Dark_Arc

Dark_Arc, 11 hours ago

The reason the US and Canadian governments are doing this is to stop that $10k car from destroying the auto motive industry in North America resulting in layoffs that make the recent tech layoffs look like peanuts.

I agree we need cheaper EVs in North America, I want one too… There’s an Ars Technica article where Ford basically goes “we thought everyone wanted expensive trucks … we made those electric … we realize we missed the mark, we’re going to work on smaller, cheaper, EVs.” So, they are coming hopefully within the next couple of years.

I’m not sure how important manufacturing still is to the Canadian economy, but for the US economy … trying to protect domestic production is important (and we should’ve done it years ago instead of letting cheap Chinese imports destroy a large amount of the factories in North America).

Dark_Arc, 13 hours ago

Well… That sucks. It looked like a decent update on Dirt Rally 2 as well

Dark_Arc, 1 day ago

Agree on the first part … disagree on the latter.

Joe has invested heavily in domestic production of “the next generation of technology” (chips, solar panels, electric vehicles, etc).

This is in no small part about protecting that … and I don’t think there’s much in terms of negotiating that China could do here.

Dark_Arc, 1 day ago (edited 20 hours ago)

This reminds me of the new game Andrew Gower and his brothers have been working on, Brighter Shores. It’s a pure passion project based on a from scratch game engine that was created to make programming (even massively) multiplayer online games much easier.

The goal isn’t profit but rather, to have fun, and make a cool enjoyable game. He’s said they’ve made more than enough money from the sale of Jagex and RuneScape back in the day (which FWIW, he regrets that sale and a lot of what has happened at Jagex/to RuneScape).

I love to see game developers (and people in general that … “make it” and then go “you know what, I do have enough”).

Dark_Arc, 1 day ago

That sounds like a really cool title for a game if nothing else!

Dark_Arc, 11 hours ago

I think there point is legality is relative … surely what China is doing is legal in China. “Unreasonable” would be a better term than illegal.

Dark_Arc, 23 hours ago

I’m opposed to the idea, we’ve got enough people that think their ideas need to be broadcast to everyone in the world.

Dark_Arc, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

It varies, I think the most important part for any kind of online discussion is to establish credibility based on the argument not credibility based on title or degree.

It’s also important to recognize a challenge on its own merits. I don’t care if you flip burgers at Wendy’s, if you can argue a point on the merits I’ll hear you out (and try to politely explain why you’re wrong – in understandable language – if needed).

I hate the “trust me bro I’m a X, it’s an elite field, it would take years to explain this to you and you wouldn’t even understand anyways” attitude some professionals take. The real experts that I’ve met and I respect can simplify the subject matter they’re an expert of (to be digestible and reasonable to most people) and I aspire to be that insightful.

Dark_Arc, 2 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Any doctor worth their salt is going to be able to answer the question “how do you know that?” way better than “I just do” or “I have a medical degree” and that’s the point; I’ve yet to find a problem space where that isn’t the case. I don’t try to win arguments by waiving my credentials around and I don’t expect people to take my for “my word” just because of my credentials.

There are plenty of people with titles and fancy degrees that are not worth listening to, like the Ohio doctor (that somehow recently got her medical license back) that claimed the COVID vaccine was making people magnetic, Dr. Oz, etc.

Put another way, do you trust the alleged internet licensed electrician that says a ground wire makes you safer but can’t explain why, the alleged internet licensed electrician that says a ground wire is worthless, or the person that says “fuck who I am, ground wires are important because they allow tying things like a metal mixer’s body to an incomplete circuit, so that if the metal becomes electrified the circuit is instantly completed and the breaker trips. Alternatively, the circuit becomes completed when you touch the metal and you might die before the breaker trips. If you don’t have a ground you can protect humans with a GFCI which detects current loss at the outlet and cuts the power locally. However, a GFCI may not detect some situations that a ground wire would resolve, like an arc that makes use of a grounded portion of the appliance and may generate enough heat to start a fire. AFCIs have been created to help detect this situation. However, both GFCI and AFCI can fail and thus a ground wire is still a useful backup option that also has value for some sensitive electronics.”?

