Posts by doublelayer

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

"It's rather higher up than most of our planes normally fly."

But not high enough that military planes can't fly there*, and I think China is also aware that we have high-altitude military planes. The point being that we don't need technology that China's not aware of to make a balloon fall down, so if it became necessary to take down the balloon without giving out any military secrets, it would be possible.

* The internet appears to be filled with copies of this article that don't mention the altitude, but other articles specify an altitude of 60,000 feet or 18 km. That's well above civilian air and routine military traffic, but several planes are capable of getting there and some are explicitly designed to do so.

Re: Difficult

With just bullets, kind of hard. With bullets and something that can start fires, a bit easier. We have lots of weapons that can start fires these days, and in fact a lot of weapons that have specifically been designed to try not to start a fire this time, so I think we may have more options on downing something filled with hydrogen if it ever shows up.

Re: Why not shoot it down ?

All you'd need in this case is a plane that can shoot at a target. I think China is already aware that the U.S. has planes with guns mounted on them. Not a lot can be learned from that.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: The old ways is the best ways

You want to play a game of who can adapt fastest to unwanted scraping? Companies that don't want you to scrape can mess with the UI in so many ways that it's often not worth doing it if they have the knowledge and will to combat it. Combine that with a terms of service that forbids it (possibly not enforceable but do you want to argue it in front of all the courts because they have more lawyers than you). If you're planning to make a profit from consistently scraping a company that doesn't want to be scraped, you face some large challenges. Maybe Twitter will fail at properly blocking scraping, and I'm in favor of people trying it because having overworked engineers constantly changing things to foil scrapers means it's more likely to break and watching it break would be fun, but I wouldn't want to set up a business doing it.

Re: Maybe he really doesn't care about the money at all

"Curious why the saudis would invest in twitter. I wouldn't have thought it would be a big thing in their parts."

Your assumption is incorrect. As of June 2022, an estimated 71.9% of the Saudi population were Twitter users, third to WhatsApp and Instagram which are both Facebook products and thus can't be bought so easily. It would make sense for them to get control of something that popular for their own political ends, whether that involves censoring stuff for the locals, monitoring private messages, or getting more personal information on people they want to hack (first with spy software, then with autopsy tools). I don't know what power they have currently, but I wouldn't trust Musk to tell us honestly. If the company went bankrupt, they'd likely get more control of the remains.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Or alternatively, that guy might take the adverts to a different social media company and Twitter will have fewer people looking at them to which they can show other adverts. It might help with revenue, but it might also decrease the size of the user base. They've decided to find out which factor makes the larger difference to their financials in production.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

That depends what form the advertising takes. Unwanted ads for things I didn't want? That drives me away and I try to block it. However, the post you replied to was about a very different kind: promotions sent out by the company selling it seen only by those who subscribe to it. That does tend to work better. I'm on a few companies' newsletters where they announce new products, discounts, etc. These are basically ads they send to me, but I not only agreed to see them, but I volunteered for them. I did this because I'm actually interested in possibly buying some of their stuff, and when that's no longer the case, I'll unsubscribe. Similarly, I also periodically visit a site which is basically a stream of ads from Chinese companies making weird items because it's fun to see what strange combinations they've come up with. That's not on Twitter, but if I liked a company and decided to go check whether they've posted any discounts I'm likely to use, that would attract some traffic.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

"So I'm not sure why he would expect Twitter to provide that service to his business for free. TV stations and newspapers didn't."

Twitter doesn't have to provide that service for free, but every other social media company does and is going to keep doing so. Twitter benefited from people posting information because it drove attention, both theirs and that of people reading it, so Twitter could shove ads at them. Since the other companies are still going to keep allowing that, people faced with a new request for payment might well decide to abandon Twitter, and Twitter would lose the revenue they were bringing in from the viewers. It's not that Twitter is or should be obliged to provide the service for free, but that there are downsides to losing the business and charging is likely to lose them clients when their competition is still allowing free usage.

