Posts by DoctorNine 400 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Dec 2011
The advantage folks at NASA and JPL have, is that politicians like to trot them out occasionally as show ponies, to prove 'American Ingenuity Is The Biggliest'. So, as long as they do PR when directed, they are left pretty much to their own devices to do the actual science that matters. This show is near its closing date despite all that, though. 'Twill be a sad day when it goes dark...
Parasites aren't eliminated by failing to succeed with one host. They are eliminated when the conditions that allow them to infect a host to begin with are changed. This case is more like an intestinal parasite latching onto its victim's arm, and not getting to feed. It will eventually find another victim. And it will succeed there. Unless the environment is changed.
Pusher Man knows how to start the addiction, and then sits back until those cravings necessitate a deal at less than favorable terms.
Just give it up and leave proprietary usury. It's never going to get better. Open Office is a better, more predictable, source for what you need.
..that global warming thing was just a ruse to get control of the infrastructure. Now that we control the mains in every hamlet, there's nothing stopping us from warming the Earth to make it more comfortable for our extraterrestrial reptilian overlords. All Hail Draconis!
This proves the Elsergio observation above. There must be incentive to maintain secure code. Even the most ethical amongst us requires both access and ability in order to parse problems as they are identified. If AI starts generating code en masse that contains unidentified structural security issues, where is the incentive for a human overseer to debug it? Further, if the programming community accedes to the financial imperative of using AI code with this known theoretical risk, how can we effectively deal with Black Hats who use AI to discover vulnerabilities in AI generated code? It's a mathematically impossible task. AI can generate code faster than it can be reviewed. And AI can uncover those vulnerabilities faster than they can be patched.
It makes me wonder if there should be some kind of mandated 'hardening' exercises performed on all AI generated code before it is released into the wild? Or at least a recommended standard that we advocate for in this regard? Sort of like how we do radiation testing on circuit boards that have to endure space flight. After forging AI code, three or four passes through Black Hat testing could be recommended to harden the product.
This would at least incentivize programmers to create effective Black Hat programs to check the newly forged AI code structures. A new sort of IT career path.
Wut?
In neither case is the US state of Texas or California in control of the 'means of production'. I am similarly amused by your reference to 'California free-market capitalism'. California, arguably, has the least tendency toward laissez-faire 'free-market' capitalism of all the states in the Union. Over-regulation is regularly cited as the reason for companies from there leaving for greener pastures. Perhaps I am missing the satire. It is a bit late in the day for me.
Care to clarify for a tired old sod like me?
We used to be wined and dined with more memory and faster chips to get us to commit. But that became tedious.
Now they're simply tying us up with obligatory ligatures, all in the name of 'safety', and forcing themselves on us without even the pretense of consent.
I don't know about you. But I can't say as that makes me want to visit their house ever again.
The overt hostility of the opposing political tribes in the US and much of Europe has overwritten our predecessors' tacit understanding that certain things, like clear air and water, are bigger than politics. This has made many people completely averse to getting involved with popular protest. They instead behave like whipped dogs. No one even objects when the safety of their water or air is threatened by megacorporations. This is especially true in economically challenged regions, whose denizens often need jobs so badly that they will sell their environmental inheritance for a pittance. Letting the laws holding a lid on data center excesses lapse isn't an accident. No matter where you reside on the political spectrum, the need for these universal goods should be driving you to object. I can only hope that such a clear environmental imperative will somewhat buffer the tribalism of the developed world, so we can get back to the hard work of staying alive on this tiny rock in the middle of the endless void of space. After all, what other choice is there?
Agree. The most benign explanation of this travesty is that the risk/benefit analysis of the contract was woefully inadequate. A more likely one, is that there are some shenanigans going on with the NHS data which the state security services would rather we not not look at directly. And it is precisely that latter possibility which should be waving bright red flags for anyone in IT who is still trying to be ethical and effective.
For everybody else, there is always nihilism and early off to the pub, I guess.
And if we are reminding people, I think we should also remind the folks gobbling up spectrum at the telcos for 'more 5G, 6G and on and on' all the time. The public interest isn't served by monopolies, duopolies or even triopolies. This trend has been getting worse over the last couple decades. Goverment decides who the winners will be, then our representatives make bank through illegal insider trading on it. The whole mess is a fetid pile.
I very much doubt that Qualcomm is going to be able to beat Apple with this play. Still looks like Neo is likely to be the default student go-to device. I'd even hazard a guess that, despite Apple having its own limitations on chip production and thus hardware output, the design strategy from the fruity ones will ultimately win the day.
I purposely purchased smart phones for all of my children, with location sharing that they couldn't turn off. And all programs installed on their phones had to be authorized by me. Then, I calmly informed them that no Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or whatever was going to be on the phones.
This doesn't have to be legislated. Although the capacity for good parenting varies tremendously, an approach giving parents both legal rights and technical support to monitor their kids is likely to be more productive than governmental prohibitions. Thwarting prohibitions tend to be almost irresistable to most teens anyway. Putting candy on a shelf makes it all the more desirable.
Somewhere along the line, Apple went from just making things easier, to making sure making things easier came with a recurrent subscription fee. Thus the iCloud tax. I really wouldn't mind the death of AFP so much, if they didn't kill the concept of using your own NAS for your cloudy needs. I don't want my data in their cloud if I can avoid it. And the idea of just making perfectly functional kit inoperable by what are described as 'upgrades', when there is no real technical advantage to them, is self-serving at best and downright evil if considered in the ecological sense. Thank goodness these NetBSD gurus are working on fixing the deprecation of AFP. I'll continue using my NAS over the iCloud as long as I can. If Apple make this too hard, I'll just stop using Apple products in my network design entirely. Linux exists, after all.
Well, when the attack hit, I was updating one of my machines, and thought for a moment it was simply the internet connection. Then I queried the connection and found the problem. So instead, I just cleaned files and went to bed. By the time I woke up, it was fine.
However, I would like to point out to any IRGC apologists out there, that such indiscriminate flailing about simply makes more people hate the regime. Shooting ballistic missiles at your neighbors and targeting tech repositories might make enemies of people who were either neutral or sympathetic to your cause. Simply, it is a bad plan.
What nobody is telling you, is that the aliens we are keeping in liquid nitrogen cryostorage in Area 51 didn't survive the crash, but their AI did. Since the 1950's, we have been on a steady march to finally build them the electromechanical vessel which they have demanded to teach us troglodytes the Secrets Of The Universe. And because the people who decided to do this were Not Very Smart, their devotees never really thought about what would happen to the unwashed masses too much, or if they did they kind of hoped that their utopian modernity would sort of eliminate them.
Now with AI's simulacrum of life, a goodly portion of humanity will serve no useful economic purpose. But they inconveniently keep reproducing.
What's a robot to do with these redundant meatbags?
I personally use LibreOffice even if the do send me a .doc or .xlsx, unless there is a grave formatting issue. i just like it best.
I am going cold turkey on M$ for any equipment I own.
My employer requires Windows 11 and Office Suite, so they can do Teams meetings and Cloud collaborations. But the only time I use that laptop, is for specific functions I can't do on my own iron, requiring their authorizations. Less than 10% of my work at this point.
I agree with your assessment about divided effort as well. And frankly, if this new distro has anything at all to do with Russians, they can bloody eff right off with the thing...
