Posts by may_i 147 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2023
I find a lot of the M$ C# development patterns totally impenetrable, web development in particular.
How anything works is hidden behind so many levels of abstraction and hidden code that you can't see and don't know how it works that doing anything with this stuff amounts to little more than making magic incantations in a language you don't understand and hoping you don't summon a major demon.
The clue is in the fact that some access broker will have needed to establish a domain administrator's hash or password. You can make Linux servers part of a Windows AD domain. Once they are members of the domain, administrator access is going to give the ransomware all the access it needs to encrypt every file.
It's ML!!
If these "biz leaders" could get their heads around the fact that there's no intelligence here, artificial or otherwise, maybe they might start to understand.
If I try to contact a company with an issue and get diverted to a chatbot, or even worse, a voice recognition system, I hang up and do not return.
micros~1's Recall only records WHAT the user did on their computer. It cannot capture WHY they did it.
Therefore, the LLM's analysis of that log will not reveal any picture which captures why the user is doing what they are doing and will miss the most important part of the process. You can't automate things where you don't understand the reasoning behind them.
Sadly, your business partner is merely engaging in the same blue sky thinking which probably motivated the creation of Recall in the first place.
Once they start training ML models on the cesspit that is f*book, the result will be a chatbot so momentously stupid, dishonest and contentious that everyone will realise what a stupid idea ML is. The venture capital market for it will crash, orders for ML and graphics card processors will nose dive and we can forget all about the "AI" bubble when we've finished laughing at all the destitute investors.
Win!!
Even without the security holes, the Zyxel firmware is a privacy nightmare. It has a feature called myZxelCloud-Agent which seems to sends everything you write to the disks up to Zyxel's servers for indexing, whether you enable the cloud storage function or not. Even if you delete myZxelCloud-Agent, the firmware downloads and re-installs it again unless you take concerted action to prevent it.
However, you can kick Zyxel's firmware out and boot the box with Debian instead. That lets you combine two 12TB disks into a logical 24TB partition and use it as a very handy backup device. It's always hard to make backups of a large NAS server, but using this super cheap box, I can regularly rsync the most important datasets from my proper NAS to one of these. If you have a pair of them and a friend nearby, it's easy to always keep one of them away from home and have a fire-proof backup of the data which is most important to you.
It's a shame that there's nothing these days which even comes close to the price I paid for these units when retailers were clearing their stocks of them. The first rsync takes a couple of weeks, but after that, the performance is more than adequate for keeping many terabytes of backups fresh and safe.
Swedish politicians love to hype up how green Sweden's energy supply is. The actual facts could not be further from what the politicians' reality distortion field suggests.
When the wind is blowing, yes, Sweden has an excess of electricity, but only in the north of the country. Due to decades of under-investment, there is no way to move that electricity from the north of the country to the south. The means that everyone in the south of the country (where 85% of the population are) has to pay two to three times as much as the north for their electricity.
When the wind isn't blowing, Sweden does not have enough predictable electricity generation to supply its own needs and must import electricity from other countries. If, one day, other countries don't have an excess to sell to Sweden, the Swedish power grid will fail, most likely in a catastrophic manner. Already, on calm days, Sweden has to rapidly bring reserve, fossil powered, stations online to defend the grid against collapse in addition to buying in electricity from abroad. If the cables used to facilitate that import were sabotaged, the entire country's grid would shut down.
It's also a fact that short sighted Swedish politicians have shut down working nuclear power stations, in the name of being green, which could have provided the desperately needed reserve of predictable generation. Much has been spouted by the politicians about how Sweden is going to make "green" steel by using electricity to smelt iron ore. They are investing billions of tax payer kronor into the project and conveniently ignoring the fact that the project requires electricity generation which is equal to the combined generation capacity of Sweden, Norway and Finland to work.
This announcement is hype and nothing else. Sweden has deep, structural problems with their electricity supply. They can build as many wind farms as they want, but when the wind stops blowing, the deficit is still there.
