fvold's comments

The biggest change Copilot has done for me so far is to have me replace my VSCode with VSCodium to be sure it doesn't sneak any uploading of my code to a third party without my knowing.

I'm all for new tech getting introduced and made useful, but let's make it all opt in, shall we?

The real scam is the audit.

Many moons ago, I failed a "security audit" because `/sbin/iptables --append INPUT --in-interface lo --jump ACCEPT`

"This leaves the interface completely unfiltered"

Since then, I've not trusted any security expert until I've personally witnessed their competence.

Yeah, if I had a spare million, I can imagine buying that dip.

We don't pay nearly enough attention to this, considering how relatively simple it is to do right.

You can't outgrow your lineage in evolution. We're monkeys. KFC is made of dinosaurs. Anything descended from bacteria would still be bacteria.

I guess there is no PR wins in just listening to the floor-level employees, then?

It's ostensibly "pure science", where we "just" gain more information on how the most fundamental building blocks of reality work.

It's hard to predict what new technology can come of this. For example, who could have predicted the transistor?

I think the information gained is valuable in itself, but way smarter people than me will be looking way harder at it, and suddenly a real-world marketable application pops out. If we could predict it happening, that would be the pop.

Also, don't underestimate the massive amounts of learning being done in engineering just by designing experiments and building/maintaining accelerators. That, alone, might be worth it.

In my experience, Ali Express is absolutely 100% a buyers market, in every single way. I've bought random junk with a somewhat long fulfillment time, and contacted the seller just to politely ask about a time frame without in any way indicating dissatisfaction, and received groveling responses begging me to not open a dispute with Ali.

There is growing legal pressure to not consider an IP address used as evidence that the "owner" of said IP address is the one doing the activity.

For example, my IP address is paid for by me, through a run-of-the-mill ISP subscription. Does that make me legally liable for all the activity of the other person that lives with me and uses "my" network for all their private internet traffic?

I guess there are laws about facilitating piracy, and whatnot, but you can't reasonably expect me to screen all my fiance's activity on the network. Most of it is encrypted anyway. I can't be on the hook for that.

I'm privileged in that I have an ISP that feels the same way as I do about this. They've fought for the privacy of their subscribers before, and will likely keep doing so in the future, because an IP address does not identify any individual.

I have a feeling the different sports corporations/leagues have done the research on this. I can't find any offhand, but maybe someone else has more luck?

Maybe it's the beer sponsors that want the game to be as easy to follow as possible, enabling a higher alcohol intake? ;-)

This is done for copyright reasons.

You can't copyright the raw list of ingredients, as it is a factual statement with too little creative input (in the list, not the recipe itself!) to get copyright protection.

To stop the recipe blog just being scraped by some recipe site and get zero visitors/impressions for themselves, they have these (at least) "minimally creative" intros that qualify for copyright.

...then the recipe sites just changed to extract the factual non-protected recipe from that, and the arms race escalates. "Whisk the eggs in with a feeling of freedom, and duty to the ancestors" - COPYRIGHT, BABY!

"It's an offset from the beginning. The first element is 0 slots from the beginning." is what I was taught. (Of course, it's more complicated than that, with pointer math etc etc, but that works as a general gist)

In the past, I've written roughly half a million lines of Lua. Arrays don't always start at 0. I've regularly shaken my fist at Lua and cursed it's wicked ways, but it's really damn useful in a lot of contexts.

N=2

I don't know about the market at large, but I do not want that. I want the a search engine to just have a huge database of websites, and look up stuff in that database based on my query, spitting out a link to the page that matches best, then the one that matches second best etc etc.

Using ML to determine the order of matches is absolutely fine, but to "digest" the internet and cook up an answer to what I'm looking for without proper sourcing? I do not want that. I don't want to try and guess what biases the language model might have. It's way easier for me to gauge the bias of another human, and for that, I need to be sent to a page a human has written.

(Of course, I realize that the "blog written by a bot" genre of writing is also becoming more convincing, making this whole thing harder...)

Yep, I feel that exact way about Nvidia Canvas [1]. It does not produce anything even close to usable as a final product, but it can produce an amazing start to a concept.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/

I don't think the breach frequency is increasing per service we use, just that we're using a lot more services now, and they're better at detecting and communicating when they've had breaches.

So yes, the absolute number of breaches are going up, just like the absolute number of car crashes are a lot higher now than they were in the 1800s.

I hate fixing bugs, but I love having fixed them more. It's the same sort of relationship I have with playing hard games, like Elden Ring, or whatever.

The actual search for the problem, and sometimes even the implementation of the fix, can be really frustrating, but that is a vital part in the absolutely ecstatic feeling I get from having actually Fixed The Thing.

I've had someone tell me, with a straight face and serious voice, to "stick to the agile process from now on"

Yep yep yep.

I've made it clear to bossmang that I don't really do customer contact. I got badly burned out in technical support decades ago, and it's still baggage I carry around, so I simply do not have a "customer service voice".

I'm hired to develop software, and I will do that to the best of my ability, but if they ever ask me to help out on the support end, I've made it clear what they can expect.

"Now listen here, you little shit..."

I want to see a comparison of the infrared from Hubble vs the infrared from James.

I also want to normalize calling JWST just "James" :)