Posts by hedgie 342 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2023
I misspoke in my previous post, I'm afraid. I just remembered that I ran across a few some months ago while going through old stuff to see what to keep and toss. So 25+ years after leaving that job, I still had someone's ancient CC information written down. In my defence, I was barely out of my teens when I had that job and work did *not* train in those procedures.
Even without intent of wrongdoing, just a bit of absent-mindedness can lead one to accumulate such things. There were times when I worked in billing I had to write down customer credit card numbers so I could walk them over to a supervisor for them to work something on the account I didn't have permissions for. Obviously, we were supposed to put them in the secure shred bin before going on break or leaving for the day. But there were times where the only bit of paper I had handy was in a personal notebook. Very occasionally I'd forget to tear out the page to shred. Some months after I left that job to move, I found the better part of a dozen scrawled somewhere.
Yes, I should have remembered to shred them at the time. Work should have definitely at least provided pads/pens for such things so employees wouldn't be having to grab a personal notebook just to scrawl something down. But even if this dude wasn't initially planning some sort of revenge, I could see him having collected a bunch of that stuff just to make the job easier despite best practice or whatever security procedures the workplace had. Unlike me just destroying the scrawled numbers when I found 'em, he took advantage of it.
Not just about "AI", but I often feel like I've been screaming into the void these past 25 years or so, warning against so many things that are happening now.[1] It seems as though every idiotic, cruel, authoritarian and dystopian scenario from fiction playing out all in parallel.
A few years ago, I met up with an old friend for dinner and to hang out for a few hours before I had to run into work. Over the course of the meal, she confessed that when we first met, she thought I was the sort of person who wore a tinfoil hat and was wondering "what all do you have to hide so bad?!" And followed up immediately with "I'm starting to think that you were right all along". And she's one of the most sceptical and purely logical people I know. And it's all even worse than when we had that conversation. Were I a woman, I'd have had my name legally changed to "Cassandra"[2] and be done with it.
[1] Sad to say, what I've been told were "paranoid ramblings of doom" are, perhaps, not even as bad as the current reality.
[2] At least it's a pretty enough name for a seer who is doomed to have no one believe any of it.
Since I'm the on-call tech for the family, I was glad when I finally got the call to replace my mother's HP all-in-one when it finally failed. Not only did it have the ink cartridge DRM deciding that "half full" meant empty because of page counts, but then some forced firmware update made it require creating an account with HP and uploading whatever you scanned for "optimisation". Even better, the login didn't work from her Macbook.
If I had a bottle of a good single-malt, I'd have poured myself a nice double on the blessed day I trashed that thing and bought her an Epson Ecotank. No software install for printing (uses CUPS on Mac/Linux), lightweight install for scanner and no phoning home to scan, and even better, she actually was able to learn how to refill the thing so I had fewer support calls.
Wow, that's presumptuous as anything, and exactly what I'm talking about with regard to zealotry and fanatics. How DARE you tell me which features I need for my art. "You don't need that fancy Leica, this cheap Soviet knockoff is all you need!". Gimp only recently got the high bit-depth and non-destructive editing. It still lacks tools that save me hours of work on individual pieces, and has a UI that I'd have to fight to get anything done. As much as I love Krita[1] it is not as strong for photo editing as Affinity or Photoshop. I use computers to get stuff done, and perhaps play a few games and want a minimum of fuss when doing so. And calling BBEdit garbage shows you are exactly the fanatic I'm talking about. I use vim, emacs, and kate on both Mac and Linux, but always return to BBEdit as the primary one. Compared to Affinity, for my use, Gimp is wearing a rubber suit and using its personal toothbrush to clean Affinity's toilet.
Like 99+% of users out there, I haven't signed up for an ideology. It's a machine that does things, and a pleasant user experience with a minimum of frustration. I want to do them comfortably and not fight the OS or various applications to get them done. While I *do* sometimes resent being "stuck" with a Mac as a primary machine, it is currently what best suits my needs. I need certain proprietary software to work flawlessly pretty much every time. That is not always possible on Linux, and having to use WINE. There is a lot of OSS software I use every day, but my definition of "freedom" as a user is to be able to use the tools which suit me best reliably.
