Posts by doublelayer

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

This is all true, but assuming the companies making AI models are really the targets, we're talking about companies whose primary business model is spending millions and waiting months for something to finish training. They can afford to have a bunch of servers pulling pages and scraping them if they decide the training data is useful, and the cost in time can be decreased by spending a bit more on lots of nodes doing the work. For the same reason, they can also justify buying the API credits to pull it themselves, depending on how many new posts they want to retrieve. The problem is that nobody else can, so Reddit appears to be building their entire business model on hoping that AI companies will be consistently interested in their data when most existing companies already have most of it and hoping that outweighs the unhappy users who make that content.

Montenegro jails Do Kwon, accused of causing $40 billion LUNA crash

They appear to. Montenegro and South Korea don't have a bilateral extradition arrangement, but they are both parties to the European Convention on Extradition, which should be sufficient. They have an extradition treaty with the United States from 1902, which has been passed through a variety of successor states but appears to still be in force. I looked for a good list of Singapore's agreements, but I didn't find one and I'm getting bored. Maybe if this means they don't have one, one of the other two will get precedence. I'm guessing South Korea will ask first and, if they decide to, send him wherever else asks.

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

Re: 123-Reg still have customers?

"Gandi upset me because a .com domain that cost £14-something to renew last year, cost £23.99 this year. And *then* I noticed they were going to charge for email accounts (previously got 2 mail boxes for free I believe) and so it'd actually cost me ~£60 this year. So... nope... voted with my feet."

I have the same problem, and I have the downside that I've renewed for years in advance and the new mailbox prices will be charged later this year anyway. If you've found another registrar that offers a basic email hosting service, I'd be very interested to hear the recommendation. I may have to get a separate email host, but my needs are very small* for most domains, so I appreciated the included basic service.

* In many cases, it would be a domain for a project or open source product with a mailbox for users to contact. I don't want to forward that to my personal email since anyone who enters something plausible in a contact form can get it and because I might add others to the mailbox so multiple people can see incoming messages. My storage usage is very low though. For now, my utilization of the 3 GB quota on the basic mailboxes runs from 0.00 to 0.03 GB, so I don't really want to buy expensive email hosting that will be used very little unless I can find no better options.

After giving us .zip, Google Domains to shut down, will be flogged off to Squarespace

Re: killedbygoogle.com

Unfortunately, Gandi are the registrar I mentioned in another comment above who just changed the way they do email for their domains. They used to include two very basic mailboxes with each domain, which they will no longer provide, and the price per mailbox has been multiplied by ten. This means that, if I stay with them and continue to use them, my effective price for the same product will be 3-4 times as large next year as it was this year, even though I've already renewed and payed them for many years to come (they do not continue to provide the service they included when I bought it). For a domain that is set up for a small project, I only need a very basic mailbox, and I don't necessarily want that to forward to a personal account, so I'm quite disappointed to have lost this.

Re: Email forwarding for Gmail users

I used to prefer native mailboxes on the domains to deal with this problem. I still do, but the registrar I used has just increased the price for their mail hosting literally by an order of magnitude. I've only got one domain where I run the mail server myself because doing so when you don't operate at scale is a pain, but it's looking like a more and more necessary part of having email under your control which isn't ridiculously hampered by the operator or expensive.

Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim

Re: This needs to be emphasized

"The story could have been that a digger drove a trench through a fiber optic cable up the road and shut down their internet leaving them locked out of their home, unable to control the lights, cooker, fridge, HVAC, entertainment system/TV and their alarm clock."

Except the facts, even the subset we had from the article, are clear in indicating otherwise. The guy has indicated that he did have local backups for the stuff he had, but was commenting on this because most users of the hardware would not. Even ignoring this, most of the IoT stuff has some kind of local option. Smart light bulbs still have wall switches which don't go online. Smart locks, assuming he had some which I doubt because I've never seen one that was any good, tend to have some plan for being unlockable manually. I was recently looking at some WiFi-enabled cooking equipment in an attempt to figure out what the WiFi was for and who would want it, and while I still don't have a great idea of how that's useful, every model I saw has buttons on it which do not require remote control to use. The thing that is lost when the account is shut down or the internet interrupted are the convenience elements, in this case the ability to control all those things using voice commands. Someone who relied on that could build a local backup voice control system, but for many users, they can deal with a loss in voice control by walking over to the existing local controls and activating them.

There are many here who appear to hate home automation hardware. I'm not just talking about not using it; I don't have any because I don't need it and I find the stuff I've seen to be of little use, and from the look of things, that applies to most authors of comments. However, that doesn't mean that I will look for reasons the equipment must be dangerous or stupid to the point that I'm inaccurate about its limitations or risks, nor that someone who chooses to have it is somehow less sympathetic. I'm seeing several comments that do one or both of these, and I find it a little confusing why there is so much hostility just because we may not use the same products.

