Posts by goblinski 156 publicly visible posts • joined 30 May 2024
You're small potatoes till you've waved a Casio CMD-40.
Younglings will appreciate it, people waiting in line in government buildings with captive channels running on TVs - even more.
Also if you've worked in a garage servicing many Renaults in the 90's. IR lock/unlock factory keyfobs ? Why not !
Naturally the Edison Cartel and Marconi's telegraph undercut his funding and reputation so they could keep billing for power and messages
..............
Et alors la marmotte, elle met le chocolat dans le papier alu.
Speaking of papier alu - I still can't fathom the fact that tinfoil hats do feed the brains under them precious eyes-only information and deep secret knowledge from the source, BUT refuse to stream basic info on how Evil and business entropy really works...
Which is that - if Tesla had anything similar at an operational level - the Evil ones would have let him finish it then steal it from him and start charging for it, for an even greater profit.
So he had it ready, but they cut his wings. Somehow - they (the bad guys) had the power to sabotage Nikola Tesla's work, in an efficient and all-destroying way, BUT were scared crapless of the the mighty laws in the US that would have left them penniless should Tesla have finished his work :-P
This is deliciously cute cherry-picking.
The reality is that if free energy/wireless energy transmission/internal combustion engines running on water/fill the blanks here COULD and DID exist, the nasty ones would be the first to exploit them and make them PAID.
The free energy sources would be taxed, the area over which the wireless energy beam would flow would be taxed, the water that goes in that magic engine would get taxed, the blanks that were left to be filled with something else magic would be taxed too.
Most basic example - home heating diesel fuel in, say, France. Costs a fraction of what diesel at gas stations costs. There are heavy fines if you're caught using it in your car - with all the matching roadblocks, and chemical tracers in heating diesel that make it easy to detect by those smiling mobile customs. Rumor is there are also little chemical "aids" that would "help" your engine to an untimely death should you use heating diesel exclusively. But that's a rumor. The roadblocks at night - I've seen myself.
There is no vacuum in business and in taxes. There's no benevolent wise lawmen watching from the side, and no Johnny Mnemonic. If wireless electricity transmission was invented tonight at midnight, it would be taxed at one past midnight. And in the morning, we'll be celebrating the abolition of cables and poles, while still paying the same electricity bills or higher.
This module is beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. At least under this angle.
It alternatively reminds me of:
- The Devourers' space ship, from Liu Cixin's "The Devourer"
- An upgraded AC compressor pulley for a BMW n54 that would NEVER break, screech, or go bad in any other way (the pulley, not the engine. I can dream, but I can't dream the impossible). Somehow it doesn't have ribs for the belt, but that's a detail.
The above would be revealing of what my recent reads and little tasks have been lately.
I was once asked to write a message that was supposed to show for people who were trying to get in places on our website where they were not supposed to be. Don't ask. It was at the dawn of internet and they were not called hackers yet, or at least they were not that nasty. So - possibly a message for script kiddies getting too curious.
I don't remember it in full, but I am quite sure it contained "...You are here. You are not supposed to be here. You should have not come here. What are you doing here ?!? Now that you're here - your computer will shed half its RAM, your chair will sag then melt, your sound card will play the Marseillaise in a loop at random times and your mouse will morph into a rat..."
There was more, but I don't remember. I put the chair part because we were using Porsche Design chairs in the office, something like $6k a pop (2000's prices), and not ONE of them was working correctly. Mine was tilting backwards as the plate's welds were giving up, others had their hydraulics shot - definitely not impressed).
We got a call two days later from a user who was absolutely panicked (long live the times when the support phone published on the site would land you directly in the office), explaining long and large how he didn't do anything, just browsing the site. To this day my then boss and main guru claims the guy was trying to do something fishy.
...beyond their actual losses...
Actual losses are fairly easy to calculate.
If this guy has two brain cells to rub together, he'll have a whole list of interviews and refusals to present as proof of his unemployability in the field.
Banks keep a list of unemployable candidates, if the Wells Fargo scandal is any indication.
