* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12132 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Performance isn't free...

Yeah. Duplicating OS userspace is inelegant and wasteful. It's a lazy solution to a problem that wouldn't exist if library maintainers were more careful about compatibility, and application developers didn't feel a need to 1) bring in every bit of functionality they've ever heard of, and 2) use libraries for every trivial thing.

FBI: FISA Section 702 'absolutely critical' to spy on, err, protect Americans

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Like a number of Reg readers, I was there on Usenet in 1990 when Mike Godwin proposed his eponymous law. And many of us chuckled. It seemed like one of those innocuous, humorous generalizations of Usenet culture, like Jo Walton's (later) "The Lurkers Support Me in Email".

But of course he was right, and we have no shortage of sophomores to demonstrate it. And generally those sophomores are ignorant of Godwin's real point: that by throwing around spurious comparisons, you not only say nothing of value, but you insult the actual victims of the Nazi regime (or whatever other atrocity you're handwaving toward) as well. Though the call for gratuitous violence is a nice addition. Certainly oppressive regimes never indulge in that!

I suppose what I'm saying is, do shut the hell up until you learn to think and communicate like an adult. Thanks.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: It does depress me

Sanders was hardly "shouted down". He had a credible run for the nomination. He also made numerous mistakes and did not make much of an attempt to broaden his base. He's not actually a terribly adept politician.

That's not to say the Democratic Party regulars aren't conservative. Biden won the nomination in 2020 largely because he was a familiar face who rode Obama's coattails, particularly with southern Democrats, and because of the perennial fear that a woman can't win the US Presidency.

Frankly, I'm not sure I'd describe anything Sanders was seriously proposing as a "major policy change". At least not more major than, say, getting the US out of Afghanistan or removing the right to abortion, or some other things which have happened without him in charge. And the POTUS is not an absolute monarch, either; there's not much a radical one can do against Congress and the courts. Carter tried to take on Reclamation and Congress – including his own party – walked all over him.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: It does depress me

Sigh. Eternal September is eternal.

I suppose it's good to know that there's no shortage of sophomores, in case it turns out they're useful for something.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: It does depress me

But what it actually does, the FBI is no different to the Stasi.

Frankly, this is complete bullshit and quite offensive.

I'm by no means a fan of the US police and surveillance state, as I think I've made clear in other posts. I think the myriad policing and surveillance branches of both the Federal and state governments need to be sharply reined in. I think the FISA court is a joke. I'd like to see the entire PATRIOT Act tossed out. (I'd say I'd like to see the fairly dreadful Department of Homeland Security broken up, but the expense would be huge and I don't think it'd actually achieve anything.)

But without excusing any of the malfeasance of US policing at any level, it is nothing like what went on on East Germany, and to suggest that it is diminishes the awful experiences of people living under that regime, and is breathtakingly disrespectful to them.

You really need to learn to think critically.

GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

It's Microsoft, that has been their mode of operation since QDos, literally *before* Day 1.

Sure, if by "literally" you mean "figuratively", and by "figuratively" you mean "actually not at all, I'm just making up some bullshit".

Microsoft (founded 1975) is handily older than QDOS (written by Paterson in 1980).

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: How close does code have to be?

Is one line of code copyrightable? How about 2? What amount of code, which is effectively just rewritten from the documentation of that language to achieve outcomes as documented, makes code copyrightable?

Gosh, if only similar questions applied to other works which are subject to copyright, and were discussed in both statute and jurisprudence.

Oh, wait, they do, and have been. In the US, some of those cases specifically regarding software are quite famous, such as Lotus v. Borland and Oracle v. Google.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: How close does code have to be?

I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make with this argument, which seems pretty naive from the perspectives of economics, psychology, and aesthetics.

Software patently has both use-value and exchange-value.

As a non-physical, non-exhaustible, non-rival good, it has no unique-object value, sure. So what? Walter Benjamin pointed out almost a century ago that such "auratic value" no applies to most creative endeavors. Welcome to modernity.

