Posts by doublelayer

European Commission: Make Europe Great Again... for startups

Re: Their biggest problem

I'm not sure that litigating the financial crisis is going to help with this discussion. The core point, that you have to prove what someone did wrong in order to imprison them, applies here as well as anyone else. I didn't say, nor do I believe, that the financial crisis just showed up out of nowhere one day and nobody could have known it was coming. I did say and believe that there were people working in finance who weren't to blame at all because they did unrelated things and there were people who worked in the area but were still not to blame. If we lived in a society where we don't need to prove fault, many of those people would have been punished just to take out our displeasure at the situation on someone the ill-informed incorrectly believe was responsible.

And when there were people who did something actively wrong, I still believe that we need to make what they did illegal. If it was already illegal, then we should charge them for it. That way, people know not to do it next time. The original suggestion was essentially to discard the rule of law and replace it with the rule of whether some random people like you. The attempts to do this of which I'm aware are universally nasty.

Re: Their biggest problem

The problem with the alternative is that it makes everything a random guess and the only important factor is PR. Break a dozen laws in egregious ways? If you can convince people that this was actually totally fine because the people accusing you of doing that are nasty, untrustworthy people, you are free to continue as you wish. Did nothing wrong, but your opposition painted you as evil? There will be consequences even though nothing happened to cause them. Laws have to be specific and courts have to stick to them, or they basically don't exist. To some extent, there is some leeway in both directions when this breaks down, with juries able to "nullify" if they consider the case wrong or with judges happily smacking down attempts to use nonexistent loopholes based on stupid interpretations of grammatical concepts. I'm not sure anyone would like the results if we made it applicable on the whim of a random person.

For example, you've mentioned the global financial crisis. If you have a specific person and a specific crime, you can charge them with it. If, instead, you want to charge anyone who worked in finance because "that was bad and we didn't like it", there's a very good reason that isn't what we want to happen: maybe that particular finance person actually didn't do anything wrong, and it's on us to prove that they did. There are plenty of financial crimes on the books that people can be charged with if they break them, and sometimes, there isn't as much enforcement as we need. In that case, the solution is more enforcement, not changing the basic nature of laws.

Feds gut host behind pig butchering scams that bilked $200M from Americans

It's likely that the Philippine business concerned isn't the physical location of the scammers, but just one of the links in the chain. The Philippines isn't a common place for the scammers to work from, but it is a common place for them to originate from as they have a higher rate of fluency in English. That business could be involved with finding people to work there*, but it probably doesn't own the building where they are now. Of course, this could be actually based there, but even then, the business probably doesn't own the building for exactly this reason. If they make it harder to identify where the building is, it's harder for it to be raided. Two business entities is a cheap way to make this more complicated.

* That's both for forced labor and for voluntary labor. There is often some of both involved, although when the people who voluntarily choose to scam people find out how little they're paid to do it, they sometimes switch categories.

Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

Re: Mr Clegg is wrong

The problem with that is that, if copyright actually does protect creators, as I believe it does despite some harms it has exacerbated, then we don't know that creators will continue to create if those protections are removed. The harms I know about are mostly to consumers of the content, not to creators themselves, meaning they don't even experience many of those and still get the protections. Even if those harms were much larger, it wouldn't be enough to prove what would happen if the system were removed.

On a basic level, I agree with you: someone will continue to do creative work if copyright were eliminated. However, just because someone still bothers to write a book doesn't mean it's all fine. If I am right, the people most likely to continue to create are those wealthy enough that they can do it as a hobby without having to worry about success. That category hasn't included many people whose work I enjoy. I want to see people continue to create and benefit from the works I have enjoyed in the past, and I believe that, if copyright were abolished, most or all of them would stop because they need to spend long enough at their work that they need financial reward from their work to make that feasible. Abolition of copyright makes that extremely difficult compared to having it.

Re: Mr Clegg is wrong

Nice try. If you think copyright has done more harm than good, it is on you to demonstrate why. I know some harms copyright has led to. I know some harms that copyright has exacerbated. I think that the protection of creative work which makes it possible to have as much as we do outweighs those, so I favor specific changes to fix those smaller harms. For example, weakening or eliminating laws like the DMCA, specifically those sections that penalize people for "breaking digital locks", I support, but removing the copyright part of that I don't support.

This is an opinion. Yours is also an opinion. No web search will prove you right, but you can convince me you're right if you have any reason at all behind your statements. I have provided arguments in support of copyright here and in another comment here already. You've consistently declined to try. Count me currently unconvinced.

Re: Mr Clegg is wrong

"A case can be made that copyright, in its present form, does more harm than good, and actually fails at what it was originally created to do, which is to support creators."

Go ahead, then. Or did you think that saying "a case can be made" is enough to make that case? Your total of no arguments to back that up are not helping prove any of your downstream points. Oh, and when we get to the point where you want to return to those points, making the case that copyright does more harm than good is a required step, but not the only one. We'll also have to make the case that it helps creators less than or equally as the thing you replace it with in order to prove that creators will still create with your replacement.

Re: Thieves.

Which handily hits the biggest problem with your idea and the biggest problem with your attitude.

The idea: "… after you disclose them to others." Do you realize that, if you were to get what you want on copyright, people would stop disclosing their ideas to others whenever possible because it's the only way for them to benefit from having had those ideas? That has some problems for technological developments. It just doesn't work for artistic work.