...I wonder what the other characters in this play would have to say about it
Very much ditto on that one.
I'm not giving any credit to any bank (hey, the opposite is also often true :-P), but I wouldn't expect them to have incompetent lawyers. And if this case is as it's presented, it's as clear cut as it gets, and no corporate legal would have allowed it.
It's not insanity at all. Not one bit. Not in the US.
Once he gets embroiled in this, he basically has to retire or go independent - he's unemployable in that field. Everyone will praise him, pat him on the back and run far, far away. And even as an independent he can get snubbed. Even if he gets the whole sum - which he won't - lawyers will eat a good chunk of it.
So in the best scenario - he'll end up pretty much unemployable - in the same field, city, area, region - with a lump sum. This lump sum has to cover for pretty much the rest of his life, with healthcare costs, out of pocket medical insurance (if available at all) and so on.
Or, he can move somewhere else, which is a life altering event big time, involving personal and financial costs at many levels.
They don't mention his age, but if he was doing say $150k/yr and he's thirty, with an expectation of 2% raise per year (it's usually more, but let's aim for that) and a retirement age of 67, you get this:
n=67−30=37 years
Salary at 67=150,000×(1.02)exponent37
His expected yearly salaries will be
| Year | Salary (\$) |
| ---- | ----------- |
| 1 | 150,000.00 |
| ......
| 10 | 179,263.89 |
| ......
| 37 | 305,983.10 |
Total sum earned over 37 years: $8,105,138.18
Note that should he actually work, he'll very likely be saving money towards health insurance, pension plans and whatnot. With a lump sum, those will add up.
So asking 20 mil is nowhere near insanity in similar cases.
I've commented on this before - I'll comment again:
Why the assumption that the specific type of recruiters that would recruit in these specific conditions care that much about NOT recruiting a Nork spy ?
- A top notch company will have top notch recruiting practices, which would make such an infiltration impossible.
- A crappy company with crappy recruiting practices will be looking to piece meal deliver a crappy product. A "Champagne from the beer tap" employee, as described above, would be a bingo for them, and they'll dig their heads in the sand stories deep to be able to exploit such an opportunity. That the money is going to eventually work against their country and society would cause but a chuckle. Confronting them further will unleash a counter-barrage of whataboutism. At the end of the day, they'll claim they didn't know, and being the victim.
- A semi-crappy company with semi-crappy practices ? Whichever way the wind blows.
In all events, if the recruiting practices are wonky, they would have worn out the recruiters themselves enough to make them WANT this to happen and close their eyes each step of the way, or not caring altogether.
- A small top notch company that actually has to go through such practices ? Errr... Don't the Norks have enough money to have created, own, and run these from the beginning and from the top, in the first place ?
And I'm not even scratching the surface on recruiting agents that would do 90% of the prescreening fighting for a buck, then dumping the candidate to a lazy and/or incompetent manager as "This is the perfect one".
I did that on my then big boss' wife's company website once (real estate company), after we shoveled for weeks while she kept changing her requirements. Just the hover tags over pictures.
I wasn't nasty, I have to insist. Just cutely snarky (I hope).
Took it down fast, as my direct supervisor was already neck deep into this and really stressed out (unlike me, he was actually working rather than goofing around). I hope to this day someone saw it.
"...Odometers are not allowed to under read but may be over by up to 10%..."
So, somehow they can be over by up to 10%, but yet they are accurate, and my point about them being consistent (including in showing the wrong value) but not mandatorily accurate is void because I happen to now live in the US ?
And both your last and your current cars cheat on you by north of 5%, but you are okay pontificating that people relying on GPS for measurements are stupid ?
Le ridicule ne tue pas :D
PS: Yep, the US are way behind in motoring regulations. They didn't make catalytic converters mandatory 18 years before Europe.
That's got to be the stupidest thing I've seen so far today...
Well now... don't sell yourself short ??? You'r still in the race. Don't give up :-P
To me, the stupidest thing seen today is someone preaching about other people's stupidity while boasting about gas mileage tracking using a device that is legally not mandated to be accurate (although there are laws against tampering with it), and has just a recommendation of ±4% accuracy.
