Posts by doublelayer

Ex-Googlers take a stab at building 'general intelligence' that makes software do what you tell it

Have you seen GPT3 in action

"To us, it sounds like the computers in Star Trek, in which you describe an action to take, and the system figures out how to carry it out. It doesn't sound like too much of a stretch."

It does to me, because I've seen what GPT3, supposedly the better of the two and the ultimate in NLP text generators, prints when it doesn't have an answer to copy-paste. If whoever wrote that sentence doesn't know what I'm talking about, they should read the GPT articles in this very journal, because it's been covered a lot of times. GPT3 prints confusing, useless, and contradictory information all the time, and if we anthropomorphize it too much, it makes up junk whenever it doesn't know the answer. Now we expect something built the same way to understand how to interact with software that's designed for human users and probably has no programmatic interface. The best thing we can hope for is that it will at least figure out which keyboard shortcuts Microsoft has changed in Office, which would make it smarter than me, but actually carrying out instructions without flailing around is expecting too much.

Re: Pizza

I have a better idea: the pizza restaurants can have a web ordering tool that works. When they make it easy to order things quickly, they'll get customers. They don't need to use a massive language processing neural network in order to understand that they should make a pizza that's already on a menu and send it to an address. An address lookup field and optional cache of previously-used addresses and a menu that is easy to navigate costs a lot less. You can also easily modify that to support pick up or order ahead options as supported by the restaurant without having to re-teach the AI that they're available. There does not need to be any guesswork about whether your order worked.

Crooks steal NFTs worth '$3m' in Bored Ape Yacht Club heist

Re: 3 million?

It is illegal to steal them*, so whether owning them is illegal or not, the people who have them can be targeted by law enforcement, assuming that law enforcement has run out of important things they're planning to do first. I'm with the original poster: stealing art doesn't make much sense to me, but at least the thief can put it on the wall and look at it or sell it to someone who wants to do that and never tell anyone. You can already do that with the images in these NFTs legally and easily, so stealing is only useful for reselling on the open market, which isn't very easy.

* There are two crimes with which the thieves can be charged. By attacking the users directly, they can be charged with computer intrusion. By taking something, which they have clearly done as the original "owners" can no longer transact with it, ordinary theft charges would also stick.

People have always valued useless things and convinced others to do so as well. It's just that this time, the things have a technical-sounding system. Before, people still valued many things that either didn't exist or held little value. People have repeatedly valued stock in companies because they didn't check what the company was doing or whether it did anything, and while they keep switching which kind of companies they're doing it with, it's been happening since stock markets were a thing. It also has been done with lots of ordinary goods during that time and probably happened before there were stock markets. NFTs don't indicate a loss of intelligence. We've been here before and we will see it again after this wave breaks and leaves a lot of people with useless bits.

Re: Said this before, I'll say it again.

I'm not the right person to clear up your confusion, because I not only agree about the complete uselessness of NFTs, but also of most physical collectable things. If you have a baseball card, it's a piece of cardboard with writing on it that I could duplicate with some ease. Somehow the scarcity of cardboard printed by whoever manufactures such things makes them valuable, but I don't get why. At least with art there's a chance that you like how it looks and can't find a reproduction that is as faithful (though that won't last), and the art market doesn't appear to work on the appreciation of the aesthetics for establishing value. I was already confused by people who collected things like that, and when people started collecting things that didn't exist, it did not clear it up.

Your AI can't tell you it's lying if it thinks it's telling the truth. That's a problem

Re: As somebody who is likely also on the so-called spectrum (cerulean! I wanna be cerulean!)

I don't think it's intelligence, as you don't have to know anything to tell someone what you think with no diplomacy. In fact, intelligence probably makes it easier to determine when diplomacy is most needed and how to encode what you need to say in a diplomatic manner. Honesty is closer, but I think there's another element, namely risk tolerance. I feel more comfortable telling a friend that their idea sounds unworkable because I trust they'll listen and not be offended, whereas if it's a stranger, especially a stranger I need something from, it's harder to be honest when there's a reasonable chance they will react badly to hearing it. This probably also relates to experience--I've said things people didn't like to hear when I was younger, felt the consequences, and became more cautious when thinking such things. I still have such thoughts regularly, but now I don't say them very often.

