azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Mathematics articles are the most obtuse I come across. I think the Venn diagram of good mathematicians and good science communicators is very close to non-intersecting.

Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from

The entire mistake right there. Look no further. They saw a solution (LLMs) and started hunting for a problem.

Had they done it the right way round there might have been some useful, though less flashy, outcome. I agree many article summaries are badly written. So why not experiment with an AI that flags those articles for review? Or even just organize a community drive to clean up article summaries?

The questions are rhetorical of course. Like every GenAI peddler they don't have an interest in the problem they purport to solve, they just want to play with or sell you this shiny toy that pretends really convincingly that it is clever.

This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device... which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don't have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip.

Sure without GPS it wouldn't be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

Every Bluetooth device has a unique identifier. Any phone that has seen that Bluetooth device in the past could have told google/apple/whoever "hey BTW this device is at those coordinates".

Google already uses this with WiFi to help "bootstrap" GPS localization. It is much faster to get a GPS fix if you already know roughly where you are (a few seconds vs a couple minutes), so they use nearby WiFi/Bluetooth devices to determine that. Remember 10-15 years ago when getting a GPS fix took forever? GPS didn't change, this did.
Apple went further and does this with Airtags now. Every Bluetooth device that ever went near an iPhone is in Apple's database with GPS coordinates.

So unless you live alone in a mountain cabin that has never been visited by someone with a smartphone before and you didn't disable the "enhanced localization" feature on your phone, yes your Bluetooth is at risk of giving up your location.

Plenty of cars flash their brake lights when ABS(/ESP?) engages, which is reasonable and should be a legal requirement IMO.

There's lots of room to give additional info in between that and "brake light is on because the driver doesn't understand that they can do mild adjustments by letting off the gas / stupid bitch-ass VW PHEV computer thinks using cruise control downhill with electric regen requires the motherfucking brake lights". It's like no-one realizes or cares that brake lights lose all purpose if they're on when the car isn't meaningfully decelerating. ARGH.

Sure, but I don't think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

Or way worse, what you said but senior techs.

Microsoft has been at this long enough that there is an army of old guys whose only - but extremely specialized - skillset is navigating arcane GUIs for group policies and AD administration. But drop them in a bash terminal and they're like a fish dropped on a tennis court.

How much of it is due to Agile (which is a very broad concept even though some people mistakenly equate it with scrum), and how much is it due to corporate pressures and inadequate processes though?

I find Agile conceptually meshes a lot better with "standard" product and solutions development thanks to the tighter feedback loops and increased reliance on local expertise over centralized planning. This only gets truer as project complexity grows.

However some companies try to make Agile work with top-down decision making and/or hard deadlines, which are deadly antipatterns. As for lack of time/resources and/or timesheet micro-management, this isn't a problem unique to Agile nor something that waterfall is exempt from.

Good agile teams are mostly independent and can define their own testing/release cycle as required for a given project; though of course when that happens there are at least a couple layers of management who feel a burning itch to stuff their dirty nosed where they don't belong because if the team succeeds despite their lack of direct involvement then everyone might realize the emperor has no pants.

That may be true in some truly well organized (usually "legacy big corpo" companies).

Where I've worked it's more like:

• Requirements only cover user-facing features, if that. (Not so) senior engineers are left to bridge the gap between UI mockups and literally everything else.
• Implementation issue is accidentally introduced
• Priority on the bug is lower than new features so no-one has any way to justify working on it
• One day a dev might be personally annoyed enough by the issue that they fix the part as part of some tangentially related work. Else it stays like that forever.

That is a basic side-effect of Agile development. If you have implementation details figured out to such an extent before writing the code, you are not doing agile, you are doing waterfall. Which has a time and a place, but that time and place is typically banking or medical or wherever you're okay with spending several times the time and money to get maximum reliability (which is a different metric than quality!).

I bet NVIDIA has driver crashes to figure out, and I know which of those issues I'd want them to focus on first if I used their windows driver.

If god didn't want my buttcheeks poopy, then why did he make them hairy?

Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it's just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

Finished severance s02 this weekend. Very disappointing ending to me (that I will not spoil), even though it seems like it's all anyone could talk about a couple months back.

Maybe it's because I just played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and we were spoiled with incredible writing that does foreshadowing excellently with deep and nuanced themes, but while Severance's execution is great in the details the overarching plot left me severely disappointed. As if they got great directors, actors, set designers, dialogue, but just wrote the s01e01 hook and then kind of just made up the plot as an afterthought. Keeping up mystery for its own sake because once the curtain is pulled back, we realize the stage pieces are not that impressive.

It's still good TV but it ain't that deep and IDK why everybody's raving on about it. Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Nowadays "buggy" is not how I'd describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.

However it's still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it's inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK "design" choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!

As a European software developer I would love to see that.

Unfortunately I'm afraid those most likely to cry foul aren't Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.

You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.

It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they're doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes... nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone's voice from halfway around the world says "yeah we see your screen". Unnatural is what it is.

The damn dean could have invited Kanye to do a standup routine that is just roman salutes and this would still have been an extremely gross violation of every democratic principle that would have gotten any other president impeached.

However in Trump's America it's just a Thursday and the so-called opposition is just nodding along and dutifully complying with every unconstitutional order. At this point Trump could sign an executive order for every registered democrat to literally dig their own grave and I think a majority would actually do it.

High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.

I've wrapped plenty of sensitive electronics that I'd be comfortable throwing at a wall. Get a larger box than you think you need, some foam wrapping/bubble wrap from another package and use that to form a protective core. Fill the rest of the box with lightly crumpled scrap paper, or packing peanuts if you have them. It ain't rocket science.

You just have to assume in the first truck the package will sit underneath seven other heavy packages, while the second truck will be completely empty as your package rattles around and bangs against the walls. Anything else is foolishness, you know damn well those trucks aren't individually fastening every box for a couple euros of gross revenue per delivery.

Those are special cases, but the majority of Trump voters voted out of fear, not hate.

citation needed

Here's one: As of April 30th 14 % of Americans think Trump hasn't gone far enough with the unconstitutional deportation and rendition of immigrants to El Salvador's concentration camps. Another 33 % of Americans think it's "been about right". 52 % oppose it.
I do not see how it is possible to interpret that any other way than Americans are voting and supporting this administration out of hate. This isn't about the price of eggs. This isn't about voting "out of habit". When asked, specifically, about the horrific and hateful practices that are most emblematic of Trump's discourse of wanton hatred, half of American people actively support it.

Think whatever the hell you want about how to deal with that, but I draw the line at giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it, and they would not do the same for you.

What?

The house I'm sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American "just wrap it all in vinyl" approach that aren't necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

The problem isn't air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won't rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that's easily avoided by decent house building.