* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12131 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Why do people assume it is only upper management that supports back to office?

For the past 30 years, I've worked on small, geographically-distributed teams. We've never needed to be physically in the same place. Partly that's because, yes, we're better than everyone else in the world; but partly it's because this "better in person" myth is bullshit.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Exactly.

Most competent developers shouldn't be writing a lot of new code, on average. Their time should be dominated by other activities: design, research, refactoring, reuse, testing, and so on. Writing a lot of code is a process failure, in most cases. It's inefficient and tends to produce more technical debt and defects.

X marks the spot where free speech clashes with Californian transparency

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yes. That doesn't mean their argument doesn't have merit, though. I agree with Goldman; this law is vulnerable to Constitutional challenges.

Of course that won't be much help to Twitter with similar laws in non-US jurisdictions.

MOXIE microwaved Mars air into oxygen, but now it's time for a breather

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Chemisty is not my strong suit....

Try doing that at 800° C.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Short sighted?

This is like complaining about a desalination plant because there isn't much fresh water in the ocean. Except even dumber.

On the other hand, if you were trolling, then well played.

Elon Musk has beef with Bill Gates because he shorted Tesla stock, says biographer

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change

Oh, I think plenty of us could tell it was sarcasm. Even Muskolytes wouldn't describe Tesla's iPads-on-wheels as "minimalist".

At least we can all agree that climate change is entirely caused by people driving existing ICE cars, though, and will be completely solved by making everyone buy a new electric vehicle.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Thanksgiving test

Family gatherings tend to reduce load, because instead of using discretionary power at two (or more) households, you're using it at one. Cooking a meal for a bunch of guests means they're not doing their own cooking at the same time. National holidays reduce power consumption at workplaces. November in the US reduces A/C power consumption.

As for personal solar, it's negligible at grid scale. The EIA says that residential PV installations in 2021 were under 4 GW total capacity. Even if that's all producing as much as possible, averaging 12 hours/day, that's 48 GWh. US electrical consumption in 2022 was over 4000 TWh. Five orders of magnitude – residential PV is a rounding error as far as the grid's concerned.

(And some of us have gas ranges. Some of us also ignore the annual festival of stupidity called "Black Friday".)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

For many of us, driving old vehicles makes more sense than buying new ones.

India warns ecommerce 'basket sneaks' and 'confirm shamers' their days are numbered

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Is this a joke article?

Because they want their competitors forced to give it up too. That should be obvious.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Of course this is the beauty of regulatory capture.

Amazon et alia continue to use dark patterns because 1) they can, 2) those patterns still offer some value, and 3) everyone else is. But for large, established players, dark patterns offer less benefit than they do to upstarts. Amazon's scale means that it doesn't need dark patterns to advertise Prime, and it can offer benefits with Prime that most customers will perceive as having some value.1 Dark patterns likely only contribute a small portion of Amazon's conversion rate.

So this "do as we say, not as we do" approach by the big online platforms works to their benefit, even if they have to change their practices.

That's not to say it's not good for consumers. It's just that there's an advantage to the big players in leveling the field.

1I don't, because I don't care about getting my purchases faster, on the rare occasions that I buy from Amazon, and I don't care about their television offerings; there are a few I watch occasionally because my wife has a subscription, but I wouldn't miss them at all if I lost access to them.

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: So Musk has NOW entered the Ukranian war.......

Do you know what "post" means? 1954 was after WWII.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

The USA has engaged in proxy wars, so all wars must be USA proxies. Got it.

Not really the brightest student in the class, are you?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "If Ukraine wants to fight a war with Russia"

Putin had publicly stated that he considered Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia and not an independent country

More importantly:

1. Sevastopol is the only good deep-water port in the eastern Black Sea. Russia has to control Sevastopol if they want to be able to project naval power effectively into the Mediterranean and through the Suez into the Arabian Sea, and on to Africa, India, etc.

2. Controlling Sevastopol requires a friendly nation control Crimea. When Ukraine pivoted toward Western Europe and the USA, it became unfriendly, so the only remaining candidate was Russia itself. (Crimea also contains a bunch of Russian-identifying people, of course, but despite public rhetoric I can't see this being a major factor in Putin's calculus, aside from making holding the peninsula somewhat easier.)

3. Crimea is poor land. Potable water and arable land are in short supply. It has to be supplied from the mainland. Russia's bridge to it was vulnerable, and indeed was successfully bombed. To secure Crimea, Russia needs a land bridge, and the only one is through eastern Ukraine (which also has a lot of Russian-identified inhabitants, but parenthetical from #2 continues to apply).

