Posts by JLV 2853 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
You're so right. No one ever had problem with opsec on chat apps, no one ever signaled their base location by logging their jogs on Strava, no one (Ukraine war) ever got their unit bombed by having live cell phones around...
Your expertise setting us all right is appreciated for all it is worth!
I don't know the UK situation but I stayed a month in Lima, Peru in for 2019/2020 NYE and gosh they are bad. Much, much, worse than us Canadians.
Dude on a moped, at a stop sign? Whips out out the old trusty.
Two attractive young people of opposite sex on a date (not that it matters but it's more likely to indicate a romantic context)? Not one looked at the other in 10 minutes.
The traffic in the shuttle from the airport was horrendous, as expected. Very stop and go, say 10-15 km average speed. Most of the buses (smaller than Western ones, but bigger than minibuses) are informal things, not company run (you pay the $1 coin, you get in, you ride). So, cue for the drivers to drive with one hand on the wheel, the other with the phone. The shuttle, professionally driven, provided a good platform, being more elevated.
Walking around looking at phones was the least of it. They must have much cheaper data plans than us Canadians, fer sure :-(
I don't know how powerful the Zoho word processor is compared to Word. But that might just be the selling point.
Methink governments, and corporations in general, would benefit greatly from producing most of their internal documents in Markdown format:
- infinitely less options beget infinitely less time faffing around with the formatting
- more focus on the content
- versioning would be more usefully done by source control
- compatibility issues fly out the Windows
- less ability to sneak in malware stuff, once urls are vetted and html sanitized. Both being highly visible in the raw text mode.
Again, no idea what Zoho uses or how Zoho works. But overcomplicated documents, and that includes putting way too much PDF on the web, where browser translation doesn't work, is a never ending bane on government productivity and rewards exactly the wrong kind of lower level managers.
( All this messing around with fonts and styles, for internal use, is much akin to the American Psycho scene with the biz cards. BTW much easier to watch than the book is to read btw. It was very toned down).
One thing the Risky Business security podcast has been saying for years: amusingly, anonymous and untraceable crypto is anything but, at least compared to cash. Precisely due to its immutable blockchain history.
Not only that, but as the forensics tools improve, criminals may find themselves arrested for breakthroughs on crimes they committed years and decades ago. So, in many cases, you're never truly safe until the statute of limitations kicks in (on all the crimes you can be charged with).
Scattered Spider, btw, is more known for extremely good social engineering - a la Kevin Mitnick - than sheer tech chops.
> Have they added it to the start button yet?
You're thinking much too small. People may never click on it there. No, what you need is a required, unavoidable, passage.
Login-via-Copilot. Who needs a regular login or power up to sign in? Passwords, schmetzwords. It would be much more secure if verifying your identify was the responsibility of Copilot.
"Dave, I see you're trying to log in. Would you like help with that?"
Hey, it could be worse. Could be trained on your posts. Imagine the outputs:
> GROK$ What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
> BRAVE ROCKS! WINNING! ELON I LOVE YOU NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE! WINNING! NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE! WINNING! NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE! Please Mr President ELON I LOVE YOU ...
There's quite a bit of truth in what you say and it's not obvious what the fix would be. Historically, top-down European computer projects have been brilliant at absorbing $$$. Considerably less at producing good stuff businesses or consumers would buy out of free choice. Taxpayers ought to shudder each time another "solution" is floated.
That said, there is probably quite a lot of value added in wiring together the kit as well as putting together its low-level system software. And a lot of software has deep European roots. Supercomputers aren't the worst of showcases and one can only have so many expectations about being a location for cutting edge foundry wizardry when even Intel is struggling.
Still the analogy about the "Waitrose baker" hits very true.
I think most other sectors would not be tolerated to operate unsafe equipment (for example equipment that have known faults that could start fires).
Likewise, most vendors of said equipment would have had to issue recalls.
The Russkies are just doing their Russky thing and, really, long-depreciated gear with known flaws should either be operated within the known tolerance limits of those flaws (as other comments suggest).
Or the operator should be made liable for any and all damages incurring from their negligence.
See PG&E in California, which got whacked with a 10B+$ fine for the Paradise Fire.
