Tried it, works, does exactly what the author wants. And while it is a meditation technique, it skips all the religious nonsense and focuses on the relevant.
"The person deciding to use nonstandard "GSM" as a unit instead of the proper "g/m²" needs to feel stupid..." ---> This is the sort of HN comment that I can't figure out if it's serious or a joke. I can read it in different voices and come to opposite conclusions haha
I'm not sure I agree. "GSM" is three syllables, versus four for "grammes per square metre". You can write it correctly using only characters everyone knows how to type quickly on their keyboard, versus either finding a way to get that superscript ² or else typing something like g/m^2 which is uglier and longer. And you can use it comfortably even if you are a complete mathematical ignoramus (you just need to know things like "larger numbers mean heavier paper" and "cheap printer paper is about 80gsm" and so forth) without the risk of turning g/m² into the nonsensical g/m2 or something.
(But arguably what whoever decided on "gsm" should have done was to just use "g", with the "per square metre" left implicit.)
The shorthand "gsm" is a completely standard alternative in some industries.
I work in advanced composites. Different weights and weaves of technical fabrics such as carbon fiber, kevlar, fiberglass, etc. are always specified in "gsm". For example, some common fabrics would be a "Carbon Fiber 3K 200gsm Twill" or a "High Modulus 12K 380gsm Carbon Fiber Plain Weave". (the "3K" and "12K" refer to the number of carbon fiber strands in each yarn in the weave, and the "Twill" and "Plain Weave" refer to the pattern in which the yarns are woven into a fabric.)
I'm sure "gsm" came to be commonly used instead of the more scientific "g/m²" or "g/m^2" because no one is doing that kind of math about the materials, and it is a lot easier to type "gsm" vs either of the other two which require at least a Shift for the caret or getting out the superscript font attribute.
Curious what you're doing that "kilograms per hour" might get used by normal people in everyday conversation. Fast food restaurant or a weight loss clinic?
Agreed but we do have to interact with them. I once tried to sell a car with 140 Mm and got nowhere. I then changed the add to 140_000 km and got a lot more interest.
That is different for many neurodivergent people, but not all. I know some who need silence. I myself need some noise floor, but something that is not distracting, like chatter than I cannot understand or make out, and without loudness spikes or recognizable names/topics/voices. For me, some kinds of music or soundscapes like waves on a beach or forest work best.
And generally, everyone who needs their personal noise in a quiet room can always use headphones. The opposite doesn't work, and the only available soundscape is "office noise" anyways.
Signal was made by people who then used it to push their get-rich-quick cryptocurrency scheme on users and who threw all their promises of being open-source and reproducible over board for it. The Signal people are absolutely not trustworthy for reasons of money and greed.
> Signal was made by people who then used it to push their get-rich-quick cryptocurrency scheme on users and who threw all their promises of being open-source and reproducible over board for it.
There's a lot to be said for the utility of reverse engineering tools and skills, but I did not need them, because it was open source. Because Signal's client software still is open source.
Whatever you think about MobileCoin, it doesn't actually intersect with the message encryption features at all. At all.
The only part in Signal that's not entirely open source are the anti-spam features baked into the Signal Server software.
And, frankly, the security of end-to-end encryption messaging apps has so little to do with whatever the server software is doing that it's frankly silly to consider that relevant to these discussions. https://soatok.blog/2025/07/09/jurisdiction-is-nearly-irrele...
> Because Signal's client software still is open source.
Only when you can trust that the published client source code is equivalent to the distributed client binaries. The only way to do this is reproducible builds, since building your own client is frowned upon and sometimes actively prevented by the signal people. Signal has always been a my-way-or-the-highway centralized cathedral, no alternate implementations, no federation, nothing. Which was always a suspicious thing. Also, "the signal client is open source software" only holds if you don't count in the proprietary Google blobs that the signal binary does contain: FCM and Maps. Those live in the same process and can do whatever to E2EE...
About the signal client that does the E2EE, reproducible builds are frequently broken for the signal client, e.g.:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11352https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/13565 and many more. Just search their issue tracker. The latter one was open for 2 years, so reproducible builds were broken at least during 2024 and most of 2025 for the client. They don't keep their promise and don't prioritize fixing those issues, because they just don't care. People do trust them blindly and the Signal people rely on that blind trust. Case in point: you yourself reviewed their code and probably didn't notice that it wasn't the code for the binary they were distributing at the time.
Now you might say that reproducible builds in the client you reviewed weren't affected by their Mobilecoin cash grab, and you are right, but it shows a pattern in that they don't care, and even lots of professionals singing their praises don't care.
