Posts by Cris E

This is all true, but I think it's easier for them to just say "have a neighbor call it in" or "time travel to 2009" than get into SIM support calls on the 911 lines. Can you imagine the number of dowagers sitting at home with their cell phones in ruins alternating between 911 calls and bothering their grandchildren?

"I do have the simp right here. It says Sandisk."

"Alright I've rebooted the phone, what do I do next? Hello? Hello?"

"I just wanted to call back say thank you for the patience you showed when you spent 90 minutes fixing my Tracfone. 911 operators are the best."

Re: it will run fine

Um, if data privacy is that important to you then perhaps the internet is not a place you should be spending too much time. Go read a nice analog book, walk in real sunlight, talk to actual people IRL. Hanging around "free" online sites while preserving anonymity is hard unless you invest some effort in it because the default state of things has to generate enough money to keep the servers running.

For example I'm under no illusions that my FB time is being sold, but my FB profile is pretty much comprised only of the things I read because I post nothing so my privacy is not violated too heavily. It's a trade I'm OK with. If you think any data sale at all is a "horrible data theft practice and worse" then you're going to find things pretty stressful for the foreseeable future and maybe you should consider moving in with the Amish.

Re: Probably A Stupid Question(s)

Oh you noticed, did you? Well fat lot of good that'll do you.

Re: asked Cloudflare to explain the term “right for the team”

There's no U in team.

There is a U in cut.

There's an I in reconsidered and a Y in no sales during the last quartery.

Re: Hackers entering GPS coordinates of OEM repair shops to prevent trains from failing?

As paragons of administrative integrity and most forms of rule-following, hackers *hate* third party support! Everyone should know this.

Re: HP can piss right off, forever

You can hate your printer every day until you despair and throw it out, or you can hate the return policy one time. This is a simple Quality Of Life choice, and I choose to avoid HP.

"A real-world example of this is attacks against the spam filters used by email providers. In a 2018 blog post on machine learning attacks, Elie Bursztein, who leads the anti-abuse research team at Google said: “In practice, we regularly see some of the most advanced spammer groups trying to throw the Gmail filter off-track by reporting massive amounts of spam emails as not spam […] Between the end of Nov 2017 and early 2018, there were at least four malicious large-scale attempts to skew our classifier.” (from csoonline.com)

I wonder if using simpler AI to classify and prepare your data wouldn't be the best way around trusting other folks' metadata. Or perhaps using AI to vet the training data before feeding it to your primary models. In the case above, for example, you could perhaps identify that many incorrectly flagged emails came from a limited set of domains. At any rate GIGO is going to be the axis that this spins on for quite a while, as problems with copyright, poison and simple litter in the training data is going to limit what gets done and how much it costs to do.

Re: Meanwhile... Landfill operators... Start your engines

I haven't bought a new desktop in ages. When setting up the kids with a Win box for school software I head to ebay, find some old enterprise warhorse coming off lease and grab what i want for $100. They usually last for quiet a while, and when they start getting a little long in the tooth you can either upgrade parts (SSD) or just swap them out. Hardware has been miles ahead of what I need for decades.

Re: Honestly....

These days the hardware, the printing itself, is usually not a problem. Folks would use hardware from any number of vendors if quality and reliability were the only criteria. Alas it is not. The grasping, voracious business models that are manifested in hateful software and Dickensian contracts are driving folks away.

I wonder if you could survive just making cheap, open printers that took any after-market toner/ink? I suppose it would be so low margin that most companies wouldn't bother tying up the assets in it, but if you went with the cheap Chinese mfg and didn't do much support it might be profitable for a small organization. Think of it as cheap network gear where you're not setting standards or trying to get rich, just want to sell some stuff and retire comfortably.

Re: A special case?

And it's a good thing too, or the Happy Birthday goons would be on you like SW 7005 Pure White Interior / Exterior on Uncle Bens Microwave Long Grain Rice 250g (6 x 250g).

Re: Puzzled....again....

Sure, if you're the only person choosing what gets compiled and run. But if you're sharing with others then you don't always get to choose what they run (and thus what they see) so you need to change the CPU to be certain.

Re: Get Rich Quick

Clamshells, well no. Suffice to say it's a long story but I've been burned before.

Still, do you have any other mollusk-centered or mollusk-adjacent securities on offer? I just can't quit 'em...

Re: "neither will they leak all our most personal data to the cloud"

The mothership could write an AI that watches for unauthorized sharing and helps you stay secure (while still collecting a fair amount of info that would be useful for its own needs.) If the line was drawn clearly that would be both fair and valuable to everyone. I suppose various settings for what was locked and what was not could be established, but having an AI pre-screen your emails and flag the dangerous ones would be great. Eventually it could be like putting the equivalent to email filters out in front of your browser to snoop for badness (ie "You're typing your SSN? Really Mike?")

Re: Lost in Translation?

It is sooo much easier to reindex, run stats, reorg a table once the data has been removed. The system just flies.

The tools AWS and Google provide for cost tracking and control are primitive as well. Hardly a surprise, but customers who need closer financial predictability are not amused. We're on GCP and we just bought a company with a lot of AWS, but there are few good ways to drill into sudden spikes in costs. We've actually started opening support tickets to get them to eat the cost of diagnosing some of these. At least Google is promising improved cost dashboards "soon".

Re: Yep I give it ~5 years or so

They'll just call it anime and slowly crank up the pixels to a billion. Voices can be done in Korea or somewhere just like the drawing was done for The Simpsons, outside the reach of the union, and only the US-based holding company has to shush the labor folk. If the unions are successful they'll put the US film industry at a slight disadvantage until everyone stops expecting live people and the generated stuff becomes indistinguishable from real. As you say, this will come in a trickle and then a flood.

Re: From the other side

That assumes someone knows what is installed throughout the plant, which is likely untrue if they don't have competent IT staff on hand. Not knowing what you don't know is frequently the biggest problem facing companies that don't have proper staffing.

Re: hurt his back sumo wrestling on his bday years ago and has been in chronic pain since

Well maybe he gets his health care through his new employer, Twitter/X, and the plan is so poor he can't get anything treated?

I believe the proposal here is concrete using carbon black in part of the role of the aggregate/sand.

"Yes, but what happens when all four of the flight computers shut themselves off?"

"Oh come on, you're just being an ass at this point."

"I don't know, things happen..."

Re: Why would he have access to any of that stuff?

Lots of NG guys have day jobs and his could be doing things that require a Top Secret clearance. But the number of people with Top Secret (the government kind) who treat it like Top Secret (the movie or microwave popcorn) is a substantial concern. It does sound like they're going to go on another round of emphasizing the seriousness of this, so that'll surely fix it.

Re: Remind me shy do I need a Twitter account to trade on eToro

Because, you see, Twitter tips are the *best* and you'll be so overwhelmed by the golden insights that you won't have time to call your broker or log in to another site before investing everything you own in Parlor or X or whatever game show quality scheme is on offer. The! Best!

Re: propane is better for backup

If the problem was performance then potential BTUs would be a relevant point. But the issue is utterly an image thing so expect it all to be painted with the fanciest green bio-wash, regardless of source, cost or effectiveness. It is just backup, so it only has to be good enough.