kevincox

kevincox , 10 hours ago

toilet water

FTFY

kevincox , 10 hours ago

They added telemetry. 100% of responses had internet access.

kevincox , 8 hours ago

I’m not an expert on modern alarm systems but it seems that it is very common and fairly inexpensive to have cellular data backup. Not every system has it, but many do. In that case cutting the main connection will likely result in someone appearing on site fairly quickly.

Many cameras also have some form of local buffering. So even if you are gone before someone does show up you still may find yourself recorded.

But at the end of the day just put a bag over your head and you can be gone by the time anyone shows up without leaving a meaningful trace. Other than the very top-end system security systems just keep the honest people honest.

kevincox , 8 hours ago

Tips for being secure online:

1. Use your browser’s password manager to generate random passwords.
2. In the rare case you need to manually enter your password into a site or app be very suspicious and very careful.
3. Never give personal information to someone who calls or emails you. If necessary look up the contact info of who called you yourself and call them back before divulging and details. Keep in mind that Caller ID and the From address of emails can be faked.
4. Update software regularly. Security problems are regularly fixed.

That’s really all you need. You don’t even need 2FA, it is nice extra security but if you use random passwords and don’t enter your passwords into phishing sites it is largely unnecessary.

kevincox , 8 hours ago

You probably mean TOTP. OTP is a generic term for any one-time-password which includes SMS-based 2FA. The other main standard is HOTP which will use a counter or challenge instead of the time as the input but this is rarely used.

kevincox , 6 hours ago

The reason I say browser password manager is two main reasons:

1. It is absolutely critical that it checks the domain to prevent phishing.
2. People already have a browser and are often logged into some sort of sync. It is a small step to use it.

So yes, if you want to use a different password manage go right ahead, as long as it checks the domain before filling the password.

kevincox , 8 hours ago

I don’t think that is quite accurate.

We discovered many more Pluto-or-larger sized things that were closer to the sun than Pluto. It became increasingly obvious that there was nothing special about Pluto and we either needed to add hundreds of planets or “demote” Pluto.

kevincox , 1 day ago

Yup, that “what can I start in 10min” question really ruins a lot of productivity.

kevincox , 4 days ago

Prom is fun. You get to hang out with all of your classmates, ask someone out. A subset of people are always going to go overboard, but keep in mind that you don’t see the “normal” cases. Most people just walk up to someone and ask them out. They find a date from the school or go alone.

I’m from Canada so I don’t know if the US is wildly different, but here it is a bit of a big deal, but I think part of that is what makes it fun, you sort of build a bit of hype around what would otherwise be just another school dance.

kevincox , 4 days ago

FWIW I think it is actually a valuable social skill to be encouraged to ask someone out to prom. A lot of people don’t have many similar experiences throughout their lives.

kevincox , 4 days ago

I don’t really mean literally to practice asking people out. But there are times in your life where you need to ask people for things. It is hard to get over the anxiety, risk of social embarrassment and practice showing confidence (even if you are not). These are valuable skills in all sort of social circumstances.

kevincox , 5 days ago

What I do is take a capture of the page, then if they haggle on the refund I can clearly show that the product is not the one I ordered.

kevincox , 5 days ago

Not to mention that Amazon search is happy to ignore most of the words in your search. So you end up sorting through pages of results that don’t match. Absolutely infuriating and one of the reasons that Amazon is my last choice now. Someone decided that it was unacceptable to show “no matching results” and lost my business.

kevincox , 5 days ago

I thought that was the problem at first too. But unless there are fields that are searchable but not visible at all to end users I have definitely found many cases where the term (and no stemmed version of it etc…) was in the listing.

kevincox , 6 days ago

It’s never too early. If you see an interesting job posting reach out and go thorough the process. At worst you learn a bit about what they were looking for and gain some interview experience. At best you get a job offer. Even if you decide not to take the offer you learn a bit about the positions available to you.

