Self deprecation comes off wrong when it seems like the thing you’re criticizing is actually important, and that you actually believe it.

So it’s funny when the audience knows you don’t believe it’s important, either because everyone agrees it’s not important (“I can’t sing on tune to save my life”) or if it’s a particular example that doesn’t matter (“I’m such a bad mom because [something inconsequential]),” or if it’s a topic that people can see isn’t important to you (jokes about being socially awkward, bad at your job, etc.).

If you’re in one of those lanes, you can go pretty hard on yourself before it seems to go too far.

They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.

By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.

On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.

you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

For what it’s worth, that particular format war, the format backed by more porn studios (HD-DVD) actually lost to the one with less porn backing (Blu-ray). Personally I think that the PS3 tipped things over the edge.

Wasteful of what, though?

If a particular farm can produce 1000 kg of meat and 500kg of bones/other waste in a year by raising female meat chickens, would it be a waste to devote that farm to raising 500 kg of meat and 400 kg of bones from male egg chickens? In a sense, that’s a waste of the farm to produce half as much meat as it can produce through killing chicks.

It’s a philosophical difference on what weight to assign to the lives of chicks, adult chickens, other resources including human labor, etc. The lazy shortcut is to maximize return on dollar investment with no regard for any of those moral, ethical, and philosophical considerations, and that’s what most of the industry does today, but even if you shift to a new moral framework you’ll need to decide how to weight those things.

Dual purpose breeds for both egg laying and meat production are poorly optimized at either. So the industry has moved onto specialized breeds that are best at doing one of them.

Plus raising roosters together is much more logistically challenging than raising hens. So they’d need much more space and much more oversight/labor. So rather than devote some resources to raising males of breeds that are good for laying eggs, they’d rather devote those same resources to raising much more meat from females of meat breeds.

The dude in charge wasn’t even a billionaire. He was just some founder whose company wasn’t doing all that well, financially. I think his peak net worth was something like $25 million, and that was mostly in stock in his doomed company. $25 million is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s also not quite enough money to explain the dude’s arrogance.

Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

Later in article:

Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

I knew they were being cavalier about safety, but didn’t realize they were penny pinching to this degree.

I’m volunteering at an animal hospital.

Animal Hospital?!?

The animals are the patients.

Oh. That makes sense.

A private equity firm bought them to naked short the stock

You just like throwing around words regardless of meaning?

They owned equity, so they were long, not short. They owned a stake so they weren’t naked.

What they did was a simple extraction of value from something they owned, destroying it. It has nothing to do with short selling, and has nothing to do with manipulation of stock trading (after all, they took it private so that it wouldn’t be publicly traded, so there were no public traders to manipulate).

Motorola Solutions is a dominant radio manufacturer in the government/first responder space, as well as major infrastructure providers. Yes, that means cops, but it also means firefighters, ambulances, trains, buses, airports, and any fleet of mobile service for mission critical stuff like electric utilities, telecom, and some aviation uses. Back in the day of trunk radio, it used to be common for taxis, too.

Motorola sold its consumer mobile businesses (cell phones) in 2011 in a spinoff as “Motorola Mobility,” around the time it was shutting down and selling off pieces of its space/satellite businesses, but kept most of its other businesses. Today’s Motorola Solutions is the legal successor to the Motorola that invented the cell phone.

If you’re going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you’re talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they “knew” a tv show was coming before 2022.

Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5

I’m pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.

GNU’s
Not
Unix

not meant to be consistent with the human eye.

Even then, postprocessing is inevitable.

As the white/gold versus blue/black dress debate showed, our perception of color is heavily influenced by context, and is more than just a simple algorithm of which rods and cone cells were activated while viewing an image.

The typical default configuration has the ISP providing DNS services (and even if you use an external DNS provider, the default configuration there is that the DNS traffic itself isn’t encrypted from the ISP’s ability to analyze).

So even if you visit a site that is hosted on some big service, where the IP address might not reveal what you’re looking at (like visiting a site hosted or cached by Cloudflare or AWS), the DNS lookup might at least reveal the domain you’re visiting.

Still, the domain itself doesn’t reveal the URL that follows the domain.

So if you do a Google search for “weird sexual fetishes,” that might cause you to visit the URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=weird+sexual+fetishes

Your ISP can see that you visited the www.google.com domain, but can’t see what search you actually performed.

There are different tricks and tips for keeping certain things private from certain observers, so splitting up the actual ISP from the DNS resolver from the website itself might be helpful and scattering pieces of information, but some of those pieces of information will inevitably have to be shared with someone.

A lot of NIL money during the off-season is booster money, yes. That’s money that basically will only go to athletes signed with a particular school.

But there’s also a lot of NIL money for actual big budget TV/print advertising from national corporations for ads produced by major ad agencies. That’s money that follows the athlete.

Not all of it will follow the athlete to the pros (and not every athlete goes pro), especially since the WNBA seems to have lower viewership than NCAA women’s basketball. But if anyone is gonna be making good money on sponsorships in the WNBA, it’ll be Caitlin Clark.

A zero day is an exploit that has been identified by someone but not yet used.

I’ve always understood that the counting of days comes from the vendor’s knowledge. So any exploit from before Google was aware of the vulnerability would be a zero day.

It wouldn’t make any sense to refer to the days counted from when an attacker first discovers the vulnerability, because by definition any vulnerability in active exploitation wouldn’t be a zero day.

disclosed active exploitation

So, not a fucking zero day.

I’m confused. Isn’t an active exploit that hasn’t been patched yet, by definition, a zero day? So the release of a new patch that closes an actively exploited vulnerability patches a zero-day?

It basically varies from chip to chip, and program to program.

Speculative execution is when a program hits some kind of branch (like an if-then statement) and the CPU just goes ahead and calculates as if it’s true, and progresses down that line until it learns “oh wait it was false, just scrub all that work I did so far down this branch.” So it really depends on what that specific chip was doing in that moment, for that specific program.

It’s a very real performance boost for normal operations, but for cryptographic operations you want every function to perform in exactly the same amount of time, so that something outside that program can’t see how long it took and infer secret information.

These timing/side channel attacks generally work like this: imagine you have a program that tests if variable X is a prime number, by testing if every number smaller than X can divide evenly, from 2 on to X. Well, the bigger X is, the longer that particular function will take. So if the function takes a really long time, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what X is. So if you have a separate program that isn’t allowed to read the value of X, but can watch another program operate on X, you might be able to learn bits of information about X.

Patches for these vulnerabilities changes the software to make those programs/function in fixed time, but then you lose all the efficiency gains of being able to finish faster, when you slow the program down to the weakest link, so to speak.