Posts by doublelayer

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.

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

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: 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."

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

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.

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.

Re: Gammon's

I don't think 1947 is an accurate cut-off for this. I too wouldn't go as far as Hong Kong, but I would definitely extend it through the 1950s when independence movements in several African colonies were being repressed by the colonial administrations, at least into the 1960s when those places received independence. I'm making exceptions for places with small land areas or populations*, but with places like Nigeria (1961), Kenya (1963), or Botswana (1966), I think they should undoubtedly be included. It's not just Africa, either. Other colonies were granted independence only after struggles and around the same time. Some examples: Malaysia in 1957, Cyprus in 1960, Jamaica in 1962, Yemen in 1967.

* Not that the smaller colonies or countries aren't important as well, both to their residents and to history, but if we're talking about the strength of the empire as an idea in British politics then large numbers of people or chunks of the planet are more in the spirit of things.

Re: Learn both? It's all in the mind

Amusingly, half a degree in Celsius is equal to 0.9 degrees in Fahrenheit, so it's the Celsius thermostats that have more granularity.

Re: The amount of times...

"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."

Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.

Re: Hexidecimalization

Yes, 12 is a great base, which is why the imperial system of length makes so much sense: 12 inches to the foot, 12 feet to the yard, 12 yards to the rod, and 12 rods to the mile which as we all know is 1728 feet. 16 is also a nice base, hence why the weight system of 16 ounces to the pound, 16 pounds to the stone, 16 stone to the ton (256 pounds) is so logical.

Oh, wait a minute. I think I made a typo somewhere.

We use decimal numbers. Maybe things would have been more logical if we used a different base, but we did not. Unless you want to switch to using base 12 for everything, get used to using base 10. We don't say that something weighs 13A pounds, so while we're using decimal numbers to express the number of the units we're using, we should also use decimal to divide the units.

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.

He wasn't mislead. Twitter didn't want him to buy it and didn't make representations to make that happen. Only after attacking them for months and convincing the shareholders to make the board sell did they agree to let him buy it, and in any normal case, the buyer would do a lot of investigation of the thing they were buying before they agreed to go ahead, even after their initial takeover bid was accepted. That would have included having a lot of access to internal details of the company. He decided not to do that and signed a contract to that effect. If Twitter was not as amazing a company as he thought it was, he could have figured that out if he did what everyone else does and he could have figured it out by learning what most others thought of his bid. He did neither; too bad for him.

Re: The fundamental problem with the business

"Can anyone explain to me why a company like Twitter needs pricey digs in the center of London? Or any other big city?"

They don't. Until recently, Twitter was one of the companies most enthusiastic about remote working, and their workforce was choosing to work from a lot of places. They'd likely have cut some of their expensive real estate had that policy remained.

Now that work from the office has been decreed, it makes a bit more sense to have expensive office locations, but not entirely. If you're looking to attract top talent, it doesn't always work to put the office in the cheapest location. The cheapest place in the country is likely to be the place where people don't want to live, which hurts when you're trying to attract people who have the choice to work for a lot of companies that might be available in a nicer place. The cheapest part of a metropolitan area, while better than a random place in the country, is still likely inconvenient for transport and may be unsafe or perceived as such. There's also an advantage in putting your office nearby offices of other companies because it makes it easier to hire people away from those companies when you don't have to ask anyone to relocate, and when companies have done this for a few decades cities start to become associated with the industries that have clustered there. If you're willing to compromise on some of that, you can probably get lower costs in various other places at the cost of more difficulty in hiring.

India uses emergency powers to order takedown of BBC documentary

Re: Whatabout massacres

As demonstrated above, RT was not blocked. There is a difference between government-ordered blocking (didn't happen), corporate-enforced blocking (unpalatable but legal, mostly didn't happen), and leaving off a DNS entry (if you don't know how to get around that or find out that happened, you don't have the skills expected of a reader here, also didn't happen universally as demonstrated by several posters who do not have any problem loading it from UK connections).

Re: Unforgivable!

Ah, this accusation again. As with the last time someone said this, I've hopped onto a UK endpoint I have access to, typed in the URL, and got their website immediately. Possibly some ISPs have put in a DNS modification on their server, but it's not all of them, it's not legally mandated, and if you don't understand the difference, you need to learn some basic IT.

