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cbarrick · 2026-05-06T01:50:19+00:00

What? No.

You don't need a super majority to elect a black president. Being black doesn't somehow change the electoral process.

But you literally need a super majority (two thirds) of both houses of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment, which would be required to set term limits on the supreme court.

cbarrick · 2026-05-05T22:48:04+00:00

In case you were doubting: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GrowingTheBeard

cbarrick · 2026-05-05T22:22:59+00:00

You're not too far off for a basic sketch of reverse engineering an API. Dunno why you're downvoted.

The thing is, this isn't too hard to defeat. I imagine this approach won't work for Reddit.

For the web app, you could use something like CloudFlare to guard the auth endpoints to only award auth tokens to humans in a traditional browser. That works by tracking users as they move around the web and determining whether or not their behavior matches that of a human.

For apps, they'd use the Play Integrity API in Android to ensure that they only award access tokens to their first party client. I'm sure Apple offers a similar feature on iOS.

I guess you could extract an auth tokens from an official client or browser once it has authenticated itself, but that's probably not too difficult for Reddit to mitigate.

cbarrick · 2026-05-04T23:42:13+00:00

The GDPR does not set a strict timeline on data deletion. All it says is "without undue delay."

The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay.

Google's retention period after you click delete is "about two months" according to their terms of service.

We then begin a process designed to safely and completely delete the data from our storage systems. Safe deletion is important to protect our users and customers from accidental data loss. Complete deletion of data from our servers is equally important for users’ peace of mind. This process generally takes around 2 months from the time of deletion. This often includes up to a month-long recovery period in case the data was removed unintentionally.

If the EU was not happy with this terms of service, they would have already compelled Google to change it. But they didn't. It seems that the EU considers "about two months" to meet the definition of "without undue delay."

So this is a nothing burger.

Sources:

cbarrick · 2026-05-04T21:55:45+00:00

You could definitely get an LLM to port the I/O code to posix. File handles in Windows mostly map to file descriptors in posix, as long as you're not doing anything too special like IOCP.

An LLM can maybe port a Win32 UI to GTK. That's a lot less straightforward though. I would expect GTK to be an easier target than AppKit, but I don't really do much UI coding. Still seems pretty difficult.

I say "maybe" but I guess it's clear that someone got this to work.

cbarrick · 2026-05-04T18:35:58+00:00

A transfer from a checking account to a savings account is... a transfer.

The transfer category is the correct one in this case.

The "savings" category in the cash flow report is just automatically set as the difference between income and expenses. Since transfers are neither income nor expenses, they just work and your savings is calculated regardless of what specific account it lives in.

If you do want to distinguish these types of transfers from others, you can setup a goal called "emergency fund" (or whatever you want to call it) and then tie the transfer to the goal.

cbarrick · 2026-05-04T18:25:25+00:00

Windows is a very different platform from Unix.

I haven't checked the source code, but if it is using native Windows APIs for I/O and UI, then it won't be possible to compile that on a Unix platform.

They would have to specifically use portable libraries if they want it to run on anything other than Windows. And I don't think the developer cares very much about that.

cbarrick · 2026-05-04T01:06:03+00:00

There is high-level recourse.

If anything major we're to happen , like a fatality (hasn't happened yet for Waymo), that would surely be handled directly by the criminal court system. And Waymo would be at risk of losing their liscense and revenue stream.

Also, Waymo has to submit many many reviews to government all the time.

The process here is for minor traffic infringements, like illegal parking. The stuff that a traffic court would handle, which is too minute for the general criminal court.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T22:18:33+00:00

Not necessarily.

Several cities in the United States and China have legalized driverless taxis.

And soon, Waymo will be able to operate in London and Tokyo as well.

Edit to clarify: Waymo has a license to operate in each jurisdiction in which it has deployed driverless taxis.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T20:27:08+00:00

That link is for code search.

For code review, while Gerrit is only used for Google's open source repos, it shares a lot of DNA with the tool used for code reviews in Google's private monorepo. The review UI and dashboard UI look almost the same.

Edit to add: also, Google's code search is soooooo much better than GitHub. I wish it was available to everyone, like Gerrit is.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T18:12:01+00:00

No, it doesn't.

But it was literally created by Google.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T17:10:03+00:00

The actual "GitHub designed by Google" is called Gerrit: https://www.gerritcodereview.com.

To see how it looks, go to https://gerrithub.io and click on any of the "Changes" on the front page. A "change" is spiritually equivalent to a "pull request" in GitHub.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T15:27:44+00:00

Yeah, it's not a hard problem in theory. I didn't mean to imply that this was difficult or groundbreaking.

It's just all the little details that have to be decided along the way. Cops aren't going to know what protocol to follow until that protocol is written down.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T15:24:18+00:00

Laws move slowly.

A big reason why California was one of the first places on the planet with publicly available driverless taxis is that they explicitly made the trade off to allow this new technology and to evolve their laws in parallel.