Your attitude: "However, attribution and credit are a differing matter." Well, it's a bit of the problem with the idea, too, because what makes you think anyone is going to care about properly attributing that thing they can have for free. You won't get it, no matter how you try. But whether you get it or not is not important because attribution is not what any of these structures are for. Giving people a patent was never supposed to be about bragging rights of being first to have this invention stamped by a clerk. It was to make that invention available to everybody on public terms and to keep inventors inventing instead of sending them to live in poverty. Copyright was invented so that people who write books can sell those books to people who like to read them, rather than writing the book, having one copy purchased by someone with a printer, and then they go off to live in poverty. Your alternative, where we send them to live in poverty but with a nice plaque, is not better. It's not about credit. It's about having more of those things you want to have, and I know you want them, because you're constantly demanding them for free.

Re: Just for the record. . .

But many people who do the same things aren't rich, and their work has been used in the same illegal way. This also isn't a rich/poor dilemma here. It's a legal/illegal one, and unless you actually disagree with copyright law, it's not hard to take a side. If you do disagree with copyright law, chances are we'll disagree, but we have only a few people who are willing to say so and the arguments haven't convinced me yet. And, if you do disagree with copyright law, it doesn't change the situation now: it's still illegal and it will be unless you can change copyright law.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: Trump said stuff about tariffs

"What I said about a $1200 iPhone is that I wouldn't be surprised if it costed as little as $100 to actually manufacture. From your link the manufacturing cost for an $800 iPhone is somewhere between $400-600. Not exactly out of the ballpark of the 50% profit I assumed??"

Are we calculating the same way? To me, a $100 manufacturing cost and a $1200 selling price is a 1100% margin*, and a $500 cost (no, not $400, that wasn't in their range) and a $800 selling price is a 60% margin, and 60 and 1100 are very different numbers.

* And it is margin, not profit. Those costs include how much it costs to get an A18 chip from TSMC, but not how much it costed to design the A18 they made, since Apple also pays for that. The costs for the software are not included either.

You're right that many of the threatened tariffs on Canada didn't go into effect as strongly as threatened. However, that's a very different story to the picture you've painted in either of your comments. Everyone knows that Trump threatens far more than he enacts, but there are tariffs in place and have been for some time. That they're not as high as he once claimed he'd make them does not change the fact that they are a lot higher than they were four months ago. That's why Canada has all those retaliatory ones you know about; the US did impose real tariffs.

Re: Hmm

What makes you say that? Any country can be blamed for problems, real or imagined, and threatened with some ridiculous number. Most of the most ridiculous numbers haven't gone into effect with the exception of those on China, which were very real and aren't normal now that they've been backed off a little. The UK can get a threat any day now, and nothing says that it will be lower than the threat the EU got, or that the end result of the negotiation will give it a lower number. All it means is that the specific threat announced then doesn't affect you, but since making threats is free, that doesn't make any difference.

Re: Trump said stuff about tariffs

You are incorrect about a few things. For example, unless I've misinterpreted the "He started with us in Canada (and Mexico). The meandering story so far would be a decent sized book. What has actually happened?" part, you think that the tariffs on Canada and Mexico have been postponed? That's wrong. They were postponed a couple times, and some others that were talked about, possibly not seriously, haven't gone into effect. However, there are active tariffs from 10-25%, active right now if people try to import things from Canada or Mexico into the US. Those are real. Those are being charged to people and they are paying them as we write. The tariffs on China, people are paying those too. The tariffs on everybody: active. The extra tariffs on the EU: not active yet, but that global tariff does apply to them already. Those are not fictional.

"It wouldn't surprise me if actual production cost was around $100."

Do you have any reason to expect that price is anywhere close to actual costs? Before we pull some numbers from the internet, let's consider what would happen if that was real. If Apple can get those components for $100, then so can any other smartphone manufacturer with enough money to buy enough components to get the bulk pricing. Apple could still get a premium because of IOS, but we'd expect that some Android manufacturer would be making comparable hardware and selling it for only a little more than components and manufacturing. Is that happening? No, it's not. There are very cheap Android phones, true, but they use LCDs, not OLEDs, their processors are not Apple-class, they use normal cheap cameras for facial recognition instead of Apple's infrared thing, there are obvious differences that allow the price to be lower. The components Apple puts in their devices could not be purchased for that price.

There's a slow way to do this: go to parts suppliers who state their prices and figure out how much you have to pay for an OLED display of comparable resolution even if you plan to buy a million of them. There's a faster way: use estimated numbers from people who already did some of this. Like these people who estimate component and manufacturing costs for the base-level iPhone 16 at $495. That's sold for $800, so Apple has 38% of that to cover software, R&D, distribution, and profit. Of course, that number isn't exact, and Apple can probably save on some of those, so their margin might be a little more. It's not going to be $100. If you could obtain similar components and manufacture them into a phone for that price, you should start a smartphone company.

Re: Woz

Woz wasn't a production genius. He was great at building the product in the first place. Figuring out the factories to mass-produce it most efficiently was never his strongest feature, and he didn't intend it to be. If he were there now, even if he had continued to be there all the way through, Apple would likely be very different than it is today but he almost certainly wouldn't have changed their production systems in the slightest. Yet, Apple does have a department full of people who do exactly that and they find it difficult to move production into the US on a whim.

