atoav

As an educator in university I have found the project proposals of students have become longer, to some degree more well written and quite certainly have LLMs involved.

This becomes problematic when it turns out people haven't even read what they sent me.

To clarify: this is about voluntary projects that do not win them extra points.

How dependent you are and how much value you get out of it are not linked as a metric. You can be smart and get a ton of value out of it, yet still be entirely dependent on it. Just like a sporty person can be dependent on a car since running a marathon to work each day is illusionary.

I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.

Any society should aim to have the most educated population it can afford to have. Them getting a better earning through it can be a nice side effect of that, but it is a side effect. The main price is that living among educated people beats living among the dumb and uneducated, especially in a democracy.

The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.

Has to do mostly with the historic environment of the country. Berlin was a split city, so after the 90s it abstained mostly from what it perceived as dangerous political experiments. Also die Linke was basically seen as a continuation party of the GDRs SED, and as such didn't have the greatest of reputations in that city (shooting/jailing people that want to move out will do that miraculously).

Die Linke today is a completely different generation of people and drawing any direct line to the SED is mostly wishful thinking by polemic conservatives.

Take this with a grain of salt or as a very edgy, polemic take:

I think we really need to hold the individuals running ad networks personally liable for the violation of our privacy rights.

Yeah? A very basic process, most people use some variation of this implicitly without talking about it.

This sounds like a slightly narcissistic manager who thinks people are doing it wrong if they don't act like small copies of him. There are multiple ways to reach the same outcome and a lot depends on your information. E.g. I typically have a mental model of a system in my head, meaning when some problem needs fixing very likely I already know where it would need fixing and already think about the various future implications arising from a different fix. A point that is totally absent from that framework.

Being a senior dev myself I have seen enough good software turn bad to know that seemingly innocent technological decisions can come with huge and lasting implications. The fact that this is missing here is speaking volumes about the lack of experience at display here.

Your task as a manager isn't to create small copies of yourself. Your task is to know each persons weaknesses and strengths and compose the work in such chunks that the weaknesses have little effect, while the strengths multiply. For this you will first of all have to trust your people and lead them to discover certain ideas themselves.

E.g. if you feel someone always jumps gun-ho I to the task without doing the research, just tell them to give you the research first. Do that a few times and they might realize how useful that is.

Can I also u literally change my subscribers agreement with them after the deal has been made?

Are you really sure you read the discussion on this?

You have no respect for the culture of the place and people you're interacting with.

"Use public data, protect private data" has been one of the main reasons in the CCC since the 80s, at the same time German Law and culture is different when it comes to taking pictures than what you seem used to. Maybe familiarize yourself with it before you break the law and claim everybody else is wrong.

Former freelance camera operator who worked in Germany here: you are misrepresenting the legal situation. It is not automatically forbidden to take or even publish pictures of strangers, but the circumstances matter. Merely taking an identifiable person's picture can already infringe their personality rights, even without any intention to publish it. A request to delete it does not automatically settle the matter, but "we are in public" does not settle it either. See BGH, VI ZR 272/94 .

Publishing such a picture generally requires consent under § 22 KunstUrhG , with exceptions under § 23 . "There is no right to privacy in the public sphere" is simply not an accurate description of German law. And "not a crime" does not mean something cannot violate someone's rights.

The comparison with memory ignores what makes a recording different: it can be copied, distributed and matched against other records. Someone remembering my face does not give them the same capabilities as having a photograph of it.

And protecting personal information is hardly some recent corruption of hacker culture. The CCC's own ethics say "Make public data available, protect private data", an addition they date to the 1980s: CCC hacker ethics .

That means when one goes out of whack, someone will notice. E.g. let's say the mathematical property is correct, but someone optimizes some behavior. Without tests or verification that could break production or worse: not break it, but break security without anybody noticing.

That is worth the hassle for some applications.

Well and this goes further. You will find that some people will only chose to do the visible work. And this will often get great feedback from superiors, although it is the metaphorical equivalent of running around with a fire extinguisher and waiting for fire to pop up in an environment littered with flammable garbage, instead of — you know — ensuring that a fire doesn't start to begin with. So being celebrated for leaving everything at the brink of collapse, they will just do that, while ensuring to be in the spotlight when the shit inevitably hits the fan.

This can become so perverted that the number of extinguished fires is treated as some sort of metric for success by management, instead of seeing it as the failure it is.

Feel free to replace this with "all nighters" in other jobs. Who is more dedicated to the job, the person that just does it all in time with plenty of room for mistakes and unforseen circumstances or the one who slacks around 90% of the duration and then squeezes in some all nighters in the last hours? If your project has to rely on all nighters without good reason¹ this just indicates bad planning to me.

¹: There are legit reasons why working through the night is needed, e.g. the work you do can only be done during the night or there are legit last minute problems that nobody could have planned for. But if you literally have those every time, they are to be expected and are to be scheduled for during normal working hours.

Exactly. As a media tech guy, my best feedback during the past decade of work was always linked to some lazy fuckup of someone else that I "heroically" rushed in to fix by fixing some noob level misuse.

Meanwhile the actually most heroic work I did was literal PCB level repair of a piece of ancient equipment whose function my boss wouldn't even understand, but the failure of which would stop our main room to a grinding halt. I then had to repeatedly ask to replace that equipment with a new replacement.

The highly visible work is often not the one that really counts, especially if you do not understand the subject matter.

One thing I want remind people of is:

The inverse-square law is only valid if the source is a point.

That means for many sources it is either the wrong law (e.g. loudspeaker array¹, long neon bulbs) because of the shape or it falls apart as you go so close to the source that a significant arc-angle is covered by the source itself meaning the law is no longer accurate. E.g. if you move ever closer to a light source with some diameter, at some point the result will look more and more like an area source and less like a point source. If you move so close that your entire horizon is covered by the light source it would be absurd to apply that formula since whatever is in front of the lamp gets the light from multiple directions now.

As such it is a great and useful simplification, but knowing the limits is equally important.

¹: this array tech is is used to get a more even level falloff from the combined wavefront so you don't have to blast off the ears of the front row while being barely audible in the back.

The main problem is that most business are run by people who have no believe at all that you could run a successful company without tricking people into buying your product. That means they don't even try. The rare exception are companies where rhe founder is e.g. a principled engineer, or some German family business that does nothing but ball bearings in the 4th generation and their business model is basically to be the best at ball bearings. Something like that.

But so many publicly traded companies appear to basically have become stock gambling dens that accidentally produce some products on the side out of legacy reasons.

Many are of the kind that use quality only as a marketing statement and when it comes to the engineering choice they will not even shell out 10 cents more for stainless screws to hold the thing together.

The reasons why there is little quality products is because the incentives all point in the other direction for most companies. And where they don't it is usually a special niche product or the intrinsic values of one or a few individuals making the choice to put their ideals above their wallet.

If we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure.

This is data that will be relevant for every single victim for decades to come and they will pay for this regularly, and it cannot be undone.

What amount per person is acceptable for a thing that simply should never happen?

I don't think "this will ruin my and my bosses life"-levels are over the top at all. Don't wanna risk it, then don't store the data. Usually for most purposes it would be e ough to store that yes, someone has a legit drivers license, which types of vehicles it is for and how long it is valid (if there is a limit).

We don't get to this kind of data reduction if people don't see data as the liability it sometimes is for their customers.

Yes but here is the catch. Surveillance comes with the incentives to us it for the personal gain. Or to phrase this differently: knowledge is power and thus the people who are already in power have good motivation to accumulate as much knowledge as possible in order to stay in power.

It is very easy to take the philosophical stance where every concept can be totally detached from the incentives it creates and the social dynamics it is part of. It is easy to take that stance, but it is very hard to use that stance to explain reality, because reality plays by more complex rules.

Please, always consider the status quo and the incentives involved instead of stating the surveillance equivalent of "weapons don't kill, people do".

This is btw. a very important consideration when you are teaching literally anything.

Telling people to imagine a cone, then a plane, then rotating the other slightly and slice through the cone without touching the base, and then looking at a normal angle at the 2D shape of the resulting intersecting surface is a really good way to explain ellipses.

IF the person you're talking to can do all these steps. Turns out some people can rotate a cow in their head and some can't. If you cannot, a drawing or animation can help a lot to get the point across. Now I haven't gotten a problem with imagination at all, but I can only imagine how hard some subjects might be if you can't do that in your head.

I would be very curious about a bit more concrete and substential criticism what is bad (or good) about how the both versions, that goes beyond general arguments like:

  Just because it is Rust, it is not safe!  
  
  It worked before, don't replace it!  
  
  etc.  
  

Not that these are not valid points of criticism, but in my opinion if we have two core utils we can (and should) pick the better one after careful continous evaluation. And if the old one is the better one on the day of the release, so be it. Having two competing solutions can have benefits for everybody looking for the best core utils they can get in the long run.

I had to reimplement and reverse engineer old tech myself as part of my dayjob and had those engineers seen my results it probably would have improved their work as well, since I usually found oddities that they probably did not intend to be that way. This means my work on their work could be seen as another pair of eyeballs, bullet-proofing their original work, instead of seeing me as a threat. That additional pair of eyeballs is crucial to open source software.