It's your human hubris holding back AI acceptance

I thought so. Well actually I thought that none of the answers were that great and wondered about the size of essay they'd take for an analysis, but of the four options, C provides critical information to debunking the obvious alternative and D provides extra circumstantial data. Both would help, but if I can only take one, I'll take C. I wonder who wrote the test and how much effort they put into making sure it was logical.

Re: Outsourcing human experience.

"If we outsource fundamental human experience to AI, the humans have no more relevance, and would be better replaced with AI drones entirely."

If we were able to outsource things to AIs and not have everything break, which we can't, then I would say we go for it. If a computer can solve a problem better than a human can, then obsoleting the manual process for the better automatic process isn't making them "an accessory object to an inhuman overlord". It's making them a person who no longer has to do that boring thing because they have a machine that can do it. That's just as true if the machine is a sink so the user doesn't have to carry buckets of water to wash things then find a place to dispose of it or a computer that can produce a statistical report so the user doesn't have to manually find all the different measurements of a dataset and try different basic regressions on their own. AI, if we ever get a reliable version, will be a tool which can be used to allow humans more ability to do what they want. It won't have to be an overlord if we don't make it that way, and I don't know of many who want an overlord, so it seems unlikely.

As Apple sales slide, Tim Cook says fanbois will tolerate higher iPhone prices

Pride over where the designer happened to be is a bit crazy, but if I wanted to defend him, I'd point out that it was designed by more than one person, and the other people were more likely to be Americans or even Californians by birth, if that matters. Although probably the design team will have people in multiple countries from even more national backgrounds, because they only said "Designed in California", not "Designed exclusively by Californians".

Qualcomm feels the squeeze because you don't want a new smartphone right now

Shortages for components of phones have eased for this period, so not really. If you want a phone, you can go and get one quickly and cheaply if you get one that's designed to be fine rather than one that's designed to appeal to someone who doesn't know that there is a limited amount of money available.

People aren't buying as many phones because they don't need to replace them, because inflation has caused them to cut back on expensive items that they don't need to replace right now, or because they don't see advantages in any of the new products. It's happening the same way with a variety of other items, including most consumer tech.

Everyone's doing it: PayPal sends 2,000 workers packing

Why, whenever there is an article about companies with many workers is there somebody to post a question like this that completely ignores what the business actually involves? Can you make an HTML form? Great. So can I. Now I'd like to see you figure out legal compliance to serve as a financial company in nearly every country which works with each country's tax authorities automatically so businesses can use the thing. Try doing that on your own. Which part do you think is harder?

I'm sure some employees of the company are unnecessary. That doesn't change the fact that their technology is more complex than a single form and that their business is more complex than a UI and a database.

So you want to replace workers with AI? Watch out for retraining fees, they're a killer

Re: Bring on the Luddites!

In fact, my point was basically the opposite of what you just said. With technological advancement, there is going to be disruption, and that will harm somebody. There are two ways you can deal with this. Only one way works.

Option 1: Don't allow technological advancement when it will harm someone (almost never, in other words). You can't functionally do this. Things break quickly. Take any era where you thought things were best for the workers and reflect on the fact that, without technological advancement in the previous decades, that era would not have worked that way. If we'd banned the telephone because "Think of what will happen to those telegraphists who spent time learning Morse", we wouldn't have had jobs for telephone operators. If we hadn't allowed cars to be manufactured because of all the damage it would have done to people with jobs related to animal-based transport, no wonderful manufacturing economies. Similarly, when those things become automated, it makes sense to adopt the improvements.

Option 2: when people are harmed, have a plan for how to help them. Instead of trying to hold back progress so everyone can keep doing what they've always done (often without considering whether what people have been doing is something they enjoy doing), provide resources to those whose jobs have been lost. The world changes, and those who live there will have to change as well. The best thing we can do is to make sure people have assistance making necessary changes.

