I haven't switched it to Graphene OS yet because I read that there are issues with NFC and a few other things. I assume this new phone won't have those problems so I think that will be my catalyst to do a big overhaul.

Both paradigms have foot guns but having used both I much prefer the hook version.

Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers.

I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies and it really sucks when they have their management Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the other "great" engineers to do their jobs.

There are some comments here saying stuff like "these compliance forms are ridiculous and are often just bureaucratic nonsense" and you see comments advocating for playing dumb and answering in bad faith and there you go.

I see there being a bit of an attitude of "everyone is doing it" to justify also doing it just to compete because you're at a disadvantage if you don't. And that's not entirely wrong but it sucks and I personally will avoid competing in that way. Probably that means not much sales in my career. Or science, but that's another topic...

What the author described was very much not that. What they described was developers making a conscious decision to add untrusted code to their extension without properly verifying it or following security best practices.

A more accurate title would be something like "It's hard to trust browser extensions, developers are bombarded with offers of easy money and may negligently add malware/adware"

That said, I heard from folks at AWS that it was not well maintained and a bit of a mess behind the scenes. I can't say I'm surprised it's being shut down given where the technology landscape has shifted since the service was originally offered.

RIP OpsWorks.

This is a really key insight. It erodes trust in the entire test suite and will lead to false negatives. If I couldn't get the time budget to fix the test, I'd delete it. I think a flaky test is worse than nothing.

Uhh, about that...

> Tesla allows self-driving cars to break speed limit, again

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/16/tesla-all...

You realize that it's only free while they test and it's not going to be free forever, right? In fact, the protests are in response to a decision which allowed the companies to start charging for driver-less rides, so that is already changing.

Hard to say which way people will go overall. I personally am no longer a fan of driver-less cars. I used to be but now I see it as a doubling down of car-dependence. I could see a nasty rebound effect [1] through increased convenience and a lot of other negative consequences if cities adapt their infrastructure to cater to those vehicles. History repeating itself for "automobile progress." A possible second coming of demolishing our cities and neighborhoods to make way for cars. Yeah I know most if not all of the arguments for how the technology will just fix all the problems and make everything about cars better, I used to make those arguments myself. I don't believe them anymore.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

- https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66478070

Yeah, color me skeptical about their publication that is essentially saying gas systems are better than electric heat pumps for the environment.

- [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOi05zDO4yw)

- [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...)

Which was also really cool!

> As with Thompson's FPGA exploiting some subtle physical properties of the device, Layzell found that evolved circuits could rely on external factors. For example, whilst trying to evolve an oscillator Bird and Layzell discovered that evolution was using part of the circuit for a radio antenna, and picking up emissions from the environment [18]. Layzell also found that evolved circuits were sensitive to whether or not a soldering iron was plugged in (not even switched on) in another part of the room[19]. ...

However, OP was actually referring to an experiment by Dr Adrian Thompson which was different but also sort of similar. The FPGA evolved by Thompson ended up depending on parts of the circuit that were disconnected from the main circuit but still affected its operation. It probably relied on electromagnetic properties, so was sort of a radio, but it did not rely on the clock of a nearby computer.

[damninteresting.com did a really interesting writeup about this](https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/)

Both were really cool, unexpected behaviors of evolved hardware systems.

Sounds grim, but I think we can still be optimistic because we have a solution that addresses pretty much all of that: cut back excessive consumption. I'm optimistic that we have so much more than we need that we could cut back to sustainable levels and still live really good lives compared to what humans have lived for most of history.

This cuts both ways. We're super special at both creating and destroying. I don't see OP as hating on humans in general. They are concerned that we are using our super amazing talents the wrong way and want us to be even better.