* Posts by nintendoeats

692 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2020

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IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

nintendoeats

Which did they go for?

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

nintendoeats

Re: Would have done otherwise

But remember, being able to fire people arbitrarily massages the ego of the suit who does it. Whereas, paying them out the nose 6 months later to do something just costs somebody else's money.

If you want to punish them, telling them to shove it is the way.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

nintendoeats

Re: Change window - cue the drums

FTFY: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/molly-guard.html

Outage-hit Twitter muddies violent speech policy

nintendoeats

Re: Elmo and his policies...

How would you feel about statements like "It is nessecary for world peace to assassinate Putin"? You may not agree, but do you think that sort of statement should be repressed? I would argue that is political speech.

nintendoeats

So...what happened to anybody can say anything Mr. Musk?...

CEO Elon Musk wants out of Tesla tweet jail. Lol, no, says SEC

nintendoeats

Ok, let's look at the source code:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

And pseudo-code the relevant snippet:

"Government agents shall not create rules which criminalize speech //throws an exception in specific cases, see SupremeCourt.cpp"

So the points of issue are really whether A: this is a rule and B: it criminalizes his speech.

Point A, is a contract a rule? It's easy to say that this is irrelevant because he agreed to it, but I don't think that totally resolves the question (not all agreements are legally recognized, even when both parties consent with full knowledge). I wouldn't blame you for saying no, but I find myself spinning around in circles pondering it.

Point B, does it criminalize his speech? I believe that the charges were criminal and not civil, so lets say that had he not agree that would have meant criminal charges. One could argue, and I'm not claiming to back this, that in effect the SEC was extorting a restriction of his free speech under thread of criminal law, which indirectly means that the SEC was "criminalizing" the speech being restricted. One could equally argue for the other side that Elon was handed a get out of jail free card. If the SEC couldn't offer such consent decrees as an option that it would increase the likihood of people being prosecuted as criminals; thus, how can it possibly be seen as a criminalization if it offers options to REDUCE criminal liability?

Somewhere down in the bowels of this nonsense are some interesting legal questions to chew on.

Microsoft strokes UK's ego by pooh-poohing EU approach to AI regulation

nintendoeats

Re: beneficial to the machinery of government

MultiVac was a bit cleverer than that of course. MultiVac would lie to us for the specific purpose of helping us to meet our goals, not because it was built on humanities flawed discourse.

nintendoeats

"Do you think ChatGPT or other forms of AI could be beneficial to the machinery of government as well as commerce more generally?"

I don't know, let me ask Skynet and Multivac. I'm sure they will have valuable opinions on the issue.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

nintendoeats

Re: South don't work in the North

How would these even wind up in the wrong hemisphere? It's not like somebody can forget they have a CRT in their wallet.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

nintendoeats

Re: When a product is better, people will naturally switch to it

I have a betamax player in my kitchen, and I approve this message.

Google staff asked to share desk space in latest cost purge

nintendoeats

"You pay for my time" does not mean "you pay for me to be miserable for a set number of hours per week". This is not the kind of thing that companies should be able to get away with when they are posting healthy profits.

Can YouTube be held liable for pushing terror vids? Asking for a Supreme Court...

nintendoeats

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

I think the point is that not restricting speech is vital, not that any one person is providing "vital" content.

nintendoeats

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

There is specific wording about this, which is an important part of the lawsuit:

(c)Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2)Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]

Content moderation is specificially exempted on the understanding that it would degrade the user experience for many websites if the service were not able to remove some content. The law specifically recognizes that such moderation does not make a website an active participant in the creation of content that is not removed. The essence of this lawsuit is the claim that promoting content with an algorithm DOES qualify as participating in the creation of the work (in this case youtube videos promoting terrorism). The plantifs are claiming that while taking down the video may not make the content provider a publisher of the work, doing anything to increase the liklihood of the video being seen DOES.

Having seen what youtube looks like without the algorithm, I'm hoping that this reasoning will not become case law, though it perhaps may not be as disasterous as some are making it out to be.

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

nintendoeats

Re: The pendulum swings

http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html

Same shit, different pile of course.

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

nintendoeats

I try, they just get angry.

"But I can play games on an iGPU!"

The brain withers.

nintendoeats

I work on a 3D graphics system in my day job, but not something like a game which has to work as fast as possible. What I tend to say is that we need to meet "interative" timing requirements. So if there is a hitch every now and again it's ok, but it can't be too long or a regular thing.

Then this goes out the window when somebody complains that it's slow because they are trying to show a correctly dept-sorted semi-transparent object with 500k vertices on an iGPU.

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

nintendoeats

Re: The difference between content creators and influencers.

As far as I know, the term "influencer" was created by marketing people to identify elements of their marketing strategy. So while logically it should refer to "one who influences", which is basically anybody who speaks, in practice it refers to a class of marketing spokespeople who are semi-independent and communicate exclusively through social media or similar platforms.

nintendoeats

Re: The difference between content creators and influencers.

There are some people on Youtube making really great educational/edutainment content. I would term them content creators.

There are some people on Youtube who advertise shoes. I would term them influencers.

Microsoft's new AI BingBot berates users and can't get its facts straight

nintendoeats

The fallacy of AI?

I think there is a logical fallacy underlying all of these things.

Why do we want computers to do things for us? One reason is efficiency, but equally important is the pseudo-fact computers are "perfect"; they will perform very simple tasks like adding two numbers, exactly correctly, every single time (I know this is not really true, but since the job of a programmer depends on it being "true enough" lets go with it).

When programmed correctly, these simple tasks become complex behaviors which can also be provably correct. If we assume that all CPU instructions are executed as documented, and the programmer made no mistakes, and the data is both correct and sufficient, then the output of your 3D model finding program (for example) will also be correct.

The issue facing us as we ask computers to do more things, is that there are lots of tasks which are difficult to specify to a program, generally because we ourselves do not have a complete logical model for them. In this case, the task presented to the computer is wading through the internet and figuring out what is true, and what is relevant to the user.

The AI solution seems to be to try and make computers think and behave more like people. The expectation seems to be that you will get a combination of the best aspects of computers (their infallibility) and people (their ability to tackle complex, abstract, often underspecified problems).

The fallacy is that once you stop writing provably correct programs and instead try to make the computer behave like a person, the infallibility chain is lost. The only reason computers can do things so reliably is because people have thought long and hard about how to harness the stack of guarantees they are sitting on top of. Machine learning throws that all out the window, so why would we expect models trained on them to retain the core reliability strengths of the computer?

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

nintendoeats

We rented an apartment a couple years ago, and it was sight unseen because of the pandemic. The listing said A/C.

What that meant was they included an anemic and extremely loud portable A/C unit. To be clear, this was not a partricularly cheap apartment.

We only stayed a year.

nintendoeats

Re: air CON

Just for my own interest, what does one test flour for, and how?

Take the blue pill: Keanu Reeves has had enough of AI baloney

nintendoeats

I put to you that in this case there are many questions around artistic expression, the meaning of media, and how artists are going to be treated. So unlike usual, it is actually reasonable to include media people in the discussion.

But of course they picked Keanu because he was in THE movie about men vs their machines. Does that give him any more value as a speaker? I suppose it means that he is more likely to have given these issues a lot of thought, and I kind of get the impression that Keanu is reasonably intelligent so that wouldn't surprise me.

Basically, I'd be more interested in Keanu's take than that of my local grocer for reasons beyond "Hey it's Ted Theodore Logan talking about philosophy!"

nintendoeats

Because I watched John Wick and my first thought was "wow, I should definitely go on a rampage to rid the world of heavily fictionalized mobsters". I totally didn't go to the kitchen and make waffles.

nintendoeats

Re: An A.I. can write *enough*.

"Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."

Core-JS chief complains open source is broken, no one will pay for it

nintendoeats

Re: Where were you?

Sorry, should have read "and it won't answer for those things".

nintendoeats

Re: Where were you?

For one thing, I'm not American. For another, I have always been opposed to the Iraq war (not that it means much since I was 12 when it started). The American government has done much that is questionable or illegal, and it won't for reasons I'm quite sure I don't need to iterate.

I'd actually prefer that NATO could provide direct military assistance to push Russia out of Ukraine, but there's that whole pesky WWIII/nuclear bomb issue.

nintendoeats

Imagine if you are inundated with state media about how your nation's army is fighting and dying to liberate an oppressed people who wish to be part of your homeland, and if you speak out against that message you risk terrible things happening to you and your loved ones.

From an armchair, it's easy to blame people for not acting out against the actions of an oppressive and information-controlled regime, it's much much harder to actually do it. That's why oppressive regimes get to keep existing. Ask yourself, what would you actually do if you were in that situation? It takes exceptional courage and skill to stand up and make progress against a force like the Russian government, and I cannot blame people for not being exceptional (though I will heap praise on those who are).

I don't resent a Ukrainian for hating the Russian people to a man, but that doesn't oblige me to do the same.

nintendoeats

That bit by Victor Shepelev disturbs me. I am in favour of all the sanctions we can put on Russia, but that doesn't mean that I am not aware that they cause significant harm to ordinary people. The degree to which an individual citizen can benefit or suffer due to the actions of their government far exceeds the amount of influence they have, particularly in a dictatorship.

Naturally, I also understand why somebody whose homeland is being destroyed wouldn't be interested in the above. Not being in either situation, I simply feel sorry for both of them being caught up in some particularly heinous geo-politics.

This said, I have difficulty interpreting the relevant section of the OP. I'm not sure what point he is trying to make or avoid. I do agree that open source and politics should be kept apart as much as possible, and while that may be idealistic everybody does have a right to their own ideals.

FOSS is broken, people need funding to work on it, GIFs at 11.

Creator of Linux virtual assistant blames 'patent troll' for project's death

nintendoeats

Re: Shame but..

Same. I bought a Vero 4k, just so I wouldn't need to connect this thing to the internet.

Sony in my case; it actually runs with no internet perfectly happily. They even provide thumbstick firmware updates.

nintendoeats

Re: Pro 1

Color me unsurprised. I'm still faintly amazed that a device actually exists.

Also frustrating, in between now and when I ordered the phone I got a Titan Pocket. I'm very happy with it, don't really need anything else. The only problem is no support for Lineage or Graphene. So now I'm waiting for a phone that will probably suck and I don't need.

nintendoeats

While we're on the subject, where's my fxtec PRO1-X? I have gotten so many emails saying "oh yeah, they'll be shipping real soon y'all".

Google now won't black-hole all AI-made pages as spam

nintendoeats

Re: Oh for the days...

I am reminded of a story from some Microsoft corpo, over 10 years ago. May have been Steve Ballmer, but I don't remember for sure.

He was talking about how he was using a hot air hand dryer once, and "realized it was the smartest device I had ever used" or some such. He waxed lyrical about how it knew exactly what to do at all times, with basically no human interface. He wanted their devices to be "smarter", like the hand dryer.

Problem with this reasoning: the hand dryer isn't smart. It's dumb. It has one user input (range sensor), one output (hot air), and the relationship between the two is trivial to understand. And THAT is why it's easy to use; because it's so freaking predictable. If it were smarter, it would be harder to predict and possibly have a worse UI.

Make things as smart as they need to be and no smarter. If the user can no longer construct a mental model of what inputs will give the desired outputs, in my opinion the UI is broken.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

nintendoeats

Re: only 2 ways it happened I see

log4j should have been discovered before it was even written.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

nintendoeats

Re: NBG

For me, Apple and Xerox deserve a lot more credit for improving usability, at least in the 80s. Once you get into the 90s, I would argue that Microsoft was leading in usability more because of their market dominance than anything else. Most other successful computing platforms at that point were not aimed at the home or (non-technical) office market, because those audiences were completely wrapped up in the Windows platform already (Apple as well, but they were going through their weird phase). So while I agree that Windows was and remains a very friendly platform for non-techies, I'd also say that MS deliberately created an environment in which nearly anybody else trying to fill that role was either destroyed or consumed (often via very sketchy business practices).

It's like if somebody opens a convenience store owner, burns down the restaurant across the road, then puts up a sign that says "only food for 200km". They are the only people providing a needed service, but it's hard to credit them with much of anything.

nintendoeats

Re: NBG

I was referring to the following line: "Now this was the 50's so computers were just a glint in Bill Gates eyes...", which I understood to imply that Bill Gates could be described as a father of the computer. It's not the first time I've seen people directly or indirectly imply that Bill Gates was somehow important in the invention or popularity of the microcomputer, so perhaps I am overly sensitive.

While I certainly agree that Microsoft has had a large influence on the market, I have trouble with the idea that Bill Gates was important in the development of personal computers. When I think through all the different things Microsoft did, what I consistently see is them being very good at positioning themselves to ride existing waves, but I don't see them being leaders. Microsoft BASIC was very popular, but it wasn't the first or only BASIC and it could just as easily have been some other language filling that role.

Even more the with DOS and the PC...Bill Gates had the right connections to position his company to effectively "own" IBM's computing platform, and I believe he did that with foresight. But the microcomputer, its move into business, and even the IBM PC itself were things that were already happening. Microsoft have carried on that way, seeing products or ideas that were already successful and buying them to integrate into the platform. One could credibly argue that doing so brought those features to a wider audience, but in my view it's a mixed bag whether that actually benefited the audience in most cases (would users have been better off if IE hadn't been the dominant force that it was?)

I believe that the history computing is one of many inevitabilities. Eventually, people were going to recognized the advantages of cheap microcomputers in the home and office, connecting them together, and making them easier to use. When I look at the figures in computing history that I consider to be important in the broad sense, I'm looking for people who "led the charge" as it were, seeing those future trends and bringing them about. That's not what I see in the history of Microsoft (with the exception of their understanding of the power of platform ownership); thus, while I think the details of the modern computing industry would certainly be very different if Gary Kildall hadn't gotten on that damned airplane (allegedly), I don't think the shape of it would have particularly changed and I don't think any aspect of it would have happened any faster.

nintendoeats

Re: NBG

Would love to see the downvoter give an accurate account of the history of computing in which Bill Gates somehow invented the computer.

nintendoeats

A fair point, I always think of Pixel as "Pixture Cell". Nonetheless, I still don't like 3D pixel because it fucks with the distinction we have in 2D between raster and vector graphics. And in any case, we have a phrase for this in graphics already; vertex.

nintendoeats

Another one, I work in machine vision where there is a lot of 3D data analysis going on these days. I've heard the phrase "3D pixel" used in earnest, which hurts my soul.

"You mean a voxel?

"No, it doesn't have a volume and it's not aligned to a grid."

"So it's not a cell then."

"No, so what?"

Fortunately I think that one has failed to catch on. We should call then Pixoints or something.

BIOS

Rewind

TTY

nintendoeats

I suppose this probably comes from the days of typewriters, when a gentle press actually wouldn't be sufficient and you really did need to "hit" the key. So in that way, it's more like one of those weird things where the terminology from an old technology is applied to the new technology just to appeal to the existing user base.

The one that always gets me is the "bulb" exposure setting for a camera. OBVIOUSLY that means the shutter will stay open as long as you hold down the button. How could you NOT know that it refers to an air bladder that you could hold down to keep the shutter open in box cameras from the early 20th century. Not at all confusing when you get your shiny new camera and are trying to figure out how to get arbitrary exposure times.

nintendoeats

Re: NBG

I feel obliged to remind everybody that Bill Gates did not participate in the invention of the computer, the microcomputer, desktop publishing, or in fact much of anything (except perhaps new techniques for exploiting software platform ownership).

/Pedantry

nintendoeats

Re: Where is the unsend button?

I can see that. Gaining great insight and courage in the moment, then coming down from the high and going "oh god what have I done!?"

Unfortunately one can never say for sure which part of one's brain is correct.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

nintendoeats

Re: Boffins?? What a weird word.

I would be happy to be described as a boffin.

nintendoeats

Re: Big Brother,...

So you are saying: you don't care that they spy on you, because you don't do anything that would upset them (because they spy on you), and you acknowledge that they are corrupt and will use this information to repress people who act out against the corruption. Is that about right?

nintendoeats

Re: Blaw yer ain trumpet

If the Chinese were to take over Canada in 20/30/40 years, I am quite likely to be rounded up and killed/interred/whatever (I'm not that interesting, but I'd definitely be "interesting enough" for a dictatorship). So yeah, I care. And then there is the question of what happens if another nation or company gains access to the data collected by China? The only way to ensure that private information is not used against you is for it not to be recorded to begin with.

I'd also observe that we have seen leaky devices used to track Russian troop movements in Ukraine, which may be nice for now but could also be used against us. Essentially, the moment China and the west start a hot war, any phone sending data back to Beijing will need to be disconnected from the network immediately because it would give them way to much info about movement patterns (and probably other stuff as well). If I ran a western nation, I'd be pissing myself about the pervasiveness of this equipment.

I hope that none of these things ever happen of course, but the upside of betting hard against them seems very low against the potential downside.

After less than half a year, Intel quietly kills RISC-V dev environment

nintendoeats

Re: If it's not x86 it's not Intel

My understanding is that DEC stuck with Alpha until they were bought by Compaq, and that if they had stuck with it AFTER that they would potentially have been in much better shape (same as SGI with MIPS).

In fact, it's interesting to consider that while Itanic didn't sink Intel, it DID sink some of their competitors.

Field trip! European Space Agency sends astronauts abroad to learn about rocks

nintendoeats

If the HBO series "From Earth to the Moon" is to be believed, this was done as part of the Apollo missions as well.

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

nintendoeats

This heavily pushes me in the "no idea what he is doing" direction. It would have taken...seconds...to see that this type of case is affected. If he didn't care that's one thing, but the fact that he changed his mind suggests that he DOES care. So either we are upgrading from 5D chess to 6D chess, or he really isn't thinking through any of his decisions.

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

nintendoeats

Re: Huh?

As said above, I would believe that it was a football related thing. The only thing that bugs me is that they would let trains through without inspecting the tracks.

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

nintendoeats

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

True, but I'm trying to look at this from the tactical scale rather than the strategic one. I'm quite sure at a high level, either Elon is truly nuts or his running of twitter is part of some kind of scam.

nintendoeats

They just did this in the wrong order

Why in the name of Christ did they not announce that the API would be going paid, then discontinue the free tier 2 months later or something? People would have been unhappy, but "our business isn't profitable so we need more revenue streams" is at least a good argument. Instead they get to look like massive disorganized dicks, with the same end situation. Good job.

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