Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | HiPhish's commentslogin

What's wrong with two-factor authentication? TOTP work without any network connection and only requires synchronized clocks to work. You could even do TOTP with pend and paper if you wanted (and were fast enough), no computer needed at all.

> My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."

I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you actively want the world to be a worse place because you believe that that is how the world works.


Ironically, the very OP statement is exactly that: trying to make the world a worse place because they believe that that is how the world works.

The solution to avoiding dictatorship is engaging in politics and preventing dictatorship directly through that. Trying to retreat into the (perceived) wilderness and build barriers to dictatorship doesn't really work. But since people drafting that statement don't believe that politics work and it is, in fact, possible to both have a vibrant political scene (we have what, five viable political parties vs the American two?) and not let kids send nudes, they try to drag everyone into the same mind frame.


I think it's vantablack unless you mean like a Starbucks Venti cup of black

much much worse are the ones taking the biege pills, who of course will drag anyone who notices into there world of where which one of 59 shades of biege constitutes the true way into non confrontational , we will escalate and swat you for any hint of agitation while we decide not to decide to not provide the very function they are in charge of,passivity and conformity to bieng childless and into flabby sad kinky stuff. legions of them.

You're giving too much thought into the issue or trying to construct something like a conspiracy out of it.

I sometimes work with people who worked on or at least worked with DRM-like stuff (Trustzone etc.). The people who make those systems and the structures that allow it falls squarely on banality of evil. It is not a big evil org or people with their own evil agendas (unlike Palantir, i think they are the true "ventablackpilled" ones). They are thousands of developers who push JIRA tickets like everyone. Many of them live in the developing world and they just pray to keep their jobs. The reason that big tech attracts developers despite their obvious and much bigger (IMO) evils is the same reason that attracts developers who make systems that can be completely closed down.

Many of the developers are not outright evil either. They sometimes voice their opinion. Their opinion doesn't matter in comparison to the business goals.

Sometimes it is understandable to write blocking software. Not all equipment is sold. Many industrial equipment is leased. So the actual owners want guarantees that their devices cannot be modified by renters.

The amount of info you can extract from an Apple phone or Graphene OS is limited due to same restrictions working in your favor too.

Similarly phones can be locked down due to radio restrictions. Nobody wants infinitely exploitable SDNs in peoples hands. It makes such SDNs a juicy target for enemies like Russia to exploit and turn into scalable attack vector as spoofing and jamming devices.

The reason those are attack vectors is also banal. We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and shitty software with no care for security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it right way". Worse is better. Silicon Valley style scaling up is the goal. Competition is for suckers. All those and every single one of us ate the fruits of shitty hardware and software that are protected by closed down systems. We engineers got the cushy jobs, our business leaders made 10x 100x gains from our work. We either had little voice (because making a big noise is guaranteeing that your cushy job no longer exists) or whatever we had is ignored in the hubris of shipping shit to billions of people.


<< We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and shitty software with no care for security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it right way".

I dunno. By that I mean, I am sure it happens, but I am not sure this is the reason for it. FWIW, I am not an engineer, but I have a window into that world.

In my little corner of the universe, we are going through belt tightening exercises already. So it is an interesting game of less meetings, shoving as much as you can onto others and the classic 'doing more with less'. In other words, even for internal customer's 'doing it the right way' is imply not a priority. On the other hand, getting more people, bigger budgets and somehow money saved is. 'Doing it the right way' is a distant ideal.

All that said, I don't think you are that wrong with the 'banality of evil' thought.


I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.

The implementation might change, but the pattern of absolute control is old as time.

"Implementation details are left as exercise for the reader.

When in doubt refer to the public API as specified in Revelations 13:15-17"


> I am now generating this website with Clojure

As everyone knows, you are not a true lisper until you have written your own static site generator.

It gave me such a great high with how easy it was to add my own "templating engine" on top, implemented all using macros. The downside is that the crash came hard; there is so much more to a good static site generator such as optimizing the output, supporting scoped CSS, server-side rendering of SPA framework components, and of course integration with the Node ecosystem (for better or for worse there is just so much useful stuff). I have since moved over to Astro. It's still fascinating how far I was able to push my own SSG all by myself though.


Heh, inspired by hiccup, I ended up implementing my favorite Clojure templating library but in Nix, exactly for the purpose of static site generation :) Even have a nifty demo of how it looks for that, it basically looks/works the same as hiccup: https://emsh.cat/niccup/examples/blog/

This is awesome, thanks for sharing

Funny, learning Janet I exactly did that. Was quite a fun experience with the built-in PEG, so I did markdown parsing from scratch. Maybe eventually I will be a true lisper (fell in love with Scheme over 20 years ago but could never really use any lisp professionally. Now I at least do some small things in Clojure and babashka. I love babashka)

Oh I've written an SSG in multiple variations of lisp, as well as sh, make, and most other languages I toy around with. It's been a good "kick the tires" project but I think I need a new one.

Yeah integrating NPM is the big one, then you’re whole day converts to recovering from breaches

> As everyone knows, you are not a true lisper until you have written your own static site generator.

I think that part is quite normal. I use ruby for the same purpose, though the only difference is that the code I use is also to be used for dynamic websites at the same time (cgi, rack, sinatra, in theory ruby on rails but I just can't stand rails and DHH these days, so I am in the opposition crowd). Using static websites, though, always feel as if I have significantly less flexibility. I do generate some static .html files as well, but they feel less useful to me, aside from being displayed faster, of course.


