Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove 2058 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2015
I wouldn't call humans driving off cliffs, crashing into restaurants, or mowing down pedestrians a success either, but that doesn't cause us to take them off the road altogether. In fact, there seems to be no feedback mechanism whatsoever to incentivize better driving among the human population, whereas the autonomous driving system receives constant updates and revisions.
The fact that Waymo is presently operating a functional autonomous taxi service in various locations serves to contradict your statement. In particular, given how challenging San Francisco is to drive in, it's pretty remarkable that Waymo vehicles are able to do so. Many humans who are apparently legally licensed to drive certainly do a worse job. In particular, I've noticed that the vehicles most prone to waiting for me to traverse an intersection on foot tend to be of the autonomous variety. Frankly, as autonomous vehicles become more common, I would support using them as a baseline for the standard of human drivers: if you can't drive on par with a Waymo, you don't get a license.
San Francisco's public transit is quite good, but there are things a passenger might need to do that a bus or rail line can't provide:
1) Go somewhere inaccessible to public transit
2) Travel at a time transit is not available
3) Get somewhere more quickly than public transit can provide
4) Transport heavy or bulky items such as groceries
Etc.
I speak as someone who preferentially takes public transit but who is also very grateful that Uber, taxis, etc. are available for those moments when transit won't do (or would have done had it shown up at all).
I'm still running an older Pi model (1? 2?) as a Pi-Hole, and it's hard to beat the long-term value of the $35 I paid for it (I stumped up for the deluxe package with a case, flash drive, and PSU). If other companies are able to compete with the Pi on speed or value, that's great, but it doesn't diminish the remarkable capabilities of the device.
I wouldn't normally bother to comment, but I see that Sergio has returned from stealing washing machines and killing Ukrainian grandmothers to slag the Pi, so I feel moved to defend it.
The stock market has been pitched as an "investment" for retirement funds. Hopefully, anyone who is retiring or has retired has most of their retirement fund in lower-risk investments such as bonds (or Krugerrands, firearms, and booze), but the funds themselves probably took a beating with Intel's loss of value. Conversely, I suspect that the current low price point makes Intel a good investment for anyone able to ride out the current headwinds.
DISCLAIMER: This post should not be considered investment advice. There are no guarantees of stock results. This post may contain forward-looking statements that have no basis in reality. Frankly, if you take investment advice from someone calling themselves "Throatwarbler Mangrove," you deserve whatever happens to you, so don't come crying to me if you wind up living in a cardboard box and eating cat food. I mean, really.
On the one hand, you get a predictable quality of dentist-bot (hopefully) each time you go to the dentist, whereas my experience with human dentists has been highly variable (#1 phrase you never want to hear from a dentist during a root canal: "We're just going to get started while you get numb.") If the mouth scanner can eliminate gum-poking during teeth-cleaning visits, I'm definitely for it!
On the other hand, how does the dentist-bot manage unpredictable patient behavior, such as unexpected movement or shrieking in pain?
Both points leave aside the question of hardware and software malfunctions, of course.
If you visit the Cinnamon Spices page, you'll see that there are a number of themes which include program titles with the icons in the taskbar, so there's no need to fully switch desktop environments.
"The Paragon ntfs3 driver destroys data."
[citation needed]
No, seriously, I would love to see some concrete information about this issue. I did a quick Web search, and I see assertions of data corruption but without a lot of information. Since the kernel maintainers appear to be set to remove FUSE driver support from kernel 6.9, it seems like they would want to know about data-eating bugs in the kernel driver.
This thread contains a huge back-and-forth regarding what errors the NTFS3 driver throws vs. the NTFS-3G (FUSE) driver. I honestly don't have the technical knowledge to fully tease out the truth, but it seems like a number of commenters in that thread and other locations are fingering multiboot scenarios and dirty/corrupted NTFS volumes for the data loss issue. I agree that the driver should perhaps handle the issue better, but it's not clear that the driver is fundamentally at fault.
Amusingly, the thread above ends with the following note from the moderators:
Closed due to pointless dogmatism.
If anything will be epitaph of Open Source, it's this.
Not that anyone asked, but I am mostly done with my migration to Mint (minus a few odds and ends that I'll get to in time), and I'm mostly happy with it. Along the way, I've upgraded my video card and motherboard, and I do have to say that Windows handled that process much more gracefully than Mint, which I had not expected (I expected Windows to BSOD and require a reinstall). When I dropped in the new Radeon video card, video in Mint was sluggish, so I tried to install updated drivers to no joy. Of course, it being Linux, the correct answer was to upgrade the kernel from the stock 5.15 to 6.5. While that process is infinitely easier than it once was, a deterrent to the average user would be the fact that Mint didn't in any way notify me that I needed to update the kernel, initially causing me to suspect bad hardware, whereas Windows detected the new hardware and downloaded and installed the correct Radeon drivers without user intervention. Not everyone wants their drivers automatically updated, of course (although I was certainly pleased), but I guess the Linux developer mindset is still that users need to know, without feedback from the operating system, that the kernel needs to be updated to incorporate new drivers.
There are other niggles as well, but Mint is certainly faster to boot and log in than Windows, and the lack of advertising and dark UI patterns makes them worth overcoming. Also, somewhat to my amusement, Linux is actually faster accessing NTFS volumes with the kernel-mode driver than Windows.
