Re: No video...
You had light? We were just shouting in the dark, like.
12336 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
I worked from home for most of the past 30 years, and even when I was in an office on a regular basis, we worked with remote teams and had daily conference calls. Those were POTS (typically with speakerphones, so even worse than with headsets) until maybe 2005, when we went through a series of videoconferencing options.
A few of the teams want video for their calls, and I'll do it, because it's not worth the effort or social capital of objecting. Most don't.
I find video doesn't seem to add anything for me, except that it's mildly pleasant to see those of my remote coworkers whom I've met in the flesh and have a long history with. Some others report that seeing faces makes meetings significantly easier for them to follow and/or easier to sit through.
My tentative hypothesis is – and I know this sound crazy, but bear with me – different people are different, and some like video, and some don't, and some don't particularly care either way.
Ah, the number of "nah, it works" software bugs I've fixed over the years...
Closer to the topic, I'm pretty dubious about the value of interviewing software developers, and particularly of asking them to solve technical problems during interviews. I don't have any thing better to propose, though. Hiring developers who are competent, reliable, trustworthy, and good team members seems to be a Hard Problem.
Rust obviously uses braces which lulls the incautious into a sense of security. However, its underlying assignment model is sufficiently novel that I'm inclined to call it a sibling of ALGOL rather than a derivative… and just about every general-purpose language (except Smalltalk, LISP, Forth and APL) is a derivative of ALGOL, so you see how big it is.
What the ever-lovin' hell is that supposed to mean? Is his claim that Rust departs from the ALGOL model? In terms of memory ownership, sure; but then OO languages depart from the ALGOL model in terms of functional dispatch, for example, which seems similarly significant. Managed languages depart from ALGOL (at least in practice) in terms of object access. Pretty much everything gave up on ALGOL 60's call-by-name.
I like Rust, and since software security is one of my fields, I think strict object ownership is a big step forward for practical software development. (And I say that as someone who's spent years writing C with an express goal of avoiding common memory-related issues.) But I don't think strict object ownership is revolutionary; it's a sensible evolution of procedural programming languages.
To the list of exceptions add Fortran and COBOL, since they both predate ALGOL. ML-family languages such as Haskell, OCaml, and F#. And all varieties of assembly language. Prolog, SQL, most scripting languages, 4GLs ... (arguably those aren't "general purpose", I suppose).
Powering 5 million homes in 2035 means about 3% of domestic electricity use in the US. It's a drop.
"You have to start somewhere" is essentially equivalent to "let's not try to figure out which approaches make sense first".
Offshore wind might be viable, and research into improving the cost-efficiency of turbines is not a bad idea in itself, but nothing in the article indicates this is a sensible area to actually develop for practical use – yet.
Worse, it extends 100 miles from any PORT OF ENTRY. That includes any "international" airport.
That's certainly been claimed, and I'm sure CBP like to believe it, but is there evidence that they've actually exercised the border exception outside the territorial-border zone, other than in actual ports of entry (e.g. on airport grounds)? I didn't find any in a quick search.
I'm not arguing that the border exception isn't abusive, or that CBP haven't routinely abused even the excessive powers it grants them. There's a ton of evidence for the latter. And even the territorial-border 100-mile zone includes about 2/3 of the US population. But the ACLU fact sheet on the border zone, for example, doesn't mention the airport extension.
Incidently, someone else posted something about the PATRIOT Act. This 100-mile-border-zone thing, alas, goes back to the 1950s, as the ACLU fact sheet explains. Unfortunately, police organizations basically never voluntarily surrender any power, the Executive Branch has absolutely no interest in curtailing CBP, and while some in Congress have fretted about it on occasion and there have been some court challenges, neither of the other branches have done much about it.
However, "Good things" and "worse" are subjective.
True, though I'd have serious concerns about anyone who wanted to argue against the Bill of Rights (OK, so the 2nd is controversial), the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, or 24th. The others are more (reasonably) debatable.
That said, I'm curious how OP's question is relevant to a story about a California law.
Nobody's going to stake $45K for a shitcoin like ETH
Per the article, over 400,000 people have already done just that.
I'm not a fan of Ether or the Ethereum network or, god knows, the enormous and ongoing disaster that is the collection of half-assed "smart contracts" running on the platform. But the fact is that quite a few people are, and there's a lot of wealth tied up in it.
Bolton may be an ass (I'm certainly not a fan), but I don't think that means we should condone (alleged) assassination plots against him.
And, really, all the article claimed was that the US government alleges a plot to assassinate Bolton among the reasons why they consider the RG a "terrorist organization". Since they apply that label liberally, the whole death-to-Bolton accusation is pretty small potatoes.
This is a matter of usage and style, not grammar as such. Nothing in English grammar prevents using "trial" as a verb; only a degree of care in usage and a sense of good style do.
And, yes, I have taught grammar, usage, and style in school, at the university level. Unfortunately there's precious little time for it, and composition pedagogy has rightfully shifted away from prescribing arbitrary rules cooked up by Neo-Classicists to actually trying to explain something about how language works, which means there's very little time indeed to spend on the implementation details.
Certainly nothing in the article gives any evidence why a Merkle graph – particularly the limited sort which, for no good reason, people insist on calling "blockchain" – would offer particular advantages here.
Merkle graphs are useful for things like journals, which is why you find them in filesystems, and other cases where partially-ordered sets are a suitable representation of data changing over time in parallel streams, which is why you find them in git and some other change-management systems. And since we already have widespread applications of Merkle graphs such as those, it really doesn't fucking matter whether "blockchain" ever has credible useful applications. There's nothing novel about blockchain.
In this case it sounds like what's really needed is broad agreement on a machine-readable document standard with an authentication mechanism, so something like an XML Schema and XML Signature ought to suffice. (Not a particular fan of those, just pointing out that they solve the problems described in the article.)
we discovered Y2K bugs in life-affecting software
Indeed. At the time, someone posted to RISKS (if memory serves) an account of fixing software for a dialysis machine that went into cleaning mode if the date 9/9/99 was entered. That's another variant of Y2K bug – an assumption that your software won't be used after a not-far-distant date – which would have killed people if not corrected.
People routinely underestimate how long their software will be in use. I support a commercial software package that was last updated about two decades ago; we have a handful of customers who are still using it. (That is, I officially provide development support for it. We haven't actually had any support questions about it in years, and even then they were generally "we moved this to a new machine and no one still working here has any idea how to adjust the configuration".) Last year I got rid of a VHS VCR that only supported two-digit years, so it no longer had the correct day-of-week in its display (which I didn't care about, but it's another example).
Customers occasionally give us pieces of their application source code to help diagnose some obscure problem, and it's not unusual to see change dates from the 1980s or even 1970s.
Nice thought, but it won't happen. There will always be a new crop of true believers. And cryptocurrencies are ideal for that purpose, because they're easy to explain in a vague, non-technical, hand-waving fashion for the foolish (such as celebrity endorsers), but wildly complex underneath to please the nerds.
And because they're online and involve no physical or face-to-face interaction, they can take advantage of network effects and quickly balloon to huge sums. And that means there will always be some people who bail out at the right point and end up with a real profit, to encourage the losers to try again.
"I've been disappointed by get-rich-quick schemes before, but here's a scheme that will get me rick – and quickly!" (Homer Simpson, and from memory, so probably not verbatim)
Taken literally, it would ban all software. "Secure" in an absolute sense is meaningless. You can only be more or less secure, and only under some threat model.
NIST SSDF (SP 800-218) refers to "secure software", which is not a technically meaningful term, but fortunately the actual practices are better specified. They're broad, but they don't assume perfection. For example:
PW.1.1: Use forms of risk modeling – such as threat modeling, attack modeling, or attack surface mapping – to help assess the security risk for the software.
And then there are examples. SSDF is pretty similar to some SDLC programs already used by many software-development organizations. If you're already making a serious effort in this area, it's probably not a huge cost to harmonize what you're doing with SSDF.
My understanding is that FedRAMP is more complicated, but I've only skimmed the surface of that.
"[In 2016], fuzzing was not widely used and was cumbersome for developers"
Oh, please. Not widely used, true; but "cumbersome"? Zalewski had released AFL three years prior to that. There was little excuse for not fuzzing any software compiled with GCC that took command-line or file inputs. Free and simple tools for tasks like network-protocol fuzzing took longer to arrive, but for a great many use cases fuzzing was readily available in 2016. Developers simply didn't want to do it.
svn commit
: WebKit migrates to GitHub
Git’s local record of commit messages, along with Git log’s ability to limit commit history to certain parts of the repository,
Both of which are available in Subversion.
mean large projects no longer require antiquated ChangeLog files be checked in with each commit
Just as in Subversion, if you understand how to use it.
What users may find frustrating with the move is that git hashes are not naturally ordered, so WebKit will be employing a system of "commit identifiers" to keep track of ancestors
And they're layering some half-assed manual process on top of git, because, again, they can't use it properly. Well, at least they're consistent.
To be clear, the issue here is that the Firebase and Apache Camel repositories had poorly secured GitHub workflow pipelines
The issue here is that GitHub workflow pipelines are too complex – GitHub itself is far too complex – and consequently a great many projects are running with trivially insecure configurations.
Whack-a-mole is not going to fix the underlying problem, which is the software industry's appetite for ill-considered quick solutions.
There is no standard definition of "monthly active users"
It's a minor point, but the metric under dispute1 is "mDAU", for "monetizable Daily Active Users", aka "addicts who might look at advertisements". Not "monthly" anything.
DAU is something Twitter can measure (well, they can measure distinct accounts each day, and refer to the average of that count as "daily active users", even if the term is not precisely correct). The "monetizable" part is going to be the result of some set of heuristics which are certainly going to be debatable. That gives Twitter quite a bit of latitude in determining their mDAU figure.
More importantly, though, it really doesn't matter, because the bar for finding Twitter in violation of the agreement is very high. Any number of actual damn lawyers have explained this, as any number of links posted in the comments sections of the various Reg stories on the topic can attest. See Masnick's or Stone's analysis, for example.
The Musk defenders need to come up with a new argument. The "but gosh wow Twitter liiiiiiied!" one is thoroughly trashed.
1Notionally, that is. I don't think anyone actually involved in the case, or any competent analyzers of it, believe this is a real point of contention.
Indeed. After reading the article I had to do multiple searches to figure out what the hell it was about, since "snap" is not a particularly useful search term.
I don't believe I've ever heard anyone I know personally mention using Snapchat, much less anything else from Snap's absurdly broad line of products. I'm not surprised someone has decided to slash that down.
I do hope they don't discontinue the line of delicious Snap Chocolate Biscuits, though. "They disappear in seconds!"
VMWare's Carbon Black is not "a product for virtual machine computing". It can be used on virtual machines, but equally so on physical ones. It's an endpoint security monitor and has nothing to do with virtualization.
The answer to your larger question, of course, is that someone in Marketing thought it was a cool name, with the added advantage that it claimed nothing about the product.
Bentham's Panopticon: where the prisoners can't see one another, but all can be seen by the ever-watchful guard
This doesn't change the force of the argument, but this statement is a misinterpretation of Bentham. The point of the Panopticon is not that the guards are eternally and constantly vigilant; the point is that they don't have to be. Because the prisoners can't tell when they're being watched, they have to assume there's some reasonable probability at any given time they're being watched. So they police their own behavior in case they are being watched, and thus internalize the guarding function.
That is the one thing Orwell got wrong with the Telescreens in 1984. It is not government watching - it is the salesman working out what to sell you next...
Yes, as useful as Nineteen Eighty-Four1 is as a symbol and touchstone, and while it really does work quite well as a novel, it turns out the oppressive surveillance state is in the minority and often short-lived (though North Korea is giving it a go).
The Foucauldian enjoy-your-submission capitalist state has been much more successful. Novels such as Brave New World and Fahrenheit 4512 describe more dangerous dystopias, where the majority of the populace is only to happy to participate.
1The novel's proper title. Orwell hated it when people wrote it with digits.
2Bradbury mentioned in interviews that he considered F 451's depiction of future entertainment – particularly the Walls – a more important feature than the book-burning.
Anon simply pointed out the calling the owner a creep
OP never did that. He wrote that having the camera positioned such that it has a close view of the neighbor's house is "insidiously creepy".
Converting an adjective describing an action into a noun labeling a person is a common rhetorical move, elevating the interlocutor's claim of bad action into a stronger strawman claim of systemic wickedness. No one can simply commit the occasional sin; either they're reprobate sinners, or they must be completely innocent.
The owner of the Ring doorbell may have done something creepy without necessarily being "a creep". The creepy act may well be unintentional. That doesn't make it unproblematic.
Modal editors should have died when we got CRT terminals. If they had, nobody sane would miss them, any more than anyone today misses Morse code in favour of a QWERTY keyboard (or QWERTZ or AZERTY or Dvorak or whatever you prefer.)
Oh, what rubbish. The fact that you don't like modal interfaces doesn't mean they aren't fine for people who do like them. God, but I'm tired of assholes like Tesler who believe that everyone is the same as them and they know better than users. Do try to be better than that, please.
There's LaTeX (probably LaTeX2e) itself, and then there are potentially many thousands of packages. Plus of course some TeX implementation and back ends. But it's the packages which are taking up most of the space.
So, sure, you might have had a pretty small LaTeX toolchain back in the day, and you could even put a reasonably small one together now. But what usually happens is people go with defaults and get zillions of class and macro packages, fonts, and so forth.
Honestly, the last time I installed LaTeX (when I got a new personal laptop around the beginning of this year) I didn't put much effort into trimming down the default installation, because Disk Is Cheap and it wasn't worth my time to figure out what I didn't want.
You do if you don't want to keep taking your hands off the home row. Either you use the mouse (or whatever pointing device you have), or you memorize "accelerators", which are just "cryptic key combinations" dumbed down for people who don't want to learn things.
I wouldn't recommend vim to people who aren't already using it, to be honest. It's got a tremendous amount of historical baggage and tremendous complexity. (Same for emacs, particularly since I don't even like emacs.) But this refrain of "ooh modern UIs are so easy and fast!" that we've heard since Steve Jobs began parading the Mac around is nonsense. It's a bogus generalization and it's not supported by research.
Yeah, I use LaTeX for my personal (and, back in the day, academic) writing too. Generally I use LyX, though it's easy enough to load a LyX file – just LaTeX with some additional markup – into vim, say, if I want to do something that's not entirely convenient in LyX. And I used to do outlining with FreeMind and then use an XSLT stylesheet to convert the FreeMind XML format into LaTeX.
But what Liam's describing sounds like a use case where LaTeX is overkill. LaTeX produces nicely1 typeset documents, these days mostly in PDF now that the troff family has faded from prominence. Using LaTeX for a short document with minimal styling (italics, bold, and hyperlinks) where layout and typesetting really aren't much of a concern, and you may need a wide range out output formats – that's overcomplicated and not a great fit.
Indeed, if your output is real POSH HTML, you aren't going to be doing much layout, and no typesetting, because the UA will handle the final formatting. And that's as it should be, for HTML. So the greatest advantage of TeX is irrelevant in that case.
1Well, yes, there's some debate about the layouts produced by TeX and LaTeX. But better than Word does, certainly.
Actually, there's no reason why gvim shouldn't be able to render Markdown into a separate buffer, and you could use splitting to show that simultaneously and have it update in real time. Someone could just write a plug-in for that, if there's actually demand.
