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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure about what the article is referencing, which is probably a little more exotic, but relay attacks are very common against keyless cars. Keyless cars are constantly pinging for their matching fob. A relay attack just involves a repeater antenna held outside the car that repeats the signal between the car and the fob inside the house. Since many people leave the fob near the front of the house, it works and allows thieves to enter and start the car. Canada has has a big problem with car thieves using relay attacks to then drive cars into shipping containers and then sell them overseas.



  • So first there is a difference between reduction of meat products and an elimination. Having people consume less meat is good and helpful even if they don’t cut it out completely.

    Second, as a vegetarian, I don’t understand what you mean by producing a bunch of monocultures. Do you think vegans just sit around all day eating avocados? I eat very little dairy or egg, and my diet consists largely of beans, rice, chilli, bread, stir fry, tofu, peanuts/legumes, veggies, baked potatoes, sandwiches, etc. I eat a large variety of staple goods cooked into a variety of dishes from around the world, and classic American fare, just without meat. Avocados and other resource intensive crops like almonds are a minority of my diet by a large margin. Things like beyond meat is also an infrequent treat.

    Edit: here’s a decent article. https://www.nytimes.com/article/plant-based-diet.html

    Generally speaking, a plant-based diet consists largely of vegetables, fruit, beans, legumes, grains and nuts, with little or no meat, dairy or fish.

    Yet another major study has recently been published, showing that eating a plant-based diet is significantly better for the environment than eating a meat-based diet.

    The research, conducted by Oxford University, found that people who follow a meat-free diet are responsible for 75 percent less in greenhouse gas emissions than those who eat meat every day, and that following a low-meat, vegetarian or pescatarian diet is proportionally less detrimental to land, water and biodiversity than a meat-heavy diet.

    Referenced research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w



  • While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.

    I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.


  • I highly recommend Stephen Tetlock’s book, super forecasting, who is the sponsor of the project you mention.

    One method of forecasting that he identified as effective was using a spreadsheet to record events that might occur over the next 6-18 months along with an initial probability based on good judgement and the factors you quoted. Then, every day look for new information that adjusts the forecast up or down by some, usually small percent. Repeat, and the goal is you will trend towards a reasonable %. I omitted many details but that was the jist.

    Now, that’s for forecasting on a short ish timeframe. There is a place for more open ended reasoning and imagination, but you have to be careful not to fall prey to your own biases.

    This particular forecast of OPs feels like it is ignoring several long running trends in technology adoption and user behavior without giving events that would address them, and forecasts something they care about doing better in the long-term, a source of bias to watch. I tend to agree with you that I think elements of this forecast are flawed.







  • So you just asked the most confusing thing about AWS service names due to how names changed over time.

    Before S3 had an archival tier, there existed a separate service that AWS named AWS Glacier Storage, and then renamed to AWS S3 Glacier.

    Around 2012 AWS started adding tiers to S3 which made the standalone service redundant. I received you look at S3 proper unless you have something like a Synology that can directly integrate with the older job based API used by the original glacier service.

    So, let’s say I have a 1TB archival file, single tarball, and I upload it to a brand new S3 bucket, without version, special features, etc, except it has a life cycle policy to move objects from S3 standard to S3 Glacier instant access after 0 days. So effectively, I upload the file and it moves to Glacier class storage.

    The S3 standard is ~$24/tb/month, and lets say worst case scenario our data sits on standard for one whole day before moving.

    $0.77+$0.005 (API cost of the put)

    Then there is the lifecycle charge to move the data from standard to glacier, with one request per object each way. Since we only have one object the cost is

    $0.004 out of standard
    $0.02 into glacier

    The cost of glacier instant tier is $4.1/tb/month. Since we would be there all but one day, the cost on the first bill would be:

    $3.95

    The second month onwards you would pay just the $4.1/month unless you are constantly adding or removing.

    Let’s say six months later you download your 1tb archive file. That would incur a cost of up to $30.

    Now I know that seems complicated and expensive. It is, because it is providing services to me in my former role as director of engineering, with complex needs and budgets to pay for stuff. It doesn’t make sense as a large-scale backup of personal data, unless you also want to leverage other AWS services, or you are truly just dumping the data away and will likely never need to retrieve it.

    S3 is great for complying with HIPAA, feeding data into a cdn, and generally dumping data around in performant way. I’ve literally dropped a petabyte off data into S3 and it just took it and did its thing.

    In my personal AWS account I use S3 as a place to dump cache contents built by lambda functions and served up by API gateway. Doing stuff like that is super cheap. I also use private git repos (code commit), private container registry (ecr), and container host (ECS), and it is nice have all of that stuff just click together.

    For backing up my personal computer, I use iDrive personal and OneDrive, where I don’t have to worry about the cost per object, etc. iDrive (not an Apple service) let’s you backup multiple devices to their platform and keeps them versioned.

    Anyway, happy to help answer questions. Have a great day.


  • Just because they don’t issue a bill doesn’t mean they don’t track costs. They track labor, labor rates, and consumables.

    That said, this particular treatment is very involved. They harvest cells over multiple periods, send them to a lab to be modified, and when they are ready they do chemotherapy to kill your immune system, then do a bone marrow transplant to introduce the modified cells, and then you have to be in isolation in a hospital until your immune system comes back. Even the best facilities are saying they can only do 5-10 of these per year.

    Pretty crazy.



  • It’s complicated. I gave the most expensive pricing, which is their fastest tier and includes stripping across three availability zones and guarantees 11 nines of data durability. Additionally, the easy integration with all other AWS services and the feature richness of S3 buckets makes it hard to do a fair apple to apple comparison unless you really have well defined needs. So I gave the highest price to keep it simple, and for someone who says they just have a few GB, any cost should be trivial.