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

Re: Does anyone recall the downfall of Digg?

"The only thing that seems likely to change is that fewer people will be prevented from participating in online discourse because of so-called wrongthink,"

Others can and have argued the accuracy of that statement. There's only one thing I want to say about it. Nobody says "wrongthink". Really nobody. It can't be so-called if nobody calls it so.

The 1984-ishness of it means that, even if someone thinks it exists and wants to talk about it, they'd never use that term. The people who think others are accusing them of it don't use the word; they've made up other words. It's not even the word used for that in 1984 itself. That is thoughtcrime, later updated to crimethink.

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

Re: Insteon wasn't always cloudy

"Why would common Wifi/Zigbee/RF devices require gobs of wiring everywhere?"

They won't, but they might also not work. Depending on the area the devices are in, RF communication isn't always a feasible option. This can be the case for many types of environment.

Perhaps the device and the central controller are spaced widely apart if you have a large house. In order for a signal to make it across, you may need to create a mesh network out of the stuff in between. Since that's not going to happen unless you already have the skill to DIY a lot of this, it becomes a problem. Maybe you've got a house that doesn't allow signals to penetrate the walls. Some kinds of buildings really attenuate signals such that even using WiFi through a wall doesn't work consistently.

If you live in a more densely-inhabited area, you may also have interference problems. Every area where people live closely together has a ton of 2.4 GHz networks that are clashing to the extent that 5 GHz or the new band on WiFi 6 that not many people have yet are the only feasible options. IoT gear using WiFi tends to only support 2.4 GHz frequencies using low-powered WiFi chips that already don't have great range. Put them in a place where your neighbor's network is stronger than yours and they're likely to have spotty connection.

There's a reason that a wired connection can often be more reliable. Adding more frequency area can help, but not in all situations.

SpaceX's Starlink service lands first aviation customer

Re: Put that laptop away

Some planes have had WiFi for some time. This just switches which satellites eventually connect the service. This has been approved for quite a while. There's also no problem using phones on planes (to the plane, actually getting the phone to do something you want is harder). The only part of their recommendation that makes any sense is asking people to put laptops away on takeoff, as it's more likely you'll drop it or get into a situation where the table causes a problem. When you're in stable flight, it's fine.

Although it's a comedy series, I must repeat this joke from Cabin Pressure that explains the situation:

Carolyn: Finally, please keep your mobile phone switched off for the duration of the flight. Obviously they have no effect whatsoever on our navigational equipment, or we wouldn't let you have them, but they drive me up the wall. Thank you and enjoy your flight.

Google bans third-party call-recording apps from Play Store

Re: Interesting

An app that sneakily records your calls is one problem, but if any app asks you to enable an accessibility service, a four-step process with security warnings, and you don't know why, you should already be worried about it. An app that has that as its purpose is a tool that people understand and may want to use.

YouTube terminates account for Hong Kong's presumed next head of government

Re: No Real Solution

I don't follow. France is democratic, yes. How does that argue against democracy being accepted elsewhere as well? How does that argue against Europe having a history of dictatorships, including in France, in the long-term? I don't see how this contradicts my argument.

Re: No Real Solution

I don't see why you don't count Germany; they chose Nazism and were, in many cases, willing to fight for it even after seeing what that party was willing to do to Germany and its neighbors. The Nazis didn't have a 100% approval rating, and that dramatically dropped when citizens realized that war isn't fun, but the regime change had to be imposed by force. Japan was the same. Italy might have an argument for doing it themselves as they eventually deposed Mussolini, but even there it's not clear.

I don't usually support regime change. I don't support it here. Many attempts have been unjust and unsuccessful. However, in many cases, the U.S. is given a lot more credit for changing the regime than they deserve and blamed for problems of that country they had nothing to do with. Your list of a dozen attempted regime changes probably includes ones with less involvement. I can only think of a few active military engagements you could argue had that goal. Many did fail, but the problems that happened there aren't always the fault of the Americans' actions.