Most professionals aren’t going to volunteer all of that, but many will volunteer more and more if challenged/questioned.

For reference, my background is in Software Engineering but my father is an electrician at a factory, and a good friend of mine is a forensic electrical engineer. I have no formal credentials in electrical engineering … but I do know a fair bit about the what and why … because I have been inquisitive, I’ve questioned the experts that I’ve come across to understand their field and learned from them.

Dark_Arc, 2 days ago

Not to mention this was the first 2 years, the years an administration is typically least effective.

If Biden gets years 4-6 with a democrat majority in the house and senate it will be a big deal.

Dark_Arc, 2 days ago

their only hope for a cheap option was artificially doubled in price overnight

Not true.

arstechnica.com/…/ford-rethinks-ev-strategy-is-wo…

Dark_Arc, 2 days ago

I’m waiting on the EV makers to pivot away from huge vehicles (arstechnica.com/…/ford-rethinks-ev-strategy-is-wo…). I’m waiting for better charging infrastructure or at the very least a consensus on what plug is going to be used. I’m waiting for cars to be able to power homes during a power outage.

I don’t think this is far away, maybe 2025 or 2026. However, it’s not a great couple of years to buy right now. As I have a Camry in pretty good condition and don’t drive a ton … I fully intend to wait until I’m really ready to buy. As much as I want an EV, I want a good EV not debt for the sake of an ideal.

Dark_Arc, 2 days ago

If you turn completely around are you going to same direction you were when you started?

I think it’s valid that it’s “completely turned my life around” and “I pulled a 180 and changed my life.”

Dark_Arc, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

I’m with the other person, virtue signaling in words is not helping the issues.

I do not believe the homeless community came out and said “I hate the word homeless, call me unhoused.” There issue is AFAIK with houses, not name calling.

Saying “unhoused people” instead of “homeless people” doesn’t make them sound any more like a person; it’s just a different qualifier.

EDIT: Even worse in this case, there are a number of people that are trying to use “unhoused” to distance “homeless” from the traditional image of an unemployed person that may or may not be asking for money on a street corner. They want to capture people that may have employment but live in a car or something.

Like… This is pretty clearly about the former (someone struggling to make ends meet and begging for moeny), not someone struggling to buy a house.

Dark_Arc, 3 days ago

The term homeless people puts the emphasis on homeless, and allows NIMBYs to forget that these people are, in fact, people.

I really think this needs to be challenged. Sociologists need to prove this actually has some positive effect; I don’t believe it does. Particularly in this case, homelessness was not an offensive term.

We just get ourselves into pointless debates about the politeness of a particular term, people looked down upon for “using an outdated term to talk about the issue” (and patting themselves on the back for “doing something for the issue”), while real people endure real suffering.

I don’t believe anyone is going to suddenly see a person as a person because someone told them “we’re relabeling that.” If they’re the dude in this article, they’re going to roll their eyes and keep handing out fake money until people actually hold them accountable for their bad behavior.

This is not much different than the former University of Akron president trying to rebrand the university as “Ohio Polytechnic Institute” (to community outrage I might add).

The left wing of the US needs to stop relabeling shit and actually do something about it. Even at the local level, we have way too many mayors trying to solve homelessness by spending extra money to make urban design hostile to homeless people. That’s not Republicans, that’s not the labeling, that’s a failure of the establishment to actually address affordable housing concerns and gaps in the social safety net.

Dark_Arc, 8 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

It’s the WSJ, it’s the Fox News of print. It’s going to have that “mostly true, but also any regulation is bigger than life” vibe.

NYTimes reported on different forms of this bill way back in December when things were still in infancy nytimes.com/…/wall-street-housing-market.html

If signed into law, the legislation, called the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 2023, could upend a growing sector of the housing market, and potentially increase the supply of single-family homes available for individual buyers. Homeownership, long a cornerstone of generational wealth in the United States, is increasingly out of reach for Americans as home prices and interest rates soar.

In separate legislation, Representatives Jeff Jackson and Alma Adams of North Carolina, both Democrats, introduced the American Neighborhoods Protection Act on Wednesday. That bill would require corporate owners of more than 75 single-family homes to pay an annual fee of $10,000 per home into a housing trust fund to be used as down payment assistance for families.

