ritswd
Software engineer working on very high scale systems, and dad.
Born and raised 🇫🇷, now resident and naturalized citizen 🇺🇸.
🎹🎸🪕🥁🎮
I’m sorry for your loss.
Might not be the answer you expect, but I have an iPhone and I got myself an Apple Arcade subscription without expecting much (I didn’t play mobile games at all before that, because they tend to feel either unoriginal, or scammy, or both), and I was surprised at how most games (not all games, but still) were truly original, and none of them were scammy since I was technically paying for them with the subscription. It’s been a surprisingly nice exploration.
For me, it’s the community. I’ve only had pleasant exchanges around here, everyone seems approchable, when on Reddit it’s quite hit-and-miss.
I deleted the Reddit app from my phone just to avoid opening it out of force of habit, and I thought it’s take some self-convincing to stay on Lemmy; but the reality is, 2 weeks in, I don’t miss Reddit at all in the end. I was mostly using it for scrolling through interesting content I’m subscribed to, and so far Lemmy does this just as well.
I know it’s a bit late for that, but adding people proactively just in case I need them to vouch for me later is the #1 reason I even have a LinkedIn account.
My understanding is that chances are slim to none. I understand that whatever malfunction happened that cut the contact, has some likelihood to have been a much greater malfunction than just radio, and that they’ve quite possibly already been dead a while.
And even if not, my understanding is that they’re scanning a massive swath of sea and it’s very much a needle-in-a-haystack situation. I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason such an unlikely operation is taking place, is because the people involved can afford it.
I don’t know that that’s the reason, but I have an intuition from having been an election judge here in Illinois.
A voting machine is a closed-circuit system that just counts votes and prints the tally. It is not connected to any network, and getting its software upgraded requires a key that only the voting machine company has, and a seal that is unique and that can only be replaced by that voting machine company.
To make it clear with an example: a judge ruled in Illinois that ballots that would be in either English or Spanish were now void, they all had to be in both language at the same time. Because that didn’t use to be the case, the election judge has to choose for each person between “English”, or “Spanish”, or both in the UI, and if they don’t choose both, the ballot is void. It’d be a trivial UI fix, and critical enough that you’d think it would be a priority. And yet the past elections still had the old UI, because updating the software on there is that hard.
So my intuition: if a CVE was found in one of the open-source solutions on there right before the election, the voting company would have to patch it, except it couldn’t realistically be done in time, so the election would be canceled until there is enough time without a CVE. Which of course doesn’t typically happen for very long. But if it’s all closed-source and the voting machine company is on the line for it, therefore that problem doesn’t exist.
“Reopen this, or else!”
But they’re carefully avoiding to say or else what. My guess is every next step option would cost them resources at the scale of subreddits they’re reaching out to, so they’re hoping that the empty threat alone will cause some to relent without costing them anything. Right?
So agreed.
Any time I’d get a lot of comments on something on Reddit, going through them involved a lot of eye-rolling and ignoring the ones from people who were just there to troll or to attempt to make people feel bad. I haven’t seen a single comment like that on Lemmy so far.