Strange but true story: the Dutch forger and scammer who sold a fake Vermeer to Goring.
www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/art-crime/0/steps/11882
> Initially, the trial seemed set against van Meegeren. It was a cut and dried case: he sold a Vermeer to the Nazis without being forced to. But then came the twist. Van Meegeren confessed to selling Göring a painting, yes, but that painting was not a national treasure. Far from it, it was fake that he produced. According to van Meegeren, he didn’t conspire to aid the Nazis at all, but rather tricked them into taking a worthless fake.
> The painting which van Meegeren sold to the Nazis was “Woman Taken in Adultery“, a forgery of a “new” Vermeer. Van Meegeren testified that he traded his forgery for approximately 127 works of Dutch art, which would have otherwise stayed with the Nazis in Germany. He would later argue in his trial that he was not a traitor, but a patriot who used his talent for the good of the country. This proclamation drew national and international attention, and caused van Meegeren to have the fame, even if only for a short time, that he had craved as an artist.
IIRC, first heard of it in an episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast, having to do with turning experts' own cognitive biases against them - he'd leveraged the authority of a Vermeer expert to pass his - shitty - fakes off.
Saw them twice in the mid 80s. They even went as far as to have physical fencing to deal with people doing bootleg recordings at their concerts.
As in, to give them a nice, well-situated, separate space where the rest of us would not interfere with their equipment and audio overmuch, in order to record the best bootlegs ;-)
Vinyl I can vaguely understand, beyond the usual "audiophile claims". They're big so you can have art, you can kinda claim something about bla-bla-bla acoustics, analog, warmer...
But cassettes? Their audio was always crappy, especially pre-recorded media that always went for the cheapest possible tape quality, they are easy to damage and they have no space for art.
Plus, who has a player these days?
Retro, simplicity and avoidance of subscription, centralized servers shenanigans makes sense, to an extent.
But cassettes seem just hipsterdom at its dumbest finest.
Interestingly enough, a major difference between the Soviet Russian army and Western ones is their relative lack of NCOs for command purposes (you might see more of them as technical specialists).
Might be one factor in Russia's tremendous successes on the battlefield in Ukraine.
> It is also a reason for the stickiness of Windows in business and in gaming, as it is also hard to port in the other direction.
Steam has by and large solved the gaming conundrums. Most, not all, games run very well on Linux.
There may be other reasons to avoid Linux as a consumer, but gaming shouldn't be a primary obstacle for most people.
Why not? The GPU is there after all. Same question's been asked about terminal emulators, same answer; fast display updates.
One reason I am mostly on Zed these days is that, at times (less so recently), VS Code could really slow down on me.
Specifically, I think it had problems updating all the shiny chrome VS Code has all over (line number, column number, class path info, etc...) that they insist on displaying on each keystroke. I'm a touch typing and I could feel my keystrokes lagging. No idea if, in VSCode, the calculations are lagging or if it's the UI refreshing that slows. That's not something I appreciate in an editor.
Not that I think it will get done, but things like implementing XEdit / KEdit's `more`, `less`, `all` display filtering commands (which act like `grep` and `grep -v` on file contents) needs quick screen refreshes.
And, for Zed, their main value proposition seems to be multi-user simultaneous editing. Think of it as live screensharing. That's probably a good call for very low level display management.
Excellent job, Shepilov.
Keep plugging at it. You have to give this audience the impression you know something more about IT than playing minesweeper and unhappy birds.
This rust line isn't all that popular however. You get better engagement when you bitch about the LLNs. Odd, I thought rust was a big problem in machinery. Still it is important to maintain consistency on our messaging and you are a master at repeating the same thing over and over. But maybe you should take inspiration from me: "M$ sucks" and "Ballmer is sweaty" is something that has worked for years.
Remember, our agency for research on the internet has a big push going on bad EU (talking point #3) and good Trump. Oh, I see you hit them with your customary "The EU is not fit for purpose".
Yours, Ilya Abramovich.
I suppose it is rather pointless to point out that cars and cats kill several orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines?
I know, I know, math is hard. One only has two hands with 10 fingers, eh tovarich? And when one reaches 5, one has to switch to the other hand... :-(
The Linux Experiment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSNgS9siL44 about a month back. 1:30 into the video, this gets covered.
According to the youtuber, this was a case of Kent having frequent issues conforming to kernel dev procedure. In this case, submitting a code change for a new feature during the release candidates phase of the development window. When called out about it, he pushes back rather than just follow the rules.
