Posts by JLV

Re: television was the origin of enshittification

Let’s not forget Sony’s Windows rootkit to prevent ripping of their audio CDs. Badly written, so malware could have piggybacked.

That was some boss-level entshittification before its time.

If Linux GUIs, desktops and configuration were as polished as Linux’s raw OS and terminal experience, yes.

But most Linux desktops and apps compete more on fancy features and gee-whiz graphics than raw, rock-stable, basic user friendliness. GParted (on Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04), for example, truncates partition labelling info because it doesn’t fit. WTF? Makes you feel warm and fuzzy when responding OK to “Are you sure? formatting deletes all data”.

Changes version to version are frequent and target power users. Change distro? Relearn, grasshopper.

Meanwhile, macos’s configs and settings barely look any different release to release. And the machine will work straight out of the box. Backups? Time Machine is close to idiot-proof both backing up and restoring.

Day-to-day use in browser and email is much more comparable, however.

This looks good for grandma and students and generally dont-care-about-tech people, doubly so for those without a Linux-savvy relative.

p.s. nothing forbids Linux from improving this. And maybe some distros do manage this. Omarchy, albeit for the opposite use case, seems to aim for that. I don’t agree with its choices, but I respect the goal. A lot.

Re: I thought we'd seen the end of consultancy cash cows

Thing is, as a dev, in-house work for govt dept or non-software company can be a little less exciting and formative than consultancy or working for a software company. Not to mention less lucrative.

And that not infrequently gets reflected in the caliber of in-house devs. It doesn’t have to, but it can.

I see no reason that phenomenon needs to happen with sysadmins, btw. Quite the contrary.

It’s a hard problem but BoE seems to at least want to deal with it.

On the flip side, the consultancies don’t all field geniuses. Far from.

> the Shia equivalent of the Pope

A rather blood-soaked Pope, wouldn't you say?

Game theory was also in relative infancy. Things like the Prisoner’s Dillemna play out very differently in a one-off setting than with repeated episodes.

I am also not convinced by your “strike first” claim here. In the absence of credible at-scale ABM systems and with large distributed arsenals, the cost benefit matrix of standard game theory still seems to point solidly to no-nuking, short of an existential threat like losing to an invader.

Think of the damage doable to the economy and peoples of USA, Russia or China with a budget of say 50-100 bombs. Hit really big industrial cities, harbors, refineries. Anything critical to the “supply chain”, like centralized fertilizer plants. Then watch a gradual collapse. Or at least other countries pulling ahead.

It’s too risky. Given a solid-looking anti-missile shield the calculations may change: can we mop up a counterstrike? But we ain’t there yet.

Also the reason limiting warhead counts needs to be done very carefully (not that it’s much on the menu these days). You want to stay in the not-worth-trying territory until you really trust each other. Few warheads plus “good-enough” ABM can upset that calculus.

Re: Sorry! :-) :-)

zig? the language. rather than zed, the editor?

zig is used by Hashimoto’s Ghostty terminal emulator, my goto these days. He evaluated Rust vs zig before settling on zig.

Re: exaggerated title...

Just to be clear - I picked Aurora for it being easily name recognizable, not for its complexity. Simple tasks are not the issue here, complicated, advanced ones are.

What I see as success factors are:

- don’t go hog wild on multiplying alternatives. Too many dilutes the knowledge pool and drives back to the better known: AWS, Azure.

- be sensitive to knowledge pools. Good docs, for sure. But then spend $ on blogs YouTubes podcasts that _explain_ not just market. Digital Ocean has brilliant mini blogs about configurations, for example.

- Keep it simple at first. And mimic known Azure and AWS setups (or simplify them). Or follow/define standards. Advanced features are great but if they require complex configuration that isn’t commonly known about : people will nod out faster than attending a Baptist revival choir on a hangover.

- be careful around X-Y integrations. In the existing US vendor world, the most common combinations draw people because they are most known about. A dominant X will have its customary, known, Y pairings. In a world where X’ and Y’ alternatives are not yet fully established, each X’ needs to make sure people know their way for integrations (that’s probably why Digital Ocean writes up so much quality guidance). Work on interop with your peers.

> it's a vicious circle of "everyone uses X…”

That is PRECISELY my point. To me, apps aside, that is very much what doomed BB10 despite having a solid offering. You don’t have to despair that it cant be overcome. But you do have to allow, watch for and compensate.

p.s. I am a happy DO user, no other links.

Re: Prior art...

For those of a Francophile bent, this 30sec scene would be the French cinematic equivalent of the Dwarf Bread.

https://youtu.be/X-4UPGVxKgc?t=75

“ Dubitchou - it’s made by hand by rolling under the armpits”

Auto-translated subtexts are sketchy as heck on this one.

Context: their weird Eastern European neighbor gifts them an XMas box of “chocolates”.

Re: Needs to go back to the manufacturer I'm afraid.

I believe the US Navy recently had some issues on their ships’ ovens. Only manufacturer staff were allowed to service them.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/the-navys-newest-problem-flushing-the-toilet

.. similar issues with their loos.

All other things reminding equal that level of lawyerese and bilking is another reason to change vendor country.

Re: Nuclear Powered Bacon!

Shades of Fallout’s Pork n Beans

Re: OpenClaw

More or less serve as your personal assistant, if given access to your private information, like your email and calendars and sundry logins.

The more access you give it the more useful it can be.

And also the more external actors can use it to abuse you. Or it can just mess things up by mistake.

The paper itself is not keen on LLM-checking-via-LLM. He spends quite a bit of time detailing why it can’t, for particular classes of problems. It’s a quick read, 7pages, with math (based on big O notation) I could barely follow - an improvement over my usual dont-understand-jack.

Near the end he does have a sentence saying multiple LLMs can be better , but doesn’t elaborate

Re: What if they reviewed their code?

Maybe it's like the 419 Nigerian prince misspellings.

Spend 10 minutes breaking in, without too much stealth. Maybe even leave for a while. If you do get detected, you're out 10 minutes.

If you don't get detected, clean up and invest time to screw the victim properly as they are so sloppy they won't see it coming.

I am not saying that's what happened int this case, but if you can break in with a spray and pray approach, then maybe a strategy would be to line up 50 marks at first and go deep on the ones that are still not clued in. That's a bit what 419 is about, though it took a while for researchers to understand the logic.

The crims also have a specialization model already, where some owns the victim's shell first and then pass it on to someone else for exploitation. LLMs might plug in better at different phases of this.

Not to mention that there will probably be copilot at the other end…

- summarizing the email.

- reusing the email as basis for further emails

Then government efficiency can be redefined as numbers of documents produced per staff. Presto, hyper efficient government.

Ex colleague once told that a consultancy - begins with ac - he worked with had a particular core competency.

Not:

- specs

- coding

- project management

- …

No, it laid in institutionalizing 2nd level contract managers who would be parachuted in on a fail and would talk rings around clueless customers, leave, repeat as needed.

“By the time they left you were convinced their 6 month delay to your go-live was something they should be thanked for as they were bravely insuring your quality and stability”.

Re: $[special] ?

A while back studies were produced indicating a horrible lack of combat-readiness in Bundeswehr gear, with a lot of stuff not ready to fly or roll on any given day.

Nothing warranting emulation.

Re: What do they actually do with all this money?

The code has gold flakes in it, natch.

Re: From available evidence below...

Oh, I am NOT dissing solar or wind here. But the Greens where I live have long opposed a new dam. And generally display all the economic savvy of a lobotomized goldfish. The Canadian Greens have a policy page that is long on wokeness and direly short on practical measures to reduce emissions.

The ones in Germany were so against nuclear that they retired working plants. Baseload backup was, for a while anyway, provided by Polish brown coal. For all the massive costs of the Wende Germany’s emissions declined at roughly same rate as other EU countries.

In Sri Lanka they pretty much nuked agriculture a few years back, by banning non-organic fertilizers.

So, no, not the least bit a fan. Global warming is too much of a problem to trust them dealing with it. Thats what my “romantic” alludes to.