I don't think most people realize just how important that distinction is.
Open, non-product protocols are the whole entire reason why the Internet succeeded, and proprietary networking solutions like IPX/SPX and DECnet didn't.
It's also what brought us successful Internet applications like email, IRC, and the web, and it's the reason Gopher failed.
Now we just need to send commercial social media platforms like X and Discord to the dustbin of history where they belong.
What the owners of “AI” wanted from it: to replace human labor, so they can exterminate everyone while still having robots to grow their food and wipe their bottoms.
Hence why they're all building bunkers.
They're not going to get their wish, at least not this decade, but their omnicidal malevolence nonetheless chills me to the bone. Not even Hitler wanted to eradicate all of humankind.
99.9% of jobs do not require urgency of any kind, really they don't. We've all had a boss who acts like someone will die if we don't hit some made up deadline by people who don't even do the job. No one needs their meal 1 minute faster or the paperwork before tomorrow morning. Your time off actually doesn't need to wait. Sometimes I think about how legitimately bad most businesses are at time management and hiring, and I wonder how they manage to exist at all.
Let it never be said that capitalism is rational, and the invisible hand of the free market punishes irrationality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Rapper Meek Mill is wondering out loud if Africans have access to streaming music apps like Spotify, and if so, if they listen to his music.
There aren't enough stories about the Africans working at big tech companies, but there are a lot of us. There are many Ghanaians, South Africans, Kenyans, and Nigerians 🙋🏿♂️, working in tech.
I often remind folks that Nigerian 7th grade math curriculum includes binary, octal, hexadecimal, statistics and data, algebra, and geometry.
Something I've noticed a lot lately, is that especially Boomer women, but honestly, women in general, don't seem to ask for what they want or need in a direct way. I notice this a lot with my Mom and her friends. Instead of just asking for what they need directly they tell a story, to ask in a roundabout way. For instance, my Mom needed help this morning, and Instead of just saying, "Hey, I dropped my remote, can you pick it up for me?" She tells a one minute story about what happened, no ask, and eventually I get the point, and then suggest that I come pick it up. Or if one of her friends wants to do something like have a birthday party for a friend, they don't say "We should have a party!" They say, It's Sarah's Birthday coming up, you know she likes surprises, what does everyone think we should do?"
I often wonder if this is why older people think younger women are rude and demanding, because younger people often just ask for what they want and need in a more direct way. But also it's probably just straight up sexism, because men are supposed to make decisions, and women are supposed to make suggestions.
What do you all think? Is this just me? Have you experienced something similar?
This was a fun one, so let's do it again. What is something you've learned that seems unlikely, even though you know it's true? Here's one I think about a lot:
Sight, while being something something many people are born with, is not an innate ability, but something we learn to do. People who were born blind or were blind for a long time, who get sight, have to learn to see.
Truth. Getting a signal from your eyeballs is innate, but recognizing that signal as an image and processing it accordingly is learned.
Fun fact! Your brain does not care which nerve it receives that signal from. A while back, someone made a device that stimulates the (blind) user's tongue according to the image from a camera. The user's brain eventually recognized these stimuli as visual input.
Microsoft Recall is going to make post-breach impact analysis impossible. Right now IR processes can establish a timeline of data stewardship to identify what information may have been available to an attacker based on the level of access they obtained. It's not trivial work, but IR folks can do it. Once a system with Recall is compromised, all data that has touched that system is potentially compromised too, and the ML indirection makes it near impossible to confidently identify a blast radius.
I know the next 3-7 days will be filled with exaggeration and doomsday talk, but IMHO the #xz backdoor, though seemingly meticulously planned for a long time, failed miserably as it was caught at a stage where it wasn't widely deployed but only in testing/prerelease distros. Yes, it made it quite far in the supply chain but it ultimately failed. The mess is being cleaned up, no cases of actual use of the exploit in the wild are known thus far. The immune system of FOSS has worked. Again.
The back door was discovered by serendipity. It could easily have gone unnoticed, if not for one person randomly noticing that logging in via ssh had gotten slightly slower, and then actually bothering to investigate why.
We're relying on luck to detect these attacks, and luck eventually runs out.
That feeling when you have a look at Linkedin and see a former boss write about how LLMs mean the end of coding and programming as a job. That now the only thing needed to get working software is to describe clearly what you want, something they were always manifestly incapable of doing
The LLM prompt is the worst #programming language ever invented, because it has no guarantees whatsoever. Literally all behavior is undefined behavior.
If a #politician tells you that #VoteByMail is a bad idea, that politician is trying to stop you from #voting. #Vote that politician out, with extreme prejudice.
xz maintainer: fell victim to social engineering, reportedly due to ill health
xz co-maintainers responsible for code review: don't exist; nobody's getting paid to do that
Corporate security impresarios in the near future, probably: “Three-factor authentication is now mandatory. This will solve everything for sure this time.”
EU government: “Open source is now illegal. Use proprietary software instead; it never contains malware.”
Which memory management strategy do you want? Stack? Heap? Heap with reference counting? Region with bump allocator? Full GC? Rust can do that, safely and without leaking.
Which concurrency strategy? Message passing? Shared immutable data? Thread local? Atomics? Mutexes? Rust can do that, safely and without data races.
And you make that choice for each datum. Want one message-passed and another mutexed? One on the stack and another ref-counted? Can do.
I don't feel strongly about #trans people themselves—their gender identity is their business, not mine—but I do find it entertaining to watch the smoke billow out of regressives' ears when reality shatters their childish Sunday-school delusions and forces them to understand that nature doesn't cleanly organize everyone into two tidy little boxes.
