I don't care.
It's my phone and I care more about my privacy and the ability to sandbox apps (useful every day) than I do about a border patrol agents trying to clone my phone. (Will statistically never happen to me)
If everyone or even multiple competing groups have approx the same level of capability, it mitigates the risk to the group as a whole. We see this in biology all the time.
I'll see if i can find the case - my description was a bit hand-wavy because it was a while ago, and just drawing on memory -- not that your explanation couldn't be true, but I thought I exercised that possibility. For your part, you'll remain sceptical it wasn't the driving language when I tell you it was Tcl, which is indeed the origin of this "manifest type" we're discussing :)
I can't replicate atm, but I now think it had to do w scientific notation, not octal - so "1e234..." into a text column. And istr "strict" solving my problem, but...
Rather than deciding for them from your bubble of privilege in your fiber-connected utopia, you could just ask these poorer countries if it is worth trading global full, high-speed internet access for "not being able to see the big dipper as clearly at night".
Or just watch what they do when presented with the choice.
That you would think to ask this shows how out of touch you are.
The vast majority of people wouldn't think twice if that was the trade-off to get connected.
We should be talking instead of governmental oversight, and whether it makes sense to restrict/regulate satellite constellations for science or culture activities.
I think there should be regulation, but clearly the people and the market wants this, so it's going to happen.
And there is regulation. SpaceX works with astronomers and their satellites are coated to reduce glare and use of sun visors for example.
Every single on of those answers I've seen _says_ they did decode it, but each and every one of them only found the decoy message without even realizing it.
Which is probably a case of the human prompting the AI only being able to see the decoy message, so they think the AI was able to read it because it matches what they can see.
Starlink doesn't qualify? Because that's a practically unbelievable track record. It's easy to say it's obvious, but it was only obvious in hindsight (or perhaps to Elon, but I think the reason that it was successful was actually more about him just being relentless)
I'm not an Elon acolyte, but as with his other enterprises (SpaceX, Tesla), he succeeded where others (Irridium etc) repeatedly failed.
It's really hard to argue that he got lucky when he keeps pulling these really extremely high capex and hard-tech and business successes off so cleanly, especially when you see the entrenched opposition (govt, politics, competitors) that's been arrayed against him.
> The pattern is unambiguous. In townlands still unserved by mid-2026, LEO provider Starlink has grown relentlessly and now accounts for 14.3% of fixed samples, approaching one in seven. In townlands where fiber arrived in 2021 and 2022, Starlink’s share has remained below 2% for five years, with no growth despite the same marketing, pricing, and availability.
(The context is that Ireland has spent the last six years building a fibre network for every rural premises in the country, which is now almost done; it will be complete late this year or early next.)
The problem for Starlink is, it works okay as a business model... Until fibre arrives. Then it's dead. So, long-term, Starlink's market is, essentially, countries which are too poor to do a rural fibre rollout (and bear in mind that it has become much cheaper to do so). Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
>Like, what's the bull case for Starlink? In a decade, you've got to assume that areas unserved by fibre won't really be a thing in the developed world.
Fiber is better once it's installed, but installing it is hard.
Rural areas in the United States have been promised fiber for a very long time and it's still nowhere close to universal. Some policymakers have decided that we should fix this with massive federal subsidies but the rollout botched so thoroughly that it became the anecdote of choice for Ezra Klein as he promoted his "Abundance" book.
I was just at my in-laws' in rural PA; unreliable Internet that runs at about 6Mbps down costs around USD$70 a month, and that was after my father-in-law haggled to get the bill down. I pitched him on Starlink, which is now cheaper than that.
It's a lot cheaper to put up a 5G tower than to run fiber. I'm not sure about Starlink's costs to launch but I know for sure they don't have to deal with the provincial fights that happen over trying to be the second service provider in a municipality.
There are plenty of places in the developed world where it just doesn't make financial sense to roll out fibre. In NZ about 90% of the country has fibre access... probably that number will creep a bit higher. But I doubt it'll ever reach 100%.
Whether or not Starlink can build a business on selling broadband to <10% of the developed world I don't know.