I lied. There's a third option: the Luddite option. That's basically where you take all the improvements from technology that affects others without thinking of them, but as soon as something looks like it will affect you, you demand special treatment. In the specific case of Ludd and his compatriots, it was well-paid production work that was automated, but they couldn't accept that anyone else could produce fabric and thought that they were more important than the people getting jobs operating the new machines. This is the hypocrisy demonstrated by the original post: "As AI becomes more useful and starts put of we techies out of jobs". Now I've seen the code that GPT spits out, and I don't have that much fear of that, but if it happened, it's the way improvements change the world. Technology has done it to others, and it may do it to us. It is our job to prepare and adapt, and if we're going to ask for more resources if it happens, we should ask for them for others as well.

Re: Standing on the shoulders of giants

And depending on how you've built your AI, you might be able to do that. Many systems that are in active use aren't built that way. You can only add so many layers on top of one, most of which simply filter the results that no longer apply and make the model try again, before you start inhibiting the performance you're looking for. A model based on millions of words can't just read a few million more and insert them in because it's already weighted things based on the old words and those weights will effect any future data.

If we end up using lots of massive models in the future, machine learning researchers may start pivoting to methods that make it easier to perform incremental training. So far, that hasn't been necessary so people haven't bothered doing it.

Re: Bring on the Luddites!

That's not precisely true. The specific group directed by Ludd weren't specifically against the technology. They were against the technology's effects on them. The new machinery meant that their skilled manual labor was not needed because a person with less skill could get the same thing done. They weren't advocating for a general increase in worker's rights or services; they wanted compensation for themselves because technology made their previously high-paid work obsolete.

We techies, as you call us, are in the business of automating things. Stuff that previously took inefficient processes involving a lot of people can now be done automatically by a computer; there aren't banks of people doing mathematical calculations manually and repeatedly anymore, for instance. People have lost jobs that have been automated, and new jobs have arisen to take their place. That has neither been completely for the better or for the worse, but it has happened and if you work in technology, you have aided it. Now that you think it's likely to affect you, you've changed your tune. Perhaps you're compatible with Ludd's thinking after all, when you could be advocating for everybody.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

I found this copy on Youtube. Although now I'm not sure if that's the right thing. It's a bit menacing with a high drone, but it's got a really basic 1970s-style base which takes a lot out of it. Maybe I'm missing the context that it went with, as I heard that the Protect and Survive information was harrowing to watch.

Re: Harmony by disharmony

The factors of a frequency don't matter much, as a frequency is just the number of pulses per second. There is no problem using non-integer frequencies, and in fact most music wouldn't work if you limited yourself to integer frequencies (high and medium pitch notes are far enough apart that you could get away with it, but the low notes are close enough together that people with perfect pitch would start hating you). Thus the factors of a frequency or that one is prime have basically no importance to their use. I'll stop here before I bore you with too much information.

"But alerting the entire country at 2am because of a missing child thousands of miles away, sometimes at "Presidential Alert" level,"

From a quick online search, the presidential alert level has been used exactly once, and the message read in part "This is a test. No action is needed." Where did you start assuming that this highest level of alert would be used for child abductions? As others have already noted earlier in these comments, the Amber alerts that are used for child abductions can be disabled without disabling other types of emergency alerts.

Re: Coming to the UK soon (allegedly)

Since the point is to not have alerts that often and the tone should be rather annoying when they do come in, I'm not sure that configuring it to a tone of your choice is that important. It's designed to get your attention, so perhaps loud and screechy is an asset.

That's incorrect. That procedure is not used now, but that was the expected activation procedure for the original system, using authenticated messages only to a small number of powerful stations which were to seed the airwaves with the signal. Here's Wikipedia's summary of the original system's activation procedure:

Actual activations originated with a primary station known as a Common Program Control Station (CPCS-1), which would transmit the Attention Signal. The Attention Signal most commonly associated with the system was a combination of the sine waves of 853 and 960 Hz‍—‌suited to attention due to its unpleasantness. Decoders at relay stations would sound an alarm, alerting station personnel to the incoming message. Then, each relay station would broadcast the alert tone and rebroadcast the emergency message from the primary station. The Attention Signal was developed in the mid-1960s.

