Posts by doublelayer

Vodafone aims to offer satellite-to-phone connectivity starting later this year

They could write that question in many ways to try to optimize the number of people saying they are willing to pay for it. I'm willing to pay for it. If you increase my bill by 0.1% and give me unlimited access worldwide, I'll pay for it preemptively. Those could probably be pushed a bit and I'd still be willing. However, I expect that it will actually take the form of a substantial increase in the bill just for the right to use the satellites at all, then extra fees for each thing the satellites are used for. If it ends up being as restricted as I predict, then I won't be buying any of it.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

Re: an alleged Nazi salute

It is clear that he made the gesture, but that isn't enough for newspapers to call it a "Nazi salute". There are two reasons for that. The phrase states, not just an action, but an intention. A paper could easily justify calling it a "Nazi-style salute", meaning only that it resembles one, but if they call it a "Nazi salute", then they are stating that he agrees with Nazis. A lot of newspapers have standards which basically forbid making such statements. They can say it looked like one. They can say that Nazis interpreted it as one. They can say that a lot of people thought it was one. They can say that Musk's actions suggest it was one. But while he is saying that it wasn't one, they're likely to stick an "alleged" in there to indicate that the intent was not proven, because there remains some chance that he had something else in mind, even if that chance is unlikely.

This is partially due to journalistic standards, but it is also because, if they suggest an intent, they can be sued for defamation. Not necessarily successfully, but it happens and the journalists don't always win. Musk is frequently litigious, and even though many of his cases fall somewhere in the range from dubious to obviously going to lose, it is a prospect that some papers don't take lightly. That is not the only reason why they may choose not to say it, but it is certainly one of them.

Re: Here's the rub

No, I am not trying to tell you that Musk has not gotten government money. Most of his businesses rely on firehoses of government money that never turn off, and when he doesn't get it, he gets angry. I'm trying to tell you that, just because he has gotten government money, it doesn't mean individual citizens can do anything about it, especially if we're also referring to things he is doing as part of a business that aren't directly related to government money. His actions as a government employee are different from his actions running Tesla. Not that individual citizens have much chance of doing something about either of them, but the reasons why they won't have much effect are different for the two things. This article is about Tesla.

I encourage you to provide instructions on how we bankrupt someone we don't like. I have never bought a Tesla or Spacex product before. I am unlikely ever to do so. They don't seem too worried about this. If I dislike Musk, tell me, what other action can I take? I think you are overestimating what anyone, or even any largish group, can do about this, which is a problem because you're clearly angry at people for not doing something they can't.

Re: Here's the rub

Who are you referring to? Politicians theoretically work for the public, and they get people shouting instructions at them all the time. They ignore those people. If you have a way of changing that, I'd like the details on that.

If you're talking about Tesla, though, then they don't work for the public. They work for their shareholders, the people who saw Musk make the same statements he always made and cheerfully bought more stock. The people who approved paying Musk billions. Enough of them evidently don't mind whatever Musk is doing. The rest of the public can do little to change this. They could refuse to buy anything from Tesla, but that only goes so far.

Re: an alleged Nazi salute

As long as he says that it wasn't, you're not going to find many news organizations saying that it was. After all, proving that it wasn't him screwing something up will be difficult because he screws a lot of things up. He got an idiom wrong when the idiom consists of two words. Most reputable ones will have their one phrasing for what it was, but they won't be as definite as you had in mind.

Security pros more confident about fending off ransomware, despite being battered by attacks

Then you may commission your own study asking people if they feel more, less, or equally confident than they did at a previous time of your choosing and then asking them why. Of course, if you do the study with a preexisting assumption, it may have some flaws. For example, you seem to have assumed that an increased confidence is "misplaced and unearned". Leaving aside questions like can you really earn confidence anyway, it makes an assumption that they could not have valid reasons for increased confidence. My example posits a few reasons that could be valid or invalid depending on which preventative actions they took, and that is far from the only possibility.

The people surveyed were more confident. The business that sells security software wants to make sure that people know that it's still a good idea to buy their software. Maybe you could attribute part of this to people being confident in the software they bought from these guys, or at least these guys would like you to think that. Still, the company's statements and those of the people unaffiliated with them don't have to agree.

