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colinb

642 karmajoined há 16 anos

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The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized

lareviewofbooks.org
5 points·by colinb·há 20 dias·0 comments

Italian companies seek High Court order directing Meta to restore accounts

irishtimes.com
3 points·by colinb·há 8 meses·0 comments

comments

colinb
·ontem·discuss
Can you provide some context for this? I’m aware of SBF’s EA links, and how empty those sentiments appear to have been, but I’m just some guy, and it isn’t clear to me that the whole idea is dishonest, even if I don’t think it’s terribly realistic.
colinb
·anteontem·discuss
Ooof. €109.70 in paperback
colinb
·há 15 dias·discuss
I sort of agree, and sort of not. The decision to cheat on exhaust fumes was taken by senior executives. How many of them are being laid off?
colinb
·há 17 dias·discuss
I presume there’s a voting mechanism? Are you complaining because democracy hasn’t yielded your favourite outcome?

FWIW I might align with you in not finding all that much that I wanted to read in recent winners. That said this years nominations for Hugos have given me

A Drop of Corruption

and

Shroud

I enjoyed the former (and the earlier book in the dance series) and I’m 30% though the latter.
colinb
·há 21 dias·discuss
Betteridge’s law strikes again. (I came close to finishing that sentence with a question mark. Oh the irony)

More seriously, I looked at the article you linked. It talks about lots if complex climate stuff that I don’t understand. I don’t think it mentions bombs as a cause. Or the war. Please show your receipts.
colinb
·há 28 dias·discuss
There has got to be a pun in here somewhere about room temperature IQs.
colinb
·mês passado·discuss
Is there a car manufacturer that hasn’t taken advantage of such schemes? Should I pay more for my next car so that Volkswagen executives can get paid despite not facing serious consequences for choosing to poison millions of people?
colinb
·mês passado·discuss
I think it’s true that declining to hand over a password in a criminal investigation is itself a criminal act in the UK. That said, I don’t know how often this actually occurs.

As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.
colinb
·há 2 meses·discuss
I have the bamboo desk with the curved front.

I like:

- the way the wood looks and feels. - it has been fairly tough. I managed to stain it with an overnight pen leak, but it's mostly easy to clean, and stands up to minor impacts from computers and cups. Also, no water marks so far.

I dislike:

- the curved front, which looked cute in the pictures but makes it a PITA to fit a keyboard tray. That was a mistake. I wish I'd gone for the straight edged desk.
colinb
·há 2 meses·discuss
The truly excellent weavers will be fine?
colinb
·há 2 meses·discuss
Do I remember correctly that one of the major characters in what we would now call an influencer with always-on video glasses? I think his spectacles get slashdotted at one point.

I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.
colinb
·há 2 meses·discuss
[I have lived in the UK. I do not live in the UK. I am not British]

well, I guess you can always try moving there. It's my suspicion that more people move from China to the UK than the other way around. Why is that? Maybe they haven't heard the news about it being a terrible place.

I get it though. As other posters have said, various British police forces seem to get ahead of themselves and then have to climb back off their hill when confronted with skeptical press [remind me, do you get much skeptical press in China?] and although I do not greatly care for the marchers who carry pictures of ultralights (because yeah! Kill civilians!!) I don't think the people who are nearby and telling us that bombing civilians is wrong (hint: bombing civilians is wrong) should be penalized for doing so. The courts and the electorate will have their say, and (slowly) grind any disagreeing gov't into a policy change. As it should be.

That said, while I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement, I can't because, well, because it's stupid. It's a stupid thing to say. You should reflect more before you type.
colinb
·há 2 meses·discuss
Yes I did/do. He’s a top guy. I think he did some pretty spiffy work on multiprotocol routers in the 90s.
colinb
·há 2 meses·discuss
I unexpectedly found myself working for the UK subsidiary of AJ just before the .com bubble pop. Interesting times. Things I remember:

  I wrote something to do cluster analysis of the previous day’s search queries. It turned out that the most frequent search was something like “naked picture of $soapOperaShowActor”. Actual search query data might shake your ideas of the goodness of people. 

 Much of AJ’s content was based on editorial staff (often young journalistic folk) researching what they thought might be the highest quality answer. One day I passed the desk of a colleague who was watching porn. What now? It turns out that they wanted to be able to answer the question “best porn of $kink” for a large variety of kinks. Which meant that they also had to have a policy of how to direct queries for CP. To something less harmful obvs.

 As a corollary of the above, the editors needed a way to search for candidate results. What did they use for this? Google of course!
Via an acquisition I worked for AJ in the US for about a year before the move to the UK. It was a vivid illustration of the way in which dishonesty and backbiting could permeate an org. I knew plenty of fine individuals there, some who kindly taught me hard lessons, but as a company, a culture, it was a cesspit.

Anyway I got laid off in the great wave of 2001, was out of work for a while, did some truly awful work on supermarket planogram s/w and eventually got a gig doing IP routing. Ever since then I’ve been patronising grad hires by telling them how useful it is to have a bad job in your past. It makes it much easier to cope with occasional bad days at an otherwise good place. “Sure, my code crashes on a double exception when the reverse bcopy chokes on an unwired chunk of address space in the ARP lookup interrupt path, but at least I’m not trying to optimise the positioning of cornflakes to take advantage is this month’s promo pricing”. Good god, there was a time when I had a subscription to The Grocer magazine. Watch out kids. This could happen to you! (I also got to spend a day following a guy around the London Underground as he refilled chocolate vending machines. But I won’t talk more about that unless you buy me a beer).
colinb
·há 3 meses·discuss
>Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.

"estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%." [0]

You do most of humanity a disservice by lumping them in with that cohort that may or may not identify themselves as evil (I have no idea) but are certainly capable of deliberately and with calculation behaving in ways that most of us would label with the "E" word.

Sometimes being judgmental is ok.

[0]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8374040/
colinb
·há 3 meses·discuss
Imagine being a news paper/site editor and having this kind of headline potential drop in your lap.
colinb
·há 3 meses·discuss
I think I understand why this is true for plain IP forwarding. There isn’t much to break the cache and the lookups are few and fast.

What’s the cheapest (new) computer that can drive a 1Gb port with NAT? With a busy encrypted (wireguard?) connection?

[I don’t think qos has a lot of use in the domestic environment; sure, someone here does it but I think it’s much less mainstream than the features I already mentioned. ]

Such a device could drive my home. But in a couple of years I suspect I’ll want 2Gb or 10.

In the past I’ve tended to use a device until its crappy power supply failed. So I guess I’m hoping for a >5 year life span/upgrade capacity.

For all I know the answer to my question is one of those passively cooled four port n100 bricks from AliExpress. Anecdata happily accepted.
colinb
·há 4 meses·discuss
I think you have the wrong end of this stick. See the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior for an example. There have been several iterations of this ship name since the first was bombed by the French secret service in 1985.
colinb
·há 4 meses·discuss
Your argument ignores two things.

First, the US constitution as it currently stands admits modifications. Amendments are version bumps. My understanding is that they’re harder to come by these days.

Second, the constitution may be written but the interpretation is always changing. In particular, the interpretation of laws around restriction of free speech have lots of history of being interpreted in ways that may or may not be congruent with the intentions of the original authors, who’re dead, so we’ll never know the truth of it. It’s only been 107 years since the US Supreme Court decided that anti-draft speech in time of war COULD BE ILLEGAL. Apparently that was partially overturned in 1969.

Thirdly [naming, caching and out by one bugs!] it is far from clear that a written constitution will lead to a durable republic. It’s only been ~250 years. Too soon to tell.
colinb
·há 4 meses·discuss
> code for radiation hardened environments

I’m aware of code that detects bit flips via unreasonable value detection (“this counter cannot be this high so quickly”). What else is there?