Before they had lines or satellite feeds going to all the stations or functionally so, and when they feared that an attack would take down those lines, the idea was that you could have more secure lines going to specific stations which could be heard by local stations. Therefore, you'd only have to successfully send the emergency message to one station in a region for every one to cut over to the alert. The only part of the description that's not true is hearing the signal anywhere else, as it would have been a small number of possible source stations that had to be monitored. That system is no longer used, but back in the days of analogue technology, that's really how they decided to do it.

Re: Harmony by disharmony..turned off Amber Alert as well

That may be true, but it also appears that you can turn off one type of alert without disabling the other alerts. So the issue is less with the emergency alert system at all, but just with the Amber alert part.

Re: "the [EAS] can take over practically any television or radio channel in the States"

Since the emergency message is automatically sent in text form to the phones, if they do have their phones in their hands, they'll be able to read the message before the tone ends and the automatic voice reads it on the TV or radio. I think they'll probably be fine.

Re: Harmony by disharmony

I think Canada's alert tone has managed to be more unpleasant than the U.S.'s tone. Here's an example on YouTube, in case you're interested. The volume is also important to how painful such tones can be to hear.

Re: Harmony by disharmony

You'd hopefully know about the risk of one and the test system would be changed to deal with the risk. For at least some places with warning sirens used for storm activity, the test procedure specifically involves postponing testing if the weather looks stormy to enable it to warn of a real event, conducting the test at the next sunny day that fits the schedule.

Re: Harmony by disharmony

"So, two slightly detuned tones are illegal tones."

Two solid tones, yes. And they're not slightly off musical scales; they're quite well off them. If you're using the typical 440 Hz = A4 scale, then 853 is between G#5 (830.61) and A5 (880), and 960 Hz is between A#5 (932.33) and B5 (987.77). Those are some big frequency differences. Your synthesizer needs to be weirdly calibrated to hit both those frequencies, and even if it was, you'd also need to be using a musical system not based on the typical 12-note scale because the two frequencies aren't an exact number of semitones apart.

That's not the main point, though. If someone accidentally played these two frequencies on an instrument during a song (which would be a rather discordant song), it wouldn't set off the warning. Only sine tones played simultaneously would do that, and that's using the emergency tone as a sample in your music. If you plan to do that, you're fine to perform live or sell copies, but it would be illegal to play that music on a broadcast medium.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Unhash?

There are a lot more than seven hashing algorithms, and you are capable of writing one of your own quite easily (though if you intend to use it for cryptographic purposes, think twice or ten times). If the goal was to have an internal representation that is opaque if leaked, anyone can write their own hash function to sort of do it, though a better way is to assign a random number instead.

The reason Facebook has access is because Home Depot wants them to have access. They agreed on the hashing algorithm to use. Probably the point of using the hash instead of sending the address directly was to have something to say if any non-Facebook user protested about the sharing. Home Depot would say that Facebook was sent a value that, if they didn't have your address, wouldn't identify you. This is without considering that Facebook has lots of email addresses of people that don't have accounts that they could use if they were so inclined.

Re: Unhash?

Hashing is one way, but every time they hash an email address, it will match anyone else hashing that email. They have two options. They could hash every email address when it comes in and just store a database of emails and hashes. Or if they didn't do that, they can go to their big box of email addresses and hash each one to see if it matches.

Hashing is useful in the case of passwords because there are so many possible passwords out there. If I had a list of hashes and knew that all of them were from an initial set of a million possibilities, they would cease to be useful. That's why hashing a common or weak password doesn't prevent it from being insecure.

Re: Really?

Alternate translation:

"We have no intention of reintroducing the tool at this time... because we didn't stop using it. We just sent a message to Facebook telling them they forgot to hide that from the big download all this random crap about you button."

