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thesmokingman

@thesmokingman@programming.dev

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thesmokingman ,

I wasn’t aware Silk Road was taken down via FISA. I’ve read all of the long form accounts of it that I’m aware of and I don’t remember FISA being mentioned at all. Can you share a source?

thesmokingman ,

I mean it’s FOSS. Have you considered opening a PR to contribute what’s missing? You can be the change you want to see. I wouldn’t normally comment something like this. Your emphasis on “still” raised my hackles a little bit and led me to ask why you still haven’t made your own.

thesmokingman ,

All of these packaging systems have plenty of tutorials. Speaking from experience, many maintainers were not developers when they started maintaining packages for distros other than the official distros. I have worked with several maintainers who do work in tech and know socially several who had no background. This could be a great place for you to start!

You bother because FOSS is as much paying it forward as it is getting shit for free.

thesmokingman ,

As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!

Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85 (www.latimes.com)

I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don't think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.

thesmokingman ,

Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.

thesmokingman ,

These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books

Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.

Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?

Edit: fixed the Weinberger link

thesmokingman ,

If you’ve read stuff like Hackers by Levy or Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner, there’s a very happy, “look at this cool shit we built” attitude to everything (both books are fantastic and worth the read). Levy’s Crypto begins to dance around some of the dangers when he writes about Diffie-Hellman. MIT AI especially has its roots in this gnarly defense world even though it’s usually portrayed as anything but. The amount of computing used for RAND to support the war in Vietnam is terrible.

thesmokingman ,

Did man write grants to show how said fire had military applications? If so, how dare they! If not your straw man is kinda lacking.

thesmokingman ,

If you’re writing a grant illustrating its military applications I don’t really care what else you want to use it for. Looks like we disagree about intention so have fun with that.

thesmokingman ,

He is a nightlife commissioner which is not a title I’d heard before

thesmokingman ,

I agree with you. I think the responses to your comment are missing a few key points

  • Calling an Apple product something weird with “i” or “Apple” is Jobsian slavish devotion to branding
  • Under Tim Cook, innovation has arguably stagnated (see comparisons to Ballmer
  • Cook has not leveraged the value of Apple’s innovation successfully eg Apple Silicon being limited to Apple devices vs PowerPC days, the Vision Pro being horrible, the recent hilarious iPad creativity crusher ad.
  • A company with Apple’s market cap can do dumb shit and still appear valuable just because they have Apple’s market cap.

I read OP as “names are dumb and this is just Apple trying to be different in the same way everyone else is.” I think all of that is true and I think it’s valid criticism of the product. My last point about Apple’s value is probably the most important. They can do a lot of dumb shit before it matters.

thesmokingman ,

If you were able to buy one at the beginning of the pandemic it was great. If you weren’t, then the 4 was annoying as fuck because it was impossible to purchase at anything less than 3X MSRP.

thesmokingman ,

I’d argue it was taken from us several years ago when Raspberry made the decision to prioritize business customers over education and hobby during the chip shortages.

thesmokingman ,

Link for the lazy

thesmokingman ,

It’s cheaper to use a platform as a service than it is to build your own distributed data centers around the world and hire thousands of engineers worldwide to maintain it. At the federal level, there can be requirements for FedRAMP or a restriction to federal equipment.

thesmokingman ,

That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.

thesmokingman ,

Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?

thesmokingman ,

Here is what I get when I complete the search.

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/b2c4bab5-910f-485e-bb04-cef898915dba.jpeg

And here’s what I get when I intentionally change the units. Notice the color difference?

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/74f463a2-86d3-4da9-b2fd-c2dc99b4876e.jpeg

thesmokingman ,

When you search “megabytes to bytes” the units are correct and the number is one. If you edit the form, the number might not be one and the units might not be correct. Changing units highlights the unit input.

OP’s ostensible point posting on this community is that searching “megabytes to bytes” gave “mebibytes to bytes” in the calculator but OP’s image shows OP has changed the calculator.

thesmokingman ,

If I ignore what’s in the search bar, I remember that the prefix “mebi” means 2^20 and use a calculator. Your point doesn’t make sense because you’re asking us to get mad at a tool intended to convert scientific units for using the bog standard scientific notation. Byte math uses powers of 2 ergo we should use a calculator that isn’t explicitly set up for rounding.

thesmokingman ,

You literally spent an entire comment explaining why you should not use scientific notation and now you’re asking why I might prefer precision in byte arithmetic?

