Greg's recent activity
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Comment on How a WhatsApp group for DC parents broke apart over politics in ~society
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Comment on How a WhatsApp group for DC parents broke apart over politics in ~society
Greg LinkThis is a really interesting one! I think “neutral” was a terrible choice of words, it implies a both sides kind of stance that’s unreasonable to take when one side is transparently evil, and it’s...This is a really interesting one! I think “neutral” was a terrible choice of words, it implies a both sides kind of stance that’s unreasonable to take when one side is transparently evil, and it’s so, so often used as a wedge by fascists trying to suggest that their bigotry deserves equal time and attention.
But it also sounds like, for once, that wasn’t actually the intention here. They don’t seem like they were trying to do the whole “we’re apolitical, and that means we’re equally OK with being either for or against state sponsored kidnapping and murder” thing, it seems like they were literally saying “guys, can we just stay on topic?!”.
I dunno, maybe the article is painting them in too flattering a light, but the original group comes out sounding surprisingly reasonable here. It doesn’t seem like they were trying to dodge taking a stance on issues where there’s an obvious right and wrong, it sounds like they were trying to keep a parenting group focused on parenting.
It does seem like they chose a bit of a shortsighted and easily misinterpreted way to say that though. I’d rather go with an unambiguous “fuck ICE, fuck fascism, trans rights are human rights - now stick to the goddamn topic and talk about all that somewhere else” if it were me.
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Comment on Some of my family members aren't convinced that ICE isn't overstepping and that they are just deporting people that broke the law, can you help me share unbiased links that proves they are? in ~society
Greg (edited )Link ParentI think that reaction means you’re unfortunately fighting a losing battle, in all the ways people have very thoughtfully discussed here already, but I did just see another factual source that made...- Exemplary
I think that reaction means you’re unfortunately fighting a losing battle, in all the ways people have very thoughtfully discussed here already, but I did just see another factual source that made me think of this thread in case it’s helpful to you or anyone else: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4400-times-that-ice-jailed-people-illegally-it-hasnt-stopped-2026-02-14/
Key facts:
- 68,000 people in detention (a 75% increase under Trump, refuting anyone who suggests this is business as usual)
- 20,000 lawsuits filed since October, of which many are still in progress because the courts can’t keep up
- 4,400 ICE detentions ruled to be unlawful so far - this is the big one, for anyone still willing to accept reality. Hundreds of separate judges have ruled thousands of times that ICE themselves are the ones breaking the law, with tens of thousands more cases to go
[Edit] And a preemptive refutation for anyone you might show this to if they suggest that the remaining 48,000 detentions must be justified (or, at the very least, lawful) because they haven’t filed lawsuits:
Judy Rall, the U.S. citizen wife of a Venezuelan detainee who has spent almost a year at the Bluebonnet detention center in Texas, said she was quoted upwards of $5,000 to file a habeas petition, which she could not afford. She and her husband have a pending immigration case based on their marriage, but the government has declined to release him while the case is being adjudicated.
(That person did eventually manage to file a case, after nearly year of detention, when their lawyer agreed to take it on for free. The point remains: finding thousands of dollars or convincing a lawyer to donate their very limited time isn't something that will happen overnight for the majority of victims)
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Comment on Leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand ‘search party’ surveillance beyond dogs in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentIt did happen, but they had it fixed within a few hours, were very transparent about the cause and the remediation, and only a few thousand accounts were affected total [Edit: a few thousand...It did happen, but they had it fixed within a few hours, were very transparent about the cause and the remediation, and only a few thousand accounts were affected total [Edit: a few thousand theoretically affected, only twelve actually accessed, apparently. Not twelve thousand. Twelve.]. And, like you say, it’s not a risk at all if you disable cloud access - that doesn’t change the fact it shouldn’t have happened at all, but it does at least come down to a user driven choice on the convenience vs risk tradeoff.
Pretty much the mirror universe compared to the Eufy situation, IMO - what the handling of a fuck up says about each of them, as much if not more than the fuck up occurring in the first place, is a big reason Eufy are on my permanent blacklist while I happily recommend Ubiquiti stuff to people all the time.
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Comment on Leaked email suggests Ring plans to expand ‘search party’ surveillance beyond dogs in ~tech
Greg Link ParentOf all the brands I whose word I wouldn’t trust on that… Admittedly that was a couple of years ago, so maybe it was high profile enough that they had to make some actual changes, but their...Of all the brands I whose word I wouldn’t trust on that…
Admittedly that was a couple of years ago, so maybe it was high profile enough that they had to make some actual changes, but their handling of it was bad enough that I stopped buying their cables and chargers as a matter of principle (Eufy is an Anker sub-brand). It’d take an awful lot to convince me that their cameras are a good option for privacy and security.