Re: No Real Solution

I agree that most regime change has been ineffective. However, I must disagree with a lot of what you've said.

"we in the West tend to think of our culture as civilization and imposed it on others where we could but many of those others objected to this. We then reacted by a program of open hostility and subversion with ongoing economic warfare which often broke out as open warfare."

No, that's not what happened. Democracy is not a uniquely western thing. Democracy has been done in various forms in a lot of places, including eastern Asia. I'm not just talking about modern democracies there; I'm talking about areas that have been ruled with the consent of their populations. Of course, if you include most of history, this has been rare compared with the number of military dictators, but this is equally true with Europe. Similarly, the local populations tend not to object to the "imposition" of democracy. The imposition of military control, yes, but not democracy. When the local population has had the power to set their own governments, the dictators have been replaced by democracy. For example, when South Korea's dictator (supported by the U.S.) was removed from office due to public protests and a strong democracy replaced him, the people chose that model and the U.S. continued to support the country. They don't deserve any credit for creating it as they were willing to support a dictator, but neither did they impede it or act to control the resultant democracy, even as it took actions of which the U.S. disapproved.

Re: No Real Solution

"People seem to forget that, in 1945, the Red Army reached Berlin before we did."

You say this as if it means the Soviet military was stronger than the others'. Berlin is in the eastern part of Germany. By the time the Soviet troops had entered or taken Berlin, a lot of similarly important cities in western Germany had been taken by British, American, and aligned forces. I don't know what would have happened had an invasion of the USSR been attempted. I do know it would have been very unpleasant for everybody involved. It was a possibility, however.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

And as one of those security folks, this is the problem with non-security folks. They assume they're safe because this box they're looking at isn't very important. They don't think about all the methods an attacker would use, including getting a beachhead in something unimportant and infrequently managed so they can attack the network from within. Since you're posting here, I think it's more likely that you really know what you mean when you say the box is on a network that never will be available to the internet, but many people also say that and find that someone did connect a cable, long ago, forgot about it, and someone has found it and used it to install malware or extract data.

I've worked with those people before. One colleague I've had was of the opinion that no security mattered because, as long as it could defeat the average five-year-old (basically as long as there was a password on any administrative or root accounts), we would be fine. His frequent explanation of this was that, as hard as we worked, we would never get a system the Russian government (for some reason, it was always them in the example) couldn't break into. This despite having several networks compromised with malware, including ransomware, during his tenure. When malware is involved, it doesn't matter that your system is more secure than someone's. It doesn't matter that it doesn't contain particularly interesting data compared to others. While being interesting can make you a bigger target, there are enough attackers attacking indiscriminately that you will always be targetable. If you set up a server with SSH access, even if the disks are otherwise blank and the machine has never sent out a packet, bots will find it and attempt to gain access within hours. Lots of other protocols are also attacked in that manner.

The average attacker might not do anything other than encrypt it and drop a ransom note, but someone who wanted to could attach malware to any executable files and hope that you'll eventually execute them. There are also code execution vulnerabilities in SMB1 that could be tried, but it would depend whose implementation and which OS they're using. Everyone has some services that really don't matter if an attacker gets access, but many people have things they think are like that but turn out to be more sensitive. I secure everything I have because I don't want to find out at short notice the problems I didn't anticipate.

Apple geniuses in Atlanta beat New York to the punch, file petition to unionize

At will just means the people can be fired more easily, but it doesn't particularly restrict union activities. Firing people because they've conducted a union-related activity is still not allowed, and they can still be sued for it. The union members still have the power to use the value of their experience and rarity to their advantage, so unless there's a large supply of people willing and able to do the work needed in an Apple store in this area, they have the ability to cause Apple pain. If there are a lot of people who want to work there and don't want to join a union, then they could have more trouble with it as their members are replaced, but that's when a union can attempt to convince non-members that they can benefit by joining. If they can't do that, then they're probably not doing enough for the workers and need to change the plan.

Ex-eBay security director to plead guilty to cyberstalking

That's from eBay's statement, not the journalist's summary of the situation. They had to cooperate with law enforcement to some extent by that point because not doing so is a crime. We also don't know what, if anything, they did to help law enforcement. My guess is they provided data for which the police had a warrant, which they're required to do. It's like saying I cooperated with the police after they arrested me by not trying to escape the cell I was put in.

A better statement would be that they undertook an investigation of who knew what exactly when, made it public, and informed law enforcement. They haven't done that.

Google 'Switch to Android' app surfaces in iOS App Store

"So how about a way to transfer purchases between platforms?"

That's up to the app developers. Those who planned for this store your purchases in a platform-independent way, which could either mean using an account on their system or with a license key they've given to you. Activating it on a different platform just means using that mechanism to prove you purchased. When a developer doesn't plan for this, it's hardly the fault of the store operator. If the store operators acted to ban the practice, that would be an issue for the regulators, but so far, they have focused on getting a cut instead (a different issue for regulators but not blocking this request).

Re: Good

That's not really unique to Windows, and not Microsoft's fault. Lots of programs only bother to write for one OS and didn't create compatible cross-platform versions. This works for Linux too; I've seen lots of open source software where porting to Windows or Mac OS wasn't in the plans. If you've invested in software, migrating to a system that can't run it is always at least a little painful, regardless of which systems you're using. Fortunately, we have VMs and emulation layers (Wine/Proton, WSL, etc) to try to make that easier.

Re: Google, which supports sideloaded apps on Android devices

Tolerates. They won't turn it off, because it's a useful lever for antitrust cases, but they'll hide it and try to make sideloaded apps less capable. It's still a lot better than platforms that don't have the option.

Re: The best thing about the internet

In their defense, just because it's a Google app, they're probably right that the privacy policy is a nightmare to understand (and also one if you succeed). I'm not sure they understood that given the rest of their comment though.

Netflix to crack down on account sharing, offer ad-laden cheaper options

I don't know where these numbers came from, but they can still be true. The other 97% would just see ads that are poorly directed because the others were targeted. I certainly have gotten this because advertisers don't know what I want to buy, so they throw random things in my path in hopes of finding out. That said, the numbers could also be anecdotal estimates or made up.

Review: Huawei's Matebook X Pro laptop is forgetful and forgettable

Re: However

Did you miss how it got compared to a different laptop doing the same thing, I.E. also in a VM? It's a test of performance of a demanding task under Linux in a VM under Windows running on the machine, and the Huawei did worse than the Asus. That's a comparison. Why that is is not the reviewer's job to explain, but there are various possible reasons that virtualization might be slower on one machine versus another.

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

Re: Funds?

"I'm no financial wizard, but how is 300mil going to buy a company that "The deal puts a $43 billion price tag on Twitter"."

The $300M figure was a typo. They meant to say $300B, which is sufficient to cover the charge except it probably won't come out of that money.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook

Yes, and a lot of people have learned to use Excel macros and have done a lot with them. Trying to sell them on dumping and reimplementing it all goes down about as well as the people who tell existing projects written in C that they should use a more modern language. Each argument might have some correct aspects, but it both ignores the user's valid points and completely ignores their preferences and the reasons they have for choosing one tool over another.

Re: The joys of Linux

They don't need to enumerate patches. If you have used Linux, you know that everything gets patched. There's a reason that there's usually something for your package manager to update quite often. This is good, because I want all my machines to have their vulnerabilities fixed. I'm quite happy to see that the code I'm using is being improved actively. However, you cannot deny that patches are needed on Linux just as they are needed on Windows.

Re: "Linux Desktop"

"Is it really so difficult to work out that you follow the tutorial for what's in front of you?"

For the average user, yes. I've recently had to tell someone that no, they can't run that application on their Windows computer because that's a Mac application. They'll need to find the Windows version if it exists. Do you really expect that a user like that will understand which package manager they've got?

