Posts by find users who cut cat tail

Awkward. At Chrome summit, developer asks: Why should anyone trust Google?

Exactly. Many of the ‘contributions’ should not be developed at all. And definitely not at Google. And become critical on top of it.

Re: Technologies

You are being tracked to get better targeted ads – they say. No ads, no need for tracking.

The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

> One is what it teaches us about Facebook's importance to our daily lives.

I read about the outage in the news the following day. Not surprising that I wouldn't notice – but apparently no one else cared enough to mention it either.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we should feel fine

If we stopped chasing the upgrade, I haven't noticed. Sure, the reason for upgrade used to be ‘it brings these nice things I need/want’, whereas now it is more ‘my old stuff is no longer working – again’.

But perhaps we are reaching some kind of equilibrium. I would not call it a good thing. It means about half of ‘improvements’ will make things worse. Probably more than half, knowing humanity and the second law of thermodynamics…

Sort-of Epic win as judge kills Apple ban on apps linking to outside payment systems

Re: Two wrongs don't make a right, apparently

Sure they will be shafted. Also there is also the third party, not always mentioned, the lawyers. And this party always wins.

Anyway, Apple are wrong on the principles and EPIC are wrong in the specifics. This is one of the cases when one wishes “can't the two just somehow annihilate”? That would leave the world a better place…

Git 2.33 released with new optional merge process likely to become the default: It's 'over 9,000' times faster

Re: Git is not a file revision system

Taking snapshots of a filesystem is a good mental model for Subversion – it is probably the mental model almost everyone uses when working with it. So I do not know where you got the ‘thinking error’ idea.

CVS versions single files. SVN versions entire directories (trees). Git… makes simple things look complicated.

Apple says its CSAM scan code can be verified by researchers. Corellium starts throwing out dollar bills

Re: Encryption? Apple AI? So what would this be?

You wanted to know? All right then.

You have two options. Give us the decryption key. Or spend a few years in prison. You don't have the key or say it doesn't exist? Then your options are limited to the second one.

Google Groups kills RSS support without notice

Re: RSS isn't dead.

For driving Maps are at least basically usable. Have you tried to plan a trek through forests and hills… I mean the immense grey void?

Google Maps can disappear any time – and good riddance.

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

Re: Quintessence

Because our capitalistic overlords would never…

Perl's Community Affairs Team chair quits as org put on ice by code language's foundation

Re: Dont go away mad, don't go away sad. just go away.

You obviously do not understand. The only code that apparently matters nowadays is that of conduct…

Hey, AI software developers, you are taking Unicode into account, right ... right?

> treating any email that contains such characters as spam

Easy if you only speak English.

If your native language is RTL on the other hand…

> we don't need to worry about the AI uprising any time soon

AI uprising has never been the problem. We will destroy ourselves using dumb machine learning long before getting close to developing a general AI.

The way it is going someone soon nukes a country while trying to erase an old Johnny Cash collection…

Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 now includes AMD options for biz customers, boasts up to 19 hours of battery life

Re: Square screen, central touchpad. Nice.

> no numberpad to give a central touchpad

What?

My NB has numeric keypad (which I use) and central touchpad (which – like all touchpads – mostly just gets in the way and gathers dust and grime and crumbles).

Atheists appeal to higher power for intercession over alleged sins against privacy

Re: I wonder what the split was over.

If the organisation's goal is to ‘demystify atheism’, which I am pretty sure is oxymoron, why not have a schism while you are at it…

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

Re: I suppose this was inevitable

The reason is always the same: You would install those more mature technologies intentionally and persumably have some control over their use. Whereas with this you will have little choice as WiFi is ubiquitous.

Satellites, space debris may have already brightened night skies 10% globally – and it's going to get worse

Re: Blankety Blank

Can we please not?

It is easy to open any link you want in a new tab. Just use the middle mouse button (or whatever works in your browser).

It is rather annoying when links open in new tabs and you do not want them to.

Linus Torvalds worries kernel 5.12 might be ‘one of those releases’ that lands a tad late

Re: So what?

Distribution kernels may or may not be LTS kernels. For instance your 5.8 is not LTS (regardless of how long the distro intends to support it).

What's in Fedora 34? GNOME 40, accelerated Wayland, PipeWire Audio, improved Flatpak support, and more

Re: bloatware like Wayland

Sure, X11 carries lots of baggage – show me Wayland after 35+ years and then we can compare.