[1] I've been using it daily recently for digital painting/drawing and find it wonderful to work with, especially using the iPad as a drawing tablet)
For full disclosure, I totally love everything about Krita, it's my go-to for digital painting. It's powerful, has a great UI and is actually a pleasure to use. But lightweight, it isn't. It's overkill for the stuff you are talking about. And there definitely is a niche for just a basic simple image editor, like MS Paint.
I suppose I could try out Tuxpaint, even if it was designed for kids, just to fill that use case.
Seems more akin to religious fundamentalism. And in a lot of ways, that harms both Linux and OSS in general. Zealots aren't going to notice the flaws or deficiencies. Nothing is wrong with the software the way it is, it's the people who need something else who are wrong. I almost ran away from Linux after dealing with one who was screaming at me on a local support mailing list for trying to get Photoshop working. How I shouldn't ever use anything proprietary and should suffer no high bit depth nor non-destructive editing (and go without several tools I needed, and totally change my workflow) out of "purity". You can't reason with such people, and they won't make any OSS projects better in the long run, because they are always right and potential users are always wrong.
You can't argue with zealots of any stripe, and it's a waste of time and energy. While I'm content enough with that proprietary fruit UNIX and the Affinity suite and a paid text-editor for now, I want the option to leave. I want to be able to do everything I want the way I want using LInux. I do want to see OSS stuff improve and succeed, but that's only going to happen once it can lure people away on its own technical virtues and not ideological ones.
Affinity[1] is the biggest reason why I broke down and got this Mac.[2]. I'd definitely be more likely to go Linux full-time if those and a few others ended up on Linux. I'm content enough as a Mac user, but I'd like having the option to switch comfortably, and those would be a big part of it.
[1] And previously, the Adobe stuff
[2] Another is simply because it is somewhat more hassle-free for day to day stuff.
My Linux laptop is running a rolling release (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for the curious) and it seems far more thoroughly tested than Windows is these days. And I've long had the ability to roll back (BTRFS snapshots) if something goes wrong, even if it can't get beyond GRUB otherwise.[1] M$ has far more in terms of resources, and still can't make rolling back easy and painless?
[1] I'll have to admit, since I've done that, my troubleshooting skills have gotten far worse. Since I can just roll back to a working state, I usually don't bother trying to figure out what went wrong since it takes all of 2 minutes to roll back.
All too true, but I was thinking more about teachers providing education for online uses that parents ought to do but haven't rather than watching the sprogs every single moment. They might not learn how to protect themselves at home, but teachers can at least provide instruction in that regard. Either way, these age verification laws and methods aren't the way to go.
At least there's a chance of the kids having a good teacher. "Age verification" laws are completely idiotic, at best, and sinister at worst. Either they can be trivially bypassed, and enacted by politicians who want to be seen as doing something, or are part of some Big Brother nonsense. With the rise of authoritarianism pretty much worldwide, the latter will almost certainly be the case even if that was not the original intent.
BBEdit is amazing, and I've been using it for over 25 years now. Mac users are already kinda spoilt for choice for text editors in any event. Aside from BBEdit, there are Aquamacs and all the various *nix editors in the terminal. Even if it were a real port, the target users would most likely be recent converts from Windows who used Notepad++ for everything.
From their business perspective, they've "gotten it right". They have a gargantuan market share, and most home and business users will take any garbage they spew out as a result. The quality of the product doesn't matter if they've grabbed their users by the short and curlies. It'd probably take a lot more twisting before companies start looking at Linux on their desktops, and thanks to Orifice, if they switch platforms they're more likely to be getting Macs and *still* paying M$ for a copy of Office.
My condolences, and that's sad to hear. I loved them back in 2001, when I was in the UK. Sounds like how disturbing it felt when on this side of the pond, Speakeasy got bought out by Best Buy. Come to think of it, enshittification has been going on far longer than I had initially assumed.
I remember Sargon.
