Possibly TPM backed remote attestation. Having said that, once you are at the point of being worried about hardware DMA attacks, TPM attestation is not as full proof as you might think.

I don’t know about Europe. But the US (or at least the portion of the US federal government I deal with) has been trying to ban us from using memory unsafe languages for as long as I can remember. For us, Rust isn’t replacing C; it is replacing Ada. The only difference is that they have stopped granting exceptions for new code bases in memory unsafe languages.

Waterproofing hasn’t been relevant to batteries since they were made internal.

I just checked, and a replacement battery for my 2024 HMD Skyline goes for $15.62 plus another $3.25 for the consumable adhesive pad and whatever shipping ends up being [0]. In practice, you might also need to buy tools, which can further drive up the cost.

Finding that source took a bit of knowledge. If you go by what HMD tells it’s US users, you would look on iFixit, which would be $30 for an entire kit, which includes the battery, adhesive, and tools (Just the battery and adhesive would run you about $28).

[0] https://gsmnet.com/products/hmd-skyline-battery-hba4633aa-service-pack-hq71101001dt2?srsltid=AfmBOor1-PdyDMT6TX5X--CtmlTm60kOFti1fr5gGnjsOMCX3pOcKZlw

https://gsmnet.com/products/hmd-skyline-battery-adhesive-service-pack-hq25804001fj0?_pos=1&_sid=1311a3ad0&_ss=r

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/HMD_Skyline

checks undetectable.ai

Of course their business model is an AI powered service to make your AI slop get classified as human by AI detectors.

Choking. I spend a fair amount of time in kink clubs, and the choking you see casually thrown into random porn would get you thrown out of all of them; including the ones that allow choking.

Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

It probably doesn’t help that Yahweh was the god of War before becoming the only God.

By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.

The most plausible path forward I see is the Native American model from the USA.

1. Genocide and ethnically cleanse the target population into progressively smaller reservations. (Israel is here)

2. Sign treaties recognizing the target population as a sovereign entity existing within the borders and legal framework of the parent nation.

3. targeted population demilitarized. It’s people become increasingly integrated into the parent nation.

4. Civil rights movement for members of the targeted population within the parent nation.

5. Develop an esoteric field of law clarifying what “sovereign entity existing within the borders and legal framework of the parent nation” even means.

6. Gradually chip away at the targeted population through a combination of progressively narrowing the scope of law covered in (5), and the natural integration of the targeted population into the host population (US is here)

New hires are often worse than useless. The effort that experienced developers spend assisting them is more than it would take those developers to do the work themselves.

If you are running an AC, you might be able modify it to reduce the humidity.

AC units naturally dehumidify (as TC points out, they are essentially the same thing as traditional dehumidifiers). However, the amount of moisture they pull out is mostly related to how long they are running, not how cold they can get. This means that if you have an overpowered AC, you get less dehumidifying effect because the AC is on less.

Some ACs let you reduce their power, which will increase their duty cycle and increase the amount of water they pull out of the air. It also helps improve their lifespan as they need to cycle less.

“Calories” is actually two different things. The first thing is a unit of energy. In this sense, calories are very much interchangeable. Wood has calories, which is why we use it for fire. However, if you tried eating wood, you would mostly just be increasing the caloric value of your poop. This is not inherent to wood; if you were a termite and tried eating wood, you would actually get nutritionally relevant calories from it.

For nutritional purposes, we generally use some variant of the Atwater system. The core idea was to measure the caloric value of food, as well as the caloric value of the subjects feces and urine. This gives you a better estimate of how many nutritionally relevant calories there are.

Nowadays, we have standard values various core food components (e.g various fats, proteins, etc). By breaking down a food into its components, we can apply the standard conversion for each component and add up the results to get a value for the food as a whole.

This process is actually pretty bad. The digestibility of individual components does not perfectly predict the digestibility of a whole food. The measure of individual components is not perfect. The actual digestibility of some foods can vary significantly between people.

As a practical matter, “counting calories”, really just means eating less in a way that roughly measures food by effective energy content. It turns out that an accurate accounting of calories just isn’t super important or useful for this. There is even bigger variance in the “calories out” department (including the annoying tendency of bodies to become more energy efficient when less energy is available). Further, all of the errors in calorie counting tend to be consistent. If you reduce calories by reducing the quantity of food you eat, you are reducing actual metabolized calories, even in the exact measurement is wrong.

It is a little more complicated if you reduce calories by changing the composition of the food you eat, but broadly speaking lower reported calories are actually lower effective calories there as well. Further, if you are adjusting the composition of your food specifically enough for this to be a problem, then you are well past the point where you should be caring about other nutritional factors.

Wow. Those wings sure get hit a lot. They should really make sure they are well armored.

/s

Cat tax

And what is the EU going to do about it? Governing bodies can declare extraterritorial laws all they want, but they are meaningless unless they have a way to enforce them.

The big improvement has been image recognition on produce. It used to be you needed to either know the produce code, or navigate a terrible menu system. Nowadays, you can just put stuff on the scale, hit the camera icon, and have it show you a few possibilities, which is almost always correct.

There was also a long period where the anti theft system would trigger if you breath on the bagging area, and require a staff member to unlock it. They seem to have toned that down a lot. Even when it triggers, it just nags you without locking anything.

So he’s an anchor baby? The reason we need to repeal birthright citizenship?

This has been solved for over a decade. Include a linter and static analysis stage in the build pipeline. No code review until the checkbox goes green (or the developer has a specific argument for why a particular finding is a false positive)

Of course they collect content you upload. How else do you think they maintain a chat history so people can see what was said while they were offline?

I see nothing in the privacy policy that says they can sell the data. There is, however, things that allow them to share the data with 3rd parties, including bot developers. Having developed Discord bots, I can tell you that you can get pretty unrestricted access (with the server owners cooperation) until you have been added to a bunch of servers (at which point you need Discord approval to get things like message content)

If you are building a static system, SELinux is amazing. You need a few lines of policy per application to label things appropriately, then you can see what accesses programs made and decide if you want to allow them or not.

Taking a full Linux system and adding a locked down SELinux policy can be done in less than a week. If you are starting with an SELinux enabled system and just want to lock down your application, it can be done in less than a day.

Once you know what you are doing, there is also a pretty powerful policy analysis tool that lets you see what a given domain can do; including transitive things like “domain sandbox_t can launch a program in Domain vim_t, which can write a file in Domain sshd_config_t, which can be read by domain sshd_t” which may indicate that your sandbox has a hole allowing it to compromise your sshd configuration. Although, to be fair, doing this level of analysis is not simple, even with the tooling. And you very quickly notice issues that are inherent in how Linux works.

The problem with SELinux comes when you try applying it to general purpose systems, because you do not know ahead of time what the user will want to do. To be effective, policy needs to be written for the specific system it will be running on.

An example I like to use is Android. Android makes great use of SELinux, and is a general purpose system. But the SELinux policy itself does not protect the general purpose Android system. It protects the special purpose system that is the Android runtime. All apps run with the same policy that says things like “cannot access the filesystem at all, unless given access by the Android runtime”, then the actual security policy users see is all implemented in use space by Android. SElinux is just a means of preventing apps from bypassing the Android permission system.

Also, AppArmor might not exist without SELinux.

When the NSA first implemented SELinux, they did so directly, but were not able to get that merged into mainline because there was concern that SELinux was not the correct solution.

What they ended up doing was creating the Linux Security Modules (LSM) framework, which is just a bunch of hooks in the kernel that a module can implement. SELinux was then rewritten as LSM module. This allowed other solutions like AppArmor to be implemented without any invasive work; they could just plug into the same system SELinux used.

Some time later, the ability to run multiple LSMs at once was added.

Incidentally, Linux capabilities are also implemented as an LSM.

A typical employee would have taxes taken out of every paycheck. Employers calculate that assuming they are your only source of income and you have nothing interesting going on tax wise, which is correct for 90% of people. Employees can ask for their income tax withholding to be changed and employers will do so no questions asked [1]. At the end of the year, you’re employer will give you a form W2 that says how much they payed you, how much they paid in taxes on your behalf, how much they payed into your tax deductible account on your behalf, etc. Basically everything about your job that is tax relevant. A copy of this W2 form is sent to the IRS.

If you have investment accounts, work as an independent contractor, or various other forms of income, you will generally be given a form 1099. Again, a copy of this will be sent to the IRS. Income tax is not automatically withheld from these, so if you get a lot of income through them, you may owe taxes at the end of the year.

You may also qualify for tax deductions that lower your effective income for the purposes of computing your income tax. For instance, the interest on you mortgage, charitable donations, etc. However if you choose not to claim these, you can instead claim a deduction of about $14,000; which is more than most people would be able to deduct anyway, so there often isn’t a point of keeping track of these.

There are a couple of less common situations that you may need to deal with

1. You can deduct significantly more than the standard deduction, so actually need to keep track of all of your possible deductions.

2. You are self employed. In this case, you need to keep track of your business expenses, as those are deductible. You also do not have anyone taking out your income tax for you, so you are responsible for making sure you have enough saved come tax time (these tend to be the people who have problems). You are also supposed to pay taxes quarterly.

3. You have a significant amount of income that is not from a single W2 employer. This can be multiple W2 jobs, 1099 jobs, investment income, proceeds from criminal activity, etc.

4. You make a significant amount of money from unreported cash tips. (In practice, you can underreport this and no one will know).

5. You choose to deduct your state’s sales tax instead of your states income tax; and do so by actually tracking how much you pay in sales tax instead of estimating it based on your income.

Having said all of that. For 99% of taxpayers, the IRS knows exactly how much you owe; because all of your income was reported to them, as was your only significant deductions, and nothing else matters because you just take the standard deduction for the rest. The IRS could send you a bill/refund based on this and let the remaining 1% file if the IRS gets it wrong. However, that would collapse the tax preparation industry, so companies like TurboTax have lobbied against it for years.

What actually happens instead is you go to TurboTax, upload all of the forms that were sent to the IRS, and let them file taxes on your behalf. This service was “free” until they were sued for false advertising on account of charging money.

[0] At least for income tax. There’s a few other taxes on payroll that you cannot change.

[1] Assuming you asked in the form of a properly filled out W4.