There is a line between a poker game with friends, or even a professional poker industry, and a sophisticated tech company operating a nationwide low-friction gambling app, incentivized to optimize harming its users as much as possible. This line was enshrined into law until recently.

I agree, which is why I think it is going too far to say “anyone who works in the gambling industry is bad”

If you want a little more consistency for muscle memory, ctrl+L goes to the address bar on Windows the same way cmd+L goes to it on Mac. Same for ctrl+W and cmd+W to close tabs.

I also think Windows' native window tiling is one of its best features, but there's a fantastic program called Swish that implements tiling for MacOS in a very native-feeling way. It supports keyboard shortcuts, but it's built around really elegant touchpad gestures. Highly recommend if that's all that's keeping you on Windows.

The other native Windows feature I really like is the clipboard manager, and I don't have a great replacement for that yet. I'm kind of shocked Apple hasn't built one. If anyone has a recommendation that feels native instead of like a ported Linux widget, please share.

They mentioned Visual Studio, as in full-fat VS, not VS Code. That's only ever going to run on Windows.

It actually did run on MacOS until recently. Personally I like Rider over Studio, but yes, if that's a hard requirement they are stuck.

No, it was not real Visual Studio on MacOS, it was rebranded Xamarin IDE.

*> the clipboard manager [...] If anyone has a recommendation that feels native

I use Maccy (https://maccy.app/). I've been very happy with it, and wish I'd installed it years earlier than I did. It's open source, and does its one job well.

I haven't used the Windows clipboard manager so I don't know how they compare on features.

I moved from Windows to Pop_Os! 6 months ago and am generally quite happy except for the window tiling. It really is fantastic in windows.

Idk which desktop environment you're using, but window tiling on KDE Plasma is quite good.

Thanks. Though, I can't find much about it's capabilities. Does it do "automatic" tiling, where windows just snap automatically into spaces and resize? Because popos can optionally do that too, but it's not what I'm looking for.

I want Windows-like functionality where new windows are full size and then I can use windows key+ arrow keys to resize and it will then automatically prompt me to select a window to snap into the remaining space. That's what's missing in popos

Apple did introduce one this past fall as part of Spotlight

I'm using Raycast on Mac, it has a bunch of stuff included but I use it only for its Clipboard History extension.

It has window tiling too.

Thank you for the Swish recommendation! Just installed, looks great.

Rigged wins aren't a real problem. Everyone knows that sports betting apps are rigged, and it doesn't affect them at all. In fact, the latest explosion of customers has been accompanied by even more blatant rigging in the form of unwinnable multi-leg parlays. Hasn't slowed them down.

> Rigged wins aren't a real problem.

Aren't a problem for whom, exactly? I'm not commenting here with concern about the prediction market businesses, founders, or shareholders. I'm concerned for the suckers who are and will continue to be taken advantage of. Forgive me for not abandoning all empathy for those suckers just because they don't realize they're being mugged. These prediction markets are zero-sum, with the connected and resourced taking yet more from those with less.

That's like me complaining about Wall St. tampering with bond ratings on sub-prime mortgages, and you telling me "Don't worry, the banks will be fine." I don't care about the banks, they have enough people looking out for them, and their golden parachutes will catch them on the way down anyway.

Aren't a problem for the companies; I was responding to you saying they're incentivized to stop it.

Believe me, I am not on their side. Gambling companies are a financial weapon aimed at the working class and a just society would shut them down. I don't blame you for assuming, though, given where we are.

Ah I hear you, makes sense

This is true for traditional gambling platforms, because they bet directly against their users, and make money when their users lose those bets.

Polymarket has a different incentive. They profit when their users bet more money, through percentage fees. Insider trading helps them achieve this by bringing in more money to the platform--they won't kick insider traders off.

That's vague enough to be more or less meaningless, where specifically do you see positive externalities outweighing the numerous negative ones?

If that strikes you as vague, I strongly recommend you to read at least an LLM summary of "The Use of Knowledge in Society".

Verification needs to work the other way around, some kind of verifiable chain of trust for photos and videos from real cameras. Watermarking all generated media is impossible.

You can bootstrap some of it. I wrote the following for solving this ~9 years ago. Kinda wish I'd done the PhD now: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/multimedia-trust-and-certific...

I don't really understand why this is so hard or why it wasn't just done from the get go.

Just have Apple and Google digitally sign videos and photos recorded from phones and then have Google and Meta, etc display that they are authentic when shown on their platforms.

You're talking about the metadata of the files, which can always be edited and someone will inevitably try to make software to do exactly that. Also, Adobe's proposal for handling generated content is exactly this and they're not able to get buy-in from other companies.

Edit the metadata in what way? It's a cryptographic hash.

If the bits that make up the video as was recorded by the camera don't match the hash anymore, then you know it was modified. That doesn't mean it's fake, it just means use skepticism when viewing. On the other hand the ones that have not been modified and still match can be trusted.

Essentially 0% of professional photography or videography uses "straight out of the camera" (SOOC) JPEGs or video. It's always raw photos or "log" video, then edited to look like what the photographer actually saw. The signal would be so noisy as to be useless.

But we are talking about consumer devices here.

Are you saying Apple and Google can't put a secure hash into the output from their camera apps that apply after their internal processing is done?

