ricecake @ ricecake @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

I actually kinda agree with both here.

It sucks working with someone who is utterly disinterested in the work, if it's anything above rote work.
Asking the candidate what they found interesting about it is at least a basically fine idea. If they can't answer when you ask, that actually is kinda concerning.
Big difference between asking and expecting them to volunteer the information.

At the same time, if the people interviewing you can't even pretend to show basic conversational courtesy by asking some basic "what do you do for fun" style questions or anything that shows they're gonna be interested in the person they're looking to work with, that's a major concern.

If it's developed for the government, even by a private contractor, it's still considered US government code and is public domain. It's why sqlite is public domain.

I personally doubt there's much available in the off-the-shelf fighter HUD system market, personally.

Eh, there's an intrinsic amount of information about the system that can't be moved into a configuration file, if the platform even supports them.

If your code is tuned to make movement calculations with a deadline of less than 50 microseconds and you have code systems for managing magnetic thrust vectoring and the timing of a rotating detonation engine, you don't need to see the specific technical details to work out ballpark speed and movement characteristics.
Code is often intrinsically illustrative of the hardware it interacts with.

Sometimes the fact that you're doing something is enough information for someone to act on.

It's why artefacts produced from classified processes are assumed to be classified until they can be cleared and declassified.
You can move the overt details into a config and redact the parts of the code that use that secret information, but that still reveals that there is secret code because the other parts of the system need to interact with it, or it's just obvious by omission.
If payload control is considered open, 9/10 missiles have open guidance control, and then one has something blacked out and no references to a guidance system, you can fairly easily deduce that that missile has a guidance system that's interesting with capabilities likely greater that what you know about.

Eschewing security through obscurity means you shouldn't rely on your enemies ignorance, and you should work under the assumption of hostile knowledge. It doesn't mean you need to seek to eliminate obscurity altogether.

Well, you probably could. Issue is that you can't self host the IRS. If they aren't running the service that accepts the data there isn't much you can do.

More likely they'll just turn off or unpublish the API that it depends on.

The Detroit Arsenal. https://tacom.army.mil/about/detroit-arsenal

It was where they made a lot of the tanks, but it's since been "consolidated" to be an r&d and testing center. Factory unionization gave Ohio and Kentucky a major headstart in the race to the bottom, and that extended past the auto sector to other related manufacturing centers as well.

Typical Ohio. First sign of disagreement and you go running to tattle to Andrew Jackson.

In seriousness though, I went to refresh my memory about the cause, and it's just preposterous.
Congress divided the Great lakes area based on a terrible, but best available, map. A state boundary was supposed to run from the southern tip of lake Michigan eastwards until it hit either Canada or the north shore of lake Erie, and then come out the other side of lake Erie and continue until Pennsylvania. At the time they thought lake Michigan only went about as far south as Detroit, give or take.
When Ohio became a state they had started to hear rumors that lake Michigan wasn't shaped the way they thought, so they included some clauses in their constitution to ensure they had more northern territory regardless. Congress said whatever, referred the change to committee, neither rejected nor accepted it and then granted statehood.
When they incorporated the Michigan territory, they used their original definition because they hadn't looked at Ohio's proposed changes at all.
When Michigan moved towards statehood we had come to a clear understanding of the shape of lake Michigan, and so Michigan assumed they got the land that Congress said they got: southern tip of lake Michigan east until lake Erie or Canada. Which would end up being Michigan stretching from roughly Gary Indiana to Sandusky Ohio.

World's most tiny drunken border conflict later and the feds say Ohio wins because a state takes precedence over a territory, but Michigan was right on the cusp of statehood and they didn't want a fresh state to immediately hate their party so they traded it for a disconnected and totally disproportionate chunk of Wisconsin, which wasn't applying for statehood yet and hence didn't matter politically. Michigan was irate until it turned out the UP was full of resources that had more value than the shipping that went through Toledo.

(I can't read a wiki and then not share if I read it because of a comment. I have no regrets for the wall of text)

Let's not forget that the real enemy here is Ohio. Their insistence that they get the Toledo strip at the bottom of Michigan caused a border war (at least two people got stabbed, and our militias drunkenly shouted at each other before the feds intervened), which the feds settled by giving the state of Ohio what they wanted, the Michigan territory the UP and nothing to the vague pile of unincorporated territory that would become Wisconsin.

In summation, it's all Ohio's fault and Wisconsin should join us in the feud.

I didn't mention buying a microwave, I mentioned finding one for free. If you buy a microwave you're a customer and your desire for ethical products can be impactful to some degree.
If you find a microwave there's no feedback, and if there were feedback they wouldn't care because you're not a customer.

The way you establish feedback in this field is by making it a viable market, and then giving your money to the most ethical company. I don't think that any of the companies offer or will offer a product that will be worth the cost or resource investment. Ergo: I don't give them money or use their products.

Downloading a model doesn't change that feedback. It's digital, so once the resources are spent copies have no additional cost. They don't get metrics or usage patterns, or even know I have it.