Re: It says something about Microsoft's offerings

You basically can't do the same things with Cortana as you could with Alexa. For one problem, I don't think Microsoft makes Cortana boxes which you can put somewhere you want to have voice commands recognized. You'd have to have laptops sitting around to do that because Cortana only works from devices running Windows. I'm not sure if you can hook Cortana into any of the services that can control automated hardware either, but that's at least more likely (I've never enabled Cortana, so I don't know what it is capable of doing). I don't have any voice control except the one built into my phone, but some systems are clearly more functional than others.

Re: This needs to be emphasized

Exactly, and the other issue is Amazon responding incorrectly. Let's assume that an event like this actually involved a lot of intentional abuse directed at the driver. Amazon might want to do something about that, and they have the right to, but that shouldn't include deactivating the products they sold or they're likely to face legal risks, not to mention informing their customers that the products are as likely to fail as we know they are, but the general customer does not. Not only do they need to check whether incidents actually occur, they need to figure out what they'll actually do in response to them rather than going to the easiest automated switch.

Re: Hypocritical

That's an advert now? How about the one mine shows:

"Install the latest PowerShell for new features and improvements! https://aka.ms/PSWindows"

If that's what we're responding to, I'd like to see the massive complaint you must have for Canonical, which has been printing something like this every time I log in just because I never even tried to change it:

Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-200-generic x86_64)

* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com

* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com

* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage

[...]

Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:

http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

Expanded Security Maintenance for Infrastructure is not enabled.

0 updates can be applied immediately.

24 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Infra.

Learn more about enabling ESM Infra service for Ubuntu 18.04 at

https://ubuntu.com/18-04

When does providing information about updates when you start a program start becoming advertising? Is it advertising when I'm shown a license or copyright statement, more common in stuff with an open source license? This is not a good example of advertising in Windows. The ads in the start menu part is very different than this, and I could complain that someone even tried it for days, but a line in PS about a new version of PS doesn't qualify in my mind.

Re: no backup strategy, SMH stupidity

"Huge difference between email, which you don't need every day, and the lights and climate control which does require daily access."

I disagree. If a smart light fails, then you have to use the wall switch. Most lights I'm aware of (I haven't purchased any, so my sample size may be limited), have a perfectly functional manual mode which means you'll have no automatic timers, color changes, or scripts to automatically set things when other events occur, but if you can move to the wall, you can still have light or darkness as you desire. If your smart light bulb is somehow missing this feature, then you can replace it with a simple light bulb and have that until you get your smart one working again, the same way you would deal with a normal light bulb that had burned out. Email, on the other hand, is quite important. It is a method of authenticating to a lot of services, a way to get important communications, and if you use one for business purposes, can be quite valuable. I'd much rather deal with a prolonged smart light bulb outage than a prolonged email outage, and therefore I would and do spend more effort having backups for email than for light bulbs.

"Your post implies you must even generate your own electricity or you'te wrong."

Sort of, since I'm trying to make the point that, at some point, the difficulty involved in doing everything yourself means it's not justified to do so. The post to which I replied was quite disparaging of this engineer for not having a third, local, backup system for something comparatively unimportant, but if you really need that level of backup, there are a lot of other things that would also need to be backed up. Some people actually go to that effort, often when they already have plenty of resources to make that possible (your own servers in your own buildings is much easier for people who own multiple buildings), but most of us do not. It would be hypocritical to attack the engineer for lacking a level of redundancy they didn't use themselves.

Re: no backup strategy, SMH stupidity

Do you have backups for everything you've ever bought for personal use, no matter how inconsequential the purchase was and how minor an inconvenience a failure would be? I seriously doubt it. This was not a person who set up this system to provide life-critical services to a client who required extreme fault tolerance; it was a person setting up some conveniences in his own house.

Answer this question: where is your email handled? All your accounts, every one of them. Is it all on your own mail server? Congratulations. Now that server, it's on hardware you control, right? Nobody else is running it? And that server is in a building you control, and by control I mean that you own it so nobody can lock you out, right? And that server has a backup which you also own, in a different building in case the first one burns down, and you control that building too? And the email address that owns the domain for those private servers is also controlled entirely by you in the same way, so you can't be locked out through that channel either? My guess is that your personal email does not have this level of backup, and it probably falls far short of that ideal. I have taken a couple steps in this direction, but I don't have that level of control or certainty. Yet, our email is far more important to our lives than smart lights, if we decide to buy them.

By the way, if you actually have this level of control over your email, consider other services that you also rely on. Can you honestly claim to have redundant backups for everything you rely on, not just the most important ones? If you do not, then your criticism of this guy applies to you as well. Fortunately, it's unwarranted, and I don't think there's anything wrong with you or that you should spend the next few years overcoming that humiliation.

He clearly understands how it happened, but didn't expect that a misheard phrase would lead to Amazon turning off everything. That's not a strange assumption to come to, because disabling purchased products for an unrelated event, whether it happened or not, is the kind of stupid thing that can lead to lawsuits and Amazon should know that.

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

Probably. They most likely had a nested set of scripts, each doing one part. All the scripts responsible for doing something worked as expected. The umbrella script for monitoring those scripts had a problem interpreting their longer logs. It's even possible that the umbrella script properly handled most of the logs correctly, only failing on a log relatively late in the process.

