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Beating the index by 40% after 2 decades as a company? Yeah, still good.

Well we just went from "6x" to "40%" and "good" so, yeah... not quite as exciting.

Of course, Facebook themselves acknowledge that 10% of their revenue is literal scams. Like, people pay them to forward their scams to the targets of said scams. They know this is happening.

Obviously criminality pays. I wouldn’t hold up a drug dealer’s returns as evidence of good leadership


Remember those dorky Bluetooth earpieces? The ones only MBA nerds wore? They were uncool until the AirPods came along.

The tail wags the dog. Wearing glasses may become inherently cool if all the cool people in your insta feeds are wearing them.


There is a UI difference between looking into a camera and talking to someone with headphones on.


The parent was talking about people choosing to wear these. Today there might be reluctance to wear them because they're creepy or uncool. But that mirrors the reluctance for cool kids to wear bluetooth earpieces back when they were those chunky Borg-looking things. Then they got shrunk down. They got "high quality, convenient, [and] light".

When these types of glasses are virtually indistinguishable from regular sunglasses, and a critical mass of cool people wear them all the time, the reluctance from the rest of us will melt away.

I hope I'm wrong. Really.


Yes. Copyright is intended to an encourage artistic works to be published, with the author of those works knowing that they can earn a living creating art. J. K. Rowling has earned quite the bundle from Harry Potter. She has been incentivized.


What about the other 99.99999% of authors?


If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?

But I do like the idea of length determined by inverse correlation of size of the creator. 20 years might be too short where an author writes something popular and a movie company just waits 20 years to do something with it rather than pay the author.


> If they wrote a book 20 years ago and it didn't sell much it's not going to sell now either, no?

That's not a universal rule. Andrzej Sapkowski wrote a little short story called "The Witcher" in the 80's, that he expanded on into a novel series through the 90's. Then a game development studio made a series of wildly successfully videogames based on his work, which definitely made way more money than his books, to the point that Netflix made a tv series based on his books. I struggle to imagine how it could be just that the videogames and tv show, based on his work, owe him nothing.


You just nailed the difficult balance in copyright law. I agree that life+70 is wayyyyy too long. But you also want to incentivize creators to keep trying to make something of their existing IP. Sapkowski is one example. Another good one is the Dresden Files series, which is 26 books in and still going strong. Each book in the series repeats some of the basics that were covered in the original (often using the exact same phrasing). Then the author extends the story over the course of a few hundred pages. If the original book were already public domain, anybody could write a fairly convincing in-universe book and I have to imagine the author would have moved on to other series.

Personally, I think 50 years strikes the best balance. Everything from the '60s would be fair use, so Spiderman would be public domain but not a wizard named Harry.


He sold his rights to CDPro. Also the videogame made him famous- I for one read one of his books BECAUSE of the game and I'm sure that I am not the only one.

There's a reason why writers want their books to become videogames and or movies. I would not be surprised if the Tolkien estate made more money after the Peter Jackson movie came out than in all the decades before...

And most importantly artists are not children. If they don't have business sense enough to read a contract they should hire an agent.


> He sold his rights to CDPro.

Yeah, and why do you think he had those rights to sell? Copyright is a good thing, with flaws in its current implementation.


Nobody is pirating them


It's collateral for their XAUt token, not the dollar one.


From the article:

"The reserves backing Tether USDT were dominated by the U.S. Treasuries with gold representing only 7% as of the end-September."


That only strengthens the parent point. Switch to an OS where this requirement doesn't come into play if you're worried about any governments having a backdoor into your own machine.


> Switch to an OS where this requirement doesn't come into play

I use BitLocker on my Windows box without uploading the keys. I don't even have it connected to a Microsoft account. This isn't a requirement.


Considering Windows's history with user consent I would be worried about the keys eventually being uploaded without asking the user and without linking online accounts.

Probably not now but not something unimaginable in some future.

However, since Windows can still run on user-controlled hardware (non-secure boot or VMs), I guess this kind of behavior could be checked for by intercepting communications before TLS encryption.


except Microsoft probably as a master key


People know the system well enough to write FOSS implementations of it; I think they would have noticed and sounded the alarm if there were a possible master key.


I don't think anybody is interested in reverse-engineering closed-source OS to check if it works as documented; it;s easier to just use Linux which has open-source code.


> I don't think

Well at least you got that part correct. Do you just not know about security researchers? Or even bug bounty programs?