And yes, when dealing with those "techs", lying my way through the nonsense was the only option. Makes me miss my time with both Demon and Speakeasy, where I could call up, rattle of the list of things I've already tried (along with what was working and what wasn't) and they had the competence to proceed from there and skip all the nonsense/already performed steps. Made the infrequent calls much quicker and more productive. I can't stand "support" being someone who could be replaced by ELIZA or doing the equivalent of playing darts while drunk, dizzy and blindfolded. I even didn't mind talking to the guy in India for support on a SCSI controller, despite the dodgy phone connection making his accent a little hard to parse, at least the dude knew what he was talking about.
At least now that I'm with Comcast, the worst I've had to deal with was the install tech who had outdated info on the router's defaults. At least he gave me what I needed to know what to look up.[1]. And the one time I had to call Verizon support, the lady I talked to ran through a few quick things before escalating within a few minutes, and very short hold times for both the call and escalation. So now, I count myself as reasonably fortunate. I think, however, that xkcd has it right and there needs to be some sort of shibboleth to get you to a real tech immediately. Maybe it's actually an appropriate time to just say "by the way, I run Arch".
[1] How to unlock "advanced" settings and getting total control over it, or even just putting it in bridge mode and largely using my own equipment.
[2] It turned out to be an account issue she didn't have access to diagnose or fix anyway.
Bell Canada sounds like AT&T "support" down here. And the "best" part is when they refuse to proceed to the next item in the script they blindly follow until you lie. Best was when I was told to replace the cable from the router to the tower, despite every device on the LAN pinging fine and traceroutes getting to the first hop outside the LAN and then dying. Or that I needed to somehow conjure up a Windows box when told to go into some Windows thing and I told them I ran Linux. To this day I don't know what settings they even wanted to look at or change, they wouldn't say.
Not even remotely limited to Microsoft. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to get anything with a pulse at more and more places. The chemist I used to go to went from having a "speak to staff" option to "leave a message and wait for a callback" then to "bot only". I took my business elsewhere even if it's a 3.5 mile bike ride each way just so I could reach a human if I needed to call. The service/status line for the train? Not just a bot but one that crashes and terminates the call without even performing its function. In a lot of cases, with all the corporate buyouts/mergers and effective monopolies, you either can't take your business elsewhere or if you *can* the competition is doing the same thing.
Not just theatre, but live music or entertainment, or even simple things like dining out somewhere where you're not asked "do you want to super-size that", or having a couple of drinks with friends. A mere 20 years ago, I could live decently enough in the SF on service industry wages + tips. Wouldn't exactly live in luxury, but could indulge sometimes, and had I been more responsible, even put a little by. Now the whole region is unaffordable unless one has one of the high-paying tech jobs. And it's not just there, the cost of living even in smaller less "desirable" cities has greatly eclipsed any gains in pay.
It's unsustainable, every day this goes on, fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the stuff anyone's selling, but I guess at that point that'll not matter to those who already have all the money.
Right. I gave a friend my old iPhone 11 when his phone died, since he didn't have money for a new phone and I was coming up on my replacement cycle anyway. He doesn't even have a bank account and was able to set up an account with little issue.[1].
[1] Once we realised that the reason he *couldn't* at first was because it didn't like his email provider. Took two minutes in support chat to get it manually allowed.
Not a regular Youtube visitor, but I've noticed with Vivaldi on Mac and uBlock Origin I get a black player window which requires clicking on it, and then takes a couple of seconds to load. Mild nuisance if one is watching long videos (QI episodes for me almost exclusively, since my alternative there is torrents). Total pain if it's shorter ones since autoplay breaks entirely.
I suppose I should just dig up the Pi3 and set up a pihole.
I'd like to get out, personally. Just a number of things making it difficult at the moment. I'd much rather be complaining about the NHS (or local equivalent) than this current issue. My last raise was basically wiped out by premium increases and now this nonsense. As much as people criticise the NHS for waits, I've got those *and* am paying through the nose.
I'm quite jealous. I kinda wish that private insurance was just to cover the "extras" or for concierge care. And a primarily private system just doesn't make sense in the first place. The only way they could even break even here[1] would be some combination of subsidies, charging arm + leg + firstborn, and denial of care. And of course, investors want to make huge and endlessly growing profits on top of that, further taking public funds, everything a person can pay and still say "no" for a necessary procedure.