People associate the experience with the product, and the qualia engendered by the experience attach to the product. We see that with video games, for example, which are definitely software and which many people form definite attachments to that go far beyond the experience of creating the game. (I haven't looked, but I'm sure there's plenty of Aeris/Tifa slash out there.) For more mundane software, there's certainly ample evidence of people making emotional investment in their preferred packages – just as they do for other tools.

Why can't Nvidia boss Jensen Huang escape the Uncanny Valley that makes AI feel icky?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

That axe getting sharp yet?

You could always start your own IT news site, focusing on lower-level employees. It is the Era of Citizen Journalism, or so we've been told (by "citizen journalists").

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

if chatGPT actually had a discernable style

Unidirectional-transformer LLMs tend to end up in one of many, many "style basins" in parameter space based on the gradient traced by the context window. Remaining in that basin while generating text in that session helps verisimilitude, since human authors tend to a degree of stylistic consistency (as you saw in your own work, and has been observed all over the place basically since various cultures started developing their versions of rhetoric and literary analysis).

What the study described in the article shows is that populating the context window with a prompt for a particular type of scientific paper tends, with high probability, to land in a style basin that's detectably distinct from the style conventions that dominate in that genre. That's probably due to a combination of the imprecision of the model (ChatGPT has a lot of parameters, but obviously it's still very lossy; modern models have a lot more, so should have somewhat better precision) and the relatively small population of training texts from this specialized genre.

If you ask ChatGPT to write, say, Harry Potter fanfic,1 you'd probably get much better adherence to genre conventions.

1And I am not for a minute suggesting you do so, though I am reminded of Rowell's fine novel Fangirl now that I bring up the subject.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Lost in translation does not equate to a disturbance in the force and source ‽ .

I would have expected ChatGPT to remember the apostrophe in "papers" [sic].

Google HR hounds threaten 'next steps' for slackers not coming in 3 days a week

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

it can be useful, and you interact with others more naturally than you would over Teams or whatever

For many people this is likely true. It's not true for everyone.

Personally, if my employer had an office near me (the closest is about a 5-hour drive) I would spend the occasional day there. I've worked from offices from time to time, and as recently as, oh, 30 years ago I was going to one regularly. I don't mind it, particularly if I can walk or take public transportation so I'm not wasting my time commuting. But generalizations about meeting in person will never be accurate for everyone, and by subscribing to any of them – from "better together" to "WFH is always best" – means discarding some of your potential talent pool.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

"there's no question that working together in the same room makes a positive difference" means "DO NOT QUESTION IT".

It's the sign of religious doctrine, which is not surprising coming from the head of HR. People are notoriously variable and Taylorist scientific management breaks down quickly when those people aren't largely-fungible manual-laboring bodies. So HR at these big tech corporations can either be an art of acknowledging all of that difference and trying to find flexible systems for balancing corporate and human requirements; or it can be fierce adherence to an ideology with no acknowledgement of empirical data.

I think we know which is the case at Google, and many other tech firms. I'm not even convinced by the "middle management panic" explanation; I think it's almost entirely ideological.That's why we see these sweeping claims from the C-suite.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: That explains why productivity has fallen off a cliff due to "W"FH.

In some jurisdictions timesheets are useful for corporate-tax purposes. They're not necessarily just an invention of management.

Not saying that should make you love them or anything, just that the organization may have financial incentive to make employees fill them out. (Accurately or not.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Still trying.

And in general it'd be nice to see deep-pocketed corporations making use of older but still serviceable commercial real estate and spreading the high-tech jobs around. That would also reduce the concentration of home price inflation.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Showing your North Eastern Employees How Little You Care

Apparently it's a popular fantasy, though, judging by OP's upvotes.

Which seems appropriate, since the story is about Google subscribing to the popular "we're better in the office" fantasy.

MediaTek accused of setting 'patent troll' on rival, says it will defend itself

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Glad to see these firms spending money on litigation

And not frittering it away on IT security, employing competent driver developers, and so on.

Beijing proposes rules to stop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks going rogue

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Fear

The elite always fear the masses. There are some who admit it, and some who don't, even to themselves. That's the only difference.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

No self-labeled "Communist" nation has ever gotten past the "dictatorship of the proletariat" stage. Or to it, really.

In the real world, with real human beings, the incentives are wrong for Communism as envisaged by Marx and Engels, or as modified by subsequent thinkers, to actually work. There are many people who want power; there are many more who want stuff and will support the first group in the hope of getting it; and there are many, many more who want an authoritarian bully in power because it makes them feel their tribe is winning.

File Explorer gets facelift in latest Windows 11 build

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

They've certainly wasted a lot of screen real estate on pointless crap.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yes, the paste-crop-save cycle was definitely the primary MS Paint use case. It was quick, easy, and convenient since it was available on all Windows systems. Things like GIMP are fine for real work, but why install additional software when you don't need it?

Paint is also fun for the occasional deliberately crude drawing, in the style of Allie Brosh, or image mashup when you want it to look half-assed.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Would anyone like any toast?

We're deep into the Rise of the Machines, man. This is no time for waffling.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The Recommended File feature

Yeah, Little Mouse really nailed it with that one. I swear this is the motto of some group at Microsoft.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Maybe get the current one working first ?

Indeed. I rarely use Exploder, but for some things that insist on using the abomination that is spacey paths, and broken applications like Teams that won't let you tell them where to put downloaded files, it's occasionally quicker than command-line completion. But the last thing it needs is stupid new misfeatures and even more bugs. It crashes often enough as it is.

10 years after Snowden's first leak, what have we learned?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Lesson Learned

Corporations make too much money off your date.

Oh, come on. All I did was pay for dinner.

Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: re: They will try to move you to the Collabora Online cloud

LibreOffice isn't the best thing ever to write a book in, but it actually seems to be the best thing that currently exists!

Ugh. I'd say a WYSIWYG word processor is very much the wrong tool to use for substantial writing.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: I have to disagree with yet another cloud evangelist article

A good example is how much more productive you can be using a full version of Microsoft Outlook

I'd hate to see what you think a bad example is.

I've been using Microsoft Outhouse (yes, the real thing, not "Express" or whatever it's called) for over two decades, and what it's consistently been productive of is a stream of invective. If there's something Outlook does well, I've not found it.

Hell, just replying to and immediately deleting an email soft-fails about 80% of the time, generating a local conflict. Presumably that's because Outlook wants to update the original email to add the metadata about having replied, and it wants to move it to "Deleted Items", and it can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

You burn the carbon monoxide for energy to power the ... oh, wait.

(Frankly I think the carbon monoxide problem takes a back seat to the energy-input problem. Solar power? Significantly diminished in Mars' orbit and dust storms are a big problem. Small nuclear reactor? Great, now you either need to cart suitable fissile material with you or find it when you get there – plus the weight and volume of the reactor itself in your mission payload. Colonizing Mars is just a stupid idea.)

Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: On physicians

In 1872 you were very likely better off with the "none at all" option. Medical "doctors" were decent anatomists but essentially useless at actually improving anyone's outcomes, and often outright dangerous, until the germ theory of disease and need for antisepsis became widespread. Even then they were at best a crapshoot for quite a while.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Shrug. That last-in-class doctor probably does a lot more good (or at any rate less harm) than those celebrity doctors, many of whom have impressive credentials, who spew nonsense on television.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Oh ferchristssake. Doctors. Already. Do. This. For. Transcripts. Prepared. By. Service. Firms.

Either they're already diligent, or they're already not.

There's nothing particularly new going on here. This is a nothingburger with LLM cheese.

I am on record as being skeptical about LLM architecture (at least deep unidirectional transformer stacks with simple rectification), applications, and particularly the hype around them. In this case, though, it's a pretty innocuous application that does not alter the existing situation dramatically. An LLM seems computationally and energetically inefficient for the purpose, but then humans are pretty inefficient too (over our whole lifecycle) for use cases that can be automated.

Malwarebytes may not be allowed to label rival's app as 'potentially unwanted'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: There is one thing missing from this discussion

No, it very much is not what matters. See my response to Dr Syntax above.

Some people seem to be having a forest-and-trees problem here.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

That's not only not essential, it's not even relevant. The question for the court is whether one vendor needs to justify what its product says about another product in the first place, not the individual merits (or lack thereof) of Malwarebytes or Spyhunger.

If, in general, a vendor can be compelled to provide such justification, then the court has effectively killed most anti-malware software.

This is a terrible decision by the Ninth Circuit panel. I agree with Goldman; we need an en banc hearing, and if we get one, I certainly hope the majority are more sensible than the two who decided to return this case to the district court.

Identity thieves can hunt us for 'rest of our lives,' claims suit after university data leak

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

AFAIK in Europe there is little to no identity theft

You do not know far enough.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "SSNs are assigned at birth, and never change"

The "don't use this number for anything except Social Security" message was removed from cards in 1972, according to Wikipedia. I don't believe it ever had the force of law.

The 1986 Tax Reform Act incentivized getting SSNs assigned to children, because they were necessary to claim those children as a deduction on income tax. That made SSNs even more useful as generic identifiers.

Considering how widely they're used and how often they leak, I don't really share the plaintiffs' concerns in this one. Yeah, you'll be at risk from identity thieves for the rest of your lives. So will everyone else.

And, yes, a poor showing by Mercer U here. But universities in the US tend to have grievously underfunded IT departments which don't pay as well as private industry, so it's not surprising. That's not an excuse, but this whole thing does seem rather mundane as breaches go.

Stanford Internet Observatory raises alarm over 'serious failings with the child protection systems at Twitter'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: As if Musk cares

Easy, now. Accusing posters of shilling is a violation of the Reg forum terms of service, and we should give DoTW the benefit of the doubt. It's entirely possible he's just refusing to understand for his own amusement.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Not sure about how many hashes CSAM uses, but that's also relevant.

CSAM doesn't use any hashes. PhotoDNA computes hashes of images; the hashes aren't part of the image. I have no idea why you think that's "relevant".

Collisions exist, of course, as they do with any non-perfect hash, by the Pigeonhole Principle. And PhotoDNA improves recall (reduces false negatives) by deliberately discarding some information which is often altered when sharing photos; its hash process converts the image to greyscale and quantizes the image. That increases the probability of a collision.

But collisions are still pretty fucking unlikely in actual real-world use. PhotoDNA uses Sobel gradients computed on overlapping 6x6 greyscale-pixel grids. Like other perceptual image hashes, its precision is going to be strongly influenced by human-perceptible differences in images, such as the number, shape, and orientation of objects in the image. And the resulting hash is 1152 bits, so the probability of a random collision is nearly 1 in 17179869184. If you have seventeen billion images in your Twitter feed, it might be something to worry about.

Metaverse? Apple thinks $3,500 AR ski goggles are the betterverse

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Use Case

Can't say I've ever felt the desire to be "immersed" in anything other than the real world. And frequently even that's disappointing.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: ssh into a server.

My laptop does too, and it has a much better (if still kind of rubbish) keyboard. And it'll do 80x70 text. In fact it'll do two of them side-by-side, with some real estate left over.

I can see use cases where "virtual ssh device" could be handy, but they're mostly "someone did a shit layout of the machine room" – compensating for a fundamental error. I prefer to solve that problem by never being in the machine room in the first place.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Most of my meetings are productive, but "virtual 3D and virtual whiteboards" would be a detriment to them.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I'm sure this appeals to some people, but I think it sounds horrible.