I don't think it's that surprising. Now that ransomware has existed for longer, more people have had an opportunity to think through what they would need to deal with it, to scare their directors into letting them do it, and to build some of the things they had in mind. Those don't prevent it altogether, but it does mean that they feel more confident about their ability to respond than they did when they had none of that.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

I disagree. You can go to museums and see a small collection of machines. Those will either be the most important ones, thus the ones that were mass-produced and were easily found when they were building the collection, or a few notable ones they went to some expense to obtain. It won't show you lots of machines that were custom-built for one factory and eventually scrapped. Those machines were destroyed before anyone put them in a museum, and the engineer's diagrams were probably stored in paper archives until someone burned them to make more space.

A hundred years from now, your proprietary software may well have been permanently deleted, but a lot of software from the age will still be around. This is especially true for all the open source software that was foundational. If you want the Apache HTTP server, a version in 1996 that was neither the first nor anything people use today, you can still have it. The same is true for all sorts of other tools. Like the museum, things that weren't used in lots of places and weren't preserved by their creators will have disappeared. Unlike the museum, you could go through the archives and get volumes of information, not just the code, but discussions, bug reports, the lot, for a lot of very important things.

Re: Paper

And the worst things about paper when compared to digital storage are that it is really easy to destroy, it is extremely difficult to search, and it is much more costly to copy. If you want something archived, the most important thing is having copies and storing them in preservable ways. In the time it takes me to photocopy one page, I can make a copy of a whole book in digital form and send it to servers on multiple continents.

Re: There Is Signal......And Then There Is Noise!

"A Microsoft Word document from 1990 cannot be rendered accurately today!"

You can:

1. Run a virtual machine of Windows 3.1 with a version of Office from the time, both of which are easily obtained and run for free on commodity hardware today.

2. Run a virtual machine of Windows 98 with a later version of Office which still has backward compatibility with that version and the ability to save that version as something later which can be opened by modern software.

3. Extract the information from the document using open source software today, though you may have to do slightly more to restore something if you used an unusual function.

Let me guess, you meant that modern software doesn't open that format natively, and that was your complaint? I disagree that there is any problem with that, but it is also not what you said.

Trump tells Musk to 'go get' Starliner astronauts

Re: utter bs

If we were having a debate about whether to spend the money on an extra retrieval, your comment would be relevant.

Since there is no extra retrieval, it isn't.

If you think this is about an extra retrieval, I suggest you read it again. If you still think that, feel free to cite where this is indicated, since the latest delay is on Spacex's part.

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

Re: Everything is lies now

If you assume that Chinese products will be superior (unproven) and given at the same or higher rate (unproven) and come with conditions of equal or lower concern (probably not). Not to mention that, in an environment where both countries are willing to give aid, it allows people to choose between them if not accepting assistance from both. Of course there are downsides, but it isn't as simple as you describe.

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

I agree. The number of times where something bad justifies firing someone is much lower than the number of times someone suggests it. My problem was that, even if we decided that something egregious enough had happened, they named someone who, for all we know, did nothing wrong. At least physical security has an improvement to make; although they caught the person, they were probably tasked with not letting him in in the first place and did not succeed at doing that. However, it would still take something extreme for me to conclude that their failure to do so required firing somebody.

Re: lax procedures

Except by their comment, it was a 4-digit code. They were told that it had five digits, and their five digit string worked, but only because the repeated digit wasn't even read in. So this tells us that it was only four digits and repeating a digit wasn't allowed.

With ten digits, the number of combinations using four digits and no repetition would be 10*9*8*7 = 5040, or 2:48:00 at two seconds per combination. A five-digit no repeated digit code would be six times as many. Still not good, but a much less intense version of not good. If the repeated entry had put obvious marks on the keypad though, that would make only 24 combinations which would be much easier to crack.

The article makes it clear that this person used physical access. Fire the physical security director if you like, although you might want to figure out how they got access to the things they did. From the lack of detail, we don't know that this person had any system access at all. If they walked in and then smashed some important computers with a rock, that would work with the information the article gives us.

Robots in schools, care homes next? This UK biz hopes to make that happen

Re: Syncretic hermeticism of the humanoid templar occultics confession

"Every now and then, I like to think of humanoid (or generally bio-inspired) robotics as a quest to better understand how we, and nature, works, much more so than something utilitarian with an industrial purpose."

Wouldn't we get better information about how we and nature work by studying those directly? Hoping that our designs for robots will tell us those things seems much less reliable. Sure, it may happen that something we built ends up doing what something in nature did to solve a problem, and seeing the robot do it will explain something that was always puzzling people who didn't understand why some bird was also doing it. I also anticipate that we will see a robot doing something and assume that nature works that way when it never did. Robots will react differently to humans because they have different resources and constraints. Science fiction often included a lot of robots which were just very literal humans, but there is a lot about the human which we don't need or want to copy when we make it mechanical.

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

Re: A certain kind of business...

Another type is companies that should have created a better UI, didn't, and hope that the LLM will do it for them. For example, some sites that are mostly used as price comparison sites but do their best to hide it. They know that the users are coming to see a list of prices and, where the products differ, the relevant details, but they won't make as much money giving them that as giving them a list of suggestions ordered by how much money the site operators can get for the user choosing them. Those sites can still be used to get the data the user wants, but the UI makes it trickier. And although my example posits such a site where the choice to do it badly was deliberate, that's not all of them either. Some of them are trying to provide the best UI, but the things they're comparing are complex enough that you can't just give someone a list of choices by price; they have to do some comparison themselves with the data you've given them. A good UI would give them filters that they can use to narrow down their choices, but that would take manual effort to design those filters. Theoretically, a functioning LLM would do this for them. In practice, it will mostly break or skip important things, but that's for users to notice rather than the site's maintainers.

The state of Right to Repair: Progress made, but key barriers remain

Re: Right to repair is great BUT

What do you think right to repair means? Do you think it means that every spare part must be offered at no more than factory cost? It doesn't. In many cases, they're not even required to make spare parts available themselves. They can leave that to secondhand devices, original parts manufacturers, or even third-party manufacturers copying them when patents allow. Proposals differ, so some do require the companies to make the parts available, but even those are limited to parts those manufacturers already keep around for their own use.

None of this will eliminate the problem of a device that could be fixed but the effort required makes it too difficult to do economically. It was also not intended to. What it was intended to eliminate, and it would, is the situation where the device would be relatively easy to repair economically but the manufacturer has intentionally prevented you from being able to do it by forbidding the sale of a component that they've designed to be incompatible by making tiny changes from an existing standard part, using software to block the installation of a new part, or trying to create terms for anyone permitted to repair the device.

Re: Parts pairing

I think you'll find they have those. Laws against theft have been there from the beginning; theft is one of those basic crimes that have been there since law version 1.0. If you're expecting a law to exist which makes it impossible to steal, then you need the Justice Field from Red Dwarf, and we'll need better tech for that. Of course, Apple could have voluntary parts pairing which could be used for this goal without making secondhand parts unusable, but that would mean fewer people buying new devices, so they've chosen not to.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

Re: If the solution makes no sense then you have not identified who has the problem

My laptop has 32 GB of RAM. Try to find a tablet that can do that.

I can have multiple drives installed in something with a 13-inch screen. Find a tablet that can do that.

"It's great for multitasking - every window can have its own screen. Try doing that with a laptop.": Yes, my laptop actually does have ports through which I can connect it to multiple screens. It's got a GPU that can drive those screens.

Are you recognizing why laptops and tablets are very different, with the laptops often being better?

Incidentally, 128 GB of RAM or multiple high-end GPUs aren't impossible to put into a laptop. They're just expensive, but your desktop probably wasn't too cheap either. The laptops that can do that are intentionally modular. They are not what I use because I don't need that much graphics on the go. What I do need there is the ability to connect to many types of peripherals, run programs intended to run on desktop operating systems, and run virtual machines, all with the ability to pick it up and move to a different place. A laptop does it. A tablet doesn't.

This doesn't make desktops or tablets bad. A tablet might not do what I need, but there are plenty of cases where a big phone with all the software limitations of that phone is just fine for a user. Just as a tablet is the right device for something you do, a laptop is the right device for things I do and I'm far from unique in that.

Re: If the solution makes no sense then you have not identified who has the problem

Except that laptops can run the more capable software that also runs on desktops, and they can be used with the same peripherals as desktops can. Tablets are usually encumbered with mobile operating systems and don't transition well or at all to larger peripherals. A tablet connected to a Bluetooth keyboard is not as useful as a laptop, but it is similarly sized and comes with a bonus that you have multiple batteries, either of which can cause difficulty if it runs flat.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

"Note this means there is no question of compensation for time spent in jail as there might be for someone whose conviction was quashed/reversed years after imprisonment (I'm not sure this is a thing in the US)"

It can be, especially if there was misconduct in law enforcement, prosecutorial, or judicial matters. It wouldn't apply to a pardoned or commuted person though.

Trump nukes 60 years of anti-discrimination rules for federal contractors

Except many of your examples didn't show that at all. When the authortarian leadership is evil, then they're not ruling legitimately and people aren't obeying happily. Several of your examples show people disobeying violently, which is quite a difference, even if at the end the disobedient peasants are killed and the leaders keep leading. There is a major difference between a monarch being universally respected and a monarch acting like dictators do but being successful about it.

And now you're not even talking about science fiction, but fantasy. And there I agree with you, though not on the nationalist stereotype. One of the problems I have that makes me dislike some fantasy is the way unrealistic monarchies exist and the plots that only make sense if authoritarian politics worked in a way it normally doesn't. Not that your example is of that, since as I understand them without having read them, the Game of Thrones monarchs were rather nasty people, not universally revered ones. But Americans didn't invent that, nor do British writers avoid it.

You should consider how many of those, not all but quite a few, were either specifically pointing out that these were bad things or were set in worlds that were intentionally flawed. Most of those were not intended to be utopian. True, the hierarchy in Brave New World didn't topple at the end, dismantled for egalitarianism, but that ending wasn't supposed to be a happy one. Star Wars gives you a lot of different stories, most of which I don't know, but the first one was being ruled by an emperor who was kind of an evil guy, what with all the mass murdering, and the heroes intended to remove him, not to make themselves emperor instead, but to put a republic in place. Whether they actually did that is something I don't know because it got a bit boring after a while, but even if they didn't, I don't think that would have been written as a positive.

I think you're making a mistake by assuming that science fiction is intended to be or should be utopian. Just because a futuristic utopia might have similar technology or aesthetic senses as some of it doesn't make that. A lot of it is explicitly dystopian, either totally where everything is terrible or intentionally making a world where technology made things worse. Many more are aiming for a flawed world like ours, where the advances in science didn't miraculously make humans nice and we still have the same kind of challenges we've always had. Hierarchies exist today, and I don't see a reason to assume that they will inevitably decline. Maybe that's a message to us, saying that we have to do the work ourselves to make societal changes we want.

Re: He's just shotgunning

"Actually, it's not but through precedence it has become "everybody knows" rather than enshrined in law."

Yes, the sentence "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." is so ambiguous. Let's defer to something else to see what it means. Surely it wasn't meant to apply after the 1860s. I'm sure they just forgot to write the "unless it is not a former slave, in which case you can decide on a whim whether they are".

Maybe it's a bad idea, in which case they can remove it. All they have to do is pass another constitutional amendment reading "That being born here makes you a citizen thing, not anymore." which you can campaign for if you desire.

Clock ticking for TikTok as US Supreme Court upholds ban

Re: Impossible to ban?

It generally takes more than a couple hours of shutdown for someone to start making those. For one thing, the person who makes the video has to test that their method works, at least often enough that people buy the thing they said to, and that won't be an option until the service is offline. You can't know how to get around an ISP block until there is an ISP block and you can see how it's done. I remain convinced that, if it had shut down for longer, someone would want to access it and they would have described their way for doing it. It probably wouldn't appeal to users in the long term because the service would be degraded to some degree and all the people using it to make money would have stopped, but someone would have done it in the short term.

Re: Impossible to ban?

You haven't been near many of them, have you? The amount of effort they put into things they care about is a lot higher than the amount they put into things they should care about but don't. That describes a lot of adults too. Keep in mind that, within a couple days of a shutdown, there will be several Youtube videos giving step-by-step instructions for using a VPN to access TikTok, whichever one sponsored that video, and that makes the effort very small as there's no research or testing required.

Re: Inquiring minds want to know

The money problem is definitely real, and it's the main reason why most of it will shut down in the US. The servers are not a problem. Canada has lots of places where you can rent or place servers. Canada also uses TikTok, and it has not banned it. If, for some reason, TikTok was willing to continue operating in the US market without getting advertisers to pay them, they would do it from Canadian and possibly Mexican servers and responsiveness would not be the problem. I don't think they're going to try because:

1. They would have no reason to do it. They want to make money, and they wouldn't be.

2. They probably still think that Trump's going to reverse this shortly, and if they're right, effort spent moving resources would be wasted.

3. If that doesn't happen, they probably think they stand a better chance at having it reversed by actually shutting down and having the most determined users complain loudly than by providing them a less functional version and letting those users gradually become bored with the service.

OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler can be tricked into DDoSing sites, answering your queries

Re: All hail to the AI. May the AI kill us all.

Tell me, how does a load balancer make one domain name point to multiple websites? As I'm sure you know, what it does is allow that website to be hosted on multiple servers. It does not change the fact that both of those addresses are going to be handled by the same cluster, at least at first. A flood of requests can swamp a load balancer just as much as they can swamp a single server. If you have a load balancer, chances are that you have more resources so you need a bigger flood to disrupt you. Otherwise, there is no difference and no inaccuracy in the statement.

Raspberry Pi hands out prizes to all in the RP2350 Hacking Challenge

Re: Transparency

Neither description of the results is entirely correct. The attacks were successful, and they did reveal things that are useful to an attacker. If, for example, someone built a system out of these but stored an encryption key in them so the communication couldn't be spoofed, these attacks would be sufficient to retrieve the key. That makes "they weren't able to do so in a way that exposed anything useful" wrong. Depending on what you were doing, though, that doesn't make all the security features ineffective. Injecting new code is not easy compared to retrieving that data, meaning that not every desired exploit is equally feasible with these methods.

Nor is this something unique to this chip. While there are some chips that are produced with the intent that it be even more difficult to break into them, a lot of embedded parts with similar security methods wouldn't stand up to people with lasers either. They're just not offering any money to the people who can use them. There is a limited number of devices which need to remain impenetrable when you have access to the hardware, expensive tools, and the willingness to destroy it. Many of the devices that would benefit from that level of security don't get it anyway. Therefore, although it is fair to call this a security failure on Raspberry Pi's fault, it is not a failure that should cause much concern for most users, including industrial users, especially as they're going to change the design to make the methods stop working*.

* The primary method that is of concern is the one that messes with the power supply. Not that this would be particularly easy to abuse either, but it is simpler than lasers or ion beams and it's the one they have the most likelihood of fixing in the design.

Parallels brings back the magic that was waiting seven minutes for Windows to boot

You can still run Windows, just ARM Windows. From reviews I've seen of people doing that, AMD64 applications run better under virtualized ARM Windows than trying to virtualize the AMD64 Windows and run it natively.

But what the platform is good for is running Mac OS, which is what most people buying Macs want to run. It is very snappy, the battery life is impressive, and a lot of the applications available have native builds. I liked it when Macs could run any operating system of my choice, but if I didn't want to run Mac OS at least some of the time, I still wouldn't have bought one back then.

Re: Windows boot time is about two to seven minutes, based on your hardware,

Interesting. I wonder which subset of people I've annoyed here. It could be people who dislike my calling Apple's hardware easily broken (it is) or people who don't like that my laptop can boot Windows 11 in 15 seconds (okay, I was lying, it took 17 seconds from pushing the power button to login screen in my test).

Re: Windows boot time is about two to seven minutes, based on your hardware,

All the hardware they're talking about is Apple M* hardware, so no, not like that. That hardware is expensive and easily broken, but the compensation and excuse for that is that it's got remarkably fast RAM and storage, by far the biggest bottlenecks in boot times, and even the M1 processor was quite powerful for a laptop chip. Since Windows 11 can boot in about 10-15 seconds on my computer with completely standard DDR4 and a cheap SSD, it means that emulation cost is the limiting factor here, as they admit, and it means that it is adding a lot of overhead.

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: At least Ronnie backed up the NAS.

"In Ronnie's case one has to wonder why anyone, professor or not, is running computational workloads on a file server."