[1] Of course, more money is spent just dealing with the fscking billing than actual patient care.
That's the crappy thing. I'm looking for another job, but I'd have to go 90 days without coverage if I quit where I am. No way I could make the >1500 a month that mine would cost without work picking up most of the tab just to keep coverage. At least my max deductible is already hit ($250) and my max out of pocket is about $7k.
About par for the course from what I've heard about State Farm.
It's an evil industry, especially the US's "health insurance" system, which is merely the most egregious out of all the insurers. There's a reason the guy who gunned down that CEO is a folk hero to so many people. It's inherent in the way insurers work, namely to get people to pay monthly but never paying out. Their whole business model is predicated on taking your money and never letting go of it. Homeowner's insurance, say, for wildfires in California or floods and hurricanes in Florida is prohibitively expensive if available at all.
Just to give non-USians an idea on the healthcare one, my premiums for that went up 50% this year, and my provider is supposedly a non-profit. I'm paying about $300 a month, and that's with my workplace covering 80% of the premiums. I just got a bill for over $500 for a CT scan. They decided to only partially cover the procedure and I had no notification that they were going to do that. And that's on top of the series of co-pays they took. And that's with both insurer and provider being different tentacles of the same beast.
Oh certainly. I'm honestly more worried about the automated tracking, since who knows how how that could be used against you. And if I was going to do makeup, I'd change it daily enough to suit that purpose. I already change my hair colour every couple of months. I'm definitely too lazy though to do much more than the half mask which does tend to blend in, especially this time of year when people might have the flu or a cold. I should probably start, because every day we're being watched and things like facial recognition spreading everywhere. "Give me six lines written by an honest man and I will find reason to hang him"[1] is definitely something to keep in mind, especially since there's no appeal from these automated overlords' decisions.
[1] Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu but I don't know if that's correct
Also depends on the purpose of fooling the system. Just not wanting to be identifiable and effectively followed everywhere by the machines, particularly if one doesn't have nefarious intent, standing out to humans is not an issue. Looking like a weirdo, especially in a large enough city isn't going to raise too many eyebrows, and most people will just dismiss it. Same with wearing a mask that looks like it's there to prevent illness/spreading illness. Looking like one is obviously trying to fool the cameras is going to raise more actual suspicion.
Like right now, I've got bright blue hair. It does stand out, but most people just dismiss the oddity. Then again, I'm not trying to go everywhere unnoticed. If I wear weird makeup, I'm sure I'll get some street harassment, but again, most people will end up just file it under "none of my business", so it would prevent automated tracking everywhere I go. Part of defeating automated tracking is the social engineering aspect where people might notice but not see it as an attempt to avoid said tracking.
You don't really even have to make yourself look like somebody else, just prevent the cameras from reading everything right. A bit of abstract art on one's face, or say, having a giant triangle (including one eye) with black makeup as part of it would certainly make you stand out to *humans*, but the trick is to look like either someone with health concerns (the surgical mask) or some sort of harmless eccentric rather than someone deliberately trying to avoid tracking.
IIRC, you don't even need a full mask to defeat them. The masks that were everywhere during the height of the pandemic would do, and attract far less suspicion. A lot of East Asian people in particular are known to wear them if it's the height of flu season or they have a cold, and in recent years I've seen far more Westerners follow that example. The right makeup would work as well. I suppose the "cybergoth" look could catch on just to defeat the things.
But sadly, I don't expect any real change unless somehow, a government that actually wants to work for the people bans that shite, and I'm not too optimistic about that given the general worldwide trend for authoritarianism.
Exactly. You don't really *need* any AI nonsense for something so basic. Something similar to Spotlight on Mac is sufficient for searching documents, including .pdf and .doc files for whatever search string you put in, and I have found useful enough to have on a keyboard shortcut. Any decent desktop search would be able to go through a user's documents and retrieve what one needs, even if it has to download data from a remote "drive" in order to do so.