I mean see above. The Irish rural fibre programme was specifically for premises where it would not be economic for the other fibre networks to roll out. It was _expensive_ (probably about 4000 euro per premises in the end), but it worked.
I was pretty sceptical of NBI when it was announced, but it really does seem to have worked out. If Ireland, which is historically very bad at big state projects and which has an unusually dispersed rural population (we were much later to restrict ribbon development than other developed countries), can do it, I don’t see why any rich country can’t.
Ireland is actually pretty compact compared to Africa or Siberia or South America or central Asia, and those are almost certainly not as wealthy as Ireland per-capita.
Are you arguing that there's no economic value to bringing internet to underserved regions like vast territories? Or that those people would be unwilling to pay for it? (They seem to be quite willing to buy mobile phones.)
I don’t think they’re likely to pay enough to justify a high valuation. And remember you’re basically talking just very rural areas in the long term; towns and villages can be hooked up increasingly cheaply. Like, Starlink is maybe a viable medium-sized telco. Maybe even a large one; they might hit Vodafone scale (though probably with a worst cost structure; a lot of Vodafone’s business is just reselling other peoples’ fibre). Note that Vodafone isn’t valued at multiple trillions.
Ultimately, it’s hard to be high margin as a telco.
But Bluetooth is basically a giant blast of security vulnerabilities. On the consumer side, yes, it's a big subsystem to drop, but on the server side, it's a little bit different!
I'm not an OpenBSD expert, but seems like you should be able to pass BT through USB and then do that in a subsystem or an isolated environment like a VM.
> But Bluetooth is basically a giant blast of security vulnerabilities
Yes, but this is exactly the point. And running OpenBSD is not a problem, until you run into a brick wall like this.
If you don't need it (and things like it), then that's all fine. As with everything, the last 10% takes 99% of the work, and code, and therefore contains about 99% of the security problems.
IIRC they were also very late to being able to run virtual machines, and even USB.
If you simply don't implement the things you don't need for a use case (e.g. a webserver) then that scales down to the fact that the compressor controller chip in your (dumb) fridge is not remotely exploitable too.
The Bluetooth spec is horrendous, and from what I read, the hardware is equally horrifying. Bluettoth is a wireless bus, not one class a device and an implementation would need to provide hooks to the other subsystems like wscons (keyboard and mouse), audio and network. OpenBSD does not have kernel modules, so it’s either in or not.
The Bluetooth Classic spec is indeed fairly awful, but the Bluetooth LE spec is not too bad. Plus, the entire specification is available free-of-charge, without even needing to register an account.
Bluetooth LE used to be limited to tiny accessories, but these days it supports nearly everything—I've completely disabled Bluetooth Classic on my (Linux) laptop because of how much of a disaster it is, but I'm still able to use my mouse and headphones over LE only.
> OpenBSD does not have kernel modules, so it’s either in or not.
But I'm assuming that not all kernel code is active at all times? Because it would seem odd to me if the amdgpu code was always active on something like a Raspberry Pi.
There’s a config[0] mechanism, both static and runtime that tells what gets enabled. In static mode, it tells what’s get compiled in the kernel, while you can disable any drivers (and save your config as a modified kernel) in a compiled one.
It mostly a drivers tree that describe how to probe for hadrware. Like mainbus -> pci -> xhci -> usb -> uaudio -> audio.
Depends on what you mean by active. The kernel has the code in the binary, but on boot it goes through device discovery and initialization, so it doesn't initialize or run drivers for things that aren't present.
There are also architecture specific builds, so the aarch64 build won't include driver code at all for devices that are specific to x86.
This isn't directed at your excellent comment, but about wealth tax in general (and the proposed California version specifically);
Should we tax the very people who are literally creating the future before they've even done so?
The progressive views on a wealth tax are an incredibly shocking blind spot, esp on this site, begun by those who are immersed in startups and believers that risking (venturing?) to pursue tech ventures can bring about a more excellent future for everyone, not just the founders. We dare to imagine a future that does not exist, and then we believe in it until it does.
If anything, we want to lubricate that path, not add friction. Hitting the VC's or founders who've made it hits everyone, all the way down the line.
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