Re: Noisy installers suck.

"No message means a clean install ... you only need to throw a message in the event of an error."

That works great until your script takes a while to run. If your install script has been printing nothing for three minutes, is it still working successfully or did it get stuck in a loop somewhere? Of course, this is also the kind of script, that, should I terminate it because it appears to be doing nothing (whether or not it was actually stuck), no output means I'll have little idea on exactly what it has done and what I need to do to clean up the mess.

Yes, there are some ways to investigate what the script is doing by looking at files it accessed, attaching monitors to the process and its children, and reading its source (of course everything is open source, right). However, the average user doesn't know how to do that and the technical user doesn't want to do that unless it's necessary, which in most cases it is not. This model also requires the programmer to detect, handle, and have a message for every error condition that could occur on any system capable of trying to run it*. Of course, that's ideal and I'd like everyone to do it, but don't pretend everyone does.

* For example, install scripts that can run on any vaguely Unixy system, but weren't intended for every single one. If I run them in a tiny Unix-style shell that runs on an iPhone and has no services stack, most scripts won't be expecting that and will fail if they try to interact with one. It would be great if every install script checks that, but most do not try at all.

Re: Noisy installers suck.

The part I thought was contradictory was this:

"Once upon a time, devs were proud of the ability to debug a User's problems, now they have to see the stack trace for themselves or it is marked "can't reproduce"."

You act like seeing a stack trace is a crutch, but seeing a core dump, which provides even more information to the debugger, is not. These statements don't seem to align. My story was not exactly the same, but an indication of why we try to use core dumps or stack traces before relying on less reliable user information, which is what I thought you wanted devs to be doing instead of asking for stack traces.

You appear to think that debugging got worse, when in fact the same tactics are being used in the same ways. People still collect logs and information generated by a crash and use those to diagnose problems. If they can't get them, they attempt to reproduce from other information.

Your reply suggests you might have had a different point: "So, yes, having *at best* a stack trace is nowhere near as useful as having the full core dump." I interpreted your previous comment to be expressing dissatisfaction with developers' skills, not their tools. However, I'm not particularly concerned about the loss of dumps; they're still available for programs that make them useful, but for many complex programs, unexpected errors still have some chance of cleaning up some resources from an unexpected error condition. A dump is a rather catastrophic fail method and it provides little information to the user, not all of whom can call the programmers quickly.

Re: Noisy installers suck.

The sentence you quoted contradicts your assertion. After all, what was the core dump? It was a lot of data about the user's situation that led to the crash. It contained a lot more data than the stack trace does. Those dumps were useful to debugging programs for exactly the same reason and in exactly the same way that stack traces are, and both only happen when the programmer did not appropriately detect and handle an error condition. In the absence of the dump or stack trace, the programmer has to try to reproduce the problem from what the user describes, which we certainly will do, but it is less effective because they may have omitted an important factor because they didn't think of it, didn't know it was important, or wouldn't know about it at all.

This reminds me of a debugging exercise I did a few years back where I was asked to fix a problem my software had when opening a certain file. They gave me a copy, and I ran the software on it with complete success. I did so repeatedly and in a variety of environments. I duplicated their server and ran it on that image. Only after a few days did they explain that the thing they were doing which caused the failure was run two copies of the software on the same file simultaneously, set to write output and logs to the same places. Of course we start with anything the computer can tell us before we ask the user to spend a lot of their time providing information they might not have.

Inadequate testing and probably several problems in the design. It sounds like the success checker was using the logs to establish whether something worked or not (bad idea), and it wasn't tested on all the different levels of logging available (inadequate testing), and the logs were not analyzed when the first failure occurred for some reason (not optimal operations). There might be more parts of this problem.

I've dealt with this kind of thing on several occasions, but usually on scripts that were written for speed rather than quality, and thus more frequently for internal or open source projects than for companies who need to make a once-or-never sale and therefore have an incentive for it to all look good at the start. One easy way to get this kind of false negative behavior is to rely too much on exit codes from programs. I've debugged a few scripts which assume that the only successful exit code is 0 and programs where the programmer thought that multiple successful exit codes would make use in scripts easier. One of those was going to need to change before the scripts worked, but sometimes, the situation lined up in such a way that the testing environment actually got a 0 out of a program which, in actual usage, would return another successful code. Of course, I've also seen the programs that didn't check any indicator of success or failure and just plowed on under the assumption that nothing would break, so at least the ones that print an incorrect failure message can be tracked down to a specific part that supposedly failed with minimal effort.

Bad times are just starting for India's IT outsourcers, says JP Morgan

Re: Always found offshore outsourcing / modern day slavery

"It also takes jobs away from local economy, don't pay taxes, and is this a form of corporate / modern day slavery?"

Usually, no. Some places have used forced labor, which is slavery, but they're not common in outsourcing and you clearly weren't talking about that. Hiring people in a different country to the one you live in, where you pay people an amount they accept and they have rights to participate or not is not slavery. It would not be slavery if I hired someone in the UK on that basis, nor if I hire them in a country which often pays less. Would you consider outsourcing to the UK, on a salary acceptable to the UK resident doing the work, following UK labor regulations, as enslaving that worker?