This also of course assumes that the tutorial does offer a bunch of versions. There's probably only one, and if there are multiple provided, they won't cover things. A knowledgeable person understands that, if they're using Mint, they can probably do most of the stuff that is in the Debian or Ubuntu tutorials, but probably not the OpenSUSE one. They also know how to interpret an error message and can usually take a reasonable guess at what they need to do in order to make a slightly inapplicable command work. Many Linux tutorials are written for that kind of knowledge level, which is just fine for me. There are people for whom it is not fine, so we either have to make it better or patch situations in which an average user will need that kind of thing.

Re: re. Anyone who tells you Linux is hard to use wasn't paying attention

"As other have mentioned though the Pi running Linux is meant as a device for tinkering around with so you kind of expect there to be more teething troubles than connecting a consumer device such as your average desktop PC."

Don't give me that. I'm mostly on the Linux side of this argument, but not when people react like that. If we're to succeed in arguing that Linux is suitable for general use, we can't react every time a bug is found by inventing a reason why it's not a problem there's a bug there. And by the way, I'm not yet convinced this is a software problem (explanation below), but your argument applies whether this is or not, so I'll deal with it first.

The Raspberry Pi is designed for education, has OS integration directly with the hardware, and has a decade of hardware and software experience. It can get away with many problems, but it can't get away with failure to function. I'm not expecting that it will repair itself after you mess around with it, but if it can't power on and use its basic peripherals, that's a critical bug requiring a patch. In my use of the Pi, I haven't encountered many of these and fortunately, the Raspbian developers appear to take my view on it more than yours. If we can confirm that it is a software issue causing this failure, it requires an immediate fix and should not be an accepted "teething trouble".

All that said, I think this might be a hardware issue, specifically an issue with the HDMI ports on the failing Pi. This can be tested; swap the SD cards between the Pis. If the same card is failing, then it's a problem with the system on that card, and a reimage could fix it and is worth a try. If the Pi continues to fail with the card that formerly worked, then it's probably a hardware issue, though you could always try replacing the embedded firmware if it's a Pi 4. The hardware issue could be in the HDMI port or controller, which would exhibit the same behavior no matter what cable or display was used.

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

"Still no voice dictation. Still no talking to my computer."

I'm confused by this. We have dictation. In my experience, it works rather well when using it to type, though like everything else you have to check it for mistakes it will make eventually. Of course, I know some people who the software seems to hate and frequently misunderstand, but there's a reasonable chance you're not one of them. We have had dictation software for some time now. If you meant conversational dictation where the computer talks back, we don't really have that. The problem with that is that the computer doesn't understand and construct responses, but it can listen and write down what you said just fine.

"One of my greatest bugbears. For all the local power available, Google, apple and amazon* insist on transmitting audio to their servers, where it is not only processed but also harvested and stored**."

I don't know about storage, but most of those places offer offline dictation and have for some time:

Apple: On Mac OS, go to the dictation settings and select the offline option. Download each language file you are interested in. On IOS, it's less clear, but they claim that if you select languages under Settings -> General -> Keyboard, that the processing will be offline. It works when I set my phone to airplane mode.

Google: On Android, go to Settings -> System -> Language and Input -> Google keyboard and select offline languages to download.

Amazon: I don't know about their tablets, but for Alexa devices, you're out of luck.

Singapore to license pentesters and managed infosec operators

Re: Another virtual land/fiat money grab guaranteeing nothing good

Any job has the opportunity to impair the security or existence of your employer. If you don't work in security, but you have access to the corporate office and/or network, you could do damage. You could also do damage by either failing to do your job competently or deliberately doing it to sabotage your employer. I don't think that's a good argument for requiring a license, as if you do so, the result will be the same: your employer will fire you and consider suing you for the damage caused.

There have been efforts to license nearly every profession in existence. Would you favor mandatory licenses for IT workers, support staff, programmers, or whatever job you have? Are there any jobs you wouldn't want to use that on?