They're involved, but it's not their fault for once.
The comment about AD authorization being a chicken-and-egg problem is certainly well-known . . . to anyone who's ever had to recover any directory-joined environment. Obviously, one needs local credentials to bootstrap the VMware environment if the AD servers have gone down, and many orgs keep at least one physical domain controller around for just this reason.
Also, aren't KnowBe4 the ones who hired a North Korean hacker? Maybe they should get their own house in order before dispensing advice.
Job requirements:
BS or CS degree in mechanical or electrical engineering
5 years of experience in data center operations, preferably working with data center engineering
Thorough knowledge of power and cooling technologies
Working knowledge of CPU and GPU internal architecture, network protocols, switching, routing, storage technologies such as RAID and GlusterFS, Linux, Windows, VMware, Solaris (SPARC), and AmigaOS
Ability to dead lift 70 pounds
Willingness to work nights and weekends
Kung-fu grip
CCIE preferred
Pay: $25/hr, no benefits
So I've been told, but I don't have access to the source files, so I have to make do with directly editing the PDF. Acrobat is an absolute dog's breakfast, with controls spread indiscriminately throughout the interface and lacking "advanced" features like "copy to clipboard."
To everyone who complains about the ribbon in Microsoft products, I recommend you try using Acrobat for a day. You will be positively aching to use the ribbon compared to whatever the fuck Adobe calls their UI model. Microsoft's user interfaces are like an eternity of delicate, soft fingers gently stimulating one's prostate gland compared to Acrobat.
I'm having to use Acrobat to revise some internal documentation, and, while I understand the purpose of PDFs (I suppose), the primitive nature of the editing tools just boggles my mind. Acrobat is basically the PDF editing tool (okay, I see the problem), and it doesn't have change tracking or a decent undo function or decent formatting tools. It does have AI, for some reason (and an additional fee), but actual improvement of the product seems to have stopped sometime in the last decade (or century). I guess the PDF specification has to be limited because of, you know, portability, but that's no reason for the editor to be so fucking pathetic.
There's a wide variety of software, all with its own foibles and requirements for being updated. With Windows, of course, the installer itself is so complicated that a patch management tool has to carefully trap errors and output to determine whether a patch push was successful, but Microsoft has actually done a lot of work to try to consolidate patching of their applications into a coherent structure. If you're running a full Microsoft stack, Endpoint Manager or whatever they're calling SCCM these days is not the easiest product to learn, but you can at least manage updates from a single location. Try updating an Oracle application or a more obscure third-party application or Cisco firmware and see what a joy that is! Our network infrastructure at my last job tended to run ancient versions of Cisco code because the network admins were afraid of the consequences of upgrading; a network upgrade that goes sideways is, of course, a disaster. You'd think that Cisco, controlling both the hardware and software stack and having a relatively limited number of configurations compared to a general-purpose OS, would be able to deliver software updates that were bulletproof but apparently not. It certainly seems as though many technology vendors subscribe to the notion that there's more money to be made by creating problems than solving them.
"GirHub"
I know this is a typo, but now I want to see a source repo powered by Gir, the robot from Invader Zim. It will ideally throw nonsensical errors and function murkily, just like git, but in a high-pitched squeaky voice.
"It was ME! I was in the source code all along!"
I think it's great that the FTC is opening this investigation. As a US citizen, I absolutely want federal regulators keeping a close eye on corporations in this manner, and I wish they would do it more. I'm just getting a little shade-throwing done at a certain sort of commentard for my own amusement.
This is a clear effort by the corrupt Biden administration to crush the independent will of dynamic, job-creating businessmen and do away with America's entrepreneurial spirit! By investigating these companies, the out-of-touch liberal elites in the Biden FTC are showing that they don't understand the true will of the American people! This is the thin end of the wedge! The camel's nose in the tent! A slippery slope to Sodom and Gomorrah! Next thing you know, jackbooted Antifa thugs will be hauling off billionaires and throwing them in gulags just like in Soviet West Germany!
Under the current management, Alphabet has gone from a risk-taking company to just another tech behemoth. Day 1 of the Wiz acquisition would probably result in 50% terminations and retraction of equity from the remaining employees to "return value to shareholders." Wiz management would also face increased scrutiny and red tape in every area of business operations. If I were a Wiz employee, I'd regard the influx of capital from such an acquisition as a poisoned chalice.
Reading the comments here, with their "kids today" attitude, it's unsurprising that younger programmers aren't excited by working with crotchety, cynical old men who wax nostalgic about how they used to carve ones and zeros by hand out of copper plates and react negatively to the very idea of change, much less innovation. Ideally, the older generation would reach out to the younger with opportunities to learn, but if the youth are being met with the contempt and ridicule expressed in this comment thread, of course they're going to pursue other interests, and that's without considering other problems, such as needing to make an income and the unpleasantness of dealing with the toxic ideological infighting which pervades Open Source.
The federal government is stepping on entrepreneurial capitalism by not using private industry to perform these checks and analysis, to say nothing of placing undue regulatory burden and profit-killing demands for greater security on job-creating businessmen! The entire CISA should be disbanded immediately and their budget returned to the public in the form of further tax cuts for billionaires!
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