Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: No video...

I worked from home for most of the past 30 years, and even when I was in an office on a regular basis, we worked with remote teams and had daily conference calls. Those were POTS (typically with speakerphones, so even worse than with headsets) until maybe 2005, when we went through a series of videoconferencing options.

A few of the teams want video for their calls, and I'll do it, because it's not worth the effort or social capital of objecting. Most don't.

I find video doesn't seem to add anything for me, except that it's mildly pleasant to see those of my remote coworkers whom I've met in the flesh and have a long history with. Some others report that seeing faces makes meetings significantly easier for them to follow and/or easier to sit through.

My tentative hypothesis is – and I know this sound crazy, but bear with me – different people are different, and some like video, and some don't, and some don't particularly care either way.

Ah, the number of "nah, it works" software bugs I've fixed over the years...

Closer to the topic, I'm pretty dubious about the value of interviewing software developers, and particularly of asking them to solve technical problems during interviews. I don't have any thing better to propose, though. Hiring developers who are competent, reliable, trustworthy, and good team members seems to be a Hard Problem.

Re: Confused Brit

However, "Good things" and "worse" are subjective.

True, though I'd have serious concerns about anyone who wanted to argue against the Bill of Rights (OK, so the 2nd is controversial), the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, or 24th. The others are more (reasonably) debatable.

That said, I'm curious how OP's question is relevant to a story about a California law.

Re: What a load of blockchain

It's not "secure" under any realistic threat model. It might be append-only under some fairly generous ones.

Re: Why?

Certainly nothing in the article gives any evidence why a Merkle graph – particularly the limited sort which, for no good reason, people insist on calling "blockchain" – would offer particular advantages here.

Merkle graphs are useful for things like journals, which is why you find them in filesystems, and other cases where partially-ordered sets are a suitable representation of data changing over time in parallel streams, which is why you find them in git and some other change-management systems. And since we already have widespread applications of Merkle graphs such as those, it really doesn't fucking matter whether "blockchain" ever has credible useful applications. There's nothing novel about blockchain.

In this case it sounds like what's really needed is broad agreement on a machine-readable document standard with an authentication mechanism, so something like an XML Schema and XML Signature ought to suffice. (Not a particular fan of those, just pointing out that they solve the problems described in the article.)

Re: Collapsing global economy and rising fascism.

Before clicking the forum link I thought, "I'll bet the very first post is the one that takes the bait".

Who claimed it was "the answer to every question"?

And fuzzing is language-independent, so that part of your claim makes no sense.

Re: Found some of the money

it'll be interesting to see how the US legal system will deal with this as it's über rich guy versus shareholders

The Delaware Court of Chancery is not impressed with rich guys. They deal with rich guys, and their armies of lawyers, all the time.

Re: Sorry, but

That is the one thing Orwell got wrong with the Telescreens in 1984. It is not government watching - it is the salesman working out what to sell you next...

Yes, as useful as Nineteen Eighty-Four¹ is as a symbol and touchstone, and while it really does work quite well as a novel, it turns out the oppressive surveillance state is in the minority and often short-lived (though North Korea is giving it a go).

The Foucauldian enjoy-your-submission capitalist state has been much more successful. Novels such as Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451² describe more dangerous dystopias, where the majority of the populace is only to happy to participate.

¹The novel's proper title. Orwell hated it when people wrote it with digits.

²Bradbury mentioned in interviews that he considered F 451's depiction of future entertainment – particularly the Walls – a more important feature than the book-burning.

Re: Apathy is the problem

Anon simply pointed out the calling the owner a creep

OP never did that. He wrote that having the camera positioned such that it has a close view of the neighbor's house is "insidiously creepy".

Converting an adjective describing an action into a noun labeling a person is a common rhetorical move, elevating the interlocutor's claim of bad action into a stronger strawman claim of systemic wickedness. No one can simply commit the occasional sin; either they're reprobate sinners, or they must be completely innocent.

The owner of the Ring doorbell may have done something creepy without necessarily being "a creep". The creepy act may well be unintentional. That doesn't make it unproblematic.

Re: "SQL coders"

Yeah, avoid those stored procedures. All the smart kids use string concatenation and interpolation to build SQL queries on the fly with tainted data.

Re: I see.

"It's written in Electron, so it requires 130 TB of RAM..."

Re: Nah

There's LaTeX (probably LaTeX2e) itself, and then there are potentially many thousands of packages. Plus of course some TeX implementation and back ends. But it's the packages which are taking up most of the space.

So, sure, you might have had a pretty small LaTeX toolchain back in the day, and you could even put a reasonably small one together now. But what usually happens is people go with defaults and get zillions of class and macro packages, fonts, and so forth.

Honestly, the last time I installed LaTeX (when I got a new personal laptop around the beginning of this year) I didn't put much effort into trimming down the default installation, because Disk Is Cheap and it wasn't worth my time to figure out what I didn't want.

Re: Heh heh...

True fans don't rant. We simply bask in our smug superiority.

