Any time I see people say "I don't see why I should care about my privacy, I've got nothing to hide" I think about how badly things can go if the wrong people end up in positions of power.
The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
You can measure my productivity by how slouched I am.
Sitting up straight at my desk, chair locked, perfect posture? I’m doing nothing, maybe looking through System Preferences to change the system highlight color.
Sliding down in my chair like jelly, with my shoulders where my butt should be and my head resting on the lumbar support? I’m building the next iPhone and it’ll be done by 2 AM.
Google's long term strategy with Android is baffling to me. Apple has had better mobile hardware for years. Apple has higher consumer trust. Apple has better app selection (for most people). Apple has been increasingly implementing the core features that differentiate Android devices, like USB-C and RCS. Every Android user lost to the increasing iOS market share is another customer Google has to pay exorbitant fees to a competitor to access.
And Google's strategy is to continue removing differentiating features from Android that also help them mitigate the threat of antitrust? Surely the marginal revenue from the inconsequential number of sideloading users isn't attractive enough to justify that kind of strategic blunder.
> This doesn’t mean that the authors of that paper are bad people!
> We should distinguish the person from the deed. We all know good people who do bad things
> They were just in situations where it was easier to do the bad thing than the good thing
I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"
In this case, it seems not owning up to the issues is the bad part. That's a choice they made. Actually, multiple choices at different times, it seems. If you keep choosing the easy path instead of the path that is right for those that depend on you, it's easier for me to just label you a bad person.
It reminds me of when Eric Schmidt, then CEO of google, tried that argument about people's worry of google collecting so much personal data. Some media outlet then published a bunch of personal information about Schmidt they had gathered using only google searches, including where he lives, his salary, his political donations, and where his kids went to school. Schmidt was not amused.
I developed and maintain a large and very widely used open source agent-based modeling toolkit. It's designed to be very highly efficient: that's its calling card. But it's old: I released its first version around 2003 and have been updating it ever since.
Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.
Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.
No matter how we look at it, EVs are much friendlier and safer to the environment. Some people argue the source of electricty can be contested against because that involves fossil fuel burning again, but in today's world we are rapidly moving away from it and towards nuclear/hydel/wind methods for generating power.
I hope ICE cars completely become a thing of the past in the next couple of decades to come.
Chenoweth has backed off her previous conclusions in recent years, observing that nonviolent protest strategies have dramatically declined in effectiveness as governments have adjusted their tactics of repression and messaging. See eg https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/07/erica-chenoweth-demo...
One current example of messaging can be seen in the reflexive dismissal by the current US government and its propagandists of any popular opposition as 'paid protesters'. Large attendance at Democratic political rallies during the 2024 election was dismissed as being paid for by the campaign, any crowd protesting government policy is described as either a rioting or alleged to be financed by George Soros or some other boogeyman of the right. This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is to have laws that are virtually impossible to not break.
I hope this gets tested in court and declared unconstitutional for being overly vague and arbitrary. For example, Montana used to have some maximum speed limits that were just "reasonable and prudent", but they were eventually rejected by courts as being too vague (what's prudent to you may not be prudent to someone else). This is similar, in that the FAA has a no fly zone but they don't actually publish what it is.
Catch-22 and 1984 weren't supposed to be instruction manuals.
Telephones only want a twisted pair. Ethernet, popular with businesses for decades, also wants a twisted pair. Now, that pair must meet much stricter criteria to be suitable, such as Category 5 (for 100Mbit) or Category 5e (1000Mbit ie Gigabit) - but it really is just twisted pair cable, merely a tighter specification than your phone.
Suppose you are a sparky (electrician) and you have some jobs where you are to install telephone connections, some where you put in "Ethernet" (presumably 100baseT would be fine) and some they specifically want you to wire for Gigabit.
You could go to your wholesaler and buy a reel of Cat3 phone cable, a reel of Cat5 100baseT Ethernet, and a third reel of Cat 5e Gigabit cable, and take the right one for each job. So long as you do this flawlessly you can probably save a few pounds every year by using a slightly cheaper cable for some jobs.
Or, you can buy one reel of Cat5e and use that for all these jobs and since it's the same reel you can't have the wrong one and don't need to check paperwork to know you've put the correct cable in a duct etc. Thought that was a phone line but now the client insists it's data? No problem, they're the exact same cable, just smile and agree.
When I bought the place where I live now I wanted GigE to this desk, even though the DSL comes into a different room. I didn't love the idea of cutting holes in walls but I was resigned to maybe needing that, except there's a phone extension in this room (like the author says, we do love phone extensions) and so that room the DSL comes into has a twisted pair to here. I opened up the box, and I'm like huh, that's Cat5e, and sure enough this entire building was wired with Cat5e because like I said, why not, it's basically the same cable, why carry a separate reel?
So I changed the face plates from telephone to Ethernet, and I'm done.
Regarding just the headline, at this point it's not really about immigration, this has evolved into a soft civil conflict being waged for political reasons. The two people who have been killed so far were themselves citizens and at best were political dissidents. They were not themselves subject to detainment due to immigration status.
> With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.
Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.
I don't see any iOS advantage with the apps anymore. That was maybe true in the very beginning, during the gold rush time of the app store. But not since then. In which category are there better iOS apps? Browsers? No, strictly worse. Youtube app? No, worse. Texting? Worse or equal (Whatsapp). Podcast client? I assume worse, since there is no Antenna Pod. Social media apps? The iOS variants of those apps are afaik in no way better. What else is there, where is the advantage?
Also, while the Play store is an equally ad-riddled and unsearchable hellhole, at least Android does have with F-Droid a high quality alternative. iOS has nothing.
But sure, removing the F-Droid advantage can only hurt Android, the direction of your comment still stands.
Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality. It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.
> At a news conference, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said the man who was shot was a 37-year-old white man with no serious criminal history and a record that showed some parking tickets. Law enforcement sources said Saturday their records show Pretti had no serious criminal history.
> O'Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.
> Q: Do I have to disclose to a peace officer that I am a permit holder and carrying a firearm?
> A: Yes, upon request of a peace officer, a permit holder must disclose to the officer whether or not the permit holder is currently carrying a firearm.
So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process. (The penalty for permitted carrying without possessing the physical permit card is $25 for a first offense and forfeiture of the weapon; it would've been his first offense per Minneapolis police.)
If ever there was a 2A violation, it's a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
Sounds like ICE's official word right now is that the guy had a gun.
But the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him maybe 4 vs 1, before they all shot him together. I'm not quite sure how a gun can have come out of this. Maybe the guy while struggling on the ground happened to reach in the direction of someone's gun while getting curbstomped, I dunno.
What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases. IE: The Renee Good case has a ton of FBI agents resigning because they've been told to focus on Good's "misbehavior" rather than the ICE Agent's aggression.
It will be up to the Minnesota police and justice system to investigate. We cannot expect anything from the DoJ/FBI here. As such, the prosecution case will be gimped, and I fear we will have nothing resembling justice in this case (or Renee Good's case either).
- If it's an internal project (like migrating from one vendor to another, with no user impact) then it takes as long as I can convince my boss it is reasonable to take.
- If it's a project with user impact (like adding a new feature) then it takes as long as the estimated ROI remains positive.
- If it's a project that requires coordination with external parties (like a client or a partner), then the sales team gets to pick the delivery date, and the engineering team gets to lie about what constitutes an MVP to fit that date.
There's a lot of jeering, I suspect at the headline more than anything, but having documented research can be helpful in changing management behavior. The changes in employee behavior documented here are not ones that managers would easily connect to their past behavior, such as a late birthday recognition.
When you train a dog, you have to give a reward very soon after the desired behavior, otherwise the dog won't associate the reward with the behavior. Likewise, a manager is not going to associate a slight towards an employee with an increase in absenteeism or lower productivity that happens days and weeks later.
This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.
You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts.
This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
Also always keep in mind that what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. This includes things like your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.
Ok it might sound crazy but I actually got the best quality of code (completely ignoring that the cost is likely 10x more) by having a full “project team” using opencode with multiple sub agents which are all managed by a single Opus instance. I gave them the task to port a legacy Java server to C# .NET 10. 9 agents, 7-stage Kanban with isolated Git Worktrees.
Manager (Claude Opus 4.5): Global event loop that wakes up specific agents based on folder (Kanban) state.
