dhork
@dhork@lemmy.world
- Comment on What is OVM in VLSI? 3 days ago:
System Verilog is awesome, but not in a form of an AI generated post in a forum it doesn’t belong in.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 6 days ago:
Because phone numbers and domain named are managed by network operators, not manufacturers. A phone doesn’t ship from the factory with a phone number, it gets assigned by the mobile operator based on the subscriber’s number. Same with domain names, computers aren’t shipped with them, they get assigned later.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 1 week ago:
They assign ip addresses, they don’t assign hardware addresses. The closest thing to a hardware address is a MAC address.
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 1 week ago:
Who is gonna assign it? There is no one central authority who decides who gets a computer number or not.
- Comment on [Serious] What is project 2025? What kind of risk is involved? 1 week ago:
There are lots of Federal agencies under the Executive Branch, The heads of those agencies are often political appointees, who are appointed directly by a President and are not expected to remain in their roles if the party in power changes. However, the actual work is done by career civil servants, who are hired based on merit and not their political connections.
Conservatives see this as a problem, because these career civil servants may have been hired by prior administrations, and they see every appointment by the opposition as tainted. They want to wreck the merit-based system that these people are hired under, subject all career government workers to loyalty tests, and fire the ones who don’t meet those tests.
This is, of course, a recipe to decimate the functioning of these agencies and make them totally ineffective. But that’s the whole point. This “deep state” they keep railing about are simply people who put their commitment to the country over their commitment to any one party or one President. So they must go.
This is an analysis from a Liberal advocacy group but I think it is an accurate description of what these chuckleheads are really up to:
- Comment on [Serious] Any high-quality right-wing media, books, explainers? 1 week ago:
I’m not sure of you’ll find the academic research you are looking for, at least out of the US, since the modern Conservative movement seems to have eschewed academia as filled with Liberals.
I haven’t read this book yet, but I’d recommend Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about JD Vance’s life in Appalachia, It came out in 2016, and I recall folks thinking that it was a good read, even if they didn’t agree with Vance’s politics, and partially explained Trump’s appeal to rural voters whose lifestyle bears no resemblance at all to Trump. And Vance parlayed it into a Senate seat, after all.
- Comment on What are these "bass" and "treble" that I see in an equalizer ? 1 week ago:
The sound is slightly deep/full for “bass” and less so for “treble”. Is that all?
Basically, yeah.
Sounds that are lower in pitch (like the bass parts) have longer wavelengths. Any sound, whether it’s music, speech, or that annoying car alarm are just vibrations in the air made up of different wavelengths.
An equalizer can boost certain wavelengths, so when you “turn up the bass” you are amplifying the longer wavelengths but not the shorter ones.
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 week ago:
Father Justin then warns you that OUR WORDS ARE BACKED WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS
- Comment on Newspapers Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement and ‘Fake News’ Hallicunations 1 week ago:
AI written articles don’t always have a byline that says “I’m a bot, Beep Boop.”
- Comment on What s the difference between gemini and chatgpt 1 week ago:
AI writes a blog post about AI
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 1 week ago:
No, if they had negotiation skills they would be below average managers.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Yes, info on Pegasus is easy to find. And never says Pegasus is active when the phone is powered off. It’s undetectable and insidious in what it can grab, but at no point is there any reference at all to being active while the phone is powered off.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
If you have a reference that states otherwise (that isn’t written by an AI), please supply it. I’ll be happy to give up on this if someone can prove their point.
And that is because it is way too easy to detect when the phone is off, not only because of the battery drain, but because the radios would be transmitting when they shouldnt . Plus, persisting across a reboot requires some trace of the Trojan to be on physical storage, which is more likely to be found on a scan.
I am assuming that when a state-level actor is hacking a phone, they are targeting a person directly, and know how to get the Trojan on undetected. Their main goal will be to continue to siphon data off it while it is in use. It’s not worth the risk of detection to track it while it is off (and not being used, after all.) Don’t you think they would prefer to use the same method they used the first time to infect the burner phone that’s actually being used?
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Nothing in your links above indicate that the spyware operates while the phones are powered off (although I relied on a crappy translation of the French). Could spyware mock the shutdown process so that it looks like the phone is powered off while the phone is actually running? Sure it can, but the victim will be tipped off when the phone’s battery is being drained even while it is “shut off”. (And someone who is paranoid enough to shut down their phone would pay attention to that.) . It seems like it’s not worth the effort.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
You seem to be the one going through mental gymastics to justify why the button might not just turn the thing off. Sometimes they’re not out to get you, you know.
These phones cram oodles of stuff into a tiny space at super low margins, and are perfectly good at spying on their users when turned on. There’s no reason for them to expensive any extra effort to spy when they’re turned off, for the .01% of people who turn their phones off regularly.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
In order to not “start from scratch”, though, you will need to save some state persistently about your location (and the location of the satellites), which will cost power. Then you go in a building and lose all your signal, while still burning power to maintain that old state.
If it was that easy and cheap in terms of power, AirTags would have GPS receivers. They don’t.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Doesn’t a modern smartphone have something like a 4000 mAH battery? And that lasts most people all day with room to spare? Even 100 mA every few minutes will get noticed, if someone has their phone off and expecting consumption to stay minimal.
And that’s the key thing here, you’re not just building a tracking platform but you are building it into commodity phone hardware without the users consent, and without them noticing. Any phone that burns that much power while off would likely get replaced by the user. Do you think the phone vendors are in on it?
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
I think you are overestimating what these devices can do when turned off, specifically when whoever is doing the tracking wants to be covert. Devices like Cellular Radios and GPS chipsets are getting more efficient every year, but they still consume enough power that it would be noticed if they came on by themselves even if the device was off.
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 1 week ago:
Sure you do, the Bay Area is full of below average devs with RSUs.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
That’s not quite how it works, though. These devices are basically mini computers now, there’s a limit to what they can do without fully booting. Devices that are plugged into the wall might be likely to retain some power-draining function while plugged in, but there’s only so much you can do on a trickle charge while a phone is powered off.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you.
How? The only legit thing I can think of is if they are tracking you anyway, and then they see your phone is turned off, they might try to claim that you must be up to something. But they won’t be able to track it while it’s off.
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 1 week ago:
That’s no guarantee, though, it would have to be negotiated. And let’s face it most devs aren’t the best at negotiating…
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 1 week ago:
My point is that while it seems insane to leave half a million in RSUs to leave a company, if the person thinks their job is in a precarious position, it’s extremely unlikely they would ever have vested them all anyway. So the money was never really theirs to begin with.
Now, is that DevOps engineer worth that much more than the warehouse guy who picks the item to send to you? I doubt it. But it seems like that’s the going rate for a competent DevOps engineer with the relevant experience. While the qualifications to be in the warehouse are not quite so stringent.
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 1 week ago:
Most of the “fun innovations” are awesome ideas that would get a small startup a ton of business and make them widely successful. But the problem is that these companies are so large, that even those successful innovations barely make an impact on the company. So many initiatives at these companies is have to be billed as huge and game-changing in order to be funded in the first place. Which means they need to hire huge staffs, to justify their importance.
The managers make extremely optimistic forecasts: they have to, to get the project funded in the first place. Then, when the project is successful (but not as successful as promised) the bean counters scale it back to the size it should have been in the first place. So the headline is all these layoffs, when the real problem is that these companies are too darn big to operate efficiently.
- Comment on How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status 1 week ago:
Companies like Amazon can pull this off because of stock grants. (And I don’t think they give out stock grants to warehouse workers, but I could be wrong.)
When they hire a developer, especially one who already has the relevant experience they for, they will say “On top of the salary and bonus, we will also give you $200k worth of stock”. But that stock can’t be sold right away; it goes into an account where it vests over 4 years, 1/8 at a time. Your only condition for vesting the stock is being employed. If you leave for any reason, or even get laid off, you give up the rest.
Sometimes you also get smaller awards with your yearly review, subject to the same terms. They do this so that if you are a key developer, leaving would mean you forfeit this large account you have accumulated on paper. But in the back of your mind, you know that if your project gets canceled and you don’t find a new one in the company, that money goes poof also. So it’s play money until it vests, anyway.
- Comment on Pre-Mac OS X games 2 weeks ago:
You might want to contact a Mac Users Group. SVMUG still looks active: svmug.org
- Comment on Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track 3 weeks ago:
Vasa? Like, the Swedish ship that sank 10 minutes after it was launched? Who named that project?
- Comment on How does South Park get away with trashing identifiable people? Are they sued often? 4 weeks ago:
The outcome of this is that an equivalent show to South Park could be made in the UK, it would just have to be utterly filthy
I never wanted to see a hypothetical show as badly as this
- Comment on Welcome to the Golden Age of User Hostility 4 weeks ago:
Oh, my sweet, summer child. This author actually thinks the users are Roku’s customers. They’re not, users are the product, being sold to advertisers.
Do meat processors worry that their business might be hostile to the cattle?
- Comment on Pros and cons of getting a job at a very small software company? (14 employees) 4 weeks ago:
Pros: there shouldn’t be a lot of red tape or layers of middle management to deal with. If you have an idea, you know exactly who you have to convince to get them to buy in. Your contributions will have a visible impact right away. If you get along well with the team it may seem like too much fun to really be work.
Cons: resources will likely be scarce. The “IT Department” might just be Ed, one of the greybeard Linux guys. (or worse yet, Ed might have just retired, and they think you’re the new Ed). There are only a handful of people “in charge” and if you don’t get along with them you may not be able to get much done.
- Comment on Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears 1 month ago:
Well, yeah, but I didn’t think they opened up options right away on new stocks