It costs effectively nothing to apply. Just a few hours of your time.

kevincox , 6 days ago

I don’t know why everyone is so negative. The gameplan seems pretty clear to me.

1. Make expensive fancy product. This is effectively a “devkit” that companies can use to start experimenting with AR software.
2. Make lower cost product. There are now a few decent apps available and early adopters will be willing to buy it to be one the leading edge.
3. Now there is a bigger market, leading more companies to be willing to develop apps.

Apple is hoping that this is enough to break the chicken-and-egg cycle. Enough to get a few powerful apps such that more regular consumers will be willing to buy which again increases the addressable market which makes it more attractive to companies.

kevincox , 7 days ago

I am a touch screen enjoyer. At least in theory. I like having time to browse, look at pictures, easy access to customization options and most importantly no feeling of pressure. I am not spending a cashier’s time and potentially blocking someone behind me (at least there is usually less of a line for the self-ordering).

However there are negatives for sure. My biggest annoyance is that these devices are often annoyingly slow and unresponsive. They just display a tiny bit of text and images, they should switch between screens at 60fps, not 2s per click. Also if I know what I want it is often faster to tell the cashier and let them enter the order (on their more expert-optimized and less laggy keypad).

kevincox , 7 days ago

Yeah, I like this style but don’t want their apps installed on my phone. A few places have mobile sites which is excellent, I know what access it has and it is shut down completely when I close the tab.

kevincox , 7 days ago

As I said if you know what you want the cashier is usually faster and easier. However I don’t eat at any single fast food place very often. So even if I know sort of what I want I don’t remember exactly what toppings, flavours and sizes are available. If I was ordering I would probably just pick whatever common order I would expect can work, but I appreciate that I can see a list of options and do a bit of browsing.

kevincox , 7 days ago

Basically yes. But also they can do that via email or web push notifications. Not that I would allow either.

kevincox , 7 days ago

I don’t agree. As a single counter example of many YouTube has a huge wealth of information and content.

Maybe that value isn’t worth the ads, that is much harder to say for certain. But it is clear that there is some valuable information on some sites that are supported by ads.

kevincox , 10 days ago

To buy the next website that people are making fun of him on.

kevincox , 11 days ago

It’s not “inherently insecure” at least not to that degree. (Once could argue that lack of E2EE is insecure.) If you stand up an unrelated instance you shouldn’t be able to access private messages that don’t relate to an account on your instance. So only bugs in your instance, or your conversation partner’s instance, will be able to leak those messages.

kevincox , 10 days ago

Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone’s HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn’t really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.

kevincox , 10 days ago

1. I can usually pull out my phone faster than taking a card out of my wallet.
2. Phone-based cards typically have significantly higher limits than physical cards. (I can tap hundreds of dollars with my phone, only about $100 on my card.)
3. The phone needs to be unlocked which is safer than the card which just needs to be tapped with no other authentication.
4. One less thing to carry around.

kevincox , 10 days ago

I would pay a lot of money to see Nintendo’s conniption over having to allow home brew and non-approved software on their game consoles. I would love to release emulators for older Nintendo consoles for the Switch so that they don’t get to keep charging people again to play old games on newer consoles.

kevincox , 10 days ago

Most credit card issuers don’t issue credit cards to random apps by solo developers.

kevincox , 12 days ago

Actually a sailor makes sales.

kevincox , 13 days ago

I wonder if it could be something like adding a Link: </post/1234>; rel=“activitypub” header or <link rel=activitypub href=/post/1234>. Then a browser (or browser extension) could detect this canonical ActivityPub URL and offer to open it in your configured instance or app. This is basically how RSS feeds work.

kevincox , 13 days ago

Counterpoint: RCS shouldn’t exist either. We should use something that isn’t tied to our mobile service providers.

kevincox , 1 month ago

How exactly does Samsung police this? Surely the repair shop could just… not tattle?

Well there is a contract in place and there would be consequences for not upholding the agreement. Sure, they could probably get away with it for quite a while. But it likely isn’t worth the risk, they would rather just out Samsung as being a piece of shit and go on their merry way.