My guess is that it was intended as a general-purpose server which was being used by this organization as a file server because they didn't have one or the ability to administer one. The professor probably didn't have access to anything more powerful, including their office computer, so they used the best option available. Or perhaps the professor used something with larger disks because their workload generated more data than they could fit on their personal computer.

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

I sympathize with the IT department. It's hard to determine where your responsibilities lie when it's a separate organization that is sharing some resources. Making sure they have network connections sounds like IT's job. Fixing their computers sounds like the organization's job. From the incident described, the problem was not the resources provided by the university going wrong. Of course, IT's insistence on preapproving the hardware they connected suggests that these lines weren't as clear as they should have been, because in my suggested arrangement, university IT would have provided them with a network where the organization could connect whatever they bought. Still, I've been in too many situations where I was expected to support computers that I had nothing to do with to blame all of this on the university's IT department when the users were not university staff.

Given that the IT department in question were either unable or unwilling to put in the most basic of controls that would tell them when unusual devices were connected to their network or block those devices from working until they got approved, I'm guessing that they never found out. I'm surprised they decided to forbid it in the first place rather than taking a "you try it and any problems are not our problem" policy.

UK businesses eye AI as the cheaper, non-whining alternative to actual staff

Re: @wolfetone

I think there are two points where we see this differently.

"If the gov minimum wage did not exceed the market minimum then it wouldnt exist."

Minimum wages were created for a reason, but they don't necessarily adjust what people are willing to do. There are places that have not increased their minimum wage where it effectively doesn't matter because nobody gets paid near that anyway. However, in a world where there are income-limited support programs, a minimum wage is partially there to avoid situations where the needs people are paying for come from that support program rather than the work they are doing. Doing without one in an anarcho-capitalist world where there is no support for anyone might work with the rest of the philosophy, but otherwise, it creates conflicts with any program with an income or resources test attached unless you have something else that replaces it. For instance, although you're right that countries like Norway don't have a single minimum wage, they do have some sector-specific minimum wages, they have intense support for unions which set wage agreements (which comes with its own problems), and abuses can be challenged in court. I don't want to live in an anarcho-capitalist world, nor do most people, but even if you support such a philosophy, you can't build it in little pieces and trying will just break existing systems without moving closer.

I've seen complaints from employers who cannot find people willing to work for what they want to pay. Some of them try to blame minimum wage laws; if they weren't restricted, then surely they'd find workers who would agree to be paid less. A lot of them can't do that because they are offering above the minimum wage and they still can't find people. I've seen similar complaints about things other than workers, such as why they can't find a high-end laptop for £100. They have their people to blame for that too, Linux, for no longer fitting on a floppy, Microsoft, for charging £800 per laptop for the Windows license, Taiwan, because most laptop manufacturers are based there so surely they must work together. In both cases, their complaints about what they think they ought to find are wrong. I've seen calls for the minimum to be ridiculously high, suggested by people who appear to assume that businesses have unlimited funds and could already pay that much, and that will not work if it is implemented. Proving that it is takes more than alleging that it must be by definition of the thing existing.

Re: @wolfetone

Part, but only part, of codejunky's comment is correct. It's true that there are jobs where, if the price of workers increases too much, the amount you have to pay to hire someone is less than the amount the business can make from their labor, and that means the employees concerned will lose their jobs and the businesses will shut down, either that element of their business, or just in general. If the minimum wage is increased, some of that will happen.

Where codejunky is wrong is thinking that this is something we can control or choose not to do, at least in our current environment. Whether or not there is an explicit minimum wage, employees cost because they have costs they have to pay, and those costs are increasing. Just as it can be too expensive to hire someone at a wage, it can be too expensive to live for a worker to accept a low enough wage. The chaos at the bottom of the wage scale is papered over by minimum wage and government assistance programs, which makes this more confusing, but whether those are present or not, the same market forces apply there. If you eliminated a minimum wage number, an unofficial one would be created based on available assistance programs and their eligibility requirements.

