planish
@planish@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on So is the global IT crash fixed yet? 3 months ago:
The pita fix only works if you can dig up a CD drive to put it in though. Most people don’t have one and are SOL.
- Comment on CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes 3 months ago:
That’s what the BSOD is. It tries to bring the system back to a nice safe freshly-booted state where e.g. the fans are running and the GPU is not happily drawing several kilowatts and trying to catch fire.
- Comment on CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes 3 months ago:
Foreign to who?
- Comment on CrowdStrike downtime apparently caused by update that replaced a file with 42kb of zeroes 3 months ago:
Holy hell
- Comment on People are realizing celebrities are unnecessary 5 months ago:
I think it’s meant to be since like 3 days ago.
- Comment on Does it seem odd to track my lifespan? 5 months ago:
I don;t know why your friend doesn’t like it. Ask your friend why they don’t like it.
- Comment on How does DNA decide the shape of the body? 6 months ago:
There are a lot of missing steps people don’t really understand yet R.E. how this all amounts to something complicated like “a liver”. But we think that the basic building block of it is that there are gradients of chemical concentration that some cells set up, and then other cells react to the level of the chemical and decide to different things. There’s a famous analogy of the French Flag Model, where the different stripes of the French flag are imagined to emerge from how far you are from the left edge where a “morphogen” chemical is coming from, because cells detect and react to different concentrations of the chemical in different ways.
And the cells do these things because the DNA programs them to do it. Some genes produce proteins that can turn around and bind to the DNA that encodes other genes, and make those other genes produce more or fewer proteins of their own. Proteins can be made so that they bind or unbind DNA in the presence of other proteins, or particular chemicals, or which can function to turn one chemical into another. So you can have little logic circuits made out of genes that measure chemicals and turn other genes on and off. And you can have little memory circuits based on which genes have things bound to them and which ones are currently on or off, so the cells can remember what it is they decided to be. And so the cells are programmed to differentiate into progressively more specific cell types over time depending on what signals they see, with the morphogen gradients or combinations of them allowing the cells to have some idea of where they are in the body.
And depending on genetic variation between people, the proteins involved can e.g. have different set points for the concentrations they react to, and that can translate into the threshold between cells deciding to do one thing or another moving around in the body, and in turn translate into people having e.g. a wider or narrower region of their face decide to be a nose.
- Comment on ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots 8 months ago:
How much of this is “the model can read ASCII art”, and how much of this is “the model knows exactly what word ought to go where [MASK] is because it is a guess-the-word-based computing paradigm”?
- Comment on AI Generated Videos Just Changed Forever (OpenAI Sora) 8 months ago:
But now, or soon, you can have one person with half an idea, like “what if The Rock had to save Shanghai from mole zombies”, and they can grab a text generator to fill in most of the screenplay, and then dial in the number of synonyms for “exciting” used to describe the explosions, and come out with Day of the Living Moles, a 95 minute feature film, in a weekend. Without actually having to have had any traditional cinematography skills or breaking an artistic sweat.
There are categories of creative work that are throw-away; little sketches on napkins, improvised songs, quick sketches that an artist might think of are of no account to anyone. And the scope of what can be dashed off like that, with minimal time and effort, is growing because of more powerful tools.
Why should I watch Universal’s superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy’s? What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?
- Comment on Apple is officially dropping iPhone support for web apps in the EU - The Verge 8 months ago:
Popular? None.
But we don’t only have to build an environment that allows the doing of popular things. We also need to maintain a society in which unpopular or unusual things can be done. The doing of unpopular or unusual things is itself popular.
- Comment on USB-PD is a de-facto low-power DC voltage standard, with USB-C being the universal plug. Hurray! 9 months ago:
AI can spell technology.
- Comment on Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels' 9 months ago:
But if the developer makes a Discord “server” for their game community, they are telling Discord to set up a service. If the developer encourages people to join it and retains moderation rights, they’re taking that service they ordered from Discord and providing it to other people. If the developer failed to get some legally required in their jurisdiction contractual terms from Discord about what Discord can and can’t do with data on the people who use the service, the developer could get in trouble when they provide that service to people without the service following local laws.
- Comment on Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels' 9 months ago:
How does one go about doing that? Because Google Voice doesn’t seem to cut it.
I could stop trying to use Discord and drive to Best Buy and buy a cell phone and pay for a month of service. Then I could add the number to the account. Then if I stop paying for the monthly service, there’s a good chance that Discord or whoever won’t believe I’m me at some future login and will demand I give them a code they sent to the phone number on file.
- Comment on pooling media libraries - like distributed storage 10 months ago:
I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that
server1/dir1/file1.txtandserver2/dir1/file2.txtandserver3/dir1/file3.txtall show up in the same folder. I’m not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn’t there though.Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?
- Comment on Firefox for Android now supports over 450 add-ons 11 months ago:
Because to put a build in F-Droid you need to write a build script to build the whole app from source on F-Droid’s VMs. You can’t, for example, fetch binary dependencies from Maven. You need to build them from source as part of your build process.
Android Firefox fetches a bunch of stuff from Maven as part of its build, some of which is proprietary libraries from Google to e.g. talk to Google Play Services or to Google’s trusted-hardware stuff, and some of which is the whole Gecko C++ source tree. Mozilla doesn’t want to pay their people to maintain two separate build systems for Firefox, one of which has to jump through a bunch of hoops.
- Comment on Top 50 defederated instances 11 months ago:
Well how do you think it should work then?
