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Built with o1.

Yes, yes, database with AI written code. NoSQL with a database that can't be trusted with your data? I. have. seen. this. before. To quote a classic:

I suggest you pipe your data to devnull it will be very fast

In defense of the database that video was about, I worked as a software architect for the company which became the first commercial user of it, Eliot hilariously didn't want to accept money for support at first. Good old days. However, around 2015 when all three large open source SQL databases --- SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL -- added JSON support I felt there was no more need for these NoSQL systems, though.

If the airline knows your name, and their attendants see and verify your face when boarding anyway, then are we losing anything through the use of face scans?

Your face scan is now online waiting for the next data breach.

I have seen neobanks requiring such 3D face scans but not Ryanair yet.

And it never will

The first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that is very hard.

This is a popular narrative but really, those nukes were a burden on Ukraine and nothing more -- the forces possessing and maintaining those weapons reported to Russia and any launch needed authorization from the Чегет the Russian head of state held, whoever that was. Sure, they were on Ukrainian land but that was all. That is why Ukraine so easily surrendered all those weapons for extremely weak reassurances. If you were to read the text https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/... you would notice how there's no real security guarantee whatsoever. Basically it says if someone nukes or threatens to nuke Ukraine they will "seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine".

Sure, there are words saying "the Russian Federation [...] reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine [...] to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine" but what if they don't? tough luck. No one promised help, there's no built in penalty mechanism, nothing.

You would greatly benefit from watching https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcfqP0PtWDcGKIHGTTbVl...

Yeah Otellini disclosed Jobs asked them for a CPU for the iPhone and he turned the request down because Jobs was adamant on a certain price and he just couldn't see it.

Even if it was hard to foresee the success of the iPhone, he surely had the Core Duo in his hands when this happened even if it didn't launch yet so the company just found its footing again and they should've attempted this moonshot: if the volume is low, the losses are low. If the volume is high then economies of scale will make it a win. This is not hindsight 20/20, this is true even if no one could've foreseen just how high the volume would've been.

and yet these fuckers downvoted my post without commenting where I am wrong

I must admit I usually immediately disregard any fancy new git tools, they come and go and often don't work right and create a gigantic mess.

But... have you seen who wrote this article?

Scott Chacon. If there's anyone in this world whose article would make me try a new git tool, it's him. He wrote the Pro Git book, Git Internals. Oh and cofounded GitHub. This is not argument from authority fallacy. This is "hey! this guy knows git like very very few others, it's worth listening to what he has to say".

One more thing: she posted Russian propaganda to her LinkedIn feed.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cristiana-b%C3%A0rsony-arcidi...

She also regularly reposts antivaxx posts.

Which does not really mesh with her supposed education level.

Weird.

As it can be expected the situation is extremely murky. Hungarian press is abuzz with this, I will translate a few hard facts and leave speculation to others. I will also use English sources as appropriate. Hungarian sources are below the list, you can run them through automated translation to fact check me.

* There's a small consulting company called BAC after the initials of the founder Bársony-Arcidiacono Cristiana. One of their services is https://archive.fo/kwTKA "We develop international technology cooperation among countries for the sale of telecommunication products. This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries". Their home page https://archive.fo/dXtMx lists these: Strategic Advisor for major International Organizations including Financial companies (Venture Capitals, IAEA, UNESCO, CNRS, EC, etc.). Business Developer and Savvy Analyst for Innovative/ Solutions in diverse fields (Sustainable Development (SDGs), Water, Energy, Resilience-Mitigation-Adaptation, Capacity Building, Complex Emergencies, Digitalization (AI, Blockchain, ICT) within Humanistic Economy.

* The official place of business is just a business "placeholder". The woman who answered the doorbell for journalists said no one ever from BAC is there, maybe once a month a mail comes which she receives.

* This house is also the registered address for a number of companies. Two companies have Russian owners. One of them is an oil wholesaler.

* BAC revenue in 2023 was 210 million forints and 13 million profit. What's remarkable is how person-related expenses (payroll etc) was a mere 0.5 million forints for the entire year. Hungarian monthly minimum wage was a bit over 0.25M HUF. One million HUF is about 2820 USD.

* NBC talked to the founder. According to her "I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong". https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/taiwan-firm-denies-making...

* The founder's linkedin is still up https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristiana-b%C3%A0rsony-arcidiaco... Her PhD from 2006 is at https://ucl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?do... so it seems real.

https://hvg.hu/kkv/20240918_hezbollah-bac-consulting

https://archive.is/QWlXw

https://telex.hu/belfold/2024/09/18/mit-lehet-tudni-a-magyar...

In conclusion, if I needed to speculate based on the LinkedIn page and the archived consulting page, what gives me pause: if this woman indeed exists she is one of the most talented people in all of Hungary. Seven languages, degrees in diverse fields and a PhD in physics. At the same time, I have indeed found a PhD from 2006 and her grants and scholarships from even earlier are probably not hard to verify either. I do not know what to think.

I read in a history book that that author committed suicide in despair because he thought the Nazis would win.

[citation needed] heavily so.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101014145959/http://www.time.c...

Friends in Brazil said he left a suicide note explaining that he was old, a man without a country, too weary to begin a new life.

Bad news -- actually good for residents -- those socialist era trams and buses are gone by now. The typical "UV" trams manufactured between 1956–1965 have been retired in 2007. The Ikarus 260 and Ikarus 280 buses last ran in 2022 November.

OK, some old trams remain but they have been throughly modernized so that old feeling is basically gone.

No, this is definitely a Soviet thing. The 1897 census found 79 million peasants out of 93 million, these people basically had no chance of getting a tertiary education. Only the remaining 15% and not that many of those either had even a chance.

Indeed, while the Stalinist rule was not a particularly popular one, the elderly certainly appreciated how their children became engineers, doctors and such. I mean, I heard my own grandmother saying this about my father often, she was a devout communist all her long life (96 years...) even after the Soviet Union fell apart.

This analogy falls even more apart when you consider LLMs. They also are not Turing machines.

Of course they are, everything that runs on a present day computer is a Turing machine.

They obviously only reside within computers, and are capable of _some_ human-like intelligence.

They so obviously are not. As Raskin put it, LLMs are essentially a zero day on the human operating system. You are bamboozled because it is trained to produce plausible sentences. Read Thinking Fast And Slow why this fools you.

No. Not even close. The problem is that it ships with the OS.

When Apple shipped Airtag and we said it's a fantastic tool for stalkers people said "but this is not new, there are other similar tools blah blah blah". Doesn't matter one whit. It's an Apple product, in accessibility and awareness it's so far above the rest it's not even funny.

Who cares that Rewind.ai exists? The chances of an abusive husband finding and installing that is incredibly low. Because of that, no one howled when it was released. But the chances of the same man click MS Recall on? waaaaaaay higher.

It's possible shipping with default off might clear the GDPR but that doesn't matter either, alas.

Of course, there's a lack of women in data scientists. https://msmagazine.com/2023/01/19/women-data-science-technol...

But as long as the field of data science remains predominantly male and white, it will be difficult to have inclusive advancements in artificial intelligence.

2023 January.

The freakin' UNESCO in 2019 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.page=1

the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women – provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education.

Today, women and girls are 25 per cent less likely than men to know how to leverage digital technology for basic purposes, 4 times less likely to know how to programme computers and 13 times less likely to file for a technology patent

of course a product will arise which prominently hurts women simply because there are not enough women around the table to say "don't do this".

1. GDPR Article 6 lists the lawful purposes for processing private data. The only that can apply is "If the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data" and opt out won't cut it based on previous cases. Microsoft needs to ship Recall default off in the EU and make it strictly opt in. Given it seems like a simple keypress might re-enable it, this doesn't look good so far.

2. Even if Microsoft ships it default off in the EU and makes it strictly opt in, it's not at all clear whether Recall recording said information of EU citizens from chats, emails and everything else on someone else's computer is lawful. Ie.: just because I sent you a message over Whatsapp or Viber doesn't mean I consented to you processing it with Recall.

3. Even if Microsoft manages to clear the GDPR hurdle and -- that's saying something -- the EP and the EC might still take issue with it: it certainly violates the spirit of the GDPR even if not the letter of it and together with the domestic abuse issue they probably will show the EU is not always so slow in legislating.

For my third shot they were still doing mass vaccinations in Vancouver and the way to get express treatment was by your doctor filling out a stupid form which had a number of conditions but didn't have a way to say "other" so he just gave me a generic doctor's note urging to get vaccinated. On site the nurse asks, ok, why do you need one ahead of your age cohort? I haven't even finished listing the shit I live with when she said enough, enough. It's not one health condition, it's a mix brewed in hell. Based on this and on my reaction to the first AZ shot, I am fair certain I wouldn't survive covid. (You do know "variant" means "vaccine resistant", right?) And if by luck I would, I don't think I would much appreciate long covid.

Luckily shots from 3rd were mRNA and those were uneventful.

This does not mention PyCon US 2024 was one of the extremely, extremely few conferences which did the right thing and had a mask mandate.

We are nice people and many of us and our fellow community members can’t attend without health and safety guidelines in place. We want PyCon US to be an event that everyone feels safe attending. PyCon US is exceptional in that we have people attending from all over the world—last year we had people attending from 75 different countries! We love that people bring their unique perspectives… but they also bring their local germs and Covid strains. We’re masking to keep our immuno-compromised friends safe at PyCon US and to ensure that those of us who share their homes with immuno-compromised people can also consider joining us without quarantining when they return home.

I salute you. I wish more conferences did this. I am quite bitter about how after all the inclusion and diversity talk over the years most open source conferences do not do this. Even Fosdem didn't have one despite

1. volunteer driven so free from financial pressure from anti vaxxer owned companies (not all communities were so lucky)

2. famous for being crowded

3. is not in the US -- where this is most politicized

Edit: please read https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/unmitigated-covid-is-overwhel... if you think we are past the pandemic.

The fanaticism of Rust programmers are well known and off putting. Why, one of them just posted about it into a Lua thread. It couldn't be less relevant. Much as I don't have a hard choice between picking assembly and PHP for a task, Rust and Lua are just not in the same problem space.

It's interesting to see Haskell vibes mentioned.

Where's the "well yes but actually no" meme when one needs it.

It's not Haskell, it's Scheme.

https://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

Semantically, Lua has many similarities with Scheme, even though these similarities are not immediately clear be- cause the two languages are syntactically very different. The influence of Scheme on Lua has gradually increased during Lua’s evolution: initially, Scheme was just a language in the background, but later it became increasingly important as a source of inspiration, especially with the introduction of anonymous functions and full lexical scoping

Of course, Haskell was also Scheme influenced although it's an ML descendant.

Speaking of this, I wonder what would've happened if they embedded Lua into Netscape instead of writing JavaScript...

https://x.com/garybernhardt/status/600783770925420546 (Gary Bernhardt of WAT fame):

Consulting service: you bring your big data problems to me, I say "your data set fits in RAM", you pay me $10,000 for saving you $500,000.

This is from 2015...

And all of that is fine when communicated properly. Even if OP is an unreliably narrator are we to believe they also left out some of CF's emails?

To me it looks like https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... is entirely the wrong email to send in the situation and if you are as old as I am and come from where I come from, you will have flashbacks to "reading between the lines" of the party daily in the 1980s. The real content is at the bottom:

As we have a very short window to report back to Trust & Safety team, please let me know if you can make time tomorrow

Big red flashing lights: the right questions are 1) why is T&S involved at all 2) What are their concerns which forces such a hurried deadline? 3) What are the consequences of missing this deadline.

The right email would start with something like this:

Providing services to your business constitutes serious legal risk to Cloudflare. We are happy to work with you in the future if you are buying an Enterprise plan. As we need to commit significant resources to accommodate you, we need an annual commitment. Otherwise, with much regret we need to terminate our services provided to you as it is our right per Terms on date/time. ("We may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or Suspend or terminate your use or access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all.")

This plan would also include these features:

Western Germany has produced porn even during the socialist years in Hungary.

The counterweight elevator is -- by far -- the most energy efficient way for people to live and be supplied. As in, if you need to supply a few thousand people with food and services then cramming them in high rises and surrounding those with facilities in walking distance will consume the least energy. Even more efficient than moving around on bikes or trams. I do not have the book at hand where this was calculated in painstaking detail but I am not sure a human consumes less energy walking up a floor than the elevator does thanks to said counterweight.

Also, if you need to convince people to live in such circumstances then a little convenience goes rather far so that also needs to be considered.