And their server code does affect your privacy even with E2EE. The server can still maliciously correlate who talks to whom. You have to trust their published source code correctly doing its obfuscation of that, otherwise you get metadata leaks the same as in all other messengers. The server can also easily impersonate you, read all your contacts and send them to evil people. "But Signal protects against this", you say? Well, it does by some SGX magic and the assurance that the code inside the enclave does the right thing. But they clearly don't care about putting their code where their mouth is, they rather put their code where the money was. Behind closed doors, until they could finish their Mobilecoin thingy.
>> The Signal people are absolutely not trustworthy for reasons of money and greed.
> I don't think you've raised sufficient justification for this point.
Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. They squandered my trust and did nothing to earn it back. Their behavior clearly shows they don't care about trust, because they frequently break their reproducibility and are slow to fix it. They cared more about their coin thing. They are given trust, even by professionals who should know better, because their cryptography is cool. But cryptography isn't everything, and one should not trust them, because they obviously are more interested in Mobilecoin than in trust. What more is there to justify, it's obvious imho.
No. Temporary data is /var/tmp or /tmp. The difference: /var/tmp should survive a reboot. /tmp might be lost on reboot.
/var is data that needs to be writable (/usr/*, /bin and /lib may be readonly), and that might be important. Like databases, long-term caches, mail and printer queues, etc.
Back in the old days, you could sit down at a table in the hackcenter and do stuff that was more of the exploratory pentesting kind. Because everyone around you understood. Because there were strict "no-photos" policies in place. Because all people were technical and in it primarily for the technical challenge.
Nowadays you cannot do that anymore, because most visitors are non-technical. Nobody respects the photo policy. Everyone judges your actions through their political lens. Instead all the "action" happens elsewhere and CCC became much more about social stuff, talking and politics. And of course about policing and judging other peoples' politics.
> Censorship for generative AI simply doesn't work the way we are used to, unless we make it illegal to posess a model that might generate illegal content, or that might have been trained on illegal data.
Censorship doesn't work for stuff that is currently illegal. See pirated movies.
Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground. That is the real problem.
> Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today.
You could never do that. A few years ago, some activists tried to make a fuzz with stuff like creeper cards, intervention teams and codes of conduct. But those were never needed in the first place, almost nothing ever happened at CCC that would have warranted those things. But "those white male hackers are certainly sexist raping pigs" is a firmly entrenched stereotype in certain circles.
The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out. Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't "hooray, more refugees", "hooray, more EU dictatorship" or "hooray, down with everything right of Rosa Luxemburg".
> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.
I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.
> The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.
Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.
The problem has been the continuous purposeful rightward shift of the overton window as part of a wider strategy by the far right.
You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left". You see the far-right decrying our democratically elected government as "dictatorship", a classic Putinist propaganda move.
Don't let the right wing extremists set the narrative! Don't listen to their complaints about things being too "political" or "far left". It's all just a tactic in their march towards fascism.
Just because you don't see the "far left" doesn't mean it isn't there. Would you consider CDU in Germany to be conservative or even Christian right now? I've been far left all my life until I noticed how fake it all is. Sane goes for the right. now I'm just following truth. It's a lonely path.
All the best & I hope you had a Merry Christmas as well.
CDU is not far left. It's reducing immigration, reducing social services, and removing bike lanes to make more room for cars. Not things the left is known for - but they are things the right is known for.
The best thing the right has done to advance its cause is to convince so many people that the words "right" and "left" don't have actual meanings.
> How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?
Since you asked the question, I assume you have an answer, and I'm curious to hear it. I imagine it will reveal more about your personal politics than any observable political reality.
Double-replying to apologize for my previous comment! I saw what I felt was a leading question and answered it with a leading question in kind, but I got turned around reading the thread and realized much later that I actually agree with you and my answer would to your question would probably be more similar to yours than to the person you were replying to.
> You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left".
No, things have changed in CCC as well. Back in the day, free speech (in the US definition) and a firm opposition to any censorship were consensus on CCC. Nowadays, censorship is totally OK if it targets the right. And any kind of remotely right-wing opinion is declared "not free speech, not an opinion, thus not protected". This is also evidenced by quite a few talks on the topic, and cooperation with far-left activist groups like "Zentrum fuer politische Schönheit" sabotaging right-wing speech on several occasions.
There is quite a difference between "speech" and what ZfpS does. Their actions are often criminal, and not in the sense of "political crimes" but actually criminal acts that have nothing to do with speech or opinions. They have doxed people and called for violence against them, they have exhumed dead children and paraded around their corpses, stolen things, stuff like that.
The trouble comes when "speech" is arbitrarily defined and/or enforced to suit a narrative. The initial targets are always the lesser-favored extreme cases in order to have the least amount of people disagree with it. Then when the people are comfortable having them define what speech is acceptable, they slowly start eroding rights to include simply anything that they don't like.
That's why people say that taking away the rights of one group is like taking it away for everyone.
