@matthewskelton@mastodon.social
@matthewskelton@mastodon.social avatar

matthewskelton

@matthewskelton@mastodon.social

Holistic innovation via fast flow at Conflux | I help organizations to adopt a holistic approach to innovation using technology and people in harmony via Fast Flow, Team Topologies, and Continuous Stewardship.

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hazelweakly, to random
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io avatar

One of the hardest things for people to understand with distributed systems is that eventual consistency is the same thing as eventual inconsistency. The very same pattern that lets you non atomically deal with things also ensures that eventually you'll have a system that doesn't match your understanding.

Resources will go stale, things will go missing, stuff will exist without ever having been created, and data will be destroyed that never got manifested.

hazelweakly,
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io avatar

"how do you prevent this?"

You don't. You figure out what flavor of wrong you want and what type of inconsistency is tolerable to you and you embrace the suffering and learn to mitigate the particularly painful outliers that bite you

Is bootstrapping your worst enemy? Regularly destroy and recreate the system to ensure no cycles exist in it. Of course, that means it will inevitably incur emergent instability and resource leaks. What's your preference?

hazelweakly,
@hazelweakly@hachyderm.io avatar

Dangling, stale, metastable, zombie. That only touches the very surface

"This system only restarts with warmed caches"

"This system can't be rebooted and scaled up at the same time"

"This system can do anything except be highly available during updates"

"This system can only be restarted in topo-sort order"

"This system has a deadlock if you drain it geographically from east to west during daylight savings time"

Pick your choice of madness, but don't pretend you won't be drinking it dry

nixCraft, (edited ) to random
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

Remembering Alan Turing, died on 7 June 1954, victim of prejudice and ignorance 💔 He was a mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist and is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artiticial intelligence. He was also homosexual in a time when homosexuality was illegal. After his conviction he was given a choice between chemical castration and prison. He chose chemical castration, and later chose to kill himself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

rysiek, (edited ) to infosec
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

Lukewarm take:

When I see general* "security advice" that mentions "do not use public WiFi" or "use a VPN", I am immediately suspicious about all other advice offered.

Yes, a decade ago that was a consideration, because most sites were not using HTTPS. Credentials were flying cleartext on the wire.

Today, almost all sites use HTTPS. Doesn't mean the risk is zero, but it's way lower.

*) "general" meaning "without a very specific threat model in mind", meant for general public, etc.

#InfoSec

rysiek, (edited )
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

Also, shout-out to @letsencrypt for dramatically changing the security landscape of the Web for the better over the years.

Rarely is there an example of a project so effective and so directly improving everyone's lives, while at the same time keeping the original engineering mindset and just Doing Stuff Right™ humbly in the background.

Next November it will have been exactly a decade since LE started. We all owe them a huge 10th birthday party.

#InfoSec

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I could go down the long rabbithole of figuring out how to call g*mp's image manipulation tools from a commandline or API, or getting imagemagick installed on this PC and figuring out how to port it over there...

or I could be silly and take advantage of the fact that I'm applying gamma ramps to an 8-bit greyscale image. What's the difference between the "before" and "after" images? a different palette.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

two of the best feelings when programming are:

  1. figuring out a really clever way to solve a problem
  2. figuring out a really stupid way to solve a problem
GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

I strongly believe we're within 5 years of the generative AI boom collapsing almost completely, and it will have a profound economic impact, as the use cases for the products being sold almost entirely suck arse.

Miriamm, to random
@Miriamm@mastodon.social avatar

These are the type of statues we should be putting up. Danuta Danielsson hitting a neo Nazi (1985).

augieray, to random
@augieray@mastodon.social avatar

80 years ago today, 2,501 Americans died at Normandy to protect lives and democracy.

Some were black, knowing they would return to a racist US.

Some were gay, knowing they could be court-martialed for who they were.

They fought anyway for what was best and right.

I don't care what you think of Biden. A world with Trump in the White House will be a disaster. In 151 days, you can do what is best and right without risking your life.

Every election. Every race. Every Democrat. #VoteBlue #DDay

Neverfadingwood, to random
@Neverfadingwood@lingo.lol avatar
djlink, to random
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Ah, I wonder why Photoshop wants access to users work? 100% sure it's for training "AI" stuff. Just with more people tried alternative software, Adobe has such a huge monopoly, might be one of the worst cases in software.

djlink,
@djlink@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Movie director Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft, Source Code) is locked out because he doesn’t agree with Photoshop new terms. Yeah Adobe is the worst

Strandjunker, to random
@Strandjunker@mstdn.social avatar

80 years ago, the greatest generation of patriotic Americans and Allied forces stormed the Normandy shores on D-Day to throw out the Nazis.

This year, all you have to do is “storm” the polls and vote.

docpop, to random
@docpop@mastodon.social avatar

Happy , y'all!

