fvold

The biggest change Copilot has done for me so far is to have me replace my VSCode with VSCodium to be sure it doesn't sneak any uploading of my code to a third party without my knowing.

I'm all for new tech getting introduced and made useful, but let's make it all opt in, shall we?

The real scam is the audit.

Many moons ago, I failed a "security audit" because `/sbin/iptables --append INPUT --in-interface lo --jump ACCEPT`

"This leaves the interface completely unfiltered"

Since then, I've not trusted any security expert until I've personally witnessed their competence.

Yeah, if I had a spare million, I can imagine buying that dip.

We don't pay nearly enough attention to this, considering how relatively simple it is to do right.

You can't outgrow your lineage in evolution. We're monkeys. KFC is made of dinosaurs. Anything descended from bacteria would still be bacteria.

I guess there is no PR wins in just listening to the floor-level employees, then?

It's ostensibly "pure science", where we "just" gain more information on how the most fundamental building blocks of reality work.

It's hard to predict what new technology can come of this. For example, who could have predicted the transistor?

I think the information gained is valuable in itself, but way smarter people than me will be looking way harder at it, and suddenly a real-world marketable application pops out. If we could predict it happening, that would be the pop.

Also, don't underestimate the massive amounts of learning being done in engineering just by designing experiments and building/maintaining accelerators. That, alone, might be worth it.

In my experience, Ali Express is absolutely 100% a buyers market, in every single way. I've bought random junk with a somewhat long fulfillment time, and contacted the seller just to politely ask about a time frame without in any way indicating dissatisfaction, and received groveling responses begging me to not open a dispute with Ali.

There is growing legal pressure to not consider an IP address used as evidence that the "owner" of said IP address is the one doing the activity.

For example, my IP address is paid for by me, through a run-of-the-mill ISP subscription. Does that make me legally liable for all the activity of the other person that lives with me and uses "my" network for all their private internet traffic?

I guess there are laws about facilitating piracy, and whatnot, but you can't reasonably expect me to screen all my fiance's activity on the network. Most of it is encrypted anyway. I can't be on the hook for that.

I'm privileged in that I have an ISP that feels the same way as I do about this. They've fought for the privacy of their subscribers before, and will likely keep doing so in the future, because an IP address does not identify any individual.

I have a feeling the different sports corporations/leagues have done the research on this. I can't find any offhand, but maybe someone else has more luck?

Maybe it's the beer sponsors that want the game to be as easy to follow as possible, enabling a higher alcohol intake? ;-)

This is done for copyright reasons.

You can't copyright the raw list of ingredients, as it is a factual statement with too little creative input (in the list, not the recipe itself!) to get copyright protection.

To stop the recipe blog just being scraped by some recipe site and get zero visitors/impressions for themselves, they have these (at least) "minimally creative" intros that qualify for copyright.

...then the recipe sites just changed to extract the factual non-protected recipe from that, and the arms race escalates. "Whisk the eggs in with a feeling of freedom, and duty to the ancestors" - COPYRIGHT, BABY!

"It's an offset from the beginning. The first element is 0 slots from the beginning." is what I was taught. (Of course, it's more complicated than that, with pointer math etc etc, but that works as a general gist)

In the past, I've written roughly half a million lines of Lua. Arrays don't always start at 0. I've regularly shaken my fist at Lua and cursed it's wicked ways, but it's really damn useful in a lot of contexts.

N=2

I don't know about the market at large, but I do not want that. I want the a search engine to just have a huge database of websites, and look up stuff in that database based on my query, spitting out a link to the page that matches best, then the one that matches second best etc etc.

Using ML to determine the order of matches is absolutely fine, but to "digest" the internet and cook up an answer to what I'm looking for without proper sourcing? I do not want that. I don't want to try and guess what biases the language model might have. It's way easier for me to gauge the bias of another human, and for that, I need to be sent to a page a human has written.

(Of course, I realize that the "blog written by a bot" genre of writing is also becoming more convincing, making this whole thing harder...)

Yep, I feel that exact way about Nvidia Canvas [1]. It does not produce anything even close to usable as a final product, but it can produce an amazing start to a concept.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/

I don't think the breach frequency is increasing per service we use, just that we're using a lot more services now, and they're better at detecting and communicating when they've had breaches.

So yes, the absolute number of breaches are going up, just like the absolute number of car crashes are a lot higher now than they were in the 1800s.

I hate fixing bugs, but I love having fixed them more. It's the same sort of relationship I have with playing hard games, like Elden Ring, or whatever.

The actual search for the problem, and sometimes even the implementation of the fix, can be really frustrating, but that is a vital part in the absolutely ecstatic feeling I get from having actually Fixed The Thing.

I've had someone tell me, with a straight face and serious voice, to "stick to the agile process from now on"

Yep yep yep.

I've made it clear to bossmang that I don't really do customer contact. I got badly burned out in technical support decades ago, and it's still baggage I carry around, so I simply do not have a "customer service voice".

I'm hired to develop software, and I will do that to the best of my ability, but if they ever ask me to help out on the support end, I've made it clear what they can expect.

"Now listen here, you little shit..."

I want to see a comparison of the infrared from Hubble vs the infrared from James.

I also want to normalize calling JWST just "James" :)

Something smooth, with a stutter-free Compiz implementation, I'm sure.

A while back I was working on a logistics follow-up system at a call center. The system would fetch the logistics data from the different logistics partners and chew on it for a while, trying to determine which ones were "delayed", and burp out "events" that humans would see and act on. Usually by calling or e-mailing the customer to tell them there would be a slight delay, and giving a reason why. In the rare event the customer called the call center first, they could look up the logistics and tell the customer exactly what was going on with their repair or exchange or whatever.

All in all it was a fun little system to work on, and I enjoyed it a lot. What made it worth doing, even though it was a giant corporation's call center, was that my (shared) office was right next to the actual team actually working with the tool. I smoked cigarettes at the time, so it was not uncommon for me to take little smoke breaks with the actual users. At first they were hesitant to try and push "work questions" on me during my break, but I assured them that it was fine.

They'd bring up those tiny little things that never get fixed in systems like this. NDA prevents me from going into any kind of detail, but it was little stuff like Olaf's New Menu Item. Working that closely with the Actual Users was very liberating, and I think it alleviated a lot of their frustrations to have developer access, too.

That said, this team was maybe 50 people. When this "preemptive logistics issue team" model was rolled out world-wide, I had already left the organization for entirely unrelated reasons, and I don't think I would have given all those people direct access to me on my breaks like that.

It works well, at certain scales, though!

I don't know if this is supposed to be amusing or informative, but I don't think it does either.

For example...

Linux is an alternative operating system (the software allowing apps to use a graphic based interface) to Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS. Linux is the largest open source project in the world.

...involves a parenthesis that is just plain wrong. That's not the job of the operating system. It's a common thing that some operating systems do, but that's just one of the user interfaces available to an OS. Linux, the kernel, is maybe the largest open source project in the world, but that's "just" the kernel. The operating system would be Debian GNU/Linux, or Ubuntu, or whatever, and some manner of X11 might be on top of that to provide something for a GUI to draw windows in, thus providing a GUI, but the OS can run entirely in textmode, or even completely headless. Ask your router, if you don't believe me.

I mean, this is a level of detail I wouldn't lay on a 5-year-old, obviously, but I'm confused as to why this is even brought up when it's so inaccurate. This sort of "uh, yeah, I guess, kinda" is soaking through the whole article, making me think maybe it was intended as a joke? Maybe there is a cultural or language barrier preventing me from "getting" the joke?

Exactly!

I don't understand this obsession with enterprise-level security on home networks and hobby projects. If you think it's fun and educational to set up, then you're doing it for fun and education, not security. If you're doing it for security, you're basically setting up anti aircraft guns to do what a drone jammer could do with way less resources spent.

Hah, that's funny to me, because after my second burnout, I'm just super happy working for someone else.

I don't have to care about bringing in customers, my signature is only on one contract (employment contract), and the finances, taxes, hiring, and all of that is handled over there. [gestures vaguely to the left]

I love it. I just sit at my desk and write code. This is what I'm happy doing, which makes me feel free.

As it happens, I'm reading this thread while taking a break from writing tax handling in a piece of e-commerce software.

It relies 100% on the settings of the application in question, because tax codes and procedures vary greatly around the world, and it's internationally used software. There are even some stores using this software that sell items to and from different countries using the same website, so it can be set up to handle tax differently per product.

Not everything is taxed everywhere, so it will accept it without question if someone sets up a product with the tax class "none", and happily log, process and store an order with 0% tax.

Yes, it's a footgun for the inexperienced to be able to accidentally commit tax fraud, but no, the software can't just override the user input and insist that a 25% VAT should be applied to random things based on ... what? The name? A hunch? MaChInE LeArNiNg?

Manual audits are used to discover human error, be it my error in creating the software, or your error in the data supplied to the software. I can create the logs and make them as easy to read as possible, but if you don't read them for three months, that's on you.

For the last few days I've been rewriting one of the company's legacy WordPress plugins to work better with modern WooCommerce.

That's right: PHP, baby. Ugly, hacky, sticky, oozing PHP.

Oh woe is me, etc etc, but you know what? It makes the customers money, which makes the company money, which makes me money. I've gotten used to eating and living indoors, so this is a good thing.

It's not serverless, there is no GraphQL, it's not within a mile of the nearest Rust compiler and it could not be implemented in golang even in my wildest fever dreams, with or without generics. There isn't even any machine learning!

We need to keep in mind the trillions of lines of legacy code out there that is still being maintained, refactored and rewritten, every day, that is not a new product or a groundbreaking new paradigm. It's just the internet, and the hacky PHP and smooth perl5 that keeps it running.

So yeah, 99% might be an exaggeration, but if I was making a new IDE (or whatever) today, I'd sure as hell target WordPress before I started making up my own buzzwords. I can't say for sure if that's because of my perspective or because of some objective data, but I do know that it would be a product with a hell of a lot more customers.

My coffee consumption is associated with lower risk of death to those around me, yes.

Exactly.

Surveillance is one of the methods of control, but it's really about oppressing the way people think, shaping it to suit the needs of The Party.

The thing is, a commercial-scale fusion reactor could produce the same energy as a truly vast solar array, and also produces power at night, does not need to be exposed to wind and rain to operate and can be scaled directly instead of with costly battery arrays.

Solar has the upside of actually producing a power surplus already, though.