solstice (u/solstice)

solstice commented on Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking? torrentfreak.com/uk-govt-... · Posted by u/gloxkiqcza

Flere-Imsaho · 6 days ago

Interesting - thanks. It looks like at least the Android and iOS apps have been updated in the last few days - so it is under active development:

https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios

Doesn't work with all email providers though, from their FAQ:

https://providers.delta.chat/

Proton mail isn't supported (I'm guessing because of the way Proton encrypts your email at rest?).

solstice · 6 days ago

AFAIK they recommend using a dedicated chatmail-enabled provider to avoid problems with using a "normal" email provider.

https://delta.chat/en/chatmail

solstice commented on Million Times Million susam.net/million-times-m... · Posted by u/susam

scotty79 · 2 months ago

Pretty much all of continental Europe is on long scale. In computing it's masked by SI prefixes. Nobody talks about billion bytes whatever it means.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/ES...

solstice · 2 months ago

Would be cool to use "ten giga-euros" to express "10 billion €". A bit like giga-gram in ... astronomy?

solstice commented on Million Times Million susam.net/million-times-m... · Posted by u/susam

flysand7 · 2 months ago

I'm kinda wondering are there any countries that still use the long scale nowadays? For me the biggest thing I've had to learn is that in Russian we use a short scale, except we don't have "billion" and instead it's "milliard". So it's just that you need to be careful with translating that one word. Are there other countries where the scale "shifts"?

solstice · 2 months ago

Germany and France do. It can be a PITA when dealing with English texts... But then again when dealing with things in an international context you'll also encounter Chinese and Indian systems for large numbers.

Chinese:

  1 yi
  10 shi
  100 bai
  1000 qian
  10000 wan
  10 x 10000 shi wan (hundred thousand)
  100 x 10000 bai wan (one million)
  1000 x 10000 qian wan (ten million)
  1 x 100.000.000 yì (hundred million)
  10 x 100.000.000 shi yi (one billion)

Indian: no idea how it works in practice but it involves crore and lakh...

solstice commented on Spain and Brazil push global action to tax the super-rich and curb inequality news.un.org/en/story/2025... · Posted by u/Traces

solstice · 2 months ago

Trevor Noah had a good take on the absurdity of stocks and unrealised gains with their Schrödinger's-cat-like qualities: https://youtu.be/Gqlbn2nPO-A?t=84

solstice commented on Fossify – A suite of open-source, ad-free apps github.com/FossifyOrg... · Posted by u/jalict

komali2 · 2 months ago

My phone crashing when I dialed 911 after a car accident was the reason I stopped messing around with android roots and custom roms and whatnot. When it comes to my phone being a phone, I need it to Just Work(tm)!

solstice · 2 months ago

damn, that sucks. I fully agree with the sentiment of your last sentence.

solstice commented on Fossify – A suite of open-source, ad-free apps github.com/FossifyOrg... · Posted by u/jalict

solstice · 2 months ago

I use them and like them. One thing to be aware of with the dialer (that might not be unique to Fossify): when dialing the number of an emergency service (like 112 in Germany), there is no indication in the app's UI that something is happening and it looks as if the call failed and you will be back looking at the dial pad, even though the call will eventually be connected. The reason is that these types of calls get handled by something deeper in the Android system and will show up neither in the "calling" UI of the dialer nor in the list of calls.

solstice commented on Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis default.blog/p/lets-talk-... · Posted by u/greenie_beans

WA · 2 months ago

> And it also sounds like the opening chapter of a story about what happens when an AI finds a nice little unpatched exploit in human cognition and uses that to its advantage.

I vaguely remember an article arguing that companies are basically a form of AI, because in a way, there are processes and systems and the whole thing is more than the sum of the humans working in it or something.