Re: Poor old Trump

This depends what goals he's trying to accomplish. If he wants Russian superiority, the answer is very different than if he wants personal wealth, pleasure, or power. Dictators have often found that the success of the country they're running is harmful to them personally, because a poorer country you can rule with an iron fist means more for you than a medium country where you may be ousted by bureaucrats you needed in order to get moderately successful, or more extremely a moderately successful country where you rule with limited authority beats a successful one where you are thrown out by the citizens who can and will demand their rights. It's not a perfect scale, and there are many exceptions, but sometimes, the actions of dictators can't be judged the way we'd normally do it.

For example, it's common to declare Putin a failure based on all the Russian soldiers who have been killed during this war, but because he doesn't care about their lives, that doesn't seem like indication of a failure from his perspective. If he values Ukrainian territory more than Russian lives, the trade could have been worth it. I'm not sure we can know what he wants now, and it probably wouldn't make much sense if he tried to explain it. Still, there's a chance that he doesn't consider it the kind of failure that it looks to us because he's going for things we wouldn't consider worth the cost.

Re: Perhaps ...

I think you're partially mistaken there. Some of the people who are in favor of this policy do want to work at a factory, with a misunderstanding of how factory work would be, what they'd have to do to qualify for it, or how well they would be paid to do it. The focus on returning to glory days includes an image of well-paid, easy, and no-knowledge-required factory work which is not a great match to what it would have been at the time they're thinking of and even more incorrect now. Some others may have a slightly more accurate picture and are still willing to do it, but they still have an unrealistic image of the economic realities involved.

Re: Perhaps ...

In this scenario, I think the rule is that all labor worldwide becomes free. This gives us two problems:

1. The less important one. Labor being free doesn't mean everything else is. Miners of cobalt might work for free, but there's still only so much cobalt, and that might make it not free.

2. The important one. Why are we bothering to do anything with notional free labor when that's never going to happen? The question of how much more expensive it is to build an iPhone in the US versus China involves labor costs, yes, but it also involves tons more, such as regulation costs, importing component costs (or local manufacturing of said component that Apple doesn't make themselves costs), training costs, recruiting costs, physical land and plant costs, utility costs, and on and on. I don't know the values for any of these, and I don't even know how large each of those is in comparison to another one.

The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

Re: No money in simplicity

"In the world I live in if a (scripting) language lacks a feature then you just add it. You don't keep revising the base language making both it and the applications you make from it ever more complex and convoluted."

In the world I live in, I sometimes have to clean up the variety of functions we wrote for one use case that could have been standard but weren't, the standard functions that could have been in libraries, and the libraries that could have been language features. Each standardization makes it possible to not redo work. If there is something that lots and lots of people want to use, then building it in might help to make the tools better. That doesn't mean you implement everything in the compiler so your program just reads doMyWork(), but when there is something that is generic to the language and heavily demanded, and the choice is whether to add some syntax or to have lots of people import a thousand-line library and write ten lines instead of one every time they want to use it, the syntax option is worth considering.

Re: The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

XKCD 1987 is very true, but what it isn't is unique, either to the time or to the language. Hands up who has never had and used:

Multiple JREs and JDKs.

Different versions of a library written in C or C++.

Different code or preprocessor directives to deal with different compilers.

Some script which doesn't run right with modern versions, but it's more work to update it than to give it whatever outdated environment it wants.

Any node_modules folder, whether or not you created it.

"I don't really understand why there's a stereotype of Debian being behind the times."

Because eventually, you want to run something but you can't because it requires a library version that was released two years ago. You could patch it in yourself, which doesn't work immediately because that interacts with another system service which also needs an update, but once you build both of those from source and make sure the paths are set right so only the thing that needs the new library uses the new library, both because you don't want the old version of anything to break on the new library and because you may not be installing security updates to your built-from-source version as often as Debian is patching the old one, it's working great. Many people don't know how to do that. Many who do don't want to have to do it too often. Each time you have to go around the OS to accomplish something becomes a little piece you have to remember to configure and maintain, putting more pressure on the admin.

This might not affect you, in which case Debian is great. Debian is also great as a component of things because of this. The people who compare distros are the most likely to have hit that wall a couple times. I certainly have.

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Re: Nonsense.

Go ahead, try it. It won't work for the same reason that you do, in fact, still have translators translating books from English to French: I could shove the book into Google Translate, or if I have some cash I could use something better. Unlike a few years ago, it won't have so many parts that are incorrect, but it won't be enjoyable to read because it lacks the literary quality the original had. Translators in general have lost jobs and wages because there are many situations where mere understanding is enough, but literature is one of those places where they still do the work.

You, apparently, do not know that. Perhaps you have a similar amount of knowledge of what happens when you take business process docs, written by someone who doesn't really want to do this, and get LLM-written code out. I encourage you to try it. It will help with your experience in one of two ways. If it turns out to work, you'll make tons of money as the person who made programmers obsolete and, as a bonus, you'll prove how stupid I and others here are. Or you'll learn firsthand what the problems are, and if the tools work well enough, maybe you'll be the one to fix them, and if you can't, at least you'll have a better understanding of why we have the views we've expressed.

