WesternInfidels

internet bluetooth wife

My new punk band name

Patents are a (relatively speaking) newfangled trick to turn ideas into legal “capital.” In the same way that a corporation “is” a person.

The backbone of capitalism? I’m not following that.

I’m probably an idiot. Tell me I’m all wrong about this.

The danger is that quantum computers could factor large products well enough to reverse public keys, finding the associated private keys. Which would indeed be very bad. But this isn’t quite a magic key that opens everything.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

Public key crypto is also not used to protect your typical encrypted zip file or file system volume. Your Bitlocker and Veracrypt secrets aren’t about to fall to quantum spies.

I’m bothered that so many popular articles about this issue draw no distinction between the classes of cryptography that are vulnerable and those that are not.

Seems like an appropriate companion piece:

The 49MB Web Page

I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

I guess I must have seen that here in the Fedi.

This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

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I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I’m not sure it helped too many people. We didn’t have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual’s help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can’t even argue with that philosophy.

But most callers just didn’t have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn’t know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn’t know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was “the computer.” They didn’t know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they’d argue with us about it. “I don’t have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks.” No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems…

Jesus, that sounds awful.

Subscribed.

The commentariat at HN was anti-DEI before anyone knew what “DEI” even was.

Garry Tan, tech [Y Combinator] CEO & campaign donor, wishes death upon San Francisco politicians

I am constantly asked to explain my opinions … I am constantly harangued for proof of what I believe, and every time I hand it over there’s some sort of ham-fisted response of “it’s getting better” and “it will get even more better from here!’

For an industry so thoroughly steeped in cold, hard rationality , AI boosters are so quick to jump to flights of fancy — to speak of the mythical “AGI” and the supposed moment when everything gets cheaper and also powerful enough to be reliable or effective.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with “AI,” but I think this highlights an interesting pattern, one where the standards of evidence for critics and boosters are different. Certainly we’ve seen a similar phenomenon in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Is it profound, is it one of those penetrating insights that you can’t stop seeing once you’ve seen it? I’m not sure. Of course enthusiasts are biased, of course their arguments are emotional and unfair.

We could view this as “MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to,” or we could view this as “MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has.” I hate it but I have eyes.

If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I’m not holding my breath, though.

The term “kill chain” reduces the slaughter of human beings to an engineering problem. It tacitly admits that modern militaries are murder factories. If we had caught ISIS or a drug cartel speaking and thinking this way, that would be a Fox News headline for months. What a dispiriting bit of jargon. It tells so much more than it says.

If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.

“The utility” has never had a way to prevent you from doing something dangerous with your wiring or with the electricity they send you. The best we’ve managed has been to encourage appliance manufacturers to design their products with safety in mind, through the UL program (which is voluntary). This is why the writer talked to the “vice president of engineering at UL Solutions.”

GPTurfing?

That annoys me as well. They call it “astroturfing” because it’s fake grassroots. I wonder if we should call this “cyberturfing.”

I’ve only skimmed but:

provide an accessible interface at account setup

They don’t even define “account.” They have a definition of “account holder” that makes no sense.

Are all devices required to have user accounts? There was a time when home computers did not have such things.

The steady exodus from Elon Musk’s X has benefited smaller, independent alternatives such as … German-developed Mastodon

So somebody took a look at the modern web and thought “Hey, this is pretty good, but you know what would make it even better? Even more shit you didn’t ask for popping up in your face with every click!”

There was a time when Amazon was not full of scummy rip-off products, when it was not playing games with prices, when it was not a cloud-computing powerhouse, and you know what happened?

That’s right, they crushed their adversaries (retail shopping) and earned billions in profits. They won.

But somehow that’s not enough winning, there isn’t enough winning until all the value has been vacuumed up from the world.