If you're interested in learning morse, there's a great app for Android, "Morse Mania: Learn Morse Code" from which I learned. It's surprisingly easy to pick up the basics but requires a good bit of practice to be able to parse it in real time.
With this discussion about perfumes, seems like an appropriate place to offer a PSA about phthalates. Perfumes often contain phthalates, which are endocrine disruptors. Exposure can be very harmful to a developing fetus and young children. It can create problems for adults too.
Phthalates are pervasive too in soaps and shampoos, where it's hidden within the ambiguous "fragrance" item.
There are phthalate-free options for soap and shampoo, and a quick google search indicates the perfume industry is starting to offer more products without phthalates. Phthalates aren't the only nasty chemical used for scents. Parabens are another, and maybe more I'm unaware of.
1. There are brands offering 100% natural perfumes.
2. I don't think it's reasonable to just say "phthalates, which are endocrine disruptors". Which ones exactly, how much? IFRA says diethylphthalate is safe to use in fragrances[0], where is the research showing otherwise?
It's fairly arbitrary, but there is at least one constraint on how much you can liquidate: You cannot liquidate much more than 10%, because you're taking money from the company and investors would not appreciate that.
I wish that I had more exact knowledge and sources at hand to counter your example, but I don't. Not because they don't exist, but because at the moment the only source I can get with relative ease are these YouTube videos:
So I do apologise for not getting a list of factual examples supporting the OP's statement, but your argument was not barely enough to make me disagree with the OP. On the contrary, I do agree with the OP very much.
This is a tech-savvy bunch in HN. I’d like to encourage my fellow hackernews users to counter this narrative that imo is being pushed by TikTok and the CCP, which is this one about data privacy. It’s a comfortable one for TikTok to attack since they can point to abuses by other tech giants. Every breath spoken or word written about personal data feeds into the CCP strategy. Instead we should be educating our peers, friends and families about the real danger from TikTok which is that it can spread propaganda. Not just influencing Americans to support pro-CCP positions. But there is a lot of negative press about the CCP that TikTok can hide or suppress. This isn’t hypothetical, it’s been happening already. I have faith young TikTok users can understand this. Congress understands this and they did the right thing (for Americans).
Price isn't a factor (happy to a few hundred bucks a year for safekeeping of files/memories).
The reason I prefer google drive / iCloud is (I think) they have backups so if a truck or a comet hits one of their data centers, my files probably won't be lost.
Whereas I don't think that's true of S3. Perhaps someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think with AWS/GCP it's up to the user to manage redundancy.
With S3, the default is for the data to be replicated across Availability Zones. Each AWS region is comprised of at least three Availability Zones. Each AZ can be thought of as a distinct data center, each one a few kilometers away from each other. So if you store your data in the Northern California region of AWS, it would take a major natural disaster to pose a risk to your data. S3 also offers replication from one region to another (eg Northern California to Northern Virginia).
My view is that Google Drive and iCloud will cost significantly more, but that is getting you a nice web interface where you can see your files. And maybe other features like sync’ing. Also, customer support.
I like AWS S3 because I trust my data is more secure there and it is much cheaper. I also trust the durability of s3, not sure that Google Drive or iCloud discloses so openly how they replicate data or if they have an SLA like S3. But S3 takes some technical knowledge to understand how to manage things in a cost effective way. And you won’t get help from AWS support unless you pay for a support plan.
I’m guessing the original maintainer of xz handed responsibilities to Jia Tan without ever seeing him/her or at least sharing a phone call. Is that common to only communicate only through email/github? I guess some maintainers of open source projects will be more cautious after this story.
> Is that common to only communicate only through email/github?
Absolutely. I've both taken over libraries as a maintainer and given away the responsibility of maintaining a library after only communicating via text, and having no idea who the "real" person is.
> I guess some maintainers of open source projects will be more cautious after this story.
