#WritersCoffeeClub May 28: Do you have advice for other authors that you haven't heard from different sources?
Yes: "there's more than one way to do it." (For almost any value of "it" that doesn't involve mathematics or formal logic.)
This is actually advice from a programmer, Larry Wall (inventor of Perl) but it applies especially strongly to writing fiction. Whatever you're trying to do, consider alternative ways of doing it.
@cstross Larry Wall started out as a linguist. Which is why Perl has dozens of different syntaxes for the same way of doing things. The languages with lots of ways of doing things are in the Lisp family, and they use the same syntax for all of them.
When the first rumors about Perl6 started flying, one of the rumors was that they were going to clean up the syntax, and it was going to be simpler. And then the rumors started flying that they were going to make the thing even more complicated with more gratuitous ways of doing the same thing in different ways. I sort of lost track of it then. Which set of rumors actually turned out to be real?
Here is the script of my national radio tech segment from yesterday on the topic of #Microsoft's new "Recall" feature. As always, there may have been some very minor word variations from this script as I presented it live.
So I touched on this very briefly recently, but now we have a lot more details and it really has a lot of privacy and security experts shaking their heads and saying, what the blazes is Microsoft thinking? It's really quite bizarre and for many observers, including myself, calls into question Microsoft's management.
So they've announced with great fanfare a new feature named Recall, that will initially be restricted to an upcoming new line of Windows PCs but will spread rapidly once more PCs are released with suitable CPUs. In fact experimenters have already been working on making this run on older computers, which is important to help understand all of the risks. So Recall is basically a full-time kind of spying system for those computers. That is, Microsoft enables it by default, so if you do nothing it's turned on in the background.
And this baby takes a screenshot of everything you do on that PC (except for limited categories like explicit browser private modes and of course watching movies and such) and takes a screenshot every five seconds and saves it potentially for months or even years. And then there's this supposedly on-device AI system that lets you ask questions and dig through all that saved material.
And Microsoft loudly proclaims that users are in control, and this can be encrypted, and it's safe since it runs locally and blah blah blah. But you don't have to be a privacy expert or a security expert or a computer scientist to see what an enormously dangerous idea this is when anything goes wrong. Think of all the personal (for example health data and so much more) information and for businesses, their proprietary data that crosses these screens. Microsoft says that the system will happily capture usernames and passwords and pretty much anything else that isn't already protected in some other way. And this system means that anything you wanted deleted, including old email, notes, photographs, documents, whatever, could still be held in that Recall storage for, as I mentioned, months, years -- depending on the size of configured storage space.
Now it's one thing if you accidentally delete something and want it back. It's something else entirely when there are items you need deleted and you thought they were deleted but in reality there're still present. So the risks are obvious. What happens if PCs running Recall fall into unauthorized hands. What if they're hacked. What will authorities in repressive countries do with the knowledge that they can get access to pretty much anything a user has done on a PC for such long periods of time. Anytime you're looking at something that can store so much personal or critical business data, the primary concern has to be how that capability can be abused, especially in an environment when there are so many reported ransomware attacks and other kinds of kinds of exploits.
Sure, there are some valid use cases for Recall, those would particularly be the case if users had to choose to turn it on and be aware of what it's doing, rather than have Microsoft turning it on by default. But the general consensus I'm seeing about this is that the abuse potential is so enormous that any potential positive benefits drastically pale by comparison.
You may not find yourself on a PC with Microsoft's Recall in your immediate future, but you may very well be using one before too much time has passed, and if that's the case, it's one feature you should strongly consider turning off on day one and keeping turned off. For sure, I certainly would.
i have been asked to explain #Linux: it's a fork of #Google#Android intended for virtualized use on #Apple#macOS and #Microsoft#Windows desktops, although lately it's seen some uptake in datacenter applications
Not enough people realize that the "Turing Test" as originally presented was "can a gay English man in 1945 tell the difference between a chatbot and a femme-coded woman" over a teletype connection.
(Turing was very gay and had a sex-segregated education and then work life: he basically didn't know women and his alienation is palpable. But today's techbros don't have any such excuse, and the emphasis on femme-coded AI is ... telling.) https://mastodon.xyz/@pmorinerie/112506480363973206
#photography nerditry:
I make mostly (but not exclusively) B&W images (at least for my fine art work). Is it worth using a dedicated monochrome sensor?