Also, one reason why it is smaller (beside X11 containig lots of stuff quite irrelevant nowadays) is that pretty much everything X11 does is against the Wayland philosophy – forwarding, making screenshots, programs positioning their own windows, … Yes, I am aware that many of these things can actualy work in Wayland. The developers are not completely Poettering-level insane. Fortunately. But anyway…

X11/Xorg has shown its strength by integrating lots of things no one even dreamed of in the 80s. Sometimes seamlessly, sometimes less. I am looking forward to its 40 year anniversary.

Re: GNOME 40?

It is the percentage of features left (i.e. not removed yet) compared to GNOME 2. Also apparently the padding of every GUI element – in olympic size swimming pools.

'Business folk often don't understand what developers do...' Twilio boss on the chasm that holds companies back

The business folk often don't understand…

Make it a full stop.

I am not even judging. It is just how it is.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

Re: Aargh...

→ minecrafts person

That's what I read on the first pass anyway…

FYI: A smart-speaker box can monitor your heartbeat using high-pitch beeps and a pinch of algorithm – study

One more reason

One more reason to avoid smart speakers as hell.

If a person is confined to the space covered by ultrasound emitted by smart speakers, they can monitor the heartbeat. What is the utility? Don't know, probably none. What happens when someone takes it seriously and tries to ‘make it work’ in practice? Disaster. All kinds of. The best possible outcome is that it will not work. Of course, the Googles and Amazons will see another data stream to record and keep, so they will grab it anyway. They always do.

India's demand to identify people on chat apps will 'break end-to-end encryption', say digital rights warriors

Re: Strictly speaking nobody's anonymous

> Requiring people to idenitify themselves would go a long way to restoring civility on the 'net.

That is the old theory, and it could even be true some time ago when people still could be ashamed or afraid of consequences or something. Not any more. Now you double down – the more outrageous things you say, the more important it is to do so. And it works.

I have watched the real-name policy applied by some news sites here (or “news” sites – though not consipracy theory pedlars, just news somewhere on the tabloid spectrum). The result is that all the insane crap in discussions continues happily, now just labelled with real names and towns.

Half a million stolen French medical records, drowned in feeble excuses

Re: Alistair, you have my sympathies

500 ml is a medium size tea mug. I need about 5-7 per day. Beside other things I drink (see icon). And that is in winter. In summer the intake goes up and becomes mostly water. Drinking a 1.2 litre jug in one go means I am just momentarily thirsty. I must be a different species…

The perils of non-disclosure? China 'cloned and used' NSA zero-day exploit for years before it was made public

Re: TL/dr

I refuse to learn from the 60s. Can I have them back now?

Microsoft says it found 1,000-plus developers' fingerprints on the SolarWinds attack

Re: How many of those fingerprints

Microsoft probably needs 100+ people to produce Hello world.

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Re: And what about Huawei?

> Presumably Huawei probably doesn't install NSA back doors to let the US spy on Chinese citizens.

They can't. There is no space left. Already too many Chinese backdoors there…

Terraria dev cancels Stadia port after Google disabled his email account for three weeks

Re: This is weird

If you could actually make Google completely delete your account this way, I would probably call it an improvement.

UK.gov awards seats on £2bn 'digital outcomes' framework to suppliers – one of which doesn't even have a website

Re: So..

And yet absolutely bananas.

Salesforce: Forget the ping-pong and snacks, the 9-to-5 working day is just so 2019, it's over and done with

Re: WFHSS

WFH = never leave work

That is what it is all about.

Location tracking report: X-Mode SDK use much more widespread than first thought

…we do not categorize all usage of trackers as malicious…

We do.

Maybe the entity with malicious intent is the app developer, maybe not. But there is always one, somewhere.

ADT techie admits he peeked into women's home security cams thousands of times to watch them undress, have sex

Re: impossible to access by anyone else..

> You trust the company and all of its employees to respect your privacy and protect your belongings.

Even it you happen to do, it is not enough. You also need to trust the manufacturers of all involved equipment to not put any stupid backdoors there and support it the entire lifetime and fix bugs when they are – inevitably – found. You need to trust the company to not be hacked or just acquired by another company. You need to believe the backdoors that were installed upon requests from three letter agencies to be not misused. Etc.

Once something is digital, it will leak. The only exception is precious data you did not back up – then it will become corrupted and you will find the entire multiverse does not contain another copy.

Top engineer who stole trade secrets from Google's self-driving division pardoned on Trump's last day as president

Not if used in ways we, as a society, mostly agree with.