- Comment on A ‘Software Developer’ Knows Enough to Deliver Working Software Alone and in Teams 11 months ago:
I think the article is probably right. A software developer should be able to make software to do whatever needs doing. Maybe not good at any given thing, but able to do it. Eventually. Nobody wants a software developer who isn’t themselves Turing-complete.
Will they always do it the Right Way if they spent 10 years learning compiler design and you want them to program an ESP32? Of course not. But if you hired a compiler engineer who cannot teach themself to solve a user’s ESP32-shaped problem, then you have hired a compiler engineer who can be completely incapacitated by a sufficiently leaky abstraction.
Sooner or later when doing any one thing in software development, you are going to run into a problem that requires you to dig into something else that you don’t actually know how to do. The abstraction leaks and suddenly how file handles work or the fact that an ESP32 needs to go to sleep sometimes is now impinging on your compiler design problem and the users are not able to do the things because of it. If you have an expert on whatever the thing is, sure, you call them in and they help you out. But if not, you learn enough to make yourself useful and you hit the problem with research and analytical thinking until it stops bothering the users.
- Comment on I wish there were more articles about tech not tech biz 11 months ago:
What? I can’t hear you.
- Comment on What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech? 11 months ago:
We could end the era of the developer as a specialized caste. Our tools should be powerful enough that they allow people with problems to collaborate on software to solve those problems, without having to let that become their full time job.
- Comment on What's the biggest change you would like to see in computing/tech? 11 months ago:
The death of the device and the return of the system.
A device is a sealed thing provided on a take it or leave it basis, often designed to oppose the interests of the person using it. Like hybrid corn, a device is infertile by design: you cannot use a device to develop, test, and program more devices.
A system is a curated collection of interchangeable hardware and software parts. Some parts are only compatible with certain other parts, but there is no part that cannot be replaced with an alternative from a different manufacturer. Like heirloom seeds, systems are fertile: systems can be used to design and program both other systems and devices.
A system is a liberatory technology for manipulating information, while a device is a carceral technology for manipulating people.
- Comment on Assuming a button that, every time you push it, your intelligence goes up. The obvious and sane thing to do is to push the button all day. Yes? No? Maybe? Is there something that I'm missing here? 1 year ago:
And it doesn’t cause other problems like outsmarting the brain systems that are supposed to be attaching your intelligence to the interests of your body? Or the people inconveniently stopping you from snorting cocaine constantly until you die? And there’s no level of intelligence you reach where you note that higher levels are unlikely to be any more use to you in achieving your actual goals, versus spending that button-pushing time on other tasks? And all this intelligence is free and doesn’t require any energy input to run in your head? And at some level you become intelligent enough to impart these abilities to your descendants or to just never die? And you reach a level of intelligence where you can fight off the CIA before you reach a level of intelligence where you interest the CIA?
People don’t generally reason about things like “intelligence” as an abstract value from zero to infinity, because we don’t encounter such things very often. What we do encounter is people trying to scam us. If you present someone with something that appears to be a 100% obvious perfect move with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, they mostly correctly conclude that they just aren’t smart enough to understand the catch.
- Comment on Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled 1 year ago:
Are you sure? One can definitely build images of the actual “Android TV” for various SBCs and the sorts of SOCs in these TV boxes, and then load them up with malware. Why wouldn’t they use that?
- Comment on YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it 1 year ago:
too expensive for there to be competition
How does that work, exactly? For something like a railroad or a power grid, you get a natural monopoly because you need a system to connect everyone to everyone else for it to really work, and you need to pay to build out the connection to each person.
For video streaming, you need to pay for servers to transcode, store, and serve the video. Which is expensive, sure. But then each user comes in over the Internet; you aren’t paying to connect directly to their house, and you aren’t putting a CDN node in every town when the town has 5 users who can just talk to the central deployment.
If you want to run ads, you find some network that places video ads, and you get the ads from them and you run them. Maybe they don’t pay enough and the service is not profitable, but what would make that change if the service were bigger?
Where are the huge, unassailable costs? Where is the revenue you can’t get unless you are the absolute biggest?
- Comment on YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it 1 year ago:
native code in Chrome for detecting ad blockers within the next 12 months.
Just a new header for whether the site allows extensions that are not Google Web Protect certified.
- Comment on YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it 1 year ago:
Looks like the ads worked
- Comment on YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it 1 year ago:
s/grandma/Google account/ - Comment on YouTube isn't happy you're using ad blockers — and it's doing something about it 1 year ago:
I think it’s it’s own thing.
The danger of advertising is not that it is able to brainwash you into changing your opinions. The danger is that repeated exposure to inauthentic stories changes your expectations, and plants paying advertisers in your memory.
This in turn allows your behavior to be controlled, especially in aggregate. You will remember company X sells a thing you want and go buy it, or you will think other people think company Y is environmentally friendly so you will pick them for your vegan barbecue party, or you will have heard of company Z and not automatically skip over their offering in a store. But since it all operates by tampering with your heuristics instead of trying to bowl over your adopted, explicit opinions, it doesn’t trigger any of your protective responses.
And that’s why you should never view an advertisement.
- Comment on Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled 1 year ago:
LTT reviewed a Roku one like that recently and for some reason didn’t recommend immediately binning it.
- Comment on Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled 1 year ago:
Aren’t the boxes running “Android TV”, the set top box oriented flavor of Android, with e.g. the launcher designed to be operated with a TV remote and not a touch screen?
They are not themselves TVs, though, and I guess nowdays it might be most common for “Android TV” to run on the TV instead of on a separate device.
- Comment on Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled 1 year ago:
You have a device not made in China?