lennivelkant
@lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Americans have 400 days to save their democracy 2 days ago:
As in, 28 per day of work missed? Or even less than that
- Comment on Americans have 400 days to save their democracy 2 days ago:
Hold the fuck up. Am I getting this right?
You have to register to be able to vote. If you register, you might have to work in court, losing out on pay. You don’t get any compensation for that. The lost pay can ruin you financially.
What the fuck?
- Comment on yin yang 2 days ago:
…I like probability and statistics. Complex numbers on the other hand can go take a dive for all I care.
- Comment on Marketing Doesn't Work on Nerds 3 days ago:
I believe that thinking you’re immune to something makes you even more vulnerable, because it creates a cognitive blind spot. If you think you can’t make mistakes, you don’t stop to wonder if you are making one.
- Comment on S1ngularity/nx attackers strike again 3 days ago:
Easy there, you’re making a bunch of assumptions and accusations here. For starters, I do understand how spoilers work, I read the spoilers and I don’t think it adds a lot of value to the conversation.
I’m technically from a CS background, but not in the field relevant to this post. I also don’t think people assume this topic to be basic. I happen to understand about 80% of it, but only ever have contact with about 20%, and that’s despite working in a CS-related field myself. And yes, I’ll keep using that abbreviation, because it’s convenient and I know that you understand it.
The short answer to “how does this affect me?” is “if you don’t know what npm is it, it doesn’t affect you”.
The intention of the blog article and the post sharing it is to get a specific warning out to a specific technical group. This group doesn’t want to scroll past three paragraphs of context they already know to get to the parts that matter. They can’t cater to every audience, so they prioritise the people that can do something with their understanding.
Unfortunately, that means that other people are left out of the conversation, because frankly, they have nothing to contribute. That’s neither malice nor arrogance, but simply expediency.
However, you’re welcome to ask! Chances are, someone will be happy to answer and fill you in on the background. More specifically, someone may be able to give a subject-specific explanation. Most importantly, that explanation will be more reliable if it comes from a human familiar with the topic.
Chatbots, no matter how diligently made to look like they know stuff, don’t and can’t know anything except the likelihood certain words occur together. They don’t have the required structure to understand the concepts behind the words. At best, they have memorised hundreds of generic explanations they can reconstruct, and hopefully that reconstruction will be accurate. But how would you know? You yourself don’t have the expertise to tell if they’re right.
And because they don’t understand the concepts, they also can’t reliably connect the dots the way a human can. The more dots to connect, the greater the chance something will go awry. The bot can’t tell you “I don’t know” if it doesn’t understand what it means to know. It will generate a text that looks plausible, and you can’t verify whether it’s actually true.
In the interest of actually getting a useful understanding, ask humans. The answer might look something like this:
NPM packages are boxes of highly specialised supplies and tools. NPM itself is an assistant that keeps your supplies stocked and your tools in shape. You tell it what you want for your project and it’ll make sure you have it.
The thing this post is about is a kind of evil robot that hides in these boxes. When your friendly NPM helper restocks, the robot crawls out of the box and starts exploring your workshop. It tells others what you’re building, what it looks like, shares any secret technology you’re using, creates and sends out copies of your keys – anything you’ve got lying around, it will attempt to make available for the people that built it.
The worst thing is that it’ll build copies of itself and hide them in any boxes you create and send out to other people. If one supplier ships to five others, that’s five more recipients under attack. If two of them also ship out to five other people each, that’s another ten. And it gets bigger and bigger from here.
So there we have it: An evil robot stealing your secrets and sending clones to anyone who trusts your product.
We realise we’re not mundane. We just don’t have the time to explain everything all the time. That’s a problem all sciences (and many other disciplines) face: When you’re working in a deep well, you can’t come up to the surface after every step of your work or you’ll never get anything done.
For CS, it’s probably more visible because the field is fairly young, rapidly changing, pretty large and the “basics” aren’t taught anywhere near as much as those of other, more well-established sciences.
But if you ask, there’s a chance someone is available to help you out. Be friendly, and they’re more likely to be friendly back.
I understand you care about making knowledge accessible and I applaud that. I acknowledge that CS has a long way to go still on that front. Let’s work on it together, shall we?
Kind regards, LVK
- Comment on Stupid Sexy Scientists 4 days ago:
A buffet of dildos?
- Comment on Senators Press Amazon’s Bezos on Unfair Scheduling Practices Hurting Workers: Amazon’s “just-in-time” scheduling leaves hourly workers with volatile schedules, uncertain paychecks 4 days ago:
My part-timer gives me his schedule on Monday.
It’s project work, the “schedule” is really just “when do we do our regular check-in?” and I don’t give a rat’s ass when he does his work, as long as I can reach him whenever he said I could. My boss doesn’t give a shit either, as long as our work gets done.
- Comment on S1ngularity/nx attackers strike again 4 days ago:
Why do you tell us that?
- Comment on Mood 5 days ago:
Ooooh okay, so that’s the point where I stop clenching up and shit my pants instead? Thanks, good to know.
More seriously, thank you for sharing that knowledge. I’ll still be terribly afraid of accidentally inhaling or ingesting them, or having them get in my pants without consent (again), but it should ease my fear of them intentionally attacking me.
- Comment on Mood 5 days ago:
vertically oriented
You mean if it’s flying up and down, rather than left-right as they usually do?
- Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch 6 days ago:
If true, that’s an intent I can get behind. But even if it isn’t, given my own inclination towards contrived shenanigans to scratch some weird itch in my brain, I’ve come to accept such things as harmless quirks and treat them with the same patience I’d want others to treat my own with.
And every now and ðen, I try someþhing myself and realise what fun it can be ;-)
- Comment on Mood 6 days ago:
Wasps are my archetypal frenemy. I hate them, but I love them and what they do, but they can please do it far away from me, but they should also do it in my backyard, but not when I’m there, and I don’t mind sharing food with them, but I can’t stand having them near my food, and I don’t want to hate them but whenever they’re near I seize up and can barely breathe or move.
I don’t like them half as much as they deserve.
- Comment on Roblox, Discord sued after 15-year-old boy was allegedly groomed online before he died by suicide 6 days ago:
Something about the density of innocent and helpless prey really appeals to people who like to prey on the helpless and innocent.
- Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch 6 days ago:
Nerds doing something unnecessarily complicatdely for the fun of it? I’m not particularly surprised.
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 6 days ago:
Absurdism is your friend. If nothing matters in the long run, if all of existence is absurd, why not enjoy the here and now?
- Comment on IF YOU TAKE ENOUGH YOU CAN SEE *THE PATTERN* BRO 6 days ago:
Dave the Barbarian is an American cartoon series produced by Disney that ran for one season between 2004 and 2005. The show is about a cowardly barbarian named Dave who is tasked with protecting the kingdom, as well as the princess, while his parents are away fighting evil.
- Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline 2 weeks ago:
I hope your weekend is as awesome as you are
- Comment on Chirp in Fahrenheit 2 weeks ago:
Simplified: A black hole is the result of density – how much mass you cram into how little space. If something is heavy enough, even light passing near it gets pulled in and swallowed, so there’s some area where no light escapes: a black hole.
The difficulty is that you need a lot of gravity to bend the course of light. Gravity gets stronger the closer you get to the center, so at a certain distance, it will be strong enough no matter how little mass the object has.
But most objects are simply too large: Light will bounce off without ever getting that close to the center. You’d need to squeeze them together real hard to make them small enough, but there are other forces trying to keep them in shape that will resist you.
What you mean with “a whole lot of stuff” is the way more stable black holes work in space: A bunch of stuff so heavy that its own gravity is stronger than the forces trying to keep shape. If it’s strong enough, it can pull itself together so close that it gets smaller than that distance. Thus, there’s now an area around it where light can be trapped.
If you involve quantum physics, things get fucky, and supposedly there actually is some radiation still escaping, which is what the other post referred to, but I’m out of my depth there. There are also different types of black holes with their own complications, a bunch of details I skipped and a lot more I don’t even know.
Space is awesome and big and full of nothing and tons of tiny, really fascinating bits of not-nothing sprinkled in, and we could spend our entire lives studying it and never know just how much we don’t.
- Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline 2 weeks ago:
Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35×30). The average month is a tad longer than 30 days, but I don’t know exactly how much. Without a calculator, I’d guess the total result is closer to 34.5. Just using my own brain, this is as far as I get.