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

You do if you don't want to keep taking your hands off the home row. Either you use the mouse (or whatever pointing device you have), or you memorize "accelerators", which are just "cryptic key combinations" dumbed down for people who don't want to learn things.

I wouldn't recommend vim to people who aren't already using it, to be honest. It's got a tremendous amount of historical baggage and tremendous complexity. (Same for emacs, particularly since I don't even like emacs.) But this refrain of "ooh modern UIs are so easy and fast!" that we've heard since Steve Jobs began parading the Mac around is nonsense. It's a bogus generalization and it's not supported by research.

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

Yeah, I use LaTeX for my personal (and, back in the day, academic) writing too. Generally I use LyX, though it's easy enough to load a LyX file – just LaTeX with some additional markup – into vim, say, if I want to do something that's not entirely convenient in LyX. And I used to do outlining with FreeMind and then use an XSLT stylesheet to convert the FreeMind XML format into LaTeX.

But what Liam's describing sounds like a use case where LaTeX is overkill. LaTeX produces nicely¹ typeset documents, these days mostly in PDF now that the troff family has faded from prominence. Using LaTeX for a short document with minimal styling (italics, bold, and hyperlinks) where layout and typesetting really aren't much of a concern, and you may need a wide range out output formats – that's overcomplicated and not a great fit.

Indeed, if your output is real POSH HTML, you aren't going to be doing much layout, and no typesetting, because the UA will handle the final formatting. And that's as it should be, for HTML. So the greatest advantage of TeX is irrelevant in that case.

¹Well, yes, there's some debate about the layouts produced by TeX and LaTeX. But better than Word does, certainly.

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

Actually, there's no reason why gvim shouldn't be able to render Markdown into a separate buffer, and you could use splitting to show that simultaneously and have it update in real time. Someone could just write a plug-in for that, if there's actually demand.

But among vim users (of which I am one) there may not be much demand for such a thing. Or someone may already have done it.

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

I don't mind when software actually takes advantage of new technology. But most of it simply regurgitates dubious design decisions of no real value.

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

I understood what you want from the article. It's not what I want, so after reading the piece I'm not rushing out to download PanWriter; but I also know my use cases and preferences aren't universal. And I don't mind taking a few minutes to hear about what someone else wants.

That said, if I were looking for something like this, I don't know that I'd be able to stomach an Electron app. Having to suffer with Teams is bad enough. But, again, preferences.

Re: Mountains of coal ash

Chemical toxicity of plutonium appears to be overrated, particularly by people who like to quote Ralph Nader. Plutonium is chemically toxic but not very bioavailable, apparently.

The ATSDR toxicity profile for plutonium (PDF) shows almost all adverse effects stem from various cancers or other radiation-induced pathology such as radiation pneumonia. Studies of plutonium-exposed workers at Sellafield did show elevated risk for cerebrovascular disease and other cardiovascular conditions, but mostly at elevated risk levels much less than those found for various cancers in other studies. (And the cardiovascular-disease effects weren't reproduced in an animal study, FWTW.)

Obviously, cancer is not an outcome anyone wants either, and plutonium is removed from the body very slowly, so it has plenty of time to do cumulative damage or accumulate if you continue to be exposed. It can be inhaled or ingested (according to the report, it's not significantly absorbed through the skin, though of course dermal burns and other damage can occur from sufficient skin exposure). So, yeah, you don't want to be exposed to significant amounts of plutonium. But the "plutonium is super toxic you guys!" line that the anti-nuclear types have been pushing since Nader doesn't appear to be supported by actual evidence.

Of course, after the last increase to the standard deduction, for many people itemization doesn't result in a larger deduction.

I miss itemizing, actually. It was a bit of fun watching the numbers change after I added each item, and a good reason to go through and do any filing and organizing of financial records that I'd been procrastinating on. But I recognize that it's not actually a good taxation mechanism.

Re: During Mudge's employment, he uncovered extreme, egregious deficiencies

Its quite clear that what Musk wanted to buy wasn't exactly what Twitter was selling. Twitter is potentially a valuable resource but to be correctly valued the user base has to be accurately enumerated.

Oh, please. Musk got a bee in his bonnet and launched his bid essentially on a whim, then got buyer's remorse and is trying to back out. The "oh my god it's full of bots" excuse is just him trying to save face, just as the "they won't give us the information" is a transparent legal dodge (which likely won't succeed).

I doubt Musk had any well-formed idea of "what [he] wanted to buy". He's forever chasing squirrels.

Re: The timing raises questions

Exactly. Mudge's position at Twitter was essentially "identify our security issues and push projects to fix them". In a bit over a year he did a bunch of the former part; only insiders can say how much of the latter. Then Agrawal came in and said "shit, this is going to cost us some bonuses!" or "man, this guy will not say what I tell him to say!", and fired him.

There's little reason for executives to blow the whistle on issues in their own portfolios, while they're still in a position to try to get them fixed.

I don't see anything wrong with what Mudge is doing here.

Re: Musk has about 44 billion reasons

What about Musk's purchase agreement for Twitter do you think this applies to?