When CF continues to host 8chan and other groups that routinely trade monkey torture/zoosadism videos, but for some reason only KF goes too far... yea that doesn't make sense to me. I don't think they should be playing Internet police, and it's possible that (in the US at least) even doing so in the first place could nullify their Section 230 safe harbor protections, by attempting to moderate content that flows through them.
But also in KF's case I think it was not so much their content that got them "in trouble", but the people behind that crusade being so loud about it, like Liz Fong-Jones and Keffals, who relentlessly harassed every possible service provider even remotely related to any aspect of KF-related services at all, which included domain registrars, DDoS protection services, hosting/colo/DNS providers, IP space owners, upstream ISPs (and even Tier 1s), etc.
It was basically a master class in mentally-questionable retribution crusades for bringing their very ugly skeletons out of the closet and exposing all of their wrongdoings. LFJ was mad that their rape allegation was made public by KF, and Keffals was mad that their illegal bathtub-HRT scheme was made public.
> Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?
I do believe that providers of such services such as cloud, internet, ... have to stay neutral on such purposes under nearly all circumstances. If the team behind KiwiFarms did something illegal, this is a problem for the judicial system.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Well Joscha Bach's talk got removed this year because of that mail exchange with Epstein.
But disregarding the content discussed, I found it indeed a bit off-putting how he basically licked the butthole of his sponsor between those lines.
do you think the old-school CCC would be happy with a guy walking onto the stage and yelling the N word over and over, or would they kick him out? Because that's the quality of "speech" they now support "censoring".
Being (un)happy about something is totally different from creating and promoting an oppressive censorship apparatus, criminal laws and police actions against that something.
Imho: You don't have to like that person yelling that stuff. You don't have to like what they are yelling. But you have to accept that it has to be their legal right to yell that stuff. Because otherwise, any opinion will one day be a criminal thing to say, just takes one election...
You actually don't have the legal right to walk on stage at C3 and yell the N word repeatedly. The fact you think you have or should have that right means I am not the extremist in this conversation.
If San Francisco is what you get when you embrace the left, and opposition to that is fascism, I think a lot of us have just decided we must be fascists.
Nah, this is just the No True Scotsman fallacy. San Francisco is FAR more left in their politics than most of the nation. For example, the new mayor described himself as:
> As a lifelong Democrat and San Franciscan, I am running for mayor to turn around the city I love
London Breed, the mayor before, was endorsed by explicitly Democrat or nonpartisan individuals (including Kamala Harris)
We could go on. What's ironic here is that this comment just reveals how disconnected this form of left wing politics is from the larger nation. They call even examples of the politics of their own "right wing" because they're so radically left
There is no left wing politician in power anywhere in the US.
Democrats are a center-right party, they do not argue for any left wing position - like nationalizing industry, abolishing markets etc etc. In Europe, their equivalents in terms of economic policy would be conservative parties like the CDU.
The fact you consider them left wing is only evidence of above overton window shift happening.
What in the quote screams left-wing to you? Is it just because he's San Franciscan? But that would be circular reasoning: SF is left because of its mayor, and its mayor is left because he's from SF.
> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground
Which is fucking based. Being a radical leftist should be normalized even more and people like you need to be driven out of _every_ fucking public space.
There is no radical left or radical right; there is only right and wrong! If you don’t understand human rights and realize that you are not the only person or creature on this planet, you need to change your point of view.
A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.
And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
> A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.
This isn't an issue in any way. Vendors have been routinely taking out rarely used instructions from the hardware and simulating them in the software for decades as part of the ongoing ISA revision.
Unimplemented instruction opcodes cause a CPU trap to occur where the missing instruction (s) is then emulated in the kernel's emulation layer.
In fact, this is what was frequently done for «budget» 80[34]86 systems that lacked the FPU – it was emulated. It was slow as a dog but worked.
There are software compiled today without using MMX support. I was thinking the idea of something that is open or for licensing is an 86 ISA that is forward compatible. And for customers that requires strict backward compatibility they could still source it from AMD and Intel.
i.e Software compiled for 86 should work on x86. The value for backward compatibility is kept with both Intel and AMD. If the market wants something in between they now have an option.
I know this isn't a sexy idea because HN or most tech people like something shiny and new. But I have always like the idea of extracting value from the "old and tried" solutions.
Sadly over the past year, Spotify builds require AVX extensions. Had an issue updating my 2008 Dell semi-upgraded bench PC that has a Q9300 in it (no AVX on it)
But thankfully I could install an old bin and lock it out from updating.
Intel’s software development emulator might run the newest bin but variable how slow it might be.
As far as I know neither Firefox nor Chrome allow you to modify the JS prior to execution without a plugin. You can run random JS, sure, but you can’t monkeypatch.
Tried it, works, does exactly what the author wants. And while it is a meditation technique, it skips all the religious nonsense and focuses on the relevant.
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