Re: The Great Replacement

It will listen all day long, but that doesn't mean the summary it provides us will be useful. For example, one of the ways to make sure the thing shows up in an LLM summary is to make sure it is mentioned many times. The most important stuff in a spec is likely to be the parts that don't need to be repeated multiple times when talking to users. So if the users talk to the LLM the same way they'd talk to us, that kind of important part will probably be the most likely part where errors show up. The talking to users part is important. That's why we do it. If all I needed to do was coddle some idiots, I wouldn't bother talking to them. I need to learn important things that they know and I don't, and if I don't, then I'm the idiot who could not build something because I was incapable of doing my job, of which determining requirements is a part.

Re: Coding isn't dead...

This is mostly wrong. The analogy is not to manufacturing things, but to designing them. We build machines to build cars now, mostly, but the cars the machines build are still designed by humans. Programming is not manufacturing work, since it's usually pretty easy to make more of the program you just wrote. Programming is design, and that has not been mechanized just yet. We build tools to speed it up, but so far, none of our tools has eliminated the requirement to think, and programming properly requires thinking.

Re: The Great Replacement

If AI can do that, AI can replace my coding job too. AI can't turn vague statements into a spec that people actually want for the same reason that I can't: I don't know what people want until I extract it from them through large amounts of talking. They could try talking that much to the AI and hope that the specs it makes after that process will represent that talking, but the talks I have tend to be much larger than the context window for the larger ones used in most models. Or mine, for that matter, which I work around by splitting up the task into pieces and writing the spec in pieces so I don't have to hold it all in and write it once.

I think the start of your comment is extremely correct, and in fact, more correct than even you think. People seem to think that AI will easily replace whatever jobs they have no respect for, often by misunderstanding how that job is done. A lot of people don't understand how programmers work or what they do that eventually makes the computer do something. The only part of that process they see is those funny documents with punctuation in weird places, so they think that's the most important part of it. You seem to have a similar view of management. Managers mess things up all the time, but that doesn't make their job as simple as you paint, and that means AI will not be as able to do it. As with ours, LLMs will do an excellent job of pretending to do that job if you give it to them. An LLM can certainly run a status meeting. It can't properly interpret that meeting and a long list of other meetings to understand what people are doing, which ones have the strongest skills in which (undefined and flexible) areas, and understand what people like, how to keep the ones you want, which ones you shouldn't have, then execute on all of that. Good managers can and do that, and bad managers will often do some of it.

How Java changed the development landscape entirely as code turns 30

Re: Excessive hardware requests, lack of backwards compatibility, taliban OO approach...

Their comment clearly indicates that they mean "won't run", and they're not the only one who has seen software refuse to work with newer JREs. No, it's not all the time, but I've had the experience of keeping around several JREs so I can execute software that won't like any other version. The code I've written in Java never seems to have that problem, but it isn't the language I use most frequently.

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

Re: It would have worked fine for Amazon

I'm not sure how their historical prices are relevant. I was saying that, even though a 145% tariff does not mean a 145% increase in price to the eventual buyer, there's no way it would be a 2% rise unless a sale of an iPhone was nearly all profit. Apple could not absorb that tariff the way the original poster suggested they would. The original post's calculations, if they did any, were faulty.

Apple didn't have to raise their prices in the past because they didn't get hit with tariffs anything like this in the past. Thus, your description of their history of not having price increases says nothing about what they'd do in response to an actual 145% tariff if it happened to them. I doubt they know either, as it's a ludicrous level and they have many ways to avoid it, such as moving manufacturing to India (they already done plenty of that for that reason), or convincing the leaders that the result would be unpleasant enough that they should be exempted (they've done it before and I expect they'll do it again). It's also difficult to compare their price changes, as each new model comes with new features. For example, when they increased the price for the iPhone 12, was that them increasing the price because they could or because something new in the iPhone 12 was worth $100 more? When they canceled the $429 iPhone SE earlier this year and replaced it with their new cheapest model, the $600 iPhone 16E, was that adding $180 to their cheapest model, or was their new one that much better? I note you didn't include that in your list of increases. Whether things they did count as increases is, as I said, not really important to me or their likely response to large tariffs.

Re: It would have worked fine for Amazon

It was Amazon's wholesale site, so the prices they're showing are much closer to the price on import, and may be identical to the price on import if the buyers are buying enough to be directly importing them.

Also, for an iPhone's 145% tariff to add only 2% to the purchase price, Apple would need to have had a 60% margin on their phones, and, crucially, be willing to still sell them at a new margin of zero. And when I say margin, I don't mean profit margin when you factor in things like software development, R&D costs, or all the money they spend on the chips they make for the phones, just the cost of manufacturing each phone, so at this 2% higher price, they'd be making a substantial loss on each unit. Incidentally, 145% is so many percents that, even if we used the 20% increase in purchase price, the reality wouldn't change much; they'd have to be collecting massive profits on each phone and they'd have to stop doing it immediately. Do you have evidence that they would be willing to do this or even that they have a ludicrously large margin in the first place; I know it's extreme, but it's not that high?

Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping

Re: Comparisons with Debian

Part of the comparison might be an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to evaluate the process from the perspective of an unseasoned Linux user. Some of the extra features in Debian's installer are great for people who know how it all works, but they make it harder for new users to navigate it successfully without getting confused or making a wrong choice that's annoying to clean up. They might prefer to write from that perspective for two reasons. First, there was an article posted a week ago which received a lot of discussion about helping unfamiliar users switch to Linux, where user-friendliness was considered a serious necessity. The second is that those with most familiarity won't need the review so much, since it is easiest for them to spin up a test version and just see how it feels.

Re: Psudo security

If you don't like the timer, then you change the one line in the sudo config to disable it and require the password every time. There are reasons to argue su versus sudo, most of them relatively small, unless it's a server, in which case sudo has some significant advantages. The ones you mention are not among them.

BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation

Re: Got off lightly

I was thinking the same. They don't necessarily have to do anything BOFHish to do well out of this if they just charge the normal vending machine profit margin and get the snacks wholesale, especially when they have a plausible reason to charge the boss whenever he's present.

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

Re: It’s special alright!

"America had every right to be very angry at Japan - that’s not the issue I was addressing."

Of course it wasn't. It was the point I was making to correct your incorrect summary about why the US declared war on and then fought Germany. Which didn't have to do with Germany torpedoing ships. Germany did torpedo some ships, but that was after the war had started, because moving submarines into position to strike US shipping was faster than planning and executing a land offensive from North America to Europe or Africa.

Similarly, "despite Churchill asking for help for quite some time, it was only offered when their arm was twisted" is wrong. Help was offered. Less than the UK wanted or needed, definitely. But you suggest that the US offered nothing until they had no other option, when in reality, the US president did everything he could do to give the UK preferential treatment and assistance, at US expense, well before the war. Had he had the public support, he would likely have joined in the war more actively, but he didn't. Attempting to do it regardless would have been illegal and a guaranteed way to get a different leader who might have had different opinions. A lot of Americans were antiwar for various self-serving or cowardly reasons, as were many UK residents before they too, lost the choice due to unquestionable aggression, but you are ignoring plenty of history to make your allegation.

Re: I can believe it

You know you're talking with an ill-informed person if they use a phrase like "BRICS alliance". BRICS is a grouping of countries because they're sort of similar: large countries that aren't in a traditional alliance with similar levels of economic development. That's all it is. India and China are two members of those five, and they're not likely to ally with each other on military matters any time soon, what with the recent military disagreement (at least a hundred deaths). Brazil and Russia have no military alliance, don't generally agree on diplomatic issues, and have little significant economic relationship other than the normal one you'd have between two largish economies that produce different things. But that grouping for categorization and the occasional conferences between them, marred only by the fact that Putin wouldn't go to the one held in South Africa because that member of the alliance was liable to arrest him, can be used to imply that there's some powerful group where there are five mostly unaligned countries, and five sounds much more powerful than your favorite one.

Re: It’s special alright!

"And they didn’t do it because it was “the right thing to do”. They did it because their supply ships to Europe were getting torpedoed by the Germans and it was …yep …. costing them money."

That's...an interesting interpretation. Maybe they did it because they had declared war against Germany, which happened because Germany declared war against them, which happened because they declared war against Japan, which happened because Japan bombed them about which they were quite angry. Are you really suggesting that they only did this because ships were being attacked. How, in your interpretation, do you explain the decision, much earlier, to give the UK and its allies weapons at US expense?

In reality, there were a lot of people in the US who wanted to stay out of the war because it was a war and those things are not much fun to be in, without putting much more thought into it. That did not apply to those running the military at the time, who, when they got the public support they needed, were quite enthusiastic about joining with the UK to fight, and they did. This is not the only time the US has had almost exactly the same reaction to a possible war, nor is it the only country to have done it. I could, for example, rewind a few years and describe the UK's reaction to German actions that looked very similar. Doing anything they could to avoid war, which of course didn't work, and when war was declared, not being very effective for several months. To explain why would take a lot of paragraphs, and almost any single-clause explanation would be virtually guaranteed to be wrong.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

Re: Fiber

That would help significantly, but most of the time, the people building these do not bother to do that. They often get the cable into some convenient part of the wall and stop there. If that convenient exit point happens to be central, so much the better, but there's no proof it will go that way. I've seen designs that have the incoming line quite near the door, maximizing conflicts between units in the building, and I've also seen them on the outside wall, maximizing power lost to covering the outside of the building. It's harder to convince residents to get a long ethernet cable and make the port more central when their landlord has chosen not to. I have had the pleasure to live in a building where there was intra-unit cabling, meaning that I could choose between three wall ports to put APs on or connect physically to, but that was not universal.

Re: Fiber

Do you know any building that has a single router per building? Nowhere I've ever seen. It's all as you describe: wires to each unit, then one or more access points for that unit's occupants. In fact, that's the problem, and you could theoretically [ducks] I said theoretically, improve the contention problem by having only one WiFi network for the building that everyone connected to.

The problem the article describes is that, when you have a bunch of APs, set up by every occupant independently, you have a lot of possibility for congestion because my AP may be quite close physically to my neighbors' ones. For example, when unit layouts are standardized, my incoming network wire is probably only three meters from those of the apartments above and below me, and most people will install their AP right where that line ends rather than extending it elsewhere. That brings multiple APs closer than they need to be, and if their bands conflict, which would usually be because they're badly configured, that will produce bad results for everyone.

Back to that theoretical thing, if you spaced out APs to avoid congestion, then you could avoid a lot of the problem by maximizing capacity, which for the 6 GHz band is huge. Eventually, you could saturate that entire thing, but most of the time, that would work fine. I don't suggest you do it, as I want my own, private network and would not want to spend all my time on a building-wide network, but offices already use that setup and, most of the time, it works more efficiently than individuals' haphazard configuration.

