At some point, lack of security becomes a feature. A fully secure, locked-down, T2 attested macOS is able to be controlled not just by Apple, but by increasingly evil governments, with no recourse available to users.
Conversely, a Linux system with no verified boot can be easily tampered with without the user detecting it by people lower than the government such as casual hackers. So in a world where your government is going crazy, you're opting for an operating system that can be penetrated with relative ease (e.g. with persistent root malware) both by a non-government hacker on top of a state backed one.
It's not really about supply chain security it's about the hardware itself. PC manufacturers in general just can't keep up since they don't have full control/integration over the hardware stack like Apple does. Also CPU, secure element etc security is limited but Qualcomm is catching up pretty quickly I believe if they aren't there already. We won't talk about Intel and AMD. But that's beyond my knowledge so I can't say anything too specific that's just what I have from general knowledge I'm sure someone will jump in with additional info if needed.
I don't think Apple is particularly any more secure against the US government than Intel is with supply chain vulnerabilities but I have nothing to back that up with aside from vibes.
Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets.
Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.
"Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.
that's not Christian though (in the sense that their beliefs are not scriptural and not subjected to scriptural review)... it's something else, and it's really ugly.
Agreed. The ability to learn new things, and what characteristics their ability to learn has -- that's one dimension that strongly differentiates people in nearly any domain.
But there are other dimensions as well that differentiate people and determine their value to business, like the ability to be handed problems no one else can solve and stick with them through sheer stubbornness until solutions begin to emerge.
(1) directly fund studies and reproductions of studies (promising ahead of time to publish the results, even if negative) targeting the exact issues they're concerned about
(2) writing and publishing extensively to show people the results and help them arrive at a correct interpretation of the data
(3) make a public commitment ahead of time to change opinion based on what the data says, and not to overstate underdetermined theses
... instead of spending money trying to control the political narrative?
That would simply be science doing science -- which has always threatened the establishment because it's accountable to reality, not authority.
Science rightly done never claims authority, just reports on what the data says. Truth is powerful enough on its own.
> I dread the moment my daughters find out about TikTok...
Tell her yourself. Explain why you hate it. And have something better to offer.
If your family culture is different (and stronger) than the culture around you, you have a decent chance at being able to intentionally shape her character.
That's where books and stories come in -- culture is transmitted primarily through engaging stories. My wife and I inherited reading as a top family practice from our parents, and we're passing it along. Every day we read to the kids ... it's been about 14 years now of that. My daughter in particular was deeply shaped by the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott - it gave her a aspirative vision for life, particularly as a future wife and mother -- and her vision transcends her family of origin, in a very good way.
Some of the things my wife and I have provided for our kids:
- lots of bookcases with probably >1500 books (including lots of kids/picture books) - what we've collected over the years
- a family laptop (2012 MacBook Pro) with no internet connection, pre-loaded with Pages, Sheets, Affinity Photo/Designer, a few small games, and some coding tools (Python, Ruby, VSCode, Scratch, etc.).
- Lego Spike and Spike Prime robotics learning sets (with software on an iPad, no internet)
- an upright piano (originally for me, but now they're taking lessons; I got it for $700 at a closeout sale at a piano store)
- a MIDI keyboard connected to Pianoteq running on an iPad in single-app mode with a couple of self-powered studio monitors and headphones
- an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
- Each of them has their own CD player boombox, we have a large collection of CDs
- An iPad with Audible, disconnected from the internet, but with our audio book collection available (over the years, it's gotten into the hundreds of books)
- starting from when they were very young, I've been periodically loading up Cosmic Osmo (CD edition, from an un-stuffed .img file) running on an emulated Quadra 650 in System 7.5.3 on InfiniteMac.org and let them play for an hour or two at a time. This is such a good game for kids - literally black and white (dithered grays), not overstimulating, very thoughtfully built, sparks imagination and curiosity, full of easter eggs.
- some good play equipment and a hammock in the back yard :)
The CD player is the big hit for my 10ish y.o. kids. Physical ownership and control of music is a huge boost for little kids and really suppirts musical exploration.
As an alternative to the VoIP phone: Redpocket has a $2.67/mo plan. We loaded that SIM into a small android phone (Unihertz Jelly phone).
It works great as a home phone but has the additional advantage of being able to wander if a pre-cellularized needs to go somewhere. For example, my 13-year-old takes it when going on a long bike-ride with his friends.
We keep it in our closet and only comes out when needed. They aren't allowed to give the number out to friends.
Well, the point of the landline phone (at least to some parents) is also that it has no screen, and has actual buttons, and stays home... for cell phone, we have prepaid SIM cards that are actually usable (in many EU countries credit doesn't expire and you must just use it every few months to keep them active, not sure about US).
Pretty much all phones have screens, even landline ones. They communicate at minimum caller ID, or what phone number you dialed out.
Using an old flip phone (they still make them that have 4g/5g connectivity these days!) gets you a similar ask, with the benefit that it’s portable if you need to.
This sounds very interesting and very much in-line with what I’ve been musing as a soon-to-be father.
One question that comes to my mind is do your kids compare their experiences to their friends? If their friends have access to a laptop with internet, or a music subscription service with all the music constantly available (a la Spotify), do they not compare and ask you why their experiences must be so limited? Why do their friends get to be on iMessage and they just have a landline phone number.
These are the kinds of questions that worry me about how much the kids can truly buy in to this. But maybe I’m overthinking this.
It can be important to tell kids early that comparisons don't matter, that everyone's diffferent, and that's ok, and every family's different and that's ok.
Depends on personality I guess. That would be sooo unsatisfying to me. E.g. not wanting to accept that languages have exceptions "just because" is what got me interested in historical linguistics as a young lad.
I was more referring to the children that compare themselves to other children, or differences between what they have/are allowed to do and what others can.
It's why I prefaced it with "It can".
Every child is different, but a big impact is every parent who has or hasn't dealt with the normal childhood stuff every parent can have, plus the extra, or latent reactivity can be modelled and passed on.
Yep, we can see a lot of people here have had little experience in raising children. Some will just seem to naturally say "I accept that", and another kid that will be like "f you, I don't do what you tell me" born a year apart and raised in the same household. Nurture can moderate these behaviors, but nature is strong.
We got my daughter an FM radio when she was around 9. Turns out it's a novelty among her friends and she really enjoys using it. I find local commercial radio insipid but apparently the music they play is acceptable to her. The music on broadcast FM is tame enough that I wasn't worried about subject matter.
That sounds super cool. What age range are your kids, and when do you expect them to start pushing back due to peer pressure from friends playing whatever the equivalent of Roblox or Pokemon is when they get there?
One of the secrets to parenting is that kids will rebel no matter what you do. They will push back on something, and giving in means they will push back on something else. Choosing when and what is the complicated part, because it really is simple that you cannot and should not prevent the rebellion.
> an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
That sounds interesting, going to look into it. My son is old enough to be home alone but I don’t want to get him a cell phone yet, but I don’t want to leave him alone without a phone in case of an emergency. Traditional home phone plans from the usual telecoms are way more expensive than I thought they’d be.
What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box? Not even sure what to search for specifically,
> What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box?
I just bought the one from Ubiquiti. No fuss, works out of the box: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/managed-voip/products/ut..., though you do need a separate piece of hardware on which to run the UniFi talk app. For me, that was my UniFi gateway (UXG-Max) - I have a lot of UniFi equipment.
There are others that could work - you can look up UniFi Talk supported devices.
I love this! I'm kind of sad that I'm likely beyond the point where I can ever have kids, but what you describe are absolutely the kind of things I'd want to provide them if I'm lucky.
One recommendation I have is a basic 3D printer and OpenSCAD installed on the family laptop. I can see that opening up a lot of added interactivity with other things like the Legos, robotics, etc.
these are great, thanks for sharing. ive found the tonibox for my youngest (3rd go round) really has helped deescalate tv watching and given us an alternative when they want to watch cartoons.
one question for you; any plans on what you might do when the kids are 15, in highschool and all their friends have iphones?
Gave her a slightly older iPhone and added it to my prepaid plan with AT&T. It's supervised via Apple Configurator, has a password-protected profile created with iMazing Profile Editor.
That profile disables a lot of things - primarily Safari and adding apps. I also have Screen Time set up to block people not in her contacts list - if she wants to add someone, she asks me. I haven't said "no" yet (not that I wouldn't ever).
The idea is less to be restrictive (although that's part of it, for now) and more to give her plausible excuse not to join Instagram/TikTok/whatever - "my dad locked my phone, but you can text or call me". She hates social media, if only from having watched teenagers glued to their phones when she was younger.
I started it in extreme lockdown a couple years ago, and recently lifted a few restrictions. I plan to finally arrive at "no restrictions" by the time she's 17 or so.
It's helped that her mom has zero social media use - she texts, calls, and hangs out in person with people, that's it. I obviously hang out on HN sometimes. (I was on Twitter for a few weeks one time, and my kids complained "dad, what are you doing, get off of social media" :) They also think LLMs are evil, haha
Also -- I told her "you can buy your own laptop if you want" -- and she did. I helped her choose a used MacBook from Swappa.com. It has no internet access, but I gave her a bunch of apps, particularly Scrivener. She is becoming quite a writer (I think up to 15 books now, 2 or 3 are finished). It's quite common to see her tapping away in the living room :)
1. Talk openly and often about how much you hate your phone, how it's addictive, and all the dangers of social media.
2. Consider an Apple Watch with its own cellular plan. This allows them to TXT with friends, call you, and be located in Find Devices.
3. Create a sense of pride in not having a phone. Other parents will openly praise this.
My child doesn't have, and doesn't want a phone. It's been our biggest win as parents.
> Talk openly about how much you hate your phone...
The idea of modelling the behaviour you're trying to teach your kids seems to be a key one as mentioned in this interview with Zak Stein [1]. Obviously the general tone might be a bit too much anti-tech for this forum, but he certainly seems to have some well reasoned points to make and obviously the genie isn't going back in the bottle so working with tech whilst being aware of it's dangers as mentioned in the original article might be the best compromise for now?