Good luck with that.

Do companies store facial and voice recognition data from the thousands of hours of zoom/teams calls that their employees use?

I heard a person call into a show the other day, voice only, and talk about some poor working conditions at a factory. Made me think about how it would probably be so easy for nefarious bosses to be able to identify that person through voice recognition SW with all of the data that comes from us looking directly into cameras and...

thesmokingman ,

I’ve seen some misinformation that doesn’t address the question and no answers.

First the misinformation: if you live in the US and work in an at-will state, your employee handbook will dictate what company can or cannot do. In most cases, especially for larger companies, there will be explicit language allowing the company to do whatever they on anything that uses their software or tech they’ve provided (eg your phone you use for company email). Two-party consent doesn’t apply in these cases because you signed the employee handbook or were informed it was a condition of your employment. Since it’s at-will too bad. However, even with these power, most companies aren’t doing shit unless you’re fucking up. Give someone a reason to throw IT or security at you and it could happen. Chances of this are higher at either larger companies or small companies with power-hungry idiots running the show. I have worked at all kinds and see all sides. If you are not in the US or live in a state with employment contracts (not at-will), this might not apply unless you signed away those rights and there is nothing getting them back. It’s always a good idea to be friendly with IT and security to learn what they do and do not do.

As to your question, do companies fingerprint employee voices, most likely not. In the US I’m at-will states you don’t need to go through all the trouble of tracking voices for termination or legal action. In the private world, this is a very secrecy-oriented problem (eg Apple trying to keep the lid on surprise and delight) so it wouldn’t happen except for very large scale. In the public sector, you genuinely should be afraid of this because government agencies are sucking down all the data they can. This is true around the world. More importantly, they’re all incompetent as fuck and being sold shitty software that doesn’t work so they’re misusing data like this for incorrect identifications.

In general, if you want to be anonymous, practice good operational security. Changing your voice never hurts. It’s not a bad idea to be safer (unless you’ve chosen a tool that can be easily reversed). You should also use phone numbers and hardware that can’t be traced back, which is a bit harder.

thesmokingman ,

And if you didn’t know it was for “Howard E Butt” now you know and can enjoy them even more.

I fucking miss HEB.

thesmokingman ,

This isn’t new. Check out Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley. It’s a nice primer. Most of our internet tech was built for the military or funded by the military for military ideas (no matter what MIT or Berkeley theoreticians might try to convince you of).

thesmokingman ,

I really like Ansible and have used it for my personal dotfiles for years. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet and I’m aware of a lot of the criticism. Containerization or immutable infra solves more production problems so I don’t really use it much at work.

At least in the devops/SRE circles I work in, we know there are different tools for different jobs. While we might fight about which is the best, I haven’t seen the ossification you’re describing.

thesmokingman ,

I like how simple it is. It’s made distrohopping very, very simple for me over the years. The only pet machines I have are my actual dev boxes. The rest are cattle I manage with other tools. Galaxy has also made it much simpler to consume other Ansible which used to be really annoying.

I’m on the fence about Nix. When I first saw years ago it was yet another package management system. I’ve seen enough interesting things with it now that I’ll probably try it out the next time I want to rebuild my configs from scratch.

After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...

thesmokingman ,

Walk me through this.

Before Spotify, I’d buy a record (physical or digital) and listen to that. I pay the artist once. After Spotify, I buy a record and listen to it on Spotify. I pay the artist the normal record price and there’s a long tail from stream payouts (unless they don’t reach the payout threshold).

Before Spotify, if someone heard a song and didn’t buy the record, they didn’t pay the artist. After Spotify, if they still don’t buy a record, the artist now earns from stream payouts.

Finally, before Spotify, if someone bought a record but stopped buying after Spotify, the artist loses that record purchase. This is definitely bad. Was Spotify the real reason? Would something other than Spotify have pulled them away? What levels of fame are materially affected by this?

Do artists have to pay to be on Spotify? Is that the issue?

thesmokingman ,

The thread you linked says what I said.

I’ve been doing DIY music since I was a kid. The vast majority of bands are never going to make any money ever. Spotify didn’t change that. Streaming didn’t cause that. The reality of every kid with a guitar thinking music is about making money not having fun is what did that.

thesmokingman ,

Who the fuck has a label? Do you know anything about music that isn’t already incredibly corporate? When was the last time you went to a DIY show and bought handmade merch off a band touring in their minivan? Compare that to the last time you bought a record from a label or merch from an online store run through not the band.

There are more than likely 300+ bands in a 20 to 50 mile radius around you. Do you support all of them as much as you’re pushing people on the internet to support all music? What about the really bad cover bands? Them too?

Your statements paint a picture that you have no idea what I meant by “levels of fame” because fucking no one makes money off music unless you get lucky. There’s just too much because music is fun.

thesmokingman ,

So you’ve bought every album from every artist you’ve ever listened to? Or, like the rest of us, do you have a limited amount of resources and have made strategic decisions about who to support? Because if you’re not dropping $20 in the tip jar of the next busker you see, you’re a huge fucking hypocrite.

I have not devalued music at all. You have, multiple times. You’ve also said that music has to be about money which is pretty fucking capitalistic. I’ve highlighted it’s about fun multiple times. You keep advocating for labels and ignore DIY which means you’ve already established a class system in music. You’ve provided no quantitative evidence to show you support any music and seem to hype up record labels whose business is built on licensing.

Should everyone get paid for all their music? Fuck yeah. Can I afford to pay every band? Fuck no. Did Spotify or streaming or even the fucking radio do that? Nope. Sure fucking didn’t. The market saturation did because music isn’t about money, it’s about fun. If you want it to be your job, good fucking luck. That’s just simple commerce. Not capitalism. If everyone on the commune is just making bead necklaces and there’s only one customer looking to buy one necklace, is that customer fucking all the people on the commune except the person they bought from?

thesmokingman ,

At least 50% of the bands I’ve seen, toured with, or heard don’t record music to make money. There’s just too much music for it to be dependable income. They do it because they wanna share something neat with their friends. They upload it to sites like Spotify or a decade ago MySpace or a decade before that zines so other people can find cool shit. If they get lucky, that stumble upon nets a shirt sale which actually nets the band some income.

The sweeping generalizations you’re making do not apply. Stop trying to make music about money.

Edit: mailing tapes was a thing a few decades ago. Are you saying I ripped off those folks because I wanted friends on one coast to hear shit friends on the other coast recorded? That’s a really fucking hard DIY tour to build. You’re fucking Skinner saying all us kids are wrong.

thesmokingman ,

For someone opposed to capitalism, you sure seem to think everything should be a grind mindset.

You’re underpaying all of us for our labor in interacting with you. You’re late on your “pay everyone on the fediverse” invoice. Don’t forget to pay your family for their “putting up with insufferable bullshit” time.

thesmokingman ,

I said multiple times “lots of folks do music for fun.” You said “you’re undervaluing their labor.” That’s why everyone thinks you think money is the point.

You also seem to not understand market saturation. If a fair value for a recording is $20 (just pretend for a minute), consumers are happy to pay $20, and artists sell for $20, why aren’t musicians getting rich? It’s because there are more musicians producing an incredible volume of work than the consumers can completely support. Nowhere in that statement is an attack on the value of that labor just an acknowledgment that there’s too much to consume.

In addition, you seem to fail to understand the difference between value to the artist and value to the consumer. Physical and digital radio provide incredible value to the consumer. They don’t really provide value to the artist unless you have an incredible amount of fame. A very good question to ask is “how do we create a solution that’s good for the consumer and the artist?” I have no idea. Making music about money (like you continue to do) instead of about fun (like a good number of artists who aren’t topping charts do) makes it very difficult to balance what an artist should get paid against what consumers can afford to pay (assuming we remove all middle layers).

thesmokingman ,

You missed the market saturation. Again. You addressed everything except the last part of the sentence there. Music is a lottery, like most jobs, because there are too many people trying to do music. Streaming, radio, labels, exposure, these aren’t the problems at all. The number of people who are good at a thing and enjoy it are.

I follow maybe 30 artists fairly closely. I regularly listen to maybe 200. Across the genres I hit each month (way down from my music heyday), there’s probably 500 in regular rotation. I work in tech and make decent money. I can’t afford to support all of these amazing people. Sharing their music gets them more exposure which might lead to merch sales which is how they actually make money. If I had to sell their music every time I shared it, that would go away. Samplers, mix tapes, music videos, all of that is to drive merch sales. I buy on Bandcamp and still stream, meaning artists are getting more money from my consumption than back in the day when me buying a cassette was the final sale.

Unless you’re going to put some sort of barrier to entry in front of music, this problem does not go away. You’re advocating for the shitty cover band making the same amount of money as the original artist putting blood, sweat, and tears into a long career. That just doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, there are too many killer artists out there for all of them to earn a living doing music. Even if I could support all the artists I love in my country, there are that many or more in other countries.

Not everyone gets to do their dream job. Decent analysis if a bit scathing. My dream as a kid was writing. Turns out that dream was held by a ton of kids like me and none of can survive on that.

thesmokingman ,

A problem so common it has an official page

thesmokingman ,

If you’re in the US, your bank knows way more about you than that and it’s naive to believe otherwise. A lack of credit doesn’t mean a lack of tracking; it just means your data is being pulled from elsewhere.

If you’re not in the US, you might have a better chance at privacy.

thesmokingman ,

Do you have a drivers license? A social security number? A phone number that you’ve used for anything else? Utility bills? Relatives? A car? Other large property?

Cash doesn’t mean shit unless you pay for everything in cash and never use the same info (including name, address, phone number, social, etc) for everything.

thesmokingman ,

It’s okay to be naive! The video talks about what data your bank has and how that gets used, as a security professional I know how all of this data is tied together plus the other data (assuming you don’t vote either?), and you don’t think there is anything tied to you so cool. Have fun with that. Keep pushing crypto.

thesmokingman ,

This doesn’t appear to cover the cost of the electricity it would take to keep your stuff running. There is no way to pay anything out at all. Seems like a pretty straightforward pump-and-dump where the end users are collecting imaginary points while some company abuses their resources. Every blog and Reddit post I looked at to try to understand this was full of referral links. Equally classic sign of pump-and-dump pyramid scheme.

thesmokingman ,

If you find the relevant department and start harassing them on Twitter and other socials at least once a day they will eventually fix it. This has happened before with other departments and security issues. My record is eight days.

thesmokingman ,

42, 47, and 50 all make sense to me. What’s the significance of 37, 57, and 73?

thesmokingman ,

See my link for 47. Its Wikipedia has more context. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen it a ton.

thesmokingman ,

wat

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/dbac1147-212a-4aef-884b-735849e3d93c.png

otl , to Privacy
@otl@hachyderm.io avatar

Finally deleted my LinkedIn account!

After putting my account into "hibernation" for the past few weeks, I finally closed it. But I'm still looking for work. Thankfully I can still find positions (SRE and software dev) by just going directly to the company's site and finding a Jobs page.

Good luck to everyone else out there looking for work!

@privacy

thesmokingman ,

This is how I use it. I’ve found a couple of jobs on LinkedIn. I’m currently happy at my job and not interested in dealing with passive searching so I check in maybe once a week to see visitors. Otherwise I don’t touch it at all.

thesmokingman , (edited )

You really shouldn’t apply a CC license to code. Someone who does that after saying what the dev said about not forking their open source code has no fucking clue what they’re talking about and is either about to spiral out or build something really dumb (or both).

Edit: yeah the dev seems pretty delusional

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/9ec42025-3096-452e-a21e-48a7a44698f7.png

thesmokingman , (edited )

There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.

There are three visible forks that have any stars. All of them have one star. You’re telling me that a project that is so widely and maliciously repackaged has no normal forks with more than one star? Is this tech that only bad actors want to use and has no following in the open source community?

Where are these evil forks, how do we actually know they’re forks, and why are they still up if they’re breaking license?

Edit: Here is a fork with 200+ stars that isn’t a direct GH fork. Given its premise is an opinionated and branded Floorp, is it morally wrong for its maintainers to not contribute to Floorp (assuming they don’t only for the sake of argument)? Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance often explicitly without the technical skill to suggest patches?

thesmokingman ,

If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.

In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.

Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.

thesmokingman ,

This headline was incredibly confusing to me because, as an American, I’d never heard of “mobes” as slang for mobile phones. The article does open with “phone motherboards” so I thought it was either a typo’d “mobos” or someone had changed the slang for motherboard when I wasn’t looking.

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