No need to take it personal…

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

Re: Won't somebody think of the ducklings?

Sledgehammers work just fine for cracking nuts, especially the smaller ones (larger ones can be unwieldy I'll give you that).

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

Although in special relativity space and time are [kind of] the same thing and they say “time is money”, I am not sure about the exact process which transmutes space to money…

Supreme Court mulls whether a cop looking up a license plate for cash is equivalent to watching Instagram at work

Declaring ‘things must/must not happen – let the courts find some such things later’ is not a reasonable legislative approach. This is exactly the statement expressed by the lawyer.

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

Re: Monolith?

Please also tell us about how it's insulting to do lithography with metal plates instead of stone…

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

> landlines will one day soon be a relic

Landlines are how you make a call to a specific place, and they have always been. If I call for example the grant office, the phone will ring there, will be answered by someone from the grant office, and that is the point. You are right that landlines may be someday replaced anyway – by immobile mobile phones.

What's that about Apple hardware? Pfft, says Intel as it intros magical self-healing PC

Re: Buzzwords

Blockchain has been a buzzword for too long and is no longer catchy. They need to rename it.

Apple cracks down on iOS terminal apps because they can download code

Re: Apparently, they've backtracked on this

Until the next time, anyway.

Google reCAPTCHA service under the microscope: Questions raised over privacy promises, cookie use

Re: reCAPTCHA only issues

It's obviously a parasite using crowd funding to train so called self driving carsGoogle killer robots.

This explains why I tend to get those terrible CAPTCHAs. I can tick more or less everything on your list.

For some of them I actually have no idea what it wants from me – like ‘store fronts’ (is this one an office or a store… and this one looks like laundrette…) or ’vehicles‘ (sure, kick scooters, skateboards and wheelbarrows are all vehicles, but is this how the machine sees them?). Several times I just gave up after getting an apparently endless stream of cropped ambiguous poorly shot rubbish in poor light to identify.

Bitcoin value jumps as PayPal says it will accept cryptocurrencies... once it has the kinks worked out

Re: Only one good thing to come from this

> I expect PayPal to not put extortionate costs on transactions

Really. Well, in such case you might be also interested in this very fine bridge…

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

The way we're screwing up the planet, we will fry everything in no time.

Microsoft builds image-to-caption AI so that your visually impaired coworkers can truly comprehend your boss's PowerPoint abominations

Re: Meh

> don't allow blank Alt-Text…

A great way to ensure lots of crappy alt texts ranging from irrelevant to annoying.

For instance: A section title describing a program function also contains the corresponding icon. The section title already is what any screen reader needs to read. Not allowing blank alt text on the icon means it will at best contain something like ‘icon of Section-Title-Repeated-Verbatim’. How is that going to help anyone (as oppose to hinder)?

Has Apple abandoned CUPS, the Linux's world's widely used open-source printing system? Seems so

I print often. Proofreading and corrections suck on screen. YMMV.

Another reminder that bias, testing, diversity is needed in machine learning: Twitter's image-crop AI may favor white men, women's chests

Re: It is a difficult task, it needs and will be addressed but it will take time.

Even if the system was developed by aliens who have never heard about human races, its performance in poor light conditions (backlight, low light, …) would deteriorate quicker for dark skin faces. That's just how optics works.

Frist you have to admit this. Then we can talk about what to do about it. Shouting racism does not help anyone.

Classy move: C++ 20 wins final approval in ISO technical ballot, formal publication expected by end of year

Re: Object

Design of algorithms, data structures, numerical methods, … – intellectual activities.

Programming – making things that do something. This goal can coexist with others, but you are always building a thing that does something.

Google Chrome 85 to block ads that hog power, CPUs, network: Web ads giant will black-hole 0.3% of web ads

How can an ad need 60 seconds of CPU time? I happen to be running some image analysis on fast camera data now – and 60 seconds is enough to process 10+ GB video on a normal PC. Or almost enough to start Acrobat Reader…

Sorry for asking such a dumb question, I have not seen on-line ad for years.

What's 2 + 2? Personal info, sniffs Twitter: Anti-doxxing AI goes off the rails, bans tweets with numbers in them

Re: The Solution is Simple

Fortunately, the nice people developing what3emojis have aleady thought of that.

I didn't know such thing existed before reading your post. But a few seconds after saying ‘now we just need a way to encode addresses using emojis’ I realised this is so silly that it must exist. And sure it does…