Consistency over the long term - yes, absolutely.
Accuracy - not by a long shot.
Booo-hoo
As long as no money is made off it and it's for personal use, people should take a chill pill. Ghibli surely already have, as they have not reacted - and they shouldn't, other than to make sure Disney+ has enough streaming pipe available for all those watching queues that will be brushed off and squeezed to screens world-wide (or at least - everywhere where it's available).
The name "Ghibli" has been pushed to a number of people worldwide that is orders of magnitude larger than the amount of people who have seen a Totoro plush but don't know what it is, which in itself is orders of magnitude larger than the amount of people that know what Ghibli is. Someone should look at before/after streaming numbers, if any are available.
As for Hitler or JFK Ghibli-style - they have always been available to anyone who would think of such thing, on DeviantArt and whatnot.
I am saving my outrage for the day when ChatGPT will be able to output Schindler's List - Michael Bay style (Ghibli-style is not needed, as Death of the Fireflies was already more depressing), or Dora the Explorer Zack Snyder style, or The Fifth Element with Alexandra Daddario as LeLoo.
And on that day, my outrage will be about not having enough lives to watch them all.
We have random issues at the office with multiple monitor setups randomly losing a monitor (going full dark).
The fix can go anything from pressing the monitor's power button to having to unplug some other monitor's video cable, re-detect monitors in Display Properties, reenable the offending monitor, extend the desktop to it and re-plug the poor thing we unplugged.
This was quite a mystery, and happening completely at random.
A couple of months ago I got up from my office chair (not touching my desk in any way) and a spark flew out as I touched my chair's handle.
At the same time, one of my monitors went dead.
I'm appalled that it's 2025, and static electricity has not been abolished yet. This is unacceptable.
Can I present my case with a flock of avatars each looking like the judges' nieces and grandkids ?
Or plead an "I didn't do it" animal cruelty case as Dr Pol ? A "I'm too weak to have beaten these three people in that street fight" as George Constanza ? Or "I don't know much about computers" in a cybersecurity case as an Amish elder ? Or "Yes your honor, he constantly kept drooling after me" as Anna Falchi ? Come on people, sky is the limit here ! Asking for a friend.
Yup, same here.
But - side note - when one submits a story and it gets published chewed up, rehashed last-year's Ai style, with major elements taken off and with the punch line of the story published in the actual title - it gives food for thought on whether to bring more in :-D
So - maybe we're looking at the result of some less than abundant supply.
That's the dumbest reason for firing I've seen, if any, if this guy's performance was otherwise good.
If at my previous jobs we'd have had to fire all the little ladies that still used Caps Lock to enter an uppercase character when they typed their password, instead of using Shift, we'd have had to refresh half the company.
This guy could have been incompetent just as much as he could have been superstitious, or preferring some weird keyboard layout that would have made switching to a different one to get to it just as long, or could be he just was genuinely refusing to admit that anyone would put a " | " character look like a " : " on steroids on the keyboard. I know I am.
If he was using the extra three seconds it takes to copy/paste for thinking on the problem, he was just as efficient as anybody else.
Not a coder, but if I was I'd avoid any place where this would be a fireable offence.
The tabs vs spaces Silicon Valley episode was at least funny. This here is not.
I'll go against current here, and submit that I know neither Aidan nor the elderly dev, so I don't see how I can join the bandwagon on applauding for some guy being pushed out.
The elderly dev was obviously unqualified for that specific job, but there's little background on what his main strengths were, and what he was doing for the company prior. Zero input on how he got there.
I am not questioning Aidan's position that said guy was unqualified for the job at hand, but I know little of how the company evolved to get to that project in the first place, what that guy was doing previously, and how much he contributed to the company getting where it was.
Could be he was God's perfect idiot, or that he was a tired horse that had to be shot, and management knew to send him to the one area where bullets were flying.