4. Russia has now made the situation worse for itself, because the war pushed Finland to join NATO. Hostile Nordic countries, particularly Finland, severely imperil Russia's Arctic naval bases and ability to project naval power through the Arctic and the Baltic.

5. Also, polls (to the extent they're reliable) show that Russian citizens overwhelmingly approve of the war, so it's important for shoring up Putin's power and the cult of personality that feeds his ego.

Russia really, really needs Sevastopol if it's going to continue to regard itself as a superpower. Let me be clear – that in no way excuses either the invasion and annexation of Crimea, nor its behavior in the current conflict. But this war is not about Putin's personal beliefs or his tenderheartedness toward ethnic-Russian people living in Crimea and the eastern Ukranian provinces.

Texas cryptomining outfit earns more from idling rigs than digging Bitcoin

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: That's a nice electricity grid you have there, ...

Hell, compared to Enron, these guys are practically altruists.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Who are these useful people, and what will they be doing with that hydrogen?

("100% renewables" is a good one, though. This is Texas we're talking about.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

It may well be useful for you. At Mountain Fastness 1 and 2, we don't use enough electricity for more instrumentation to be useful.

Even at the Stately Manor, which used significantly more for various reasons (bigger, fans running most of the time in the warmer months, etc), instrumentation is unlikely to have helped. On a per-appliance basis, perhaps; I discovered at one point that the dehumidifier in the basement was using a lot more power than I expected, and got rid of it (we were close to selling the Manor at that point so I didn't bother with a replacement). But for the meter itself? No, not useful.

When we had the Manor the local power utility kept sending us letters urging us to get a smart meter that would adjust the thermostat to reduce A/C load during peak hours. We declined, as we didn't have air conditioning, and reducing it below zero seemed implausible.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Someone paid for it. And eventually, one way or another, the consumer will pay.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Being hilariously insecure, perhaps? But I guess we're all bored with Every. Fucking. Device being hilariously insecure.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yes. I haven't read Catch-22 in nearly four decades, but I remember that bit. It was an aside about someone's father, I think – Orr's? Major's? Snowden's?

But then it's a pretty memorable novel, with its looping chronology and episodic structure.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Resistance is futile

New cars ARE CONNECTED and you cannot use them otherwise.

Is someone forcing you to buy a new car?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: please forgive my lack of knowledge...

There's a ton of information in IP packet metadata that's useful to data thieves (including appliance manufacturers). And while most HTTP traffic is over TLS these days, and HTTP dominates home-user traffic, glossing that as "most data" could be misleading.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: please forgive my lack of knowledge...

For WiFi with WPA, if the hostile device has the PSK (the WiFi "password") and captures the initial handshake when a device joins the network, then cracking the individual device's session key is pretty trivial.

This is probably illegal in at least some jurisdictions (IANAL), but technically feasible.

Even without breaking WPA, a device could snoop metadata and report how many devices are connected to the network, what off-network peers they connect to, and so on. That reveals quite a lot of information.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

That, and without crap bespoke control boards that fail all the time and cost hundreds of dollars to replace, when an OTS Arduino and some relays could do the job better for a tenth of the cost.

(Going fully electromechanical is too much to ask for.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Enough! Eliminate the root cause

"Make targeted advertising illegal" is nonsensical. How would you define it? Generic OTC medications in the US often have text similar to "Compare to <brand name>" on the packaging – that's targeted advertising. And in the US a blanket ban would almost certainly fall foul of the First Amendment.

Frankly, I've found targeted advertising occasionally useful. In particular, on my Amazon Kindles, it's led to my discovering a number of authors I wouldn't have found otherwise, including some new favorites.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

If I still had underage children, I'd refuse their request to "the washing machine app". But then I wouldn't grant myself access to it either, because the very idea of a "washing machine app" is asinine.

Windows File Explorer gets nostalgic speed boost thanks to one weird bug

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: just get Linux already

Unfortunately even Linux + WINE isn't a viable option for my work system. IT here make some effort to support Linux (and MacOS) for developer systems, but we're so heavily dependent on MIcrosoft for communications and office work that it's a substantial burden on the end user. And I have to sometimes develop for .NET Framework, which is not fully ported to Linux and never will be. (This is a product that relies heavily on WCF, among other things.)