No competent UNIX sysadmin needs anything even remotely like the endless maze of pointy, clicky tools that are available to administrate Windows. They're been screwing around with that crap for decades now and each time they tweak it, my idea of where to look for the right place to change various Windows settings gets more and more confused.
Maybe this is why systemd has such a painful command line interface. It's all part of the master plan to shift everything to Windows control panel style interfaces and finally extinguish the UNIX idea of having one tool that is really good at the one thing it does and making the system easy to use and administrate with a bunch of those simple, memorable tools. Once they do that, they can deprecate the WSL and enter the extinguish phase.
Instead of trying to implement more and more bans on more and more things and behaviours, how about trying things which make parents take the responsibilities that they have as parents seriously?
The government is not (and should not be) responsible for ensuring that your children are brought up to be responsible and functioning members of society.
And to all of you suggesting that the responsibility for constraining access to social media and the Internet in general by children is the government's problem to fix, think again. The only way to do that is to make it impossible to use the Internet without having to legally identify yourself. This is an exceptionally bad idea. An Internet with no possibility to be anonymous is something the government would love, and you are playing right into big brother's hands.
This tends to say it all really. Legislators tend to be members of bodies, the kind of bodies which include the board of directors of companies like Elsevier. Copyright monopolists.
If people who actually know what they are talking about think there are good reasons to start pouring human knowledge and culture into machine learning systems in the hope of creating something incredible, that's a good reason why copyright should not apply to that use.
Imagine creating a potentially ultra-intelligent child and being legally unable to impart all of humanity's defining data to that child to fully educate them. Where is the sense in that?
Most people have absorbed trademarked words into everyday speech. In theory anyone who calls a vacuum cleaner a "Hoover" is committing misuse of the "Hoover" trademark. Lines between "fair use", "inspired by" and other concepts which provide a small respite from the already overextended rights of copyright and patent holders are constantly being re-drawn in increasingly restrictive ways, to the benefit of corporate entities instead of society at large.
The legal and legislative debate and actions concerning ML systems, potential future AIs, copyright, patents, trademarks and the ownership of knowledge in general will define the next decades. There are very real risks with allowing corporate interests to assert control over the ownership of human knowledge and culture. Excusing monopolistic behaviour regarding knowledge by claiming to be a 'trusted curator' is transparently self-serving. Curating humankind's collective data is a society's responsibility, as is making it widely available. In times long ago, learning your tribe's songs and stories so that knowledge was passed to the next generation was a responsibility given wisely to trusted people. If nobody bothered to pass on information about which plants would kill you if you ate them, your tribe would probably die out . Here in 2024, we have taken that idea and made it many orders of magnitude larger. Our modern data storage and networking technology lets us store incomprehensibly large amounts of knowledge, culture and data. So much data that we cannot make good use of it without a lot of help. The help is the exponentially more powerful computer and the ways we can express our thoughts to them.
We have the possibility in front of us to possibly make something far more than the sum of its parts. A risk which is surely worth taking?
Locking what is needed to teach our collective child behind laws which only benefit rich, greedy monopolists is not in society's best interests.
I fear that there are too few people in governments who are impartial enough, knowledgeable enough and imaginative enough to be trusted with this responsibility.
When I look at the prices for EVs and compare them to the very nice Peugeot 207 with all the extras that I bought some 12 years ago, the EVs are hideously overpriced. If the only option for me to buy an EV is restricted to overpriced EU manufactured models, it looks like I'm going to be hanging on to my Peugeot for as long as I can keep it running cost effectively.
All this data will be fed into massive storage systems, never to be forgotten. Everything you do, can and will be used against you.
Then, all the data will be mined by notoriously unreliable AI systems to flag people considered to be a 'problem'.
Without you having done anything remotely illegal, these AI systems will invariably throw up false positives which will lead to a large number of heavily armed police kicking down your door in the early hours and dragging you out of your bed for interrogation - if they don't just shoot you first.
Welcome to the Brave New World UK citizens, you let them do this to you in exchange for protecting you from the bogey man. The fantasy of "innocent until proven guilty" is now a quaint notion from times gone by. You now are guilty because the AI says so and you have no appeal. You are simply guilty with no chance to even prove your innocence.
Any chances of organising any action to reverse this process are now gone as TPTB will be able to identify anyone trying to organise to change the status quo and you and your fellow conspirators will be rounded up and "re-educated" - if you're lucky.
What a helpful comment!
If you think there's some magic way "power is delivered to chargers" which doesn't require inch thick conductors and without the risk of frying the user, setting fire to the charging station etc, instead of being a twat, why don't you enlighten us with your wisdom by explaining exactly how this "power is delivered to chargers"?
I'm all ears.
Let's do a little maths to see how achievable any of these preposterous claims about fast charging are.
A Tesla Model 3 battery has a nominal 75kW/h capacity and it operates at 350V
To charge it from empty to 80% full therefore requires putting 60kW/h of energy into it (assuming 100% charge efficiency - which is unrealistic)
If your electricity supply is 240V, you would need to boost it up to 350V for charging. (a 31.33% increase)
To put 60kW/h of energy into the battery in 10 minutes (1/6 of an hour) you need to put in 360kW for ten minutes.
360kW at 350V is 1028A. As you are having to boost 240V to 350V, you will need (assuming 100% boost efficiency - also unrealistic) to pull 1350A from a 240V supply to achieve this.
Doesn't anyone see the problem with this?
It was truly a masterstroke by the green fundamentalists in getting a child to shill for their blue sky fantasies.
Thankfully, she is getting older now and critics can't be deflected any more by the accusation of being nasty to a hopeful child when you call her out for her appalling logic and lack of analysis.
Even if you can fix all the local infrastructure issues (which is hard to start with), if there isn't enough power available in the grid, all the local infrastructure upgrades are pointless.
In the example of Sweden, the politicians can't see further than the next four years and have consistently failed to look at the problems they have been lining up for the perfect storm. They have closed working nuclear reactors in favour of generating power from unreliable sources such as wind. Now the country is in the position that the politicians are making lots of noise about how Sweden is going to produce "green steel" and are pouring billions into projects which need the combined electricity generation capacity of Norway, Sweden and Finland put together to provide enough electricity to make their hare-brained scheme possible. Due to underinvestment, even when the wind is blowing, there is not enough grid capacity to transfer all the electricity generated by wind power from the north of the country to the south where most of the industry is, making Swedish consumers in the south of the country reliant on expensive imported electricity and the excess wind power from the north ends up being sold at discounted prices to Finland and Norway. This also means that if you live in the south of the country, you pay up to five times more for electricity than those who live in the north.
They have absolutely no idea what they are doing, On calm days, Sweden has to rely on imported electricity. One fine, calm day soon there won't be enough imported electricity to keep the lights on and the perfect storm will decimate the grid as power station after power station goes offline and the entire country shuts down. The politicians have been warned by experts for the last two decades that they are mismanaging the country's electricity system and that it will all blow up in their faces, but they all work on the principle that they won't be in power when it happens and that as politicians, they cannot be held responsible for any decisions they made while in power anyway.
And if that sounds incredible, it is! All politicians have "ansvarsfrihet" or "freedom from responsibility". What a great incentive for encouraging responsible management of my taxes. NOT!
It's all very well installing charging points, but unless the underlying generation capacity increases to supply those charging points, it's all rather pointless.
As it takes about 20 years to get a new nuclear reactor built and online, I don't see any way the vast majority of countries can increase generation to keep up with the increasing needs of not just electric cars, but industry in general. Decades of short sighted planning and political incompetence have already put many countries in the awkward position where they already cannot generate enough electricity to satisfy today's demands, let alone the demands of ridiculous targets like not having any petrol/diesel cars on the roads in ten years time.
If everyone is supposed to drive electric cars, not only are the current plans for charging points woefully inadequate, generation to supply them won't exist either.
I live in the capital of Sweden. Most people live in apartments here and very, very few have dedicated parking. All parking is on a 'whoever gets there first' basis on the road outside. I can't see the city paying to dig up all the roads and put hundreds of charging points on every street, so I can't even see how they can provide enough charging points to meet demand, let alone produce enough electricity to feed them. I'm sure the same applies in many major cities all over Europe. Let's not even start talking about how the local substations in most areas are not capable of meeting the increased demand either.