AI cannot be credited as authors in papers, top academic journals rule

I don't really have a problem banning the tools, and having banned them, to punish those who violate such bans. When those tools have been used to generate false data, it's probably easier to prove the lies and punish the author. However, if the tool is just used to produce text, I'm less confident that a test will eventually become available that detects that well.

The problem is that AI's text looks generally like humans' text, even if it's written differently. All a test can do is suggest that some words look like they could have been automatically generated, but it can't prove that. It can use a bunch of methods to distinguish between human-written and machine-written text, but many of those are prone to mistakes that could be damaging if people are assumed to be guilty if the computer says it's suspicious. For example, if it builds a model of typical text written by a person and compares writing to that, passages written by other contributors, passages written in a group, or passages that have been significantly modified in response to critiques would probably look quite different from the norm. For that matter, I know that my writing style can vary quite a lot depending on whether I have an interesting point to make, whether I am tired or active, and whether I've successfully switched my brain from informal to formal writing modes. If it's about grammatical or vocabulary patterns, people who are less familiar with the language are more likely to have patterns they're more comfortable with and use more often.

If five years from now I can present you with a computer-provided report which shades a bunch of text in various warning colors for possible use of AI, how much do you have to see before you're willing to use the punishments you describe? If you wait for extreme confidence, a lot of people aren't going to get caught and they may think that using AI is safe because you'll never catch them. If you use low confidence answers, a lot of innocent people are going to get punished. Even if your test is right, you can't prove it and the person who received the punishment can probe the tool you used to point out its problems and claim you attacked them on faulty evidence.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

Re: Content

"That would be true if the sentence was written in a way that could be universally understood, which is not the case here."

Isn't it? The person in the article who didn't follow the message didn't express that they thought it said something else, or that their actions weren't contradictory to its instructions. When asked about the message, they understood that they had made a mistake without needing the message clarified. Their problem was not a lack of understanding. It was a lack of following instructions. I've seen lots of vague messages that omitted important details or were phrased in a confusing way. This wasn't one of them.

But I don't know how to make something universally understood, so teach me. What part of this message wasn't universally understandable, what phrasing would be universally understood, and what is the method you can use to guarantee that when writing future messages? My guess is that your answer to the first part will be tenuous as with the arguments over "attempt" and "reboot", your second will be as easy to quibble with as this one, and your third will be unusably vague or difficult. I'm ready to be proved wrong, and I write messages in programs, so it's worth teaching me if you can.

Re: That works??

Or, if you're writing the malware and I'm not sure why I'm giving you advice, you make your program start at boot and stay silent so someone can use the machine without making it obvious you're infecting it and your attack survives a reboot. Like they've been doing for decades. You cannot sell ignoring a message as a security precaution.

Re: Remove, Throw, Call

In this case, if muscle memory turned the computer off but the user remembered, you could always just turn it back on immediately for the updates to be applied. While there are some people who didn't have the realization that they did something wrong until after they left the building, there are so many examples of people ignoring messages that I wouldn't put it all down to muscle memory and leaky other memory.

Re: Snotty Service Manager

That may be true, but depending on what the updates were for, that might be the reason for the technicians' paychecks. If those prevented the equipment from breaking or making expensive mistakes, then they're important maintenance and the technician needs to perform important maintenance.

The same arguments are used against IT all the time. Why do you want to spend a bunch of our money on backups and enforce security policies that get in the way? Don't you know we pay you? Yes, but if you get hit by ransomware or a building fire and your data isn't there, you won't be able to pay anybody. If you have technology, it's probably critical to the company making money. If you don't think it is, have a trial all computers and machines connected to them are broken week and see how things go.

Re: Content

I don't think it's condescending to expect someone to interpret a sentence according to the rules of the language it's written in. The contortions we've had to use to explain this situation, arguing over what technically counts as rebooting or whether an attempt is an attempt if you know how to attempt it are ridiculous. Lots of messages are vague, and I don't expect every user will unerringly understand each one if it's terse or uses unfamiliar terms. I've seen enough examples of a clear error message being bypassed not because the user didn't understand it but because the user ignored it, so I'm not very willing to take the blame every time a user causes a problem by not reading by assuming that there was a magic phrasing of the message that would have perfect success if only I asked enough people what this meant to them.

Re: Have users ignored your instructions?

Rarely. In one job, I wrote software that was run exclusively by other software devs during compilation. This has got to be the group of people who are most used to reading error messages, at the point during their work where they're most likely to expect error messages, with sufficient technical knowledge that they should understand error messages, and with experience of users ignoring error messages. To be fair to them, we had a lot of users most of which never contacted us. Still, we would get emails from time to time asking for help with a specific error message. In general terms, that message read as follows:

[Tool name] has detected [number] errors in your code. Details of each error are printed above this line. Each reported error has an associated documentation link to provide more information about the error. If any of the errors are incorrect consult [link to wiki page about how to ignore, avoid, and/or report them].

Some users managed to read this, go to the wiki page, scroll through the wiki page until they found our contact address at the bottom, and send us an email to ask why our code crashed. We'd helpfully copy the error verbatim from the output and show them that they could either fix or ignore this. No matter how many ways we phrased this concept and how many wiki pages it went on, there was always someone who would send the email.

Re: To be fair....

That depends on your definition of reboot. It had been booted, she got it into an off state and then booted it again, so does a computer have to shut down cleanly to be rebooted? Is rebooting only rebooting if it's done as a single action?

Re: Content

So using your dictionary, if something isn't difficult then I cannot attempt it? What if it would be easy except something went wrong before I completed the action, for example I was going to press the reset button and someone blocked me from doing so? Can that be termed an attempt? I reject this definition. Attempt merely means to take actions you think will lead to a goal, which may be successful or unsuccessful.

Apple sued for promising privacy, failing at it

I agree that first-party data usage is less problematic than third-party data sharing, but that doesn't mean I agree with your acceptance. There's a reason that GDPR and similar legislation requires informed consent (and would actually matter if enforced). Just because I engage in a business relationship with you doesn't mean I know all the stuff you're planning to do with my data, and burying that information somewhere or waiting for someone to discover it later doesn't count as me agreeing to have it done.

There are a lot of cases where a company has a reason to collect a ton of information. I have, for example, engaged in a product testing situation where I was handed a prerelease device to attempt to use and all my reactions to the features and interactions with the device recorded for future analysis. This was supposed to help them improve confusing parts of the interface and judge what a specific user thought of the features they were going to make available. This was fine, because they told me that's what they were going to do. A company could equally well collect the data from users of the device after it's been sold, using the collected data to improve the next version, but it would be entirely unacceptable to collect anything like that without specifically informing the user of everything that was going to happen and getting consent for every part of it. Even if you don't share the information, you don't have the right to surveil everything I do for your own use.

If you want to collect ten types of information, then you need to ask ten times and you need to tell me what each type is and what you're using it for. In countries with satisfactory regulations, you should also be forbidden from denying me the service because I don't consent to the collection. If you want to share that information with others, then you have to ask ten more times for that part as well.

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Re: At least "our employees are our biggest value" still holds true

"That said, the whole "Don't be evil" should have set off alarm bells the moment the very phrase was uttered so I can't really see that as a guide to what the company would get up to."

I disagree. It fits pretty well as a call to caution indicating that this company has a lot of power and therefore a lot of ways it can use that power in a damaging way. They had a responsibility not to do those things. Of course, anyone has a responsibility not to do evil things, but that responsibility is even more important for people who have the power either to drive good outcomes or to cause serious damage by their actions, and I don't think that acknowledging that responsibility is a problem. It didn't take that long for them to abandon that responsibility and drop the unused warning.

Amusingly, one of the people who could have written it, Paul Buchheit, said that he wanted something that would be hard to take out if you got it written. Sorry Paul, looks like they didn't find it that hard to ignore it and then demote it twice.

You thought that?

"Even though Google dumped that phrase from its code of conduct in 2018, many of us still thought Google was a bit better than other companies."

Now why did you think that? I won't get into a which tech company is more evil debate here, because for any company that's existed more than a decade, there are some people who think any line of code they write must be simultaneously the most stupid thing ever written and another brick in the wall of corporate dictatorship (I'm thinking of reactions to Microsoft mostly, but they're not the only one). Still, by 2018, Google had lots of dodgy programs going on. Still use their search, still like Android, appreciate the open source stuff, I get why you'd do that, for the same reason why I can acknowledge that Apple's devices have some good features even if the prices are excessive and support too patchy.

I still don't see any reason why you would consider Google better than the pack by that point. Their privacy record had become clear. Their product support record with Android updates and Chromebook lifetimes was known. Complaints about their anticompetitive activities weren't new and the proof to back them up wasn't hard to find. Since open source is important in your estimation, you could see all the non-open standards they were shoving through W3C and similar bodies at the time, doing significant damage to open standards and making life harder for competitors who were actually writing open source software. Evidently none of this lowered them in your estimation, but firing some open source developers was the last straw. I don't support that either, but I'm a lot less surprised than you seem to be that they did it.

Poor Meta. Technical debt and user training made its exabyte-scale data migration tricky

Rearchitecting sometimes helps

It sounds like making a database system that can handle all the data you decided to record even though I didn't give you permission to have it works a lot better than tying a bunch of disconnected systems together with APIs that don't know about the system as a whole. Imagine that.

I'm dealing with a similar set of codebases at the moment, and it's as if people don't understand that building something with no design for expansion then patching each new feature on in the way that takes the least amount of time has any downsides. They don't seem to think that there's anything bad about the fact that there are three systems for doing the same thing, all of which work in different ways, have different interfaces, and are missing a few features that another one has. In fact, one suggestion that was recently made was to build a shim connecting two of these redundant systems together, but only to use about 10% of the functionality of one of them so let's just leave out all the other functions of that system. This is why I have come to dislike old systems; the original design was probably fine back in the day (some exceptions apply), but if people have been sticking on new editions for the past twenty years, it's less likely that it in its entirety is of acceptable quality and trying to clean it up is such a difficult task that it appears completely futile.

Microsoft shells out for 2.5GW of solar. Not that it'll make a big dent in its emissions

Re: Dumb idea?

"Many US states have argued that this is unconstitutional."

I know how fun making insults without checking can be, but it might help you to look at the facts before you do it. Of the 50 U.S. states, 47 are connected to large interstate grids, with two covering the whole nation although those two are linked. Let's take a look at the three that are not. The first is Hawaii, which isn't connected because it's in the middle of the ocean, two time zones from the nearest continental coast. The second is Alaska, which is not connected because it's quite remote. Even if lines were made to link it with Canada, the part of Canada that borders Alaska is sparsely populated. The third is Texas, which is the only state that could easily connect to a grid but chose not to do so. So if you're to be correct, we must redefine the word many to mean one.

Except that, despite the fact that Texas chose not to join a grid and it has caused them problems, they don't argue that an interstate grid is unconstitutional. That would be a rather stupid argument because it's pretty easy to prove it incorrect. All they have to argue is that they don't want to do it, and that's basically what they've decided. Bad decision? Yes, it turns out it was. Spurious legal argument? Nope. No states meet your criteria.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: The amount of times...

You don't have to calibrate a thermometer based on the water temperatures alone. You can use whatever points you like if you know where on the scale they are. That means that if the ammonium chloride mixture is a point you can achieve more easily than freezing water (it isn't because you have to get significantly colder which is a bit tricky if it's not winter and you don't have refrigeration) you can use that and remember to label it -17. Using a dog for a temperature source is ridiculous as their average temperature is different from humans, but as there's so much variation with a human, it wouldn't allow much accuracy even if you used them.

Amazon warehouse workers 'make history' with first official UK strike

Re: 45%

In negotiating, you have to start somewhere which is reasonable. If I went to my boss and said I wanted ten times my salary, I'm less likely to get an actual raise than if I went there and asked for something smaller. Asking for the moon makes you sound like you don't take the negotiation seriously, they can't counteroffer anything close to what you said, and it can also make the other party hate you and want to deny you things. Think about your reaction in a market (one where haggling is still common) between someone whose opening price seems a little high and someone who is charging a laptop's price for a cheap object. Which seller would you talk to?

I'm speaking in general here about tactics. I can't comment on how reasonable the requests are because I've never lived in the UK. Wage and salary levels vary a lot by country and I don't have a good understanding of what's normal. Whenever I see direct comparisons of salaries across countries, they look very unbalanced, but a lot of data can be hidden when only one value is reported because information about prices, taxes, or what services are government-provided and at what cost is missing from that straightforward comparison.

Yes, as the wage theft would be. It's also stealing if you're not being robbed of your wages but your wages are small, which is a different situation. One crime (and only the former is a crime) doesn't justify another.

"I realise that this implies stealing by a very small number of Amazon 'fulfilment' staff, but I wonder whether there would be les of this is they were paid a decent, living, wage?"

Actually, I doubt that's what happened. Among other things, the fulfillment staff are recorded in a number of ways so if you stole a laptop that you packed, they could probably find you. I've seen tactics such as shipping the wrong thing used more often by dodgy sellers who purport to sell an item and ship something to the buyer so that they have a longer time to run with the money before the buyer realizes they didn't get what they ordered. It's possible the computer was bought from a third-party seller who shipped using Amazon instead. Either is possible, but the latter makes more sense to me.

Ukraine slides closer to NATO with buckets of experience fending off Moscow's cyberattacks

Re: Barbarossa

Because last time, those who didn't wish for war didn't get war until countries that would have been their allies had been crushed, then they got war without help and in some cases got to experience the joys of occupation by an enemy who wasn't very nice about it.

Oh, and because watching people get crushed by a military force that's trying to destroy their government, committing war crimes (even if you accepted that they're allowed to engage in lawful war which they are not), and expanding the rule of a despotic government when you have the power to do something about it is kind of bad. I assume you don't care about any of that or have your invalid what-about-something-completely-different argument ready, so I figured I'd start with the amoral part.

Developers: What if someone said you’d never have to meet with marketing again?

The problem is not the talking

As a dev for internally-aimed things, I don't frequently have to talk with marketing. I do have to talk to management and various other parts of the company which are broadly similar. In all of these cases, I don't object to talking or sending information to these people. If they need to be alerted of a release, I can send that email with ease. I don't need a software solution that makes the process of sending an informational email into a multi-stage process of writing it and setting up triggers that determine exactly when an automatic script will send it for me; my brain can do that pretty quickly whether it's a message saying the beta is ready for testing, the RC is available, or the release is completed.

The problems start when the communication makes the leap from informing one another of events that are occurring to demands to change things. When some team decides it has the power to mandate that approaches be changed, whether or not they actually have authority, that's where teams start to dislike the interaction. Automating communication can't deal with arguments about the future plan or who gets to make final decisions. Only two approaches work: reasoned discussion of the disagreement or one team telling the other one to shut up.

British monarchy goes after Twitter, alleges rent not paid for UK base

Re: Said it before,,,

"Paying off the loans he took out to buy Twitter is certainly within his means, which makes you wonder why he took out the loans in the first place."

Three reasons. First, if he sold enough stock to cover the entire purchase, he would have had to pay more in taxes and he didn't want to do that. Second, if he sold that much of mostly Tesla stock, he would weaken his voting power (though probably not enough to matter) and decrease confidence in the stock so it would decline faster than it already has. Third, if he crashes Twitter into a cliff by doing stupid things, he'll end up losing less money because he can wipe out some banks' investments too. Basically, if you're rich, banks will give you money for next to free (cheaper than the alternative of liquidating your investment) and take on the risks. Being rich has advantages.