Which is completely the wrong takeaway. It's not the maintainer who is responsible for what people end up pulling into their project, it's up to the people who work on the project. Either you trust the maintainer, or you don't, and when you start to depend on a library, you're implicitly signing up for updating yourself on who you are trusting. For better or worse.
Trusting the maintainer als means trusting that they won't hand over the project to someone untrustworthy. It is the maintainers responsibility to honor that trust if they want their software to be used in the first place.
That’s basically how it is right now. Millions of companies freeloading off the work of unpaid open source developers. Unsurprisingly they sometimes leave and it causes problems.
> Is that common to only communicate only through email/github?
Yes. I’ve joined half a dozen open-source projects of various sizes (from 100 to 30k stars on GitHub) without ever calling anyone; written communication is the standard.
Have you ever interacted with a volunteer organization?
If you show up for a tea & cookies meet-and-greet and aren't careful, they'll nominate you for chair just because no one else wants it, and "showed up once to a scheduled event" is a higher bar than half the other members have met in while.
I don't think he ever fully gave up his "top maintainer" status or gave away the repo. He just let Jian have defacto maintainership because no one else was really contributing
If you’re being berated by multiple people as to your speed of delivery, then it is not unexpected for them to be convinced that they are somehow the problem, and transfer the project to whoever they feel at the time is the best choice without thinking through their decisions.
However, knowing a person personally doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
I used to work on an open source project a long time ago (under a pseudonym) that I do not wish to name here for reasons that’ll become clear shortly. The lead programmer had a co-maintainer who the lead seemed to have known quite well.
The co-maintainer constantly gaslit me, and later, other maintainers, belittled them, criticized them for the smallest of bugs etc. (and not in a Linus Torvalds way, where the rants are educational if you remove the insults) until they left; and was egged on by the lead maintainer as they agreed with the technical substance of these arguments.
Many years later, the co-maintainer attempted a hostile takeover of the project, which did not go as expected, and soon after, multiple private correspondences with other people became public where it became clear that the co-maintainer always wanted to do this, and gaslighting other maintainers was just part of this goal. All of this, despite the fact that the two of them knew each other.
He wouldn’t be able to do more than that if publicity were expected from core maintainers. Maybe he is trying to do the exact same thing with another project at this very moment.
They did communicate off list and non publicly, that's as much as we know at the moment.
As an open source developer he might have received donations too from the adversary - it's reasonably common for devs to get donations to "say thanks". He might have had voice chats with them, who knows. The emails might be with LEO at the moment but I think its in the public interest for all communications to be released.
If LEO is involved, they wouldn't be disclosing evidence to avoid the public interacting with suspects or possibly leapfrogging them and tipping off someone new.
In this case the public would benefit from knowing quickly who are the bad actors and what other projects they touched.
Can we not dogpile Lasse after his vacation was ruined by this. He has much bigger concerns right now than trying to export and sanitize his entire communication history with Jia.
I have a lot of respect for xz's original author, I just didn't think about the legal stuff, and that sounds quite reasonable to me now.
Personally, I find it hard to subscribe to certain theories, such as the possibility of Lasse being impersonated or involved in the incident. But that doesn't mean we should dismiss them outright at this stage. (And I'm sorry if you don't like to hear that, saying this is not comfortable for me either).
If you look at their early commit history, "Jia Tan" was always a devious actor.
It's easy to think that they would just have made a video call, but it is a lot harder to lie convincingly over sync videochat than over async text. And a lot harder still to lie in person, and esp over multiple meetings.
Not to say it's impossible, people get scammed in person all the time! But it raises the bar, for sure.
Adding on to that, it might be difficult to differentiate between people from China vs Taiwan/Singapore/etc and since people are generally anonymous online, they can use any name they want
I guess the blame is on the people who decide to depend on a very small (by team size at least) project: https://xkcd.com/2347/ . While having plenty of safer alternatives.
Lets suppose I create a personal and hobby project. Suddenly RedHat, Debian, Amazon, Google... you name it, decide to put my project as a fundamental dependency of their toolchain, without giving me at least some support in the form of trustable developers. The more cautious I would be is to shut down the project entirely or abandon it, but more probably I would have fallen to Jia Tan tricks.
Also, the phone call and even a face to face meeting wouldn't give you extra security. In what scenario a phone conversation with Jia would expose him, or would make you suspicious enough to not delegate?
I did not like this movie. That must be an unpopular opinion, given all the movie’s success. And specifically what I didn’t like was that the film makers could have gone in many directions in telling a story about Oppenheimer, but chose to make the RDJ villain central to the plot. The conflict in the film felt forced and unnecessary for telling a good story.
While Nolan is a one of a kind director, his lack of research shows. He essentially adapted the book "American Prometheus" but didn't engage with any material beyond it.
Personally, I think the movie is too dramatized to be a documentary and too linear to be true drama. I'd rather have him stick to directing and get an A-class writer instead.
As someone with an interest in the history of physics as I'm sure many people here are, I didn't much like the film either. I liked the renditions of the different physicists and the overall arc of the story, but more like I'd be interested in a documentary.
What's impressive about the movie is that they managed to create drama, artistry and tension in what's fundamentally something you can't really make a movie about because in the end it's just a story of some physicists that successfully accomplished something without anyone really opposing them in any material way.
I think that's laudable and interesting. But if you would judge the movie just based on its entertainment value, I don't think it would score very high. The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
> What's impressive about the movie is that they managed to create drama, artistry and tension in what's fundamentally something you can't really make a movie about because in the end it's just a story of some physicists that successfully accomplished something without anyone really opposing them in any material way.
Feynman made it way more interesting in his book without needing to create fake villains! You could make a whole movie about his shenanigans alone.
Feynman has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the movie. During one of the successful tests, there's a brief shot of a cheerful guy playing the bongos.
> The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
This is wildly subjective, different people watch movies for very different reasons.
>The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.
And I have the exact opposite view! hah
The Barbie movie felt like a series of clips to me. Not a coherent movie. I also dislike musicals, so maybe personal.
Also despite Oppenheimer being about The Manhattan Project, The Barbie movie felt "too american" for me with weird Twitter references to "The Znyder cut?". (How will that reference age in 2 years?)
Oppenheimer just feels like expertly crafted cinema. I truly got lost in it and the story. The first 20mins felt like 1h in a good way. Truly masterful.
They did pretty good given that Barbie got the higher number of views/sales as well as the videos floating around of people who did the whole "Barbieheimer" tour who just surfed TikTok on their phones during the film (because of how bored they were I presume).
If this is how the general public reacted to a movie like Oppenheimer, its impressive how well they actually did viewer wise.
The Barbie being an easier to watch movie than Oppenheimer is a take I didn't expect to see on HN. I'm pretty sure a lot of people on here were a lot more uncomfortable watching the Barbie movie than they were watching Oppenheimer.
I suspect a lot of people even plain didn't see the Barbie movie because they were more comfortable watching a movie that skirts over criticising American fascism/authoritarianism of the 40's and 50's, than watching a movie that treats modern American culture without kid gloves.
Now America was fascist and authoritarian in the mid-post WWII era?? Are you guys competing for biggest contrarian or did I accidentally step into a neomarxist forum?
America wasn't fascist, it had fascism. For example in the form of McCarthyism. I don't support Marxism or Communism. I just think the ruthless persecution, group think powered selective reading of the constitution and bullying tactics of empowered individuals constitute to enough of the qualities to be labeled fascism.
If you've got a scale that goes from equal rights direct democracy on the left to dictatorial fascism on the right, then America was not quite fascist in the sense that they still had indirect partly represented democracy. But the way minorities, other-gendered, other-lifestyled and the politically deviant were denied representation and other basic rights it was definitely on the fascist side of the spectrum.
I see what you mean and how that ties into Barbie, although this worldview is definitely rooted in neomarxist revisionism. But I don't have the time and energy to derail this any further so I'll leave it at that.
Setting aside whether "easier to watch" is somehow beneath an HN reader, your parent said "more entertaining" not easier to watch. The primary goal of the movie industry is obviously to entertain.
(Well, the primary goal is to make money, but they do that by entertaining people.)
Nah, I don't think so. Every time I've seen something criticized or praised for its "entertainment value" it's been code for less challenging, simpler, easier to watch. It's fine if you like that, but you can't call a tropey, confused toy advertisement better because it has dancing instead of court scenes, come on. I guess it's unfair to expect much artistic sophistication in tech circles. In tech terms it's like dogpiling about Firefox having telemetry on by default and recommending Chrome as a better alternative without any justification.
Some people like watching documentaries, some like a bit of drama. This movie catered to the masses, but it catered very very well.
Don't expect movie about scientists with complex story span over decades to get much better than this, they have to cut away important stuff and modify characters slightly.
To me this movie showed how Oppenheimer's protests against nuclear proliferation was hushed by the powers of the time, leaving him to be remembered in history as the architect of the most fearsome weapon imaginable, not a brilliant scientist full of regret, becoming anti-proliferation but blackmailed into silence due to earlier communist ties.
I was also fascinated to learn that the fear of Germany getting the bomb first was what drove him and so many others to create the worst thing humans have ever created and used.
As a non-american, none of this was common knowledge and I welcomed the history lesson, I always wondered why such a brilliant physicist and intelligent person would want to destroy the world but never thought to find a book on the topic (I've since added American Prometheus to my read list). It is shameful he was not allowed a public platform to denounce nuclear arms as strongly as he felt.
I think Oppenheimer was kept an enigma on purpose. I didn't exactly like the movie but I was somehow very impressed nevertheless. I don't regret seeing it but I might never watch it again.
This is a pretty common criticism (and I agree with it). To me it felt like the successful test was the obvious dramatic climax of the movie, but then you had another hour of a bunch of guys sitting in a room arguing about security clearance. It could have been shorter, or if they wanted to keep the length they could have explored Oppenheimer's early life in more detail.
> That must be an unpopular opinion, given all the movie’s success.
Maybe not so much unpopular as outside the (lucrative) bubble. [1]
The economic goal of the film/television industry is to make a thing that its audience will watch. Then this result is celebrated (multiple times) until the final event, a sort of Super Bowl where statuettes are thrown for touchdowns.
It's a huge global business, something on the order of $130 b USD. [2]
It's also interesting to read the section, "Largest markets by box office revenue" in the referenced article. [2]
> chose to make the RDJ villain central to the plot
The movie is really about the conflict between a small-souled bureaucrat and a physics genius. The question is: what could a different story have been? I'm not sure there is enough juice in the "personal guilt" angle, and I don't think the "communist spie" angle is viable in today's Hollywood, given the general political leanings and, well, who the actual traitors were. Oppenheimer's direct involvement hasn't been conclusively proven (unlike eg Leo Szilard and a myriad others), so it comes down to how much you believe Pavel Sudoplatov's testimony, who was an NKVD general.
Uncommonly known factoid: movie ticket sales have been sharply declining for decades. We hit 'peak Hollywood' in 2002. [1] That's especially remarkable when you consider that the population has continued to increase since then.
The 'record breaking sales' since then are mostly a product of inflation alongside a mix of price increases. Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among the top 10. It's not us - it's Hollywood, but they seem ultimately unable to bring themselves out of this rut. What happened? I suspect a mixture of drugs and politics - the two cancers of the mind.
There's a really interesting poll (that was not so easy to dig up!) here. [1] It's from 2005, so still quite near peak movie, on why Americans aren't going to the movies. The interesting thing about the poll is, as you mentioned, the leading reason for people stated for why they aren't going to the movies anymore is they prefer to watch at home (33%).