I really miss the ability to swap out KWin for a tiling window manager. I'm currently using Krohnkite and it's OK, much better than nothing, but after having used a real tiling window manager the difference is just too jarring. I physically need a desktop which is usable as much as possible both with the mouse and with the keyboard so I have to switch as rarely between the two as possible. Plasma on X11 with a tiling window manger was the perfect combo.

The solution would be either for Plasma to do something like River did [1] and separate compositing from window management, or for Plasma to make it possible to use Plasma widgets in other compositors. As it stands now I either have to make do with Krohnkite or go down the ricing rabbit hole with with River and Quickshell.

[1] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/


Have you tried LXQt? It made things easy for me when Plasma 6 broke a KWin script I was using to improve the multihead experience.

I use LXQt with virtual machines, is it good for using on bare metal too?

I only used it on bare metal, worked fine.

Great for the people who like Twilight Princess, I guess. Personally, I have very mixed feelings about Twilight Princess. I remember the years long hype since its first announcement, I remember the hype around the Wii launch. This was the first game I bought for the Wii. I remember being blown away by it, thinking it was totally worth the wait.

But as time went on I came to realize that it was a hot mess to the point where I had to force myself to finish it. The gameplay itself was fine, as with most Nintendo games, but the content was a hodgepodge of parts that did not fit together. The story was building up this grand mystery with an all new villain, but then none of it went anywhere and halfway through the game the developers just threw in the towel and went "lol, it's Ganondorf again, to save the princess".

The items were mostly just "keys" used for very specific situations and just server to overcome obstacles which were specifically crafted to give those items a purpose (the spinning top being the worst offender).

The wolf mechanic was not really worth using, it was just a worse gameplay experience, so the wolf form was something just to be used when it was forced upon the player. You enter an area, it's all twilight and you turn into a wolf, then you go and collect all the light bugs, turn the area back to normal, and then you can finally play the game proper.

The game was aiming for a more realistic and gritty style after the backlash from Wind Waker, which is what many people wanted. But then they put all those goofy disproportionate character models in the game. It's as if Nintendo really wanted to make a new Wind Waker, but then reskinned the models with realistic and gritty textures. The end result is worse than if they had just made another Wind Waker style game. (and I did not even mind Wind Waker personally, but I do get where people are coming from)

The almost-open world design looked cool the first time around, but the world was just empty. There was hardly anything interesting to do. The same for the dungeons. There are no real puzzles that make you think in the game either, it's just gimmicks and chores.

I think this was the last time I gaslighted myself into liking a game. I had paid 250€ plus 60 € for that game, so of course it had to be good. It wasn't, but it took time to admit it. Since then I have taken a more critical stance towards video games: if it's not fun there is no point in forcing myself through it, I'll just drop it and eat the loss. It's better to wast money than waste both time and money.

Is Twilight Princess a bad game? Not really, there are worse offenders. If you have nothing better it's serviceable, but it just makes me want to play another game. Is it the worst Zelda? No, at least not for me; that time goes to Spirit Tracks, the game that irreparably made me give up on future Zelda forever.


I love Twilight Princess because of this dichotomy. Yes it has all the flaws you have mentioned, but it also suggests at what a Zelda game could look like in an era where people thought that the Zelda series was Nintendo's competitor to games like Shadow of Colossus, ICO, Drakengard, Legend of Kain of the era.

Ultimately, Nintendo realized that that's not the way they want to take the IP. They wanted game-play to feel timeless and take a priority, and the narrative to take a backseat.

It's was definitely the right choice and revived the IP, but despite it's technical excellence and dynamic game-play I can not get into the latest entries.

It's a shame you did not like Spirit Tracks. I found the puzzles to actually be interesting and the boss battles to be the most exhilarating in the series - with a good soundtrack to boot.


I always felt TP fell between two stools; it had to be modified and changed to become a Wii launch title and the direction was fractured because of that.

Had it been the last great GameCube title I think it would have at least been more consistent.


Wow I’m surprised you had such a negative opinion! It’s one of my favorites (tied with Ocarina).

I loved the music, graphics, and darker themes.


I remember being greatly annoyed you couldn’t skip the train rides.

Are you sure that's a fossil and not just a rook that happens to look kinda like a snail's shell?

Finding a chess piece out there would be very interesting

I just want to point out that you can use Tailwind inside your CSS with the `@apply` directive (not to be confused with the since abandoned CSS `@apply` rule). You write your CSS and mix in Tailwind instructions where it makes sense. Example:

    @import 'tailwindcss';
    
    p {
     @apply text-justify;
     @apply bg-slate-300 dark:bg-slate-800;  /* Second rule just for colors */
     display: block;  /* regular CSS */
    }
I used to be a big Tailwind hater because putting all those utility classes as inline styling into my HTML is a crime against nature. But this way I get the best of both worlds. Tailwind is really nice as higher-level building blocks and saves me from writing a bunch of media queries.


> putting all those utility classes as inline styling into my HTML is a crime against nature.

It’s really not when working with components instead of pages, and when working with variables properly


Even with components I prefer what Astro is doing: the component can have a `<style>` tag in which I can add my own CSS. When building the website Astro will know how to transform the CSS so it only applies to that component. This way markup and presentation remain separate even if they are within the same source file.

https://docs.astro.build/en/guides/styling/


> and all of the diabetes.

Can you elaborate please? Type 1 or type 2? If type 1, does that mean your body can now produce insulin on its own? If type 2, does that mean the insulin sensitivity of your cells is now back to normal levels and you could eat sugary food without issues?


Not the OP, but I would guess more likely type 2, and most likely solved while on the diet; not necessarily forever (although maybe when they went away from strict carnivore they didn't return to a mainstream diet and may still be effectively moderating their blood sugar through diet)


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: