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Comment Re: What About All This Data? (Score 1) 48

Anecdote: I have it enabled and stored forever. And I will try to make sure my location history survives the announced change.

I have had many instances where a precise recollection of my whereabouts was incredibly helpful to me and I would not want to miss it. What are some examples I can think of right away:

Knowing when my last checkup at this particular doctor was. Their system purged all old data and browsing through the paper folders would have taken them forever, and so they could pinpoint the time frame they have to search. Reduced time from hours to less than a minute.

Knowing when my last visit to this particular shop was. Instantly knowing when the purchase date was of an item I bought there. Saved a lot of time searching through all the receipts, becaue I instantly knew it was beyond the warranty period and bothering with receipts and returns would be pretty much pointless. Saved an hour or more of searching for the receipt and then be disappointed, or worse, not finding it, driving to the store asking them to look up the copy in their system, only to then find out it's out of warranty.

Organizing photo collections from vacations and road trips. EXIF data shows date and time, but not GPS (with the camera, at least). With Google timeline, I can easily and quickly find out where each photo was taken.

Remembering vacations and roadtrips in more detail. Whan it's time to revisit vacation photos, the timeline can show much more detail of where I went that day and that helps me remembering more of what I experienced there, especially for places or circumstances when photos to remember them couldn't, shouldn't be made or simply weren't, because it didn't seem to be relevant at the time.

Filling out time sheets for work. Timeline always knows when I was in the office, at a client's location, how I traveled there, how far and when, for filing expenses and reports.

Retracing my steps looking for a lost item. Arrived somewhere, noticed something was missing and now had a good chance of retrieving it, because I could then walk back the exact route of the day and either remembering where I might have misplaced it or knowing where to look for.

Revisiting tourist sights from vacations years ago or giving recommendations to friends about them. Photos rarely help with that, especially when touring large cities in East Asia, because even if there's text in the photo, it's difficult to tell others about the name of the place and the area is densely packed with places, so approximate locations don't help.

It is some form of an externalized brain that remembers times and places that I could never, ever hope to remember at all, and certainly not with all the details. People with photographic memory might not need any of it, but my linear time and place memory is so bad, that it helps me a lot. Yeah I could write a daily journal instead. I don't have the time, energy and discipline to do that. I am thankful that technology can do that for me.

That Google wants to get rid of the central unencrypted storage of all this location data is hardly surprising. Firstly, because it is probably compute-intensive to maintain. Millions of users randomly accessing their location data piecemeal will be a resource drain, as it will be in a database form and look-up and processing will definitely be difficult, especially with Terabytes of it accumulating and being otherwise pretty cold data most of the time. Secondly, because being in control of user data with a huge impact on privacy and legal matters, is probably a liability for Google. Every law enforcement agency can contact them all the time and try to extract the data from them for whatever investigation they have. If Google has the data, they will be compelled to hand it over. If they don't, they're punished. If they make a mistake with that, they will be sued. If they don't have it anymore, or it's all end-to-end encrypted, they can more easily refuse subpoenas. And thirdly, because even if they now don't count the storage towards the users' contingents, they will of course do so in the future. Google always does that, eventually counting everything towards the contingent. They don't do it right away merely to lessen the backlash, nothing else. And it is reasonable to do so, because every byte stored on their servers must be paid for by someone, eventually. If my location history is X amount of data, of course it's my responsibility to pay for it.

Comment Re:Pregnant people? *eyevroll* (Score 2, Insightful) 145

I hate seeing people pretending there is no "normality", no "default", no "usually" about anything and rephrase their language pretending to include the rarest of special cases.

Even if something is true for 99.9% of people, we are forced to pretend it isn't, or that the other 0.001% have enough importance to change every sentence and phrase in every document and every speech. As if human activity, values, speech, society, processes etc would be wrong or even evil, if they did not accomodate for every single particularity in existence, even if it was less than one in a million.

We should allow things, people, concepts to be considered "normal" again.

Comment FIDO is the answer (Score 1) 22

Passwords are outdated and insecure, per se, all of them, all of the time.

Do not use passwords for anything accessible from the Internet. I repeat: Do not use passwords for anything ANY THING connected to the Internet.

Buy one dedicated, USB and NFC capable FIDO2 device, a one-time 50 USD investment, put it on your keychain to always carry it with you on person, register it for your primary identity provider(s) (usually the email service, where all the password-forgotten emails would go to) and find a good place to store the recovery codes offline and secure, and you're done. If you're using Apple, you need TWO FIDO2 devices, because Apple requires you to register a backup, they don't want recovery codes. If you're smart, don't use a politically active company for the ID provider role that would kick you out of their ecosystem for a youtube comment critical of one of their increasingly numerous "sacred cow" subjects. Repeat: use an ID provider that does not care about your political stance. Big tech does, and no matter your stance today, there's a chance you'll one day be on the wrong side of their censorship. If you choose Google or Facebook, be mindful that they have the keys to all your services and their TOS allow them to lock you out for ONE comment anywhere that they don't like. If you want, register a new empty account with one of them and use it ONLY for the purpose of logging in with third parties and nothing else, ever. That could be safe(er) from censorship.

And then change all other services to log in with that identity provider. Not using passwords, but OAUTH2 "login with google" "login with facebook" etc., which will pull in their security level - FIDO2 and / or other passwordless - to the other services. That way, you have no other passwords for anything else, and everything has the strongest possible security. All the other services won't, can't enable FIDO or other advanced login method, so that is the easiest and fastest way to get rid of passwords and enable a strong MFA for as many accounts as possible.

Comment Re: On the subject of padering (Score 0, Flamebait) 245

A company that is led by members of the tribe cannot go bankrupt. It will always get more credit from the other tribesmen. They create money out of thin air via the Federal Reserve and fractional banking of everyone's money. And they will cross-finance sell / buy parts of "their" companies (companies led or owned by members) whenever they struggle to one another, so the newly created money is channeled into the parent companies to keep them afloat.

As long as money is being created out of thin air, with no thought to actual reserves (if the reserves at Fort Knox are even there anymore), companies under control of the tribe will always survive AND outperform companies NOT under control of them, until they are bought and integrated into this group.

Look how 90% of the media market belongs to 6 companies. The same with food and pharma. Tech as well. There's are reason why all the tech company icons are blue-on-white or rainbow.

Comment Plants should be looked at more closely (Score 5, Informative) 85

The surprising surprise behind that is: if maximum evaporation happens at 520nm, a very lush green, does it have by any chance any relation to plants, who use chlorophyll for their photosynthesis and thus appear mostly green?

Look at the absorption spectrum of the different chlorophyll variants and you will notice that all those different variants leave out the same wavelength region. You probably guess which one: all chlorophyll variants exclude the 520nm region, some even drop off very sharply before that point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.atophort.com/files...

As if every species that evolved some version of cholorophyll for their environment specifically evolved around that. For some reason, it seems as if it was better for all photosynthesizing species to NOT absorb 520nm light but to even REFLECT as much of it as possible from specifically this wavelength. As this is wasting potential solar energy income for that cell, they probably have a good reason to do it that far outweighs the wasted potential. If conserving water and minizing unwanted evaportation was the reason, it could make some sense for evolution to come to this point.

The study didn't concern itself with plants at all, but several biologists will probably home in on it next Monday, I guess.

Comment "OK, Boomer" is appropriate here for once (Score 3, Insightful) 209

In 2021, the average car owner in the USA was between 55 and 64 years old.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

The age graph looks like a slightly skewed normal distribution, so about a little less than half of car owners could even be older than that.

It is pretty much the Boomer generation and older who are most of the car owners today. It is not surprising that they do not listen to streaming music but AM/FM radio.

There's probably a handful of guys here clamoring for AM radio, but the "convention of American AM radio listeners under 40" is probably the smallest event ever.-

Comment Re:NYC to SFO in 10 hrs (Score 1) 77

Japan does not have 300mph trains. Their top speed is 320kph, quite a bit less. And riding these trains is hardly comfortable enough to do it for 10 hours. The 2+ hours ride from Tokyo to Osaka is shaky enough, despite all the advancements. It's much better economically and ecologically, and faster than taking a flight for the same trip, but it's not that great in terms of comfort. Shinkansen has too little room for luggage (90% of Japanese travelers travel for business and family visit and thus don't take a large suitcase; Japanese rarely travel with small children, not even in the subways, so there's little space or even width to put up with a stroller)

I'm not saying it's bad. The Shinkansen are the best train system in the world, but mainly because of their punctuality, their reliability, their extremely high frequency (one train every 10 minutes, so waiting times are minimal) and the overall speed of getting from and to city centers. However, they are not the paragon of comfort and certainly not cheap to ride or operate.

The maglev trains are even worse regarding comfort and cost. The Shanghai airport maglev is marginally faster than Shinkansen, but a LOT less comfortable. You wouldn't ride them for hours, and many passengers would regularly get sick during the ride.

With the size of the US and the distances between their population centers, high speed rail is not that great. Not even ecologically. Propelling a train at 300kph or 300mph through dense air on ground level takes insane amounts of energy to overcome air resistance. Electric propulsion may be cleaner or at least possibly be produced renewably, but HSR is using VERY MUCH of it. Don't underestimate the power consumption. For Shinkansen, it is 17 MW. Seventeen MEGAwatts. Per train. And for the 2+ hours between Tokyo and Osaka, 10min apart, there are about 12 trains en route during the day, per direction, so about 400 MW continuous usage just for that flagship route. That is the output of one block of a nuclear nuclear power plant completely drained. For one route.

Comment Re: 2 things.... (Score 2) 120

You describe gendered insults that have no place in a discussion anywhere ever for any reason. It has nothing to do with what the OP talked about.

OP did talk about a term that disparages certain behavior (speaking in a manner perceived as arrogant or aloof) AND that ties is to the gender of the speaker.

This word is the worst term ever invented by modern society, because it alone ruins decades worth of effort to achieve gender equality and gender neutrality. This word alone destroys any hope of civil discourse whenever it is used, because it creates an insurmountable obstacle between the person using it and the person receiving it. Why I think that is:

It assumes manner of speaking and gender of speaker are strongly linked, therefore the person using it destroys any of their other claims about genders being equal. They could not be equal if their manner of speaking would be gender-typical, because different things cannot be equal in all regards or they weren't different.

There is no term for the other gender, so it creates the illusion that people from that gender simply are not capable or would never do that behavior, linking behavior even further to gender AND pretending one side to be free from fault in the discussion merely by virtue of being that particular gender

Anyone who wishes to promote gender-neutrality ruins themselves and all their effort by using it even once.

Also, it alienates the speakers receiving it from any further interaction immediately and forever. If it is wrongly applied to someone who does NOT identify as a man, that person may feel hurt beyond belief. If that person is a man, it will frustrate any and all efforts for speaking, because they cannot not be a man and therefore could not partake in the discussion, EVER.

With that term alone, the discussion is immediately over for all participants and there cannot be any reconciliation between them unless taken back. It has the same effect as the N word in a debate about race. All aspects of the discussion become moot, because it is no longer about facts and opinions, but the deepest identification or even the DNA of the speakers. At that point, they are insulted for being something that they cannot change and any further interaction is pointless.

And you do not want to alienate more than half of the population from further interactions unless your character is the absolute worst. And if you alienate enough people for long enough what they are and cannot change, some of them will become hostile and violent.

Comment Re:this is not even ignoring the problem (Score 3, Insightful) 99

You should leave the West for a vacation in East and South East Asia soon.

Just sit there on a street and look at, nay, marvel at the complete NONEXISTENCE of any environmental protection, the complete disregard for not using fossil fuels, the sheer number of combustion engines passing by per minute even in cities that have absolutely, insanely perfect public transport, like Tokyo and Seoul.

And then count the number of AC units on their 20-40 story housing towers, where every apartment complex has 5 or 10 of these, where this one complex has easily enough the same number inhabitants as a small Western city. Every district of their cities being much larger than most Western cities. And EVERY apartment has 1-4 AC units running 24/7 in summer.

This will get you a sense for the scale of the problem and a sense of humility about the actual impact of everything we do in the West. Outside of the US, the rest of the Western world is a tiny sliver on the planetary scale of things.

Comment Re:They're doing something wrong. (Score 1) 102

The summary talks like they only cared about the drives that failed. The actual article is entirely different and makes it absolutely clear that it is about "drive days" and calculated from that the annualized failure rates, which are quite low.

Only true journalists possess the skill to process an article that loudly says "1% of most drive types fail per year" into a summary "drives typically fail after two and half years".

Yes, we are missing data on how long Backblaze is operating their drives on average, but that average would mean very little on the stats, because the AFR stats are quite varied between drives. We would need to see the AFR values developing over time PER DRIVE MODEL to gain any insight from it on what to buy as a SOHO operator, because in SOHO, most drives are run until they actually fail and it'd be nice to see which one last the longest. Backblaze will retire drives long before failure, because of energy efficiency gains, upgrading clusters with bigger drives and anticipating / avoiding unplanned downtime.

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