Why are you even on this forum? Doesn't seem like you know much about technology


If you sync your Linux machines key in the cloud, police could subpoena it too. The solution is not to switch to Linux, but to stop storing it in plain text in the cloud.


Do you know what a private key means in this context?


No, I don't. The bitlocker key is a symmetric key.


Ok, do you at least know what private means?


Not public.


Check behind your kid's stereo - what's that? Oh, it's a PGP key and gram of meth!


Yes. Like with Tuya devices (tasmota) or the WRT-54G two decades ago.

Only takes one person to create the new firmware. Everyone else can follow whatever steps are needed to use it.


Who is everyone? Are you talking about people with familiarity with tech and hacking? Most people don't know how to write a URL in the browser.


"Lemon" was never mentioned. That's extreme. I don't care what make and model of car you choose, I'll show you a list of TSBs associated with that model. There's never been a car produced that was perfectly engineered and had no after-sale issues common to that model and year. There's always something.

Yes, I would be thrilled to find a car that gave cheap and available replacement parts so I could remedy those issues later. That used to be the standard! The trend now is for automakers to keep juicing the proprietary software tools and one-off components, making repairability harder for the owner.

So, to rephrase your analogy: "[That's like] buying a new car then bragging to your friends ... that you're thrilled because you can repair it yourself (at cost)."


I was really surprised to find out that the F-91W was first released in 1989. I had assumed it was even older than that!

I wasn't too surprised to see their blurb leave out it's other (alleged!) known use

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism


There existed watches with the same digits, features and buttons before that, but they were in steel. 1989 is about when Casio transitioned from metal to resin.

The metal watches were succeeded by the A158W, which is chrome-plated resin on the outside, same electronics module as the F-91W on the inside, and likewise is still in production.

After the resin case of my A158W eventually broke, I got a vintage W-34 with a broken movement and put the A158W's module inside. (It will get a SensorWatch PCB once I am done with my firmware mods)

Steel replacement cases for a F-91W are now also available on Aliexpress, so you don't have to hunt down a vintage watch if you want real steel.


> There existed watches with the same digits, features and buttons before that, but they were in steel.

I had an F-87W [1] when I was a kid, which was launched in 1982. It is almost exactly the same as F-91W.

[1] https://www.digital-watch.com/DWL/1work/casio_f-87w


The F-91W is such a fun watch. Super functional, you're not scared of damaging it, because A) You can't and B) it's like $25.

The backlight is my absolute favorit feature. It's completely pointless. It can barely light up the hours, and only the left most digit and Casio never bothered to fix it. Absolutely delightful.


Casio is still super hit or miss with backlights. I have a Casio Lineage LCW-M100TSE-1AER and the light is even less useful for its display. Otherwise it's very nearly a perfect watch for me.


I wouldn't say my F-201WA has an amazing backlight, but it does work to see everything on the screen in the dark.


I strongly prefer the WS1400H; it's only about $10 more and your wrist won't accidentally bump the stopwatch buttons.


I always bump the 24H button on the F-91W, I'm not entirely sure why Casio felt like you should be able to switch between 12h and 24h at the push of a button. My assumption is that most people stick to either of the two formats, jumping between them seems like a edge case.


FYI Casio recently brought out a minimalist series of the F-91W (same watch - just a bit less chrome on the face) e.g. https://www.casio.com/europe/watches/casio/product.F-91WB-1A


Exactly. Degradation can occur for many reasons.

Enshittification is a deliberate kind of degradation to juice a metric.

That metric is never “customer satisfaction”


I love walking up to my front door and having it automatically unlock when I’m carrying groceries.

It’s also really nice to just leave the house and have it lock automatically behind me.

But I didn’t fall for cloud bullshit. It’s purely local and z-wave.


But, the obvious failure mode: you assume it locked automatically behind you, but how can you be guaranteed of this without checking? It seems to me at that point it's better to just lock it with a key, which guarantees it's locked.


I get a notification when the doors lock. I can also check the status of the lock in Home Assistant.

If for some reason the deadbolt jams, or the door was not actually locked, then I risk it for those few hours. It hasn't happened yet.

I have probably "manually" forgotten to lock my door more times than that. (e.g. Carrying items out to the car, I think I will go back for more, then I get distracted and leave instead.)


I like my auto lock feature, but I manually lock it as a habit and only rely on the auto lock as a backup in case I forget. I only have to touch the keypad to lock it and can hear it lock. Also, I can check remotely if it is locked (even though the lock can/does work completely without a need for a connection).


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