But then I haven't even used multiple monitors in over 30 years. Did that in the '80s and '90s, but the novelty wore off and I never found it useful enough to bother setting it up again.

Yaccarino takes wheel at Twitter early as advertising woes become public

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Make sure you get paid

Nah. At this level, the salary generally isn't important.

What you get, mostly, is connections. Sure, there are the benefits, and there are the stock options (though in Twitter's case those will probably soon be worthless except to collectors of ephemera). What you want are the lucrative, minimal-effort speaking honoraria and short-term consultation gigs and maybe the management-book deal (those things get pumped out by the zillions), and most of all the board appointments. Getting five or six figures for four meetings a year is a pretty good deal, and once you make those connections you can be appointed to half a dozen of the things.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Linda Yaccarino is reportedly starting work at the bird site today

As I wrote when her appointment was first announced, I think it makes sense for someone who's interested in building their own reputation and doesn't really care about anything beyond that. She's being "gutsy" by taking on a company that everyone knows is in dire straits, under the leadership of someone who's clearly difficult to work with. Because Twitter is widely seen as doomed, either she succeeds against great odds and is brilliant, or she fails but it's not her fault – and along the way she gets to show off making "tough choices" (tough for other people, that is).

Executives who leave failing companies rarely seem to be held accountable for those failures. Indeed, high-profile failures appear to help their careers. It's good work if you can get it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Is revenue the biggest problem?

Even Musk can't father enough children to supply the necessary stream of new Twitter users.

UK warned not to bother racing US, EU on EV subsidies

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Do you routinely drive ICEs with more than that mileage without spending a load on maintenance?

My Toyota truck has more than 420000 km on the odometer, and in the three years I've owned it, I haven't done anything more than change the oil once. So, yes.

The bonkers water-cooled shoe PC, hexagonal pink workstations, and IKEA-style cases of Computex 2023

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Transbuds

As it is, they'll be banned in a couple dozen US states by the end of the year.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

A picture is worth a thousand videos. Or at least a picture contains only one millivideo of annoyance.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Coppyright length

music and culture also has an incredibly short shelf life

Right, which is why no one these days has ever heard of Star Wars, or Shakespeare, or Journey to the West. And no one listens to Bach or traditional folk music.

Hell, my 10-year-old granddaughter spends her free time reading books and playing games that are older than her (she and her friends are back into Minecraft now, which came out in 2011), and I've heard her singing songs from the 1970s. The six-year-old was obsessively re-watching Disney's Snow White (1937) not long ago (in rotation with Encanto, from two years ago, and Zootopia from seven).

I'm in favor of sharply reducing copyright terms myself, but I don't think the "no one pays attention to old stuff" generalization holds any water.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Yes and no

How did they "corral the commons"? Your work is still available. Their derivative work isn't, to the public, but it never was. The situation is unchanged.

If you don't want work derived from your work1 to be proprietary, fine; that's your preference, and I'm glad you have a legal mechanism that might actually achieve that.2 But I've never been persuaded by the FSF's claim that this is somehow a moral imperative (and I was in Cambridge not long after the FSF was founded and there was still much contentious debate over it, and Stallman's pronouncements, and a few years later over the GPL). There is quite a lot of finger-wagging done by GPL advocates but not a great deal of actual substantive argument to justify it, beyond personal preference.

1Of course all labor that's not the most primitive sort of extraction is derived from prior labor. Actually even primitive extraction is, since adult humans do not spring forth fully formed from the void, generally speaking.

2In practice I doubt the GPL has been terribly successful at this. Certainly we've seen no shortage of stories of "vendor X is shipping GPL'd component Y with changes but not providing source".

Laid-off 60-year-old Kyndryl exec says he was told IT giant wanted 'new blood'

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Let it go

Some of us are capable of being interested in our labors. Not everyone is you.