Last I heard, the QCbros were still trying to find the prime factors of 15.

(I remember using quantum algorithms to find prime factors 25 years or more ago, using the Quantum::Suppositions Perl module.)

I do that on my phone. It's almost as easy to tap an ocr-ed url in my photos app as it is to click a link on a web page.

(On my laptop, I'm just as likely to spend half a day writing a scraper or reverse engineering the javascript and apis to collect a dozen or two urls that I should have just jotted down in my notebook...)

This is probably the best innovation in the last decade as far as I’m concerned.

It has conquered the 20 digit WiFi password in 6 font.

They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.

That's a big deal to some of us.

Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.

> USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.

I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control, and the latest news is that they're still trying / succeeding on some fronts. Please don't reduce such complicated matters to red vs. blue, it's really more complicated and there are no easy solutions anywhere.

> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,

Strange to compare "scares" with a business model that's 20 years old now. Sure the EU is far from perfect but it's like comparing a well known problem to a potential one. One is bad, the other might sucks. It's definitely not equivalent.

> It's definitely not equivalent.

We agree, but not for the reasons you think we do.

Chatcontrol is literally 1984. It's mandated at the provider level. You can't opt out.

You can always chose not to participate in the social media, sharing whatever you do. You can't not participate in chat control. Same same, but different.

You can't opt out because there's nothing to opt out from, chat control is not law, it failed to be approved every single time people tried to bring it up, sometimes it even failed before being voted on (like this last time)

FWIW I didn't say Chatcontrol was good. I'm saying there is a fundamental difference between a potential law versus an existing situation.

But you get that it's still hypothetical at this point, while it's been going on in the US for, what, 20 years now?

> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,

Chat control is an EU thing. The article is about a move to Proton which is Swiss and therefore outside the EU and not directly affected by chat control or other EU laws. Of course the EU might make it illegal for them to supply their services to EU countries, but then no platform anywhere can avoid that problem.

On the whole EU govt surveillance (assuming you live in the EU) is better than EU govt surveillance plus US govt surveillance plus big tech surveillance.

Proton already announced earlier this year that they are leaving Switzerland due to legal uncertainty and relocating their physical infrastructure to Germany, which obviously is in the EU.

Have they moved yet? If not they are not EU yet.

Its also interesting that they have chosen specific EU countries and the differences between countries does matter.

What happens if, as is probable, the EU brings in similar laws?

I mean I don't think anyone seriously thinks the USA doesn't have access to all the EU data.

That's a bold claim, are you implying that encryption is a scam?

All is hyperbole, but given the reach of big tech combined with intelligence gathering it probably does have that access to almost all. Not because of lack of encryption but because there are so many routes to getting that data. The combination of US domination of cloud services with even greater domination of device OSes the US has access to most data if it wants to.

> almost all. ... access to most data if it wants to.

Well that's a quite an important difference.

I do. I think many do.

> They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy

I see, the EU propaganda shows effect. Of course a proponent of the non-elected regime doesn't mind the illegal "chat control" and censorship of any wrongthink facilitated by the Digital Services Act.

Care to elaborate how chat control came into effect?

Last time I checked, it was always rejected, no matter how they reforrmed it. The EU is not one voice, it will always have different opinions. What matters is what's actually voted into law, chat control tried multiple times and it never was.

Also, would you be so kind as to share those wrongthinking related with DSA?

So we an focus on improving things and not bashing on them.

I'd rather Google have my data than the EU

That's a choice. But it's not everyone's choice. And with <waves hands wildly around>, the non-USA choice is rapidly becoming more popular - at least among the people I know and talk to outside the US.

I’d argue the opposite, that the US is moving away from the rest of the ‘free’ world.

‘Free’ meaning not run by dictators.

Dictators typically don't win popular votes legitimately. Dictators typically don't have the courts constantly overruling them.

Europeans tend to have very little idea how the US government functions. Trump is able to do what he does simply because the people voted for a congress that supports him.

> Dictators typically don't win popular votes legitimately.

It also isn’t how you win in the US. The winner of the popular vote was Trump this last round (unlike his first term), but with a far-from-resounding 1.5%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

I'm sure this is trivia on the other side of the world but we learn this in 2nd grade

FWIW, my perspective is from Australia, not EU.

Wow so full speed ahead on Chinese data centers and Russian social media then?

I applaud non-USA people for their dedication to human rights and privacy in their move towards those platforms.

Then again non USA countries like Australians are essentially client states of China, aren't they?

So anyone not aligning with the U.S. is basically in bed with China/Russia?

Huh, where have we heard this before?

Also, the irony here is you not seeing the ongoing Russia-US alignment.

Sorry, can you define non-US for me? Does a Chinese data centre count as a US option, or are people not moving towards "non-US" options?

Let's play the game where you slowly whittle your definition of "non-US" to a set of villages in Iceland and Norway

I'm not sure what your problem is here.

Non-US means anything that is not US. Pickup a map and start enumerating countries, China and Russia are just two of many.

I did. And I chose China and Russia, which is included in non-US.

I'm congratulating clever non-US people by their commitment to privacy and human rights by moving to platforms owned by these countries. What's the problem?

You understand that the set is greater than those two countries, thus you understand the problem already.

Is this new “I’d rather have Chinese my data than US”?

For me, "overindulgent and annoying" is way too harsh. But they feel _sooooo_ slow and I kind of resent "missing out" on the other books I could have read while the audiobook plods along (even at chipmunk 2x babble speed).

I save audiobooks for times when I couldn't have read something else - while doing chores, driving, etc. - so I can avoid that "missing out" feeling.

That to me, feels opposite the the article's advice.

And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.

Audiobooks are awesome because I can listen to them while doing other things like walking or biking or lifting weights. And the best narrators actually improve the books like The Hail Mary Project and Blood Meridian.

If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.

For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.

From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"

Sure, but isn't there still an advantage to this? If two people are silently doing this then they don't influence one another as much, helping find a wider range of solutions as well as identify issues with certain solutions that the other might not have seen.

Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less.

Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.

I had the same thoughts reading this. I think there’s an optimal blend of blurters and thinkers, one isn’t better than the other. I find that I do both, it just kind of depends on my comfort with the subject matter.

Another way to think of it is if you're blurting out your thinking you're reducing redundant work and perhaps inspiring the other person to think of additional solutions that are offshoots of what you're dismissing. I see merits to both ways of looking at this.

Yeah I agree but that's why I think there's a balance. But the context here is the more nervous blurting which I think is going too much in the other direction. We should be comfortable with some silence and thinking.

But everyone has their own personal preferences. Which is perfectly fine too. But I think it's worth mentioning that, as illustrated by the comment, it's typically more acceptable to blurt than think silently. And there's the bias that blurting makes it harder to think silently by thinking silently doesn't make blurting harder (the uncomfortable with some silence part is not healthy imo. Of course long silence is a different issue but we're talking 30-60s)

Probably true for many. When thinking about hard problems I'm usually not thinking in language, at least not the kind we speak between us humans, so it can be incredibly distracting if I have to "translate" back and forth while both thinking and communicating.

> I feel like we’ve been hearing this for 4 years now.

I feel we were hearing very similar claims 40 years ago, about how the next version of "Fourth Generation Languages" were going to enable business people and managers to write their own software without needing pesky programmers to do it for them. They'll "just" need to learn how to specify the problem sufficiently well.

(Where "just" is used in it's "I don't understand the problem well enough to know how complicated or difficult what I'm about to say next is" sense. "Just stop buying cigarettes, smoker!", "Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!", "Just get a better paying job, poor person!", "Just cheer up, depressed person!")

The post discusses that:

Security First

Because the “PII Map” (the link between ID:1 and John Smith) effectively is the PII, we treat it as sensitive material.

The library includes a crypto module that forces AES-256-GCM encryption for the mapping table. The raw PII never leaves the local memory space, and the state object that persists between the masking and rehydration steps is encrypted at rest.

I've bookmarked this for inspiration for a medium/long term project I am considering building. I'd like to be able to take dumps of our production database and automatically (one way) anonymize it. Replacing all names with meaningless but semantically representative placeholders (gender matching where obvious - Alice, Bob, Mallory, Eve, Trent perhaps, and gender neutral like Jamie or Alex when suitable). Use similar techniques to rewrite email addresses (alice@example.org, bob@example.com, mallory@example.net) and addresses/placenames/whatever else can be pulled out with Named Entity Recognition. I suspect I'll in general be able to do a higher accuracy version of this, since I'll have an understanding of the database structure and we're already in the process of adding metadata about table and column data sensitivity. I will definitely be checking out the regexes and NER models used here.

That sounds interesting! I've been thinking about using representative placeholders as well, but while they have their strengths, there are also some downsides. We decided to go with an XML tag also because it clearly identifies the anonymized text as being anonymized (for humans) so mixups don't happen. After reading your comment I think it would also be really interesting to be able to add custom metadata to the tags. Like if you have a username that you want to anonymize, but your database has additional (deterministic) information like the gender, we should add a callback for you as the user to add this information to the tag.

Yep - I totally got that from your original comment.

I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.

¿Porque no los dos?

My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.

Thanks for the sanity/perspective.

[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.

I've heard of aluminium referred to as "Frozen Electricity". (yes, I know, but that's the .au spelling)

Relatively speaking, bauxite is practically worthless. But mix it in with a few gigawatt hours and you get out a fairly valuable commodity.