Sure they could, but then you trim the video by 2 seconds, tweak the colors, or just send it over WhatsApp, which recompresses the file with its own encoder. The hash breaks instantly. Cryptography protects bits, but video is about visual meaning. The slightest pixel modification kills the hardware signature. Plus, it does absolutely nothing to fix the "analog hole" problem - a scammer can just point that cryptographically signed iphone camera at a high-quality deepfake playing on a monitor

I would assume whatsapp would read the hash and verify it when the video is chosen to be sent to someone, so the reciever would see that the video that was selected by the sender was indeed authentic. Assuming you trust meta to re-encode it and not mess with it.

As far as recording a monitor, I guess, but I feel like you can tell that someone is recording a monitor.

As far as editing, no it wont work in those cases, but the point here is not to verify ALL videos, but to have an easy way for people to verify important videos. People will learn that if you edit it, it won't be verified, so they will be less inclined to edit it if they want to make it clear it's an authentic video. Think like people recording some event going down on the streets etc or recording a video message for family and friends.

If AI video generation is going to get that good, don't you think it would be a good idea to have a way to record provably authentic videos if we need? Like a police interaction or something. There is no real reason to need to edit that.

Also, could a video hash just be computed every X seconds, and give the user the choice to trim the video at each of those intervals?

It becomes a hard problem quickly when you introduce editing, and most photos and videos on social media are edited. I'm not sure how it would work. It seems more feasible than universal watermarks, though.

It's pretty much impossible to do this in a useful way, _and_ it would also cement even more control over the media landscape to those companies.

This is the same thing they did to drones. It's corruption. It doesn't even make sense from an extreme isolationist point of view, because there's no path to create domestic manufacturing.

I'm guessing the rest of this looks like drones, too: FCC approval is given only to American companies that bribe members of the administration, and they raise prices through the roof. The routers are still manufactured overseas and there's no improvement in security.

There absolutely is a path to domestic manufacturing. It might be long and hard, but it does exist.

Source: My company manages logistics for dozens of US manufacturing companies.

In theory but the difficulty in practice is that if you were to invest in local manufacturing you'd have to be sure that someone else won't be given a waver via lobbying / corruption and will then be able to completely undercut you. The current US administration lacks the credibility to give such assurances. Given existing models are exempt you're better of just delaying new models while you wait for a new admin.

I don't think it follows that a Democrat administration would reverse this.

I'm not sure the democrats could give such assurances either. If domestic manufacturing is 2x as expensive that's a lot of money that could be spent on campaign donations and still break even.

Then it needs careful consideration and compromise. Ramming through a change is just another signal that they can't get anyone to agree to it.

“Long and hard” is not something the US does anymore. You would be insane to invest here based on the assumption that the current tariffs and regulations will survive any period of time. Even Trump changes his mind every week, probably based on whoever pays most.

It's almost as if there's a global push to make Rest of World harder to reach, for everyone.

Between "age verification" - ID - laws being rolled out across many countries, rocketing transport costs, ICE at airports, incredible inflation of RAM prices, and now catastrophic restrictions on routers, none of this is making Rest of World easier to access.

Let's not forget Russia and Iran both clamped down hard on general Internet access, and Israel and some of the Gulf states have set up aggressive restrictions on live reporting.

I think we're heading to a balkanised Internet at the absolute best.

At least that checks "death by hobby drone swarm" off my possible apocalypses list

Why is there no path? Surely it’s possible to do?

It would take years, maybe decades. We saw the same thing with drones. It's impossible to overstate how much the supply chain for modern electronics depends on China. Everything in a router, from the chips to the resistors to the antennae to the coating on the PCBs, comes from there.If you wanted to build it all in America, even if you had unlimited funding it would take forever.

There's no router industry here because there's (mostly) no electronics industry, and to make one you'd need to build all the supply chains and subsidiary industries from scratch.

You’re just saying it’s painful and don’t want to do it which is the purpose of the law.

I'm saying that if you wanted a fully made-in-America WiFi 8 router, it is impossible, it physically can't happen. The timescale required to spin all of this up is too long, even with perfect funding and organization.

I'm also saying that because in reality there is no funding for it, American routers will end up like the US shipbuilding industry, using protectionist policies as an excuse to stay decades behind the times and produce nothing.

> it is impossible, it physically can't happen.

I don’t think that’s true.

> American routers will end up like the US shipbuilding industry, using protectionist policies as an excuse to stay decades behind the times

I agree.

I can't change what you believe, but as far as I understand the American manufacturing industry, there is zero chance they could build a WiFi 8 router in the time period where it's the current standard. Not low, zero.

This article is a good example: https://archive.is/RAZMJ

Apple, with all their resources, couldn’t even get American screws. Now, if they really wanted to, they could have spun up their own screw manufacturing, eventually. But for a router, you need a lot more than screws. Resistors, capacitors, PCBs, plastics, all the secondary and tertiary industries for the materials behind those--it would probably take decades and trillions of dollars.

LLMs also don't have the primary advantage humans get from job separation, diverse perspectives. A council of Opuses are all exploring the exact same weights with the exact same hardware, unlike multiple humans with unique brains and memories. Even with different ones, Codex 5.3 is far more similar to Opus than any two humans are to each other. Telling an Opus agent to focus on security puts it in a different part of the weights, but it's the same graph-- it's not really more of an expert than a general Opus agent with a rule to maintain secure practices.

You can differentiate by context, one sees the work session, the other sees just the code. Same model, but different perspectives. Or by model, there are at least 7 decent models between the top 3 providers.

I know, but none of those is nearly as much of a difference as another human looking at code. The top models have such overlapping training data they sometimes identify as each other.

It doesn't map well to a mediocre human programmer, I think. It operates in a much more jagged world between superhuman, and inhuman stupidity.

A data center of geniuses on a medium dose of LSD.