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Comment on In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud in ~tech
Greg Link ParentA lot of things seem to follow a logarithmic graph, at least if you take the brand name premium out of the equation: double the price at the low end and you get a big jump in quality, double it...A lot of things seem to follow a logarithmic graph, at least if you take the brand name premium out of the equation: double the price at the low end and you get a big jump in quality, double it again and you get a smaller but still really noticeable improvement, double it a third time and you’re pretty much at the top end, and then everything above that is huge increases in cost and/or effort fighting for the last few percent. Almost nobody’s going to notice the difference past the first few steps, and even fewer will really get value out of the later jumps in cost.
Audio equipment in general definitely follows that, but audiophile stuff does also seem to have an unusually high concentration of really expensive stuff that’s just total snake oil. Literal magic crystals and shiny stickers selling for hundreds if not thousands, that kind of thing.
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Comment on Need a replacement for my old macbook pro, should I just get another one? in ~comp
Greg Link ParentIf you compare the base model of whatever Mac hardware to other machines, it’s more that you’re paying for build quality and attention to detail. You would definitely also struggle to get an exact...It just kinda seems silly to me to spend 1k on a computer with the same specs as I can get for half that, feels like I'm spending $500 on an operating system. I guess it is what it is though?
If you compare the base model of whatever Mac hardware to other machines, it’s more that you’re paying for build quality and attention to detail. You would definitely also struggle to get an exact match on specs for a lower price, but often that’s a little artificial - you probably wouldn’t be looking for a 100% exact match, you’d be looking at spec equivalent for your use case and things you care about. I’m mentioning this not because I think the specs and benchmarks are bad (they aren’t! And the battery life in particular is the real deal), but because I think you’ll be set up for disappointment if you decide to buy one on that angle alone.
The machines are just… nice. Solid. Well thought out. Precisely engineered. The kind of thing that feels as though it was built mostly with quality in mind rather than mostly with cost cutting in mind.
Does that add however many hundred in value to you? Only you can know that, but I think it’s important to be thinking in those terms if you decide to buy one. For what it worth, I’ve been using Macs alongside Linux machines for decades and it’s always felt absolutely worth the premium to me - I strongly recommend them to anyone who isn’t buying specifically on a tight budget.
It’s also worth noting that I said “base model” when talking about price vs spec at the top there. Apple will screw you on memory and storage upgrades, there’s no two ways about it, and IMO their base models are underspecced to push you into the upgraded versions, where the premium you’re paying for Apple gets wider. This frustrates the hell out of me, but it doesn’t change anything I’ve said above: I tend to buy pretty heavily upgraded machines and it’s still always been worth it to me, irritated though I am about it every single time. The quality and general good experience still justify the final price as far as I’m concerned, but you get ever further from being able to say they’re priced similarly to equivalent spec non-Apple machines - another reason I prefer not to think in those terms when looking at them!
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Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space
Greg Link ParentYour instinct is a good one! The tricky part about doing it in space is that you're not just dealing with the difficulties of a vacuum environment where heat doesn't really go anywhere, you're...Your instinct is a good one! The tricky part about doing it in space is that you're not just dealing with the difficulties of a vacuum environment where heat doesn't really go anywhere, you're balancing that with the realities of a $1,500/kg launch cost too.
You're always going to need some level of radiative cooling system (can't beat thermodynamics in the end, however good your reclamation systems get, so there will always be some waste heat to dump), so the fixed costs there are already paid - in terms of actual system cost and in terms of having to launch it. If you add, say, thermoelectric heat reclamation then it might allow you to make the surface area of the cooling system smaller, but you've now got the fixed cost and launch weight of an additional new system to account for. It only makes sense if you can get the weight per watt reclaimed lower than the additional weight per watt of making your existing cooling system bigger, basically.*
If it were a scientific mission with specific requirements, or just a technical research platform to see if we can viably add those kind of systems, I'd be all for it - I'd actually love to see the kind of advancements we could make in balancing and optimising those competing concerns! But for an allegedly profit-making project, we're kinda already giving them the benefit of the doubt when we talk about the cooling system size, because that's actually the most viable way to minimise weight, and therefore launch costs, with current tech.
