Posts by withQuietEyes

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

Swiss ones are too, but with even stranger accent keys. I always look like a moron when I have to use someone else's computer, because my keyboard is canadian

Cybercrims now licking stamps and sending extortion demands in snail mail

Re: Wouldn't work round here...

Respectfully, that's hilarious. (Probably also very inconvenient for you, but hilarious.)

Agent P waxes lyrical about 14 years of systemd

This does at least explain the impressive number of "I <3 systemd" shirts I saw.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

Familial tech support is still like this

My dad likes his gadgets, and I'm at my parents' helping them set up the new house they just moved into. Guess who's been fixing everything from soundbars to TV setups to printers since arriving.

(With the dog forever attempting to help by drooling on the technology in question.)

The Automattic vs WP Engine WordPress wars are getting really annoying

Well that's proven me wrong.

I thought, when his transphobic nonsense went down on Tumblr (and I found out he was the CEO of fucking WORDPRESS), that it was a Musk-like situation: some intelligent subordinate had redirected his more loony instincts towards Tumblr, the useless moneysink (/affectionate) that they'd somehow ended up with, in order to keep him from making trouble in the actual important shit in the company. Sure, he'd piss off Tumblr instantly, but that's a bit like pissing off the three specific sparrows who live in your favorite park bench. Pissing off the entire WP Engine userbase seems a very different affair.

My brother in Christ she joked about turning him off and on again. Like a computer. Because he wasn't working right.

You know, the joke that this entire site has affectionately beaten into the ground.

How violent.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

I can beat 8.5 seconds...

I clicked Apply on the display configuration screen.

(That whole internship was like that, honestly. I think their one IT guy got an intern specifically so he could fob off these kinds of tasks and actually get some work done.)

NIST: New smoke alarms are better at detecting fires, but still go off for bacon

Re: Just like UK building regulations say

Or with your wardrobe, I should hope. One must have a touch of the dashing in one's outfit, and the man is an utterly joyless dresser!

Re: Not in kitchen >you need sprinklers!

Or do what my mom does and take the portable hob outside for it. (Two birds with one stone: the house doesn't smell of oil afterwards)

Re: Not in kitchen

This prompted me to go wandering around my apartment to actually find my smoke alarm. It is outside of my delightfully separate kitchen, over the door to the corridor, which in fairness is still within three meters of the door (oldish build, so the kitchen is separate but also a little galley thing)

Re: Heat detector

In fairness, I wouldn't expect false positives to be as big an issue for smoke alarms as for cars or the like. 1. they are SO loud that it's hard to ignore them, and 2. Usually when the false positives happen, you are physically standing over a pan of smoking oil and can identify the source. If it starts blaring and I don't already know exactly where the smoke is coming from, I know to be, well, alarmed.

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Re: "French president Emannuel Macron used his X account"

Also, "XEETED"

San Francisco set to ban rent-hiking algorithms used by landlords

Re: Well...

Maybe it'll work like anti-discrimination laws? At least you can catch the ones stupid enough to tell you to your face that they're doing it. And then it can form a foundation for later regulations. (Hopefully.)

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Open-source could stand to accept the new blood it gets

As one of the young ones - you need to accept that open source doesn't attract geniuses. They'll use it, but there are other new and interesting things for them to work on. Those of us who are interested in open source are, well, average. A bit slow, not great at getting engaged in things without guidance or motivators or *someone who'll talk us through it*. If you keep trying to motivate young geniuses to work on open source, you'll get nowhere. They're off making hundreds of thousands of dollars in cutting-edge computing and AI research. Focus on teaching the B- students why and how to contribute.

And yes, that means answering a lot of dumb questions. Or accepting that open source is going to have a much smaller base of maintainers in the future.

Re: New Cow Theory?

I mean yeah, that sounds like exactly the reason why nobody i know (even those of us who like and use open-source) want to join old or important open-source projects. The attitude of everyone in them is "You young kids don't know how to write Real Code! You need to be whipped into shape!" ... and then fail to provide any whipping. Or explanations. People with the will and ability to sit down and independently read through thousands of lines of code are few and far between, and they're mostly busy doing things that make a lot more money than open-source. The rest of us do actually need our hands held if you want us to become useful.

Re: New Cow Theory?

This is it, yeah. I tried to get into understanding open source (nothing fancy; trying to understand how Arch worked, attempting to read source code for open-source programs I was using) and hit that wall of sarcasm pretty much immediately. I don't think I even got to the point of asking my own questions! I found questions other people had asked and got scared off by the replies they were getting. I can't speak for others, but personally I'm definitely more sensitive than the average programmer, and being scolded for asking a question scared me off trying all that hard at the time.

Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign

Re: Privacy Expert?

I skimmed the PDF, it looks like that was his job description at time of trial

Re: Why, oh why ?

I mean, I know a fair number of women whose exes would have felt entitled to do this sort of thing and just couldn´t be bothered/wouldn't have known how to. There's a level of entitlement that some men will have towards women they're attracted to; they treat it almost as a crime when they get turned down or broken up with. It's a more common mindset than I think any of us like to think about.

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

Well that's a bit dumb.

I found and watched the reporting on this from one of the big radio/tv groups here, and only about half of currently used cars have DAB+ radio. In a country where the radio is regularly used to warn about traffic hazards, jams, closed tunnels.

This'll go well.

Plus there's a 10% of the population who don't use it yet, especially for local stations, and that's an awful lot of people to shove off their favorite channels.

Parliamentarians urge next UK govt to consider ban on smartphones for under-16s

It's almost as if A) more and more of children's homework is processed in online platforms and B) there aren't enough safe options for modern kids to physically hang out with their friends with even marginal privacy from their parents.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

Can I join your class? I started on Linux in university and I'm now very comfortable messing around with software and operating systems, but I never quite got past the "electronics are scary and also for boys" phase, and now I don't really know where to start. (And I make miniatures, so I may be an adult but I'd still want to set up a dollhouse! It's actually what got me to start at least trying, now; I managed a very simple circuit with two LEDs and one of those giant batteries, but I don't know how to actually install it or have it turn on and off)

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: Honestly....

I bought the Pavilion when I started a computer science degree at uni, so excited for my first Real Laptop (had a Chromebook before that because it was cheap and a pretty color). It broke down on me three times that first year, and was hot and making screaming fan noises all the rest of the time. Gave up on it the next year, when my dad found a half-price Thinkpad that I've been using ever since. Only problem I've ever had with my Thinkpad was my own stupid fault. (I busted up the charging port somehow).

Cinnamon and KDE sync version numbers in desktop sibling rivalry

Re: Stark differences in DE

Base KDE is incredibly ugly, but I keep coming back to it because I can customize it to hell and back from the actual settings, rather than having to do it through config files, and I'm lazy like that. (Although lately it's been crashing on me a lot, so it might be time to look at other ideas.)

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

Re: Good.

I didn't start using adblock until they started playing multiple 5-second-minimum ads before every video. I remember back when they had little banner ads along the bottom, no-one ever raised a fuss about those, least of all me

Spotted in the wild: Chimera – a Linux that isn't GNU/Linux

How to know you're reading something too technical for you

The voice in your head that reads stuff out turns into one of the grown-ups from Rugrats talking on the phone.

(Look, i have barely grasped the difference between an OS, a DE and a kernel. I am too stupid for this!)

Workday sued over its AI job screening tool, candidate claims discrimination

Re: Why is he putting his DOB on his resume?

I don't know about the specific process Workday uses, but I've encountered a few where the DOB was a required field - you couldn't even submit your application otherwise. And for photos, I was told by every adult I know (Switzerland) to put one on my resume, so it might have been something along those lines. (I like the Canadian style way better - you're not even allowed to have one!)

Re: computer says no

In fairness, aren't basically all application portals terrible? I've yet to encounter one that didn't make me seriously reconsider how badly I wanted to make that application. (And I've never heard back from a single one, which, while a standard part of the application process, is fucking frustrating.)

Re: Little more than "automated pseudoscience"

I had the same reaction - I'm more surprised that there aren't more (entirely justified) lawsuits against this kind of AI nonsense. They work exactly as designed: make the same selections as the assholes whose decisions you fed it. Perpetuate our biases, but give us the shield of objectivity because "a machine made that decision, so any discrimination is the machine's fault!"

(Though I do wonder if the lawsuit would make more sense if a few more people banded together, I think this guy on his own might have trouble winning.)

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

As an actual Zoomer I can define all of these except rizz and ong, but I'd only use maybe 2 of them. I don't know what that means except that "gen Z slang" is a very general term

Roses are red, algorithms are blue, here's a poem I made a machine write for you

Re: chatbot Valentine

Off the top of my head I can name four guys in my college class who would have tried it. (one of which would be my ex-boyfriend...)

Re: Love poem

The comments section of an article on AI are an interesting place to learn new poetry vocabulary.

Fast-evolving Prilex POS malware can block contactless payments

Yeah that is an entirely new idea to me - I'm not very into cybersecurity, but like (probably) everyone else I assumed chip and pin was more secure

AI may finally cure us of our data fetish

Re: Preferences

In general, the letter on your passport/driver's license is meant to serve as identifying information - like your eye color, or your height. In which case, preferred gender identity is exactly what you'd want on your ID.

> If security are doing a body cavity search

yep! trans people would also prefer to have searches performed by people of the appropriate gender. Which won't happen if their IDs have their birth sex on them instead of their gender.

TikTok NSFW if you work for the South Dakota government

Re: Sounds like a replay

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, I would 100% watch that movie. Possibly while drunk and/or stoned, depending who made it, but it would be brilliant. King of bad cult classics.

Low code is no replacement for software development, say German-speaking SAP users

They're completely insane! And the people making them aren't thinking like programmers, so nothing's ever documented, and it seems like they just slap features together so they can sell their system as "API-capable" or whatever buzzwords they think will sell, without checking if they're actually usable in any coherent way. The amount of time I spent trying to just get a single, basic GET to run and display...

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Does *anyone* shop online without doing price comparisons? Ever?

Just on a basic level, the Amazon search results are so wildly varied that I can't imagine anyone trying to shop via voice. Then again, the only people I know who use an Alexa are my grandparents, and they don't shop online at all!

My mother and grandmother use voice things to set kitchen timers, my grandparents have a single command they use to play a particular news report that they like (basically to hit play on a podcast), and my dad occasionally uses his to look up little history factoids. That's about it.

Re: The great turn off

Encountered the same thing with my grandparents, although I think it was a lot longer than a month ago. They were excited about the tech, so I was showing them stuff they can theoretically do with one (my uncle bought it for them) and suggested they try asking it to play music. It did, but it started off with a big long advertisement to tell them to buy some paid music service. If the user experience is that annoying, why would anyone bother?

Evernote's fall from grace is complete, with sale to Italian app maker

In every setting where I've used collaborative editing, it's just a matter of getting multiple people to contribute to one document. There's always a final owner who handles the last layer of polish before it goes out, but having collaborative tools (especially in school, where our quality standards were a bit lower) does make it a lot easier to get a report together. Formatting is obviously an issue, but it's the kind of issue that can be fixed reasonably quickly relative to the research/analysis that goes into the body of the paper.

(And again in a school environment: it helps a lot to be able to see whether you're working with the kind of classmate who pastes shit in from Wikipedia. Learned that lesson pretty quick.)

I've been using Simplenote recently and I've found it very useful, although I don't have much to compare to (I have my phone with me everywhere and don't take a lot of notes, so I was just using Google Keep before). It doesn't have much in terms of features, but it does what it says and it does it very well

Open source community split over offer of 'corporate' welfare for critical dev tools

I had the same reaction to that line. I'm not hugely up on the open-source community, but I cannot think of any part of it that has noticeably benefited from the "increased rigor" of being corporatized (because it provide any that I've ever seen).

Musk sells $3.95 billion in Tesla shares, paid eleven times more for Twitter

Tumblr is still open and thriving, if your minds stretch to surrealism in memes. It's not what's It anymore, but the ads aren't targeted and the feed is chronological!

Microsoft tests 'upsells' of its products in Windows 11 sign-out menu

Re: Dear

I ran dual boot for a while when I worked for a company that didn't want to shell out for a new laptop (that's game companies for you I guess?) and I remember this was the one problem I never managed to fix. No matter what I did, my clock in Windows was always out of whack when I signed back in. Is this why, you think?

Re: Shouting into the Abyss...

... today in "things I wish I'd thought of for NaNoWriMo"

NFT vending machine appears in London

I love reading about NFTs

It's a bit like trash tv: lots of drama I'm not involved in, and the ability to feel *very* smart by comparison. Plus the inventiveness of scams, without the guilt of seeing anyone likeable fall for them.

KDE 5.26 gets a second point release (yes, already)

Re: Sadly? and Slackware

The thing is that some of us are boring and don't use our (personal) computers to get work done, so the glitter is the point (for me at least, it's the whole reason I'm on KDE)

Infosec still (mostly) a boys club

The thing is that one of the factors contributing to women "choosing" underpaid professions, or to leave work, often do so because of cultural forces. It's still the "norm" for the mother to take time off work, to be the first number on the kids' emergency sheet, to take time off to care for aging relatives (less so in Western countries, but still) and to be the one to stop working if that becomes feasible or necessary. Even when it's a matter of different job choices, those choices are often being dictated by the force of gender roles. (Hence the focus on flexible work schedules, and paid time off - so women don't have to choose between quitting and being seen as failures as mothers.)

Re: Sometimes they're just not interested

1. In fairness, boys do that too. A lot.

2. Think of gender as a spectrum with big piles at either end, like an inverted bell curve - I find it's an easier way to conceptualize things. New pronouns aren't new genders, just new experiments in labelling sections of the curve.

The interesting thing with that is that there's a difference between "girls just inherently aren't interested in boy things!" (which is rampant in the comments on here) and "girls want to be like other girls, so they do things they see other girls doing" (which has been both my observation and experience.) It's a self-reinforcing cycle; it's too scary to get into a field dominated by men, so a lot of girls leave, so it's even more dominated by men... I love tech, I love FOSS, I love software development; but I'd have been much less scared of getting into it if I hadn't felt so alone. Which is why getting more representation is important!

Re: Schooling

I suspect (/hope) that if you repeated the experiment today, with parents who grew up with a more relaxed environment, you would get very different results. My parents would have been very happy for me to take shop classes, and had they existed at my school, I probably would have. My grandmother, on the other hand (a parent of high schoolers in the 80s) would have pitched an absolute shit fit if a son of hers tried to take sewing or cooking classes. Or worse, a daughter in a "boy's class". I would definitely put the self-sorting down to parental influence.

(also, not to make you feel old: I had to look up what "drafting" meant in this context, because I've only very rarely heard of it.)

Re: Schooling

Scratch is really good for getting kids to start on the concepts, especially if you're starting in third or fourth grade, when reading is probably not yet instinctive for kids. It's largely visual, which is also good for teaching the metaphors that make it easier to grasp programming. (And also, are we using different grading systems? Long division is more of a sixth grade thing in my hazy memories of school days)