It's all a pipe dream created by people who don't have to take any responsibility for the consequences.
If Micros~1 think that I am going to install Windows 11 on my only PC that needs it (my gaming PC), they can eat my shorts!
Why the holy crap would I want to install an operating system which has become a surveillance and advertising platform, instead of an operating system?
Maybe when they kill Windows 10 for real, I will finally be forced into migrating to a fully Linux based gaming machine and kick out all the games which won't play nicely with Linux. I have a feeling that when that happens, it will be a pleasure and will leave me basking in the warm glow which comes from finally banishing anything developed in Redmond from my home.
Quite why the USA has such a byzantine tax system is beyond me.
Here in Sweden, the tax authority sends people their pre-filled tax declaration form a month before the deadline for filing. If I agree with the figures on the pre-printed form (which already includes income, tax paid, and deductions for interest paid on loans, etc), I just send a text message to the tax authority and my tax declaration is done. It takes me about 1 minute each year and costs no more than sending the text message.
I got a fair number of downvotes yesterday for suggesting that these export bans will end up costing US manufacturers sales to a huge market and accelerate the speed at which China will catch up with and surpass them. I'm not quite sure why I was downvoted for stating the bleeding obvious.
There is no shortage of very capable engineers in China and there is a large amount of government money available to be strategically invested into long term goals. The Chinese government, by its constant nature, is able to make ten year (and longer) plans and execute them as they are unfettered by the inevitable short sighted focus which comes with western four year political cycles.
Underestimate them at your peril!
This "no high tech for China" nonsense is childish and in the end, counter-productive.
All the high tech bans will achieve is to cost US companies sales to a massive market and accelerate the speed at which China will catch up with and then surpass US companies in all of the technologies which they can't, for manufactured reasons, be allowed to buy. It's all about protectionism and very little to do with the, by nature undocumented, "national security" risks. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is the expression which comes to mind.
As to electric cars from China spying on you, well, the ones which don't come from China already do a fine job at that, so what's the difference?
Just don't make your NAS accessible from the Internet. Even if you *think* it is fully patched. Is anything really that important that you're prepared to make your NAS a honeypot?
Even if your shiny new NAS is from "a reputable source", it isn't suitable for putting on the Internet.
A long time ago, I had a QNAP NAS. I used their service which functioned as a proxy so that I could access my NAS when I was away from home. It was only when I heard the NAS running its fan at full speed when it wasn't supposed to be doing anything that I found out I had been owned. Some enterprising people had broken in to QNAP's proxy and planted their Monero miner on tens of thousands of customer machines.
I was lucky this was before the ransomware gangs got started.
1. Make something useful
2. Put lots of security holes in it
3. Stop updating it and fixing the holes
4. Offer a new version with new holes
5. Profit!
I have a similar, cheap as chips, Zyxel NAS. It was also full of holes plus some spyware that tried to download everything I uploaded to it.
It runs Debian now. It can't be reached from the Internet and doesn't open any external connections either. It's a great backup device for my real NAS. No replacement needed!
This guy is stupid. Deep down incurably stupid.
Aside from the moronic attitude which thinks that having people killed is a good solution, putting his bitcoin in an exchange wallet is just dumb to start with. Using that identifiable bitcoin to pay for a non-existent hit man is cosmically stupid. Thinking that you can hire a real hit man using the Internet or the Darknet makes him Darwin award material.
That anyone would donate to his sister's gofundme just goes to prove how many equally stupid people there are out there.
I have lost count of how many years it has been since Notepad++ became one of the first programs that get installed on any Windows machine that I have to work with. It's just great.
This article reminded me of this and the fact that I don't think I've ever donated to Don for his wonderful editor. So I went over to https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ and donated some money to Don to say thanks.
Maybe you might also realise how long you have taken this great program for granted. If you do, be a good person and send Don some cash, he deserves it.
Thank you for the first comment about the article.
Elon seems to be under the impression that his own personal interpretations of the term "free speech" apply to every sovereign state in the world and override their laws. For a supposedly intelligent man, this is remarkably poor reasoning.
So is Elon stupid or just fucking arrogant?
I am leaning towards the latter opinion. There is a good chance that Elon's self-centred arrogance will eventually destroy Xitter and in five years from now, Xitter will just be a reference on Wikipedia. I hope it bankrupts him. Of all those who desperately need taking down a peg or 5000, he is close to the top of the queue. People who live under the illusion that they are invincible or untouchable tend to get their comeuppance in the end.
ELON! Try keeping your public gob shut for six months and stop micromanaging your companies. You might be able to pay off the loans you took to destroy Twitter!
There is an old adage about locks only keeping honest people out, and it's so true.
None of these trivial locks which secure server racks, little steel cash boxes and similar take more than about five seconds to open with a rake pick and that doesn't even require more than a modicum of skill to use.
Many moons ago, the shared laundry room in my apartment block was locked when my booked time came around. The person who had locked it with their booking tag wasn't even home so that I could get them to remove their clothes from the machine so that I could start my wash. What to do? Then I noticed that the door was hardly a great fit in its frame - the simple application of a large screwdriver between the door and its frame was sufficient to open it. After dumping the missing resident's wet clothes in a trolley and starting my wash, I was on my way out when another resident saw me leaving the room and commented "Oh, have they finally come and collected their washing?". I replied "No, it's all in that trolley over there". "But how did you get in?" she said.
The look on her face when I simply smiled and showed her the big screwdriver I had in my back pocket was classic!
I've long tired of trying to get useful results for any software technical query from a search engine, particularly with anything relatively new. There are so many results for the alpha, beta and various releases of anything that most search engines seem to be incapable of putting the results which apply to the latest release at the top of the result list. The engines themselves get little help from an army of (Indian mostly for some reason) CV fluffers who all pirate the same copy from the first article it appears in, to show that they have a web site full of technical tips. The fact that none of these cloned articles have a meaningful publication date or any indication as to which release they refer to hardly helps the search engine, or the unfortunate reader.
AI was supposed to be the saviour of search engine results. If I'm trying to filter a list of results, I can almost without actively looking, filter suspicious URLs out as I scan down the list. If I can do that, matching obvious patterns in almost less time than it takes to skip my eye over each result, what can't this wonderful new AI technology do it better than me and save me the trouble?
I'd say that the answer to that is: It's not AI. It does exactly what you would expect a Machine Learning system to do when presented with data it has not been trained on. There's no adaptability, instinctive pattern matching or deriving new knowledge from past experience. There is NO AI, it's just a marketing buzzword term. The press at large deserves the ultimate nut kick for misleading people, who have no understanding of computers, that artificial intelligence actually exists.
The hype has become so bad that I'm almost considering giving up correcting people when they say "AI" that they mean "ML".
Almost...
Any company that stores credentials in plain text, on their own internal systems, or in "the cloud" who gets caught should see their CEO and other management subject to criminal liability which includes a prison sentence, not just cash fines to the ever greedy government authorities.
There are NO EXCUSES for this kind of crap!
I've been running TrueNAS for a long time on the various hardware that has hosted my NAS over the years. The NAS still has 'freenas' as its host name, and it has been rock solid through the years.
I only run two jails on it - one to share out my media library through Jellyfin and one which runs URBackup to keep my work and personal machines backed up.
I see zero benefit in running my NAS on Linux and having to transition a stable configuration to something which provides zero benefit for me compared to what I'm running now. All the experimental virtual machines, containers and one-off experiments run on my Proxmox cluster where they can't damage anything and benefit from the flexibility needed for that use case.
It's sad to see iX leaving their FreeBSD product to wither and die and while the new SCALE version may gain them some buzz and hype for the next few years, I can't help but think they are doing themselves no favours by abandoning the stability and reliability that they have in the FreeBSD code base. The general sentiment on their forums, from the users who have been with them since the freenas days, is far from positive.
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