* Posts by Michael Wojcik

12132 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007

Elon Musk's Neuralink probed over pathogen transport

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Start with the amygdala.

Classiq to school academia in quantum computing with help from Microsoft

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: "in readiness for when fault-tolerant systems become available"

if you're dealing with a system where all possible values are automatically and instantly computed

That is not what quantum computers do. Not at all.

The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Nah. People who do that sort of thing ought to suffer for all time. There's nothing gained by making things easier for them.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I thought the whole point of twitter was to make a succinct point in a very small number of characters

Indeed. The pain of long twitstreams isn't a bug; it's a feature, there to punish the idiots who compose long twitstreams and the greater idiots who try to read them.

None of it interests me – I stopped even clicking on Twitter links in articles once they required enabling scripting on their site to read them, and as far as I can tell, anything of actual importance that appears on Twitter very shortly appears elsewhere in a more generous, informative, and palatable form. But if Twitter is going to exist, it ought to at least remain true to its genre.

SpaceX cuts off Ukraine's 'offensive' Starlink use

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Kessler

Your space-laser proposal still has the heat-dissipation problem.

No more free love: Netflix expands account sharing restrictions

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Using any date format other than ISO 8601 is a mortal sin.

The Balthazar laptop: An all-European RISC-V Free Hardware computer

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Odd designs

Hmm. I think I'd take the PET's chiclet keyboard over any of the membrane keyboards. At least the PET keys had some travel.

Also, it was easy to get an add-on conventional keyboard for the PET 2001. It had a ribbon cable which you snaked into the front of the case, between the top and bottom halves, so it sat in front of the case. The ribbon connector was a pass-through so both keyboards would work, which made for some entertaining two-person operation, NCIS-style.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Odd designs

Some of us have to fix other people's output too, you know. Sure, usually I just write a program to do that, but occasionally it's faster to do it manually with an editor.

Americans have the right to livestream police traffic stops … probably

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

There's no assumption of privacy for a traffic stop or arrest on a public roadway.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

They have laws to demand your PIN and you have to provide it or be jailed.

Depends on the jurisdiction. In some states, you can be compelled to unlock a device using biometrics (which is an excellent reason not to enable them), but not to supply a PIN or password, thanks to the Fifth Amendment. Courts in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Indiana, and other states have granted protection to PINs; but others in New Jersey, Florida, Wisconsin, and, um, Pennsylvania have rejected it. (Come on, Pennsylvania – get it together.)

This needs to be settled by SCOTUS, but given the current makeup of that bench it's really hard to guess how they'd go. I mean, Alito thinks the police should be able to do whatever they want, and Thomas thinks we should get rid of pesky civil rights altogether1, so they're easy to handicap; and I don't see Sotomeyer, Kagan, or Jackson having much trouble with a broad interpretation of the 5th. But the other four can be unpredictable.

1Except for Loving of course, because he personally relies on it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The EFF is nearly wrong..

QI is important in some circumstances. It applies to firefighters, for example, who otherwise would almost certainly be routinely sued by insurance companies looking to defray their own costs for property and medical insurance. That's a rational, if unethical, move by insurers; without QI, first responders would have to carry malpractice insurance as US doctors do, and then we'd just have dueling insurance companies tying up courts and arbitration processes and wasting money with inefficiencies.

But it has been interpreted far too broadly by the courts, up to and definitely including SCOTUS.

Find My Kids app is basically AirTags for your offspring

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Good Lord how the world has changed!

Child-rearing books from around the turn of the twentieth century often describe young children – around 10 years old, say – staying away from home for days at a time when not in school, camping alone or with siblings or friends, Swallows and Amazons style. For that matter, while later critics sometimes complained the S&A books are unrealistic in the amount of freedom the children are given, I don't recall any contemporary reviews from the 1930s and '40s making the same objection. (Of course the novels are set a couple of decades earlier – you can find the exact date in the message they cache on Katchenjunga, though I don't recall what it is offhand – but apparently even in the '30s it still didn't strike most people as implausible.)

Realistic youth fiction of the era that's set in more-urban environments, such as, say, It's Like This, Cat, Harriet the Spy, or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler show relatively young children unaccompanied in the city. (Living in a museum, in FtMUF, is not itself particularly realistic, but Claudia and Jamie spend a lot of time doing mundane things like washing their clothes at the laundromat or eating at diners.)

In the '70s and '80s my sibs and I didn't run off to live in the woods for a week, but we frequently played on the cliffs overlooking the harbor, or explored the storm-surge drainage tunnels, or took the bus into the city to go to the shops.

Even with the statistically-significant jumps in 2002 and 2020, violent crime in the US is greatly decreased from the early 1990s. I've yet to see a reliable source supporting the dangerist tendencies that have spread widely in the US in the 21st century.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Bad move to know too much

Most people for a wide radius (for a kid) knew who the local kids we were and would step in if we needed help

This is true of the neighborhood where my granddaughters live now. Parents would do well to build their local communities rather than investing in siege mentality.

Of course, this requires you not live in Texas or Florida or Chicago. But that's good advice regardless.

(To really curb US dangerism, we need to greatly restrict qualified immunity, unfortunately, and there's little chance of that happening with the current Congress and SCOTUS.)

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Find my kid's watch

Yup. This is just expensive dangerism. Inventing problems so you can sell solutions to them.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yeah, the type of people who would give an Apple Watch to their kids are probably the type who replace perfectly usable expensive consumer equipment, too.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Who on earth buys an Apple Watch?

I generally wear a watch, but it's one of a few inexpensive quartz analog watches that I have. (I have more than one because one has a cracked crystal and I use it when I'm working on the house, and a couple more I got for free when someone was getting rid of them.)

My daughter has an Apple Watch that she uses to preview messages and the like. Personally, if I get a message, I read it when I'm good and ready to read it, and I don't mind taking my phone out of my pocket to do so.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Stranger Danger!!!!

Troy Hunt (of Have I Been Pwnd) looked into some of these trackers a while back, and they had abysmal security, even by the terrible standards of the industry.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Bad move to know too much

is it a lot more dangerous for kids to play on the streets? Absolutely.

I call bullshit. Wild generalization needs actual supporting data.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: But still

A ban on unaccompanied minors carrying guns has just been defeated in the Missouri state senate.

The "Shoot-Me State".

Really, there are plenty of people in the US who don't feel it's necessary to tote guns everywhere. Some of us don't even have guns.

Though to be honest we've discussed getting one. The Mountain Fastness is semi-rural. There are skunks about, and they're a pretty common rabies vector. There are feral dogs, which are as well. There's a decent chance of a car hitting and mortally wounding a deer or even a horse, which would then need to be put down. It could take a couple of hours for Animal Control to get out here if we had an animal situation along those lines, which is not ideal.

There are occasionally bears, too, but trying to shoot a bear would be very much a desperation move to try to save someone in imminent danger, so quite improbable.

But if we ever did, it would be locked in a gun safe and would not leave the premises except for practice at a range. I don't buy the "self-protection" fantasy for a minute.

GitHub claims source code search engine is a game changer

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Why?

Right. There are programmers who learn about what they need to use; and there are programmers who just search for something that looks like it might be right.

The former have managed to do plenty of damage over the years, certainly. But the latter are an unmitigated disaster.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Why?

so far as I can tell libcurl is a library that exposes the curl program's functionality to C code

It's more that curl is a command-line interface to libcurl.

If you're writing code for a Unix-like system then you certainly know that reading from a socket and writing to a file descriptor is no big deal.

But a great many people get it wrong nonetheless. I have seen far too many misuses and abuses of the socket API (and the name resolver API, etc) to think this is a good idea.

And more important, HTTP is no longer a trivial protocol. Yes, if you only need to fetch something once in a while, you can probably get away with just implementing client-side HTTP/1.0. But it won't do for anything ambitious, and any version of HTTP beyond that is significantly harder to get right (particularly regarding security).

And then there's TLS, and no one is competent implement TLS. (If you're one of the exceptions to this rule, you already know that you shouldn't implement TLS either. There are very, very few people who should even try to implement TLS.)

Now, all that said, it's a terrible example. Searching GitHub for code that calls libcurl will very likely give you examples of using libcurl poorly. And you won't learn anything from copying them. The only way to use libcurl properly is to understand the protocols it implements, and then its API and architecture. If you can't write it yourself with nothing beyond the occasional reference to the libcurl documentation, you need to put the API down and back away slowly.

Source-code search, like Copilot, is just another form of learned helplessness and a way to encourage the worst development practices. It optimizes for bad behavior.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: 2006 to 2023

Yeah. Much of my day-to-day is for a component that was introduced in 2006, which makes it newer than most of the other components my team and I are responsible for. Some of those components date back to the late 1980s.

I still have maintenance responsibility for a commercial product that hasn't seen an update in two decades.

2006 is nothing. And September is Eternal.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Why?

Just reading a few of John Resig's posts ought to be enough to warn people away from jQuery.

This is a man who threw a public tantrum because a popular implementation of the language conformed to the specification, rather than to his preferences.

China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Before we sold the Stately Manor, we had not just POTS service but an actual fully-wired handset mounted on the wall in the kitchen. When a storm took the power out for nearly 3 days, we had (after about the first 24 hours) the only working phone in the neighborhood, as it was powered entirely by the telco line power, which still had substantial battery backup.

It let us find the one place in the area where we could still get dry ice for the freezer. Saved us a few hundred dollars' worth of food spoilage.

Alas, the local carrier started charging an outrageous rate for it, and announced they were switching all the POTS service to VoIP, so we dropped it in the final year or so.

Here at the Mountain Fastness, POTS would be unreasonably expensive and probably not very reliable, whereas our FTTP Internet and picocell work well for regular voice calls. If the power or Internet fails, we wander outside to get a connection, or go into town; it's not ideal, but we grew up in an era when people were frequently out of contact and a handful of us survived through that.

Google pushes fake abortion clinic ads to lower-income women, report says

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Puritan America

Don't know what the downvotes are for – perhaps taking issue with the claim that some sort of Puritanism held sway in England.1 I don't know of a reputable historian of the USA or its colonial predecessors who thinks the Puritans lasted in importance for any significant length of time. jake's completely correct that their influence was negligible by the middle of the 18th century.

Modern US cultural conservatism is much more rooted in later movements, including the aspirational class-marking repressions of the mid-19th century, the Christian revivalist movements, and the Agrarian movement and ongoing culture war between urban and rural US which really came into its own around the time of the Gilded Age.

1Which, y'know, Cromwell; though of course the Civil War and Protectorate are roughly contemporaneous with the establishment of Puritans in the proto-US, so that doesn't fit with the thesis of Puritans or some sort of neo-Puritans "taking over the British Government" after their US settlements. I'm not going to try to argue either side of that.

Google shows off upcoming AI search features, leaves Bard waiting in the wings

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

The end of search

Well, it's pretty clear where this is headed. You won't have to supply any explicit inputs to Google search. It'll constantly be watching everything you do (assuming you let it, which most people will), and it will just have a continual stream of recommended results running by.

Cry, little user baby, and I will stuff your face with something to distract you. Enjoy your helplessness!

(My impression is that this is how TikTok already works, more or less, though since I have zero interest in ever using TikTok that's based on things I've overheard and may be completely wrong.)

Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Not everyone

anyone interacting with ChatGPT asked themselves “Why can’t I use this for search?"

Patently untrue. There are any number of chat-search skeptics and critics out there – as indeed this comment section demonstrates. They range from GOML curmudgeons (whom I quite like), to cautious late-adopter types who want to see some real evidence of utility and safety first, to many people with expertise in just how dangerous it is to mistake free-form prose for precise instructions, to those who (like Nick Carr) are not keen on yet more learned helplessness, to those who actually follow some of the research and understand that the current generation of transformer LLMs are so very much not ready for prime time, to those who don't want to pay egregious resource costs for less-efficient search processes, to the LW "ASI as existential risk" types.

It's fine to criticize chat-search and this latest Moogle arms race, which seems to be setting a new record (for IT, anyway) in the foolishness × wastefulness product. But let's not pretend you're a lone voice in the wilderness, eh?

Zoom and gloom: Vid-chat biz sheds 15 percent of staff – by email

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Yeah.

On the one hand, I don't believe for a second that the C-suite didn't know this was coming from the moment they started hiring all those additional staff. Everyone – everyone – who was paying any sort of attention and capable of critical thought knew the pandemic hiring surge was unsustainable. Many people said so at the time. I do not for a moment believe company officers are at all surprised by this turn of events. I expect they've been discussing all along what layoffs would have to be made, and when.

On the other, I do appreciate seeing the exec team taking a significant hit in compensation themselves as penance.

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

What a load of bullshit. Even by Internet standards, that's an astoundingly stupid thing to claim.

Google could delete every bit of information they have about me and it really wouldn't trouble me much. There'd be some hassle setting up a new email account for my personal stuff.

Killing me would be rather more damaging.

MIT Press to trial open access journals, so long as someone else pays for it

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: cost-plus

Small payments for individuals are problematic because they're cumbersome. People don't really want to be entering their credit-card details or using PayPal (ugh) or the like just because a paper looks like it might be interesting.

Access through professional organizations and other institutions, with a relatively small fixed payment included in an annual membership fee or the like, is probably more workable. The ACM's Digital Library is a decent model, though the ACM is moving toward Open Access itself. University libraries could automatically enroll all university members (students, faculty, and staff), and public libraries could offer it to members as an add-on.

It wouldn't be sufficient to fund journals completely, by a long shot, but it could contribute to the pool.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Ditch the share holders

Profit margins for some academic journals are high – see the Nature article linked above – but they're not the entire cost. At best, removing profit looks like it saves up to 40% of the cost for some particularly profit-heavy titles. That still leaves 60% or more that has to be funded somehow.

As usual, lots of people who haven't been involved in the business end of producing an academic journal are sure they know what the problem is, and how to fix it.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

That's a decent article, but of course as you say the main conclusion is that it's complicated and varies widely.

My wife has been editor-in-chief for two prominent (in their fields) academic journals. There's a lot of work involved in the editorial process, so even when print costs are excluded or removed (by going online-only, though there too you still have expenses in terms of computing resources, maintenance, etc), there are still significant costs.

Open access is a lovely idea, but someone has to pay for it.

Pakistan’s PM overturns Wikipedia ban, seeks end to whack-a-mole content blocks

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Trying to Edit WIKIpeadia can be a fools errand.

Maybe the Wikipedia Cabal is just sick of people who can't use apostrophes correctly?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

I'll be the first to admit that I do not follow Pakistan's political scene more than cursorily, but that's my impression too. It looks like the PTA's version of Trump's "windmills from China killing all our bald eagles!" demagoguery.

School laptop auction devolves into extortion allegation

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Better idea

I don't think it's safe to assume a bunch of computers from a school don't have material that's considerably more sensitive. And in the US, school grades are covered by FERPA, so there's a legal requirement to protect that data, regardless of whether you find it interesting.

RDA did the right thing, and San Benito is at fault, under FERPA. That's pretty clear. Paxton, as usual, doesn't give a rat's ass about the law – though of course FERPA is a Federal law and it's the US ADA who should be getting in on this.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Where is the unsend button?

Indeed. Let's save our cruelty for our users.

It is possible to extract copies of images used to train generative AI models

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: plainly stores all of its training data

Right. The models are overfitting, but only in a very small fraction of cases – though that's still a large absolute number of cases, and I agree raises significant copyright and ethical issues.

Eliminating duplicates and similar measures seem like band-aids to me. Adding some random noise to each image in the training data would probably help more – maybe even using duplicates of images with different noise, or distorting them using a more-sophisticated mechanism such as using a different model (e.g. the previous generation) to combine source images into a corpus of derived images, which you use to train the final model.

But the more pressing need is the legal and ethical work to reach some consensus between creators and IP owners on the one hand, and model builders on the other, on what images can be used for training in the first place, with what restrictions, and with what compensation.

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Are those really the best examples?

The (short) list in that blog post linked in the article is rather underwhelming, in my opinion. Sure, the earthquake one is maybe useful for some folks (ObXKCD). Some of the others look like niche entertainment, which is fine, but hardly compelling.

But ... a Twitter bot to remind you to drink water? Hell, why not one to remind you to breathe? How friggin' incompetent can someone be that they have any real need for that? "Self-care" my ass – that's learned helplessness. "BigTechAlert follows all the Twitter activity of the world's biggest tech companies and CEOs" – well, that's hardly something someone could do on their own, possibly from more-reliable sources, eh?

I heartily agree that Musk was being a right jackass with the API restrictions, and my sympathies are with people who use Twitter bots for something useful. This is not a list that makes me think of the Library of Alexandria, though.

Google to present AI-powered search features next week in live event

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

It won't be really successful until there's a solid enterprise framework for plugging a quantum blockchain into your DevChatOps.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: No!

Ah, I miss the days of AltaVista – which wasn't as good as the original Google, but wasn't a surveillance regime disguised as Your Friendly Web Pal either – and the original Yahoo!, which was a manually-curated index using a well-designed ontology and information model.

Of course, I miss the days of Archie, too.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Google has pulled engineers from other projects

Next week: Google loses interest in latest shiny thing and moves on to something else, abandoning project.

Though search-by-chat does elicit more information from the user, which means more surveillance, so they might keep this one around. People become even less cautious when there's a simulacrum of immediate interactivity, as we saw as far back as ELIZA. Chat-search is a con game to harvest more information from users, and manipulate them more effectively. Expect Amazon to get into the game too, since it looks like a good way to get people to buy more stuff.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: The machines are coming

I'm not a fan of autonomous taxis, but we shouldn't read "accidents" for "incidents". From the article, it seems the incidents included stopping inappropriately; "nearly run[ning] over water hoses being used by local firefighters" (which is bad, but not an accident as such); and calling emergency services for sleeping passengers, which has a cost but is failing safe and also isn't an accident.

A few hundred miles between incidents is not good, but it's not as bad as a few hundred between accidents.

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Gwynne Shotwell

Well, and the unpleasantness of ballistic travel. Not everyone wants a seat on the vomit comet with a bunch of strangers.

I think I'd rather spend 22 hours on a conventional flight from, say, London to Sydney (not that I'm in either place, but Europe-Australia was your example) than do it with an hour-long carnival ride and lose my lunch in the process. But tastes vary.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: ozone holes - NOT from rockets (instead, volcanoes)

But it has the forum footprint of 650 Australian straw men.

Musk, Tesla win securities fraud battle over that 'funding secured' tweet

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Electric Jesus

"I'm as good as that guy Jesus / I can walk on water when it freezes"

(Actually, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recommends you not immerse your Electric Jesus, due to the risk of shock.)

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Help visualizing it? Try Stable Diffusion.

Help because you're trying to visualize it? I think that's beyond our powers.

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Just substitute alternative lyrics in your head. The Gilligan's Island theme works, as do most of Emily Dickinson's poems. ("My life ... had stood ... a loaded gu-un...")

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Well, in the first couple of years after it came out, the number of "My class did a blog!" presentations at Computers & Writing fell drastically, replaced by "My class did a Twitter!". So that was ... variety, I guess.

I do know of some actual production applications in academia which used Twitter as a pub/sub mechanism for user workflow, and did something useful. It's pretty hard to make a tool that doesn't have any useful applications. Take Amazon's Alexa: you can totally throw one of those things at a serial killer who's chasing you.

Microsoft injects AI into Teams so no one will ever forget what the meeting decided

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Translation...

"My hovercraft is full of eels."

(ChatGPT: "ACTION: Remove eels.")

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: If only...

There would be an option to turn off the automatic conversion of punctuation in chat messages into fucking emoji.

The "quoted text" format wouldn't put all the text in italics.

Hotkeys for character formatting would work correctly, instead of turning formatting on and off at random points in the text.