We can't help people in an unlimited way by increasing minimum wages drastically. However, when employees are more expensive to hire, it often just means that the business concerned needs to do something different. If your business model needs to hire people at below what those people need to live, then your business model will fail just as much as my business model which requires me to have a reliable and cheap supply of pure gold. I need to find a cheaper material to do it, and you need to find a way of having fewer workers which you can pay sufficiently to get them, or we need to have a lot more money, or we have to find a different business. In many cases, the government-set wage is not outlandish to the extent that it's making that happen when it otherwise would not.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Just a thought

There are some people in India who have a lot more skills. Just because a lot of people thought they could outsource to any company with some people who had computer skills, defined as they've seen a computer before, doesn't mean that you can't find knowledgeable people there and hire them. All the first wave proved is that there are some people who want to save money so much that they don't bother testing whether the people they hired on the cheap had the skills they needed.

However, even if we assume that everyone in India with skills moved, or at least that it's too hard to find those who remain, you have the option of "outsourcing" to someone who lives in the same country. If your employer is based in London, and they used to make you come to the office in London to do your work but now don't need you to, then the person in Belfast who doesn't want to leave Belfast wasn't an option before but now is. They are also fluent English speakers. They'll work in the same time zone that you would, meaning no changes necessary to how this will be managed. They had similar educational opportunities that you did and may have done the same things. As with any employee change, there will be inertia as they are added and your experience of processes will take some time to reproduce, but you managed to learn that and so can the Belfast person.

Re: Just a thought

And, depending on the employer, that can be relatively easy after all. An employer that is large enough may already have local offices. Sure, they originally only did local sales and a little basic support, but that's enough legal entity to hire programmers and IT. That is also something that can be built without a lot of effort; while they do incur more paperwork to do it, a lot of people manage to open a small business without it taking forever and those companies can as well.

However, there was a reason that I provided the same continent or same country as alternatives. If they are hiring in the same country, for example anywhere in the UK but not outside it, the amount of necessary paperwork goes down so much that the company often doesn't notice. Some countries will require different arrangements per region, but those differences tend to be smaller and, if the company doesn't want to manage it, there are plenty of companies with the experience who will do it for them. In the approach of staying within a continent or comparable region, you have to do a little more work but not as much. For example, a UK business could open an EU-based subsidiary, which would involve doing that work, and use that subsidiary to add people in that labor market. A US or Canada based business could add the other. For the cost of setting up one additional entity, they add a large pool of available workers who are in similar time zones and quite likely speak the same languages.

Re: I wonder if this could become an election issue eventually

I seriously doubt it. They're not going to ban remote working. At most, they're going to make the people who work for the government and the companies they own work from offices. That's far fewer people, and it's much easier to get someone angry about what you did to them than what you did to someone else. It's also worth considering how limited the remote working thing has been. On a site like this, it feels like pretty much everyone could at least try to work remotely because we're biased to a small number of jobs, nearly all quite connected to computers. Most people don't have that. Since you're hoping for or at least predicting a US effect here, consider the industry sector sizes in the US labor market. Information workers, that is most of us, is 1.8% of total employment. Some of the other sectors on that list could also try, but some of them, such as financial services, have had significantly stronger returns to offices, and some others, for example state government employees, are so variable that not all of the people categorized there will be able to. Remote working and attempts to end it are a much bigger part of our experiences than they are for most people.

Re: Just a thought

That is true, but the original point is still valid. Wherever the most talented people are, remote working makes it easier to hire people who are not willing to go to the office or to move to where the employer has offices. That means it is easier for someone, formerly hired because they would go to the office, to be replaced. I think people supporting remote working understand that in theory, and it's not like they get a choice about this, but it is one risk of that arrangement which is lower if an office is involved. Whether that skilled person is in India, Canada, or Italy, they can be hired by a company that's embraced global remote working. Even if they're restricting it to the same continent or country, the number of available workers makes it easier for them to try to search for someone with better skills or one with similar skills willing to work for less.

That's not always the case. Sometimes, you're just looking to see if there is a better option out there. Not everyone is passionate about their work, and even though I can get really into work at times, I keep in mind that it is not supposed to be the central thing in my life. That means that I don't need to love everything about it to continue doing it, and I don't need to hate it to stop doing it. The external factors involved in the decision shouldn't be discounted.

