Software engineer working on very high scale systems, and dad.

Born and raised 🇫🇷, now resident and naturalized citizen 🇺🇸.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I once had a conversation under NDA (which has expired since) with an engineer at Apple who was working on iCloud infrastructure, and he was telling me that his team was a bit shocked to read that Dropbox was releasing apps for photos at the time “because they’ve noticed that most of the files users are uploading to Dropbox are photos”. He was like: how do they know that exactly? His team had no idea and couldn’t possibly find out if the encrypted files they were storing were photos, sounds, videos, texts, whatever. That’s what encryption is for, only the client side (the devices) is supposed to know what’s up.

    Not having that information meant a direct loss of business insights and value for Apple, since Dropbox had it and leveraged it. But it turns out Apple doesn’t joke around about security/privacy.





  • Maybe it extended it, maybe not, my understanding is it’s hard to say.

    One thing for sure: slavery lived on quite a lot more than 20 years. The abolition of the Atlantic trade was later voted to be in effect on Jan 1st 1808, the very day that it was constitutionally possible to abolish it; but that didn’t free the existing slaves quite yet. 50+ years went by to attempt to resolve the issue diplomatically, which eventually failed and gave way to 4 years of Civil War. So, that’s almost 80 years total.

    But on the other hand, my understanding is no one really knew clearly what the King had in mind to do about slavery, and it was not in his interest to be too clear about it and risk to alienate either side, before actually taking action. Maybe he was planning to quickly abolish slavery indeed; or maybe just to limit it, or maybe to tax it. The Southern states were very worried they he may abolish, but I’m not sure it’s well known what his actual plan was. So, maybe he would have stopped slavery earlier; or maybe he would have regulated it the way he wanted to and then let it happen, and slavery could very well still be active to this day. No idea.



  • In my area they’re alongside roads a lot, and we get the occasional post on NextDoor that shows a picture of a kid with a red and swollen face, and the parents says “OMG my kid was playing with those pretty plants by the road, beware!” It really is not fun. Thankfully, as far as I know, all symptoms eventually recede.

    They’re not just by roads though, a guy I know has a decent amount of land and there was a fairly massive poison ivy bush on it, that he burned in a controlled burn. I wasn’t there, but he showed me the video, it’s quite impressive. There’s also a satisfying feeling to it, it feels like payback against those fuckers! 😉