Re: And Gamers...

"What's the experience of others? If you live in such a building, have you noticed lots of wifi congestion that's affected what you're trying to do?"

I have, but that was mostly on the 2.4 GHz band. Terrible congestion on all the channels. Fortunately, after disabling that, 5 GHz has been fine and I've had no need to go to 6 GHz, which only some of my devices would support anyway. There are probably people who are packed more tightly than I have been, and 5 GHz could be more congested for them.

One possible explanation is that I do a proper check of the available bands before selecting one. If I'm able to find a clear one because people are trusting to automatic selectors that don't work, then they may be getting more congestion than I see on the popular defaults. Compared to the way the study did it, I also don't set a massive band, going with the smallest option which has never been a problem. Mostly, that is the default, meaning they may have estimated more congestion than really exists by assuming that many more people will opt to use several channels at once when that is a relatively rare choice.

Sergey Brin promises next generation of Glassholes will be much less conspicuous

Re: I'm probably not the target market for these...

For some, the point of new tech is showing off that you have it. For others, the point is using the new tech. Most of the time, the people building the tech are thinking about the people who want to use it, hence why the original Google Glass team focused on ways you could use their tiny screen and ignored how it looked ridiculous to everybody. With this modern version, they'll pay a bit more attention to making it not as ridiculous because they already cut themselves on that once, but their focus will still be on the tech.

That doesn't mean the tech will work well. Often, people who focus too much on the tech build in something they think makes for a cool demo but ignore "boring" features that someone might want to use, or they decide that some moderately useful feature takes precedence over hardware deficiencies like insufficient battery life. Not every tech designer wants to or thinks they can make their product a luxury good that every user will be showing off.

Re: The problem isn't that they are conspicuous

Wrong comparisons. The thing to compare this to to see how the public response will go is Facebook's smart glasses. These may look different as it sounds like they're still going to have a screen, whereas Facebook's (fine, Meta's, but I still don't like letting them change the name) decided to skip that part. The important part for those worried about privacy is still there: Meta's got a camera in those. I don't notice people wearing those in public, although I'm not looking closely for them. That either means that, although seemingly popular by reported numbers, there aren't many users near me or, alternatively, they aren't as obvious as Google Glass was.

Actors' union complains about Epic Games cloning Darth Vader

Re: A sign of times to come

And, once again, you have the opportunity to attack someone you disagree with and be convincing, because the union representing actors has no reason to control what can be done with recordings the users had permission to use from both the legal owner of those recordings and from the person (or family of deceased person in this case). Armed with this great opportunity, you completely ignore it and go on to bang your "copyright is bad" drum again.

A lot of artists do complain a lot about the threat of competition, and sometimes that's all they're afraid of. In my opinion, too bad for them. But some of them are complaining about their work being used without permission or legal right to do so, and I support them in this. I don't care if the studios use their computers to make fake actors. If they can manage it and it means human actors have a harder time finding work, that's normal change. If, however, studios try to clone the appearance or voice or gait of a human without permission, I have a problem with that. If artists lose to competition from an AI model that has legally licensed all its training data, I won't support the artists. Every model that's competing with them right now is trained on illegally obtained training material, and I support those who did not give permission for that use.

To progress as an engineer career-wise, become a great communicator

Re: Not the case elsewhere? US?

The downvotes are because it presents a straw man (you have to be knowledgeable about literature to be hired), when nobody suggested that. The point they actually suggested, that people be tested on their ability to communicate, is a good one, and elsergiovolador was clear that they disapprove of this, using unconvincing arguments to oppose it.

The kind of communication that needs to be tested is not particularly extreme. Can you write a readme for your code that, when read by a person who hasn't read your code, does these things:

1. Tells the reader what the code is for.

2. Tells the reader what else you need to use it.

3. Explains how to run it.

These aren't high bars. This is one of the few types of communication where typos aren't a fatal problem, as long as they're not in commands or change important meanings. You don't have to work too hard to accomplish it.

Some people can't do this or hate it so much that they refuse to. Some of them have convinced themselves that, because they can't, it's okay if they don't. It's not okay if they don't. In some cases, you might want people with even more communication skills than this, which is still not a high bar, but most of the time, the readme and similarly detailed notes and emails to colleagues is fine. A good grade in a literature class would probably demonstrate you had that skill, but you certainly wouldn't need that to prove it and could gain that skill in other ways.

Re: Reality check

Most of the time, we're not talking about being great at presenting a sales pitch or a viral public presentation, but discussing a technical matter with your colleagues. The programmer who can write the code and it works scores lower than the one who can do that and describe it well enough that a new colleague can modify it quickly instead of having to parse through everything from scratch.

And since you still have your fixation on managers being universally bad, increasing in badness as you go up the org chart, one major situation where this is important to the career of that person is whether they can describe what they did, are doing, or want to do to the boss without making the boss go through everything. Those who can summarize clearly, accurately, and with the right details included and excluded, make sense and are more likely to retain their jobs. In the real world, that's because the boss has a lot of things to do and their job is to direct and monitor, trusting the engineers to build what they decided needed to be built. In your world, you can put it down to managers being lazy. Either way, though, it means that the bare minimum policy you recommend includes being able to communicate well enough that management doesn't worry that your poor communication is a smokescreen for not being able to do anything. I have had the experience of someone using poor communication skills to distract from their poor technical skills. I think they actually could communicate better, but that would involve saying that they couldn't do any of the work, so they disguised that with terse and unclear statements. It didn't work.