Re: Easier to prosecute hackers

That's already a crime. Pentesting without permission is no different from regular crimes, just as if I broke into your house without permission, whether I meant to take your stuff or demonstrate that your lock isn't good makes no difference. You don't need a law to eliminate that defense; it's invalid and thoroughly rejected.

Dell trials 4-day workweek, massive UK pilot of shortened week begins

Re: I'm not sure I understand how this is going to work.

The theory is that, when you drop from five to four days, two things happen. First, workers get more rest and are therefore more alert and productive when they're working. Second, because there's less time to waste, the people who make long, unnecessary meetings see those meetings take up even more of a limited resource and trim them back. If you actually got both those to happen, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw productivity increase. However, everyone understands how meetings can impair productivity* and we still have a lot of them, so I am not as confident that the second one will happen.

*Yes, the organizers of meetings do understand that meetings can be a problem. It's just that the meetings they personally decided to organize are critical ones that can't be moved. They're perfectly willing to ascribe the problems to other people's meetings.

It can still be. It just means a different structure--if something breaks and you need to fix it now, for an hourly worker this may be an unpleasant task whose rewards will be delivered in cash, whereas for a salary worker it's just unpleasant. That is if you have a job that sticks to a normal level of effort when there isn't a crisis. There are many jobs like that, so it's not automatically a problem. The problem comes when a job decides not to go that way and assumes that workers on a salary can be abused for as much effort as can be burned out of them. That happens and a lot more often than it should, but it's not universal.

Re: There s no way to buy more time

"In this day and age of computers for calculating wages and taxes, it really shouldn't be an issue."

That's not the only issue. Sure, the people who make the software that does that charge a lot for multiple countries and businesses don't really want to pay if they don't have to, but they also have additional regulatory requirements that get in the way. If you only employ people in one country, even if they're citizens of another, then you have to be familiar with and follow the one country's labor laws. If you employ people in multiple countries, then you have to deal with regulations in all of them, which undoubtedly includes additional paperwork and probably includes situations where some employees get one situation and some get a different one even though they work on the same things and close together geographically. Everything from worker's insurance to vacation policies has some legal restriction, and that's a lot of overhead. This is easier for countries that already employ people in that country, but for smaller places that don't, it's not work they're likely to want.

They might be paid with a salary. In that case, quite frequently the system is that the employer asks you to work more and you don't get paid any better. At that point, even getting paid at a proportional rate seems like an advantage.

Attackers exploit Spring4Shell flaw to let loose the Mirai botnet

Separate volume, lots of people do that. Noexec, not as many people as you'd hope. Although in this case, /tmp is just a convenient place to store things because a lot of these things are embedded devices with little storage but /tmp in RAM. If a target wasn't allowing the chmod from there, the attacker could find somewhere else to put their binary as long as there was some writable storage. That binary could be a very small one that loaded instructions from another file in /tmp that wasn't executed.

Google to sell replacement Pixel phone parts via iFixit

Re: Motivation

The chance of doing it wrong by yourself is always there, but that's what the guides are there for. If you don't have confidence that you can do it properly, I'm sure you can find someone who will do it for you so long as you pay them (of course they may also fail). Google wouldn't mind if you failed and bought another one, but when they weren't providing parts, the result was the same. At least now, a lot of people who would try DIY repair will succeed. I think your second argument is incorrect.

Your first is probably correct, but I'm good with that. If they want to attract attention by doing the right thing in a way that actually works for me and all the others who want to repair, then I like that approach. It's much better than pretending to be interested while taking no real action. It's also better than hiring lobbyists to try to kill legislation. Basically, Google saw that people might require them to do it, so they found a way they could do it that worked for them. Unless something turns up that hampers the plan, this looks like a positive to me.

Raspberry Pi OS update beefs up security

Re: Linux and security

No, it doesn't, at least with the previous default config. The setup was that Pi could automatically elevate to root without password using sudo. That was one of the things on every list of how to harden the default config.