It would be pretty easy to catch this as well. Samsung can just occasionally submit a phone with a known third party part for repair and see if the expected report comes in.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Is this worse? It sounds pretty similar.

kevincox , 1 month ago

They’ll brick your device if a part can’t be verified so that isn’t much different they destroying. Maybe they don’t require repair shops to hand over personal info, but they do require device identifiers so I wouldn’t be surprised if that is basically identical.

kevincox , 1 month ago

You can make contributes sign an CLA to allow the licenses you need for the console release. Some people may not want to but it seems like a reasonable compromise if you want to support consoles.

kevincox , 1 month ago

I’ll trade rooms with you!

kevincox , 1 month ago

So then don’t buy a folding phone until they make that better.

No one is saying that everyone should having a folding phone. But it seems obvious that the ability to have a large screen that fits in your pocket is a great feature that many people value. There are downsides, but for some people the upsides outweigh them. For other people (like you) they don’t and you can continue to get a non-folding phone.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Yeah, just jump in.

To get started it is best to keep Windows around, then if you need to get something done urgently you can go back to what you know then figure out how to do it in Linux later. Dual-booting is probably the best option if you are gaming as GPU passthrough can be difficult to get great performance. That is the approach I took a long time ago and then at some point I realized that I hadn’t booted into Windows for months and just deleted the partition.

kevincox , 1 month ago

My problem is that I do red, blue, green then can’t think of any more clearly visible colours.

kevincox , 1 month ago

I wonder if it would be better to have a term limit. I don’t really care if you are 125, but there should be a limit to how long you sit there with huge amounts of power. Especially since they aren’t directly re-elected.

kevincox , 1 month ago

I’m sure some people will demand it. But for 99.9% of the population you don’t need 1000Hz content. The main benefit is that whatever framerate your content is it will not have notable delay from the display refresh rate.

For example if you are watching 60Hz video on a 100Hz monitor you will get bad frame pacing. But on a 1000Hz monitor even though it isn’t perfectly divisible. the 1/3ms delay isn’t perceptible.

VRR can help a lot here, but can fall apart if you have different content at different frame rates. For example a notification pops up and a frame is rendered but then your game finishes its frame and needs to wait until the next refresh cycle. Ideally the compositor would have waited for the game frame before flushing the notification but it doesn’t really know how long the game will take to render the next frame.

So really you just need your GPU to be able to composite at 1000Hz, you probably don’t need your game to render at 1000Hz. It isn’t really going to make much difference.

Basically at this point faster refresh rates just improve frame pacing when multiple things are on screen. Much like VRR does for single sources.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Yeah, not only are there a dozen platforms that you need to search but they all suck. I have seen so many instances where people download videos for a vacation and then they can’t be played. I can’t even share screenshots to advertise the shows that you are selling to my friends for free!

Funny enough when I have a video file sitting on my computer it just works, all of the time, super fast. And instead of using services that tell me what streaming platform a given show is on it is easier to use a service that tell me the infohash of the file.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Because some people want to filter it out. So it gets a label.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Because once you have a taste of power you want more. She wants to use her position of influence to propagate her beliefs.

I’d be happy to retire to a small cottage on a private lake, but maybe I just haven’t been sufficiently corrupted by power yet.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Algorithms are like AI but accurate, predictable and usually much faster.

kevincox , 1 month ago

You could go columns for the content, but I think my ideal layout would still have the main content in a single column. I would put all of the chrome horizontally through. For example no header before and footer afterwards, put everything in different columns. Maybe even throw some extra navigation on the screen.

You don’t need to use every pixel, just avoid putting things offscreen unnecessarily.

kevincox , 1 month ago

Oh, flac fixes for HLS. I wonder if github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8722 was fixed. I’ll have to try it out today.

kevincox , 14 days ago

It would be great to have an RSS feed of reports in a community. This way it can be piped into external tools and notification mechanisms.