WesternInfidels

If you’re going to sneakily change what the creator drew or wrote, why stop at the creator’s name? Why not fix up a dull punch line or tidy up a drawings weaknesses?

How would we know you aren’t doing that already?

internet bluetooth wife

My new punk band name

Oil wrestling shows up in the classic heist film Topkapi.

I had a visit with a PA who pantomimed the use of an inhaler she didn’t actually have on hand. The note-taking robot decided that was a “demonstration” with a billing code, and that it should be billed as $800.

You’d never really get those ducks in a row, but it would be entertaining to watch you try.

Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.

The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.

I’m probably an idiot. Tell me I’m all wrong about this.

The danger is that quantum computers could factor large products well enough to reverse public keys, finding the associated private keys. Which would indeed be very bad. But this isn’t quite a magic key that opens everything.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

Public key crypto is also not used to protect your typical encrypted zip file or file system volume. Your Bitlocker and Veracrypt secrets aren’t about to fall to quantum spies.

I’m bothered that so many popular articles about this issue draw no distinction between the classes of cryptography that are vulnerable and those that are not.

Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

deleted by creator

I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.

But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems…

Jesus, that sounds awful.

Subscribed.

The commentariat at HN was anti-DEI before anyone knew what “DEI” even was.

Garry Tan, tech [Y Combinator] CEO & campaign donor, wishes death upon San Francisco politicians

I am constantly asked to explain my opinions … I am constantly harangued for proof of what I believe, and every time I hand it over there’s some sort of ham-fisted response of “it’s getting better” and “it will get even more better from here!’

For an industry so thoroughly steeped in cold, hard rationality , AI boosters are so quick to jump to flights of fancy — to speak of the mythical “AGI” and the supposed moment when everything gets cheaper and also powerful enough to be reliable or effective.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with “AI,” but I think this highlights an interesting pattern, one where the standards of evidence for critics and boosters are different. Certainly we’ve seen a similar phenomenon in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Is it profound, is it one of those penetrating insights that you can’t stop seeing once you’ve seen it? I’m not sure. Of course enthusiasts are biased, of course their arguments are emotional and unfair.

You give somebody who’s used to living paycheck to paycheck a few million bucks and they will spend it.

So they become job creators?

Is the goal to become a rich asshole? Or is the goal for everyone to make $19/hr?

Well I guess those are definitely the only possible outcomes, aren’t they?

We could view this as “MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to,” or we could view this as “MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has.” I hate it but I have eyes.

If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I’m not holding my breath, though.

The term “kill chain” reduces the slaughter of human beings to an engineering problem. It tacitly admits that modern militaries are murder factories. If we had caught ISIS or a drug cartel speaking and thinking this way, that would be a Fox News headline for months. What a dispiriting bit of jargon. It tells so much more than it says.

If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.

I’m concerned in a general way that the federated design of Lemmy / Mastodon etc. is by its nature (arguably even by its intent) likely to lead users to construct isolated media bubbles. But I don’t know how to improve it. I’m not going to subscribe to a (hypothetical as far as I know) fascist community just to “broaden my mind,” that wouldn’t work.

It’s hard to know how much of the division we see and feel is meatspace division facilitated by social media, and how much of it is social media reflecting divisions in meatspace. There’s no reason to suppose the answer would be simple or easy.

…it wasnt a slippery slope. They didnt make laws a little bit invasive … before slowly nudging it further

I disagree.

There was a certain (large) amount of government surveillance and eavesdropping going on before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to massively expand it. There was already inspection and security and traveler record-keeping at airports before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to expand those. CBP had long had the legislative authority to do all kinds of nastiness within 100 miles of a border before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to step their activities up, to legal limits and beyond.

In every case, an initial claim of urgent, exceptional authority was used to create both the physical infrastructure and the cultural permission required to make later, expanded claims of urgent, exceptional authority much easier to implement when an excuse presented itself. That is the slippery slope, we really slid way down it, it’s a real phenomenon. It doesn’t have to be smooth or gradual, it can happen in jerks and waves. It doesn’t have to come as a result of a plot, a plan, a deliberate conspiracy, it can be an accretion of individually opportunistic acts.