AMD Threadripper CPU supply severely low, PC makers say

Re: Naming

At least with their names, after a bit of study I can understand them. Intel used to be similar, but starting with the 10th generation, someone there decided to put all model numbers through a blender before releasing them such that there's letters in the middle, they are different ones, and I no longer see a pattern. AMD has a few issues like that as well (processors end with a letter but unlike what Intel used to do, that doesn't mean that they have the same TDP). Still, I have to give the advantage to AMD for having model numbers that I can probably guess what kind of performance and power situation they're for.

Fish mentality: If The Rock told you to eat flies, would you buy my NFT?

Re: Happy Anniversary!

I think the term millionaire makes a lot of comparisons difficult due to its history. When it was first used, a million currency units was such a large quantity of money that was unimaginable for most people in the general public. Nowadays, with the last century of inflation, that's not the case, but yet we still use the word. Take this guy as an example. I don't know how much wealth he has, but if he has €1M including property, it's less than it sounds. The median wealth in France is estimated at $134k (€123k), with the mean at $300k. A million still makes someone wealthy, but it's not the kind of carefree can-buy-anything wealth that used to be the meaning of millionaire.

This issue is stronger when other currencies are used. I'm not just talking about places like Japan (¥1M = €7393). Even when the currencies are the same scale, the values can be very different. Someone who has a million euros has 9% more than someone with a million U.S. dollars and 46% more than someone with a million Australian dollars. I'm afraid nothing short of complete devaluation will remove the word from general use, but I think we often give it a connotation that's above what it really means. This doesn't make it wrong to use it. Pointing out that a politician has eight times the median wealth is still a useful argument. I just think that more numerical representation might be clearer.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Seems ok

"who else would really have even thought about charging for this?"

I have a set of tiers. If you're a close friend or family member, I'll do it for free at two in the morning if it's urgent. I'll ask you if it's urgent first or if we could wait for the morning, but if for some reason it is, that's fine. These are the people that, if I have something urgent, I expect would act to help me even if it would be inconvenient.

If you're a less close friend, then I'll do it for free when it's convenient. They can bring over the machine and we'll have a crack at it. I'll not guarantee success, but I will try my hardest to do it for them. Once again, this is a friend with whom I have a real friendship, meaning we frequently do things because we like each other, not someone who mostly talks to me when they've got a task they want done.

If you are, as it sounds in this case, a person I've never met before, then maybe not. I have been asked to do free work by various people, often people who don't know me very well. It's often someone who doesn't understand the scale of what they want. Among the requests I've received are "Could you just write a quick phone app for me", "I just want my website to look different and you write programs, so you should be able to design a better one", and "Could you come fix my business's technology, because we stopped having any IT support eighteen months ago and the accumulated breakage is starting to be noticed". I could spend a lot of my time fulfilling these requests, but I don't want to. I have the abilities and my employer pays me to use them. People I don't know should be aware of this, and I first inform them of the time and effort it would cost me to do what they've asked.

This doesn't mean I'll charge unreasonably. Nor did this guy do so; £50 is relatively small and significantly less than the quote from a company. That the action was necessary because someone died doesn't much matter. He wasn't asking to recover something of sentimental value. He was asking for a business file that someone hadn't backed up. We don't even know how close the people were.

If you fire someone, don't let them hang around a month to finish code

That's not always a problem. If the functions are designed properly, it still provides a system that's easier to update or modify. For the same reason that people write scripts that call system binaries instead of taking all the code for them and building a program with all of that included, there's a case for implementing a few basic functions and having a chain of calls in main.

If they're just doing it because they were told about the benefits of functions without understanding why, then I get your point. If they really did implement self-contained operations and then had a basic function to call each one, then I'm not sure it's an issue.

Microsoft, NXP unveil Arm-based Windows 10 IoT Enterprise experience

Re: Aren't we supposed to be moving on from Windows 10?

Most embedded devices run older versions of software. It took forever for XP to stop being used in such things. When they use Android, it's always something like Android 8.1 if they're modern. When they use Linux, prepare to see a 4 at the beginning of the version (if you're lucky). As such, using Windows 10 is entirely in character for this area. Probably, Microsoft would have liked to use whatever Windows 11 variant they have planned for this level but realized that they needed to use something established if they wanted any OEMs to use it.

