Posts by cdrcat 122 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2015
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-11/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-elon-musk-blames-the-lawyers
https://web.archive.org/web/20230711174717/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-11/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-elon-musk-blames-the-lawyers
The Dunning-Kruger paper posited two results, the second less well renowned result measured that humble people were “skilled but unaware just how skilled they are”.
You can apply the label Dunning-Kruger to yourself with pride if you humbly belong to the second group who underestimate their skills - similar to owning the word c*nt because you have an affinity for c*nts.
Very very little, marginally. They give you $18.00 of credit to use and on the dashboard you can see how much it costs you to generate a hundred paragraphs (hint: very little). By assuming that most of the $ go on hosting, and using an estimate of percentage costs for a data centre on leccy, you can make an estimate of leccy consumption. Training is expensive, but gets amortised over a very large number of prompt queries.
“Larry was running a project to replace the laptops in an entire division of 500 staff, and decided to split the deal between two PC makers.”
"This wasn't a dozen machines, or maybe a couple of dozen. This was 350 laptops in total, at $1,000 a piece – not counting peripherals, docking stations, bags, and other doodads the company ordered depending upon the department and seniority."
GML was involved with the history of HTML[1] because it was a predecessor to SGML. However stating that the GML codebase became Mosaic or Spyglass sounds surreal. If you have alternative facts, I suggest you pass them to the appropriate history buffs to cross-check them: why post anything important here?
[1] https://www.w3.org/2012/08/history-of-the-web/origins.htm
I would paraphrase your comment as “cabal of insiders team up against retail investors” (The haves team up against the fish). That sounds like nonsense: most crypto is inherently trustless: if any individual can defect against the group (defect against your “haves”) they will, which is just sensible economics.
Disclaimer: I no didly-squat about crypto and I don’t own none
I am not a Google lover by any means, but Google *mostly* does a pretty good job given the ad industry.
If Android and gmail were split off, I imagine the first thing would be to upgrade install the worst possible uninstallable Apps and sell off your data to the spammiest bidder. How many times have I seen a product go to shit when it changed hands? Imagine if Microsoft owned Android?
The Chrome development team are uniquely talented - the reliability is astonishing and their speed of development is unlike any other team I know of (I don’t like all the new features but I really love others, and W3 was trying to spec some epically stupid stuff so fuck them) . Three other well paid teams are shit in comparison from my very long and painful experience. Imagine what would happen to Chrome if it was sold? It is open source - a gift to us all - so you don’t have to use Chrome.
I am most dissatisfied with Google search and YouTube - the gradual degradation with more and more adverts is killing those for me.
Some Netflix traffic goes via backbones, but most Netflix data is streamed from cached content served by appliances installed at reasonably local peering exchanges.
“Each Open Connect Appliance (OCA) stores a portion of the Netflix catalog, which in general is less than the complete content library for a given region. Popularity changes, new titles that are added to the service, re-encoded movies, and routine software enhancements are all part of the nightly updates, or fill, that each appliance must download to remain current.” — https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035618071
As per https://github.com/VCVRack/Rack/blob/v1/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md
“””
To accept a contribution, all authors of the contribution need to either
* declare the patch under the CC0 license.
* complete a copyright reassignment form.
* perform the work under a paid agreement.
“””
> It seems to me that the biggest technical achievement was keeping the areogel intact for the trip
"""not all aerogels are easy to break! Classic (or 'legacy') aerogels exhibit extremely high strength-to-weight ratios and are able (in principle) to hold thousands of times their weight in applied force, however also typically exhibit extremely low fracture toughness, that is, the ability to resist propagation of flaws in the material. As a result, it is possible for a classic aerogel block that is 96% air by volume to hold a brick thousands of times its own weight, but only if the weight is placed on the monolith gently and there are no major cracks in the aerogel.
New mechanically strong and machinable aerogels such as Airloy® strong aerogels made by Aerogel Technologies fix this problem. Airloy aerogels are hundreds of times stronger and stiffer than classic aerogels and simultaneously durable and fracture tough. Unlike legacy aerogels, Airloy aerogels can be machined (drilled, tapped, turned, milled) and bent without breaking. The strength, stiffness, thermal conductivity, and other properties of Airloy aerogels depend on the product series."""
http://www.aerogeltechnologies.com/about/faqs/
Different people have different rules about what is OK to do to another’s creation - and the rules are largely subconscious. They try to avoid that bias: “All the participants were told they could alter the structure however they wanted to.”
But that isn’t quite the same as giving “ownership” of the tower. It is hard to guess what one would do as a participant, but I suspect I would feel it wasn’t “my” tower, so my scope of changes would be more limited.
Buttons that don’t click when you press them are a horrendous UI failure. You see the problem with slow user interfaces - people naturally click again and the second click can be on something behind a modal - fail.
You can fade-in the button, or grey out the button while it is disabled, but those solutions also lead to unwanted side-effects.
Pop up modals and unexpected scrolling are hard problems (on Android Chrome double clicking an input box selects, but the first click pops up the keyboard and scrolls the input box away, very annoying!)
“but it is not the MCAS. The autopilot has to be off for MCAS to kick in.”
“The pilots said that soon after engaging the autopilot on Boeing 737 Max 8 planes, the nose tilted down sharply. In both cases, they recovered quickly after disconnecting the autopilot.”
