Posts by doublelayer

Smartphones face a memory cost crunch – and buyers aren't in the mood

Re: There's already heavy discounts in 2025

I would guess not, but I can't say I know the business model of people who steal that kind of thing. There are two reasons that come to mind which make today different from the 1990s. There are so many different types of RAM that while it's all expensive, it's not as easy to easily resell any given stolen RAM. They probably could get around that, but it wouldn't help the profitability.

However, what might be harder to get around is the computers they would be stealing them from. Imagine that I've broken into an office and stolen all the RAM from desktops. Chances are that I've mostly got 8 GB DIMMs. Most memory-hungry machines will have 16 GB from two of those, whereas plenty would only need 8 GB and the criminals would be hoping that they did that with one 8 GB module rather than two 4 GB ones. But who is buying 8 GB secondhand RAM modules? People who want a lot of RAM in their desktop probably don't have so many slots that 8 GB modules are big enough. People who only need 8 or 16 probably bought that with the machine in the first place. If they could easily get 16 GB or larger modules, that might be different. That's just the desktops, but a lot of offices have laptops. Not only does that make them trickier to steal because people can take the laptops home, but a lot of laptops have the RAM soldered. If people were stealing RAM, they'd probably steal the laptops altogether, so unless you're seeing frequent thefts of laptops, I doubt you'll see them for RAM.

Devs say Apple still flouting EU's Digital Markets Act six months on

Re: Want Crapple to comply?

I haven't downvoted either of your posts, but there's lots not to like about them even for someone who doesn't like Apple's position on any of the DMA stuff. I wanted them to lose in court, I want the DMA conditions to be enforced and extended worldwide, and your suggestions are useless. Among other things, once you get to the deactivation of devices, you're talking about something the government doesn't have the power to do either technically or legally and you're punishing Apple users instead of Apple which is misguided and stupid because it makes an enemy of those you're trying to protect. There also appears to be confusion between EU and UK laws here which isn't helping.

New Jolla phone and Sailfish 5 offer a break from iOS-Android monotony

Unfortunately, that's far too common in my experience whenever intercontinental shipping comes up. Unless they already planned their business around it, it often ends up being far too expensive and chaotic, with some companies shipping things with no customs forms and some refusing to ship on the theory that you won't deal with import requirements but will try to blame them for it. I don't think it's unique to getting things from the US. A lot of companies don't seem to have planned for customers outside their country or one of a few near ones.

Re: Once bitten...

"this company has been around for over a decade, has launched 2 devices successfully (and one less so), and maintained its OS for 13 years."

Of those defenses, only one of them, that the company has been around, doesn't contradict their complaints. They complained that the company has not, in fact, maintained the OS for years. The fact that they released a second device and also got people to buy it, a device that also got almost no updates, doesn't help the point, especially as one reason their third device failed was that people had learned that they should expect no software updates and some people need them, something that was not yet evident when they parleyed their market success with their first product into quick sales of a second.

While some features of a device can indeed work for a long time, software updates aren't as meaningless to many of us as they seem to be to you. Old Android versions do start to lose support from apps. Not everything, but sometimes I don't want to play the game of guessing whether a certain app will work or if I need to hunt for something that has the same features but won't balk. Security updates are important too; what's the security patch date on that Gemini? The same thing is true for Linux kernel updates for Debian or Sailfish, because if the kernel is very old, then some features I can easily get on something with a new one are unavailable, and sooner or later, that's going to affect the distros too. I've dealt with the problems that happen when a distro has left a kernel version behind but I can't, and they can result in boot failures.

We've had this debate before. I think you are taking your fondness for the form factor of the Gemini and letting it decide your opinion on everything else related to it. That is a very bad thing to do if you want to convince anyone. I wanted a Gemini when they launched too. The hardware looked brilliant and I was especially interested in having a native Linux option as there are things I want to run from a mobile device which don't work too well from Android's layers. If someone else built a similar thing, I'd still be interested. But not Planet, because it has become obvious that Planet has no interest in their products lasting very long in software, so even if that's not a problem for some use case, why should I expect that they're going to pay proper attention to hardware either?

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

Re: Implemention says wut?

I don't know if it's changed, but quite a while ago, I wanted to access some BBC material (I am not a UK citizen or resident) and they just don't have any mechanism for people to pay them for it. They had some programs with access to some news content, but nothing for the rest of it. I understand why that would be the case for things they licensed from others for a UK audience, but what I wanted was a BBC production and I couldn't find any way to give them money for it. I wonder how many people would have paid if they had, and my decision would have depended a lot on whatever price they chose, but it still could be an opportunity for them.

This is almost entirely wrong. The good news is that enforcement of copyright law is lax so that people following this advice are unlikely to face the full consequences they theoretically could. Anyone who finds themselves trying this argument in court will find that it's not very representative of most countries' laws. However, since the discussion was about the intentions, purposes, and effects of a law regulating VPNs, I don't see a benefit in debating someone's incorrect understanding of penalties under copyright law in lots of different countries and will suggest that people intending to push the limits research what the law looks like in their own country with a special attention to case law from similar situations.

