I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast.
Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
Yeah, I don’t have any evidence for this but it certainly would make sense. It seems likely that the US government was catching wise to the data brokering loophole around the same time as the PayPal mafia was cashing out and Thiel would have been in the right circles to run into any well-connected gov’t types sniffing around for the most morally flexible big names in the valley. But it seems equally likely that Thiel just wanted to continue accumulating wealth and power to pursue his other authoritarian projects and the government had the biggest bag of cash around so he worked backwards from that.
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
>When it became cheaper to x did the quality go up?
...yes?
It introduces a lower barrier to entry, so more low-quality things are also created, but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier as well. It's important to note that in FOSS, we (Or atleast...I) don't generally care who wrote the code, as long as it compiles and isn't malicious. This overlays with the original discussion...If I was paying you to read your posts, I expect them to be hand-written. If I'm paying for software, it better not be AI Slop. If you're offering me something for free, I'm not really in a position to complain about the quality.
It's undeniable that, especially in software, cheaper costs and a lower barrier to get started will bring more great FOSS software. This is like one of the pillars of FOSS, right? That's how we got LetsEncrypt, OpenDNS, etc. It will also 100% bring more slop. Both can be true at the same time.
I'd say that those high quality things that still exist do so despite of the higher volume of junk and they mostly exist because of other reasons/unique circumstances. (Individual pride, craftsmanship, people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints etc)
In a landscape where the market is mostly filled with junk by spending anything on "quality" any commercial product is essentially losing money.
>people doing things as a hobby/without financial constraints
Isn't this the exact point I was making...? I get you're arguing it's only a single factor, but I feel like the point still stands. More hobbyists, less financial constraints
The problem is that with the amount of low-quality stuff we're seeing, and with the expansion of the low-quality frenzy into the realm of information dissemination, it can become prohibitively difficult to distinguish the high-quality stuff. What matters is not the "total quality" but sort of like the expected value of the quality you can access in practice, and I feel like in at least some areas that has gone down.
> but it also increases the quality of the higher-tier
I truly don't see this happening anymore. Maybe it did before?
If there's real competition, maybe this does happen. We don't have it and it'll never last in capitalism since one or a few companies will always win at some point.
If you're a higher tier X, cheaper processes means you'll just enjoy bigger profit margins and eventually decide to start the enshittification phase since you're a monopoly/oligopoly, so why not?
As for FOSS, well, we'll have more crappy AI generated apps that are full of vulnerabilities and will become unmaintainable. We already have hordes of garbage "contributions" to FOSS generated by these AI systems worsening the lives of maintainers.
Is that really higher quality? I reckon it's only higher quantity with more potential to lower quality of even higher-tier software.
There's been some talk of people using Starlink to stay online. Is this a practical counter measure, or is Iran just not yet prepared to deal with them?
It's my understanding Iran polices the ISPs, who aren't assigning IP addresses at this time. Iran could treat the dishes as contraband, but short of working with Starlink, is there a practical way for them to prevent satellite internet? You could flood all channels with packets like a jammer or something, but doing that at nation-scale still seems impractical to me? I'm not an expert in any of these fields, just asking really
Iran has deployed jammers for Starlink. It sounds like they got help from Russia and China. They may not be jamming Starlink directly, but GPS that Starlink needs to locate dishes.
Easiest way would be to fly drones or planes around and look for the dishes. Should be possible to receive and triangulate the signals.
The problem for Iran regime is that they are busy putting down the uprising.
> or is Iran just not yet prepared to deal with them? ... you could flood all channels with packets like a jammer or something
A related question that someone here may be able to answer: Who wins the jamming game in principal? Is it $JAMMER or $COMMUNICATORS?
It seems like Starlink could distribute secret codes[0] on each device, where each code is used in some kind of spread spectrum scheme, and that jamming all of the codes would be difficult, the wider the spectrum?
There must be some kind of energy/bandwidth tradeoff, but what I want to understand is if the game is easier for one side in principal.
Just look at Ukraine: drones are using fiber because the jammers are winning. AFAIK jamming is simpler than communication and the jammer can always broadcast just as wide as you can spread a signal.
>Also if someone in another country messages you, if that country’s laws require that Apple provide the name
I don't mean to sound like an Apple fanboy, but is this true just for SMS or iMessage as well? It's my understanding that for SMS, Apple is at the mercy of governments and service providers, while iMessage gives them some wiggle room.
Ancedotal, but when my messages were subpoenaed, it was only the SMS messages. US citizen fwiw
> Apple did not even bother with touch screen laptops on the other hand.
> Windows 8 was Microsoft thinking everyone was going to use touch screens for EVERYTHING and ruining the non-touch screen experience for most.
Did/Does anyone actually use the touch screen on a laptop? Surfaces still ship with a touchscreen, so I assume they've done their market research.... It just seems like the trackpad/keyboard are the better ways to interface with your laptop, especially when it's already built in and not BT accessories or something. I hate to sound like an Apple fanboy but I'd assume the thought process was something along the lines of "Customers want touch screens on phones and tablets, not laptops"
My laptop fills the role of "Desktop computer on the go" and I want it to emulate that as close as possible, aside from form factor. Maybe I'm in the minority there? Others do use a laptop as a primary 'daily driver' and want the touch screen?
I can't imagine my working life without a touchscreen. Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff. I also use business style light laptops, so touch is always there and more usable/precise than the touchpad. People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen for... nothing, usually.
> People always get confused when they ask me for help on their machines and I reach to the screen
Nooooo, please don't touch my screen! I can't stand fingerprints on my laptop display! Pretty much every gesture you mentioned has a touch pad equivalent that works just as well or better for a desktop OS.
> Drag to scroll, touch to focus, pinch to zoom, just the usual stuff
I feel like trackpads do most of the above better than a touchscreen? Mac trackpads, at any rate (I do recall a lot of PC trackpads and/or drivers being hot garbage)
I don’t want a touchscreen laptop, but I do want a laptop that can convert to a tablet. Not to use as a tablet, but because then I can plug in a proper keyboard and just use the laptop as a monitor. If they sold non-touchscreen convertibles I’d go for that, but realistically that’s an impossible niche.
Yes, and this is a huge habit difference between Mac and Windows laptop users I know. Give a Windows user a Mac and they will habitually try to use scrollbars with their fingers. Mac users just don’t have that habit and they find it strange. The reflective MacBook screens also look awful with the slightest smudge so that enforces the “don’t touch” reflex for them, I think.
I don't, but my kids definitely do. I think this is a generational gap largely due to "what you grew up on." A laptop having a touch screen is near the top of the list of very-nice-to-have or even must-have features for my kids
With the continuous degradation of Windows past 8.1, I slowly moved away from Surface, Windows and Touch, but even months after I have got a non-touch notebook, I still would touch my screen.
I do use one that converts to a tablet and has a stylus. But I have to do a lot of serious drawing for a living. I also appreciate coming close to book note taking without having to print stuff.
Yes, quite a bit. Not so much as a replacement for trackpad/keyboard/mouse, but mostly to write down notes with a stylus, or do some quick sketches. I don't do that often enough to justify carrying another device like a tablet, but regularly enough to feel limited by the absence of touchscreens.
I have a Surface Laptop Studio. And while Windows 11 overall kinda sucks, the ability to turn it into a little easel and the responsiveness of the pen are both great. I also like precise scrolling with the touchscreen sometimes.
The part of the hardware I really don't like is that the `Fn` key toggles fn-lock with a tap and then alt + F4 and such don't work. There's enough space to have another row of keys or something, I never want fn-lock off (I use four finger scroll for volume controls), it's infuriating. But pretty much all laptops (and shockingly some desktop keyboards) have similarly dumb behavior.
Depends on how unique your legal name is. Buying your own home as an individual creates a public record with your address and your name. This gets ingested by lots of people search websites like https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ (which I have used). But if your legal name is really common, it would be harder for anyone else to deduce which one is actually you.
For what it's worth, I just searched that site you linked with my name and the zip code I lived in for the first 18 years of my life, and it seems to have a pretty muddled view of who I am. It has my correct age, full legal name, and current address, as well as two of my past apartments and my address for those 18 years where I lived in the zip code I searched, but it also lists my parents current home that they bought over a decade after I had permanently left that state in a city I've never lived in. The landline number it lists is the number my parents had at the house I grew up in, but they don't even use it now, and it wouldn't have been an effective way of reaching me since I used to live at that house, and the mobile number it lists is one I've never seen in my life. For family members, it lists one of my brothers and parents, but not my other brother or either of my two living maternal grandparents, although it has a strangely long list of names I've never heard of, some of whom have my mother's maiden name but aren't my grandparents or any of my relatives with that name who I'm aware of, as well as a bunch of people whose names I don't recognize with last names I'm not aware of being in my family tree.
I'm not saying that site isn't potentially useful as a starting point to find out some stuff, but it hardly seems worth influencing a major decision like what legal entity to purchase a home with.
(edited to add): It also says there's no public record of me being married, which definitely is not the case. My wife literally co-owns and also lives in the house it lists me as living in (and has the correct purchase date for it), so you'd think that whatever algorithm is used to build the dataset would be smart enough to see if there's any other ways we're legally tied together. It also says it doesn't have any records of business associations I have when last year I registered a single-member LLC for contract work last year. The LLC literally has the same name as me followed by " LLC", because apparently no one else had registered that before in my state, which at least gives some evidence that my name isn't overwhelmingly common.
I'm not saying it's not worth trying to buy a house in a way that ensures privacy. I'm saying that there are probably better ways to consider the risks than looking at a site like this when it literally shows more people I've never met or even heard of than people actually related to me.
If someone is concerned about being stalked, they certainly should consider how to protect themselves if they're purchasing a home, but that would be equally true even if sites like this didn't exist. For someone who isn't otherwise already considering using an LLC to purchase a house for other reasons, I don't think a site like this is worth taking into account.
Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast. Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors
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