Not too long ago, I got unreasonably upset at a streaming service forcing me to watch ads on a subscription plan, so I went out and got a Blu-ray player. I've been periodically visiting my used DVD store, and I've been able to STOCK UP on movies for next-to-nothing. While this isn't the most low-tech solution, it's been kinda fun for someone who spent their youth with CDs/DVDs.
Old CDs and movies are decently cheap on eBay, but local sales (antique stores, library sales, thrift stores, etc.) can be amazing for stocking up on media in bulk.
>an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
Not sure if things are different where you are, but I'm Australia we use PAYG plans through CrazyTel. You pay per minute, ends up costing us like $1.86/mo for our small business
Oil/Gas/Petroleum is essential for our economy to function, and the line between "ethical" and "not ethical" is a dial (one among many that all need to be tuned together), not a switch.
$PTL/Inspire does not adjudicate "dial" ethical issues, just switches -- company practices/policies that it views as black-and-white good/bad. "It would be ethical if you produced N% less" doesn't fit that category.
Most of the examples I provided are due to differing country codes; their site fails to recognize things like Alphabet trading on a Mexican stock exchange is still the same company:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL.MX/
$GOOGL.MX scoring differently than other $GOOGL listings makes me extremely skeptical that humans are diligently creating these scores (finance professionals should've recognized that secondary listings like $GOOGL.MX don't need their own scoring)
Scores on different exchanges may be due to varying behavior by international subsidiaries -- MSFT in Australia may be doing something objectionable that MSFT US does not do, for example. I'm not sure though.
What I think is more likely is that it's a dumb oversight in the web app and/or data - maybe an intern stubbed out international stocks and it got pushed to production
Secondary listings allow entire companies to trade on multiple exchanges (not just corresponding subsidiaries)
So I agree that it was likely just a mistake to list multiple listings of the same companies, but the fact that they usually receive different scores proves their process isn't diligent:
* $GOOGL.MX is dinged for multiple non-Mexico-specific violations that the other listing isn't
I think the pipeline between (1) and (2) is probably tight within the company (probably a few big Excel spreadsheets) and the (2) side has a lot of brains.
But the (1) side needs to do more work on the pipeline between those spreadsheets and the Web, and maybe hire more/better software dev help for that. They'd do better to use Postgres as their source of truth.
> From what I've read of her in the past she seems to be a pretty damn good developer. But in the open source world those are a dime a dozen
Not exactly. Very few people in recent decades have achieved anything comparable to αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε and Cosmopolitan libc - they're in the category of "that should not even be possible". Of course, Tunney's work doesn't touch Fabrice Bellard in terms of sheer breadth and impact, but they're arguably in the same category.
The concept of a polyglot[0] has been around for ages: the Wikipedia page mentions an 8-language one going around on Usenet in the 1990s. If it works for source code, and for scripting languages, and for things like PDF+ZIP, why wouldn't there be a pretty good chance the various executable formats are flexible enough to allow for it too?
A libc which is flexible enough to select specific code paths depending on runtime conditions? Every libc already does this to make use of the latest hardware features[1], using the same approach for platform-specific code isn't a huge stretch - you're basically doing a lightweight WINE.
Her work is definitely impressive, but it isn't magic. You'll see similar stuff if you look into the demoscene, or the IOCCC, or a decent chunk of the talks at CCC. And it's not like APE and Cosmo libc are seeing massive adoption: the people who want portability but can't even compile for multiple platforms are probably happier with something like Java due to the better ecosystem support.
Yes, polyglot binaries are a straightforward extension of the notion of polyglot source code to binary executable files. But APE/Cosmopolitan takes this to insane levels:
- a fully cross-platform libc with cross-platform support built into the output binary, integrated into clang and gcc toolchains
- not just cross-platform, but also cross-architecture: output binaries work unmodified on both AMD64 and ARM64 architectures
- sheer number of executable format compatibilities: it's a polyglot across macOS, linux, windows, 3 BSDs, and a bootable BIOS target
- polyglot not just for executable outputs, but also for PKZIP. You can open and modify an executable using common zip file editors. And post-hoc zipped-in data can be accessed/modified by code in the executable using interfaces in cosmopolitan libc
- Zip polyglot can be used to create portable embeddable code-packaged interpreters where the code being interpreted is loaded/executed from zipped-in data. One example: RedBean is a very high-performance APE-packaged web server that serves data in its zip archive and hosts web service code from Lua scripts in its zip archive. Built-in library enables Lua code to store/retrieve data from zipped-in SQLite databases.
The comparison to the demoscene and IOCCC is apt, but this is at another level because it's all production-ready. The Llamafile format is an APE binary compiled with Cosmopolitan libc with model weights zipped into it.
There's an "ape loader" that speeds up loading the executable on various platforms -- that will guarantee it continues to work, as it can evolve with the platform to continue support for binary format.
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