gsv

I don’t think you are paranoid. This technology is creepy as hell. Almost all cars are connected nowadays and send data back to the manufacturer’s server—visible or not. In the best case it’s just the service history, in the worst case live positions and more. Some cars stop working if the server is shut down *cough. Cameras equipped to unlock based on a face record biometric data. And honestly, would you trust your car manufacturer (!) to handle your biometric data?

From an environmental physics point of view, this is not very weird: Warm air holds more absolute amount of water, leading to stronger downpours and longer dry periods. One could also say, the world is getting warmer and this a little “more like summer”. And strong rains converts to strong surface runoff. In other words: Strong rains causes your streets and fields to flood and that water raises the rivers rather than the soil’s moisture. And there we go: The soil is getting drier although there’s more total rainfall.

With one difference. After merging with text.com they switched to a model with on-device bridges so that the decryption on their servers is no longer needed. Ofc it’s similar if the matrix instance and the bridges run on the own server.

To be fair though, moving personal to institutional knowledge was always a challenge and rarely works really well. While I value apprenticeship a lot (I do science in Central Europe where that is pivotal) I wonder whether it is also a way to move personal knowledge from person to person without ever becoming institutional knowledge. Management didn’t just bury the legacy of Ben, they missed making sure that Ben and Sarah were leaving a manual which cannot burn. We know similar problems because we, as in the scientific endeavour, keep telling people that doing core developments and writing papers about it on half-year contracts in different institutions half a globe apart for a decade is about excellence and learning to become senior rather than a lack of commitment. And we have done so for a long time. But at least juniors, dreaming of becoming a sailor on the research vessel, keep coming.

And after watching ML is exacerbating existing problems in other fields for some years, we start (!) debating whether it might be slowly replacing us, too. But rather than challenging LLMs writing papers so that other LLMs can summarize them for us, we are still thinking about the next paper and how it will be cited most because that is how it always was and will always be.

So it is not just about greed. It is the idea of ever performing better to death and the way we define success. The same reason we self-optimize and love that fitness watch and the paid subscription so much because it helps us building habits and being strong and fit and better rested so that we can work even better. In the end, we must acknowledge that we have been part of it all along and the rest is a mirror of what societies’ rules have become.

What software stack are you running on it though? Asahi doesn’t seem to support the M4, yet.

Exactly at the speed of light, the γ-coefficient would be infinite and so would be the time dialation. The eigen time of the moving person would thus be infinitely slower than the non-moving person. From the perspective of the stationary person, the time of the moving person would stand still and thus the person would never say anything. Very close to the light speed, when the coefficients are large, this problem eases but persists. The stationary person would have to wait for very long (and use a massive Doppler shift of the moving signal) to perceive something. At the end of the conversation, it will have lasted much longer for the stationary person, spending years on this. The twin paradox would basically kick in as well. If the moving person is at a speed too close to the speed of light, the stationary person might die before the conversation is over—assuming the stationary person is not immortal. That is kind of a very slow motion, yes. What a dedication, spending a lifetime on a person who can’t slow down ;-) Funny enough, from the perspective of the moving person, the effect is reversed.

The only thing that really got me going was small applications I had some interest in. Writing games I will not play never kept my interest up for long. So I’ve been building mini tools I used for teaching numerics classes in meteorology (Python, Julia, Fortran, C) or code I would be using for some tinkering with microcontrollers or similar (Python, C++) when using new languages. For me personally, some iconic projects were a CO2 sensor with an attached display, or very simple internal gravity wave ray tracers. But that’s likely not what you’d be interested in. So without trying to suggest specific applications for you (many good examples in the responses :-) I’d advise to do something you’ll have fun with. Get yourself a small project that generates added value for you specifically (and fun is great added value in my eyes).

Link to app repos, both contain the disclaimers: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-ios-wallet-ui https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-android-wallet-ui

Maybe the security expert could read the readmes in the repos first. From the iOS app repo:

The initial development release has reduced security, privacy, availability, and reliability standards relative to future releases. This could make the software slower, less reliable, or more vulnerable to attacks than mature software.

And further:

If you’re planning to use this application in production, we recommend reviewing the following steps: […] The Pin storage configuration matches your security requirements, or provide your own by following this guide Pin Storage Configuration […]

So the text hints not at design flaws but at facts that are already stated in the readme. <irony> Plus, the major source for the article is Pavel Durov, who’s messenger is of course a standard in security and privacy. </irony>

So there seems to be no news but a lot of speculation by Durov instead.

Clouds.

• polar stratospheric clouds play an important role in creating the ozone hole
• the highest clouds on earth are about 80 km high
• in the mid-latitudes most rain is cold rain, that means it leaves the clouds as ice and melts on the way down
• pure water droplets without an aerosol inside (cloud condensation nucleus) freeze at about -40°C, sea salt aerosols make cloud droplets freeze at about -38°C, …

And there’s much more to be found.

I’m glad to hear that lack of time/resources for code reviews are more common. Also for clarification: I was the author and requested reviews by my colleagues. In reverse, I did not receive requests to review PRs so far. Tbh. I would really like such a review culture as it is already standard in scientific publishing and it would have avoided some obvious bugs we did encounter in the past. Having that said, as I did not receive any review at all and I would appreciate low(er) quality reviews better than none.

It was more a question of finding the time within the daily business of doing science. I suppose it is also a culture issue, the priority to do a review is usually low. In other words, there was de facto never a review.

From a scientific modeler perspective: Always trying to do 5 (or 4), but I’m having difficulties getting a culture of reviewing each other’s codes going. Many times I was asked to “just merge” months after submitting a PR. In the context of operational or large community codes, 5 is usually strictly enforced. Weather services don’t appreciate broken code.

Of course one would have to trust Jolla. But then again, isn’t that always the case for everything that isn’t 100% open source? And even then, there could be compromised code somewhere. SFOS is in use for many years, there is an active community around it but the closed source parts of the OS, including hardware vendor drivers, are, well, closed source.

But then that’s just it. Whom do we want to trust? There is no 100% open source phone and SFOS seems the only persistent Linux-based OS for phones around.