The bills were introduced three months after The New York Times published a story examining the impact of corporate-backed investment on Charlotte, N.C., where, in 2022, investors purchased 17 percent of the city’s homes in cash, often outcompeting first-time buyers who rely heavily on mortgages.

Investors buying up 17% of a city with nearly a population of 900,000 people is just nuts. If you say 4 people per household, that’s roughly 38,250 homes.

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago

I can’t read it because of the paywall but IIRC (based on a similar article) that was such a nothing-burger issue.

People turned on an entirely optional (I think off by default setting) for some feature that allowed discovery of users by location … and shocked pikachu they could be tracked or something like that.

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago

Server-side source code is a red herring. It’s meaningless, it can’t be verified.

The latter point is fair.

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago

Cloud source server or open source server, you can’t know what server their running.

Pavel’s whole argument here is basically the same thing for the client; “you can’t verify the build in the app store matches what’s in the source code, so you have no way of knowing it’s actually what you’re auditing.”

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.

Honestly? Because the others are just so bad.

• Element has an extremely clunky UX and uses Electron. The other Matrix app implementations are incomplete buggy messes.
• Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop, uses a messy Electron interface, and lacks a bunch of features/polish I’ve come to expect.
• Discord doesn’t even pay lip service to privacy and uses a similarly doesn’t invest in native apps.
• Threema has been saying that cross-platform/multi-device connectivity is coming for like 2+ years and has had nothing but the most minor of unexciting features added.
• WhatsApp is run by Meta, has a crappy desktop experience, and has had several serious security vulnerabilities.
• Jami is … extremely glitchy.
• Session is basically Signal backed by a Crypto platform.

If someone took Telegram’s UX and feature set and paired that with Signal’s approach of “everything is encrypted”, that would be a winner. I kinda hope someday Telegram just does that and moves everything to E2EE. When Telegram was launched E2EE for group chats/at scale wasn’t really a thing … now it’s not nearly as novel but nobody has deployed E2EE with a feature set like Telegram’s.

It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world.

That’s not even what happens by the way. It’s just that you can spoof a device into random locations and eventually figure out where someone is.

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago

That’s fair … especially in the case of something Telegram like where the server is a major portion of the security model (for non-secret chats).

For truly private E2EE chats though the attacks on Telegram’s lack of an open source server side (and Signal’s presence of one) is fairly meaningless. If the client E2EE is correct and you’re using a reproducible build the server, and even any MITM (man in the middle), shouldn’t matter.

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago

A “toot” isn’t a very persuasive piece of journalism.

I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.

That claim needs a lot more investigation and context. At the very least, it needs investigated by a credible third party.

Also, do you even know what the feature you’re criticizing is? A “channel”? Because it’s not even really a part of the messaging portion of Telegram. It’s basically an in-app blogging platform.

Dark_Arc, 9 days ago

That news article talks nothing about targeting groups unfairly and only talks about removal of extremist activity from what’s a social media platform (which is standard practice for all social media platforms). Specially that article talks about targeting “combating the online propaganda of ISIS, Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham, and Al-Qaeda” which I believe is uncontroversial for all decent and reasonable people.

Dark_Arc, 8 days ago

If that’s your bar for gaslighting I hate to tell you I can just edit my messages all over the place to say things that were never said.

Dark_Arc, 8 days ago

• Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop
• Persistent voice rooms
• Custom emoji
• Animated emoji
• Location sharing
• Chat folders
• Topics/rooms for larger group chats
• Support for larger group chats
• Quoted replies (i.e., quote part of a reply or create an arbitrary quote block)
• Code snippets
• Message forwarding
• Polls
• Animations in the UI
• Detailed custom theming
• Chat room theming
• A content index (e.g., view only the files, links, videos, etc that were sent in this chat)
• Group invite links to people you don’t have in your contacts
• Channels (i.e., micro-ish blogging)
• A nice bot API
• Subjective UI/UX changes to put things in more reasonable places (e.g, why can’t I right click on a chat to pin it in the desktop client, why is the Electron menu bar shown by default)

And probably several other things I’ve forgotten because … basically nobody I know is still using Signal.