Similarly, the tax situation is not only not slavery, but not at all surprising. In my example, my British colleague would be paying tax to the UK, not to the country I'm in. That's to be expected, and my country wouldn't have a justification to complain about it.

Of course. The management consultant charges a massive amount and will get very angry if you say the work is garbage. GPT costs little or nothing and generates the same level of garbage, but if you say so, it will apologize as many times as you want it to and generate new garbage for you every time.

Google searchers from years past can get paid for pilfered privacy

They probably calculated the expected value based on some incorrect assumption on how many people will bother filling out the forms. I wonder whether any class action places are smart and sneaky enough to make the forms even more complex than usual or actively broken so they can split that payment among some friends who coincidentally are the only people to actually have registered themselves in a database.

LockBit suspect's arrest sheds more light on 'trustworthy' gang

"Amazingly overconfident about basing his operation in Arizona. Because zero state income tax?"

Probably not, as the internet tells me that Arizona taxes individual income at rates from 2.59-8% and corporate income at 4.9%. Also, although the press release and the complaint don't indicate how Arizona got involved, it does identify his residence as being in Russia. Perhaps he got tired of the winter and went somewhere warm, picking the wrong place.

North Korea created very phishy evil twin of Naver, South Korea's top portal

Re: Does NK not have something better to do

Most of their tiny civilian budget is focused on feeding its people, having turned basically every plot of land that isn't occupied by a military base or factory into a farm, even those plots that are not very good at being farms (a policy that has resulted in widespread crop destruction before after significant ecological damage). As for letting their citizens have peace, that's a bad idea for a dictatorship that has chosen the full Stalinism leadership style option, one they seem very gleeful to continue using.

Re: "shut down the now inaccessible phishing site"

It is not hosted in North Korea. North Korea has a very small address block, and I wouldn't be surprised that that block is firewalled in a lot of places anyway. It's far too obvious if you're running a phishing site. The actual address appears to be hosted by Cloudzy, formerly Router Hosting, a company in the United States.

South Korea could attempt to get that company to stop hosting it. They could also try to get the domain name revoked. Both would not prevent North Korea from setting up a new phishing site using a different name and address, but it could interfere with it at least a little.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: COP/EOD

Of course it's easy to translate that into human: "Let's do some work as soon as I'm done talking". If you want to translate each part, though, not so easy. For example, what does "synergize cross-functionally" mean? It's very clear that we're supposed to be doing it, but not clear on how we do that. The good news is that anyone can basically skim over it and assume that it means "work with each other", or more likely ignore it entirely and work the way they were already going to, but that is not what the words entirely mean. Someone who has worked for a few weeks will know what the key performance indicators are, but that doesn't automatically mean that they know what they're supposed to do to "align" them, although their assumption of "keep them looking positive, like you were already planning to" is likely to be close enough. People can learn the "low hanging fruit" analogy easy enough, but what does "provide visibility" on that mean? That you should work on it? That you should tell someone about it (who)? That you should write it down? That you should avoid focusing on that alone, which is probably a good idea but not implied by the words?

If it's just about understanding that the person talking wants you to work well, it's very easy to understand. If anybody says this stuff with a more specific plan of action in mind, they are not actually succeeding at communicating that plan to anybody. It's like the announcement for a new tech product where the release describes it as advanced, flexible, stable, smaller and lighter, faster processing, more memory, and after reading it all you know for sure is that they have a new product out there, but you can't tell any important details about what it will be like until they release the spec sheet.

Re: This is not even as close to as bad as acronyms are

"If you've never heard the phrase "Blue Sky Thinking" (lucky you), from the context of a sentence, you could probably work it out."

Time for an interesting experiment for me. I have heard the phrase, but so far my brain has always just skimmed over it thinking that I don't really need to know what they're trying to say. So I'm going to try to guess what it could mean and see if I get it right. Here are the options I came up with:

1. It refers to people thinking only for the ideal situation, I.E. for nice weather, without considering the likely problems, hence why it's just blue skies.

2. It's someone thinking of the situation from before they started the project, and it's an airplane metaphor.

3. It's referring to someone who lets their ideas grow too big, as if they're focusing on the sky instead of the ground.

Now I'll look it up...

Nope, I didn't get it. Also, I note that there's a perfectly good word for that concept, just one single verb which people will recognize already. I'm not posting the actual definition (well, first result from a search that had a definition on the page) in case anyone else who hasn't understood the phrase wants to try the experiment too. If you don't know and want to, here you go.

Re: Most misused list - where is "steep learning curve"?

"Plot "% learnt" or "ability to do useful work" against time and it becomes blindingly obvious that a steep learning curve is good - everyone is finding it easy to learn, or there isn't much to learn in the first place."

Only if they plotted it the same way you just suggested. It's pretty easy to see that there are other ways. Here's a simple one: reverse the axes from the way you did it. Now it's the amount of time taken to reach a certain level of learning. If the curve is steep, then it takes a lot of time to make a small amount of progress. Or you could take the derivative of your equation. In this case a steep downward curve indicates that the subject matter is taking longer and longer as a student advances through it, common in disciplines where the introductory material is generally applicable but advanced material is often theoretical and intertwined. If we're just referring to steepness of a line drawn on a graph, we can make a graph where steep means whatever we want it to mean. The idiom isn't necessarily directly connected to any particular graph that was used elsewhere.

That is if the person who first said that was thinking of graphs at all. They might have been making an analogy to physically steep things, which are difficult to climb, and it's been mutated with usage.

In his defense, he admitted this:

Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.

I agree with you, however, that his complaints about others weren't contrasted with a better writing style from him. Part of my difficulty agreeing with the essay might be that most of the stuff he's complaining about isn't common in typical speech anymore, because it was most often focused on overly formal text. While there's certainly plenty of text which makes a point of being excessively formal to show off, I think it's much less common to see it nowadays than it was in his time, based on books, papers, speeches, and many other sources of language from the time.

UN boss recommends nuclear option for AI regulation

I have similar objections, and another one about the "certain threshold". I wonder how they plan to specify that. It's not as if AI systems have a numerical complexity score that can be directly compared. A tiny program can be used in a damaging way and a massive program can be next to useless. A text-generating model and a facial recognition system are dangerous in completely different ways. I wonder whether any politician has considered even for ten seconds how they'd decide what would get the severe regulation* and what would not. This is in addition to the problem that they don't have much of a hope that anyone will comply with that regulation or that they will be able to penalize those who ignore them.

* They don't seem to have a great idea of what that regulation would be, but they do agree there would be a lot of whatever it is.

FTC pulls emergency brake on Microsoft's marriage to Activision Blizzard

Re: What happens if the FTC fail to get a restraining order

It has been approved now, so this is not really an issue, but I can answer the questions on what would have happened.

If they didn't get the restraining order, then the companies would not be prevented from merging. The FTC has to block a merge before it becomes illegal, and they haven't completed doing so. They could try to change their schedule to have the next hearing earlier, but no guarantee they could organize it or that that will be the last one they need. They would still be able to raise objections after the merger completes, but then you have to somehow pull apart two companies that have already merged, which is a larger mess. Any problems caused during that mess would probably get the FTC sued by one or both of the companies involved. This only covers the United States. If the two companies merged, they would have some problems in the UK where they have already been refused permission. What they could or would do about that isn't something I know enough about to explain, but they probably have hundreds of lawyers who studied British corporate law looking at it.

By getting the order approved, the FTC has a lot of power to cause problems for the deal. This is partially because they can still argue for the deal to be refused, but also because they can delay action until existing agreements expire. I don't know what's in those agreements, so I don't know how difficult it would be to negotiate an extension, but it would create more problems for the two.

WFH mandates bad for staff morale and stunt innovation

Re: Evidence

Those are good data, and I'm not trying to pretend that they don't exist. However, people who advocate returning to the office (I should reiterate that I'm not one of those people), have studies of their own. Even without considering ones that might have been written specifically to come to that conclusion, there are reports like this one which concludes that remote workers get more done, but by working longer hours rather than by being more productive, which has other downsides in the long-term health of the team. Similarly, at least some companies have described that they're returning to the office because they've seen productivity declines, often specifically referring to new hires. Whether they have the data to defend that or they just made it up because it sounds convincing is harder to know, because most of them didn't bothering giving out data.

You appear to have a strong opinion, so I'm not surprised that you find the papers supporting higher productivity to be convincing to you. I still question whether those sources are as universal as the summaries of them would lead us to believe. I am less convinced in part because there are a lot of different kinds of work, and I would expect there to be a lot of differences in productivity based on exactly what you're doing at home, whereas a lot of these papers either try to study everybody or focus on one activity which isn't necessarily the same as the work we do. I sometimes work from an office and sometimes work at home, and anecdotally I have some advantages when at home and often prefer to work there. The problem comes when I decide that, because that's my experience, it must also be yours and that of everyone else I know.

Re: Evidence

I agree that they should be able to say something more complex than "The office is better because I say so", a statement that has so far convinced exactly zero people (some people already agreed, but it didn't convince them either). I've begun to wonder whether this might be a test from managers to see if people will do something because they've been told to without having any reasons.

Unfortunately, I do not see that much evidence provided by people who encourage WFH, either. There are papers that have come to a variety of conclusions, many of which are limited to a specific company, and you can always pick one of those to support your point. In comments posted here, however, I see some people saying with no evidence that everybody should work from the office because it's terrible to do it the other way and many others saying the same thing, just with the office and home reversed. Evidence on this topic appears limited to personal preference, with at most a citation that their work has improved/suffered/remained unchanged from the switch from/to WFH/working in the office (pick the combination that supports your preference), so therefore everybody's will and anybody who disagrees is stupid or worse.

I have seen indications of improvement both from working from home and from having some employees in the office, and there are a lot of variables that modify those. I have not studied any of them, so my anecdotes aren't usable to prove which is better, if there even is a provable superior option.

Re: Bad headline

I've heard Americans complaining about that phrase as well, so I wouldn't be so quick to assume that it's a regional difference, rather than a group of people who care about the inaccuracy and others who don't, the way most grammatical disagreements work. Sorry to interfere with any stereotypes out there, but not everything you dislike about the use of English is the fault of a single country.

Bad headline

The headline's "WFH mandates" suggest that the article is talking about companies that don't have an office and require people to work from home, which is not at all what the article talks about. "Anti-WFH mandates" or "office mandates" would have made more sense.

Having helped a charity sign up for one of those, they might find it useful. Some systems that work with corporates have a tiny form which basically outsources the decision to the relevant national regulator anyway, but someone has to fill in that form to add them to the database. I can't speak for all such systems globally, but the one I helped a charity fill out took about five minutes of effort and a week of waiting, and the extra donations* was considered worth it in that case.

* The extra donations just came from me at the start, but at least they're available should anyone else use the same system. Since I spent the five minutes, it wasn't much of a hassle.

Surprise! GitHub finds 92% of developers love AI tools

Re: Kids of today, eh?

"OK, so at what point as an "industry" of developers do we take responsibility for our work?"

At many points, but not the one you're complaining about. If your management judges you on something, you don't get to choose that. It might not even affect your work. I've written good quality code despite management clearly not caring about the quality, just wanting something that works. So if the statistic shows that 100% of coders are not judged on code quality, it wouldn't automatically follow that 100% of code is of poor quality as some will be self-motivated to produce good code. But even if that's not the case, this is clearly a management issue. Let's take an example from an unrelated field:

Let's say that you work in a call center and I'm your boss. You're receiving calls from customers who have problems and you're trying to solve them. I've decided that these customers are highly likely to remain customers, so there's not much need to treat them well. Therefore, I've given you instructions to go through a basic script to fix the really easy problems, and if it's more complex, leave them on hold forever until they give up. Since I've given you such a simple script, you need to spend no more than three minutes on a call, and if you do, I'll be monitoring and harassing you over it. Whose fault is it that the customer service is terrible? If we're following your logic, it's your fault. If we're following common sense, it's clear that it is my doing that led to the situation and it is I who need to change if the situation is to be resolved. Blaming people for management's mistakes not only punishes the wrong person but prevents you from improving the situation.

Re: Kids of today, eh?

That doesn't have to be their fault. I'm not sure I've always been judged on code quality. If so, there are some places I've worked where some people were not being judged correctly. Sometimes, management really does prefer the completion of whatever tasks they just set, regardless of whether those tasks are completed well or if they were worth completing.

I find that the latter tends to come first; someone is given a task that has no purpose and management wants it done fast, so any time they spend on doing it well feels like time wasted and is punished by managerial complaints. It's not surprising that motivation is lower for task number 2, leading to lower quality. The survey also indicated that progress was measured in lines of code, which every manager should understand is a bad measure of capability or productivity, so we're not looking at well-run projects here.

There is probably also a sample problem as well; my guess is that GitHub managed to get 92% agreement on AI tools by putting the survey invite in something that only people who had used Copilot would see. They filter out individuals and small companies later, and 8% of the respondents were those who tried out the tool out of curiosity and didn't like it. I can't prove that, of course, but that's how I would expect a 92% positive survey result to be generated if managers indicated that they preferred that result to honesty and survey quality.

Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed

Re: Yeah, right.

This is the outdated view I have come to expect. Microsoft did want a monopoly in servers, and I'm sure they'd happily take one now. They're not going to get one. They know that. They've stopped treating that goal like it's possible, and they stopped quite a long time ago now.

Similarly, blaming Microsoft for things you don't like and they had nothing to do with. Systemd is not a Microsoft product. It was designed by employees of Red Hat, and it was adopted and promoted by Red Hat. You know, one of Microsoft's competitors in the server space you think they're focused on. But since you have a negative opinion on it, you'll jump to the conclusion that it must have been their idea and somehow they've duped all the distros into using it. Poettering went to work at Microsoft only twelve years after developing that and all the other core developers didn't go to work there at all; what a long game they play.

"Microsoft *does* care. A lot. Every linux server is lost profit for them. You actually believe a greedy corporation like MS would *not* care about lost profit? If you do, you have serious disconnection from reality."

Well, they do appear to make a lot of money on all those Linux servers they sell to people through Azure. They've got the Windows server option up there as well and they charge more for that, but they figured out before even launching that service that people liked Linux servers and were going to use them, so they ended up providing their services for those as well. So basically, they don't care too much because they'd much rather you run Linux on Azure than avoid them because it's not an option. The ship has sailed away from their server monopolistic ambitions and they know it. You, however, appear not to.

Re: Yeah, right.

Enthusiastic? Not really. But yes, I noticed that they've been using Linux in Azure for some time and added the WSL. That's not exactly embracing it, just providing some features that their technical customers want, but I'm not sure what else you would want them to do relating to Linux*.

* The Windows versus Linux fight became kind of pointless in the 2000s. Use whichever you prefer, or both. Nobody cares. Microsoft doesn't care, because they're pretty confident they don't face a threat to their desktop market share from it. Their embracing of Linux or lack of doing so would make basically no difference.

GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations

Re: How close does code have to be?

"the whole world is not the USA."

They didn't say it was. "In the US" is a dependent clause, meaning that the cases they're about to mention are from that country, not that everything is.

The precedents set so far don't cover everything, but the general concept applies to many other kinds of work and are frequently tested. Small chunks of music are probably the most direct similar cases, where a few notes in a sequence can be considered unique enough to be copyrighted, but in many cases are considered small or common enough that infringement of them is not possible. However, clips of recorded audio are also copyrightable, and those stand up to more protection. A lot of it will come down to a judge's idea of common sense, which while not being a perfect solution because it isn't deterministic, often leads to functional verdicts.

Re: Software is not a creative work?

"the "lines of code" are really the least interesting thing about it. Far more important is the design - visual design, interface design, component design."

I disagree. Sure, design is sometimes useful, but if Firefox moved the menus around, I could deal with that. It wouldn't be the most important aspect. Same if they changed the colors or the visuals around the controls, or changed the structure of the script parsing and execution system. What is most important is what it does and how it does it, and it is the code that defines both. Not to mention that it is also the code that implements the design. While each individual line of code is not critical to me, the thing that they allow me to do is. Whether the tracking blocking has a switch in the settings, in the menus, or its own keyboard shortcut is relatively unimportant. That there is tracking blocking and that it's been kept updated to continue to work against new exploits that advertisers try to use is very important.

The same is true of any other creative work. Take a good book. The core part of any book is its plot, setting, and characters, but this is not a good book:

Winston Smith: employee of despotic government, not having fun, doesn't like situation. Government tortures people for no good reason. Smith tries to think of a way around the absolute dictatorship, meets a fellow dissident, caught by police, tortured, ends up depressed, dictatorship as strong as it ever was.

All those connective sentences, each of which is relatively unimportant, is what turns this boring list of statements into something that's enjoyable to read. While many people wouldn't come up with a plot like this if they tried, many others could envision it but couldn't make it with the quality that Orwell could, and some people could make a book that is just as good, but takes those plot points in a different direction. Each individual sentence is relatively unimportant, but as they build up, they create something that is bigger than the original picture in the author's mind. This is why the idea of a dictatorship and a person struggling under it isn't copyrightable, but 1984 is.

Re: How close does code have to be?

Which works if you can find one person who wants the product enough to be the only customer. Otherwise, the person buying the work tends to be selling the product themselves, so just because you're not selling it directly doesn't change the situation. Basically, if you or someone else can't sell the product, you'll often be unable to sell the work that would have created the product.

Re: How close does code have to be?

"Remove copyright and you could copy any software for free, no problem. Basically same business model as open software has now: Money is in the support, not in the program itself."

Except for three major differences/problems:

1. That business model doesn't consistently produce the kind of profit needed to develop all the kinds of software that the copyright model does.

2. They are sometimes based on not having other companies copy their work, which works pretty well when the license is structured to require modifications to be published under the same terms and enough people are using the code to resolve forks, but not on other types of projects.

3. This would only become the same if the code was published, but "There is no more copyright protection" does not automatically lead to "All source code will be published".

Re: Global context of intellectual property

"Knowledge sharing accelerates economic development. Isn't it what everyone wants in the end?"

Knowledge sharing isn't diametrically opposed to copyright. In a few ways, copyright actually helps the availability of knowledge. The obvious example is why it exists in the first place: if there is copyright, people can sell the results of their work which means they're motivated to keep doing that work and making the results public. Sure, it's not free at the start, but you get more of it because people are attracted to the work. If you don't have copyright, then someone who cannot make their work without payment will choose to do something else instead, and you'll be denied the creative production of which they would otherwise be capable.

There's another way to look at this, though. What would happen if copyright was completely eliminated, and now you can use any code you can get your hands on without anything to hinder you? Those companies which continued to make software and want to get paid for it would decide that it is too risky to leave anything open to the customer and would resort to ever stronger software locking mechanisms to prevent people from getting access to the sensitive code. Since they would no longer be able to send scary legal letters to catch the horse when it started to bolt, they'd need some really strong locks on the barn door. When those software locks were defeated, they might focus on hardware locks, and unfortunately those have been good enough to prevent most users from getting past them; consider how many Android phones never get any alternative software installed on them because the average developer cannot bypass their locks. Those companies also now have the right to take any open source code they can find, modify it in any way they choose, and lock it away since the licenses would have lost all legal force. This would end up taking a lot of software developers and making them work on anti-copying code, burden hardware with extra protection work, and you still wouldn't get access to most of that code. Does this really sound like knowledge sharing, and do you think it would lead to meaningful economic development?

Oh, and "singularity" has a meaning and your use isn't even close to it. Look it up. We're trying to communicate here, and making up new salamanders* just causes hypothesis** and foments*** the conversation.

* definitions

** confusion

*** slows down

Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State

Re: Its demographics

"So in a world where people can afford Mercedes they buy Tesla. Why? Its not cost, its "cost of ownership"."