Me playing with a yo-yo in my living room. The first shot is extremely close up to the yo-yo and shows a complex string trick called "Bus Flow". Then it switches to a shot from further away. You can see that I'm smiling and having fun will doing the trick. The rest of the room is dark, with some cool lighting behind my back that changes colors. I'm wearing a black t-shirt with the yo-yo emoji on it.

docpop,
@docpop@mastodon.social avatar

In honor of , here's the story of how I helped get the 🪀 emoji added to unicode. https://youtu.be/PkcpLTPOt7Y

slashdot, to random
@slashdot@mastodon.cloud avatar

NewsBreak, Most Downloaded US News App, Caught Sharing 'Entirely False' AI-Generated Stories https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/06/06/0157205/newsbreak-most-downloaded-us-news-app-caught-sharing-entirely-false-ai-generated-stories?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon

chris__martin, to random
@chris__martin@functional.cafe avatar

Without making any statement about what "agile" "really means," I'll just say that I cannot imagine why anybody would begrudge spending an hour every two weeks letting engineering and product confer about the relative priorities and difficulties of upcoming work.

SmudgeTheInsultCat, to random
@SmudgeTheInsultCat@mas.to avatar
marick, to random
@marick@mstdn.social avatar

I am, for no particular reason, rereading the multi-author anthology /Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos/¹. I sometimes make up little short stories as I go to sleep. Influenced by the book, I conceived of an AI doomerism story. The premise was:

  1. We know that large language models (henceforth, “AI”) have a “dumping sewage upstream of where you get your drinking water” problem in that their output at time N will be used as training input at time N+1. (1/4)
marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar
  1. It’s generally thought that the “fixed point”² for AI output will be some universally bland sort of meaningless marketese.
  2. Oh really? What readers actually like marketese? What people want is pithy content that riles them up. Isn’t the fixed point more likely to be Twitter?
  3. So that, not marketese, is what the not-so-smart AI that destroys civilization³ will produce. (2/4)
marick,
@marick@mstdn.social avatar
  1. Bad enough. But suppose Cthulhu mythos stories form some sort of strange attractor⁴ for the AI generator. For certain algorithmically-targeted subgroups, the rage-inducing fixed point shifts to creating the sort of rage-and-despair-fueled slavish devotion that drives groups of maddened acolytes to perform unholy rites on unhallowed ground. (3/4)
overholt, to random
@overholt@glammr.us avatar

I’ve got some practice with 17th century English orthography but this one throws me every time.

b0rk, (edited ) to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

I know $12 USD is a lot of money for some people, so to celebrate 1000+ sales (!!!), I'm giving away 1000 PDF copies of How Git Works (honour system: only if $12 is a lot for you!)

Here's the link, enter code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get a free copy https://wizardzines.com/zines/git/

(it'll ask you for a billing address but you can enter a fake address if you'd prefer)

b0rk, (edited )
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

I was going to post “the 1000 free copies of How Git Works for folks who can't afford it have all been claimed, I'll release more when we sell 2000 copies"

But then I went to check this morning and we've already sold 2000 copies of the zine??? So I guess we're giving away another 1000 copies now. https://wizardzines.com/zines/git/

more details in this post: https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/112552672907642693

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft have decided to bake essentially an infostealer into base Windows OS and enable by default.

From the Microsoft FAQ: “Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers."

Info is stored locally - but rather than something like Redline stealing your local browser password vault, now they can just steal the last 3 months of everything you’ve typed and viewed in one database.

video/mp4

GossiTheDog,
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

WIRED has a piece about Total Recall, a now released tool which dumps keypresses, text and screenshots (they’re JPEGs) from Microsoft Recall

https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/

Total Recall software by @xaitax https://github.com/xaitax/TotalRecall

Example search for ‘password’:

🪟 Captured Windows: 133
📸 Images Taken: 36
🔍 Search results for 'password': 22

📄 Summary of the extraction is available in the file:
C:\Users\alex\Downloads\TotalRecall\2024-06-04-13-49_Recall_Extraction\TotalRecall.txt

GossiTheDog,
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

A key element of Recall is Microsoft say only you can access your Recall, it is per user.

ArsTechnica enabled Recall on Windows 11 box and tested the claim. By logging in as another user they could access the database and screenshots.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/windows-recall-demands-an-extraordinary-level-of-trust-that-microsoft-hasnt-earned/

GossiTheDog,
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

Three Copilot+ Recall questions that keep coming up.

Q. Can you alter the Recall history?

A. Yes. You can change the OCR database and change the screenshots as the logged in user or as software running as the local user. There is no audit log of changes.

Q. Are they snapshots, as Microsoft says, or screenshots?

A. They are just screenshots, jpegs.

Q. What is to stop apps on your machine accessing your Recall covertly?
A. Nothing. There is no audit log of access.

GossiTheDog,
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

If you want to know how Microsoft have got themselves into this giant mess with Recall, here’s what the documentation says between the lines:

you, the customer, are a simpleton who doesn’t want to be an AI genius yet. Have a caveman mode.

GossiTheDog, (edited )
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

If anybody is wondering what Microsoft's reaction to any of the Copilot+ Recall concerns are, they're continuing to decline comment to every media outlet.

I've seen comments MS staff have been given for enterprise customers, which are nonsense handwaving.

Product ships live on devices from Dell, Lenovo etc this month. https://x.com/zacbowden/status/1798221879741931847

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