One use-case of what? Whether a format is "streamable" is entirely orthogonal to whether it is text or binary. Streamability depends on other things such as if it has a header or checksum at the end, et cetera.
They work best for things that a human has to move, and since a good chunk of humans (at least in US/CA) have iPhones, the movement of the physical thing will be tracked by an iPhone fairly reliably. Any time the critter is outside the range of an i-device picking it up the location will be stale. There isn't really a way around that, since GPS/5G radios are a lot more power hungry than the occasional bluetooth pings an airtag broadcasts.
1. they way the network works, it works better for inanimate objects that don't move around
2. they contain small parts that pets might inadvertently eat, and some of the collars that exist for them have been known to snag on things and entrap pets.
I think mostly it's a chew risk for dogs and won't help if the dog is far from the AirTag network. I still have one on my dog anyway (he's not a chewer) and my daughter puts one on her cat occasionally. (Both pets are microchipped too, of course.)
We use them on our cats and have found the trouble-maker cat 3 times out of 3 when needed (in an urban apartment area; most recently the cat was scared by a noise which may have kept her hidden out all night in the cold, unless we had found her/shooed her back to the house)
we have them for our cats, they're great. Sometimes they're hiding in bushes and we don't realize they're 10 ft away. Other times they're down by the neighbor's house. It's not perfect but it tells us which direction more or less. And definitely more peace of mind if they ever got lost. They
They make breakaway collars so if they get caught on something it won't trap them.
i propose the following benchmark task that i think can serve as a baseline of whether these local automation systems can really save time:
starting with a bare ubuntu desktop system with plenty of RAM and CPU, setup three ubuntu VMs for secure development and networking skills learning (wireshark, protocol analysis, etc etc):
one ubuntu “virtual” desktop to simulate a working desktop that an end-user or developer would use. its networking should initially be completely isolated.
one ubuntu server to simulate a bastion machine. route all “virtual desktop” traffic through this “bastion”. it will serve as a tap.
one ubuntu server to serve as edge node. this one can share internet access with the host. route all bastion traffic through the edge node.
use this three vm setup to perform ordinary tasks in the “virtual desktop “ and observe the resulting traffic in the “bastion”. verify that no other traffic is generated on or from the host outside of the expected path virtual desktop -> bastion -> edge.
i claim this is a minimal “network clean” development setup for anyone wanting to do security-conscious development.
extra credit: setup another isolated vm sever to act as the package manager ; ie mirror anything to be installed on the “virtual desktop” onto this package server and configure this server as the install point for apt on the “virtual desktop”.
i doubt an AI can set this up right now. (i’ve tried)
no ties to my other accounts would be ideal from my perspective
i understand that it’s easier to get a stronger “trust” signal by being more invasive
but hopefully the product will be so valuable that users will value their accounts as assets (like on hn) that they won’t want to compromise with bad behavior
The problem is authors will sign up for fake accounts to vote for their own books, so having an email with each account is a big trust factor that helps us a bit.
i love that meme which shows three identical paper clips in a row but one is upside down relative to the others which is a minute difference. the caption reads “chaos German style”
this carrier approval to move esim problem is more generalized on modern “smartphones”. unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone. and a host of other authentication/authorization data is tied to the device in an opaque way. don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.
> unless you opt in to cloud providers holding your data there is no easy way afaik to migrate your authenticator apps to another phone.
You could self-host Bitwarden/Vaultwarden, or something like that.
> don’t get me started on apple’s unpredictable model of sending 2fa to some other “trusted” device which means tou never know what tou need to bring with you.
I think they send 2FA to all supported devices on one's Apple account?
i just ran into a situation activating a new device in which apple were trying to send to a device i had forgotten to “properly” remove from that icloud account.
and also another situation in which the 2fa code would flash on the remote device and disappear in a fraction of a second. i eventually captured it with screen recording but every time i did it the code was not accepted.
my conclusion: apple had silently ruled that i would not be allowed to activate using that particular icloud account. no idea why. i tried a different one and things went through ok.
that’s good to know thanks but creates more special cases to manage if i just want to backup my stuff so i can manually recover when i need to (on lost device say).
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