It's not quite, but kinda, like saying that you should only shoplift fair trade coffee. This doesn't signal to anyone that they should invest in making their coffee more equitable.

While I agree with you, legally speaking the state is prohibited from establishing a religion, not from having religious symbols in general.

Traditionally many have opted to entirely separate them, but this has led some to claim that an antipathy for religion is also a lack of the required indifference to religion.
In my opinion this is well over the line, since a permanent display installed by the school is different from a student initiated activity or cultural event with religious context.

Given that line of argument though, it's much easier to overturn these types of laws by showing that they have preferences, rather than it being too much.
The satanic temples whole thing is basically saying that if you want the ten commandments, you need to display our commandments too. Right up there with arguing abortion is a religious sacrament.

It's a setup for a lawsuit, not a serious demand.

some of them are pretty reasonable, but others are just outdated, even from a pragmatic "rules for society" sense.
Murder, theft and perjury? Bad, shouldn't do 'em. Adultery? Super shitty, no argument. Not sure it's in the same order as murder, or even petty theft.
Coveting, or more modernly called "embracing feelings of strong envy"? Isn't that just saying not to do the thing that causes stealing sometimes? It's not really a societal thing, just a life tip.
Honor your parents? Maybe, but some people have really shitty ones, so being sent to hell for not obeying your abusive Dad is actively cruddy. I'll charitably accept it as "care for the elderly".

That's something like 50% that I'd call good rules. Most of the rest are just "God says to like God".

That's far from saying they're negligible. What they're saying is inline with my point. If you find a microwave are you going to research how green it's manufacturing was so you can ensure you only find good ones for free in the future?

Irrelevant or moot is different from negligible. One says it's small enough to not matter, and the other says it doesn't affect your actions.

I play with AI models on my own computer. I think the training costs are far from negligible and for the most part shouldn't have been bothered with. (I'm very tolerant of research models that are then made public. Even though the tech isn't scalable or as world changing as some think doesn't mean it isn't worth understanding or that it won't lead to something more viable later. Churning it over and over without open results or novelty isn't worth it though). I also think that the training costs are irrelevant with regards to how I use it at home. They're spent before I knew it existed, and they never have or will see information or feedback from me.
My home usage had less impact than using my computer for games has.

If you're a company you don't care what the home user does. They didn't pay for the model and so their existence in the first place indicates a missed opportunity for market share.

No one is saying training costs are negligible. They're saying the cost has already been paid and they had no say in influencing it then or in the future. If you don't pay for it and they can't tell how often you use it they can't really be influenced by your behavior.

It's like being overly concerned with the impact of a microwave you found by the road. The maker doesn't care about your opinion of it because you don't give them money. The don't even know you exist. The only thing you can meaningfully influence is how it's used today.

Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of "sleepy". :)

There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there's a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

I honestly can't tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.

For the most part they're just based on reading everything and responding with what's most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
This is usually how they do math since it isn't well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
Google's system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.

Same end result, but one refers to the actual and the other the state. The act of dying versus the state of being dead is kinda pedantic, but if you replace it with a state that can (conventionally) be left it's a little more clear.
"I thought he slept" vs "I thought he was sleeping".

You are correct. Typically you don't see crimes charged at both the state and federal level, but they're not exclusive.

To each their own I suppose. "Catsup" has always just seemed like a weird affectation to me.

For the first one... Not sure I get it. It was originally ketchup, and has been predominantly spelled that way for hundreds of years. It was spelled that way before ketchup even had tomato in it.

Typically people propose switching everything to UTC.

The read this doesn't work is because humans are still bound by a diurnal cycle and you won't have everyone wake up at 0800, since for some people that's the time in the middle of when the sun sets and rises.
So you still need to communicate to people across space where the sun is or will be for you at a time in the future, or otherwise relate where in your wake cycle you'll be.
Tied to this is legal jurisdictions. Within a legal jurisdiction it's important for regulatory events to be synchronized. For things like bank hours, school hours, government office hours, things like "no loud noises when people tend to be sleeping", "teenagers old enough to have a job aren't allowed to work late on school nights", and what specifically constitutes "after hours or weekend labor" for the purposes of overtime and labor regulation you need your definition to be consistent across the jurisdiction. Depending on where you are in relation to Greenwich a typical workday can start at 1900 Friday night/morning, and extend until 0300 Saturday morning/afternoon. Your "weekend" would start when you woke up around 1800 Saturday evening/morning.

Right now we solve this problem by deciding on a consistent set of numbers for where the sun is across some area that inevitably lines up with legal jurisdiction. Then we use a lookup table to translate our conception of where the sun is to where it is elsewhere.

Without timezones you instead need to use the same type of lookup table to find the position of the sun at the time and place of interest, and then try to infer what the situation would be.

We have UTC now, and people inevitably already use it where it makes sense. It's just usually easier to have many clocks that follow similar rules than it is to have one clock that's interpreted many different ways.