(reads the title and daydreams a bit)
> Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash
Yessss! Poettering finally annoyed one too many folks and systemd is out.
(wakes up and realizes Kate Upton is not this evening's date)
Uh, sorry, probability about on par with Beast666 moving out of his mom's basement in St. Petersburg or finally having something semi-intelligent to contribute.
Back to reality, yo! Clashing nerd egos driving technical strategy. Good coverage, vultures.
Yes, yes, I know systemd is not in the kernel.
You know the funniest thing with Latinx is that a solution was so easily at hand - outside of Ancient History concerns:
"Latin".
But, yeah, a dimwitted idea if there ever was one. And not one too difficult to anticipate if one knew any Spanish whatsoever.
Re. blackface that is a more mixed bag (stupid veggie issues aside). Thing is, for the longest time, Hollywood had a real tough time casting non-White, non-hetero, actors, even for parts concerning non-White, non-hetero characters. If it was the only bit of political correctness skulking about, no biggy.
A lot of this comes from good intentions. If leavened with common sense, the results tend to be good. For most of the population common sense does tend to apply and we chuckle at the stupidity on display at either extremes, while mostly jettisoning actual intentional disrespect.
Not always though: IIRC University of Toronto's student government banned yoga some years back because it was "cultural appropriation". Probably brought back since, but still indicative of a lack of functioning brain cells.
`Person of color` is an Americanism and best understood from knowing the context of the word `colored` which was some kinda Jim Crow (racist Southerner) thing.
While understandable in their home context, it's gotten to the point that some Americans were giving some South African singer grief a year or two ago because she was describing herself as `colored`, which has a very different connotation in South Africa, where it means `mixed race`. And apparently were insistent that she had to see their truth.
You don't have to use `person of color` in the US, but you do have to steer clear of `colored`. By no means is it as actually value neutral as `black`. So, if you mean to say non-White there, just be careful on what you use.
Ain't linguistics a hoot?
It wasn't a problem with the term I used.
Probably something along the lines of "Ce monsieur est noir" - which I have no idea if it would be appropriate nowadays having not lived in France for 30 years. But I added "Monsieur" to be more formal/polite which would help.
The problem was that mentioning his ethnicity at all was deemed politically incorrect, because we were supposed to be color-blind. Even if, in this particular instance, it made sense because it was a strong determinant in finding him expeditiously amongst all of our, very Caucasian, staff (I think there were max about 4-5 non-Caucasian, non-Asian, staff in our 400-500 consultants). So, not very good at actual hiring diversity, but quite good at pretend inclusiveness.
This is similar to elsergiovolador's case above.
BTW, "Black", the English word, can be used informally, in a neutral, even positive, fashion to designate Black people in French. Probably best avoided in a business setting. I don't think we have anything like African-American transposed to French.
Really one needs to live there to know what's the correct manners of speech nowadays. Especially with all the gendered brouhaha going on, that must be a pain in the French language.
LOL. In the early 90s I worked as an IT consultant in Paris. Characteristically for France, very few of its professional staff were non-Caucasian and I was pretty good friends with one of them, a Black salesman / project director chap. `S.` for short. Who owned a rather nice BMW IIRC.
One day that BMW was double parked (probably a mistake, S. wasn't really the nasty thoughtless type) near the reception. So the person whose car was blocked comes and asks the receptionist and there were some folk lounging about:
- blockee : Can you find the owner of the car that is blocking me?
- receptionist: That is S.'s car he's should be around somewhere nearby, he just came in for a sec.
- bystander 1: He's about 35.
- bystander 2: Tall guy.
- bystander 3: Wearing a suit.
- me: He's a Black gentleman
As with the above poster, my favorite morning exercise was thus obviously kicking puppies.
See, it's not about democracy, or even traditional US conservative thingies like gun ownership or individual liberties anymore with some of these folk. It's about any regime that fits their worldview, which probably has more to do with opposing "wokeness" than anything else.
- China is not democratic
- China does not allow private gun ownership
- China is a surveillance state with extensive oversight over free speech and religion
- China is (at least nominally) Communist.
But...
- All good and forgiven because China is not "woke" and manly men - like VoT, no doubt - can be manly. Ditto Russia's Putin who hates on whatever minorities and sexual mores VoT objects to.
