reverendsteveii

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reverendsteveii

9 miesięcy temudiscuss

our industry has existed on the cutting edge doing what's hard since its inception. it's just that there was a time when sending a piece of text across a wire was hard. Now that's easy, so we do more with the tools that make that easy. When what's hard today becomes easy we'll do that quickly with the tools that make it easy and then do more hard stuff. We can say we've achieved AGI when the tools are doing better on their own than a tool plus an engineer would do, and I think that's a long way off.

reverendsteveii

12 miesięcy temudiscuss

I've been told that my rainbow flag lapel pin is anti-Christian hate. This opinion seems to be gaining in popularity. If society decides this is the case, which some elements of society are currently making a concerted effort to see through with dozens of bills across dozens of states, is it incumbent upon me to accept it?

Right now in Europe there are people arguing that it's fundamental to the nature of Islam that adherents hate anyone who is not Islamic. They can cite Quran saying some pretty horrendous stuff about non-believers, that they need to be killed in a holy war and things like that. Is it within the bounds of society to decide that being Islamic is ipso facto a hate crime?

reverendsteveii

12 miesięcy temudiscuss

What is hate? Who gets to decide? What if someone decides that what you're saying is hate?

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I didn't sign up for the newsletter because OP listens to El-P, but that would have been enough on its own. I signed up for the Milton Friedman hate.

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my bank requires non-alphanumeric characters in their passwords but will reject a password if it has alphanumeric characters it associates with command injection attacks.

as far as WAFs being garbage, they absolutely are, but this is a great time for a POSIWID analysis. A WAF says its purpose is to secure web apps. It doesn't do that, but people keep buying them. Now we're faced with a crossroads: we either have to assume that everyone is stupid or that the actual purpose of a WAF is something other than its stated purpose. I personally only assume stupidity as a last resort. I find it lazy and cynical, and it's often used to dismiss things as hopeless when they're not actually hopeless. To just say "Oh well, people are dumb" is a thought-terminating cliche that ignores potential opportunities. So we do the other thing and actually take some time to think about who decides to put a WAF in-place and what value it adds for them. Once you do that, you see myriad benefits because a WAF is a cheap, quick solution that allows non-technical people to say they're doing something. You're the manager of a finance OU that has a development group in it whose responsibility is some small web app. Your boss just read an article about cyber security and wants to know what this group two levels below you is doing about cyber security. Would you rather come back with "We're gonna need a year, $1 million and every other dev priority to be pushed back in order to develop a custom solution" or "We can have one fired up tomorrow for $300/mo, it's developed and supported by Microsoft and it's basically industry standard." The negative impact of these things is obvious to us because this is what we do, but we're not always the decision-makers for stuff like that. Often the decision-makers are actually that naive and/or they're motivated less by the ostensible goal of better web app security and more by the goal of better job security.

As far as etc/passwd you're right that passwords don't live there anymore but user IDs often do and those can indicate which services are running as daemons on a given system. This is vital because if you can figure out what services are running you can start version fingerprinting them and then cross-referencing those versions with the CVE database.

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"I wonder why it's called Scunthorpe....?"

sits quietly for a second

"Oh nnnnnnnooooooooooooooo lol!"

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You're taking everything I discuss and projecting my moral approval on it. I've purposely expressed no opinion either way, but you can't fathom the idea that Trump might be good at something. You have to live in a world where he's just a flailing idiot, and I'd caution you to take some time with the fact that that flailing idiot is currently batting a very prescient .666 against those of us who'd like the USA to at least last out their own lifetimes.

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The people beneath him aren't just not part of his plan, they're the lever he's pulling to get the powerful in line behind him.

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I think you're equivocating between the value of the actual goal itself and the value of the actions they're taking in the context of fulfilling that goal. Blowing up the economy to maximize your personal power is short-sighted, I agree, but once you accept that as Trump's goal you'll see that arbitrary tariffs (and other financial manipulation, look at how he's using federal funding to thought police universities and punish dissident state governors) is a ruthlessly effective strategy. If you don't do what he wants, he'll starve out you and your underlings until either you give up or the people beneath you revolt and replace you with someone who'll do what he says.

Do not, my friends, become addicted to [federal funding]. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.

reverendsteveii

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their stated goals (avoiding obesity) don't line up with their actions (food choices that promote obesity), so they must have different goals (enjoying food regardless of whether it promotes obesity). not the opposite of their stated goal, just a different one.

reverendsteveii

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They're not selecting to maximize performance, they're selecting to maximize their own control. Pete Hegseth isn't SecDef because he's good at it. He leaks war plans and can't get through a press conference without being seen with a drink in his hand. He's SecDef because he'll do what Trump tells him to do regardless of whether it's legal or a good idea. The tariffs aren't meant to bring manufacturing back. They'd have gradual and consistent and the money raised would be earmarked for developing that industry at home if they were. They're arbitrary because they're the way the people in charge punish countries and companies that don't bend the knee. Everything they're doing is about removing the institution of government with its pesky rules and procedures and bringing everything under the control of one guy who can reward and punish arbitrarily as he sees fit. Overall economic performance simply isn't a factor.

It's changed my outlook a lot to make an arbitrary decision to stop assuming people are stupid when their stated goals don't line up with their actions, and to start assuming the easily predictable results of their actions are their actual goals regardless of what their stated goals are. Once I did that, I started being able to understand and even predict what these previously inscrutable people would do next.

reverendsteveii

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You see the establishment of separate, unwritten classes of things here, right? It will be a case-by-case basis which of these rules is invoked, that way no matter what happens they're "just following the rules we all agreed to" but they get to hand-select which thoughts are compulsory and which are forbidden.

reverendsteveii

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make it "I can ID a good baker without being able to make a wild-fermented bread myself" then. In any case, it's a proof of the pudding is in the eating thing: good programmers are defined as programmers that make good software, and good software is software that pleases users and provides functionality that they want. You don't need to be a programmer to know whether the software you're using is consistently good across its lifecycle. If it's bad at the outset it's bad at the outset and if it's not built maintainably and extensibly it will become bad over the course of its lifetime.

reverendsteveii

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I certainly would. Getting blasted w traffic because of an insightful post is an edge case that it doesn't make sense to design around and I'm not really gonna want my personal blog to be a time or money sink when I could be spending either on things that I like more than that. So I'm gonna go with the free tier of something that provides basic protection and availability and if I do get hug-of-death'd by some content aggregator or another it's no real loss to me that they use the wayback machine rather than hit my page directly because I'm not monetizing.

reverendsteveii

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I can identify a lion without being able to chase down and kill a gazelle on the hoof

reverendsteveii

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"Alice, schedule a meeting for me. At the white house. I'm gonna get Trump and Vance."

reverendsteveii

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This was a setup. It wasn't meant to be a meeting where policy is negotiated, it was an attempt bully Zelensky into agreeing to a bunch of pro-Russian falsehoods in hopes that he'd get something from the US. Good on him for realizing that Ukraine will get nothing from our compromised government, pushing back against false narratives and not hurting his cause trying to pursue a "compromise" just like the one that Ukraine got in 2015 that Russia reneg'd on almost immediately.

reverendsteveii

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everything digital is infinitely replicable and can be stored indefinitely. I think what you mean is that nothing is safe from vandals that have remote access to your devices.

reverendsteveii

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>Amazon

>principles