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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • Most likely written down somewhere. The seed phrase is the backup method of storing a private key to a crypto wallet. You’re supposed to put it somewhere safe as a way to recover the wallet if the normal way to access it (a software app or a hardware device) fails.

    Brute-forcing a full 12 or 24 word phrase would take centuries to millennia, so there’s only a few possibilities:

    1. They just found the full phrase written on a card in a safe somewhere, in which “deciphering” it is as simple as typing it into a fucking wallet app;
    2. He was smart enough to split the phrase up and keep different parts of it in different places, so they might have had to brute-force part of it;
    3. They found a hardware wallet and hacked into it to recover the phrase;
    4. (exceedingly unlikely) they figured out that the random number generator he used to generate the phrase was broken and had predictable output patterns.



  • We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers.

    And actually, the fact that the price hasn’t increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.

    Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?

    The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it’s that much.

    There’s tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.


  • The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/

    The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.

    The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US

    Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?

    And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don’t follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We’ve seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it’s not really reasonable to assume that Apple’s costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.


  • But here’s the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.

    Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.

    And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:

    Do you have a charging cable?

    Is it an Apple cable?

    Are you sure you have one that’s USB-C and supports USB Power Delivery?

    And it’s not worn out?

    You say your dog chewed on it a little but it’s mostly intact and still works?

    Well, I’d recommend getting a new one anyway.

    Yeah you can get your own if you want but it’s best if you get an Apple cable.

    OK great, that comes out to $820 total. And do you want to insure your phone for $5 a month?











  • Even if it didn’t, any middle manager who decides to replace their dev team with AI is going to realize pretty quickly that actually writing code is only a small part of the job.

    Won’t stop 'em from trying, of course. But when the laid-off devs get frantic calls from management asking them to come back and fix everything, they’ll be in a good position to negotiate a raise.





  • As Boyd writes, UVC light at 254 nm “is an established 80-year-old technology that has been widely used in water disinfection, food decontamination, and the control of TB in hospitals and homeless shelters.” It was starting to gain traction in the mid-20th century, but “fell out of fashion” as western societies adopted vaccines and antibiotics, opting to treat rather than prevent disease.

    Or maybe, before the creation of UV LEDs in the last decade, it took huge mercury vapor lamps that took a fuckton of power and put out dangerous UV radiation as well as a bunch of heat?

    Nah, obviously it’s a conspiracy.

    This article reads like it has an agenda.