Well that escalated quickly: India demos homebrew mobile OS

A deterrent to the average citizen, certainly. A deterrent to the kind of criminals who want to steal money, criminals who either operate from outside India or routinely give bribes to the Indian police like all the people targeting foreigners do, not so much.

Re: Let's see images or code

"Device drivers exist for linux based on Google's work with Android so most people would start further up the stack in inventing anything. Also binary compatibility is worth a lot so that encourages a lot more copying."

Yes, it does. However, it also encourages a lot more copying and not inventing anything but swapping names. People who want to sound independent take something that already exists and make it look slightly different without making any real advancements. If I took GCC or LLVM and renamed it, copied the docs and switched the names, and buried the mandatory licenses somewhere so I'm not breaking the law but the reader wouldn't know the extent of my copying, then included a library of mine in the standard code, I have not invented a new compiler. All I would have done in that case is released my library in a cumbersome manner intended to earn undeserved fame.

When you say you've released a new OS, I generally expect there to be a list of differences from an existing OS that's longer than "The name is different, we reordered the items in the settings app, and it doesn't include Google Play Services binaries". Android ROMs like Lineage OS have a list of extra features as well as their own versions of default apps, and I would still usually count them as a variant of Android, not a new operating system.

Let's see images or code

This looks interesting, but I'm going to wait until the source (or since that seems unlikely a system image) becomes available. People have talked about custom operating systems before with generous praise of its independence, security, and openness only to turn out to be a copy of something with the names hurriedly swapped. If it turns out that this is Android, Firefox OS (for the third time), or even a variant of Salefish, they'll lose the points they got for actually following through on a plan I thought would just be posturing.

Windows 10 paid downloads end but buyers need not fear ISO-lation

Re: Just Today I Bought A "Refurbished" Workstation With Windows 10.......

Part of my comparison was thinking about Android from which Google Play Services has been removed, which I didn't mention. Even with those, though, there are a few features that people like which are unavailable without signing in, such as location or management of a lost or stolen device. I'm unaware of any third-party methods you could use to get that back and given Android's security model where you have to break your system to give an app root privileges, I can't imagine one working with certainty. I've decided just to live with the risk that if I lose my device, the most I can do about it is to send a SMS so anyone who picks it up can call me, but when I've listed features that people will lose without giving Google device access, this has been one of the least popular. There are also some applications that use the device's Google account as an identifier, either for antipiracy or just because the app forgot to delete that from the template. I choose not to use such apps, but it's annoying that they don't support an alternative identification method.

If you use a version of Android without Google's extra libraries of undisclosed code with every permission possible, you lose even more. Prepare for most of your Aurora-installed apps to crash on startup or worse, at some point after you've used them for a bit. FDroid-installed ones tend not to use those APIs, which helps a lot with general functions, but not so well with anything specific to a service or some more niche requirements (I looked for a while for an FDroid app that could use an IR blaster before the friend who asked me went to the Play Store and found one in thirty seconds).

Re: 500+ million PC's obsolete in 2025 unable to run Windows 11, 2026 might just be year of Linux

I'm not missing it; I'm disagreeing with you about how it will go. I think a lot of those machines won't go to landfill or use Linux because the users will be using them without security patches, the way they did with earlier versions. I won't do that, and I would advocate for an alternative path, but people don't automatically listen when I say "Try Linux. It's great" or "Stop using Windows 7 already because there are zero-days in it". I've even received complaints about that latter one here, where you'd think more people are familiar with computer security.

Similarly, I expect a large chunk of the machines owned by businesses to go to landfill before the switchover anyway simply because businesses replace machines more frequently and break them. Again, something I would prefer they not do, as repair is often worth it and recycling is better than trashing, but they do it anyway.

People have had lots of chances to adopt Linux and it hasn't been considered by many of them. I think the above two reasons will mean that this cliff won't be as convincing to Windows 10 users as you or I would like it to be.

Re: Just Today I Bought A "Refurbished" Workstation With Windows 10.......

It still works for 11 Pro, Enterprise, or Education, but no longer on 11 Home. I have heard of some hacks to get around it, but no guarantee that any of them work. This annoys me, but given how few people operate Mac OS, IOS, or Android without signing in and how many features the latter two drop when you don't, I doubt it will be resisted much by the general public.

If you can get this guy to help you out, your limiting factor would become the speed of picking up the floppies and stacking them in the right order. That is always assuming that you have a computer that doesn't have a problem addressing 512 separate drives simultaneously. Maybe get a group to spread the work out.

