Posts by Combat Epistomologist 55 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2018
Tell this to all the people you know (you might not know you know them) whose jobs have already been replaced by AI, or who are the only survivor in their department and whose job has been reduced to watching a bank of twenty monitors with a three second delay in which they are expected to step in of one of the twenty LLM sessions goes off into the weeds.
Don't be surprised if they laugh at you. Or if they threaten to punch you in the gob.
The insufficiently understood issue I'm seeing not mentioned here is that bidirectional "multi-master" MySQL native streaming replication is inherently unsafe in the first place, and can result in silent data corruption. Especially when that replication is over a high-latency link. To briefly summarize, the problem occurs when two "masters" update the same record at close enough to the same time that the updates pass each other in flight, and when all is done each database ends up with the update written by the other node.
I worked with a marketing company that insisted on doing this and CONSTANTLY ran into data errors where the two halves of their database cluster disagreed. Their solution was to constantly manually monitor for mismatches, decide which version of the truth was correct, and fire off corrections using Percona database tools.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this didn't work well. It was a continuous dumpster fire.
By contrast, for another customer I built a database solution with five primary nodes on four continents using Galera synchronous replication, with haproxy managing fail-over. And THAT solution worked. Yes, sometimes it was slow for customers in one region when their local node was down or rebuilding. But it worked, and kept on working, and didn't corrupt its own data.
"Nice fare deal you got here. Be a shame if you missed your flight."
Also worth remembering: The TSA hated the idea of the Federal Flight Deck Officer armed-flight-crew anti-hijacking program, and managed to get regulations written such that FFDOs could not carry their own sidearm onto the aircraft they were about to fly, it had to be placed in the cockpit by TSA personnel. It turned out the OVERWHELMINGLY LARGEST SINGLE CAUSE of loss of FFDO sidearms was theft of the sidearms by TSA personnel.
As Bruce Schneier said, "If you entrust your security to amateurs, don't be surprised when you get amateur security."
"Gentoo: [...] if [AUTOMATING] compiling everything from source is your idea of a good time, [...]"
... "Then just think how much more fun it is DOING IT BY HAND!!!"
I detect a certain lack of consistency here.
"Thanks to our policy of building our own software, we need the capability to package our own software or control the versions we use. This autonomy allows us to tailor the software to our specific needs and avoid unnecessary components."
Which is EXACTLY why Gentoo users use Gentoo.
... Oh, so now I can have my tabs back on the bottom, next to the page, instead of having to have them up at the top which has been an inherently stupid idea EVEN BEFORE anyone thought of it, without having to use extensions or custom CSS to put them back where they belong as I have had to do for the last twenty years, right?
... RIGHT, MOZILLA?
... No? ... Anyone? ... Bueller?
And you've taken out all the tracking telemetry? Restored "Do Not Track"? And provided a way forward to restore the vast add-on ecosystem that was one of Firefox's most popular features, before you nuked it from orbit TWICE?
No?
Then don't tell me Firefox 136 gives me the features I want.
I think you mean "third". OpenRC solves all of the problems with sysvinit that systemd was allegedly designed to solve, but does so without being a metastatic cancer that is slowly subsuming every other part of the OS into itself — or introducing any of the other problems systemd does. I shit you not, I wait every day for the announcement of systemd-kerneld (or some name like that) with which systemd borgs the Linux kernel. It seems like it's all just incremental steps towards PoetteringOS, the future OS that might actually be worse than Windows. If Poettering has his way, one day systemd will BE your OS.
IMO one of the most telling comments about systemd ever made is that if sysvinit were as monolithic as systemd is, it would have been impossible to develop systemd.
And there is the Nikola option (edit: which I see NOW someone else already mentioned) — a smart, powerful site builder written in Python that generates static deployment-ready HTML/CSS with no CMS or PHP required. Combined with Isso, you can even get interactive blog commenting still with no need for PHP.
I worked once in the tech support department of a certain Very Large Software Company whose name begins with M. I'm sure you know the one. One of the more senior support engineers would sit at his desk speaking with a customer in calm, unflappable dulcet tones somewhere between your therapist and Chuck Yeager ... and then he would mute his headset mic and shout unprintable profanities about the customer's utter stupidity in a voice that could be heard down the hallways.
Then came the day when his headset mic mute button failed ...
The build-everything--into-your-kernel approach, unfortunately, can very readily become impossible if you are using, for example, ZFS. Or nVivia binary display drivers.
ZFS is a solvable problem. All it needs is for Larry Ellison to tell Oracle's legal department, "Look, just cross-license the thing." But he won't, even though Oracle has taken Solaris out behind the barn and shot it in the head.
Exactly this. We are being told to believe that LLMs understand language and the subject matter behind the questions we ask them or the things we ask them to do. We have lost sight of the fact that they are a SIMULATION of understanding language, with no actual understanding of anything deeper than grammar and expectation. Autocomplete on steroids, indeed.
I've seen various industry figures hold forth about how "we're going to solve the hallucination problem". No, you're not. Because EVERYTHING AN LLM EMITS is "hallucination". It is simply that some of the hallucination happens to fairly plausibly resemble reality. It continues to boggle me that C-level corporate officers are willing to bet their company on an engine that is unable to correctly answer how many r's there are in the word "strawberry".
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the FT misrepresents socialism... ironically, their misrepresentation — "you can't have it because somebody else didn't get it" — is more closely aligned with the kind of small-minded conservative thought that screams about forgiving student loans because they didn't go to college.
(Incidentally, my site 404 page is CGI-generated using one of seven randomly chosen templates, from The Prisoner to Star Wars to the Goon Show to ninja monkeys.)
"Firefox did not keep up with the market and what people really want. A lot of hardcore Firefox fans are now happy Chrome users."
Well, Mozilla DID keep killing off its users' favorite features, force unwanted UI changes, and not once but TWICE nuke its entire add-on ecosystem from orbit. It's almost as though they were deliberately trying to kill off the Firefox userbase.
This raised the question: With Thunderbird spun off, if Firefox dies on the vine, what the hell is Mozilla even FOR?
I detest and despise Chrome. It's a horrible browser with terrible habits that phones every damn thing I do home to the mothership. I refuse to use it unless absolutely necessary, like I refuse to use Google search when I have an alternative. But at this rate, soon there will be no alternative. Unless you do everything on a fruitphone, it'll be Chrome, Chrome, Chrome, or, well, Chrome.
But that's not a monopoly. Honest.
I just got suddenly exposed to the Supernova UI this weekend. Dear gods, what were they thinking? The customizable toolbar is ABOVE the menubar. In fact, I'm given to understand they actually consider it the titlebar. A search box in the titlebar? WTF?
And that seems to be the ONLY place you can add controls. So, here I am, reading a message, and in my preferred layout here's the message, halfway down the screen with my inbox contents above it, and here in the messages pane are all the usual reply, forward, junk, delete buttons ...
But not 'redirect'. THAT button is sitting up in the titlebar. The only place I'm allowed to put it.
Seriously, Mozilla, WTF?
I can't help wonder if what's REALLY going on with this "supernova" UI, behind the scenes, is "Only mobile matters. Everyone else can go pound sand."
There's a couple of important details here.
First, the entire gun is not 3D printed, except in a couple of rare cases that don't actually work very well. The typical application is to 3D print the frame or lower receiver, which is (A) the part that is required to have a serial number if you buy one, and (B) a relatively unstressed part. A 3D printed frame or lower receiver, especially if painted, can look almost indistinguishable from a machined one.
You then build up the rest of the firearm using commercially purchased spare parts — barrel, bolt, trigger group etc — that are not required to be serial numbered. The 3D printed frame may wear out quickly, but it's cheap to print another one.
The other way of doing this is to buy what's referred to as an "80% receiver", i.e. an 80% finished lower receiver that you need to perform the final machining on (typically drilling holes etc) yourself. Under ATF rules, if it's 80% complete or less it is not considered a firearm yet and does not require a serial number.
These are both ways of exploiting BATF regulations that were originally intended to make it legal to build a firearm yourself from scratch, making all the parts yourself, to prototype a new design for example, with the proviso that any such firearm can never legally be sold UNLESS you put a serial number on it and get a license to manufacture.
Second, the article mentions full-auto sears can be bought (for some firearms). This is true, but the important part it doesn't mention is that to legally buy a full-auto sear you MUST have a $200 permit from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, because that sear ITSELF is legally considered a "machinegun" or machinegun part. Even if you don't put it into anything, it's illegal to possess one that is not registered with the BATF and does not have its tax stamp, and it's illegal for a dealer to SELL one to you without seeing proof that you have the tax stamp (the dealer's license can be revoked if BATF finds out). So, yeah, it's a thing, but it's not really a common thing. You can't just go down to the corner gunshop and say "Yeah, I want to buy a full-auto sear for my [fill in the blank]." (Well, OK, you can, but the gunsmith will laugh at you.) The fact is, virtually all full-auto firearms used in crimes were obtained illegally in the first place or illegally modified.
The whole controversy around "bump stocks" arose because idiots seized on them as a way to have a similar EFFECT to making a full-auto firearm, without actually having to have any controlled or technically illegal parts, and this end-run is why the BATF then decided they should be illegal. The people who buy them don't really care that accurate fire with a bump stock is extremely difficult. Personally I think they're a stupid idea, but there are a lot of people in the US who buy fundamentally stupid things Because They Can, especially if you tell them that by doing so they're somehow putting one over on the government or Owning The Libs. (Like "truck nuts". Dude, seriously, what are you trying to compensate for?)
"If you don't agree that AGI is coming soon, you need to explain why your views are more informed than expert AI researchers."
If you think that the current fad for LLMs mean that AGI is coming soon, you don't understand the problem. It should come as no surprise that the foolish statement above comes from a professor at Yale's MANAGEMENT school.
Honestly, the idea of just "tossing a satellite out of orbit" is completely silly. It doesn't work that way. It's not like yanking your kid brother's model airplane off the piece of fishing line that suspends it from the ceiling of his room. No mechanical arm on a satellite is going to be able to "toss" another satellite with the kilometers per second of delta-V necessary to de-orbit it in any realistic amount of time. It would be like trying to derail an oncoming freight train by tying a piece of string across the railway line.
Some of these language changes are quite reasonable. From saying master/slave to primary/replica (or in mechanical contexts, primary/repeater) for example. No problem there.
But can't say 'segregate'? Can't say 'sanity check'? This is rapidly descending into Pythonesque silliness.
"Saying 'yes' is unfair to sufferers of oppositional disorders." "Talking about the seven-layer OSI model is offensive to Thais and Chinese! Seven is an unlucky number!"
"You're not allowed to say 'not allowed'. It is freedom-restricting language. You're nicked, mate."
"Can't say 'nicked'."
"Alright then, off to jail with—"
"Can't say jail."
"Right, I'm detaining you at Her Maj—"
"ROYALIST LANGUAGE!"
"Oh, sod it. I'm off to the pub."
"Can't say 'sod'!"
"You can't say 'can't'. It's ableist."
"Oh. Well, bugger this lark, then."
> "It's unclear why a business with internal data about the age of its employees would choose not to publish that information, when doing so might help prevent or resolve allegations of age discrimination."
Unless, of course, they already knew that it would be highly incriminating...
Yeah, yeah, OK, the ability to do handwriting annotation (and even handwriting recognition) using the S Pen is nice if you like that sort of thing, and it CAN BE faster than trying to type on a mobile device, but really that's only because trying to type on a mobile device is such an excruciatingly horrible experience. (Which is a whole separate rant.) The thing that I love the S Pen for is because it makes it so much easier to TYPE on a touchscreen soft keyboard, since my fingertips are, bizarrely, not 3mm in diameter. Even more shockingly, this seems to be true of many other humans too. One might be forgiven for cynically wondering whether actual real-world human anatomy was taken into account when designing mobile devices at all.
The first "smart" phone I ever used was actually a work-issued Crackberry. I hated the cursed thing, not least because its keyboard buttons were so tiny and so densely packed that my fingers covered three or four buttons at once and it was never certain which button (or buttons) it would register the press on. Admittedly I have rather, let's say, robust hands. But not freakishly enough so to make me some kind of bizarre corner-case when it comes to using a human interface device.
Never mind sodium iron, the battery chemistry I'm interested in is aluminum ion. The chemistry is non-flammable, the material is cheap as dirt, and it offers up to three times the charge density of lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries, because the aluminum ion is 3-valent vs. the 1-valent lithium and sodium ions. The aluminum ion chemistry was invented by John Goodenough, the same guy who invented the lithium-ion battery, so, y'know, can't say the dude doesn't know what he's doing.
The Microsoft Natural Pro is still probably the most comfortable keyboard I have ever used.
...So of course, Microsoft discontinued it and never replaced it with an equivalent model. No Microsoft keyboard since has been as good, culminating in the wretched Natural Keyboard 4000, the final victor in the race to the bottom of the quality barrel.
If Microsoft were to re-release an updated Natural Pro today, made to Natural Pro standards — especially one with mechanical keyswitches — I would very seriously consider one. But a cheap Chinese-made keyboard with a membrane switch and screen-printed keycaps? Fuhgeddaboudit. Kinesis gets my money, for now.
"Indeed," replied the Universe, "but that does not induce in me any sense of obligation."
Politicians are uniformly reliable in their expectation that reality should conform to their will in any number of technically infeasible things, and what is more, expecting it to conform post-haste, and at no cost to the public purse! Reality, if it deigns to notice at all, simply sniggers behind its hand and goes on exactly as it was.
What we need isn't *longer* keys. It's *better/stronger* keys. A 521-byte ED25519 key is enormously stronger than a 2048-byte RSA key.
This StackExchange response is 7 years old, but the truth is nothing in it has substantively changed yet:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/90077/ssh-key-ed25519-vs-rsa
Yes, there is a lot of *chatter* about quantum computers. Decoherence continues to be an almost insurmountable problem. Recently there was a "major" advance in the field, which was this: Someone devised a scheme for quantum error correction that *introduced slightly fewer errors than it fixed.* Think about that for a minute.
Quantum computers, ON PAPER, have enormous capabilities. Quantum computers with limited numbers of qubits have been deployed in certain extremely narrow niche applications. But there is no real sign on the horizon yet of overcoming the difficulties of scaling them to be generally useful at real-world problems. The death of conventional cryptography is a long, long way away yet. It is definitely time to be *prepared and aware*; but it's not time to panic, and if you think that the solution to your (or anyone else's) problem is a 4096-bit RSA key, then you don't understand the problem.
One has to read the referenced paper with a grain of salt. A VERY LARGE grain of salt, upon which are written the following words:
"Keep in mind that a star having *no* 'metals' has no possibility of life on its planets at all, because in astronomer-speak, 'metal' means 'any element heavier than hydrogen and helium', and nobody has ever come up with an even remotely possible mechanism for life to evolve in a planetary environment where ONLY hydrogen and helium are available."
The authors of the research appear to have neglected the question of whether life on planets around their "metal"-poor stars is even possible at all. We don't have enough data points yet to establish what alternate biochemistries to our own are possible, but it is a pretty safe bet to make the general statement that a certain threshold level of chemical complexity is *required* for the development of life. ANY form of life is going to need to be able to build at least somewhat complex molecules. And that means "metals" need to be available. We don't know for sure what that minimum required chemical complexity *is* ... but I can flatly, iron-bound, copper-bottomed guarantee you it's more than 'hydrogen and helium'. And they need to be present in sufficient quantities to, y'know, get together and react. Or there won't be any life, or even any complex chemistry, happening at all.
One should probably remember that The Dalles only makes it to "city" status because of weird American municipal-government technicalities. "City" in the US doesn't mean what you probably think it does. By anyone else's standard, The Dalles barely makes it to "small town" with its population of 16,010.
Exactly. Sure, they got, what, 3.12MJ out from 2.05MJ of laser energy delivered to the hohlraum ... but it took over 300MJ to generate those laser beams. This is only over break-even by an exceedingly narrow definition. OVERALL, they achieved 1% efficiency. (Which, *in context*, isn't bad.)
But the thing that has to be remembered is that the Livermore fusion research center is the national Ignition Facility, and it is not intended for the purpose of developing practical fusion power. It's not even intended to do RESEARCH towards fusion power. The *purpose* of the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore is fundamentally to validate that the mathematics used in SIMULATED testing of fusion warheads — because the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty prohibits *actually* testing them — actually represents the reality of what happens in a fusion reaction with sufficient accuracy to make those simulated tests usefully more reliable than a couple of nuclear weapons engineers doodling on a napkin, nodding to each other, and saying, "Sure, looks good to me."
The gripping hand is, while technical ignition is a definite milestone (at last) for the national Ignition Facility, it is disingenuous at best for the US Department of Energy to suggest that this actually represents any kind of progress towards any kind of practical fusion power development. It is scarcely even RELEVANT to fusion power generation. That's not what the NIF is for in the first place.
Sure it does. It makes PERFECT sense. You just need the historical, and I mean REALLY historical, context.
£ (a stylized L), s, d. Librum, solidus, denarius. Roman money. "Pound" and "librum" still refer to the same unit of weight, the Roman pound, and in Roman times, a 'librum', in money terms, was a pound of silver. The librum was divided into 20 solidii, each divided in turn into twelve denarii, making 240 denarii to the librum. In the Holy Roman Empire the solidus became a gold coin of 1/72 pound weight instead of a silver one of 1/20 pound, and eventually became (by a long and convoluted path) a shilling (from Dutch, schilling), and the place of the denarius was eventually taken by the penny, but the L, s, d symbols for British currency remained long after the names of the original Roman coinage were forgotten by everyone but historians.
And then of course came metrication, which finished the job of breaking any obvious connection between the £ and Roman coinage.
The comment about copying Chrome is very much on the mark. Just like Gnome trying to copy the feel of Windows, copying someone else is trying to compete on someone else's home pitch by their rules. It's doomed to lose. You can never be "a better Windows than Windows" because Windows defines what Windows is, and you can never be a better Chrome than Chrome because Chrome defines what Chrome is. Success comes from doing YOUR OWN thing and dancing to YOUR OWN drummer.
Mozilla forgot that. Firefox set out its own turf, then abandoned it to follow Chrome in some kind of vague hope that becoming more like Chrome would increase its slumping market share, failing to understand that by doing so, Mozilla was walking away from any reason to use Firefox. I'm one of those who switched to Pale Moon, but I abandoned it recently due to Pale Moon too ceasing to support most classic Firefox addons (including ALL of the most important ones I used), more and more sites not functioning properly in Pale Moon, and — to be honest — the incredibly toxic developer culture at Moonchild Productions, with the developers frequently screaming invective and abuse at people who are just looking for help or even TRYING TO help. The day came when Pale Moon had nothing **left** to offer me that was worth putting up with that level of abuse.
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