Also, we already have a tech-neutral law, the one that makes copyright and therefore makes violations of copyright illegal. That someone chooses to break that law using a VPN doesn't need to add to the pile of laws broken to be illegal. Otherwise, we would need to pass a law for every item to indicate that you are also not allowed to break the law using it. The Tennis Ball Abuse Regulation is written to make sure that, should you deliberately hit someone with a tennis ball, that would be illegal, something assault laws evidently don't cover.

The only point of having a new law is if they intend to mandate that VPN providers do something actively about this. Any statement that this won't involve those active measures either indicates that the speaker is lying or the speaker has no idea what they're talking about.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: Go, Look, See

A little beside the point of punctuation naming, but since you brought this up, I haven't read it but I already have a problem. So we're going to use "uncleft" instead of "atom"? That's a bad replacement. Atom was chosen for a word for "indivisible", not capable of being divided, rather than just something that hadn't yet been divided which is what uncleft means. It does break down a bit since atoms can be divided, but I can argue that they change their natures when that happens so they're still compatible. Introducing inaccuracy into fundamental words so that they don't include anything too Greek. I suppose another reason not to support linguistic purism and I already had plenty.

Re: An industrial tribunal

Only if that did the same to people paid hourly, which it almost certainly wouldn't. I haven't seen that system, but I'm quite confident that this was a bad mechanism for salaried workers because those I have encountered usually define a fixed number of hours to give people credit for and always use it, no matter whether people use more or less. The systems I've used mostly don't care about how many hours you work and don't bother to collect it or, if they do, allow you to enter whatever you want and then ignore the number and use the normal value anyway because they're calculating pay rates based on number of theoretical hours in the payroll period. In order to make a case for wage theft, some wages have to go missing first, so this would only work for hourly workers and they're very unlikely to have used the same configuration for those because it would mean that anyone who worked less than 35 hours in any week would be overpaid.

Re: Error message

At the point where you need that, you might as well skip that and communicate the error straight to tech support automatically and lock the application until tech support clears it (be sure to have a report key in case more than one comes through at once). In both cases, it's a lot more than most problems deserve.

Re: Reminds me of the time ...

I doubt it. In my experience, yelling deadens most of the reaction to real problems and stupid solutions don't really help either. If someone asks for a blob applied to their screen, I'd probably ask why and try to find a better solution. If they don't put up with that but are satisfied with that simple fix, then I'm less likely to consider if they had a good point about interfaces, especially if the "asks for" could be better described as "screamed at me for not having already done". That's regardless of whether the problem was real. While that's not necessarily a good thing because it would be nice if every potential problem got a full review, I, and a lot of others I know, have limited time to do that and therefore use rough but fast heuristics to decide whether to bother thinking further or just make the user happy and go back to work.

Re: "I'm looking at a Blank Screen"

So what's the answer instead? Put the line at the top? How would that make any difference when the screen is small enough that the user can see the whole thing. Especially when, as in many cases, the bottom line is already used for status and this is a status update. Instead of making a new type of window, you continue to place the information in the same place, meaning any user who receives training and understands it knows where to look for the information about what's happening. Consistency can be helpful to users as well.

Re: In this instance i cant blame the user for this!

While I kind of agree about IT visiting, that's based on an assumption that any building with users on terminals probably had IT on site. If it was a distributed thing with a user at a facility with no IT staff on site, we're now talking about a much longer travel to have someone physically show up for a minor problem.

But the tape thing is different. I don't know what the procedure was for loading one and whether the user might have had to ask for it. Maybe there was someone who should have loaded that earlier. However, even if it was completely automated except for a human loader, there would still inevitably be at least a couple minutes latency for any tape to be loaded and the user would still see that screen, just for less time. They would still have had the call with the helpdesk, it would just have abruptly ended when the user hopefully said that it all came back to normal. Either way, when the user faced an expected part of the interface and didn't understand it, it was their inaccurate description of the situation that caused all of their problem.

Re: Error message

I'd adjust it a bit. In my experience, it's not the people who can't read, as in don't understand the message. They usually ask for help and listen. It's the people who can read but don't. A lot of messages that get ignored are things that the user can understand if they read them, and even if they don't, it is something they can contact a person about and read clearly so that person can help. A lot of people do that. Those who don't usually don't out of choice rather than ability.

Re: reminds me of the telnet test

I had the opposite problem. A charity I sometimes volunteer for wanted a copy of something that was being maintained for them by another company. That company provided them with temporary FTP credentials. So far, I wasn't involved other than recommending an FTP client because I hadn't set up that service. But when they consistently failed to figure out how to use the FTP client, even with the assistance of their providers' helpdesk, that's when I was called in.