Re: 500+ million PC's obsolete in 2025 unable to run Windows 11, 2026 might just be year of Linux

I don't think that's going to happen. How many places still used XP or 7 machines after those versions went out of support? Of those who care about software support, how many will balk at buying replacements for computers, which while quite useful, will be at least seven years old at that point? I keep mine around longer than that, but think of how many broken computers are replaced frequently by IT departments and that many of them will have machines from the 2020 pandemic laptop purchase extravaganza which will all run 11. It probably won't be any easier to just swap Linux for Windows in 2025 than it is now, and companies that were willing to try it have had a lot of chances already.

ChatGPT talks its way through Wharton MBA, medical exams

Knowing how to search for information online is a needed skill. Yet we don't let people use that skill to get out of having any real abilities. It may occasionally be necessary for your doctor to go to Google to solve a medical problem, but I think we can agree that someone who does that every time is probably doing something wrong and we wouldn't feel so confident if our airline pilot typed "How do you fly this aircraft again" into a chatbot or search engine when told they have permission to take off. I use web searches frequently, but it doesn't replace the skills I studied and can use even if the internet's down.

That's not true. A computer could pass mathematics exams decades ago. We still make people do them. Not because you'll frequently need to perform complex computations without a computer, which is why advanced tests now tend to allow a basic calculator to be used, but to verify that the student has the understanding of the concepts which are applicable in courses that cannot be automated or at least not yet.

Similarly, introductory computer science exams are trivially easy to solve with a computer, and nobody cares if you can pass one of them. It's still useful because it verifies that a student has the grounding necessary to take on more advanced courses, the solutions to which are not so easily automated. Other tests involve knowing a lot of facts that could easily be retrieved from a database or parsed from an encyclopedia, which are of use for future applications. If you were taking geography just to memorize where each country is, you could just as well look up a map, but if you're going to use that knowledge to do things like predict weather patterns, anticipate problems in international disputes, or arrange for transportation, knowing nothing and having to constantly refer to an atlas would make you much less efficient.

In some ways, it would be best if we could make exams a way for people to establish their skill level without having an effect on their credentials so there's no incentive to cheat. This isn't easy to do, though, since academic credentials have attained quite a large part in getting jobs and proving one's abilities. Condensing all of education into a small number of standardized tests could have other detrimental effects as well.

World of Warcraft Classic lead dev resigns to protest 'stack ranking'

Re: Microsoft killing stack ranking

According to Nadella's speeches, he encountered a lot of problems trying to build functioning cloud teams with this ranking system due to the internal competition. It's not surprising that, having taken over and elevated the cloud to one of their more profitable products, he would have actually tried to improve the system. I doubt your urge to assume Microsoft has to fail at everything is true in this case.

Re: I wonder

I'm guessing there were five slides as follows:

Slide 1: Graph of GE's market cap by year, ending before it had that whole economic collapse deal. Caption: "Would you like this?" Hidden note to presenter: "Stopped ranking in 2016 after these people graduated management classes that could tell them why"

Slide 2: Graph of big companies in the stock market showing Microsoft as biggest or second biggest. Caption: "Learn how they got this way" Note to presenter: "Hope these people don't know that Microsoft stopped doing this a decade ago."

Slide 3: Diagram of stack ranking of a large team with extra notes, for example "Sold 50% above average" for the high person and "set building on fire" for the lowest.

Slide 4: List of platitudes about "Move into the future with the best of your business and constantly strive to hire the best people".

Slide 5: We at WeCanUsePowerPoint Consulting Group are proud to serve your company by providing you the best employee management services. That will be $8 million please. Comment from supervisor: don't include the bill in the presentation. Comment from writer: I will make that change before presenting this to the client. Comment from supervisor: we should have a spot in this presentation where we put the client's name so it doesn't look like we just send this to everybody. Hidden note to presenter: "You should distract participants until someone figures out how to delete these comments from the presentation."

WFH can get you 40% salary boost in UK and US tech jobs

Re: Alright for now, but...

Remote working doesn't prevent any of the "that's not the way things are done round here" culture. In fact, I think it's slightly more likely to kill suggested improvements, because there is less of an opportunity to suggest the improvement casually to individual colleagues to get their thoughts before bringing it up to everyone in a larger team meeting. No matter where people are working, a workplace that doesn't want to change won't.

