This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

jj4211 ,

Agreed, WW2 scale became crazy because Japan and Germany were just allowed to conquer so much so fast before a meaningful response. Russia is being held to a much tighter theater from the onset.

jj4211 ,

Also there's no way it would toss "origin: ru" in there and only that. It's way too convenient to have those three pieces of data and only those.

I think it was a joke and a lot of people ate the onion.

jj4211 ,

So much the better, as far as those executives are concerned.

Let's say you want to cut costs and you know you have momentum and a long lag where your total incompetence won't make a difference to business results in the short term, so cut costs by getting rid of the top talent.

Now if they outright just fire every good person, well that looks obviously stupid, but if those good people just... up and quit... well they are hardly to blame, and don't have to pay out those massive severances. You get your annual bonus which is big, and your big restricted stock payday might be delayed two years, but they know, realistically, they can probably coast a good 3 or 4 years before the game is up. Or if you have a supremely strong 'business brand', you might be able to coast indefinitely as the big shots will never believe that brand isn't good anymore.

jj4211 ,

the stuff you're asking for doesn't work that well, but this does

I didn't think that this works. The examples where people claim "is just like this" I don't see as being like this.

The ones that work are ones that have some relation to their cause. Forcing everyone to really think about an issue Inherent to the act. For example, going about and doing this to parked private jets, which they did.

Just doing anything to get attention isn't useful if there's no Inherent message in the act itself. Especially with climate where everyone already has awareness, just not action.

Being merely loud is not going to sway hearts and minds in your favor.

jj4211 ,

That's been my experience so far, that it's largely useless for knowledge based stuff.

In programming, you can have it take "pseducode" and have it output actionable code for more tedious languages, but you have to audit it. Ultimately I find traditional autocompletion just as useful.

I definitely see how it helps cheat on homework, and extends "stock photography" to the point of really limiting the market for me photography or artists for bland business assets though.

I see how people find it useful for their "professional" communications, but I hate it because people that used to be nice and to the point are staying to explode their communication into a big LLM mess.

jj4211 ,

I have found my headset useful for work, when working from home and I don't do camera on meetings anyway.

At home it's pretty nice, and since my ears are open I can actually talk, so my wife actually prefers it over me wearing headphones. But all things in moderation, I wouldn't wear it constantly.

Despite being a huge fan of the concept, I still couldn't go for Apple's headset, it's heavy, it's expensive, and lack of controllers are all deal breakers. The Quest 3 is lighter, has good controllers, and is more affordable. It may not have the displays as nice as Vision, but that doesn't make up for the rest of the stuff.

jj4211 ,

Particularly in rural America, that's not an option. When dealing with used stuff, well one person or the other is going to need a truck to haul it. If you take a boat regularly to water or a camper regularly to outdoors, you need something that can tow.

I rarely need to haul, but I do need to tow a lot, so I have an SUV that can tow and rent a trailer on the odd occasion I have to haul stuff. The SUV is from a European manufacturer if that's comforting.

But these pickups have laughably tall heights that is just a detriment to utility and a safety hazard. Ironically brought on by efficiency standards that gave a pass to larger vehicles, so when the car company can either try to engineer more efficiency or just make them bigger, they chose 'just make em bigger'. The truck buying market doesn't help, with a lot of people getting giddy at the thought of playing "I drive a big rig" with their personal vehicle.

jj4211 ,

It turns out that over 97% of people in the US do not live in NYC. I don't know why you think when I cited rural America I would have even possibly been trying to cover NYC...

HP bricks ProBook laptops with bad BIOS delivered via automatic updates — many users face black screen after Windows pushes new firmware ( www.tomshardware.com )

On May 26, a user on HP's support forums reported that a forced, automatic BIOS update had bricked their HP ProBook 455 G7 into an unusable state. Subsequently, other users have joined the thread to sound off about experiencing the same issue....

jj4211 ,

fwupd under Linux also pushes firmware updates, if you let it.

jj4211 ,

Some Linux distros probably did push the bad HP firmware. Vendors push updates via fwupd.

jj4211 ,

Fedora pulls fwupd by default. If you use one of the 'check for updates' UIs, fwupd, dnf, and flatpak sources are all polled.

jj4211 ,

Sentiment changed when the "BIOS" became a component for enforcing security architecture via "SecureBoot" and also Bitlocker sealed to PCRs only does so much if the BIOS code is vulnerable. Now they really badly want a "trusted" chain from some root of trust until the OS bootloader takes over. Problem is that the developers have historically enjoyed being in a trusted, single user context for decades and so the firmware has been full of holes when actually pushed.

jj4211 ,

Updates for my laptop show up in the 'update' view of Discover. I currently manually decide whether to proceed, but the 'click to update all' I suspect is close enough for most people to be fully automatic, and perhaps even is fully automated for some people.

jj4211 ,

Even if it isn't "bitlocker" branded, most Windows PCs ship with "BitLocker" enabled. The distinction between Windows Home disk encryption and "BitLocker" is that BitLocker additionally allows external management of the key material, while Home only supports the TPM and your microsoft account for the key/recovery codes.