The people at the charity were using the FTP client correctly. They kept getting errors and new sets of single-use credentials, none of which solved the problem because the people providing them evidently never thought to consider that their FTP ports are normally firewalled off with an allowlist and, as far as I know, never collected any IP addresses to allow through. Every connection would time out before the credentials were tried because only the SYN packet ever got sent. I don't know why their support system wasn't equipped to add things to their firewall when they were to generate an infinite number of temporary passwords, but it took escalation to what they called L3 support before they found someone who understood my email which boiled down to "This is the IP address. This is a log of no TCP connection. This is a log of a successful connection to the port the application runs on. Something is wrong with only the FTP server. Might this possibly be that this address is not allowed through your firewall?". I wanted to but did not ask "What address did you think would have worked here since you never asked anyone for one to allow".

Re: Nifty-Looking Desktop Computer Cases

That's one approach, and nothing's very wrong with that, but another perfectly valid approach is to have a flat top surface if it fits your design but don't make it in such a way that it causes problems. Put the power button, reset button, ports, and everything else on some other side and leave the top blank or with something decorative on it. That way, it can be flat and it still can't be misused. Designers should always start with how their equipment will be used and can then be creative within that envelope.

Re: "I found that a strange concept of 'nothing,'"

It still should be something that never happens, since the user was not asked to understand or even read the message, just to recognize that some things on the screen is not the same as the screen being completely blank. Sadly, it's also very common. I have a few people who will report problems to me but cannot understand that, if there is an error message, I want to hear A) that there was one and B) what it said, and if there was not an error message, I want to hear what was attempted, what normally happens, and what happened differently this time. I don't know why they have not learned that, when they tell me that "The server doesn't let me work", the first thing I'm going to ask is what it said (okay, what I'm first going to ask is what they're calling a server today, but once we've established the thing they're trying to work with, looking for the error message is the first step after that).

Affection for Excel spans generations, from Boomers to Zoomers

Re: Friends don’t let friends use Excel

Which platform that has Python but doesn't have PowerShell was important to you? I prefer Python, so I'm fine with this, but if this was because PowerShell isn't on Linux or Mac OS, it easily can be installed and you would have to install Python manually too. I doubt you're referring to embedded systems running MicroPython. This doesn't look like a valid reason against PowerShell.

And the security model isn't because it's used for admin, it's because IT departments like to lock down user machines and sometimes for good reason, so when Microsoft designed another tool, they decided to give admins more control of what users are allowed to do with it. If you change the policy to unrestricted, you have exactly as much protection against user actions as you do when they're running Python scripts which do not have limits on what actions, under the users' privileges, the scripts can use.

Re: Dunno

There are plenty of free databases using SQL or SQL-like syntaxes, notably Postgresql (you still need to install it somewhere) and SQLite (works entirely portably). Licensing isn't really the problem.

The problem is that you can put a spreadsheet in front of a user and they'll figure out how to find an intersection between a row and column to enter data, but put them in front of an SQL CLI and they'll be immediately lost. Most systems that use a database have programmed UIs built specifically for it, and if you have those, they are generally quite helpful with two major drawbacks. It took someone with more programming knowledge to write them, so if you don't have one of those, you don't have them. And, if you need anything that's not already in the UI, now you've got an annoying process of trying to find someone to add it and the addition won't be a simple formula or view, a problem that gets worse if your change needs to change the database's structure by, for example, adding a column which some things will handle, most things will ignore, and some things will break on. That's why spreadsheets have and will continue to win for this kind of task. We have not succeeded at making anything better from the users' perspective.

Re: Dunno

I think that does account for a lot of users. In case people are interested in the blog we're talking about, it is here and it's from 25 years ago.

The problem with the complaint is that we're entirely correct that Excel has a lot of problems when used as a database but, from the perspective of most users, there isn't anything else for them to use. Following the same design advice from that post, we haven't considered what the people who don't have experience with databases need and therefore haven't built something that solves their problems. If we tried, we'd likely end up with something that looked a lot like a spreadsheet but just didn't do as many of the spreadsheet things. It's likely not very hard for us to write an SQL table schema to describe the data we're going to store and some input validation restrictions, either running at the SQL level or slightly above it. Both are foreign to a lot of people who need to create and store records with specific fields. Therefore, it's often quite difficult to figure out what to tell people to use instead of Excel. The stereotypical comment doesn't even try, just saying "a database" which doesn't specify what database engine or how they'd configure it and certainly doesn't cover the entry and display parts of the problem.

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

Re: But... why?

Of course they lie. One of the primary reasons that explains all the ones I listed is that the people selling the implementation are often more familiar with things than the ones buying it. Several of the problems could be partially fixed by more clearly specifying what is needed in technical terms, and one of the reasons it doesn't happen is that a lot of clients come with relatively vague specs which gives the people agreeing to build it far more latitude to set terms and manipulate them to their benefit. The people who make these systems are often less than ethical which doesn't help, but they have the opportunity to use the methods with which they're so familiar because the situation that justifies them is so common. Without that, both outsourcing and building locally would both go better, but since it is almost impossible to prevent in any sufficiently large organization, it still happens. The programmers don't have enough understanding of all the processes they're automating, the people who understand the processes don't have enough understanding of programming, and there are so many processes that you don't usually get lucky and find someone who has sufficient knowledge of both of them because no one person understands more than 15% of the processes.

But unless you can fix that, the other options don't become available. Nobody will accept the single payment for subjective completion of a vague spec. Instead, they remove one of those three things giving you:

1. Not a single payment: the system will arrive eventually and do what is required (for now, good luck when things change), at as many hours as they can extract from it.

2. Not a subjective completion. This is common for government. The people writing the spec have to provide specific criteria and the code delivered will definitely pass those criteria. If it doesn't do what you wanted but what you wanted wasn't in those criteria, too bad for you, you pay up and get to decide what to do with the system that doesn't work.

3. Not a vague spec. This is the holy grail, a spec that's so detailed that someone can complete it without needing anything else and can easily be tested for whether it's done so. Unfortunately, it's about as hard to make as the program you wanted in the first place.

That also affects non-outsourced projects too. It's generally somewhat cheaper if you have competent staff because you don't have the overhead of the sales team, but it's not very different with the extra costs coming in the form of delivery delays while the programmers continue to collect salaries and, if the people running the team aren't great at hiring programmers, the inefficiency of incompetent ones can cause costs to spiral too.

Re: But... why?

Companies often try that method, or the similar RFP method where they release a spec and ask for flat bids. Mostly, it doesn't work. Here are some of the reasons why:

It tilts the power very far one way. If I'm specifying a project and you're writing it and our contract says that I'll pay a fixed amount when I'm happy, then I've got all the power. If you deliver what I specified but I've decided that I want more, whether that's because something was unclear and you did it wrong or I just thought of some new features, then I can say it's not yet acceptable and make you add things at your cost. People know that, so they don't agree to those terms.

Nobody has a full spec for any system. They may sometimes think they do, but those specs are rarely sufficient. If you're trying to build a spec with gaps in it, it's going to be more successful if you can talk with the people who want it and get guidance rather than following a single document. That makes any competitive method very challenging because you'll have five different implementers each racing to get that prize as fast as possible frantically asking for your review.

Projects fail. Imagine you decide on a single provider to solve the last problem, they spend .6x but the thing doesn't work, they spend another .09x and it still doesn't work, and now they are very close to making a loss to deliver the project. They may come to ask for more money, which presumably you would refuse. The problem is that there's only so much they'll risk before cutting their losses and abandoning your project. True, you didn't lose any money, but you're years on, down the prices of preparing specs and working with the provider, and you still don't have anything. A lot of these systems can deliver useful components even when they're partially built, so when costs go over, there's still some return from it.

Re: Not Fragile (Duh-Duh-Duh-Duh-Duhn DUHN-DUHN duh Duhn*)

You are correct that that would be better. The problem is that it would also be more expensive and take longer. It's almost always easier and cheaper in the short term to write code that does the process you do now. Making one that can handle changes requires thinking ahead about what changes might look like to make sure every part related to those is implemented in a nicely expandable way. Some of those aren't too hard, but to make it fully generic takes quite a lot of brainstorming possible places where someone might need to insert a change and ways to make sure they can if they want to. That' just if it's acceptable to have programmers whose entire job is making those changes and just trying to make it easier. If you also want users to be able to implement those without needing to reprogram the component, then you have a much harder task because you have to implement lots of interfaces to modify the structure and flow of the software and deal with compatibility issues between the different components.

That kind of thing is also hard to explain and sell to the people who pay for it. From their perspective, either way they get software that looks and does the same thing. To some extent, the people writing it can ask them what changes they are planning and those can be the first types of changes they design for, but most times I've asked about this kind of thing, the person with the requirements doesn't anticipate making many changes, wants their code quickly and doesn't take kindly to the months of additional preparation, and therefore chooses an approach where that doesn't happen.

Re: Not Fragile (Duh-Duh-Duh-Duh-Duhn DUHN-DUHN duh Duhn*)

I think an important part of your post is "accepting less functionality from the new mega-system", which doesn't necessarily have to be bad. Done well, a rewrite gives you the opportunity to decide whether you really need everything you built and, if you decide that you don't, to redesign processes around the system you'll have. I find that it's easier to do that kind of thing during design than when something mostly already exists and anything else is being implemented as a bolt-on component. Of course, their costs suggest that they might not have been doing a lot of that and from my experience of Workday, and to be fair to Workday pretty much everything even slightly like it, my hopes are not very high that it would be great.

That version 2 has broken doesn't prove that version 1 was fit. In fact, without any other evidence, I'd consider this massive bill a suggestion that what they had before probably wasn't good enough, because as the project continued on with worse and worse outcomes, the temptation to abandon it and just use what we have would grow. It's worth considering that the people building these are likely different since version 1 was written in the 1990s. One of the reasons the system I described was harder to modify is that the people who wrote the C++ original had left and their replacements knew the language but not every internal structure in the program which had not been documented. Any institution can mess up a complicated system two times in a row, and some of them can mess it up every time they try.