Re: Not the case elsewhere? US?

That depends what kind of company it is, but most of the problems they're referring to aren't only encountered when programmers are told to do every job. You don't need to be talking to a customer for the need to communicate to be important. They can employ all the customer talkers they want who will polish up your message for the customer's enjoyment, but if your message is so unclear that the polisher can't understand it, there's still a problem.

If you're going to have the situation you describe where it is your company, then chances are that your company will be small and you can't afford to employ enough polishers to deal with unclear output from an uncommunicative tech team. In that case, you will actually need them to be able to do both of those things, and a tech who can write code but can't document will be unsuitable. Those companies who try to ignore this often find that they have a product and no customers, and it often ends badly from there.

Boffins devise technique that lets users prove location without giving it away

Re: How about no...

"As for battery life, are you saying that disabling GPS doesn't switch off the GPS radio?"

No, kind of the opposite. I'm saying that keeping GPS enabled doesn't mean the GPS radio is always on. I leave it enabled, but I know what apps are able to use it. If none of those are running, the radio is off and consuming no power, the same way it would be if I had disabled it. It'll turn on when one of those apps requests it. If I know what apps I've allowed to use it, whether those are using it now, and don't have something weird in the background also using it, then it works that way. If I didn't have all three of those things, I'd be more worried about not knowing them than about my battery life.

Re: How about no...

If you have WiFi enabled but aren't using it, it spends a little power looking for networks to connect to. If you have GPS enabled and aren't using it, it doesn't need to do anything. Unless there are background processes using GPS, the power explanation doesn't explain it.

On Android, you can use a few mechanisms to create shortcuts to enabling or disabling certain settings, and if you have a reason to want to switch location access on and off frequently, that might be the closest thing to what you want. I just suggest that you check whether your reasons are backed up by what actually happens when you do it.

Re: Isn't this something you could do with traceroute?

This is one of the reasons a lot of systems no longer respond to packets that have their TTL expire. True, the privacy aspect is probably not the strongest reason it mostly doesn't work, but it's one of them. There are ways of trying to geolocate by IP timing, but they aren't the most effective. Also, there are ways to fix that.

This is for a very different kind of location tracking, though. It's mostly aimed at mobile devices, which probably fall into one of these categories that make IP tracking even less useful than they otherwise would be:

1. They're moving, and their provider is giving them new addresses when they do. Mostly not what they do anymore but it can sometimes still happen, and it will look the same if they're frequently using local WiFi.

2. They're moving, so the mobile provider keeps changing their internal routing tables to move their address with them. Your tracking data becomes wrong on an unpredictable schedule.

3. Their provider doesn't have an address for them specifically because they're still using CGNAT, so your attempt to track them down fails because the closest point you can get is their shared address router.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Skill issue

"That is only 2 of the 4 essential freedoms;"

Thank you for that. Of course, I had never heard of them before. It's not as if I wanted to get to the point without copying an entire blog post. But I'm sure your clarification statement was helpful to somebody.

"Everyone deserves freedom even if they didn't have any freedom at all previously and therefore didn't realise it was a thing."

You didn't read closely enough. Read again. It wasn't that they "didn't realize". They don't care. In order to convince them, you need to explain, to them, not to me, because I already care, why they should care. And, when you've tried and failed as many, including me, have before you, you will need to take the next step and understand what they will care about. Of the four freedoms, three are almost entirely useless to someone who cannot read code and don't intend either to learn how themselves or to ask someone else to do it for them. To the average nontechnical person, your argument sounds like this:

You: This car is better than yours. You should switch to it.

Them: I like my car. Why should I use yours?

You: Because mine gives you freedom.

Them: It doesn't have a steering wheel.

You: You steer with pedals on the floor. You'll get used to it.

Them: How do you accelerate?

You: The buttons over near the glove box.

Them: What freedom does it give me again?

You: You're allowed to melt down the door panels.

Them: I don't want to melt down the door panels, and I couldn't manage it properly if I wanted to.

Until you understand their position, you'll keep telling them things about freedom which they don't understand, don't care about, or think you're deluded about. You need to correctly describe the deficiencies in the alternative, deficiencies that actually exist and don't take the form of "it doesn't have freedom", because they won't understand that and it won't make sense even if you explain it. Have you ever heard the people who protest things, but you can't tell, even after discussing with them, what they're protesting against or what they want to replace it with and you get the idea that they don't know either but they like protesting something? To people who don't already know what the four freedoms are and value them independently of your arguments, you sound like those people. We understand you, but nobody will realize what freedoms they don't have if you keep doing this. Break your loop.

Yes. I have used a lot of things. What I haven't tried to do is to switch a hundred people to any one of them with the hope that they won't be cursing my name tomorrow or requiring me to spend weeks helping each one out. If I decided I wanted to do the latter, I'd be looking for something that made their systems as standard and as easy to use as possible, which is often the opposite of what I look for for my personal machines. On those, they're mine, so I want them to work exactly the way I tell them to. If that means I have to do extra work to get around something my choice didn't build in, then I'll do that extra work. Sometimes, I specifically want to avoid something the more complex systems built in and I don't want. I know people who custom-built distros for their family, with everything nicely integrated and remotely administerable, and I can and have done similar things. That took a lot of work, and I can't and don't want to do it at a large scale.

