cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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532

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2 yr. ago

I actually dare them to try. I'm really looking forward to the massive paychecks I'm going to get when companies are panicking to try to untangle all the absolute nonsense bullshit these AI companies are about to unleash into corporate codebases. The AI-slop bugfest will make the Y2K issue seem trivial. I'm so excited, the future looks very bright for human software developers.

My advice: Practice going over other people's code with a fine-tooth comb looking for bad architecture, flaws and inefficiencies. You won't always be right, you won't find them all, but you'll learn lots of skills you'll need in the future. Whatever you do, don't undersell yourselves, remember that your experience is valuable, and AI has no experience, it just has a huge library it can shotgun "solutions" out of. Half the time they don't even compile, nevermind work properly, or efficiently.

I feel like 99% of the time that's just a lazy or misleading excuse. I've worked in proprietary software development for 25 years and I've never worked for a company that didn't avoid restricted third-party code like the plague at all times. In the few, rare cases when we did have to use some proprietary third-party licensed library, it was usually kept very compartmentalized and easy to drop out of the code specifically because we were always afraid the other proprietary code vendor could fuck us and jack up their prices or find some nasty way to make our lives difficult.

The excuse that there is some secret but legitimate third-party code they're not allowed to share simply doesn't hold water in the vast majority of cases.

More likely answers are that some beancounter somewhere still imagines that the proprietary source code could possibly be valuable in some hypothetical future acquisition (nonsense of course) even though it has no real commercial value, or fears that it could expose the company to liability if some security flaw or licensing violation is found (more plausible).

Ironically, perhaps the most likely reality for this resistance is that the software actually includes code that dictates they were actually always obligated to publish the source but never did. ie, GPL-based code. GPL violations are all too common in proprietary software and very few organizations have codebase governance effective enough to keep the situation under control with developers copy-pasting from anything they can find on Google. Releasing their plagiarized GPL source code would reveal to the world that they were not in compliance all along. Let it quietly die, and nobody ever finds out and they get away with it. It's not simply that they're embarrassed by bad code, it's that their bad code will potentially incriminate them. Not worth the risk, and sometimes it's not just a risk it's a certainty.

The proprietary software industry relies on open source so much and rarely gives much of anything back. I'm fortunate that the company I'm working for now actually takes licensing seriously and does contribute to open source projects to some degree, although I keep insisting they need to do better.

There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.

Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you're interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who's right?

I know you think you're looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you're drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there's some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You're not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.

Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool's errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you've created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don't fit. You're never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.

Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don't reuse that password on other sites because it's more likely one of those sites will get hacked then all your accounts with the same password will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts and cell phone number/identity locked down like Fort Knox, since email and phones can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.

That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.

Lots of leopards eating people's faces these days. Probably shouldn't have voted for the leopards eating people's faces party.

I have never understood why people are so unequivocal and quick to take sides in this conflict. Either people insist on "No criticism of Hamas" or "No criticism of Israel". It has always seemed clear to me that both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are victims of their and each other's respective warmongering hardline governments. It is possible for both sides to be completely in the wrong, and arguing about which is "more wrong" and trying to tally up historical injustices to debate who has the biggest total is fruitless and counterproductive. Until both sides are willing to admit they've been wrong and done wrong to each other and accept that very justified criticism, the violence is never going to end. Criticism of both sides is not only deserved it is necessary and probably the only answer. Both sides need to be forced to take responsibility for what they've each done wrong instead of justifying and defending it and acting like they're completely innocent before this is ever going to have a chance at resolution.

The only conclusion I can draw is that some people REALLY don't want it to ever have a peaceful resolution, and I think that's probably closest to the actual truth of the situation. Really sickening and sad, for everyone victimized by this conflict. And I'm not even going to start getting into all the various foreign governments "supporting" both these sides. These are the ones who don't want it to ever have a peaceful resolution, I suspect.

I am hoping that maybe these protests are at least a sign that Gazans are willing to start vocally criticizing Hamas' role in perpetuating this violence. Now for us to be getting somewhere we'd need to start to see the same from the Israeli people too. But I'm not holding my breath. These protest efforts may be too little too late. Israel is clearly the better equipped and supported regime here; globally we seem to be returning to the horrible principle of "might makes right". As we know history is written by the victor, and genocide is an unfortunately practical and well-tested way of silencing your critics.

If you yourself use/are familiar with Linux and willing to actually test and polish your Linux version to the same standard as your Windows version, then a native Linux version is always appreciated.

However these days, it's probably not necessary and a lazy afterthought Linux version is like a bad console port, and because we DO have the option to run the Windows version, it's probably worse than no Linux version at all.

So it really depends on your personal feelings towards Linux, and nobody's going to judge you for not providing a native version you can't personally test and support. That's why we have Proton.

Of course the US would rather get its fertilizer from Russia than Canada. Sanction nasty Canada, free trade with Russia. Bring fertilizer from the other side of the world instead of across the border. Burn more oil in the process, Russian oil. This is sensible and wise!

When did I go through the portal into the Evil Alternate Universe?

Sometimes doing something illegal is anti-social behavior. Sometimes it's anti-authoritarian behavior. These are not the same thing.

The Marshall Plan was one of the most ambitious and apparently successful contributions to global peace, prosperity, and safety that has been made in modern history. Probably one of the greatest contributions of all time. Perhaps more importantly for the self-centered people out there, it cemented American hegemony for three quarters of a century.

Why would anyone want to try to repeat something like that? /s

That said, Europe will probably do an even better job, and it's their turn anyway.

Violence is an intrinsic part of fascism. It is the inevitable consequence of "might makes right". Be prepared for a lot more violence. Probably on both sides.

They may seem like nerf when they first come out of the AI, but they turn into real bullets once they start filling people's heads with convincing enough lies and falsehoods, and those people start wielding their own weapons against minorities, democracy, and the government. If the election of Trump 2.0 has not convinced you of the immense danger of disinformation and misinformation, I have literally no idea how anything could ever possibly get through to you.

That was unconfirmed but Louis Rossmann blew it up into a big thing. Don't get me wrong, I love the guy, he'll be the first one to admit he's not perfect, but that was not his finest work and nothing about it was convincing. Brother isn't perfect either, but as far as printer manufacturers go, they're pretty okay.

Canada has done some great steps towards indigenous truth and reconciliation, I'm not going to dox myself but I've been part of that on a local level and continue to be. It's not hypocritical to admit that yes, my ancestors invaded another nation and genocided its people. The difference is, we're all now on the same side saying "Don't do that, we won't let you do it". We've done it. It's wrong. We're speaking from experience and trying to make a better world where this doesn't happen anymore.

The user is also a Russian propaganda outlet, probably.

I think context is what's going to kill LLMs. They keep throwing hacks on top of it to try to make it understand context, but it never really "understands" it just makes it look like it is following the context by simulating a few pertinent cues. Every interaction is essentially a fresh slate with a few prompts hiding underneath to seed it with what looks like context, but trying to actually preserve the context of the model to the level that we would consider actual "intelligence" never mind long term planning and actual "thinking" would explode towards infinity so fast there are probably not enough resources in the universe to even do it once.

To be fair, so are statements like yours. Any bleeding heart running around crying "what about the Good Germans?" during WW2 was probably either an idiot or a fucking traitor. The "Good Germans" did nothing but go along with what Germany was doing and shrug. There was no resistance. There was no widespread insurgency. There were exceptions like Oskar Schindler, and the exception is why we still talk about him today. But on the whole most people made no attempt to betray the Reich, to save people from being put in concentration camps, to free the concentration camps, to even improve conditions in the concentration camps. They might've claimed they didn't know what was going on, maybe some didn't, but they could've known if they had paid any attention at all, they didn't want to know, they didn't try to know. They were afraid, that's valid, but why is their fear more acceptable than the fear of the soldiers who were called up to defend their country against German invasion, who are getting shot at and bombed? There comes a point where the "Good German" just becomes a "Cowardly German" and doesn't deserve the sympathy you're trying to create for them.

The vast majority of Russians have done nothing to stop Putin, and that's true of the ones who've fled to the west, the ones who signed up for a military payday, the ones who are farming to feed the army, the ones who are building the missiles and the bombs, the ones working on the rails and the ships that transport all this war materiel, the ones operating the oil refineries that pay the bills, the ones building the software that runs and controls all of this.

When they can tell me what specifically they've done to try to stop Putin, to sabotage this war and this regime, then I'll be the judge of whether they're indeed an actual "Good Russian", or a "Typical Russian". Because the "Typical Russian" has done, and continues to do, absolutely fucking nothing while thousands are dying, or worse they celebrate it. They'll probably tell you they did that out of fear too, that they feared consequences if they didn't celebrate it, but those kind of loyalty displays are the reasons other people feel fear, they are helping the regime to maintain its control. They're being part of the problem. They're not doing good things, and they don't get a pass for being cowardly while other innocent people are dying. They don't get to trade other people's lives for their own safety and get away with it.

Back in the old days, a lot of people went through the "Linux From Scratch" process to literally build up the OS from absolute scratch. No distro, no packages, no precompiled kernel, nothing but the raw ingredients. It is a good way to really understand the fundamentals not just of Linux but of the whole computing paradigm our systems are built on. It is not as hard as it probably sounds, but it's an investment. It takes some time and you need to put your brain in gear to actually learn.

Yeah, that's all it is. Calibre Portable. In a folder on Nextcloud.

Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It's not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There's really nothing locked down about them, they don't do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don't do anything to make it hard either. "koreader" installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you're hardcore for some reason) and you're basically off to the races.