Bill shock? The red ink of web services doesn’t come out of the blue

The same is true of people who don't pay sufficient attention to backups. Nothing is immune to something catastrophically collapsing, and it is the job of the administrators to have a method of recovering from a situation like that. Whether that's using multiple datacenters in a cloud array or having physical servers in multiple places, it involves extra expense for the benefit of resiliency. There are many actions OVH customers could have taken which would have survived the loss of the datacenter, many of which wouldn't even require downtime. OVH's example demonstrates that the cloud goes wrong, but not that on prem is better.

A lot of things were different in the 1960s, not universally for the better and most of which is not coming back.

"it's worth remembering that back then almost everyone created open-source software code to help other users get things working. And everyone could read the source and update their own work without having to panic about what might happen."

That's a bit charitable. Since people were writing in assembly quite frequently, the programs people received could be more easily edited. You can theoretically modify the binaries we receive today, but it's harder because they're compiled from more complex languages and tend to be much bigger. A lot of software wasn't open source just in the sense that it wasn't published for anyone's use, but kept restricted to the organization that wrote it or to people who bought it. Those people would have access to the code, but it wasn't like modern open source is where any person who wants can get a copy for free in a few minutes and with clearly defined rights to copy, modify, and distribute.

"CP/M and MSDOS were created and while they made a few people get a decent payroll, neither operating system generated millions"

Millions of what? Of dollars or pounds, yes they did. Digital Research had revenue of $45M in 1983. We all know how profitable Microsoft was. Some of that came from other software like compilers for DR or productivity software from MS, but a lot of that relied on the operating systems that software ran on. Millions of computers? I'm not sure, but I think DOS did have millions of installs eventually. CP/M came along too early to get mass adoption because computers weren't mainstream in the 1974-1983 period.

"But now Twitter is worth 41 billion dollars"

No, somebody paid $44B for it. That doesn't mean it was worth that much, and now that that person has spent a few months smashing it, it's worth less than it used to be.

"where did all that money come from,"

From the people who thought that Musk-owned companies are a lot better than anyone else making similar products and thus valued them very highly, from cryptocurrency speculation, and banks who are now regretting that they put up cash when a billionaire decided to make an impulse buy. But if you're meaning companies other than Twitter, such as modern operating systems, it came from the fact that billions of people are using computers today who had never thought of doing so in the 1980s.

"and where is it going? Is everyone happy or just in debt?"

Everyone isn't happy, but I'm not sure that's ever an option. If we're specifically speaking of Twitter, then some people don't use it (myself included), so my happiness level hasn't changed as it's been damaged. If we're talking large corporations in general, we had large corporations before; they were just different names. It causes problems now for the same reason that it did before, and we'll have to deal with that, but it's not always on the top of my list of problems I need to solve.

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

"And again, there are going to be 5, not 32 of them."

This is incorrect. There are going to be five lines of parts serving different power levels, each containing at least one but probably more individual choices. You could argue that Intel has only five lines (I9, I7, I5, I3, and the thing that used to have the Celeron/Pentium name but now they just call Processor). The 32 mobile choices are variants of these five lines, as AMD's choices will be. Either way, there are lots of choices and you have to figure it out.

Hundreds of Spotify staff stream out the door in latest layoffs

A global streaming business which needs infrastructure maintained in multiple places and monitored for scaling as well as functionality, working with artists and recording companies requiring salespeople and contract lawyers, makes money from advertising and thus needs people to work with advertisers in all the major markets, and also owns a lot of podcasts which involves the work of a media company as well. Yes, you end up finding new tasks to do which requires hiring more people to get them done. Writing an app that can play some audio files off this server over here takes a single person or more likely a small team. Scaling it up to the level described is another problem. Doing that while making money is even more challenging, and from the sound of it they haven't figured that part out.

Universities offered software to sniff out ChatGPT-written essays

Re: Just expell anyone caught

One problem is that a tool like this will only give you a prediction of whether GPT was used. It can say that such a thing is probable, but not that it is certain. If a student denies it and you have a tool which says "computer says yes" but you can't verify it, what will you do? If you catch someone using it to generate work or can prove it with certainty, then treating it as a violation of policies against cheating makes sense, but there will have to be some plan for cases where it's in doubt whether it happened.