No, it's not. Just because people with the means choose to buy something doesn't mean it's the efficient choice. In fact, that often makes it less cost-efficient than what a poorer person might choose, because the poorer person at least has to think a bit about the cost. If you can easily buy an expensive car, you are likely also capable of buying more expensive repairs, and thus not thinking about the repair cost too much. The same thing can be seen in expensive computers, which are not necessarily any easier to repair and are in some cases much harder to repair than something cheaper.

Ask those people why they chose a Tesla. Maybe some people will speak about a lower cost or frequency of repairs, although I have no information on whether that's true, but I doubt that's the major cited reason. I'm expecting a lot more generalities about it being high-quality, high-tech, pleasant, or environmentally friendly. These are perfectly good reasons to spend money on a car, but don't assume the average customer has calculated out the total cost of ownership before they buy anything.

Lawyers who cited fake legal cases generated by ChatGPT blame the software

Re: The "AI" is a red herring here...

GPT generates answers randomly, meaning that it's not guaranteed that you'll get the same result if you just ask the same question multiple times. As far as I know, that's not even what was tried because the prompt isn't known word for word, so people have to try similar prompts. In addition, OpenAI have been known to add filters to eliminate embarrassing answers after they make the news, which this did weeks ago. This doesn't prove that the lawyers are telling the truth, but it means that a failure to reproduce doesn't mean that they made it up. In my opinion, it doesn't matter much because, whether they made up this excuse for the crap data or they did actually get and mindlessly accept the crap data, they've submitted said crap data to a court without having a clue about it which indicates their lack of responsibility.

Chinese chipmaker insists it has Intel on-side, not inside

Re: Build/Buy (again)

"According to the article it was bought. Suggest dropping "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology" filter when reading."

According to the company, they bought it. Intel, as the article points out, did not confirm this. I'm inclined to believe them. However, you can't take a company's statement of "Trust us, it's all legal" as unshakeable truth. Companies have been caught before using stuff they didn't have a license for, but when questioned, they all say that there's no problem with their situation. For an example, try asking a lot of companies for GPL source code; you'll get ignored a lot and some companies will actually do it, but you'll also see more than a couple companies who send you a letter explaining why the GPL doesn't apply to them, none of which have any legal legitimacy.

Re: Build/Buy (again)

All the posts I've read so far are based on the reasoning that "the Chinese can't do it without stealing our technology".

That's not what they say to me. They certainly could do it without our technology, but in this case, they clearly didn't. That this company is using an Intel design isn't in question, and the only remaining question is whether they bought or stole that technology. Neither possibility suggests that Chinese people are incapable of doing it or intellectually inferior. Taking a quick look at the diverse ethnic and national backgrounds of the employees of chip companies who design and build such things would disprove that idea pretty quickly. So would looking at many existing Chinese chip design companies who have succeeded in designing functioning and performant chips, and if manufacturing at high efficiency weren't as monopolized, possibly would have built them.

The reason that China doesn't have an X86 chip as fast as Intel and AMD make is that both those companies have a lot of experience with all the little quirks of the architecture because all the quirks are the fault of one or both of them. They have a lot of internal information about how they designed things before, which they can copy or improve on as desired for each new generation. Other companies don't have that, no matter what country they're in, which is why Zhaoxin processors run X86 code too but not as quickly or efficiently. In other architectures, Chinese companies have had more success creating their own designs, and of course they're successful at designing chips around existing cores, especially for ARM CPUs, and the difference is likely the openness of the design and the availability of a market.

China has the ability to make chips on their own, and if we were in a normal situation, they would do so as they have been for decades. However, it's also clear that, if they decide to, they're also willing to steal technology and copy that instead. There are logical reasons to do so, including sanctions currently placed on them and expected ones should they take a more active role in conquering lands near them. If they were focused on making a profit in a global economy, they wouldn't do it as blatantly, and if they're focused on having technology in a world where they're cut off, they would.

Man sues OpenAI claiming ChatGPT 'hallucination' said he embezzled money

It would be OpenAI that is punished for the functioning of their service. You can't sue a program, but you can sue the writer of the program who is making money from the operation of that program.

Re: Is blame binary?

"I thought "summarise this document" was one of the things these models were good at?"

It's more one of the things that they've been shown doing during demonstrations. They can, and they produce results which look good if you don't look too hard or get lucky, but they're as prone to problems as anything. Also, there's a chance that the journalist gave the bot an address to the file, which won't work; the bot will simply make up something based on the rest of the prompt. It can only try to summarize a document if it is pasted in.

For a demonstration of this, here's a blog entry testing Bard, which works similarly, on describing images, which it won't retrieve and as far as I know, can't do. It still tries making up a possible description for each picture it didn't read, and even if we assumed a picture, its descriptions aren't internally consistent either. The descriptions are quite inventive, though.

Notepad doesn't determine what words you type. GPT does choose the words to print out. Whether that rises to a level that can bring on legal consequences, I'm not really sure, but I am entirely certain that you can't compare GPT to Notepad using any good logic, especially including the logic you're decrying.