@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

falcon

@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks

Shadytel aerial cable inspector. Searchable. ArchiveBot, Cryoflesh, AS398960. Parts 13, 97; 91 with instruments, 107. M.Sc., MBA. À bas le metaverse, pas de web3, milliardaires en enfer. He/they/that, bi, poly, various bird sounds. 🦢🏴🏳️‍🌈 🦀

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

AI is a case study in overpromise and underdeliver, and it has been throughout its history. When the chips are down, if two systems perform a function, and one of them is deterministic and simple, and the other one is nondeterministic and unanalyzable (e.g., AI), the deterministic and simple one is better by any meaningful measure of outcomes.

The argument I hear made is that the promise of AGI merits investment on moral grounds, but if it could be done it would stand on its own.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

The idea that we should accept a period of barely functional or even non-functional systems as a forcing function to build AGI is its own antithesis. In fact, assuming AGI is even both desirable and possible, breaking everything from search to programming to business planning sets ablaze the very tools that would be needed to do it. The more that is invested in non-working AI on the theory that it will of course be improved, the farther away from it we get.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

It is too bad, because for a moment, we got incredibly good at search. We had NLP and structured data combined in such a way that the correct answer to nearly any answered question could be had in a moment. We had this for something like 4 years, and the few people to whom we entrusted the direction of the maintenance and improvement of that decided instead to destroy it (there is a lesson here about capitalism versus democracy).

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

So it is my ardent hope that the kinds of people who write memos claiming that AI is the only priority that matters and that all work should be invested in applying AI and introducing AI applications to existing practice not in need of optimization should be, in due course, the subjects of creative destruction. We have entered an era where, against all reason and against the intentions of capital, it makes economic sense to found a new search engine.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

The original colonists of the West were just, like, some dudes. The building I live in has been around for more than half of the time the Northwest has been settled. A bunch of the dams have been there for less than a quarter of it. It's really not too late to reimagine how the place should run.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

The State of South Dakota has no redeeming qualities and should be altogether abolished with its territory partitioned among its neighbours.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@rst Entirely reasonable. The "this was the bargain a bunch of otherwise sovereign states consented to a couple hundred years ago and so we must keep it sacrosanct" position doesn't even hold the limited amount of water it says it does.

scottsantens, to random
@scottsantens@hachyderm.io avatar

We already have 1,000 would-be Mozarts who instead of learning music and honing their skills are doing shit jobs for shit wages. They're spending their time just surviving instead of blessing the rest of us with music we'd love.

What these would-be Mozarts need is basic income.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@scottsantens I mean I am sure they both think they got rich solely by personal merit and that famous artists spring up from nothing without patrons just by virtue of talent alone...

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

I feel the AI winter coming on and I am excited for some snowball-making, skiing, and getting literally any useful thing done with all these resources. Let the few actually viable applications rise and the others flake away.

They do exist. We might or might not call them AI. But we will start to see them more clearly when it finally becomes OK to pitch an initiative or a company again without going on some AGI or AI-maximalist tangent.

polpo, to random
@polpo@bitbang.social avatar

This is one of my favorite weird mice: a Bluetooth combo mouse and number pad with built in calculator, made by Canon. There’s a button you can use to send the result of your calculations to the computer.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@polpo this would be legitimately useful for bookkeeping.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

I really hate the support tradition of mechanically requesting huge config dump and log artifacts for fairly obvious bugs. Like this one: Mikrotik logs say it is rejecting client proposals, when configured for AES-GCM, for not having an authentication transformation. One isn't needed or allowed. This is obvious. But I am not going to file it because I do not want to generate supout.rif from my gateway router with several copies of the Internet routing table.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

IPSec with modern options, as a standard, actually works pretty well. It would be easy to configure if everyone's implementation wasn't full of bizarre bugs and if they actually exposed necessary config options instead of inferring wrong things.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

For example, if you try to use the Windows EAP-TLS client with a certificate in the personal store, it will refuse to send any kind of identity to the remote server. If you try to get Mikrotik to use GCM, it will reject negotiations for not having an authentication transform.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

Asking people to watch training videos that are read by a computer-generated voice is not different from forcing people to use a screenreader.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates

It means that every post published was important to the writer

Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most

You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@baldur yeah that makes for content that is so much better than the empty cruft people write on a regular schedule.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

Not following the people who complain about "resistance to monetization" here.