Yet when the identical question is asked in a slightly different way, you get a very different result. When asked if they would see more movies if they were cheaper, 43% said they would be much more likely. When asked about movies being better quality, 36% said they would be much more likely to see more movies. And that was back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!
> back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!
Really? If anything, I’d say the frequency of remakes and sequels is going down from how I remember things back then.
The top movies in 2005 were Star Wars 3, a Harry Potter Sequel, a War of the Worlds remake, Charlie and the Chocolate factory remake. We also got spandex remakes of Batman Begins and Fantastic Four. Hardly some golden era of original storytelling
Wiki has a nice little series of pages with releases that placed 1st during at least one weekend in a year. The pages aren't well designed and have only a nav button at the very buttom (beyond even the references), but you can also just change the year in the URL manually. Anyhow, it's definitely not how you remember it.
Although of course you are right. 2005 was not a great year for Hollywood, though it had some decent movies like Sin City, and comedy still hadn't been banned yet (Meet the Fockers, 40 Year-Old Virgin) - so that was cool. But contrasted against 2023 (and the contemporary era in general), it makes it look like the Golden Era of Hollywood.
It's certainly quite hard to see things when you close your eyes. You intentionally ignored the lists of movies I referenced to try to find one you could spin into being 'not so bad.' And even in your cherry picked sample, there's still a decline - substantially more so when once one factors in your quite creative counting.
Modern Hollywood has always found itself in ruts, as efforts at stable revenue generation gradually give way to creative decline. For instance in the 90s every film was a disaster film of ever deteriorating quality, but they eventually managed to pull themselves out of it before the decline hit too hard. But this rut they're stuck in today seems like it's become inextricable and will be their final resting place, until we gradually see China become the new Hollywood. Incidentally one of the 2 novel top grossing 'Hollywood' films of 2023 you referenced was Chinese! All we have left is Christopher Nolan, one of the few individuals in Hollywood still putting out decent films.
I scrolled down to the top 10 highest grossing section in each link you posted and counted the number of non-remakes, sequels, or “spandex” movies. Those are your links and the categories you defined.
Sorry I’m not really following the entirety of your rant.
You ignored 40+ films from both years, and these films made the difference even more strikingly apparent than your cherry picking.
As for your understanding, I think there are generally two types of films in Hollywood. There's the largely uninspired make a buck type film, and there's the more creative works where you have a group of people who actually have a pretty neat idea. 'Hollywood' did not remake the Little Mermaid because there was some wave of inspiration where they felt they could really create an amazing film. It was just an uninspired sifting through an IP bucket to find what could be remade to make a movie for the year. And that drivel is what they dug up.
And this is of course nothing new. But what's changed has largely been the ratio. I reference the spandex films not because there's anything inherently wrong with the genre, but because it's become the clearest embodiment of this uninspired conveyor-belt style film-making. The overwhelming majority of these stories may as well have been written by ChatGPT, and the future ones probably will be! And Hollywood is absolutely spamming us with them at this point. But there's nothing inherently awful about the genre. The Dark Knight was clearly an inspired and quiet good film, yet of course it was also spandex.
I've absolutely nothing against Hollywood and am more than happy to see an inspired film. In recently saw Dune 2 yesterday - a sequel of a remake!? But I have no interest in watching 'conveyor belt films', and that is currently the vastly overwhelming majority of what is coming out of Hollywood. And that's not how it used to be.
> Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among them.
The Force Awakens (2015) is #11. Avatar (2009) is #15. Avengers Endgame (2019) is #16. And that’s just in the top 20. Not too bad for a list that covers a century of films, especially when you consider the limited entertainment options available in the first half of that century.
Part of it is that Hollywood has gotten worse, but another part of it is that our other mindless entertainment options have gotten better. 30 years ago, if you didn't want to go to the movies, you had what, TV? Books? Now you have TikTok, Instagram, Fortnight, Reddit. There's a larger and more powerful set of forces competing for the same limited hours in a day.
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