Product Owner (Claude Opus 4.5): Strategy. Cuts scope creep
Scrum Master (Opus 4.5): Prioritizes backlog and assigns tickets to technical agents.
Architect (Sonnet 4.5): Design only. Writes specs/interfaces, never implementation.
Archaeologist (Grok-Free): Lazy-loaded. Only reads legacy Java decompilation when Architect hits a doc gap.
CAB (Opus 4.5): The Bouncer. Rejects features at Design phase (Gate 1) and Code phase (Gate 2).
Librarian (Gemini 2.5): Maintains "As-Built" docs and triggers sprint retrospectives.
You might ask yourself the question “isn’t this extremely unnecessary?” and the answer is most likely _yes_. But I never had this much fun watching AI agents at work (especially when CAB rejects implementations).
This was an early version of the process that the AI agents are following (I didn’t update it since it was only for me anyway): https://imgur.com/a/rdEBU5I
There's been a lot of talk on HN about generative AI and how it will be weaponized to scam people and politically for propoganda. That reality got here very quickly.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney, being arrested at a political protest. A half hour later, the official White House X account posted an altered version in which Armstrong’s face was manipulated to make it appear that she was crying.
Wild to see this tech get adopted so fast and so unapologetically used.
Bubble of protection is 3000 feet laterally and 1000 feet vertically. From the article:
“Unlike traditional Temporary Flight Restrictions, the NOTAM does not provide geographic coordinates, activation times, or public notification when the restriction is in effect near a specific location. Instead, the restricted airspace moves with DHS assets, meaning the no-fly zone can appear wherever ICE or other DHS units operate.”
“In practical terms, a drone operator flying legally in a public area could unknowingly enter restricted airspace if an ICE convoy passes within the protected radius.”
Rabbi Haim once ascended to the firmaments to see the difference between the worlds. He first visited Gehenna (Hell).
He saw a vast hall with long tables covered in the most magnificent foods. But the people sitting there were skeletal and wailing in agony. As the Rabbi looked closer, he saw that every person had wooden slats splinted to their arms, stretching from their shoulders to their wrists. Their arms were perfectly straight and stiff; they could pick up a spoon, but they could not bend their elbows to bring the food to their own mouths. They sat in front of a feast, starving in bitterness.
The Rabbi then visited Gan Eden (Heaven). To his surprise, he saw the exact same hall, the same tables, and the same magnificent food. Even more shocking, the people there also had wooden slats splinted to their arms, keeping them from bending their elbows.
But here, the hall was filled with laughter and song. The people were well-fed and glowing. As the Rabbi watched, he saw a man fill his spoon and reach across the table, placing the food into the mouth of the man sitting opposite him. That man, in turn, filled his spoon and fed his friend.
The Rabbi returned to Hell and whispered to one of the starving men, "You do not have to starve! Reach across and feed your neighbor, and he will feed you."
The man in Hell looked at him with spite and replied, "What? You expect me to feed that fool across from me? I would rather starve than give him the pleasure of a full belly!"
Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist.
Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland when you were a graduate student there in the mid nineties. A lot of what you had to say shaped the way I think about computer science. Thank you.
Telekom is a bunch of strange folks.
I lately was not able to send mails, from my private mail servrr to my fathers telekom mail. After investigation I found out my server got blocked. After a decade of working.
I mailed them, and they told me to register my mailserver with them. I shall tell them what mails I will send from there and about what content. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Sure, thats how mail was supposed to work. Register with every mail server in the world, before you can send mail.
Their mail excerpt:
This system has not sent any e-mail to our customers for a long time.
For security reasons our systems will only accept e-mails from such IP
addresses after a check of setup and information about these systems.
Please give us details about this system and the company using it,
tell us all about the sending domain, what type of e-mail will be sent
and especially if you or your customer want to send newsletter give us
detailed information on how recipients e-mail addresses had been
acquired. Who in person is responsible for e-mail sent from this
system (MTA)?
Please be advised that only technically proper configured and very well
maintained systems are qualified for a reset of reputation and please
see our FAQ section 4.1 (Requirements for smooth access to our e-mail
exchanges <https://postmaster.t-online.de/index.en.html#t4.1>):
"There must be a domain and website with direct contact information
easily deducible from the delivering IP's hostname (FQDN)."
The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.