It's also why a lot of us are so skeptical: datacenters, which are a notoriously power-dense and cooling-heavy use case in general, just seem inherently unsuited to the environment. In a space elevator future with $0.10/kg cost to orbit the calculations change pretty dramatically, but if you're looking that far off you need to account for things like nuclear fusion too. Right now it's like starting a business growing coconuts in Antarctica, or building a golf course in the middle of the Sahara - we probably could do it, even with current technology, but it's going to be wildly expensive and difficult for a result that's no better than doing it the easy way.
*You absolutely need to account for energy input costs too, but the incoming solar is free and abundant, and panels are relatively cheap and lightweight to launch, so that's rarely a breaking concern for earth-orbital systems. It gets trickier if you're doing scientific missions further from the sun...
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Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space
Greg Link ParentThe heat we're talking about is the waste energy that's left over after the solar panels have captured incoming solar energy, converted it to electricity as efficiently as they're able to, and...The heat we're talking about is the waste energy that's left over after the solar panels have captured incoming solar energy, converted it to electricity as efficiently as they're able to, and used that electricity for the computers to do work.
Each step of the process has inefficiencies, where energy is wasted heating up the equipment rather than being harnessed to do something productive. On the ground, it's relatively easy to get rid of that waste heat by just blowing out the hot air and pulling in cool air, but in a vacuum you're basically stuck with an almost-closed system that keeps getting hotter and hotter due to those inefficiencies the longer it runs.
You can get rid of heat in a vacuum, but you have to radiate it, which is a whole lot more difficult than using conduction or convection - doing that at datacenter scale while keeping the systems lightweight enough that the launch costs don't make the whole thing utterly prohibitive is the unsolved problem here.
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Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space
Greg Link ParentOh yeah for sure, and not just state level actors - good old fashioned speedboats-and-AK47s piracy would be a legitimate concern too. One of the few genuine advantages of space vs ocean is...Oh yeah for sure, and not just state level actors - good old fashioned speedboats-and-AK47s piracy would be a legitimate concern too. One of the few genuine advantages of space vs ocean is limiting the number of organisations/governments who’d be physically capable of interfering, actually!
I will say that I think you’d need to really piss off the US for them to go full legally-questionable naval confiscation, though, and I get the impression that the game for a lot of billionaires’ dealings is plausible deniability and a legal fig leaf rather than a direct middle finger to the government that’d prompt a targeted response. You’re giving yourself the ability to bury the plaintiff in paperwork and convince the US courts that it’s not their problem or jurisdiction when someone sues you, more than poking the bear and going against the US itself, I think.
But yeah, edge cases and practicalities aside I’m not suggesting that extrajudicial seafaring datacenters are actually a good idea - I just think we’d see them as a stepping stone to orbital ones if the actual demand were there.
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Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space
Greg Link ParentI feel like we'd be seeing a lot more offshore datacenter barges in international waters if that were a significant driver, though? Those would have a whole stack of their own logistical problems,...I feel like we'd be seeing a lot more offshore datacenter barges in international waters if that were a significant driver, though? Those would have a whole stack of their own logistical problems, but I'd bet you can build them with 2x-3x redundancy (physically and legally) and still come out hundreds of millions cheaper than launching them into space. Let's say one ship flagged in Liberia and moored off the coast of the Philippines, one flagged in Vanuatu and moored near Mexico, one flaged in the Marshall Islands and moored off India - you're gonna cause a decade of legal gridlock trying to shut down even one of those, let alone all three.
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Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space
Greg LinkI did some back of the envelope numbers on this when the topic came up a month or two ago. The short version is that the gap in scale from what we have now in space-based cooling systems to what...I did some back of the envelope numbers on this when the topic came up a month or two ago. The short version is that the gap in scale from what we have now in space-based cooling systems to what we’d need is basically equivalent to going from a Prius to a supertanker. And that needs to be done in a way that’s financially competitive compared to just… not launching them into space, and using big-ass fans for cooling instead.
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Comment on UK retailer GAME closes all standalone stores as it enters administration in ~games
Greg LinkThe Super Monkey Ball thread got me reminiscing about old consoles (the wrong one, as it turns out, but I stand by my nostalgia!), and now the place I went to get that console on its midnight...The Super Monkey Ball thread got me reminiscing about old consoles (the wrong one, as it turns out, but I stand by my nostalgia!), and now the place I went to get that console on its midnight release is gone too. Like @alp said, it was already pretty much gone years before, but still, it's sad to see that era close in a very final way...