I could see the use of an "AI" to provide summaries of documents rather than searching particular strings, or to find specific images based upon content (ie, that silly one of a dog wearing sunglasses that you don't remember the file name of), but it comes at too high a cost. I don't *want* any online storage provider to even be able to read my documents, let alone have some data-harvesting bot looking through everything for $DEITY knows what purpose. And since M$ has shown itself to be a purveyor of spyware, if I have 0 trust in any provider, my trust for M$ to not mishandle it is a negative or imaginary number.
I'm just glad there's no reporting option for "too fscking easy", since I'd probably be in trouble then.
Of course, I also wanted to allude to the classic ""Windows is a 32-bit shell for a 16-bit extension to an 8-bit operating system designed for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition." (source unknown)
Especially on something *big*. Even the one device I have running services (ssh, key authentication only) gets poked at constantly. I've had IDS logs hit thousands of login attempts overnight and countless scans all on one tiny pathetic host. The RasPi probably spends more time blocking[1] that crap than it does actually doing anything that I put it online for in the first place. All that on a piddling tiny home server that's just a target of opportunity because it's *there*. If there was actually anything in/on there that was of real value to anyone else the number and sophistication of attacks would probably be exponentially higher.
I suppose that attacks like this are the consequence of skimping on paying enough to have staff who are competent and care enough to lock it down well and only have people who are willing to work for the peanuts they reluctantly throw out.
[1] 90% of which seem to originate in China or Russia, and the rest some combination of Eastern Europe, Iran, and Israel.
I suppose I just look at it that way since even if I wasn't often hung-over (student and all) I'd struggle to tell someone what the change would be until I had counted it out (ie, doing the sums in my head) unless it was *really* simple. It was kinda the "child counting physical objects" level. It's sad to admit that right now it took me almost 30 seconds to do the subtraction of 10.75 from 20 in my head with the numbers as a sort of abstraction, and the counting method would have been faster.
I was gaming, and the last system I built with an Nvidia card was ages ago. ATI hadn't opensourced their drivers yet, and the ATI card I originally ordered wouldn't work with the blob of the time and I was stuck with onboard VGA graphics until I sent the card back and got the Nvidia one. *That* blob worked just fine on Linux. Except when I switched to a rolling version of SUSE. Usually every six months or so, the kernel was too new for the blob, and since I *was* doing stuff like gaming, the OSS driver wasn't good enough for the performance I needed.
Thankfully, when that happened, since I had system snapshots enabled, it took just a couple of reboot cycles to revert all the updates and I just waited a few weeks for the blob to catch up with the kernel I was using. Annoying when it did, but it only took a few minutes to deal with.
fair enough. Yes, the people running the scam are getting rich and it'll be everyone else holding the bag one way or another when the final accounting[1] is done. In a way, it's the sort of thing that has happened countless times before but it's just so sickening to watch helplessly like some Cassandra.
[1] Yes, I know it sounds vaguely eschatological, but then again, I'm partially looking forward to the AIpocalypse.
I'll admit when I posted last night, I didn't think of the details of the financial angle beyond "keep bubble going". Then again, thinking of all the details of his self-interest financial angle required more mental bandwidth than knocking out a pithy line or two when sleep meds are taking hold.
Exactly. AI is a cash sink that hasn't produced returns, and trying to do it but in space even worse. The most logical reason for this acquisition is to prop up shares that are likely going to crash soon if things remain as they are. Also, I expect various "unforeseen" problems that he'll explain away to account for the massive losses and keep the wool firmly over the eyes of investors.
That is assuming that there *is* a logical reason for all of this. It could be that that, given his reputed drugs use, he was high as a kite, actually *thought* he had a brilliant idea and none of the sycophants around him would even try to talk him out of it.
Thanks. I didn't know she was a nun at first, since most of them are allowed to wear normal clothes instead of the penguin outfit. She was just another face I recognised as someone who comes in there but hitherto hadn't really talked much with. Since the evening started out during "happy hour", I assumed that she was just another person who had finished the workday and wanted to relax. Which *was* technically true, but when I asked where she worked again, the reply was "St. Gabriel's, I'm a nun". And yes, there were many drinks involved. Their vows have things like "poverty" and "chastity", but not "sobriety". Nuns and priests tend to have boozing and gambling as their allowed vices, even though they have to donate the proceeds from the latter.