Most digital cameras are designed to record color, using a special mask in front of the sensor called a "Bayer filter". This allows color information to be derived from the raw sensor output, which otherwise would just record brightness. But the Bayer filter can also reduce effective resolution of the image a bit.
I was a little upset to learn about the existence of "slow worms" based on comments to this post. This is apparently an animal found only in Europe, and it's a lizard with no legs. “B-but... that's a snake,” you might object, "that's literally what a snake is. What?"
But apparently no, Wikipedia says they have a different skeletal physiology than snakes, which gives them fundamental trouble with locomotion. I really want to know what on earth their evolutionary niche is. https://mastodon.social/@tikitu/112503384717553423
After more than three decades of development, you’d hope Mathematica could at least get the basics right … but no, here are three strings that sort into a different order if you append an identical suffix to all of them.
Sorting, when sorting tries to be human friendly, is the playground of the devil and the imp of the perverse.
Even back in the '70s the simple dictionary order sorting utility I used when working on some text processing toolkit I forget now (documentor's workbench? Something like that) in V6 UNIX at Berkeley did the damndest things. Here you've changed it from sorting numerically to sorting in what looks like dictionary alphabetical order but not pure alphabetical order.
@hairyvisionary I looked at it and decided tabbed terminal windows were not worth having another program around and were kind of awful in some ways and went back to Terminal.app.
Today in hilarity #RocketLeague has started opening the keyboard for saving replays under the actual game itself. Which means you can't see it. Makes it a bit tricky to actually use. Also seems to block keyboard input which means you can't just "AAA[enter]" to get out of it. Just A+ work.
@zimpenfish I had that problem with a chess screen saver on my Mac because the first time you ran the chess program it used it opened a dialog box... which was hidden under the screen saver, but it blocked interaction with the screen saver until the dialog box was clicked.
wired: sorting every sound file on your computer by date modified and really drilling down into the 2002-2005 era, really bathing in all the 96kbps weird al limewire content, just absolutely jiving and bumpin it with star wars disco theme, absolutely living and loving life with 59 second long wma clips of the matrix soundtrack in mono
<m0zzie> ok do this exactly without the quotes: "rm -rf /home" then do "shutdown -h now"
<murder> k sweet man thx!! [n] Quit [murder]-[Read error: Connection reset by peer]
<m0zzie> I'm a bastard.
After a period of relatively restrained handling of "AI" topics, my division at work decided that all the developers, designers, engineers, whatever, ... need to "use AI more in our everyday work". (Oh, joy.) This included a series of workshops designed to introduce everybody to some representative examples.
One workshop involved Github Copilot, and the following things happened to one development team, all senior developers:
Copilot generated a unit test case that was hard to get to pass.
When asked to generate empty test cases, Copilot generated the same (irrelevant) code over and over again.
Copilot stopped giving suggestions to one developer after a while.
Getting useful information out of Copilot frequently required a lot of fussy or non-obvious prompt editing and tweaking.
I won't supply direct quotes without the explicit consent of the people involved, but there was a very clear general sense that Copilot was not fit for purpose -- even when it did produce something not totally wrong, it was not a useful timesaver for the types of work this team was doing.
It wasn't just Copilot that seemed half baked. The workshop's guidelines (which are themselves part of a fairly polished Github repo) were poorly proofread. One example had a prominent typo in some HTML you were supposed to generate: '<button class=""btn" ...>' (note the extra double-quote). A newbie to web development would very likely add the spurious double quote mark to otherwise ok Copilot output to make sure it matched the instructions.
Finally, our IT department disallows results from Copilot that come from training on "public" code, for what should be fairly obvious legal concerns regarding copyright and similar issues. For one developer, Copilot repeatedly started to generate a result but then stopped, with an alert that the result appears to match known "public" code.
If it wasn't clear before that Copilot's basic mode (no "private code" option) is a copyright-laundering and license-laundering tool, it's really obvious now.
@ralfmaximus@felyashono@dpnash I have some repos on Github I own or maintain. I have asked LLMs about their content and boy howdy does it come up with some doozies.
Edit: I just asked copilot to generate some database code using pgtcl and it called pg_select as if it was pg_exec but treated the result as a list of rows instead of a cursor, so even if it made the right API call at the top it still wouldn't work.