Modern washing machines are certainly more water efficient than hand washing and I wouldn't be surprised, again, if they would be more energy efficient too. Once again: humans consume energy too. Edit: and as someone else noted, we look should look at the societal effect. Well, it's quite clear the washing machine is an extremely big plus as it automates a time consuming, hard physical task.

So far every order effect of LLMs are terrible as they are built on the backs of exploited workers and are used to further disenfranchise workers and also artists.

As we continue to innovate, we must focus on consuming more energy rather than less.

I think in your fervor to put me down with a flippant comment you went too far. You know this is patently untrue, aren't you? I mean, since you mentioned washing machines surely you are aware both the United States and the EU are pushing hard for more efficient washing machines? https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/ecodesign-and... https://environmentamerica.org/center/media-center/biden-adm...

As for lights, LED lights consume less energy and are safer than the old incandescent bulbs. That's once again progressing towards less energy.

Sure we consume more energy than we did pre-industrial revolution but that doesn't mean we must continue upwards.

You could read https://theconversation.com/why-scrapping-the-term-long-covi... which meets these claims head on and highlights why the research is faulty. The Guardian published https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/15/long-covid-sym... as well which is more truthful.

And of course, if you had not relied on a politically motivated, faulty, non-peer reviewed study you would find the following problems caused by Long Covid:

viral persistence https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01601-2

Microclots in the blood and endothelial dysfunction (leading to vascular problems, organ failure, cardiac events) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883497/

Immune system dysregulation https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7942

Mitochondrial damage https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240104/Study-identifies-...

And finally yes, blood-brain barrier disruption https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01576-9

This is 100% false.

I have been running Ubuntu then Arch as my daily driver 2004-2017. As I started a consultant working for Western companies I thought they will care about me being clean copyright wise so I went 100% Linux. This was obviously not so but what did I know? I deeply regret doing this now. (I was dual booting before.)

With Ubuntu, upgrades every six month or so meant you were better off reinstalling and reconfiguring -- no matter which way you went, it was 2-3 days of work lost to tinkering the system. With Arch, the whole system doesn't shatter, it's just this and that doesn't work and it's frustrating. Bluetooth, multifunction scanner-printers being in the forefront. In fact, I needed to sell a perfectly working Samsung MFC at one point because Samsung ceased to make drivers, the old ones didn't work with newer Linux and while open source drivers surfaced that only happened years later. Let's not even talk multimedia. https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

Neither systems were great on connecting to weird enterprise networks, be it enterprise wifi or strange VPN. At one point I was running an older Firefox as root (!) to be able to connect to the F5 VPN of my client because the only thing supporting 2FA for that VPN was a classic extension -- and the binary helper disappeared in the mists of time. The only Linux related discussion was ... the IT head of my client asking how to connect Linux to his VPN now that he turned 2FA on and being told it doesn't work. https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-ed... well I made it work but faugh.

I have been running Windows 10 + WSL since 2018 January and all is well. It reboots sometimes while I am asleep and that's about it. You need to run O&o shutup like once in a blue moon. Right now I am on Win 11 as my primary laptop is being repaired, you need to run ExplorerPatcher but that's it. It's been indeed six years and there was never an update where the OS just didn't start up or a hardware driver decided to call it quits after an upgrade.

Also, updates are not forced, I control my machine thanksmuch via Group Policy.

https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

The problem is the storage is not removable in the Apple Macbooks.

It is disturbing it didn't sink the Macbooks. It speaks volumes of how little people care about their own data. About their own privacy. There should've been zero sold. It truly is dismal and a very large systemic problem a laptop like this is sold.

Because when it breaks, are you going to wipe it and restore from backup? No. You will just hand it over to a repair person and even an ethical shop much less Apple doesn't even have a chance to hand the disk back before handling it. An unknown amount of complete strangers will access your everything. Your medical records, your banking, your private photos, everything.

And people pay real world money for this, money they worked hard for. It's unfathomable to me.

You can be good and yet the heavy hand of the law still gets you. They got Escobar and "El Chapo" Guzmán too. And his operation was smaller than either of those fine gentlemen's.

Paul Le Roux also fits. He had the crypto knowledge and the coins haven't moved because he is in federal custody. He was also quite good at opsec.

There is no way to query all tables for something,

Ha. I would bet anything you could adopt my MySQL findall() to SQLite for the purpose. https://stackoverflow.com/a/68915413/308851