Now, adding a calculator to my toolset, the average month is 365.2425 d / 12 m = 30.4377 d/m. The total result comes out to about 34.2, so I overestimated a little.
Also, the total time is 1041.66… which would be more correctly rounded to 1042, but has negligible impact on the redult.
- Comment on Leaked emails link NHS data privatiser Palantir to Jeffrey Epstein 2 weeks ago:
if you have nothing worth bragging about, resorting to basic functions of sapient life for clout is the best you can do. I’m a thinker too. I’m also a breather, an eater and plenty moee things that aren’t special.
I’ve got some actual achievements too, such as being a former piece of shit, so I’ve actually got a leg up on him!
- Comment on Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now'". Android users are screwed - Louis Rossmann 2 weeks ago:
I never had one of my wired earbuds fall off the platform at the train station and disappear in the gravel, nor did I ever have isues with forgetting to charge them, let alone their case being brolen and not charging at all. And if I want to switch my favourite headphones over from my PC to my phone, I’m really glad my old phone still has a jack.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
Some house nearby must have one of those in their garden, because there’s a section of the road where I always catch that odour. Thanks for pointing it out to me, now I’ll look for the tree next time I have to pass through.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
In the United States, a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is a third-party administrator of prescription drug programs.
[…]
PBMs play a role as the middlemen between pharmacies, drug manufacturers, wholesalers, and health insurance plan companies.
Parasites who make money off of ripping off patients and fucking over pharmacists. They are the rotten core of the US healthcare system and the primary facilitators of the exploitation machine turning your misery into profit.
They negotiate cheap prices from the manufacturers, charge the pharmacies (and by extension the patients) an arm and a leg and pocket the difference.
I believe they’re also the ones that argue with the pharmacist whether the patient really needs that expensive life-saving medication their insurance doesn’t want to cover, because they get kickbacks for saving them money. Sure, you might have cancer, but have you tried Yoga instead of chemo?
Dr. Glaucomflecken has a nice video on it as part of his series on US healthcare.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
Bet MMA is making the list too
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
We have one app where client management can’t globally disable update checks or notifications, but also, the updates aren’t critical enough to constantly validate and roll out.
So we get that “update available” badge in the app and can’t do anything about it. Probably not an issue for most people, since they already do updates only when they’re forced to, but annoying to the few who even look at those notifications.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
Entitled customers of any flavour are awful. It’s one thing to know what you want and to decide whether something is worth your money, but it’s another to demand people cater to your specific taste and be a dick about it, as if the devs’ time and effort wasn’t worth anything.
And particularly annoying in my opinion are those who think they know how to fix a given issue, call you an idiot for not “just” doing that and have no idea of the constraints and decisions that might preclude or complicate that “simple fix”.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 3 weeks ago:
I would never be able to explain coherently the difference between UX and UI people.
In theory, UX deals with the psychology behind it: What do people want that our product can provide? Does our product communicate that it can do so? Do people understand how to use the product? Does the product guide them through usage helpfully? Are they satisfied with the result?
Perhaps most nebulously: How do they feel before, while and after using the product, independent of the product itself, and how does that impact their experience? For instance, if you’re buying a train ticket, you might already be stressed and annoyed, so you’ll have less patience.
Source: My wife, who had UX as the focus of her undergrad.
In practice, a lot of people are like you in that they don’t really know or grasp the field, particularly managers who aren’t qualified to make the hiring decisions they do and accordingly there’s always gonna be people capitalising on that ambiguity and grifting their way to a cushy “I’m important and get to have a say, so pay me well” job.
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 3 weeks ago:
a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics
A lot of history work is based on statistics and crunching numbers, apparently. For example, ACOUP is currently currently doing a series on the life of pre-modern peasants that involves a lot of calculating and modeling.
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 3 weeks ago:
I guess the point is that MBA systematically trains you to be unethical in order to do well
- Comment on All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell. 3 weeks ago:
I work with one on the daily. I swear, his primary expertise is in buzzwords. Tried to tell me how much better a certain format for documenting requirements is because I can let the people that require something do the documenting for me.
Never mind that this format is neither feasible outside his example case, nor even sufficient for this specific case.