jj4211 ,

I can tell you every factory preload of windows on a Lenovo I have seen for the past few years has disk encryption on by default (windows home, so not "bitlocker", but it's the same thing with respect to being tied to TPM.

jj4211 ,

Left half of my face black, right half of my face white. Then I could fight those no good people who have a black right side of their face and white left side.

jj4211 ,

Well now the question is why they don't put an extra AA battery in the glove box.

jj4211 ,

I think we will see that car manufacturers will start to

They started to do this decades ago. Generally any given part in a car might be left unchanged for 5 or 6 model years before it gets changed, often for completely arbitrary reasons. For many cars, if it's over ten years old your only hope for a replacement part is the junkyard.

jj4211 ,

Yeah, options open up for some massively popular models or otherwise very well loved models. I got replacement gears for headlight motors for a 90s car with pop-up headlights, because people got tired of the OEM design wearing out so easily. I suspect someone trying to keep a Pontiac Aztek going might have a harder time finding enthusiasts keeping things alive.

jj4211 ,

My kid showed me a test question from a junior high math test about construction a building in 12 months with x number of workers, how many workers do they need to hire if they want it done in 6 months.

So I guess if you answer that question "wrong" youd be smart, and if you answer it right, management. Even a junior high student mocked it...

jj4211 ,

Yeah, Agile isn’t really at fault here. If done right

This is what ticks me off about the "Agile" brand, it's chock full of no true Scotsman fallacy (if a team failed while doing "Agile", it means they weren't being "Agile").

I can appreciate sympathizing with some tenets as Agile might be presented, but the popularity and consultancy around it has pretty much ruined Agile as a brand.

Broadly speaking, any attempt to capture nuance of "best practices" into a brand word/phrase will be ruined the second it becomes "popular".

jj4211 ,

Total Recall? Get your ass to Linux!

jj4211 ,

Well "brilliant" may be a stretch for a lot of those...

jj4211 ,

They know that, at least for a little while, the customers are buying the brand name and not evaluating the nuanced ccompetency. When that falls, their stocks have vested and they are long gone.

jj4211 ,

Also 9x the terrible flaws that scare away customers.

Spent about the same for more people to do less work and lower quality work.

Note that 99% of the time the offshore labor geography does have talent, but they aren't going to work for an offshoring shop, they will work for real companies in that geography. The offshoring companies thrive on essentially fraud, no matter what country they are in.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information ( futurism.com )

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

jj4211 ,

Yes, LLMs today are the ultimate "confidently incorrect" type of behavior.

jj4211 ,

On the other hand, assuming the social system isn't the right one, hypothetically AI fully realized could make it more unreasonable and more tightly stuck the way it is.

jj4211 ,

Another interesting thing to consider.

To be clear, he is rich. But he's not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.

With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat's, SuSE's and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.

His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.

His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.

It's used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.

People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.

Now there's more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.

Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.

jj4211 ,

I think it's a shining example of the 'right' sort of rich. Despite a significance that overwhelmingly exceeds usual billionaire level, he's not nearly so 'rich' and yet he has enough to just not worry about money, but he has earned it.

jj4211 ,

Come see the violence inherent in the system.

jj4211 ,

But that if that "idiot" does propagate, but so does everyone else, no skin off the species back. If the selective pressure returns, well then the others keep going.

jj4211 ,

Exactly, even if 7 billion people died, well there's still a billion people. If 99% of people died, well there are still millions.

jj4211 ,

if you can afford kids or not.

To amend that, if you are responsible and think you can't afford kids and have the restraint and planning to select not to have children.. there are plenty of people that can't afford as many children as they have.

In fact of those that can "afford" kids easily, they are still more likely to stay at one or two.

jj4211 ,

There was a sort of nice period.

In the wake of a bunch of BS, Google came along with rather nice and unobtrusive ads, and it seemed to catch on. Then over the last decade, it's really gone way downhill again.

jj4211 ,

I spent way too long ignoring the park and rides at major events. Then I started paying attention and they always had them and it was always so much nicer. No more excessively long walking, no more mpossible traffic getting in and out.

As long as the event clearly highlights park and ride options, it's fantastic and has been going on forever. These events pay the bus charter companies to generally provide rides free of charge to the riders.

jj4211 ,

You just run the same query a bunch of times and see how consistent the answer is.

A lot of people are developing what I'd call superstitions on some way to overcome LLm limitations. I remember someone swearing they fixed the problem by appending "Ensure the response does not contain hallucinations" to every prompt.

In my experience, what you describe is not a reliable method. Sometimes it's really attached to the same sort of mistakes for the same query. I've seen it double down, when instructed a facet of the answer was incorrect and to revise, several times I'd get "sorry for the incorrect information", followed by exact same mistake. On the flip side, to the extent it "works", it works on valid responses too, meaning an extra pass to ward off "hallucinations" you end up gaslighting the model and it changes the previously correct answer as if it were a hallucination.

jj4211 ,

This seems like an overblown concern. To prove it, I'm going to make a video putting my finger in the way as it closes and I'm sure it will be fine.. /s

jj4211 ,

Well, the 9/11 wasn't about the human body. Rubbing ass against the screen is outright unsanitary.

jj4211 ,

There's an assumption that these companies actually value competency.

