Serious question. If I am re-entering the US after traveling abroad, can customs legally ask me to turn the phone back on and/or seize my phone? I am a US citizen.
Out of habit, I keep my phone off during the flight and turn it on after clearing customs.
If you are a US citizen, you legally cannot be denied re-entry into the country for any reason, including not unlocking your phone. They can make it really annoying and detain you for a while, though.
my understanding is that they can hold you for a couple days without charges for your insubordination but as a citizen they have to let you back into the country or officially arrest you, try to get an actual warrant, etc.
Did you know that on most models of iPhone, saying "Hey Siri, who's iPhone is this?" will disable biometric authentication until the passcode is entered?
In case anyone is wondering: In newer versions of MacOS, the user must log out to require a password. Locking screen no longer requires password if Touch ID is enabled.
I am not sure how it works on Macs, but on iPhone, after first unlock after a reboot, it’s trivial for law enforcement to break into your iPhone - the same with Android.
Everyone makes this same comment on each of these threads, but it's important to remember this only works if you have some sort of advance warning. If you have the iPhone in your hand and there is a loaded gun pointed at your head telling you not to move, you probably won't want to move.
Or squeeze the power and volume buttons for a couple of seconds. It’s good to practice both these gestures so that they become reflex, rather than trying to remember them when they’re needed.
Sad, neither of those works on Android. Pressing the power button activates the emergency call screen with a countdown to call emergency services, and power + volume either just takes a screenshot or enables vibrations/haptics depending on which volume button you press.
On my 9 you get a setting to choose if holding Power gets you the power menu or activates the assistant (I think it defaulted to assistant? I have it set to the power menu because I don't really ever use the assistant.)
Did you check your phone settings? Mine has an option to add it to the power menu, so you get to it by whichever method you use to do that (which itself is sad that phones are starting to differ in what the power key does).
It's close enough, because (most of) the encryption keys are wiped from memory every time the device is locked, and this action makes the secure enclave require PIN authentication to release them again.
Not really, because tools like Cellbrite are more limited with BFU, hence the manual informing LEO to keep (locked) devices charged, amd the countermeasures being iOS forcefully rebooting devices that have been locked for too long.
I believe doing the standard Restart everyone knows is not enough though. The instructions saw were these
Quick-press Volume Up, then Quick-press Volume Down.
Hold the side power button until the screen turns black (approx. 10 seconds).
Immediately hold both the side button and the Volume Down button for 5 seconds.
Release the side button but continue holding the Volume Down button for another 10 seconds.
The screen will remain black.
If the Apple logo appears, the side button was held too long, and the process must be repeated.
Eh? BFU ("before first unlock") is, by definition, the state that a phone is in when it is turned on. There's no need to "force" it.
If you mean forcing an iOS device out of BFU, that's impossible. The device's storage is encrypted using a key derived from the user's passcode. That key is only available once the user has unlocked the device once, using their passcode.
This is the third person advocating button squeezing, as a reminder: IF a gun is on you the jig is up, you can be shot for resisting or reaching for a potential weapon. Wireless detonators do exist, don't f around please.
> I've written tons of code, I've taken no shortcuts, and I've focused on improving over my many iterations. This has enabled me to be an effective steward of generative coding (etc) models, but will younger engineers ever get the reps necessary to get where I am? Are there other ways to get this knowledge and taste?
I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before [0]. With the latest crop of foundational coding models and harnesses, and more progress on the way, I'm beginning to wonder if it will matter? If there's a future where agents are designing the code, implementing the code, and reading and reviewing the code... At that point the code is no longer the thing. "Software engineers" will continue to sit at the interface of product and software, but the software will be writing itself. Of course there will be a need for programmers who can actually read and write computer code, the same way there's a need for Fortran and compiler devs today.
The skill that all software engineers will need to learn, regardless of level, is how to leverage commoditized reasoning to build products effectively.
- how to design systems declaratively and in terms of requirements and constraints
- how to configure the systems in such a way that they're automatically testable end-to-end
- how to move tacit knowledge out of people's heads and into the context (all of our meetings will be transcribed; questions from the agent will be generated during the meeting resolve ambiguity; the agent will be an omnipresent attendee in all meetings: "Agent: The topic you're discussing overlaps with what Sally said three days ago when she met with Mike. They covered xyz..."; companies that follow remote work best practices will have an advantage here)
- how to allocate and orchestrate teams of people and agents
> I think this will be a problem in the middle term, and I've written about such deskilling before
I'm thinking more broadly. Here's an example: barring malnutrition, western people aren't as strong as they used to be. But why is that? We have gyms and home exercise machines. People have never had more access to the latest exercise science and technology. It's because you no longer incidentally get the reps in modern life. We're reaping the rewards of that with obesity and cardiovascular disease, and that's bad enough.
Imagine the same thing happening to our minds because we no longer incidentally get cognitive reps in future life. People will be asking chatgpt who to vote for, whether they should have kids, whether they should stay in relationships or which major to choose. People will stop going to doctors because doctors will forget how to doctor after using medical models. Etc.
What's a society that's forgotten how to think like? What happens when there are no teachers, doctors, software engineers, lawyers, writers, artists, therapists, because the lack of economic incentive has made it impossible to justify the employment, let alone the training?
There is value in the doing. We aren't what we produce or make; we are what we do.
thanks for sharing this, it resonates with me. as some other commenters have said, CLIs, cURL, and other shell tools are composable and discoverable. it seems like a good direction.
auth considerations are present in the design of MCP. this, as opposed to the hodgepodge auth story with CLIs. there are APIs that either don't support OAuth or where using bare credentials is more expedient, and using agent-visible env vars is a security incident waiting to happen. but that doesn't necessarily mean we must use MCP. i think it's a matter of time before agentic tools come bundled with a proxy layer from which secrets / env vars can be set and used but not directly read [0].
you may have issues running in Docker; when i last touched this i needed to modify docker.sh:
-docker run --rm -ti -v "$PWD":/usr/src/koans -w /usr/src/koans golang:1.6.0-alpine go test
+docker run --rm -ti -e GO111MODULE=off -v "$PWD":/usr/src/koans -w /usr/src/koans golang:1.18-alpine go test
That's because its a shit title editorialization: The article is actually saying that there hasn't been an October in two decades with this many layoffs, not that this October had more layoffs than any other month in two decades.
I'm using mcp-agent and have tried the orchestrator workflow pattern[0]. For deep research I'm having mixed results. As far as I can tell, it's not using prompt caching[1] with Anthropic models, nor the gpt-5 responses API[2], which is preferable to the completions API. The many MCP tools from a handful of servers eat up a lot of context. It doesn't report progress, so it'll just spin for minutes at a time without meaningful indication. Mostly it has been high cost and high latency without great grounding in source facts. I like the interface overall, but some of the patterns and examples were convoluted. I'm aware that mcp-agent is being worked on, and I look forward to improvements.
When I was a kid, my dad and I were watching a cooking show together. I asked him "what do they do with all the food they make", and then, as if on cue, the host said, "In case you're wondering, the staff eat all the food we make here." My dad and I looked at each other with a silent look of "whoa".
It's why I have a hard time watching some of the Gordon Ramsey shock cooking shows. He'll take a barely over or under-done filet and toss it in the bin to make a point. That's just not OK
[0]: https://opencode.ai/docs/ecosystem/#:~:text=Use%20your%20Cha...
[1]: https://github.com/numman-ali/opencode-openai-codex-auth
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