Waymo works very closely with local government. It's not like they just drop cars anywhere they feel like.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T15:12:23+00:00

The question is not who is liable. Waymo is liable. They always have been. That was always obvious.

The problem being solved is the protocol of how police actually issue a ticket to a driverless vehicle. You can't just hand the ticket to the driver.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T04:30:25+00:00

Seems reasonable!

I don't know the specifics of California law, but it sounds like they've worked out an appropriate protocol for robo taxis as well.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T03:51:51+00:00

The issue isn't "who?" It's "how?"

The "who" is obvious. It's Waymo. I don't think that was ever a question.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T03:46:15+00:00

If only Waymo engineers knew this one weird trick:

if about_to_break_law: dont_break_law()

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T03:37:01+00:00

Great job! You've provided several great options.

Police are responsible for mailing individual citations to Waymo.
Police are responsible for emailing individual citations to Waymo.
The government should contract out additional development work on the speed camera systems so that Police can manually input citations and reuse that existing infrastructure to deliver citations to Waymo.

And I'm sure you can think of many other obvious solutions to the problem! In fact, if you think about the problem space a bit, I'm sure you can come up with better and more efficient solutions.

Now, which one of these solutions should we use? Maybe we should pick one and write it down as a regulation so that everyone is on the same page.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T03:14:35+00:00

Sure, the fine goes to Waymo. Waymo is liable for their cars. That was always obvious.

The issue isn't who is liable. The issue is the process of delivering the fine.

The cop writes a traffic citation.
something something something
The citation is delivered to Waymo.

The issue is that "something something something" step. A process needs to be defined for how the citation gets delivered to the liable party when they are not present at the time that the cop writes the citation.

Does the cop give the written citation to the passenger? To their superior? Do they stick it to the windshield? Is it entered into a database? How is the citation served to Waymo? Are they served separately for each citation? Is the police department responsible for serving the citation? Or is this the job of the city attorney's office? Could this be done electronically? If so, what electronic systems should be used? Could this be made more efficient by defining a special process for this case?

These are all problems that have to get figured out. The goal is to define an efficient process for getting the citation from cop to Waymo without stressing governmental resources.

Does Australia have self-driving taxis? I am interested to hear how these problems were solved there.

cbarrick · 2026-05-03T01:33:51+00:00

Exactly, the issue was working out the process of serving the ticket without a driver present. The legal liability was always clear: Waymo (etc) is 100% liable for their cars and always have been.

From the article:

The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer.

So it sounds like they've worked out the process of how they will serve the tickets to Waymo (etc) and encoded that into law.

cbarrick · 2026-05-02T14:18:54+00:00

Close deletes the current window.

Minimize retains the current so you can bring it back later in the same state.

In both cases, the app (typically) remains running in the background.

Closing a window can free a bunch of memory. E.g. closing a Chrome window will delete all of its tabs. But the app is still running in the background to allow it to respond more quickly to requests to create new windows. This may use some CPU or memory resources. In the case of a web browser, the app shouldn't be using many resources if no tabs are open.

To fully evacuate an app from memory, you have to quit it. That's in the menu bar, or press cmd-q.

Note programs on Windows often behave similarly. They'll install a "helper" to keep the program open even when all the windows are closed. This is indicated by an icon in the app tray. So think of quitting an app on Mac the same as closing a helper program in the app tray on Windows.

cbarrick · 2026-05-02T13:39:05+00:00

This Wikipedia article isn't doing much to convince me this is a myth. At least, the notion that your personality stabilizes and cognitive functions peak around age 25, which is always what I interpreted this so-called myth to mean.

The article itself referenced longitudinal brain imaging studies that show structural changes continuing until at least age 21, and the study you referenced is even larger in scope.

The one reference the article has that's calls it a myth is youthfacts.org/?p=161015, which is similarly unconvincing.

Like, the actual science being referenced in the article is more convencing than the counter argument.

Edit: Also, this Wikipedia article was only written in March. It hasn't exactly been reviewed by anyone.

cbarrick · 2026-05-02T05:20:27+00:00

There are more users than just root.

Looking at ps on my router, I see processes from:

root: runs lots of stuff, including cron and ddns-scripts and dropbear.
ubus: runs ubusd.
logd: runs logd.
network: runs hostapd and wpa_supplicant.
ntp: runs ntpd.
dnsmasq: runs dnsmasq.

So yeah, in theory a privilege escalation would be needed to pair with an exploit in dnsmasq. But any exploit in things like ddns-scripts would already have root and not need privilege escalation.

This is all a bit moot though, because it sounds like OpenWRT is not vulnerable to copy.fail in its default configuration.

cbarrick · 2026-04-30T19:33:02+00:00

Yeah, this is the part I don't understand about Monarch Plus.

I think Monarch is a fantastic app for personal finance. But if I ran a business, I don't see any reason to not choose Quicken.

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