Megan, AI recruiting agent, is on the job, giving bosses fewer reasons to hire in HR

They don't have to have a dedicated HR person to theoretically save time and money with software that could do the work of one. If they didn't, someone would still have to do those tasks, it'd just be someone who does non-HR things some of the time. At the high end, a company with thirty employees probably does have someone who could be called an HR person, someone who mostly spends their time with administrative work related to the employees. It depends a lot on what that company does, but I don't think it's that unreasonable. If they don't, they will often contract with an agency which will do some of that for them when needed. That is probably more expensive than this is.

Of course, that probably doesn't go hilariously off the rails, well hilariously if you don't have any stake in it going properly. I'm not convinced that this software can do very much. So far, the two features I'm confident that it has are filtering resumes, which I doubt it can do properly, and communicating with candidates, which really shouldn't be difficult. You could communicate perfectly well with candidates with pre-written mails which get sent when predefined events occur, such as inviting them for an interview or telling them they are no longer in consideration. Companies who can't be bothered to send that latter message probably don't want a program, since it would have taken them about five seconds to do manually.

The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

Re: Free Speech

Being banned and voluntarily shutting down because everyone hates you and won't agree to buy your product are two separate things. Even if the end of publication had been because the business was fined so much for breaking the laws they broke and couldn't afford to continue, that would be different. I am no fan of TikTok. I have not used it and will not change that. If a law was passed making something that TikTok did criminal, and TikTok refused to stop doing it, I would not object (I suppose it depends on whether I agreed that the thing in question was a problem). However, that didn't happen. Instead, a law was passed simply declaring that TikTok is not allowed. I have concerns about that kind of law even if I don't care for the target of this one.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: A novice does not know the difference between RAM and disk, and they should not have to

Ah, so a RAM dump. We've had that for ages. Of course, it does mean that if your program ever goes wrong, then all your data is lost. If you saved it somewhere, be that a file or a database, you could get that back and start again. It's not hard to take the data you have now and snapshot it so that you can restore it later. It is very hard to take that data and do anything else with it. It also makes it virtually impossible to change your code without starting from scratch.

I'm guessing that's not what you're going for. The problem is that it sounds like you're asking for magic. The same way that some users want a computer to just solve their problem without having to explain what their problem is or work on data without having to find and import it, you sometimes have to define what your storage is supposed to do. You can do less work, but if you do, you will get less power.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Re: and most of them do because they don't know how to use it anyway.

I like having the option, not being required to use it. There are some people, a small number but I have met some, who pretend that GUIs are bad and that all that matters is having a CLI. I don't believe them because of the number of tasks where a GUI is clearly better, sometimes significantly better. There is a reason why all my computers boot into a GUI first, but there is also a reason why there's often a terminal window or five up, because there are times where a CLI is more efficient or useful. Having both options is what I want, not picking a single winner.

One of the reasons for that in my case is that I'm a programmer and I often solve my problems by writing small programs. A CLI is one of the simplest ways of going from having some code that fixes a problem to executing that code. I don't need to write much in order to get some inputs and print progress reports. I have at times made some basic GUI libraries so I could do those simple things in a GUI, but often less flexibly than a CLI would. It also means that my various CLIs are not the same. A zsh or bash session, a Python REPL, and an R window may look similar, but they're quite different in what they do well and what their limitations are.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Re: Pocket Casts

On IOS, I have been happily using the Downcast podcast player for many years. I'm still looking for things on Android that are as conveniently configurable, though.

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Re: Settings

I guess you could still tip the laptop on its side so the screen is in portrait orientation. Not sure why you would want to, but you could definitely do it. I could see it being used if the laptop could unfold 360°, even without a touch screen as a small additional screen for desktop use, but I'm guessing yours doesn't do that, so propping it up on its side might be your only option.

Pastor's divine 'dream' crypto scheme indicted by Uncle Sam

To be entirely fair to him, he's only an idiot on the first point, namely that a vault that nobody can open and may not exist is not at all useful. Not being on the gold standard doesn't prevent you from making an investment based on an openable vault containing gold, and there are several places that do exactly that. It just means that you wouldn't be able to exchange your government-issued cash for gold at a fixed rate. There are many types of investments that base their value on a specific location containing things of value. While people generally want it, shares of the investment change in price. If people all decide they don't want it, someone is going to have to go in there and take some of the stuff out so it can be sold.