Once you learn about parser combinators, all other parsing looks pretty dopey.

In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.

You don’t kill zombies; a zombie is already dead. You wait for or reap zombies. (A zombie process is just a process table entry with its exit status; it goes away once the parent process has read that exit status.)

Suing your former customers, now there’s a way to make people want to do business with you!

People pay for this?

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.

This has been going on for over 25 years now.

The kind of people who go into business building censorship software turn out to quite often be the kind of people who think feminism is a hate group, atheism is a cult, birth control is a dangerous drug, evolutionary biology is political extremism, and therapists are child-molesters. As such, it is unsurprising that this software’s behavior has quite often reflected those views.

I’m reminded of the character names that show up in MIT CS textbooks, like Alyssa P. Hacker (“a Lisp hacker”) and Eva Lu Ator.

If you threaten violence to people for calling you a fascist … you might be a fascist.

Obviously, trivially, blatantly false, because the AI safety people have been at it since long before there was anything to market. Back then, the bullshit criticism was “AI will never be able to understand language or interpret pictures; what harm could it possibly ever do?”

Also, TCP/IP requires that the server receive your IP address (or that of a proxy, VPN endpoint, etc.) so that it can send the response back. Opening a new browser window doesn’t change that.

Even though going incognito prevents Chrome from saving cookies, site data and your browsing history, it doesn’t actually prevent websites or your internet service provider (ISP) from tracking you and knowing what you’re up to online. This news comes as a shock to many Chrome users but privacy experts have long warned that the browser’s incognito mode isn’t as private as you might think.

Know where else you’ll find that same warning?

On every new incognito window in Chrome.

It’s been there for years —

Your activity might still be visible to:

• Websites you visit
• Your employer or school
• Your internet service provider

In other words, they will continue to pay Nazis to write Nazi articles.

This is a spam blog. The real report is here:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/

The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac. How do you open a document in a desktop OS? You double-click on the document, and the OS finds the correct application to open it with. That was a Mac thing. On most other systems of the mid-1980s, you run your application program (from the command line) and then tell the program to load a file.

Applications as “bundles” of code and data was a Mac thing too, starting with the resource/code division in the classic Mac System. Rather than an application coming with a mess of directories of libraries and data files, it’s all bundled up into a single application file that can contain structured data (“resources”) for the GUI elements. On a classic Mac, you could load an application program up in ResEdit and modify the menus, add keyboard shortcuts, and so on, without recompiling anything.

The Apple Newton had data persistence of a sort that we now expect on cloud applications like Google Docs. Rather than “saving” and “loading” files, every change was automatically committed to storage. If you turn the device off (or it runs out of battery power), you don’t lose your work.

Here’s the actual blog post.

The article about the blog post adds nothing.

Here’s the actual blog post.

The article about the blog post adds nothing.

“Shit, if everyone knows that I play girl characters online, they’ll think I’m a trans.”

The company is probably a money laundering operation to begin with, channeling funds from Russian backers to American traitors.

In that case, it’s a patented product that happens to reproduce itself as part of its normal operation.

In this case, it’s just shitty business behavior.

(To be clear, no, living organisms should not be patentable. But it’d be fucking hilarious if patented genes went feral.)

Well, “social media” and “online” ain’t the same thing, now are they?

So if I claim fubo as a username on Signal, that means what? Nobody else can use that username? If so, it’s another global namespace, same as Twitter; ten or twenty years in the future, someone’s gonna want to be reclaiming disused usernames.

(What if I want to be fubo to some people, and MissCatPictures to other people? Can I do that from one phone? One phone number?)

No mention of patent license costs as a separate line item from materials? Boo.

Conspiracism is not truth-tracking. It’s rooted in an emotional response to feelings of lack of control. By saying false things and getting away with it, the conspiracist feels greater control over their life. “You can’t stop me from lying, therefore I have power.”

Hence why authoritarians love conspiracism: authoritarianism promises that if you repeat the doctrine and smash the Leader’s designated enemies (the “conspiracy”), you will regain the control that was taken from you. This also illustrates why “left” authoritarianism (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism) is really rightist: it does not actually offer freedom or equality, but rather rigid hierarchy and escalating falsehood and cruelty.

If you follow Nazism, Stalin, Hamas, Trump, or Netanyahu and smash the designated enemies who the Leader tells you have been conspiring against your nation … you do not get freedom, you just eventually become the next enemy to be smashed. Of course really your Leader has built up the enemy to threaten you: authoritarians never seek peace, because peace removes the need to fear and hate.

(None of this is new. Orwell and Sartre both described it in the 1940s.)

Yeah, but I mean the AI risk stuff that people like Steve Omohundro and Eliezer Yudkowsky write about.

The tech companies did not invent the AI risk concept. Culturally, it emerged out of 1990s futurism.

AI safety folks have been warning about the predictable disastrous consequences of turning economic power over to unethical AI systems for many years now, long before deepfakes, predictive policing, or other trendy “AI dangers” were around.

I can already make video calls from Signal, which isn’t run by neofarcists.

(That was a typo, but it’s fitting.)

Deepfakes of an actual child should be considered defamatory use of a person’s image; but they aren’t evidence of actual abuse the way real CSAM is.

Remember, the original point of the term “child sexual abuse material” was to distinguish images/video made through the actual abuse of a child, from depictions not involving actual abuse – such as erotic Harry Potter fanfiction, anime characters, drawings from imagination, and the like.

Purely fictional depictions, not involving any actual child being abused, are not evidence of a crime. Even deepfake images depicting a real person, but without their actual involvement, are a different sort of problem from actual child abuse. (And should be considered defamatory, same as deepfakes of an adult.)

But if a picture does not depict a crime of abuse, and does not depict a real person, it is basically an illustration, same as if it was drawn with a pencil.

You could write them a letter and ask, I suppose?

It’s dishonest to say “I don’t see X” when you haven’t made any effort to look for X.

Where have you checked?

It’s not currently up to the British Museum; it’s up to Parliament. Repatriating artifacts is currently illegal under UK law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum_Act_1963

Humanity has been using writing for millennia. It’s a proven technology. Photographs and video don’t tend to last longer than the one institution or family that cares about them.

Did Reddit actually accept any money for these junk tokens? It kinda sounds like they didn’t, they just issued them and then decided to quit using them. If they did accept money for them, then yeah, sure sounds like securities fraud.

In general, the cryptocurrency “industry” cannot exist without crime (ransomware, fraud, money laundering, etc.) – but this one just seems like a bad product that was cancelled. Most major cryptocurrencies should be considered to be backed by crime, in the same sense that dollars used to be backed by gold and silver: the underlying value of Bitcoin is that you can use it to pay criminal ransoms or acquire fentanyl. But this one just seems to have been backed by fake internet points.

Just consider: If sex work were legal and not stigmatized, there wouldn’t be incels, which would rob the far-right of some of its most vigorous supporters.

Taking away privacy makes it easier for children to be abused.

Remember, the most likely abusers of children are not strangers off the Internet; they’re people who have authority over those children: parents, church leaders, teachers, coaches, police, etc.

Private online communication makes it easier for abused children to get help.

In other words, these laws are not “fighting pedophilia”. They are enabling child abuse.

I’ve been using IRS Free File Fillable Forms for a few years now. It’s not super great but it does the job. It also has a dorky name.

By default, creating and publishing “deepfake porn” of a real person constitutes defamation against that person, as it carries the false statement “this person posed for this picture” which is likely to cause that person harm. Often, the intention is to cause harm.

As such, we don’t need new laws here. Existing laws against defamation just need to be applied.

In Soviet Russia, access to photocopiers, mimeographs, etc. was restricted to prevent the dissemination of samizdat.

The companies that I know of that are hiring still can’t find people.

It’s quite possible for hiring to be terrible for both employers and candidates at the same time. It doesn’t have to be easy-peasy for one and terrible for the other.

Programmers are not interchangeable parts, and neither are programming projects. Some people really do much better on one sort of project than another. But the way hiring works – keyword scanning, resume review by people who don’t know the project, etc. – does most of the “search work” in a way that pretends that both programmers and roles are manufactured objects with a single easily measurable quality metric.

Quite a lot of tech hiring doctrine tells the candidate, “It’s your job to look like you’re good at everything, so you don’t get passed-over on a webdev role in favor of someone who wrote their own BIOS once” and tells the employer, “It’s your job to hire only the best, so you don’t get stuck with dweebs who can’t FizzBuzz or who give up on a production problem once the network stack is involved.”

Both of these are dopey.