiers exist for specific protocol reasons; using them for device or user tracking is an abuse that should be mitigated technically".

eduction · 7 days ago

Stellar reasoning.

Did you ever get to the point of hypothesizing good ways to align incentives to make this happen? It is hard to tell (having not thought much about it) whether this is a “smart well meaning engineers need to make new standards” problem, a “we need to harness the power of corporate greed problem,” or something else.

eduction commented on A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website lina.sh/blog/telefonica-s... · Posted by u/shaunpud

eduction · 7 days ago

You seem to misunderstand the word “orthogonal.” Maybe you mean “opposite” or “contradictory.” “Orthogonal” would mean “related to an entirely different topic.”

eduction commented on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year helsinkitimes.fi/finland/... · Posted by u/DaveZale

jfengel · a month ago

NYC has really cracked down on excessive honking. It's nowhere near as bad as it used to be.

Shouting and middle fingers are still common.

eduction · a month ago

What? How? Where I am it is endless. Maybe it used to be worse but I have never heard of or seen someone getting a ticket for it or seen a single sign or heard an elected official so much as mention it.

eduction commented on The jank programming language jank-lang.org/... · Posted by u/akkad33

onionisafruit · 2 months ago

What's the demonym for Jank devs? Janker?

eduction · 2 months ago

Yes but pronounced in the Nordic and Central European fashion (“yanker”)