So the article is probably not MCAS related.
The tone on multiple technical websites has really started to go up a notch whenever it is something related to Google. In this case a lot of comments are shooting the messenger.
The Google Zero team are not cowboy dicks: they follow a fair process and have thought about the issues more than most, and are trying to be responsible.
Think about what happens in an alternative world where Google keep these vulnerabilities hidden or just informs the vendor, instead of publishing them... Nobody likes the outcomes of vulnerabilities, but they are simply a result of Microsoft’s historical attitude towards security.
These security faults are often ancient, and the rate of discovery is not decreasing, so expect more of the same in the coming years.
There are multiple hardware mitigations *already* in Apple processors. They are mostly aimed at preventing kernel level exploits, but it seems very likely Apple will continue putting in more security protections into the A* processors.
Intel have repeatably shown they prioritise sales performance before security, sort of like Microsoft of yore, and Intel is less likely to develop mitigations that require tight integration with the OS or deep modification of the OS.
Scroll way down to the heading “iOS kernel exploit mitigations” in this link which details some of the hardware protections: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-survey-of-recent-ios-kernel-exploits.html
Say you have white (255,255,255). Now you want a red as bright as that white, maybe that should be represented as (765,0,0).
Or maybe you want to have 10 bit colours, so you can choose between (1023,1023,1023) or (255.75,255.75,255.75) as representations that allow ten bits per channel to be declared.
It’s all completely insane of course, since the page would have to say what colour space it was using, the gamma, and what representation it was using. Otherwise a browser couldn’t map the wide-gamut or 10-bit colours when someone used a normal 24 bit colour monitor.
Cristobal Colon is still alive running the show from a secret bunker located under the Vatican. You’ll notice that Christopher Columbus Is an obvious anagram containing “Hitler”, which says it all. “Americans” are actually spy robots - they have to be loud to cover up the noise of their internal machinery (Machiavellian has the same root). If the mods publish this, I will be replaced with a machine intelligence: if the quality of my comments improves then it proves it (or if they get worse it’ll be because they programmed the replacement to act dumb).
Old Android phones remain more secure from attacks via web pages, because the browser is updated regularly. Android 4.4 (released Oct 2013) is still getting Chrome updates. Most other attacks are mitigated by needing to be physically near phone, are filtered by SMS infrastructure, or can be avoided by not installing crap apps.
Anyone on iOS 12 or less is stuck on an old and insecure version of Safari - the recent flaw that gives access to cameras also gives access to stored passwords... Roll the dice on every web page visited!
I generally recommend Nokia phones with Android One (designed by HMD) because they are relatively cheap but good, they get updates, and the Android version is clean (no manufacturer shit).
The Oxford Indian Dictionary will replace the OED.
Soon to be heard from your local chav:
My daughter is convent-educated
My teacher is sitting on my head
My friend is eating my brain
https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/ten-surprising-expressions-indian-english
Testable.
Order something that needs delivery from China, preferably that has just become stocked again.
My bet is that China is open for business at the moment - if the US had some real dirt on China they would be printing it no the presses already.
And there are multiple other Asian countries that have functioning economies - the star being Taiwan.
Why would they ever have unused hardware? That would be a waste of money - hardware should be used.
“Google's Borg system is a cluster manager that runs hundreds of thousands of jobs, from many thousands of different applications, across a number of clusters each with up to tens of thousands of machines.”.
The system is set up so that hardware failures are dealt with by restarting jobs. Google have done that since they started (optimising for cheaper machines that are expected to fail, rather than expensive reliable machines).
Assuming 25 critical bugs found per month, for the next three years, means there are 900 critical bugs left to find... this one bug doesn’t matter that much since there are *plenty* left for skilled parties to find and abuse.
https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2020/03/microsoft-patch-tuesday-march-2020.html
Windows Server is amazingly reliable. But what happens when you get that one weird problem?
I regularly see a story about someone’s epic journey starting with an application level bug and ending with debugging some Linux internals and finally solving the problem (some obscure Intel CPU bug, or driver software issue, or epic network race condition etc). Those journeys begin with the belief that with sufficient motivation you can track down any problem on Linux/BSD.
When you watch someone solve a Windows Server bug the “solutions” are very different, and you rarely hear of someone debugging drivers or OS issues.
When I was smaller I wrote embedded software, and tracked down a very-hard-to-find bug in a RTOS.
Disclaimer: The business I helped found depended on Windows Server, and it rarely let us down.
If it is a pandemic, then all tourism will be shut down and probably flights will be very restricted (with a lovely long stay in a quarantine facility on arrival). An individual couldn’t predict the timing of that.
I wouldn’t want to be overseas if travel is mostly shut down: unless you happen to be in a country with better services. I’m in NZ and have enough food/water/medicine to let me hunker down at home for a few weeks. I am also lucky enough to have options to move to rural locations: hospitals won’t be able to help much if a pandemic peaks quickly...
> According to Granal, this identifier is sent to youtube.com, google.com, doubleclick.net, googleadservices.com...
The code[1] shows the X-CLIENT-DATA is sent for any google.X domain where google owns the TLD, but if there were any youtube.X domain owned by a squatter then the PII would be leaked to that squatter. I haven’t looked if there are youtube domain squatters that match that restriction...
[1] https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/components/google/core/common/google_util.cc?q=IsGoogleAssociatedDomainUrl
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