Even for my personal laptop, the path of least resistance has been to keep the preinstalled Windows, add Cygwin so I have a decent CLI, use Pale Moon and Vivaldi for browsers, and run Linux (Kali for hackage, Tumbleweed for regular stuff) in VMs when I want it. Honestly for most of what I do, Cygwin is fine. At the moment I have Windows vim/gvim for editing, but at some point I'll probably switch that to Cygwin/X's vim and gvim, as I have on my work laptop. The main thing, for me, is having pure-CLI toolchains for development. I use LyX for writing, and LibreOffice if I'm forced to deal with Microsoft's file formats.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: It is a bit silly...

I used Norton Commander for some things under DOS, but in any OS where I have ksh or bash and the POSIX command-line tools I've never felt any desire to use a "file manager".

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Collecting sexual activity - Top Gear S16 Ep4

The mattress-gaining-significant-weight myth was made up from whole cloth by a mattress marketer. It has no basis in reality.

And biological "contamination" is everywhere. It's not like new cars are sterilized before you take possession, and even if they were, they wouldn't remain clean for long.

While sensible hygiene is certainly a major health factor, worrying about this sort of thing is just dangerism.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Tesla Dashboards

Your TV, headphones, fridge freezers, witeless speaker systems, personal computers, smartphones...

Er, not my TV, headphones, refrigerator, computers, or smartphone. I don't own any witeless speakers, or even witeful ones, so that's not a concern.

It is still possible to do without "connected" crap. Yes, in many cases it requires more work, but in others it's quite simple. We just bought an LG range for Mountain Fastness 2.0, and simply declined to connect it to the network. Nothing of value was lost. The new dishwasher and refrigerator don't even have connectivity as an option, and they're reasonably high-end models. With TVs, true, it's getting harder; when the current one dies, finding a suitable replacement may take some research. (Fortunately neither of us care about picture resolution or sound quality, nor do we need a large TV.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: A long time ago...

Well, there's this, for example. There are many more.

Voice assistants were The Next Big Thing somewhere between cryptocurrency and LLMs. They didn't tank quite as hard as some of the Next Big Things (hello, Google Glass!), but they underperformed dramatically and lost favor with the add-on developers.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: A long time ago...

I'm a bit surprised I had to scroll down this far to find this joke. It's the first thing that occurred to me too.

Guy who ran Bitcoins4Less tells Feds he had less than zero laundering protections

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Cheap sentence?

Federal parole was essentially abolished by the CCCA in 1984. It's my understanding that absent a pardon, the final sentence (after appeals) for a Federal crime in the US should be at least 85% served before an inmate is eligible for early release, though I haven't found a specific citation to confirm that. With the 1994 Crime Bill the Feds also incentivized states (with additional funding) to impose the 85% rule for certain felonies, and apparently most of the states took up the offer.

So contrary to what OP claimed, this guy should end up serving most or all of his sentence.

AI coding is 'inescapable' and here to stay, says GitLab

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Troubles or Treats ahead? Who/What Chooses what IT and AI is Going to Deliver?

You're new here, I take it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Just another way to be lazy and not understand what you're doing

Indeed. Judging just from the quality of their output, a large percentage of programmers are terrible at their job. Automating the production of lousy code will not improve the dire state of the industry.

If you're a decent programmer, it's unlikely that most of your time at work will be spent actually writing lines of code anyway. Per Amdahl's Law, automating part of that portion of the work is not going to realize a large return anyway.

That said, I can see using tools, including generative LLMs, to create testcases. Most software projects I've seen are very far from the point of diminishing returns in testing, so additional testcases are likely to offer significant value. Obviously this can be abused (it's not a substitute for all other forms of testing), but it could contribute to quality.

It's also possible for an LLM to be usefully incorporated into static analysis, though I'd expect a bidirectional transformer architecture would have significant advantages over the unidirectional ones used by the major public models (except for InstructGPT, which IIRC is bidirectional).

X may train its AI models on your social media posts

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Mock all you like, but...

... personally I was happy when my school changed its mascot from LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT to WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT. Just seemed more optimistic, you know?

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Not sure why not. Anyone who cares already knows. It's hard to see how additional exposure would harm the Scientologists.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Do you want snakes in your mailbox?

Is that the sequel to Snakes on a Plane?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Expose

For me, Battlefield Earth (the novel; I haven't seen the film, which is said to be execrable) falls into the "so terrible it's actually kind of enjoyable" category. I read it two or three times as a teenager, shaking my head at the inanity of it all – the pseudoscience (the Psychlos are made of viruses! their atmosphere explodes on contact with uranium!), yes, but also the amateurish characterization, plotting, and concepts – but carried along by its pulpy exuberance. I'm glad I read a great deal more of good, and even mediocre, science fiction, though, or it would have given me a terribly distorted view of the genre.

The world seems so loopy. But at least someone's written a memory-safe sudo in Rust

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Catch is

assuming changing to a memory safe language is going to solve ALL your woes is being very naive

Who was making this assumption?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: NP complete

the cyclic references described won't be GC'ed

Modern (like, since 1970) garbage collectors nearly always use algorithms that handle graph cycles just fine, thanks. Mark/sweep and color GC find the transitive closure of reachable objects and collect the rest. Sometimes those are augmented with various optimizations, such as generational collection or heuristics for identifying theoretically-reachable but never-reused objects. (The latter is in general uncomputable but can often be decided in practice for a non-negligible set of objects.)

Similarly, many modern GCs support weak or abstracted references which don't prohibit collection of the referred-to object, which a program can use during the object's lifetime without interfering with collection.

GC isn't suitable for all use cases, but trivial problems like orphaned object cycles were solved long ago.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: C and ++: Threading Defects

Engaging is a waste of your time. fg_swe is a longstanding Register forum kook, who shows up only to plug his pet language. We've seen these same arguments for years. They've become boring; he's not even a fun kook these days.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: 1970's style C code

It won't be happy with plenty of possible C99 or C11 source either, like anything that uses "new" or "class" as an identifier, for example. Or that uses implicit conversion of void* to a specific object pointer type (which is preferable over using a cast, in C, since the cast can hide various errors).

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Perhaps /etc/sudoers more of a problem than perhaps C memory safety

You cannot write a device driver, a task schedular, or a memory manager in go, C# or Java.

You most certainly can. At the limit, you can use the Kolmogorov-equivalency approach: You write an interpreter for the desired language in some language suitable for the target environment.

More generally, there's nothing that inherently prevents directly writing any of those three things in any of those three source languages, except possible ABI issues. Any of those languages could be compiled to native code, if that's a requirement of the environment (and such a requirement is itself arbitrary).

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Perhaps /etc/sudoers more of a problem than perhaps C memory safety

The issue is that it is not possible to guarantee that C code is safe

It is not possible to guarantee any non-trivial program is safe, because "safe" is not well-defined and security is not an absolute.

The programmer's intentions may not match the user's intentions. The user's intentions may not match their desired result, or the result desired by the owners of whatever resources are affected. Everyone may have the correct intentions but there may be unanticipated adverse consequences.

Adding security mechanisms to a language – as Rust did, with its strict object-ownership rules – prunes branches off the attack tree and removes some failure modes. The same can broadly be said for using modern C++ idioms (though in significantly different ways and with significantly different results) versus C and C++. But these are quantitative differences, shifting some of the work of improving security from the programmer to the machine, not qualitative ones.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Mandate

Yeah. The FIPS 140 mandate has also gone well.

A part of "the U.S. government"1 can, and often does, mandate all sorts of things. Compliance is generally poor, as any number of audits by various Inspectors General and the like keep finding, over and over.

Government agencies need to get things done. They're going to try to buy software that lets them get things done. Obeying mandates from on high regarding that software is pretty far down on the list.

1The phrase "the U.S. government" isn't particularly meaningful. Even if we assume the writer means the Federal government, that's a huge, heterogeneous entity.

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Personally, I've disabled WASM in all my browsers, and nothing of value to me has been lost.

I have zero interest at this point in using WASM for anything else, either. And I don't trust WASI as far as I can throw it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: It's a competitor/successor to the JVM.

You're holding it wrong.

The point of WASM isn't to replace scripting for RIAs. Originally it was to take a subset of Javascript (ECMAScript, technically) and compile that down to a portable intermediate representation. The "subset" part was important, because it enabled various optimizations.

Now with WASI some people want to use WASM as a generic portable-executable framework, running in a sandbox. It is exactly a Java replacement, and like the JVM now supports other source languages.

What it isn't is a direct replacement for containers, and the waffle about it doing so is a category error (even if it's Mr Docker saying it). I am not particularly a fan of containers (a half-assed alternative to proper VMs), but having an entire segregated userspace is significantly different from just using an interpreted or JITted language in a sandbox.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Welcome back Java promise!!!

And before Java there was ANDF.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Care?

there is a large number of geologists

Out of curiosity, what is this number? Do you have a citation for it?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Care?

Some of us regard Big Bang Theory as the humor-impaired element here. I enjoy plenty of rubbish art (not so much television these days, because my tolerance for synchronous media has plummeted), but BBT ... yikes.

(I didn't downvote you.)