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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.




  • I was a Sega kid in the Genesis generation. A friend of mine got a Saturn and I so desperately wanted to like Nights because it was the thing for Saturn. I didn’t like it at all. It felt hard to control, hard to understand, and was just not pleasant for me.

    Meanwhile, a different friend and I had a blast trading off playing Mario 64. Hands down, way better for a 9 year old me.



  • I think people are placing too much on this. Being registered is just sending a piece of mail with a checkbox checked, I think. You don’t even have to donate or anything. I registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries a long time ago, and I have literally never voted for a Republican candidate for any office.




  • There’s some inherent risk in the ad blocker as well, though. If it’s an extension, you’re trusting that this thing you installed, that can read and modify every website you visit, isn’t going to do anything sneaky. Yes, maybe it’s open source, but every once in a while something sneaks into open source projects, too. It will get caught, but it could be after the damage is done.

    I mean, I use an ad blocker. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to value security and not use one.




  • Investing in a company is, in a real sense, providing them money. Stocks aren’t pretend money totally separate from corporate finances, they are intended to provide capital for expanding a business. If it goes well, the company makes money, the value goes up, and you can sell at a profit. If it goes poorly, you can lose up to 100% of the money you spent to buy the stock. That’s why it’s “investing.” You make it sound like a dog track where the money you put in has no actual effect on the outcome of the race, but that’s not true.

    Even if it were true, where is the line? If I come to you with my meth business, a proven track record, and a high potential rate of return and I just want money to help expand, you would consider that a good business? What if it’s assassination? Suppose it’s a totally legal banana company but also they moonlight in overthrowing democracies?

    It may be that my literal dollar bill that I invest does not end up in the hands of a guerilla, but in helping dump money into the company I am helping enable the behavior. In this scenario, I think figuring out who is legally culpable and should have known is impractical and the risk is too high of innocent people ending up in jail for us to lock up shareholders, but losing the money invested is absolutely a risk you take when investing, and if people lost their money more often they’d probably pay more attention and it would be a net good.


  • I sort of disagree. It should be tackled from both sides. Shareholders do have some culpability for investing in unethical businessed and not doing enough due diligence. Your average person saving for retirement probably did nothing wrong, dumped the money in an ETF or IRA or 401k and the investment company handled it, but the investment company should have been looking at business practices and not solely stock performance.

    Jail time for the decision makers. We already have a way to punish shareholders: Fines on the company. They should just stop being small fines and start at the very least exceeding the amount the company made through crime.

    Jailing the decision makers will discourage crime to some extent. The temptation will still be there to pump numbers and make a lot of money. Hitting investors and investment firms in the wallet will encourage a culture of giving a shit about where you’re putting your money.


  • It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.

    When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

    Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.





  • Level 5: Handle cookies, a local key value store, and a local database internally in a secure way.

    Level 6: If you can’t watch Netflix on your browser it’s probably a non-starter for some users so better figure out a way to include DRM compatibility. But if you do it, the privacy minded will get really upset, so ideally you’d figure out a way to do it in some way that can be easily turned off or removed.

    Level 7: alright, so implementing all of that was hard. But if you don’t implement it in such an insanely optimized fashion that you can win arbitrary script tests that are meant to strain modern CPUs, the audience most likely to use your browser (geeks) will immediately move to something else and say your browser sucks. Get optimizing.