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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure about what the article is referencing, which is probably a little more exotic, but relay attacks are very common against keyless cars. Keyless cars are constantly pinging for their matching fob. A relay attack just involves a repeater antenna held outside the car that repeats the signal between the car and the fob inside the house. Since many people leave the fob near the front of the house, it works and allows thieves to enter and start the car. Canada has has a big problem with car thieves using relay attacks to then drive cars into shipping containers and then sell them overseas.




  • Years and years ago I built my own 16 bit computer from the nand gates up. ALU, etc, all built from scratch. Wrote the assembler, then wrote a compiler for a lightweight object oriented language. Built the OS, network stack, etc. At the end of the day I had a really neat, absolutely useless computer. The knowledge was what I wanted, not a usable computer.

    Building something actually useful, and modern takes so much more work. I could never even make a dent in the hour, max, I have a day outside of work and family. Plus, I worked in technology for 25 years, ended as director of engineering before fully leaving tech behind and taking a leadership position.

    I’ve done so much tech work. I’m ready to spend my down time in nature, and watching birds, and skiing.


  • Some suggestions, either online or local;

    Bookclubs
    Walking groups
    Chess, board games, table top
    Theater groups (meetup groups to go to the theater as a group)
    Escape room group meetups.

    Depending on if you are in a city or a smaller town the locals options will vary. I’d look at meetups site and browse local activities. For most any activity you will find a range of ages, but some will skew more one way than another.

    Best of luck!


  • The article says that steam showing a notice on snap installs that it isn’t an official package and to report errors to snap would be extreme. But that seems pretty reasonable to me, especially since the small package doesn’t include that in its own description. Is there any reason why that would be considered extreme, in the face of higher than normal error rates with the package, and lack of appropriate package description?



  • While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.

    I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.



  • Yeah, this is one of those situations I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, in a perfect world what consenting adults do on their own time wouldn’t change perceptions of their competency or leadership.

    Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and executive leaders do carry the expectation to keep their private lives private, and if something is public it shouldn’t be controversial.

    My two cents is that the guy was naive in thinking this wouldn’t undermines his executive role as leader of a campus. And naivety isn’t a great trait in a leader. But the president shouldn’t have made disparaging remarks about him and should simply have left it at a vague “differences in judgement.”


  • I read a NYT article on this and the videos included them having sex with the pornstars and they also published their own porn videos.

    In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Gow and Ms. Wilson said that they believe they were fired over the videos, which included sex scenes together and with others under the username Sexy Happy Couple. Both said they felt it was wrong for the university to punish them over the videos, arguing that doing so infringes on their free speech rights.

    Mr. Gow, 63, said he and his wife, 56, have made videos together for years but had decided recently to make them publicly available on porn websites and had been pleased by the response. They said they never mentioned the university or their jobs in the videos, several of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.

    The article also includes some basic legal history that doesn’t make it seem like they will have much recourse.

    NYT gift article


  • I look at the long arc of history and see that progress is not monotonic (always increasing or decreasing). We are experiencing setbacks to overcoming our challenges, as have those who came before us. But while we can read about years passing in a paragraph in a history book, we have to live and experience those years. And with all the challenges comes new technology and drive and awareness to solve problems. As unfortunate as it is trouble breeds innovation and commitment to change far better than comfort and easy times.


  • I highly recommend Stephen Tetlock’s book, super forecasting, who is the sponsor of the project you mention.

    One method of forecasting that he identified as effective was using a spreadsheet to record events that might occur over the next 6-18 months along with an initial probability based on good judgement and the factors you quoted. Then, every day look for new information that adjusts the forecast up or down by some, usually small percent. Repeat, and the goal is you will trend towards a reasonable %. I omitted many details but that was the jist.

    Now, that’s for forecasting on a short ish timeframe. There is a place for more open ended reasoning and imagination, but you have to be careful not to fall prey to your own biases.

    This particular forecast of OPs feels like it is ignoring several long running trends in technology adoption and user behavior without giving events that would address them, and forecasts something they care about doing better in the long-term, a source of bias to watch. I tend to agree with you that I think elements of this forecast are flawed.


  • I was unfamiliar with misophonia so I went looking into it. I know it is a poorly studied issue, but I wasn’t able to find any peer reviewed research where children’s noises in general were used or reported as a trigger. I found lots of discussion forums, but that is anecdotal.

    The reason I went digging is because the op describes all children’s noises, happy, sad, whatever, whereas what I read in the literature was very specific noises were reported as triggers. E.g, lip smacking, chewing, pen clicking, etc. In one study, they even used videos of children and dogs playing to help participants calm down and establish a baseline. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227118

    While I’m admittedly ignorant, it seems OP may have a more general aversion to children than I would expect of misophonia given what I’ve read from medical sources.

    I only mention this as a counter suggestion to help op avoid self diagnosing and maybe going down the wrong track.

    I think counseling is warranted to help sort it out.