Wing launches drone deliveries in the US where people actually live

Re: Pointless

I admit I didn't watch the video, but that would make the drone's travel less efficient. I assumed they would return to recharge and the products would be loaded as they did so, but if they have to land somewhere, recharge, fly to the pickup location, then fly to the customer, they will have to fly even longer distances to make a single delivery. This may be the only functional way to perform the small deliveries, but it won't scale as well as delivering to a launch location and only flying from there.

Re: Pointless

"As for snow, it doesn't really matter in the big picture, most big urban centers never experience 2 inches of snow (and snow is getting less and less common anyway)."

I'm assuming you live in a place that doesn't? A lot of cities do get snow. If your climate is a continental one, common in North America, eastern Europe, or Asia, you probably get snow during the winter. Unless the city is very good at clearing it from everywhere, there will be occasional places where it impedes travel. As the climate warms, we won't see snow vanishing. Temperatures aren't soaring, they're gradually sliding upward. In fact, some places may get additional snowfall as precipitation patterns change. There are large parts of the planet that won't have to deal with this, but just because you live in one doesn't make the issue disappear.

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Many of those outposts don't have any people on them, as France enjoyed collecting islands that aren't really suitable for people to live on. One of their territories often doesn't count as land as it's underwater at high tide, but it gives them a massive patch of the Indian ocean that they can claim to own.

Some of the ones with people won't have a problem because the small populations mean that a small amount of connectivity goes a long way. For example, Réunion is one of the most connected parts of France despite its remoteness because the existing fiber connections cover the local area well already. French Polynesia isn't as advanced, but they've already completed the project of connecting fiber lines to each of the smaller islands (the big ones already have links). Each of the small islands is small enough that they don't need a lot of connections in order to have satisfactory bandwidth. Many other overseas French territories are in the Caribbean, where there are a lot of islands that are building networks.

This isn't to say that satellite is never needed, but just that remoteness doesn't always mean it is relevant.

Apple patched critical flaws in macOS Monterey but not in Big Sur nor Catalina

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

That's for Mac OS two versions old. If we consider Big Sur, there are machines stuck with it that are only six years old. Let's consider the MacBook Pro 13-inch from 2014 (discontinued May 2015, so a little under seven years ago). It has a Haswell-series CPU. Now let's consider the MacBook Air that was released in 2020 (the last with an Intel processor). It's a newer chip. Memory-wise, they have the same amount. Storage-wise, the disk interfaces are the same speed and the disk capacity is the same. Processing-wise, the chip has the same number of cores and they benchmark similarly (the single-threaded benchmark is almost exactly equal, whereas the Air gets a slightly higher multithreaded score). True, the older machine does that with a 28W processor and the newer with a 9W one, but that only affects the battery life. In short, there's no technical problem with the older one's performance that prevents it from running the newer OS.

That's not the newest machine that's getting cut off. I used that one to have a valid comparison (had I used the 15-inch laptop that uses a 47W quad-core chip, I could have given you even better proof about the performance issue). The latest machine not to get the update is the MacBook Retina from 2015 (discontinued April 2016), narrowly beating out an iMac. This means that they're only keeping support up for six years before they allow security vulnerabilities to remain deliberately unpatched.

Contrary to your claims, it isn't just now that you would expect someone to use a computer longer than six years. I know people who are still using computers from 2010, and I'm talking about people who run Windows on them and never upgraded any of the internals. For that matter, I also know people using Macs from that long ago, though unlike the Windows people, they're stuck without patches. We all know that, if you make certain updates like installing an SSD and run efficient software, you can exceed that length easily.

Re: There is an official update available from Apple

WebKit can be used as a component for displaying HTML content inside other applications. Not all applications that do so will use it. There's also the possibility that Mac OS would open Safari instead of your preferred browser for certain types of resources, meaning that someone could tailor a link to make it open Safari. Your risk is still lower from someone trying an untargeted infection.