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Comment on AntiRender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings in ~tech
Greg LinkI like this idea a lot! Seems like a creative use for tech that by definition makes a best guess - there's something quite satisfying about "let's set this pessimistic guess against your marketing...I like this idea a lot! Seems like a creative use for tech that by definition makes a best guess - there's something quite satisfying about "let's set this pessimistic guess against your marketing department's overly-optimistic one".
Honestly I think a decent architect would probably value something like this, even though I wouldn't expect to see them releasing the images publicly (and I imagine they're already considering the same realities of weathering and maintenance already if they're actually decent!). The third example makes me think yeah, whoever laid out that park probably was already considering the grey miserable days, and they've done a solid job even then.
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Comment on Lawsuit alleges that WhatsApp has no end-to-end encryption in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentIt’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack...It’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack it, trying to reverse engineer it, trying to interoperate with it (some even with Meta’s begrudging blessing, thanks to the EU) etc. etc.
That’s not to say it couldn’t be sending the keys in some subtle way, and I have absolutely zero trust in Meta, but after seeing enough absolutely insanely subtle vulnerabilities in much more niche software picked up and presented at Defcon, I’d say balance of probabilities is that a target this size is probably fine if we haven’t heard otherwise. I still use Signal and try to convince everyone I can to do the same, though!
[Edit] Clarity
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Comment on USB-C PD all the things! in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentWeirdly, the really cheap no-brand USB-C to barrel adapters do have a tiny seven segment display built in, even though they’re fixed voltage. Power readout is nice, I guess, but it seems like an...Weirdly, the really cheap no-brand USB-C to barrel adapters do have a tiny seven segment display built in, even though they’re fixed voltage. Power readout is nice, I guess, but it seems like an odd design choice that would’ve worked much better on something reconfigurable like this!
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Comment on USB-C PD all the things! in ~tech
Greg Link ParentI wonder if the programmable USB-C bit knows which of the barrel jack extensions it’s attached to? If you can set a profile per barrel jack I can see that as a nice reason for using the more...I wonder if the programmable USB-C bit knows which of the barrel jack extensions it’s attached to? If you can set a profile per barrel jack I can see that as a nice reason for using the more complex adapter in the middle.
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Comment on USB-C PD all the things! in ~tech
Greg LinkIf anyone's looking for the general-case version of this, "USB-C trigger board" is the search term you need - they tend to just be bare boards not too much bigger than the USB-C port itself, with...If anyone's looking for the general-case version of this, "USB-C trigger board" is the search term you need - they tend to just be bare boards not too much bigger than the USB-C port itself, with solder pads or screw terminals for the output and dip switches or traces to bridge to set the voltage. They're also like $0.50 each if you buy a multipack.
The version in the video looks cool too, and for a lot of uses there's solid value in a neat packaged ready to go solution, so no intention to say anything against it if it's what you're looking for. But there have been enough occasions that I've needed something that turned out to be a totally standard part and I just didn't know it existed/didn't know what it was called that it seemed worth pointing out!
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Comment on Super Monkey Ball web game in ~games
Greg Link ParentUhhh... yes, I definitely intended that as an extreme deep cut and didn't just have a minor existential crisis over the fact that I'm sure I remember having it on a Dreamcast demo disc back in the...Uhhh... yes, I definitely intended that as an extreme deep cut and didn't just have a minor existential crisis over the fact that I'm sure I remember having it on a Dreamcast demo disc back in the day! (Seriously though TIL - I could've sworn it was a Dreamcast release, but at a guess I'm probably remembering seeing it hyped in ye olde dead tree gaming magazines of the era as an upcoming title while they were still trying to make
fetchDreamcast a thing, and then conflating that with eventually actually playing it on a GameCube at a friend's house or something after Sega shifted to software-only) -
Comment on Amazon’s promotion of ‘Melania’ has critics questioning its motives (Amazon has spent 35M on marketing on top of its 40M budget) in ~movies
Greg Link ParentProblem is, you’ve got to get a critical mass of the population on side for anything to actually be a solution. And more specifically, on side in a principled support of greater equality way, not...Problem is, you’ve got to get a critical mass of the population on side for anything to actually be a solution. And more specifically, on side in a principled support of greater equality way, not in an “I might be on top one day, and then people like me had better watch out” way.
Not sure how this meshes with what you were thinking, but I’d say the US probably has (or should have) already reached that point in my eyes, at least if ensuring free and fair elections in the future is going to be on the table - and I feel like if anything I’m all the more on board with carving out some spaces to hang on to a bit of normalcy in a world where the primary focus is pretty bleak?
[Edit] Clarity