But among vim users (of which I am one) there may not be much demand for such a thing. Or someone may already have done it.
I understood what you want from the article. It's not what I want, so after reading the piece I'm not rushing out to download PanWriter; but I also know my use cases and preferences aren't universal. And I don't mind taking a few minutes to hear about what someone else wants.
That said, if I were looking for something like this, I don't know that I'd be able to stomach an Electron app. Having to suffer with Teams is bad enough. But, again, preferences.
In these parts we have 100% daytime solar electrical generation on average, for the whole county.
And that works, because:
- We get a lot of sun. Semi-arid climate with at least several hours of clear skies most days.
- It's a rural residential and agricultural county. Very little manufacturing to consume lots of electricity.
- Population density is low, so overall load is low and there's plenty of space to find good sites for big photovoltaic and battery installations.
I haven't verified this personally, but I believe those conditions don't apply everywhere, so it would be a mistake to generalize this to "everyone can just use solar lol!".
But generalizing from Australia is probably a totally different argument and perfectly reasonable. Where isn't like Australia?
Chemical toxicity of plutonium appears to be overrated, particularly by people who like to quote Ralph Nader. Plutonium is chemically toxic but not very bioavailable, apparently.
The ATSDR toxicity profile for plutonium (PDF) shows almost all adverse effects stem from various cancers or other radiation-induced pathology such as radiation pneumonia. Studies of plutonium-exposed workers at Sellafield did show elevated risk for cerebrovascular disease and other cardiovascular conditions, but mostly at elevated risk levels much less than those found for various cancers in other studies. (And the cardiovascular-disease effects weren't reproduced in an animal study, FWTW.)
Obviously, cancer is not an outcome anyone wants either, and plutonium is removed from the body very slowly, so it has plenty of time to do cumulative damage or accumulate if you continue to be exposed. It can be inhaled or ingested (according to the report, it's not significantly absorbed through the skin, though of course dermal burns and other damage can occur from sufficient skin exposure). So, yeah, you don't want to be exposed to significant amounts of plutonium. But the "plutonium is super toxic you guys!" line that the anti-nuclear types have been pushing since Nader doesn't appear to be supported by actual evidence.
Yes, TurboTax's ever-changing tax-file format and lack of backward compatibility is an abomination. I have the last several years' versions installed Just In Case, even though I have all my paperwork as both PDF and paper.
This year, when I went to get TurboTax 2021 (reluctantly, but, hey, the returns have to be prepared somehow), it took hours to figure out how to buy and download the installable version. Intuit really, really, really wanted everyone to use the web version. Utter bastards.
Of course, after the last increase to the standard deduction, for many people itemization doesn't result in a larger deduction.
I miss itemizing, actually. It was a bit of fun watching the numbers change after I added each item, and a good reason to go through and do any filing and organizing of financial records that I'd been procrastinating on. But I recognize that it's not actually a good taxation mechanism.
Its quite clear that what Musk wanted to buy wasn't exactly what Twitter was selling. Twitter is potentially a valuable resource but to be correctly valued the user base has to be accurately enumerated.
Oh, please. Musk got a bee in his bonnet and launched his bid essentially on a whim, then got buyer's remorse and is trying to back out. The "oh my god it's full of bots" excuse is just him trying to save face, just as the "they won't give us the information" is a transparent legal dodge (which likely won't succeed).
I doubt Musk had any well-formed idea of "what [he] wanted to buy". He's forever chasing squirrels.
Exactly. Mudge's position at Twitter was essentially "identify our security issues and push projects to fix them". In a bit over a year he did a bunch of the former part; only insiders can say how much of the latter. Then Agrawal came in and said "shit, this is going to cost us some bonuses!" or "man, this guy will not say what I tell him to say!", and fired him.
There's little reason for executives to blow the whistle on issues in their own portfolios, while they're still in a position to try to get them fixed.
I don't see anything wrong with what Mudge is doing here.