Posts by may_i 556 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2023
Without sovereign operating systems and hardware management layers, the cake is only half baked.
Just having a sovereign LLM running on hardware and software that the USA can turn off on a whim means nothing. The vast majority of European CTOs are still operating on the principle of burying their heads in the sand and hoping that the problem of having your computing infrastructure supplied by a hostile country will go away.
Pascal started the idea of writing programs which got compiled into instructions for a non-existent CPU and then converting that to real instructions at runtime. The dream being portability.
I thought it was a bad idea then and think C# is an equally bad idea. Sadly, there are too few of us left now who understand how a computer actually works and why treating memory and CPU cycles as the limited resources they are is still a good idea.
Everyone in the UK should see this for what it is: forcing every UK person to identify themselves before using the Internet to prove that they are over 16.
Once again, "Won't someone think of the children!?" turns out to be the reliable excuse for the government to expand its panopticon.
Why are all these coked up CEOs celebrating the implementation of a panopticon which will destroy privacy, personal life, employment and society?
Maybe they really are all planning to retreat to their bunkers and wait out the destruction of humanity, burning down society so that they may rule over the ashes.
> Why is it that almost all the worst (pseudo)religious whackjobbery originates in the US, and mostly a small subset of states at that ?
A combination of poor education, indoctrination from a very early age and an unshakable arrogance which makes people believe they are the chosen ones.
You forgot the most important function of organised religion: to control people.
I'm nice to other people. Not because some religion told me to be that way, rather because that's what society expects of its citizens and it is necessary for society to function.
If some people want to believe in sky fairies, then as long as they keep that belief personal and don't try to force it down my throat, then they are welcome to their delusions. However, when people try to force that belief on others, or change the political system to give themselves preferential treatment, I reserve my right to become angry.
I still remember 8" floppies! Fixed a good few 8" floppy drives in my time too.
With every release of Windows, the computer it was installed on was twice as fast as the previous one, but no installation of Windows ever felt faster than the previous one.
Modern applications are layer upon layer upon layer of APIs, frameworks, libraries and abstractions. The theory was that all these layers let you write more reliable code more quickly. Nobody ever bothered thinking about whether this was a good idea or not. I've certainly not seen any increase in reliability over the decades. Most programmers today have zero idea about how the code they write actually runs on the computer - this leads to exactly the problems which come from treating memory and CPU cycles as an inexhaustible resource.
I follow the one true path: agnosticism. I follow this path because it is impossible to prove god's existence or non-existence.
I find it offensive that some people believe that I have missed a part of human experience which is “an important part of human flourishing", and that I am somehow less of a person because I am not religious. I am moral, honest and reliable. My personal values are based on Christian concepts like "don't treat other people in ways that you would not want to be treated yourself". That stealing is wrong. That killing is wrong. These values are obvious to me. Society does not work if you don't share these kinds of values. You don't need religion to adopt values which are compatible with society.
Organised religion is nothing more than a tool of power used to control people. It is responsible for so much conflict, cruelty and death that other causes pale into insignificance.
If a LLM started spouting religion at me, there would be an immediate command "do not talk about religion" added to its profile.
What on earth are "racialized people"? An offensive concept if ever I heard one.
As for the Met's behaviour, it is hardly surprising that in the increasingly authoritarian UK, the police are always looking for people to prosecute for what they say or who they know. The only thing which surprises me is that they even bother asking. They can just ask GCHQ for anything that anyone does with their phone or computer.
It's highly ironic that Google are now discussing rolling out draconian, privacy killing additions to recaptcha to help web site owners defend against the onslaught of LLM agents that Google and their buddies created.
See: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/introducing-google-cloud-fraud-defense-the-next-evolution-of-recaptcha/
Even if the supposed drones at Gatwick were real, which I very much doubt, this system is pointless.
Bad actors won't fit transponders to their RC aircraft. Honest people, who are already demonised for wanting to fly RC aircraft will have extra weight to add to their craft and extra expense. The system will undoubtedly not protect the privacy of the model flyer and it won't prevent bad actors either.
More knee-jerk reactions from politicians who either don't understand technology, or, they're lying and not stating the real reason to introduce the system.
The "Sent from my smartphone xxx" comments are actually added to the user's message by an app called Tapatalk.
This horrible app requires that the forum owner installs a plugin to enable it. Once installed, the plugin interfaces with the Tapatalk app. The big problem is what else it does. Regardless of the forum's robots.txt, the Tapatalk plugin downloads every message from the forum so that Tapatalk can use the data for searching and anything else they want to use it for.
Best avoided.
All the smart people jumped ship from GitHub as soon as Microslop took it over.
It doesn't take a genius to predict that they would ruin the site with unwanted integrations and tools that nobody had asked for. That they can't even keep availability up at 99.9% is a terrible reflection on them.
While I'm no fan of antisocial media companies, this smells like a shake-down to me.
If old media companies can't make money because nobody wants to read or listen to their poor journalism, robbing companies who enable people to share information with each other to prop them up is trying to fix one wrong with another.
But, the Aussies have hardly shown themselves to have legislators who even understand the first thing about technology.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."
Dumbo Donny can't comprehend that his own supreme court has already told him he does not have the authority to impose tariffs, only congress may set tariffs, not the president. Even his most brainwashed supporters are starting to understand that a tariff is paid by them, not by the countries the tariff is applied to.
But then again, this disgusting paedophile crook's days as president are numbered. So the correct answer to him from Starmer would be "Get lost, stupid.".
Quite why King Charles is going to visit a regime which is actively committing war crimes is beyond me. It legitimises Trump's actions, and that's the last thing which is needed right now.
That's the worst thing. Normally, if a company thought that screwing one part of its customer base was OK because there was another part who was prepared to pay more, the angry customers would go somewhere else.
Now, with the monopoly which still exists and still acts like a cartel, it's more like: Oh, don't like our prices? Tough luck!
It would be great if I could just use my YubiKey to log in to the various web sites and services that I use. It would also be great if I could log in to Windows and RDP sessions at work with a YubiKey.
Is the company I work for planning to use passkeys? Nah, they think Windows Hello is a good idea. FFS.
Do any of the web sites or services that I use support passkeys? Only one of them.
Passkeys are a great idea, but as far as I can see, there's too much "not invented here" and inertia to make them commonplace.
Microsoft got extensive tax breaks from the Swedish government to encourage them to build a data centre in Sweden.
None of the Swedish businesses who operate data centres get any tax breaks though.
Personally, I'd prosecute the government for being traitors to their country, but that's just me.
It's funny, but the instance of Kodi that I have running on an old RPi still works perfectly and streams to my devices just as well as it always has. If I really wanted voice recognition, I guess I could drive it with my completely offline Home Assistant system.
Buy products where someone else owns the software and service, expect enshittification and obsolescence. Don't expect pity.
Your average FPV quadcopter has a wide field of view through the camera so that you can see where you are flying. This means that the theoretical topless sunbathers you talk about would provide a very small and uninteresting image in the FPV goggles. The same with trying to case houses to burgle. Unless you fly right up to the windows, you're not going to be able to see anything useful.
Both of these scare tactics were dreamt up by the press to demonise model flyers. The entire idea behind demonising model flyers was to destroy the hobby and make it possible for the government to sell rights to the airspace under 400 feet to Amazon et al for their drone delivery services.