Sure, maybe that's what that translates to. However, maybe it translates somewhat differently, because I've also seen deployments that could be described that way. The way those worked, the ancient application from the 1990s needed to be manually tweaked for every change in input data because that input data was defined as a sprawling C++ object rather than anything that a non-programmer user could modify themselves. As processes changed more frequently, that meant more work for the people who maintained it and now had to spend most of their time operating it. It had serious efficiency problems which couldn't be fixed both because there wasn't much documentation of everything inside it and because the people who could give it a try were busy running it over and over every time someone who wanted output needed some changes which required the programmer to modify the source, so they had no time to reimplement big components. One procedure was so tricky to automate within the software that nobody did and, if you wanted the results which were needed at least twice a year, there were two different ways to do it: way 1 which involved a bunch of people in a room manually moving pieces of paper around and way number 2 which involved a separate Excel spreadsheet with macros that routinely took eight hours to complete.

How do you know they didn't have those? You don't have evidence to say that their old code worked any more than I can use my anecdote to prove that it was as fragile as what I have witnessed. Keep in mind that universities change a lot and software that handles them properly would ideally be implemented so generically that it's easy for the software to handle when departments are created or destroyed, when the criteria for graduation change, or about a dozen less common* but more drastic administrative changes, but in practice, most software is not written that way because doing that takes a lot longer than writing software that works well with the system we run today and we can always patch it when things change later.

* The examples I posited are just things that happened at my university while I was a student. Sometimes, things get a lot more crazy and difficult to handle. I doubt Workday will do a lot better, but I wouldn't have bet on the previous mechanisms.

Reddit sues Australia to exempt itself from kids social media ban

Re: Warning: Bogus argument

Social media companies oppose the law because they don't want to be regulated. I oppose it, not because I care for any of the social media (I have no accounts on any of the services listed though I've occasionally considered registering for a Reddit account but then not bothered) because I don't like having to hand identity documents to data thieves and take video of myself to use the internet.

We can easily disagree if you think that your interest in keeping your children off sites you oppose is more important than the privacy of any adults using the service and I think that it's not worth giving up privacy and access because it makes being a parent easier. Part of the reason I don't find the view I think you're expressing very convincing is that there are many things parents can already do to keep their children off social media and very few parents, including everyone I've heard calling for this, seem to be trying anything. The few I know who do have mostly managed to keep their children from it, and one effective technique involves no technical measures whatsoever but just explaining why it is not a good idea. Perhaps that experience colors my view of laws like this because if they clearly don't care to do anything on their own, why should I give up things to mostly not solve the problem. Maybe you have taken some steps to protect your children, in which case I'm still not convinced because the chances are that whatever measures you've used are more effective than the weak things this law puts in place. The laws seem to have just enough effect to be able to claim that something was done while coming with significant privacy harms and the people demanding it don't appear to take much responsibility for themselves. This is not a convincing combination.

Re: Rant

Here's my bid. Find out what social media does which causes the biggest problems and pass laws against those that restrict the social media companies rather than the users. For example, if one risk is the collection of user data which we'd rather not do to children, then we might pass a privacy law, kind of like GDPR but one that actually gets enforced, which would protect everybody instead of collecting identification for every user which the less scrupulous companies, so probably all of them, can use for their advantage. If the problem is malicious users, then penalize companies for not acting on reports of malicious activity, and if you don't think their mechanisms for reporting that activity are sufficient, mandate that more be added. In general, clearly define the problem and try to solve it.

And while you're considering that bid, can I add another aspect to your criteria? In addition to having regulations that are more effective, one other thing we might want is to make the regulation less harmful. I can make many regulations extremely effective if we don't count any damage that regulation causes. Australia's social media ban and, to a greater extent, things like the UK's OSA which followed suit, have lots of negative side effects on privacy and access.

Fortunately for the rest of us, that's not how courts work. Even if they fail, they will not be fined for raising a completely normal constitutional challenge. And it's far less stupid than you think or phrased. The constitutional right has been upheld by Australia's courts many times, and never in the text or in their opinions did they decide that children don't have that right. They could modify their ruling to account for that, but that would be a substantial change. I agree with you that the second argument about anonymous accounts doesn't seem to have any effect on the law; sure, it might kind of work as an argument that this law is stupid, but courts can't strike down laws for being stupid, only for contradicting other things, so I expect that part to go nowhere.

Re: It's Time To Reign In All Of Them

That is not parental gatekeeping. It is governmental gatekeeping. If a parent thinks something is fine, can they let their child do it legally? No. If a parent thinks a different site is bad, can they add it to the denied list? No. It is not giving any parents more power. It is the government making blanket parenting decisions, whether you like those decisions or not.

Re: Um, Reddit, that is not how things work

Not if you think the law as written is illegal. If you do, you can make that case, and if the courts agree with you, you win and the law stops existing. Are you unaware that laws can sometimes be struck down? In this case, their first argument is an easily understood constitutional complaint, if not one that has an obvious answer. If you tried to pass a law that had a higher age limit, it would almost certainly be struck down as a violation of the Australian Constitution's guaranteed rights, so the question for the courts to decide is whether it is compatible to deny those rights to children. It might decide that it is because those children cannot vote, but it is far from the obvious result you claim. Countries where you cannot do that have a name: dictatorships. Fortunately, Australia has the rule of law and must properly handle challenges like this, whatever the answer ends up being.

Why do you think that's new? Why do you think that's bad? It is neither. If a country passes a law that is not compatible with other laws, that's one of the tools, and in practice pretty much the only tool, to do anything about it including finding out what the answer is. That's the entire point of legal and constitutional courts, as opposed to criminal and civil courts. While countries rarely have explicitly designated courts only for that purpose, most of the higher appellate courts spend most of their time on exactly these problems and have been doing so for centuries, pretty much as soon as the rule of law took over from royal decree.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Re: Third party booking sites?

Presumably the other part of your recommendation is ""don't be price-sensitive"". The point of most of the aggregators is to get lots of prices for similar things so you can decide whether flying an hour earlier of a different airline, possibly not one you've used a lot, is worth a lower fee. In my experience, the next step is to go to that airline again and see if you can get an even better fee from them directly, which you often can, but if you always go to your standby airline, you'll always get a flight but you may not be paying a low amount. Not only are there many people for whom cost is important, there are some for whom it's so critical that they can't travel without optimizing. The alternative is just to have all the airlines websites open and try to look up the options on every one of them simultaneously, navigating each site's method of showing you the flights that it would be most advantageous for them that you buy.

Ex-CISA officials, CISOs dispel 'hacklore,' spread cybersecurity truths

Re: Is this really the priority?

Mostly, the battery consumption with those turned on is negligible. Bluetooth uses more active scanning, so it would technically decrease your battery life but usually it's been optimized so much by companies that specialize in Bluetooth chips that the decrease is not noticeable. That is different when a device is connected and using the connection which definitely does drain battery somewhat faster, especially when doing things like audio which require constant high-bandwidth transmission, but if it's just sitting there looking for a device announcing itself, it's very low. NFC is mostly passive until activated by proximity, so that would be even harder to notice. If you need to eek out a couple more minutes from a charge, then turning them off might get you that, but if you expect hours of difference, you won't get it.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

I still can't blame the video platform. Whichever person and reason there is for turning it on can take the blame or decide if they have a sufficient need for it that the network needs to be upgraded.

Crypto-crasher Do Kwon jailed for 15 years over $40bn UST bust

Since he's a South Korean citizen, yes, since he will be deported there. They could also work with the US to charge him earlier or even have him finish his US sentence there, though since prison is expensive, they might not bother.

AI superintelligence is a Silicon Valley fantasy, Ai2 researcher says

Re: Some people still think the Earth is flat

As I understand their obsession with the south pole, one explanation for why there's not an edge to fall off if the world is flat is that Antarctica is a big ice wall that keeps the oceans from flowing off the edge and onto the floor (or whatever is below the flat which they never seem to have thought about).

I don't know who came up with that theory, and if you try to work anything out geographically, it breaks down. It would put the north pole at the center of the planet, and I have yet to hear an explanation for why the center is cold, halfway from the center to the edge is warm, and the edge is also cold. Maybe there's a ring-shaped heater suspended over it somehow. The reason for the north pole being at the center and the south pole being the edge is because they argue that planes never fly over the south pole which proves that airlines are covering up the flatness. I've also never heard a theory for why anyone is advantaged by covering this up. Those times I've talked to flat earth people, both of them, I've always secretly suspected that nobody, or at least nobody I've met, actually believes it and they just find it fun to play-act that they do.

I don't know about that. As soon as they started trying, RAM makers could increase production to their capacity and undercut them. Those companies have already been paid or entered into contracts, so they don't have an incentive not to. I'm not sure the market is complex enough for OpenAI to successfully set up a middleman position in it.

Re: See Icon

I don't think they are entirely "humanities focused". Their objections include lots of problems when using them in scientific or engineering areas, and in fact most of the problems they name are worse in those areas. If you're asking for some poetry, a little variation from the same prompt is not going to hurt and may help a little. If you're trying to use this tool to solve a problem where answers are right or wrong, variation makes it much worse.

I'm hoping that you successfully use this as a tool. Maybe you do. Unfortunately, I know many people who say they can and they definitely do, a tool that solves their problem very quickly if the problem is that they have tasks to do and solving the problem consists of being able to lie that those tasks are now complete. Unfortunately, most people I know who like to use AI have quality problems and some of them make those my problem by failing to care enough about the usefulness of what they produce. You can get lots of summaries that occasionally include completely wrong information. You can write lots of software that occasionally fails to even compile. Perhaps it is sometimes faster to correct the inaccuracies than to generate the whole thing from scratch, but I unfortunately have to deal more often with people who decide that it's always faster not to correct the inaccuracies at all.

Disney turns to dark side, licenses IP to OpenAI for videos, images

Re: The Mouse that roared

They probably got quite a lot out of OpenAI as well, though the terms other than the investment, and most of the important ones about that part too, are not disclosed in things I have found. There's a benefit for OpenAI, and not just the one that when Disney goes after all their competition, they'll be insulated. Disney has lots of money and lots of lawyers experienced at punishing people with copyright, so AI companies don't want Disney for an enemy, especially if they teamed up with someone else.

Meanwhile, most of the Disney-related output is probably not something Disney actually cares too much about. There's plenty of art depicting Disney characters, and while they are more vicious than some others, they mostly ignore it because they don't have much of a choice and aren't suffering as a result. I think Disney probably came out ahead from this negotiation and that OpenAI probably isn't very disappointed either.

Vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software

Re: I read a Google "vibe coding" gush-agrada thing last night...

Both parts of that are words for substantial amounts of praise. Gush is a common term in English, whereas agrada sounds like it was either taken from one of a few romance languages where it's a word meaning the same thing or as part of one of a few English words that come from the same Latin root such as gratify, congratulate, or ingratiate. So I think you could translate that as "I read an intensely self-congratulatory thing from Google". I'm quite certain that's the intent from the gush part, so if they meant something else by the "agrada", they can correct this.

Re: Redundant Department of Redundancy

If we're going to be pedantic, and you started it, then those integrateds don't mean the same thing. The original integrated meant that the development tools were all together, integrated with one another. The second one means that those tools, still integrated with each other, are now integrated with a code guesser too.

That's neither small nor obvious. The old version involved copying and pasting code into and out of models, and it was a lot worse if you wanted to play roulette with your code generation. How to keep all of that code in the context window was tricky. Now the software is theoretically able to manage it for you. I doubt it does it well, but that's something that was quite a bit harder with standalone models. Other coding models managed it with IDE plugins which had similar goals, although depending on how much work Antigravity did, it could easily exceed those in feature set, and if I had to guess based on the amount of destruction it can cause, I think that it is likely they have managed a larger integration than their competition.

Re: It's going to be interesting

The more people there are who understand this, the more it happens, and yet even if managers and PMs don't understand it, there is a certain amount of coverage that programmers will do all on their own. I know that, if I don't make this work with certain error cases, they're going to happen and I'm going to have to fix it and I'm going to be yelled at for why it broke in the first place, so I might as well make it work now. If the PM who didn't understand this complains about me doing that, it's probably easier for me to explain, possibly dishonestly*, that this is necessary to keep it from blowing up than to try to do that after they have an error they are blaming on me.

* I fortunately have mostly had managers who understood what I was talking about so I've rarely had to. I will admit that I have, at least once, lied to people that something I was fixing was done to prevent serious consequences even though, in practice, we might have avoided the edge case altogether and it wouldn't have been terrible if we hit it, just because I didn't want to live in a world where the code was guaranteed to fail if we did. In that situation, we did end up hitting that edge case (from logged data), so I count it as having saved at least a day and some user complaints, but that was not guaranteed.

Re: I read a Google "vibe coding" gush-agrada thing last night...

Some definitions and translations you may find useful:

Contoso example: A fake company frequently used by Microsoft to demonstrate how a service might be set up using a specific Microsoft product. "Example" because it wasn't a full implementation, but a usage demonstration of a specific component. Microsoft assumed people reading the examples would decide which components to use, so they were showing how to use each one, not telling you which ones you needed for any given task. Therefore:

"looked like it had crawled out of a Contoso example": Had the form of a solution without the content and was missing important elements that needed to be added.

"No back end": The code that was produced only shows the interface. You need the back end code to do any tasks. Given their assessment of the quality of the front end (part you see), they weren't very confident that it would have managed the rest.

Does that help?

I don't have a position on it either way, but those two statements come from the same source. Someone who doubts the first might also doubt the second, with the option that the author is exaggerating or inventing his history, that he has forgotten important parts of that history, or that, while having done exactly what he claimed in the past, he still doesn't have enough understanding or testing of his new tool to be so confident in its professionalism. Among other things, his claimed history with VRML could mean that the software is professional in its ability to do the tasks he's testing but doesn't necessarily prove that the code is professional, an important aspect if it is to be later maintained. Any of these things would have to be supposition without external knowledge of the author's skills and experience which I certainly do not have, but so would any assumptions that those statements are both true.

Re: Job losses

I think the Iraq War example is a lot closer to the mark than you claim and has similar restrictions and answers as the AI example, starting with a simple problem with your statement: "Technically, it would have been possible to do it in a week with WWII technology if it was politically acceptable to have high civilian casualties."

Fine, everything's on the table. You can carpet bomb, small nukes, kill anyone you want. What can you actually do within a week? If the goal was simple, find where Saddam Hussein is and kill him, maybe you could. Even then, all sorts of things could get in the way of that quick a timeline. That's a short timeline for finding a hiding place if he was fortunate enough to go to one. That's analogous to code that you only need to work once and can go wrong in many ways, and we do have plenty like that. If I can write something quick and dirty which will get the results I want rapidly, even if I cause several errors using the run first and check whether I followed the API requirements later, I can do that too.

If your goal is a little bigger, obtaining the surrender of Iraq's armed forces, now it's trickier. Oh, it might look easier because somebody's going to surrender when you're threatening to nuke Baghdad, but you don't just need them, you need everything. That's analogous to something quick but that you're going to run multiple times. Little bugs are no longer acceptable, but at least there shouldn't be so many you need to iron out because the task itself is small.

But neither of those was the complete goal, hence why the actual war was long. Debating the goal of the attackers is not relevant here, but no matter what you think it was, whether that's making Iraq a democratic country, eliminating terrorist groups resident there, preventing more genocide, weakening other countries' diplomatic or military positions without going to war with them as well, those are not simple goals and no level of weaponry was going to make that happen because the trouble was not easily locatable and bombable. Getting that after World War II took a lot of time, money, and some threatening countries that the allies were protecting the vanquished from, and repeating that is not easy either to achieve or to convince politicians and citizens to pay for. And that's what people who write software mostly need as well. They need software which continues to work long-term, that can be fixed or improved without rewriting big chunks, reasonable confidence that those little changes won't introduce massive new bugs, testing to confirm that, and correct documentation and understanding from those maintaining it. These are not simple requirements and current LLMs do not do them at all. Nor is it likely that just throwing more money at it will make that happen any more than more bombs in 2003 would have prevented ISIS from forming. There are some problems that can be solved by throwing more money at them, but diplomacy and inventing unproven technology tend not to be among them.

Really Simple Licensing spec lets web publishers demand their due from AI scrapers

Re: Enforcement?

They weren't saying that the mechanism doesn't allow setting a price, but the generic anti-copyright "everything digital should be free at all times" crap. At least in the narrow case of their comments, they're correct; it is digital and it lacks any worth, monetary or otherwise.

UK finally vows to look at 35-year-old Computer Misuse Act

Of course it needs changing. The problem in the text is the word "unauthorized". What does that mean? People who don't like that you've pointed out they've got a gaping hole often interpret that as "we did not like that you told us this, therefore you were unauthorized to do so". It's not defined, so what authority can authorize you to do what thing is entirely unclear. Do you need prior written permission to view a public site? How about to take apart hardware you legally purchased and own? Or take things I do at my job. I work in security and have plenty of authorization to poke lots of places looking for problems, including things we bought or licensed from others with access to our data. Do I also need authorization from those others to do that, with my employers' being insufficient?

In practice, this has no definition other than what a complainant and law enforcement are willing to accept. Therefore, if I find a problem, report it, and get threatened that if I say anything to anyone about this ever again, they'll have me arrested as an evil criminal hacker, I don't have any certainty that I won't find myself in police interviews and there's at least some chance I might find myself convicted. Probably not, which is why I still report things, but I know people who have gotten plenty of legal threats. The fact that I and most of those can point to professional work in security, will push back against threats, and are not asking for money act in our defense. We should not need any of those things to be able to report problems without fear, and there are people who don't have those and still have valid reports.

The analogy to doors is almost always flawed and makes this tricky, but I will try anyway. The difference is that these are doors in a very public space where the general expectation is that they will be unlocked and open unless the owners wish otherwise. Websites are intended to be accessed by all sorts of people from almost anywhere, and thus they should be treated differently than private property.

Consider a simple example: I'm navigating a website to download a driver I need. I click the link that says it's for the driver. I get a 404. So far, I'm accessing public resources available to anyone through paths created by the website owners. But now, since I didn't get the file the link was supposed to go to, I try removing the last part of the URL to go up a level. I'd argue this is still completely normal, no more invasive than going around the back of a shelf to see if they just misplaced it. If they don't want me to do that, blocking that is incredibly easy.

This brings me to a directory of files, and I choose the one that looks like it's the file I wanted. But when I open it, I discover that this is sensitive internal information they really don't think should be public. Have I broken the rules here, just because I didn't only follow their own links? Is it different if I followed someone else's link to the same page? In both cases, this is available to anyone who knows a predictable URL and would have been very easy to block.

This is not a theoretical example. This is an example I went through, reported to the owner of a website, and received an irritated response to. While they didn't go to the effort of threatening me with legal consequences, that does happen. I did not apply to the corporate headquarters for a written permission to navigate their website, nor in my opinion should I need to in order to avoid prosecution because they were unhappy that they put things they didn't want people to see there.

The information was sent to their personal email account. That's a lot more akin to having a key mailed specifically to you, and you would have a few reasons to try to figure out what it was doing there. For example, did you have an account you created years ago and forgot about, the most plausible reason that they would think there was an account using your address? Was someone specifically impersonating you, in which case you have a personal security reason to identify it and close it? In both cases, you would have every legal right to do exactly that because mail that is directed to you at an address you legally control is yours.