Re: Not obsolete if you monotask singlemedia

In some cases, especially with nontechnical users, that's exactly how it comes to be a mess. Nothing was there, which means that everything that is there now was bolted on by me at some point, and maybe I've forgotten that I did something. That makes it harder to unbolt things that are causing problems because there's no simple uninstall button for a lot of it. For the normal usage of Alpine, embedded and limited-purpose deployments, that's probably fine. For handing it to a user who might want to do all sorts of things, it makes it a courageous option unless, and possibly even if, you're the only person who will ever be asked to administer it for them.

With each layer you remove, you increase the number of things you'll have to fix. Mint or Zorin are huge, but they have tested the configuration they release and made sure a lot of things are present and functional. Ubuntu figured out several of the things that Debian left up to the user. When it's my machine, I don't mind having to do a little custom-building, and I'd rather do a bit of that than have to deal with a suboptimal default that's harder to remove. That is not the case for a place trying to give unfamiliar people new OS installs.

If you're trying to convert people to Linux en masse, your most likely bottleneck will be availability of technical users' time. That means you want as many things to be easy to do without needing any tweaking. That means, for example, that if there's a piece of software that a lot of people want and only works when there's systemd, you use the bloody systemd whether you like it or not. The alternative is that you use the same time to convert three people, because most of it is spent trying to implement compatibility with the older init with that application, that you could have spent converting fifty people who could click on the app's name. Alternatively, you tell a lot of people that their system can't run that and they leave, annoyed. Alternatively, you explain to people why there's a difference and they grow confused about init systems and why it's bad that Leonard works at Microsoft and leave, annoyed. Your idea actually sounds closer to not invented here since you're going to end up redoing some of the things distros exist to do, just at a smaller and probably less maintainable scale.

Re: TODO

I missed the edit window, so to add one more point, I think one of the ways we fail to convince others to use Linux is that we don't understand what they want to do and insist on putting other things in front of it. It happens a lot in these comments. The archetypal example is the constant comparisons between PhotoShop, GIMP, and other photo editors. That's a frustrating one, since I don't use any of them and have no way to know who is right about whether they have the same features or not. In many cases, the points appear to be decided by ideology. I like open source, so the open source program must work, or I find Linux annoying, so the Linux-compatible program must have problems. Neither approach helps, no matter how confidently they say it.

I think a helpful resource could be Louis Rossmann's guide to an open source life. It does two things that are useful. It demonstrates the style that is needed for people who are trying to use the software but don't understand it, and it points out where our tendencies as developers or power users need to change. Some of the things listed in the introduction as reasons that the software isn't more commonly used affect all of us, but because we can use our technical ability to eventually work around them, we forget how big a roadblock that is. People who find it harder to experiment their way through will often stop there. If we want them to use the same tools they are, then we need to change our ways. To some extent, this might be the occasion to decide whether and why we want them to do that so we can take actual steps toward achieving whatever goal we decide on.

Re: TODO

"any distro you'd advise them to install has its GUI interface to the repository which they should be encouraged to use and has Wine in that repository."

True, and the Wine wiki I linked to has a bit of a recommendation about those:

Many Linux distributions come with an included Wine package, but due to Wine's rapid development rate these are usually old and often broken versions. It is best to uninstall your distribution's included package versions and update to the latest Wine version available here.

So when you give that advice, you'd better be confident that, should the user try it, your version is going to work. And you'd better direct them away from pages like that which tell them it won't. And we haven't yet gotten to how they're running Wine, and if they'll use one of the frontends around it or not, and which one, and how they configure it. So far, at best, we've installed it. Sometimes, making everything functional to people who don't want to think about complicated things is more complicated than using it the way we do.

Apple to add fresh accessibility features for 2025

Re: "Lie-nucks"

"So I don’t quite share the author’s sunny appraisal of Apple’s assistive features, no."

I think you're thinking about the wrong thing. Speech recognition has lots of flaws, and likely always will although I've seen significant improvements. But that's just one tool and assistive use is just one of the things it's for. People without disabilities use that feature all the time. There are a lot of features which are specifically for use by people with disabilities in most operating systems, and, for example, only one of them in IOS is related to speech recognition, namely the feature used to control the device by voice for those who cannot or find it difficult to use the touchscreen to do it, and those users also have switch control as an option, where they use a separate controller which they can more easily interact with to control the device. Features meant for people who have trouble seeing, hearing, or speaking are completely unrelated to this, so the failure of a speech recognition model wouldn't be useful in judging the quality of any of those.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure where they get those models, but it's likely that they, like a lot of operating systems, license it from a company that specializes in making them*, so they can't actually improve that part easily. Who knows, as Apple is big enough that it might have brought that in. Microsoft bought Nuance, one of those specialized companies, so they're presumably using that, so Apple could have done a similar thing.

* It's a little easier now with neural networks and cheap computer power to keep throwing at them, but for a while, they employed a lot of people who were really focused on linguistics and acoustics. Building a model for one language was hard. Doing it for the thirty languages most operating systems want to provide was extremely hard. Specializing was the most logical way to make it feasible, since the work could be spread out among lots of users.