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The Dodgers could have so easily turned this into a huge win. After 50 years they could have just awarded him a paper lifetime pass. Scan this and get in for any game! It would have been so easy.

Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!


No smartphone. A cheap wifi-only Android tablet without a lock screen and their stupid app on the home screen.

Almost everything had an easter egg in it back in the day. When computing was more fun and less serious.

They fell out of favor when people realized they were a security issue, because it was a code path that rarely got tested.


Or they were removed for other reasons than security.

In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, we had a hidden animation of Captain Kirk's toupee jumping off his head and running out of the room. It was caught before release and they made us take it out since no one wanted to piss off William Shatner.


No, proper easter eggs don't introduce security issues, they're benign almost by definition. I think what made them disappear was the introduction of all the suit-wearing people who decide what the programmers are supposed to program, with no room for autonomous work within that.

> proper easter eggs don't introduce security issues

Proper code doesn't either, and yet there they are! The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.

When people started to care about 100% test coverage, they started to disappear.


> The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.

I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise?

But yes, another code path created by easter eggs that wasn't tested I've seen countless of times, but never been an issue, but maybe our easter eggs always been too small in scope for that.


The most famous is the Xbox hack that was only possible because of an Easter Egg:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144202/are-ther...


Another fun related one: If your username is Tyler and you run shutdown, instead of the usual message it will say "Oh, good morning Mr. Tyler, going down?"

Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".

(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)


While I sympathize with the author, and feel the same way, I think Apple/Google have some blame here. They make certain simple things only possible in the apps, because the APIs are not exposed via the web.

Notifications is a big obvious one. Not sure if they've changed it since I last looked into it, but having an app installed was the only way to send a notification to someone for a long time.


How are you going to get a push notification from a site after the tab is closed?

The web notification standard supports this. They have since adopted it, but it took them a long time to do so.

> having an app installed was the only way to send a notification

that used to be true, especially on ios. but web push has existed there for a while now for home screen web apps.

so that explains some of the history... doesn't really excuse today's habit of shipping the web as a second-class client.


Do people allow website notifications? One argument I have heard raised in favour of mobile apps is that people are more likely to give an app notification permission.


Reg. Notifications:

Isnt there are similar feature in iOS browser as in Firefox these "desktop notifications" that some webpages request?


Apple still doesnt give you the right dimensions for a page that switches between portrait and landscape.

That's one of the main reasons to not install an app. Extremely few apps are able to limit their notifications to actually transactional events. As soon as they have the capability they start spamming away.

I have no idea if that claim is true, but what I did love about visiting Finland was the even the small apartment I rented had a sauna in it! It seems like it's a non-negotiable for even the smallest accommodations.

The cheaper apartments tend to not have private saunas built into the bathroom, but most apartment complexes at least have a shared sauna on the top floor. Residents can book a block of personal time in advance.

In most buildings the shared sauna is on the first floor (basement) and not top.

Also there can be blocks of time regularly scheduled, for example on weekends.

I've been using this one: https://issinfo.net/artemis.html

Better information density.


> but it was arguably the Christian value system which forged the government and institutions that made these achievements possible.

Many of the founders were specifically anti-Christian. They were deists, and believed in a higher power, but specifically rejected the idea of a divine intervention of God or Jesus.

Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.


Of the 45 delegates to the continental congress, only two (Benjamin Franklin and another) were known to be deists. One's membership records couldn't be found. The other 42 were active members and on the books in their churches.[0]

Jefferson also was a deist, but he wasn't present at the constitutional convention of 1787 (though he earlier authored the Declaration of Independence).

[0] M. E. Bradford. Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution, second edition. University Press of Kansas, 1994.


typo - *55 delegates attended the constitutional congress, 52 of which were on the church registers as active church members.

note: only 39 delegates signed the resulting document


I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.

Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?

Those are all Christian values. For what it's worth, I'm not Christian.


> I stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state.

And I said:

> Christians do not own the idea of being nice to others and trusting others.

But let's look at your list:

> Do you value separation of state and religious authority? Women's rights? Minority rights? Human dignity? Equality before the law? Sanctity of life? Individual moral responsibility? Monogamous marriage? The objective study of history? Fair trial? Witnesses at trial? Tolerance of alternative viewpoints?

First of all, these are all Jewish values that Christian's adopted. And secondly, none of these are exclusive to Christianity. In fact they appear in many religions worldwide, as well as secular societies.

These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.


  > These are all just common decency, which is why they appear in most religions, and non-religions.
You and I both wish these decencies were common. Some cultures have some variations on some of these decencies, but they are not common. Assuming that they are common is projecting your culture onto others.

This is why I mentioned the importance of high trust society.


Christian values are always whatever individual Christians say they are.

There's really no such animal in practice. Over time Christian values have included charity for the poor, rapacious capitalism, slavery, the abolition of slavery, anti-science, science, war, peace, and the rest.


Many of the Christians I hear from the most loudly are proclaiming that empathy is toxic. Go figure.

> stated that the United States is based on Christian values. Not that the United States is a Christian state

I believe most of the founders expressed disdain at the notion that the United States was built on Christian values. They were privately Christian. But publicly American. They were trying to break the cycle of history that building countries on religious values brings.

Saying we were built on Christian values is arguing for a continuing role for Christian values. Which, in turn, leads to a Christian state. And then we’re back to popes and mullahs in charge, and the SecDef and Speaker of the House giving sermons.


I actually like when that happens. Like when people "correct" me about how reddit works. I appreciate that we still focus on the content and not who is saying it.

That's not really what happened on this thread. Someone said something sensible and banal about vulnerability research, then someone else said do-you-even-lift-bro, and got shown up.

That's true in this particular case, but I was talking more about the general case.

My friends who work at Meta said that they bought 100s of copies of the book and were passing it around to make sure everyone read it.

I played this on the original IBM PC. (Un)fortunately, my dad got the 8MHz upgrade, so the game was really hard, because it was built for a 4MHz clock.

Luckily someone eventually realeased a DOS utility that would fake a 4MHz clock by making everything take two cycles.

Good times. :)


I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)

I seem to recall that the turbo button didn't come along until the 80286, but some of the PC clones had them before that.

My 486 definitely had a turbo button (that was the one I built after using the original PC for so many years).


The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).

AFAIK no first-party IBM PC ever had a turbo button, only clones, and my only personal recollection of pre-286 clones running significantly faster than 4.77 MHz were the Compaq Deskpro and AT&T PC 6300.

I don't know about the PC 6300 — I only ever used it to run Aldus PageMaker, which, running under Windows on an 8086, could use all the speed it could get — but the Deskpro had a keystroke combination to switch between native and compatible speeds rather than a button.


Hmm, maybe my memory is betraying me. I remember our first family computer was an XT and then later we had a 386. Maybe I'm misremembering and it was the 386 that had the turbo button or maybe the earlier one was a clone. My first own PC was a 486 as well that I built together with my dad. Good memories.

Was the utility called slomo? I recall having to do something like `slomo sopwith.exe` to bring the processing loop back down into human ranges of reaction times.

Probably thinking of “moslo”.

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