> What I am saying—and what you seem to have misunderstood—is that the TOR network is most likely used, precisely because of its strength, for highly sensitive clandestine operations.
Tor seems to be a poster child of the "Nobody But Us"[1] principle the NSA likes so much: it's strong when used by American spooks, but weak when used against them. If a country developed body armor that's impervious to all rounds except their own special alloy rounds, their use and promotion of that armor is not evidence of its utter robustness.
I don't doubt a lot of darknet busts involve a lot of parallel construction - the intelligence community doesn't have to give detailed logs; summaries are enough (IP addresses, dates and times). This is before considering that the FBI is involved in both (counter) intelligence and law environment.
How long has he been interning? Is it long enough for him to have learned how long the timescale big-tech roadmaps operate on? If he wants a feature, he better write it himself (if his PR doesn't conflict with an upcoming rewrite, coming "soon"), or lobby to get it slotted for the second quarter of 2026.
He started right about the time COVID started, so... about four years now, I think. I'm not sure if those were contiguous though.
I'm not sure what your idea about PRs and features has to do with the above... he's not there to work on the internal infra framework. He's there for ML stuff. Unfortunately, the road to the later goes through the former, but he's not really a kind of programmer who'd deal with Facebook's infrastructure and plumbing.
The point is, it's inconvenient. Is it inconvenient because Facebook works on a five-year plan basis or whatever other reason they have for it doesn't really matter. It's just not good.
I also have no problems admitting that all big companies (two in total, one being Google) I worked for so far had bad internal tools. I don't imagine Facebook is anything special in this respect. I just don't feel like it's necessary to justify it in any way. It's just a fact of life: large companies have a tendency to produce bad internal tools (but small often have none whatsoever!) It's a water is wet kind of thing...
> Facebook didn't use mercurial because of big O, they used it because of hubris and a bad disk config.
Half-remembering a blog post I read - the git maintainers also wouldn't give Facebook the time of day on code changes to accommodate FBs requirements. Mercurial was more amenable. This also disproves the "Facebook has a fork of evertyhing, because the attempted to upstream the changes they wanted)
> Back in pre-LLM days, it's not like I would have hired a x264 expert to do this job for me. I would have either had to spend hours more on this task, or more likely, this 97 year old man would never have seen his great granddaughter's dance
Didn't most DVD burning software include video transcoding as a standard feature? Back in the day, you'd have used Nero Burning ROM, or Handbrake - granted, the quality may not have been optimized to your standards, but the result would have been a watchable video (especially to 97 year-old eyes)
Back in the day they did. I checked handbrake but now there's nothing specific about DVD compatibility there. I could have picked something like Super HQ 576p, and there's a good chance that would have sufficed, but old DVD players were extremely finicky about filenames, extensions, interlacing, etc. I didn't want to risk the DVD traveling half way across the world only to find that it's not playable.
I mentioned Handbrake without checking its DVD authoring capability - probably used it to rip DVDs many years ago and got it mixed up with burning them; a better FLOSS alternative for authoring would have been DeVeDe or bombono.
Perhaps because no other country goes to the same lengths to help its citizens abroad in times of trouble. When there's geopolitical trouble brewing, it not uncommon for other nationalities to take advantage of American evacuations. Few countries come close the US in leveraging intelligence and logistics to help citizens; France is probably #2.
True, but it is kinda like paying for insurance and then when you need it you get a giant surprise bill.
Although ironically much like the American health care insurance system which is much the same. Pay every month for “insurance”, and when you need it you also pay for it.
I don't know what it's like for Americans living abroad but indeed, as a French citizen living abroad I do believe that France spends enough resources to justify taxing me (with guarantees against double taxation, and the various complications and edge cases it implies).
As far as I know, American citizens can't really vote abroad (they have to be registered to a place inside the US and vote by correspondence, I think?) while we have voting booths in most countries where France has a consulate[0].
Since there are many French citizens where I live, there were 14 booths across this country for the last elections so you're probably never more than 50 kilometers from one (in addition to being able to vote through Internet). There were 23 of them in the US, 33 in Canada (20 of them in Montreal apparently), etc.
That's a whole lot of effort for people who are voting for things that will not affect them directly and who don't pay taxes (even a token tax) for France, and it's great, and I think it's normal to devote efforts for all citizens wherever they are, but it means I couldn't honestly complain about reasonable taxation.
> As far as I know, American citizens can't really vote abroad (they have to be registered to a place inside the US and vote by correspondence, I think?) while we have voting booths in most countries where France has a consulate[0].
French expats also have their own representatives to the National Assembly, on top of voting for national elections (mostly presidential and the occasional referendum). It’s like if there were representatives for Europe in the US congress.
> Xbox and Playstation dont earn AMD much profits at all
It doesn't cost them much either. Lisa Su, in an interview that was posted to HN a few months ago, said it is a deliberate strategy to repackage IP AMD has already developed. They are willing to pull designs from the shelf and customize it to meet partners needs. Having a long tail of products adds up, and sets you up to get first dibs on higher margin partnerships in the future.
> Why is os and phone model so tightly integrated and locked together, when in the pc world you can generally install any os on any computer?
Qualcomm is the reason. Qualcomm wants OEMs to buy new chips every year, and for that to happen, consumers have to buy new phones every year. To upgrade Android (across kernel versions), OEMs need Qualcomm to provide updated drivers, which Qualcomm has been reluctant to do, because their sales will be undercut by chips they sold years ago. Android phones are closer to Mac than PCs, as there's one hardware-maker who determines which models become obsolete, and when, based on the software they choose to update (or not).
That's something that I've found really notable about Linux, compared to Windows. Windows drivers seem to work across versions, whereas binary Linux drivers are typically specific to a kernel minor release.
Does Microsoft just maintain broad kernel backward compatibility, or are driver authors doing more work to support more Windows versions? Is it a fundamental architecture difference with how each OS implements their kernel APIs?
You will see a half dozen or so talks about firedancer and probably 35-40 or so of us total (I’m at the company that does security for firedancer, Asymmetric Research. We were founded by former jumpers).
You can make the determination on your own, but there will be an obvious large showing of firedancer folks and some exciting updates for the project.
Indeed so, I also meant the hardware budget/hardware resources to acquire the data before it's processed. I'd bet it's a solid theory that some of the large things launched in those large payload fairings of NRO satellite launches in the past 20 years are SAR satellites, with billion+ dollar budgets.
Tor seems to be a poster child of the "Nobody But Us"[1] principle the NSA likes so much: it's strong when used by American spooks, but weak when used against them. If a country developed body armor that's impervious to all rounds except their own special alloy rounds, their use and promotion of that armor is not evidence of its utter robustness.
I don't doubt a lot of darknet busts involve a lot of parallel construction - the intelligence community doesn't have to give detailed logs; summaries are enough (IP addresses, dates and times). This is before considering that the FBI is involved in both (counter) intelligence and law environment.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
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