Under Trump, America is indeed turning into a major dumpster fire in the swamps, true.
Nevertheless, it ought to/might change in 4 years.
With China, a shit leopard can't really change its spots. If you think there is anything benign about its authority, look at the Uyghurs or at Hong Kong. Look at the Middle Kingdom's relations to its neighbors until the 16th century when it gradually weakened into insignificance. Look at the concept of Tianxia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianxia , which is expressly praised by Xi. That got as far as getting Japan to pony up tribute, when it could get away with it. Remember the "centuries of humiliation" we'll presumably be asked to atone for.
Most of the West has a rather nasty history wrt colonialism. Doesn't really mean we need to as stupidly sanguine as yourself when it comes to totalitarian neo-Marxist states reinventing the concept for the 21st century.
First, is there a typo in the 3rd set, the re-scaled version? Starting from `BF16 values, 0.0625, 0.375, 0.078125, and 0.25` seems like our poor 0.25 got missed :-(
> 4-bit floating point value by the scaling factor, resulting in: 0.0625, 0.375, 0.09375, and 0.0625.
Shouldn't that last one be 0.25 as it ought to fit in a 16-bit space, just like 0.375.
Also, two questions about the scaling factor: First, how are these 32 (or 16) common-scaling blocks determined? Memory-adjacent? Some higher order data structure?
Second, in the training phase, does that factor evolve in time? i.e. Do the scaling factors appear in the very outset of a training run, as a factor of the initial data? Or does the model have to train for a while before block commonalities are apparent?
p.s.
> This is going to get really nerdy, really quickly here, so we won't judge if you want to jump straight to the why it matters section.
Nah, we love this stuff. Fascinating and from the looks of it, quite significant. Esp. from the PoV of running LLMs locally on some mid/upper range GPUs with constrained memory.
I am pretty sure it figured in the Late Great Planet Earth movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth as the beast with 10 heads or whatnot. The EU was at 9 count at the time, IIRC, but who's counting?
It made questionable sense to my teen self at the time, but it's not a bad movie to watch to understand some of the weirder US Evangelical ruminations. Lots of stock footage of tanks and ships shooting off rockets, with a voiceover splicing in current events and a future war in Israel to Revelations and the Second Coming.
Beastie probably had it as an assigned watch/reading in St. Petersburg (no, not the one in Florida), to pass as an American ;-)
> gardening leave
So true.
Bit like each new iOS release has to rearrange the deck chairs on the Music app a bit. Followed by the obligatory pontificating from Apple pundit websites about the deep significance thereof ("the corners on the buttons are much betterly rounded!").
You know, it's far from a bad idea.
In a hot war, cybers are going to be used to a lesser or greater extent. No, they haven't been used very decisively in Ukraine. But their impact in Iran was much greater, such as a major Iranian bank, one used to pay civil servants amongst others, apparently being offlined for a few days.
To say nothing of poor Hezbollah's pagers :-(
The US has Cyber Command, true. But working on a real live incident may be quite usefully instructive, as opposed to just drilling for it.
Shepilov,
I understand and sympathize with, your desire to defend Mother Russia's PoV. But you need to make it less glaringly obvious you are working for our agency for research for the internet.
Your beast666 persona is supposed to be an angry disaffected American white male, allegedly working in IT, cheering up Trump and Musk. Not an angry disaffected Russian upset loser that knows nothing about IT.
Remember: Americans traditionally mistrust Russians.
Please be a little more competent at your job. Is that asking so much?
Yours, Ilya Abramovich.
Good on Talking Point #14 however: "MSM". Remember to use it some more, as opposed to Winning! Which is not one of our official talking points, but one you frequently resort to due to your total lack of imagination.
Not really.
This is more like you going to a free concert, for years. No problem.
Then, on the 12th year, you continue to going to the concert - still advertised as "free" - but you go to the bathroom, and do not notice the writing next to the door that says you are now liable for a $200 admission fee, whenever you enter the loo. Whether you pee or not. And whether you watch the band or not.
(in small print, naturally).
This is precisely the trick they pulled off with Java.
From my own, French, PoV, I find comparing sex to USB-C's only one position, one size, one type, one way, approach rather... limiting.
Perhaps you can enlighten me on the Anglo-Saxon PoV? Is it related to "No sex, please. We're British"?
What always surprises me is perps doing incriminating searches on their own devices or from their home broadband connections.
Seems to me the first thing you'd do is to drive over to the next town's public library and use a kiosk for that. You'd have to be looking up some pretty hardcore crap before you got into trouble - I've seen dudes watching porn in ours. Then you know, takes notes on paper.
OK, I get that this guy knew nothing about telecoms </sarcasm>
Odd that they had to do something. I just haven't entered my LLM credentials into Zed and well... no LLM interactions from it. I guess they're talking about baked in autocompletes? "LLM stuff" does hog the Command-R shortcut, which I'd like to use for Symbol search (like VS Code).
Whenever I do want to interact with LLMs I fire up VS Code, but Zed is now my primary editor, as I was sick and tired of occasional slowdowns with VS Code.
It's not perfect - out of the box its Python auto-completion is sketchy at best, it lacks easy bookmarking and snippets (there are plugins, I think).
But it's very fast, clutter free and doesn't insist on rising above its station as an editor.
The snippet gap has been taken care of by finding a terminal snippet manager and then writing some glue code to point it to my existing VS Code snippets. My typical workflow is to jump from the terminal to the editor, rather than the reverse, so that works for me. The bookmarking gap is still outstanding.
I've used (recent ones only) Sublime Text, VS Code and Zed and a pre-release, still-not-always-stable, Zed is my preferred option for now. Older ones include KEdit, XEdit (MVS) and, shudder of shudders, Eclipse.
Yeah, surprising to me too. I may have just selected just line for #parent or all 4 the two times it happened. This was just a playground bit of code, however, if #parent was on bracketing a large amount of lines then that would have more difficult to do anyway.
Quite possibly, with a better prompt approach - I just started this html playground as a testbed - I'd have gotten better results, but at some point you have to wonder at the time tradeoff between a) learning to prompt and not learning to code and b) learning to code.
Keep in mind: all this is fluid - what shortcomings are true now might be solved 2 years from now. My bigger concern is that I have an idiosyncratic coding style, partially out of habit, partially from the problem domain, and I don't feel all that comfortable trusting the LLM to stick to it rather than going back to everyone else's "best practices". In my case I use Django but eschew using its ORM because I mostly deal with introspecting "arbitrary" databases with very high table counts and their own custom metadata tables. I can't have everyone else's "best practices".
Writing 10-50 lines of code under tight supervision, especially on syntax I am unfamiliar with (I'll review it later) is my preferred use case and it's achieved little with that. The one thing it has been good at is filling in the gaps of my shell knowledge, except that I am on zsh and it never seems to remember that either, which sometimes bites like when it uses bash array syntax.
But I admit my prompts are undisciplined and I will need to be more deliberate with them. Copilot on vscode has things like context flags like #codebase and pre-rolled "prompt files" that look promising.
Here's a funny one I noticed, on repeat, today. I read somewhere that at least one thing they are good it is spewing up reasonable HTML UIs. And this a subject that I suck at, I typically have to read a lot, experiment a lot, before having something semi-serviceable that a CSS person can look at later. I any case, I typically immediately forget about it and feel like an idiot. So LLMs can shine polishing up 10 lines of HTML.
OK, here goes. I have a div - let's call it #parent that surrounds 2 other divs. I want to do something CSS-y via Tailwind, but I figure I can be lazy and ask CoPilot.
So I have 4 lines: parent, child 1, child2 and the tag closure for #parent on line 4.
Me: Copilot, make that red text bold with Tailwind.
Copilot: -- adds the some Tailwind class, saving me much time.
screen: no bold, no red text either.
me: ???? And then I notice that Copilot in all its wisdom has added a </div> closure for #parent online on line 1. Giving me malformed HTML and nuking any CSS effects on child1 and child2.
You'd be miffed at an intern for getting this wrong and my success rate getting it to do Tailwind has been pretty much limited to it styling forms correctly. Which was semi-impressive until I realized it cribbed the entire styling direct from the Tailwind doc on input tags... Which I would likely have managed just as well. For the rest, it tends to very self-assuredly adds a mish mash of Tailwind classes that typically do nothing on every prompt and I learn even less than if I refreshed my Tailwind knowledge, which really isn't that hard to do.