I have been in a similar situation, and while I genuinely wasn't qualified for the things that were requested from me when company directions changed, I also genuinely saw little assistance from the guys in my team, who were neighbors and pals since first grade, following each other at different companies, completing each other's sentences and genuinely functioning as one (very smart and very competent) two-brained worker. Great guys one way or the other, but my career path took a nice bat hit.
Not everyone has the brains or graciousness to admit lack of knowledge in a professional environment, so - too bad for that guy publicly confronting Aidan and digging himself deeper, but the simple fact that he got tangentially centrifuged the next day is indication that he was set for that from the very beginning.
Don't pay attention, could be this type of story doesn't click well with the visions of 19 years-old college dropouts screaming and yelling at career public servants and firing them by the thousands I've been seeing these last months. Carry on.
so the only real advantage was time.
Which, as it is well known, is ABSOLUTELY irrelevant in arms races :)
Be it in the nuclear field (getting the bomb two years earlier), or in raw power (all those billions of rubles saved went, it is well known, for parks, recreations and for the general benefit of the peaceful Soviet populace, NOT for weapons, equipment and other military programs (all of which were later thrown against the West in Korea a few years later).
This thing was described in Frederic Forsyth's "The fourth protocol" in the early 80's.
If it had not been fixed by 2010, the problem is not with Internet and online snooping.
Then again, in the same book (I think) Forsyth was stating that an acceptable form of id in the UK is a letter addressed to your name. Is this still a thing ?
I know it's wishful thinking, but - it's clear this data can't be protected. Can't it be honeypot'ed ?
List all my info in your db, make the normal retrieval return several options, extrapolated from scratch, or mixing data from 100 other users in the db. Have an independent human factor (dongle, whatever) be the only one able to retrieve the correct combination of data.
This will NOT go south Brazil-like into a Tuttle vs Buttle situation, right ?
Didn't Macron's team do something similar in 2017 during his election campaign ?
https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/08/team_macron_pre_hack_opsec/
Back in France I used to work as the IT guy at an automotive parts distributor, and one day I was requisitioned by one of the sales people to go and check a tire balancing machine at a client's shop, somewhere in the wilderness. Or was it the wheel alignment station.
I was adamant that I'm not the best for this, but his words were - it has a monitor.
There was a lot riding on this, as we were (apparently) trying to sell these as a more reasonably priced alternative to the local Facoms that we were also selling, which were priced, let's say, patriotically.
I went there, the relevant part of the machine turned out to be a little cabinet on wheels - once I opened the side door, it turned out there was a Windows PC inside.
Managed to start it, then it turned out it was all in Italian, with some quite elaborate bespoke system menu to go through.
The salesperson who got me there was half-Italian, so I thought we'd be good. Nope. He couldn't understand a word. I was at what seemed to be the last step, but it was a Yes/No (Si/No ? S/N ?) and I wasn't feeling lucky.
Well - when I was in 4th grade I found two Topolino books (turned out it's Mickey Mouse in Italian), and those were my only comics books for three years. So I knew that Uncle Donald Duck is Zio Paperone, and la mancia (tips) is something he never gives. Plus in Summer when the weather was very, very clear, I'd be able to catch a few minutes of Rai tv per day and I'd watch the news, as the ladies reading them were very, very good looking.
This turned out to be enough all those decades later for me to be able to call the support line in Italy, fight my way to an engineer, who guided me in (slow) Italian, and get the machine to work. I was a hero.
The day went downhill from there, but that's very different story.
I keep wondering why people persist in still considering Broadcom as a provider of anything (service, product, you name it).
At this point, what they are is an entity which spent 61 billion to make 900 billion. History has seen worse performance.
From there on, they can do anything they want. They can experiment with clients, kick out anyone they want, tinker with any setting they want. All they have to do is provide some simulacrum of activity - the more controversial, counterintuitive, illogical, shocking and against common business sense - the better. They can stay afloat if only by playing with their own stock.
They are like a handyman or a plumber who won the lottery, but have to keep the business open for tax purposes, not worrying about client satisfaction.
Or like that wedding photographer that got so much in demand that he started raising his prices to discourage clients, eventually levelling at around $90k per wedding for a sustained but not overwhelming flow of clients.
They can play with that flow to infinity in any way they want.
At this point, they have their own financial gravity pull - they attract money no matter what they do, and they have a wide berth in playing with the orbiting money's speed to keep it as fast as possible, but still just under escape velocity.
"...Imagine you instead simply upload your public key to sites as you create an account. Never need to log in again. Web browsers could make this even more simple by acting as an agent for your private key..."
How is that different from logging in with a GooFaceGramX account, which most sites already support, and how does it increase security ?
I genuinely don't know what uploading a public key is, but from the short sentence describing it - it sounds like a comfort feature to ease logging in, rather than a security one. If someone gets on my computer and my public key is uploaded, how do I prevent them from getting on these sites where I'll never need to log in again ?
And if the answer is "enter your private key" - I'll refer to my first question ?
Thanks
My comment was about the post above that a sniper will be able to methodically take out a bunch of targets to eliminate the threat from that laser-equipped thingie. It simply won't happen.
I doubt that any sniper on the Ukranian side or elsewhere would go into a series of fast consecutive shots and expect to survive. Same for any other snipers operating in the zones you mention.
It is extremely difficult for a good sniper's target to survive the first shot.
It is pretty much as difficult for the sniper fighting against a well equipped and trained enemy to survive while producing fast consecutive shots past the first one.
No problem with ten snipers firing at the same time or in a short timespan. But if they can pull that off, they might as well do White Tights 2.
"...Thumb down??? ..."
"...I got in, asked for a half-caf, soy milk, extra hot, boiling with ice, with a pump of vanilla and a sprinkle of cinnamon, single-origin, pour-over, with notes of bergamot and a medium body.
They told me 'M'am, all we do here is sell insurance' - and I didn't like AT ALL how it made me feel.
Zero stars..."
"...Which is going to add a whole new dimension to terms like 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage'..."
Those dimensions are already well controlled in a single-shot context to the point of being irrelevant. And this thing is single-shot.
Friendly fire and collateral damage are an issue overwhelmingly with explosives and anything explosive-dependent on arrival in the target's vicinity.
This thing will be as problematic friendly fire and collateral damage-wise as a sniper's bullet currently is (minus the "kill what's behind the target" part in the laser's case). Which is - close to zero.
Decently efficient anti-sniper technologies have been available to the big players since at least the war in Bosnia, if not earlier. Most allow for one clear shot which will have to count, some can catch you before that. Not 100% efficient by any means, but there are little chances of getting a streak of defenses off with one sniper.
Ditto !
Might I add - I'm also appalled by the audacity of some people claiming that torching other people's cars because of their brand is a bad thing !
I'm sure that my right to destroy someone else's property, threaten them and make their life hell because I don't have the balls to attack the real culprit is a right enshrined in the Constitution somewhere. I know this because I know to be right, which entitles me to do that stuff.
I also would like to remind all that this DOES NOT make me the same or worse as those jerks in Diesel trucks that have been boxing in and rolling coal on them for years. These guys ARE bad. I am good.
I mean, these guys with the trucks are bad still. I don't torch their trucks though, as they tend to be men in decent shape and armed with bats or worse. This sorta makes me feel like I'll let it slide. But those kids, little ladies and college professors in Teslas - aaah THE SCUM !!! BURN !!! BUUURNNN !!!
I have a condition that I'll probably carry to the grave - I have been taught to respect competent professionals. Started with the usual - respect medical doctors, teachers and scientists. They are pillars of society. In my mind someone who was able to go through all those years of studies, make it and progress further, was someone whose other human qualities automatically followed suit.
It took me all the way deep to my adult years to realize that there's zero correlation between professional competence & abilities & achievements, and basic human ones. The revelation was a top, really top level neuro surgeon that turned out to otherwise be about 12 years old in his day to day interactions.
Still, I tend to trip on the "If smart enough to achieve X - will be smart enough to not do Y" cable to this day.
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