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trog

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Same! And I feel weird about it. The only issue I have is sometimes the task switcher hangs or fails and I can't easily switch tasks, but aside from that it ticks a lot of boxes.

Given how easy it seems to be to convince actual human beings to vote against their own interests when it comes for 'freedom', do you think it will be hard to convince some random AIs, when - based on this document - it seems like we can literally just reach in and insert words into their brains?

You can set this up in a non-production environment and realise a lot of the benefits. It would also help you figure out better ways to manage your logs such that you can improve signal-to-noise ratio in monitoring solutions and alarming.

Not convinced "AI" is needed for this sort of around the clock pen testing - a well-defined set of rules that is being actively maintained as the threat landscape changes, and I am pretty sure there are a bunch of businesses that offer this already - but I think constant attacking is the only way to really improve security posture.

To quote one of my favourite lines in Neal Stephenson's Anathem: "The only way to preserve the integrity of the defenses is to subject them to unceasing assault".

Very curious what sort of workloads are being talked about here that have the intensity that have C or Rust or Go extensions are necessary? I can certainly believe they exist but I'd be really interested to find out more and why it makes sense to add this complexity into the stack and not solve in other ways.

Pixel 10 Phones 11 months ago

My last two Pixel phones - 6a and 7a - were both "recalled" with battery issues. I got almost a complete refund for both, and got keep the phone (my 7a died a few months after the recall, 6a is still going strong).

I got a 9a to replace them just because I didn't want to have to deal with learning iPhone, but I'm fully expecting the 9a to fail with a similar issue so looking at buying an iPhone soon as a backup so I can get up to speed.

Maybe we should define our terms then? I favour this definition of "ur-fascism" by Umberto Eco: https://archive.is/VamLM

To steal a few examples from a convenient summary list someone[1] made:

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

...

10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

Open to other definitions. But I look at that list, written in 1995, and it feels like you can check off a lot of these items in things that are rapidly being normalised.

1. https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the...

It's hard for me to take all of this seriously because I sat and listened to how Google Search was going to ruin everyone's mind and without the skill of manual research we'd all be turned into imbeciles.

Have you recently watched a civilian perform a basic task? Their first approach is to use Google and pick the top result - ad or otherwise. I think websearch /has/ ruined everyone's minds, and it is being exacerbated on a daily basis by AI.

I work for a freight forwarder. We have some customers that exported to the US and were hit with the boosted tariffs. Only a few smaller air freight shipments, so not container loads full - they decided to eat the extra cost to try to keep momentum, just on those shipments.

But it was only ever a short term strategy; if they had persisted they would have had to reconsider.

I've been writing shell scripts in PHP for more than 20 years for this reason. Don't work on a lot of PHP sites any more but I still do most of my shell scripting in it. I think this'll be a big win for C# users once they get used to the paradigm shift.

I notice another poster said it's a bit slow but for many common use cases even half a second startup time is probably a small price to pay to be able to write in the language you're familiar with, use your standard libraries, etc.

All true but tell the average programmer that you think their industry should be regulated and they should potentially be held liable for their code.

This is not a popular opinion on software development circles - unless you're already in one of those regulated fields, like where a software engineer (a literal accredited engineer) is required.

But it's been an increasingly common talking point from a lot of experts. Bruce Schneier writes about it a lot - he convinced me long ago that our industry is pretty pathetic when it comes to holding corporations liable for massive security failures, for example.

Windows 10/11 it's a shit show. The last good Windows was 8.1. And the last great Windows was 7.

Yeh I think there's this weird stigma that stuck after Windows 8 was a bit iffy but 8.1 was fine.

I preferred Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 (and MUCH preferred it to 11) because at least it still had all the old core Windows control panel stuff under the hood. Windows 10 feels like a way more awkward mismash of things because they seem to have simply just taken a bunch of stuff away.

The zillions of different UI paradigms smooshed together started in Win8 but Win10 is where they really seemed to pile it on.

Anyway, I'm not a Mac user. But I absolutely see why they want to keep touch interface separate from keyboard & mouse. It's hard.

But the culls are smaller, and so the impact lessened. The problem becomes more distributed.

Presumably the risk of spread of bird flu to humans increases though, due to the increased amount of contact. And then the increased risk of mutation leading to human to human transmission.

Bit wild to me that we don't seem to be taking this very seriously other than "o no my eggs" given we just had a pandemic a few years ago.

There is also the question of whether the actions required to cut the waste are themselves expensive. If you spend a huge amount of time and effort to cut waste, there's a point at which it would have been cheaper to just accept that some waste is inevitable and to not worry about it.

Literally every organisation I've been in has had "waste", but most of them have been smart enough to realise that you don't want to spend thousands of person-hours measuring every tiny little thing and doing wildly complex RoI analyses (especially on stuff where it's almost impossible to figure out anyway because there are too many variables), and instead focus on having metrics around the outcomes that they do care about.

Heh I read Atlas Shrugged and had the exact same response as you reading Fountainhead. I recall quite enjoying the writing style, but just found the whole thing silly and the idea that anyone could come out of reading it thinking they'd just stumbled across a great life philosophy funny and depressing.