jimmar

Quadlets and rootless containers are two major reasons I'll be switching from Docker to Podman.

People predict that in 50 years, no human will be driving a car, and people will be shocked that we let humans drive cars manually. Coding may be the same. So many vulnerabilities in code written by very competent programmers. Manually building large, complex systems without major bugs or security vulnerabilities seems to be a nearly impossible challenge.

Don't we all inherently know that government surveillance will constantly increase over time if we give in? In theory, we could achieve a "happy medium," but the same access used by a thoughtful law enforcement agency are the same tools that a fascist government would use to suppress dissent or other "wrong" thinking.

Seems analogous to employees of a missile manufacturer being upset that their missiles were used for their intended purpose.

I'm not disputing the designation.

Per the US Code [1]:

The term "supply chain risk" means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system.

My reading of the situation is that the relevant parts of that statute would be the "distribution" or "operation" of their systems as to "deny" or "disrupt" the "operation of such system." I.e., the Pentagon is afraid that Anthropic won't let them use their stuff.

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

First of all, what "blacklist?" The article puts that in the title, but never explains anything about a blacklist.

The National Security Agency is using Anthropic's most powerful model yet, Mythos Preview, despite top officials at the Department of Defense — which oversees the NSA — insisting the company is a "supply chain risk," two sources tell Axios.

I find the article confusing. My impression of the "supply chain risk" wasn't that Anthropic's products themselves were risky, but that the Department of Defense would be at risk if they could not use Anthropic's products. Like, of course the NSA wants to use it. They are fearful about not being able to use it.

I followed the shooting at Brown University last year very closely. Brown's leadership was heavily criticized for having camera blind spots and not being able to track the shooter's exact movements through campus. I can understand why people with stewardship over the safety of their students/customers/constituents would make decisions to err on the side of tracking. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I understand it.

So just talk to the people who you think already agree with you?

One of the first signs that a somebody has Alzheimer's is that they'll get lost. E.g., they've been attending church on Thursdays nights at the same chapel for 15 years, but suddenly they forgot how to get home after a recent service. Part of the reason for the findings in the current study is that people quit those professions when they feel themselves starting to struggle.

From the home page:

Stop trusting blindly

One-line installer scripts,

Here are the manual install instructions from the "Install / Build page:

curl -L https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/jai.tar.gz | tar xzf -

cd jai

makepkg -i

So, trust their jai tool, but not _other_ installer scripts?

I've never regretted buying Legos for my kids. Yeah, the kits can be expensive, but they last forever. We've thrown out or donated lots of old toys, but the Legos will never be given away.

As a kid in the early 1980s, I spent a lot of time experimenting with computers by playing basic games and drawing with crude applications. And it was fun. I would have loved to have something like Google's Genie to play with. Even if it never evolved, the product in the demos looks good enough for people to get value from.

I've wasted hours of my life trying to get Latex to format my journal articles to different journals' specifications. That's tedious typesetting that wastes my time. I'm all for AI tools that help me produce my thoughts with as little friction as possible.

I'm not in favor of letting AI do my thinking for me. Time will tell where Prism sits.

Seeing things like, "<h2 id="new-driving-model">New driving model</h2>" on their list of latest releases does not inspire a lot of confidence. Yes, the HTML tags are displayed on the page. Some basic quality assurance on the website would help me trust the quality assurance applied to their product offering.

https://comma.ai/openpilot

I took meds for depression a few years ago. I don't know that they did anything other than signal to myself that I wasn't ready to give up. They may have served as a kind of "dumbo's feather" that helped me get through a rough patch. Exercise might be similar. People who choose to exercise make the statement to themselves that they are worth doing something positive for. Some mental health problems resolve with time and without medication, and in those cases, exercise might be a great way to address them. But if you're struggling, call your doctor and make and appointment. Medication is sometimes the answer.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7598063/

Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.

Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...

"The Dominance of PostgreSQL Continues"

It seems like the author is more focused on database features than user base. Every metric I can find online says that MySQL/MariaDB is more popular than PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL seems "better" (more features, better standards compliance) but MySQL/MariaDB works fine for many people. Am I living in a bubble?

I'm slowly de-Microsofting my computing. I've traded OneDrive for Syncthing. I ditched one PC for a Mac. I have the technical skills to run Linux effectively, but the biggest obstacle for my Linux adoption is distro fatigue. Run Ubuntu? Debian? Fedora? PopOS? Kubuntu? Arch? The article introduced yet another one to consider--Bazzite.

The Linux world is amazing for its experimentation and collaboration. But the fragmentation makes it hard for even technical people like me who just want to get work done to embrace it for the desktop.

Ubuntu LTS is probably the right choice. But it's just one more thing I have to go research.

I don't know that I'd trust IBM when they are pitching their own stuff. But if anybody has experience with the difficulty of making money off of cutting-edge technology, it's IBM. They were early to AI, early to cloud computing, etc. And yet they failed to capture market share and grow revenues sufficiently in those areas. Cool tech demos (like the Watson Jeopardy) mimic some AI demos today (6-second videos). Yeah, it's cool tech, but what's the product that people will actually pay money for?

I attended a presentation in the early 2000s where an IBM executive was trying to explain to us how big software-as-a-service was going to be and how IBM was investing hundreds of millions into it. IBM was right, but it just wasn't IBM's software that people ended up buying.

Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great.

For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me.

But in the end, no markup language will make you write better. It’s kind of like saying that ballpoint pens are limiting your writing, so you should switch to mechanical pencils.

AWS already documents a solution to self-host a NAT instance: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/work-with-n...

People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.

At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.

IBM anticipates that the first cases of verified quantum advantage will be confirmed by the wider community by the end of 2026.

In 2019, Google claimed quantum supremacy [1]. I'm truly confused about what quantum computing can do today, or what it's likely to be able to do in the next decade.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/technology/computing/google-and-nasa-ac...

I installed it, entered one prompt, clicked the "Proceed" button, and got "Model quota limit exceeded."

Those quota limits brought me back down to earth quickly.

I respect Troy Hunt's work. I searched for my email address on https://haveibeenpwned.com/, and my email was in the latest breach data set. But the site does not give me any way to take action. haveibeenpwned knows what passwords were breached, the people who breached the data knows what passwords were breached, but there does not seem to be any way for _me_, the person affected, to know what password were breached. The takeaway message is basically, "Yeah, you're at risk. Use good password practices."

There is no perfect solution. Obviously, we don't want to give everybody an easy form where you can enter an email address and see all of the password it found. But I'm not going to reset 500+ password because one of them might have been compromised. It seems like we must rely on our password managers (BitWarden, 1Password, Chrome's built-in manager, etc.) to tell us if individual passwords have been compromised.

Per https://www.truthwave.com/legal/terms-of-service

8.6 Indemnification. If you behave in a way that gets us in legal trouble, we may exercise legal recourse against you. You agree to indemnify, defend (if we so request), and hold harmless TruthWave and our officers, directors, suppliers, partners, and agents from and against any third-party claims, demands, losses, damages, or expenses (including reasonable attorney fees) arising from (a) the content you post or submit, (b) your use of the Services (c) your violation of these Terms, or (d) your violation of any rights of a third party. Your indemnification obligation will survive the termination of these Terms and your use of the Services.

So if I submit a tip to TruthWave, and they get sued, I'm on the line to pay for TruthWave's legal defense? Yeah...no.

Conservatives want to cut taxes to force liberals to cut spending. Liberals want to increase spending to force the conservatives to increase taxes. But voters don't like increased taxes (on themselves) or decreased spending. So we end up with the worst of both worlds--higher spending without the tax revenue to afford it. Then we get to watch each side win the war of opinion on cable news. They throw each other under the bus, eventually come to a deal, and both sides claim victory. Rinse. Repeat.

U.S. government debt is the safest investment you can make today. If you "write if off" by simply telling debt holders you won't pay them, you'd make U.S. government debt the most unsafe investment possible. Nobody would ever buy U.S. government debt. That, and peoples' pensions and other retirement accounts that hold U.S. government debt would be hammered.

Gateway timeout, 504 host error. I can't access the article about an outage because of an outage. Reliability is hard, apparently.

My company has been ahead of all of this by causing outages in our own data center without waiting for the cloud to do it for them.

On a serious note, resiliency takes effort and investment no matter where you host your content.