For many companies, once they established the brand value, competency becomes an expensive superfluous thing. From that point forward it's about high margin while churning so the customers don't immediately catch on that the good folks are gone. Especially once they've converted a critical mass of customers to renting their product, then the money keeps rolling in and the product can pretty much plateau.

In companies serving businesses, it can take a long long while before the right people at the customers catch on enough to care. When the product sucks for the users and they gripe to leadership, well a few rounds of golf with the vendor and that can is kicked down the line. The employees need to suck it up because this is the premier solution in the industry...

jj4211 ,

I mean if you read some of what his first wife wrote, he was pretty much this bad. Though at the time she was saying it the world didn't want to hear it. He also did the whole retcon Tesla to be founded by him over 15 years ago, in some pretty petty behavior. When x.com failed relative to PayPal, he somehow managed to get them to merge and make him the head of PayPal, and then they kicked him down when we almost tanked PayPal.

It basically seems that a critical mass of people were covering for him and propping up the brand of his name and image, likely for the sake of their investments. Which should be a fairly familiar story, because 80s Trump had the same things going on, very bad business results glossed over by investors needing to keep the Trump brand strong for the sake of their own money. Both trump and musk successfully tied up some big business fate with their names specifically, forcing investors to play into the conceit.

jj4211 ,

Not only did he never apologize, he paid for investigation in the hopes that the diver randomly turned out to be a pedo and vindicating him. Then when that failed, he tried to play it off as "of that's just a common south African generic insult, no one takes it literally", with no one banking him up on that one.

jj4211 ,

That's a good point. Back in the day if he was leading a big brand to a cliff, others intervened and kicked him out and had the side effect of saving his reputation. Notably, it's probable his leadership would have destroyed PayPal, but others took the reigns away from him. So when Tesla pretty much made his name, folks simply noted his early leadership at PayPal and retconned attributing him with the crazy success, despite PayPal originally outcompeting the online payment company he was a part of, getting the leadership briefly nearly tanking it, and getting kicked out allowing it to flourish.

jj4211 ,

Depends on their prospects.

For example right this moment, if my employer pulled this on me with a 10% pay cut, it's probably still better than my prospects in the open market at this moment. I would normally have a pretty strong network of connections, but at the moment they are all in hiring freezes, so I'd probably have to take a huge pay cut to find a job.

But you would be sure I'd be heavily watching my chances and leave as soon as I had a competitive offer on the table.

Hello GPT-4o ( openai.com )

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds,...

jj4211 ,

Just yesterday I was faced with someone complaining because something that was "supposed" to work didn't work. They proceeded to describe a function they wanted to use that didn't exist. Finally it came out that it was what GPT says to do... Sigh...

jj4211 ,

I wouldn't bother with the webcam monitoring, but there are absolutely people who will barely work if they aren't actively engaged with teammates frequently.

It could be because they don't understand something or don't have confidence to do task without some ad-hoc training, and sometimes this is just easier to navigate face to face (someone getting starting may be shy about soliciting help, or may feel intimidated by the prospect of "interrupting" someone important.

It could be that they just lack the discipline to stay on task if too many options open up.

It could be that they need the cover of work as "bad guy" to get them away from family members that don't take their remote work seriously and impose on them.

jj4211 ,

I wager they are angling for the negative feedback to be private.

jj4211 ,

Embargoes do get a bit of backlash sometimes, but not nearly enough.

Why should a full embargo get backlash? They are trying to get input for an understanding, controlled population before unleashing it on a wider public. The whole idea is that the preview is not representative enough to start setting expectations for everyone. But it is far enough along to get the general idea and get feedback to address.

I am constantly testing pretty well known products in advance of their release and they are frequently crap. Like one thing I'm working on hasn't been able to work at all for a week due to some bugs that something I did triggered and they haven't provided an update yet. However when they actually are available to the general customers, they are pretty much always solid and get good reviews. If I publicly reviewed it, it could tank this product even though no one could possibly hit most of the stuff that I hit.

A full embargo seems fair. The selective embargo seems like an unfair idea, but also is a bad idea. If everyone knows they are allowed to talk about it, but only the good parts, then people will be speculating on what is not said. One product I tested had someone fanboying so hard about it they were begging the product team to lift the embargo so they could share their enthusiasm. They said no, they didn't want partially informed internet speculation running until they could address all aspects of the product publicly, and frankly there was too much crappy parts even if he was over the moon over the product and didn't really use the bad parts.

I suppose I could see being uncomfortable with the "testers" also being the likely "reviewers", because your are developing to the tastes of specific reviewers and tailoring for a good review in the end even if those reviewers aren't fully representative of the general population. It's easier to get a few dozen key influencers happy by catering to them/making them feel special, than releasing a product and hoping you hit their sensibilities.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines