skriticos2

When I think about the two models, I have Linux as the dictator type and XML as committee designed. Both are functional enough, but the while so few data points are hardly conclusive, I think it's generally indicative.

I'm not a particular fan of XML, even if it's functional enough to get the job done.

Of course you have to find a dictator that is ready to invest all the time and energy to care for a project over a prolonged time and is actually capable of doing so while avoiding to alienate the user base. That's a pretty tall order.

Why is it a binary value? What about masochists, or people who lost a bet and want to be stabbed just a little? Or strangled?

Yea, legitimate with illegitimate is a weird kind of calculation, as the risk with illegitimate market is to end up in jail, and few people want to calculate the monetary value of lost time due to incareration and all the fallout that comes with it.

The more interesting question would be, if the bug bounty is enough to keep legitimate researchers engaged to investigate and document the threats. But..

The bug bounty itself is only a drop in the bucket for security companies, as it's a, unsteady and b, not enough to cover even trivial research environment cost.

Pratcially it's a nice monetary and reputation bonus (for having the name associated with the detection) in addition to the regular bussiness of providing baseline security intelligence, solutions and services to enterprises, which is what earns the regular paycheck.

Living from quests and bonties is more the realm of fantasy.

Yep. The US did drop around 160,800 tons of conventional bombs on Japan during WWII, thought that's still relatively tame compared to the 623,000 tons they drop on Germany. Though the two nukes more than made up for it, I guess.

Bomb findings during construction is nothing especially rare in these countries.

Guess it depends on the software. I have seen enough business critical software that was built 15 years ago with the developer having long left the scene and nobody having any idea on how it works internally (much less skill to actually change something).

Oh, the analogy does work. Every construction needs to be adjusted at times. Sure, not as often as software, but new regulations and the passing of time is eating at the substance. After a couple of decades most buildings tend to need major overhaul and that's not much different than software. Even the reasons are similar (e.g. new building codes, energy efficiency standards, obsolote tech stacks - think asbestos and lead pipes). Especially if you live in an area where the city scape needs to be preserved for historical reasons, houses behave very similar to software - just on a different time scale.

Yea. Many places in Europe have historical city scape protection. Buildings that have been built centuries ago are being rebuilt internally all the time to fit new purposes and regulations. Not to mention extreme cases like the Kowloon walled city, that was basically a gigant interconnected amalgamation of buildings that housed 35000 people. Nobody envisioned what that would become when it started as an imperial fort, that's for sure. There are many reasons why building are remodelled to fit a new purpose without the new purpose even having existed when the buildings were first conieved.

ps. And even modern buildings suffer from this, like the projects where the requirements change all the time. Like Irelands new children's hospital, that should have cost just a couple of million Euros and balooned to billions. Construction projects are somemites done exactly like software development projects with all the fallout that comes with it. Same story with the airport in Germany (BER).

As a GNOME user, I kinda understand what they want to achieve, but they are seriously short on resources, so there is really little substance to all the rosy aspirations. They are also very oppinionated, which then turns away a lot of liberal developers that just want to scratch their own itches.

As for file manager usability, I grew up with Norton commander and pretty much gave up on ever seeing power user addressed file manager. It's fine for simple office type stuff that I bother few times a month on my Linux system but that's basically it.

When I have any more elaborate needs I fall back to plain old terminal with something like git or maybe even midnight commander, because that's what's getting the job done.

What I find really sad is, that they have like a million bindings to every programming language there is (including one that they made up) and I have no idea how they want to maintain that codebase. The basic API still looks somewhat antiquated and disjointed, but now it's in JavaScript and Vala. So even the more OCD type developers that would accept the design language constraints are frustrated that it looks so sad under the hood.

But I mean, I get it. Building a consistent desktop environment with a clean design language is hard and especially expensive. I'm impressed by what GNOME actually manages to get done with the few resources that they have. Is it anywhere close to being consistent and complete. I don't think so.

But than again, I mostly just use the desktop environment to open Chrome and the terminal, so for me it's perfectly fine.

Sadly, doing the work is usually just half of the effort if you want to be independent. Maintaining business contacts is the other half. You seem to have been doing quite some coding in the past on part time jobs. Do you have a database about who you have been working for? Maybe they need some updates or maintainance on the stuff that you have built in the past? Or maybe they know someone who needs something done. Personal connections are what makes any business work.

Not saying you have to be a sociable person. I'm a total introvert myself, but knowing a couple of insiders that act as multipliers for these kinds of jobs would sound like it could help you, especially if you have a proven track record.

I found that ChatGPT needs to be rained in with the prompts, and then it does a very impressive job. E.g. you can create a function prototype (with input and output expectations) and in the body tell the logic you are thinking about in meta-code. Then tell it to write the actual code. It's also good if you want to immerse yourself into a new programming language and outline what kind of program you want, and expect the results to be different from what you throught, but insightful.

Now if you throw larger context or more obscure interface expectations at it, it'll start to discard code and hallucinate.

There is a reason that Esperanto or one of it's siblings is not the language of global understanding and we are discussing in English. The world at large generally does not care about these kinds of fancy. It's half a miracle that we agreed to whatever the Chromium engine implements to be a baseline that most folks build stuff on.

Seeing Anya (the girl pointing at pictures), I'd guess the author is partial to Japanese culture. As their writing system does not have a concept of upper/lower case, he might just have determined that they are superfluous. Or he is simply an eccentric. Though I guess this is one of the things that some folks will not care and others getting hung up mightily.

I personally don't really mind that bit of capitalization that English does. German is much worse.

Well, the main reason why Wayland even exists is, that the X11 maintainers got fed up with a design from a time when graphics cards were not even a thing yet and decades of patchwork. They wanted to move on to something that has way less technical debt. Sure, X11 won't go away anytime soon, but finding people who actually want to work and maintain that codebase will be more than a little difficult.

Yea, that's basic culture here. The bins are also sized according, and using the recycle bins is cheaper. There is still unsorted/compound waste, but plastics + metals go into the yellow/recycle bin automatically. Same for paper. Municipal waste centers are basically recycling sorters, where you have to declare waste type. You can offload recyclables for free and other waste costs you an arm and a leg, so there most certainly is incentive to follow.

Not that I'd take the recycling percentage at face value, there are certainly challenges. But the overall system is fairly solid.

I'd be very skeptical that AI would worsen the situation with music. For example, many pop music titles in last decades incorporate the same millennial whoop over and over and over again. I seriously stopped following pop music a long time ago and I can't imagine that AI can make it any more generic if it tried. I don't see a threat for non-generic indie music. AI is good at the generic stuff, as it usually statistically averages out the inputs.

Being part of the security industry, I'm certainly not impartial, but your view seems to be a bit naive and you seem to be generally angry at the world.

Thing is, when computers permeated society in the 90's, everything looked so simple and wondrous, few people did nefarious stuff and if so mostly for fun. Now during the 2000s computers matured in companies to a degree that they became fundamental infrastructure, and that's where complications start, as someone eventually wants to take advantage of that to make a profit without regards to the means. The Internet bringing the world closer together of course changed the playing field.

Now trust me, many companies would love to sing kumbaya and ignore the topic all together, but that's just a way of presenting oneself as a low hanging target, as many have painfully recognized. And that includes low skill and targeted attacks on all levels. That's why there is a security industry, because IT infrastructure became so fundamental to how we do business.

Now it's a part of everyday life, being a risk the same as other externalities, like market cycle, supply chain and a million other things. The main issue really is, that back in the day nobody cared all that much, so there are few people that got into this branch, and thus there is a constant shortage.

But generally, the kind of stuff like in the article is just one of many security threats both low and high skill that companies are facing and they need a sophisticated system/process to categorize and counteract them (both in terms of prevention and damage mitigation). Unless you manage to remove global inequality and the incentives to exploit affluent entities, this reality just is.

Now I know this sounds grim, but statistically we are currently way better off than just a few decades ago, much less centuries. Things get better. It's just in our human nature to bitch about it anyway. Just take a deep breather and enjoy your shipping free delivery of basically anything you could want at reasonable rates straight from the other side of the world while looking at the bleak news than in no way reflect statistical reality (like, nobody wants to hear how good things work compared to 20-50 years ago, that's boring).

I'm still not sure what you suggest. Do you want to police the world of software, only allowing stuff to be released that has obvious use and limited negative effects? That won't really fly in a liberal society.. people will tinker unless you want to go the dystopian path.

I mean sure, you can nicely ask or try to shame people, but when did that ever do anything of note?

Security through obscurity does not work. As soon as deepfakes have proliferated on TikTok for stupid stuff, they'd inevitably be used for this kind of exploits by any adversary that is motivated enough to do a directed operation on a high value target.

The researchers really just raise awareness on where things are going, but ultimately the solution will be to improve process and verify anything that has to do with money through specific internal company channels that are hard to forge - and anybody in a call like this that would not use them needs to automatically raise an alarm by procedure.

JS also had the major advantage of being sandboxed by design, so they could work from there. Most of the technical legacy centered around syntax backwards compatibility, but it's all isolated - so much easier to optimize.

Python with it's C API basically gives you the keys to the kingdom on a machine code level. Modifying something that has an API to connect to essentially anything is not an easy proposition. Of course, it has the advantage that you can make Python faster by performance analysis and moving the expensive parts to optimized C code, if you have the resources.

Hah, so true. If you give up on your ICE now in one of the western democracies, it will be sold as a used car in your country first and continue being driven around by someone poorer, then eventually be shipped to Asia and be driven around there by even poorer people until it eventually goes to Africa and and be driven until it finally gives out. Getting a new EV and dumping the ICE won't change much on that in the short term.

So what I want to say is, that poor people have better things to worry about than EVs and sustainability, like getting through the day with food on their plate and maybe a roof over their head. While they will be the most impacted, they can afford to care about it the least.

Also, EVs right now just shift the problem around until we manage to produce electricity from renewable sources, which is still some way off, especially in the poor places that will drive the least efficient ICEs while they last.

Yea, same here back in the day. Stage 1 installations for Gentoo really made me interact with the kernel and software in a different way. It did not just work, but while solving the issues, I learned a lot on how things worked internally. It's a great thing to get really familiar with the workings under the hood.

But yea, now-a-days I'm on Ubuntu LTS.

Yea, at this point he probably pissed of the judge enough to enjoy his wait behind bars.

Judicial process is a very methodical thing. Lot's of paper needs to be filled with words and filed properly. Judge needs to review and condense all that and put it together into a judgement that is well reasoned (well, there are layers that assist with that).

As for what happens between conviction and sentencing, the typical law answer is: it depends..

He certainly has been in jail for some time already, as he could not help himself from doing stupid things, like contacting witnesses. Maybe it continues, maybe not. Maybe he'll be free for some time after sentencing too. They set a date when he has to show up at the prison.

Until then, it's mostly up to the judge. If he is deemed a flight risk, or continues to run his mouth, he very well may spend the time up to his prison sentence in jail. Though, as he cannot mess with his trial any more and he is not generally a danger to community, he could walk around some more. It depends..

This is just the conviction. Sentencing is sometime end of March next year.

But considering that he was found guilty on all accounts and after the mess he was making during the trial, his sentence will most likely be no good news for him.

He is also kind of being made an example of to encourage more due diligence in the industry. Being bad at business is one thing, but handling billions without basic risk management is basically gambling with customer funds.

PS: in the case of Musk and Twitter, which I believe started this discussion..

It's Musk, so you can throw out the book. He just takes the stock value and then tweaks it so that the offer contains 420 because obviously that's his shtick since some time.

Wonder if the SEC will ever live that one down.

Well, the market does follow a set of rules (buy-sell pressure), but it's not necessarily reflective of actual value of a stock. More a heard consensus (which is why we get bubbles).

The other side is also not necessarily irrational, but much less deterministic. For example, there is the question if the board even wants to sell, if they like the potential buyer, if they have a vision for the company that aligns with the buyer and some non-tangibles. Charisma projection and speech-craft definitely has an influence too, as has track record.

The more factors are in alignment with the board, the closer the price is to the stock value. The more hostile the negotiation, the more it moves away.

So what benefit would the right to repair bring?

Even if all the schematics were published, parts be more standardized and built in a way that things are easier to maintain, would it really make a difference?

People want the shiny new PS5 no matter how repairable the PS3 is. Maybe in a few decades the technology development slows to a point where this might be reasonable, but today people think on how to get their hands on the new M2 chip even before the M1 is fully rolled out.

Then there is mechanical degradation, most components degrade over time and start to cause problems. The longer you wait, the more problems (basically the same as with cars). Most people who can afford will go for a median timeline where the devices work reliably and then dump them no matter what. So unless we make them last for decades reliably (not likely in the near future) this is not a viable thing to strive for.

Then there is software support. Vendors continuously improve the software and add new hardware capabilities to stay competitive, because everyone else is doing it. So if we wanted to keep stuff working, we'd have to strangle competitive innovation and mandate a specific cap on technology for a given time.

So I think that's all not reasonable. Instead we should strive to make the stuff we produce recyclable (like really), so that the materials can become the new shiny stuff that people crave for. But stuff is not designed to be recyclable at all and if you look at the global recycling industry (or fantasy really, so little is recovered) you can picture a giant dumpster we leave for the next generations.

I imagine people in home office situations would like to use this not only for the background, but them-self. I mean, if you are in doors all day, you might not be perfectly groomed for the day - so faking that would probably appeal to many people.

Agree.

Compared to renewables - nuclear is a big risk (financial and operational). Also nuclear needs a lot of water, which is getting to be a serious problem. Compared to coal/gas/biomass they look great though in our current terraforming predicament.

There is no way we could build enough of them in the near term to matter, so that makes this discussion moot anyway. There is simply not enough expertise and production capacity left. Very few nuclear plants have been completed recently and the institutional knowlege is fading. It takes a lot of time and effort to reinvigorate that, especially since the nuclear industry is so extremely conservative.

Also the conversation is not being done on technical merits - but political inertia, an unwillingness to change and special interests by established energy companies (coal, gas).

As you say, renewables are still winning (slowly) because of the low risk profile and generally being price competitive.

Not that it matters much, we are mostly over the point of no return. It's just a matter of time before this ball is getting very unpleasant, sadly. We are just playing with the dial on how quickly that happens.

Qt(Widgets) certainly is good if you know how to use it, you just need someone to tell you what parts to ignore when starting out. Here I put on the "teen who interacts first time with the concept of programming" glasses because of the thread, and consistency and constraints benefit that situation. Unguided first contact with programming through the mess that Qt is today is somewhat counterproductive in this respect. Look at the documentation page for Qt, that's certainly no place where an unguided newcomer could find their way around easily.