Do many people open up social media intending to hand out a bunch of cash? I interact here to vent or socialize or keep up to date, not to try and do business with people.

jmcleod, to random
@jmcleod@mastodon.au avatar

In Australia, our public taxes are generously diverted by religious politicians to fund private religious schools. Mostly run by the Catholic Church Inc.

In America, capitalist corporations (Catholic Church Inc. again), are trying to divert public taxes to fund elite private schools. See the video.

If the Catholic Church Inc., wants to run private schools, they can fund them privately. Use some of the money collected by the Vatican Bank.

Bit too late for us in Australia, where our taxes are generously used to fund elite private religious schools. Which enforces the "we're born to rule, we're rich, you're poor, but you poor shits have to pay for our privileges with your taxes hahaha" social division that the wealthy love.

How did this even happen?

Oh, PS: pay some goddamn tax, too.

video/mp4

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@jmcleod Canada found a nice way around this back in the day which has persisted past its time: the Catholic schools are not run by the Church, but by a public elected board like anywhere. Sometimes the bishop threatens to say they can't call it Catholic anymore if they don't do this or that,, to which they say, ok but what will you do if we tell you to get bent.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

Why does the other building on this block need to run their emergency generator at 0400 to 0430 twice a week?

I get the need to run it at intervals, but it's not pleasant to get woken up to the sounds and smells that are the same as someone running a tractor outside one's bedroom window.

NanoRaptor, to random
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social avatar

Ink Jet.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@bornach @RL_Dane @NanoRaptor we really have to stop making them print out those full route NOTAMs. https://fixingnotams.org/reel-of-telegrams/

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

Shout out to the Astound engineer working on the Seattle DOCSIS network who configured the CMTS to respond on its link local address, respond to ff02::2, and send RAs, but advertise no prefixes nor DHCPv6-PD.

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

~🪿

A seagull quacks and looks into a window, overlooking the bay

falcon, to random
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

Spent some time looking into how the coax part of an HFC network is managed and I'm now super mad Astound's techs didn't fix this obvious issue that left me with shitty Internet access at home for a couple years.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

Basically the problem is I have RG-58U cable going around 100m from the cable room in the building to my place, which cannot feasibly be replaced, and has high frequency loss. That's where the tech threw up his hands. But apparently this kind of loss is expected, and compensation for it is called "tilt" in the industry, and is good and normal. The tap is 20db, and the high channel is 12db down, (low was 2db down) so all it needed was a lower value tap and an EQ pad.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

So in my case, since I can't replace their taps (legally, at least), it's plenty sufficient to put in a 15db forward amplifier for just my line in the cable room, and an EQ pad so the low channel isn't coming in at 12db.

soatok, to random
@soatok@furry.engineer avatar

Instead of wasting time fudging CVSS scores, I feel like researchers and vendors should look at incumbent generally accepted security ratings for similar findings and just rate qualitatively.

Which is different from "just vibes" because you have a cheat sheet of past vibes-based ratings to maintain narrative consistency.

falcon, (edited )
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@soatok Yeah haggling with stakeholders over CVSS scores is a huge exhausting time-waster. CVSS also has very limited dynamic range if you're a cloud provider and therefore nearly everything is "network".

I'll also note that one of your examples (expensive exploit) would probably have this CVSS v4 vector https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/4.0#CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N and come out "critical", even though the loss expectancy is near-zero. Oops!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • love
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • provamag3
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •