Yeah, it wouldn't be copyright. It might be trade secrets, though. And trade secrets can be made out of public data, but arranged in a way that gives competitive advantage (for example, customer lists themselves might be trade secrets, even if each entry is a publicly available set of name/contact information/job title/company).

The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:

1. Etch a stencil that has the pattern you want.
2. Place the stencil over a piece of silicon.
3. Bombard the silicon and stencil with radiation so that the chemical properties of the silicon change exactly under that stencil.
4. Repeat the process with multiple other stencils, so that the resulting silicon has basically shapes of wires and logic gates that can perform different functions with the electricity running through those shapes.

In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.

Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.

The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it's working correctly.

Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.

I like to use these shortcuts as the perfect example to show that it is perfectly fine for sites to offer different, alternative, functionality based on what the platform and input method can offer:

• Got touch? Great, you can now swipe and pinch-zoom on things.

• Got a keyboard? Great, you can focus elements by tabbing into them.
• Got a pointer device? Great, things can now happen on hover.
• Using a keyboard? Great, you can use handy shortcuts.

A practical example here is a modal dialog that is getting shown: depending on which platform and input mechanism combo you are using, you can close it by flinging it away, hitting the ESC key, doing a back swipe, tapping the backdrop, or by activating the close button.

This is an interesting point about input methods and devices, but I'm still not entirely convinced that this shows much more than the idea that users should have multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. I'm less comfortable with the idea that some users with some devices simply cannot reach the same functions as some users with some other devices, even if using what they'd consider to be a full featured, up to date browser.

Hibernating twice a day with 32 GB of RAM? That seems insane to me.

I pretty much never hibernate, because I'm usually gonna have the laptop plugged in again sometime later than day. Doing it twice a day means that they know they'll be using the computer in a few hours.

The blog post raises real issues and discussion, and it's fair to see this as an individual's belief (formed and shaped through experiences that predate this person working at Google, and probably predating the launch of Google Chrome to begin with).

ARM and x86 are instruction sets, not architectures. Intel chips and AMD chips can be different from each other, too, just as different ARM processors can be different from each other.

But all modern processors improve performance by engaging in speculative execution, where they run code or calculations before they're necessary, to have the results on hand in case it's needed, or rolled back if it turns out it's not needed after all. The specific methods differ from vendor to vendor and chip to chip (and even core to core on the same chip, as the article discusses).

Exploring these things is important because sometimes speculative execution leaks data beyond the process that's entitled to view it, and there have been computer vulnerabilities exploiting this (see Spectre, Meltdown, etc.).

crypto is untraceable (mostly)

It is very traceable. It's just that the government doesn't have a special position with tracing transactions, so there's been a bunch of kludges built on top of the very transparent Bitcoin network to try to mask things.

Oauth should become federated, just as email.

Aren't you just describing OpenID at that point? Implementation and adoption has been uneven, but the standard complements OAuth.

Our heads are just loaded with sensory capabilities that are more than just the two eyes. Our proprioception, balance, and mental mapping allows us to move our heads around and take in visual data from almost any direction at a glance, and then internally model that three dimensional space as the universe around us. Meanwhile, our ears can process direction finding for sounds and synthesize that information with our visual processing.

Meanwhile, the tactile feedback of the steering wheel, vibration of the actual car (felt by the body and heard by the ears), give us plenty of sensory information for understanding our speed, acceleration, and the mechanical condition of the car. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes, and the indicators on our dash are all part of the information we use to understand how we're driving.

Much of it is trained through experience. But the fact is, I can tell when I have a flat tire or when I'm hydroplaning even if I can't see the tires. I can feel inclines or declines that affect my speed or lateral movement even when there aren't easy visual indicators, like at night.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.

Here's the original reporting, instead of another website's summary of Bloomberg's actual report:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-28/us-ends-investigation-into-claims-whatsapp-chats-aren-t-private

https://archive.is/sGE3e

So it sounds like the agent was investigating allegations, from content moderation contractors, that Meta could access the contents of WhatsApp messages, and came to the conclusion that yes, Meta could.

There are a few possibilities here.

1. Meta does have full plain text access to all Whatsapp messages, but guards that access very closely. Although the clients seem to generate E2EE keys for each session, somehow they're leaking those keys to Meta's servers somewhere, and the closed source code sufficiently hides that so that there's no whistleblower or security researcher able to detect this definitively.
2. Meta has a secret wiretap functionality where they can compromise the E2EE keys somehow, but uses it only for narrow cases. This helps keep the functionality secret, because security researchers and other reviewers may never see the functionality in action.
3. Meta allows users to report objectionable content in the threads they're already part of. The reporting function either forwards the E2EE key itself, or all the plaintext data, that gives content moderators access to the underlying message contents. The contractor whistleblowers and the federal agent investigating these allegations simply got it wrong, and misunderstood the technical process of how the plaintext messages end up in the content moderator's possession.

Meta claims that it's #3. They acknowledge they have plaintext access to messages when a party to the thread presses the report button.

This unnamed federal agent believes it's #1, after 10 months of investigation, and sent out an email to other investigators that they should look into that possibility.

I'm skeptical of #1, simply because I don't believe that conspiracies to keep that kind of stuff secret can be maintained. It's not just that there would be technically skilled whistleblowers who have actual access to the code (not the non-technical content moderator contractors who review the content), but a weakness in such an important and widely used protocol would attract all sorts of hackers, state sponsored or otherwise.

But option #2 might explain everything we've seen so far. Full wiretap capability that is rarely used and very tightly controlled.

They always win, unless they don't. History is littered with examples of the freer standard losing to the more proprietary standard, with plenty of examples going the other way, too.

Openness is an advantage in some cases, but tight control can be an advantage in some other cases.

"Whistleblows" as if he's some kind of NVIDIA insider.

• Existing JPEG files (which are the vast, vast majority of images currently on the web and in people's own libraries/catalogs) can be losslessly compressed even further with zero loss of quality. This alone means that there's benefits to adoption, if nothing else for archival and serving old stuff.
• JPEG XL encoding and decoding is much, much faster than pretty much any other format.
• The format works for both lossy and lossless compression, depending on the use case and need. Photographs can be encoded in a lossy way much more efficiently than JPEG and things like screenshots can be losslessly encoded more efficiently than PNG.
• The format anticipates being useful for both screen and prints. Webp, HEIF, and AVIF are all optimized for screen resolutions, and fail at truly high resolution uses appropriate for prints. The JPEG XL format isn't ready to replace camera RAW files, but there's room in the spec to accommodate that use case, too.

It's great and should be adopted everywhere, to replace every raster format from JPEG photographs to animated GIFs (or the more modern live photos format with full color depth in moving pictures) to PNGs to scanned TIFFs with zero compression/loss.

briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent.

That's just an awkward sentence construction but it makes sense: they released track via Bittorrent. The tracks were scraped from Spotify.

I sold my car that was purchased from a dealership via private party sale.

I charged my laptop that normally accepts 100W via a 20W phone charger.

I would've used a "which" phrase with commas to avoid the confusion, but the sentence as written is valid and makes sense.

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.

In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: "We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time."

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

He's written up his findings in English, for anyone who prefers English over German or text over video.

But basically the JBIG2 image compression algorithm used in those scanners looked for certain repeating patterns, and incorrectly compressed certain portions of the image into "close enough" blocks of pixels. Unfortunately, that meant that scanned number data wasn't guaranteed to be accurate, even when the decoded output clearly looked like a number with no distortion or noise.

It's worth the full read.

Passports really should be using four digit years.