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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • Much has been said about the idea of ‘signal leaving UK or EU’. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.

    AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK’s or EU’s regulations than, say, Iran’s or China’s or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.

    Signal’s leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they’d pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).

    If EU tried to do that, it’d just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.










  • There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.

    In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…







  • That was a fairly famous situation. The reporter was very anti-EV, and trashed the car’s crappy range and said it ran out of power on him with no warning.
    Tesla released the logs showing that it popped up low power warnings and suggested places to charge several times, all of which were ignored. When the car reported 0% it was then driven to a parking lot where it drove around in circles (the whole time, suggesting a nearby charger) until it finally shut down.
    The reporter was then fired.


  • I’ve been saying this for a long time.

    There are use cases for the cloud. I put e-mail in the cloud- ain’t nobody got time to deal with providing reliable SMTP or Exchange while keeping spam out. If you have a web app that needs to scale quickly, cloud’s the way. If you’re a startup with limited capital and you don’t want to blow it on a bunch of servers when you’re not sure if you’ll survive more than a year or so, cloud’s the way.

    But Cloud ISN’T the end-all answer for everything.

    If you have a predictable workload, especially one that relies on more expensive cloud services, de-clouding can save you a bundle. Buying hardware can be cheaper than renting it, if only because (think about it) the cloud provider has to buy the same hardware and rent it to you AND make a profit. If you’re going to be around a while, and you expect to use a piece of hardware for its full service life, that makes a lot of sense.