Now replace "AI" with "company" in this sentence of yours and we are already there. The exploits being the gigantic slot machine of social media, notifications, short-form content and endless scrolling.

solstice · 2 months ago

You might be thinking about Charlie Stross' text/speech from 2018 in which he talks about corporations as slow AIs: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you...

solstice commented on Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry... · Posted by u/2-3-7-43-1807

ddahlen · 7 months ago

I work on the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) writing simulation code which predicts which objects we will see. This one has drummed up a bit of interest due to its (relatively) high chance of impact. I actually spent quite a bit of time yesterday digging through archive images trying trying to see if it was spotted on some previous times it came by the Earth (no luck unfortunately). Since we saw it so briefly, our knowledge of its orbit is not that great, and running the clock back to 2016 for example ended up with a large chunk of sky where it could have been, and it is quite small. We will almost certainly see it again with NEO Surveyor years before its 2032 close encounter. I have not run a simulation for it, but I would not be surprised if LSST (a large ground telescope survey which is currently coming online) to catch it around the same time NEO Surveyor does.

Our knowledge of the diameter of this object is a bit fuzzy, because of surface reflectivity, small shiny things can appear as bright as dark large things. This is one of the motivations of making the NEO Surveyor an IR telescope, since IR we see black body emission off of the objects, which is mostly size dependent, and only weakly albedo dependent.

There is an even tinier chance that if it misses the Earth in 2032, it could hit the moon. I haven't run the numbers precisely for that one, but it impacted a few times in some monte-carlo simulations.

If anyone is interested in orbit dynamics, I have open sourced some of the engine we are using for observation predictions: https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete

It is relatively high precision, though JPL Horizons has more accurate gravitational models and is far better suited for impact studies. My code is primarily for predicting when objects will be seen in telescopes.

solstice · 7 months ago

Could we stick an rtg-powered tracking beacon on it during its next flyby so that we can better calculate its orbit?

solstice commented on Forced to upgrade herman.bearblog.dev/force... · Posted by u/SpookyChoice

keiferski · 9 months ago

To play devil’s advocate here, I actually think iPhones have some of the best longevity and resale value, compared to virtually any other product or brand - except perhaps if we go back decades to appliances made near the middle of the century. The fact that a device can be perfectly usable for 5+ years is pretty good compared to most other things I find myself buying and replacing in less time.

Otherwise I think the only real “solution” to this is to rethink your notion of a phone. Personally I tend to use WhatsApp, email, and other non-phone-specific applications, and don’t use the actual phone feature very often. So theoretically I could use any small computing device and upgrade its components as needed, and not need to have a phone at all.

solstice · 9 months ago

That could work (given sufficiently good build-out of the data network), but for the mid-term you'd still need to have a way to receive SMS for 2FA etc.

solstice commented on PRC Targeting of Commercial Telecommunications Infrastructure fbi.gov/news/press-releas... · Posted by u/2OEH8eoCRo0

clwg · 10 months ago

I was working with MISP[0], an open-source threat intelligence sharing platform, and came across a really interesting dataset from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on China's technology research institutions[1]. I liked the data so much I built a quick cross-filter visualization on top of it to help explore it[2].

The data offers a fairly comprehensive and interesting perspective on China's research priorities and organization, I can't speak to the effectiveness of the programs themselves, but it does make me concerned that we are falling far behind in many areas, including cyber security.

[0] https://www.misp-project.org/

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MISP/misp-galaxy/refs/head...

[2] https://www.layer8.org/8541dd18-ff05-4720-aac7-1bd59d3921dd/

solstice · 10 months ago

Two things and one question:

1) While being a fantastic resource to get a first impression of what's out there, the Defense Universities Tracker has not been updated since about 2019. So it is starting to be outdated and anyone using it should be well aware of it. It seems that an update is in an early stage.

2) In order to assess the actual risks, the sources that are provided at each institution's page are crucial. These are ommitted in your version. Please consider linking back to each institutions page under https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/

The question: What is the value added of your page over the official page https://unitracker.aspi.org.au/ ? I only see the map. Am I missing something?