This is why it is sad that too much about this whole discussion feels like yet another culture war, heated on the stove of social media figures looking to convert heat into ad revenue.

Which is why I would love to have more concrete points of technical criticism of specific bits maybe even to specific lines in the code or specific reproducable behavior.

If we go the culture-war route nobody wins, if we discuss both solutions on their merits, we all can win.

For varying definitions of broken. I know multiple people from broken regions of the world, who would dream to have it like the US. Then there are others who claim their system is broken and only a protest vote will send the sign, while where they live has one of thr highest standards of living in the world.

The absolute level of broken is mostly irrelevant, what counts is the direction of travel.

I can't shake the feeling that this is a bit like asking how someone got shot during a game of Russian Roulette. You have a bullet in the chamber and you roll, of course shooting the bullet may be a possible outcome.

LLMS with an access to a shell will at occasion do things that the shell allows them that have dire consequences. The only way to prevent that is to not put the bullet in the chamber.

A lot of it has to do with communications. The times I (as a programmer myself) have witnessed how companies we asked to write software tackled it was eye opening in a negative sense.

As a freelancer my process involves a lot of observation, asking questions and planning. Usually when I go into the details more questions emerge and whom to ask better than the people who do exactly this daily? Sure sometimes their process is a bad abstraction, they chose because they did not knew better and thus not worth putting into software. But before you decide that you gotta ask whether there are reasons why it was done that way. I see my task as a programmer to make peoples lives easier, by finding elegant abstractions for their problems, that are at the same time, reliable, adjustable, encourage correctness, avoid problems and so on.

Now most software companies I interacted with from the other side did none of the things. They rushed to gather the specs, asked some questions in the beginning and were out of the door to start way too fast, with some things they just assumed without confirming. Then crickets and then something half broken comes around that you need to beat into shape in an exhausting back and forth, where again you have to be the person with the questions.

If it is exhausting for a person with software development experience to be your customer, how bad will it be for people who have no such experience.

Now there are of course exceptions also in such companies, but in my experience that is mich rarer than it should be.

Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.

Yes, which is precisely what I said, in different words. Now hardware iterative cycles are different than in software, where you can just define perfect interfaces and get a lossless roundtrip between them. In hardware you always have loss, so sometimes that software analogy does not work.

To have an actuator that is useful to measure you skin sensor, that actuator does not only need to be complimentary, it needs to be better than the sensor (otherwise you're only measuring the flaws of the actuator). So quite often you will need to take a different approach than just a complimentary actuator/sensor-pair and make one of the two a specialized overly accurate and incredibly pricey fixture.

Seriously, US: Is this the "freedom" I keep hearing about? My 5 year old nieces all walked to school alone, in a mid sized city. As do most 5 year olds in my country, because we want them to grow into adults with the capability to navigate their own environment.

Ask yourself the question: Does this align with what we can observe?

XR hardware needs actors, this is about sensors.

An actor that changes temperature is a heater or maybe something like a peltier element, that can heat and cool. A sensor is the opposite: a thermometer that measures what temperature is somewhere.

Needless to say these are fundamentally different technologies. Sure, you need one to develope the other: e.g. to create a temperature sensing skin with high spatial resolution, you will need to generate precise spatial temperatures to test the whole thing.

There are websites in Japan that are only "open" during Japanese business hours.

Because my parents do not speak English and these solutions have no localizaction usually. Bubu baba may be sound stupid, but I am confident a German parent or an Italian friend would understand it better than an assortment of complicated English words they don't know the meaning of and where the writing is unclear.

Additionally there is an effective mnemonic technique thst turns text into a melody that is sung (hence the name probably). This works better with "baba bubo kali meta" than with "atrocious limestone".

The variables aren't that hard to learn. The one thing many beginners struggle with is that they don't really get the principles involved. They treat a soldering iron as some sort of heated paint brush and wonder why they can't get the paint off the brush.

In reality there are multiple factors at play, but a simple and useful abstraction is to think about solder as something that flows more easily to places that are hot. That means the solder always likes to go onto the iron, since that is likely the hottest thing around.

This means your first goal is simply to heat up the places you want to solder far enough so they can melt the solder if you touch them with the solder wire¹.

This usually means heating two things at once: be it two wires you solder together or a pad and the leg of a resistor. That means knowing the geometry of your tip well is useful: How to wedge it in to heat the two things at once. Typically only the shiny, plated bits of the tip are really good at conducting heat². A little drop of solder on the iron can help conduct the heat to a bigger surface, a bit like the fat in a frying pan.

But generally you heat the parts with the iron and then you feed the solder wire into the parts. If they are hot e ough, the solder melts. If not, you wait.

The solder wire typically has a resin-like fluid inside, that helps with soldering as it reduces the surface tension of the metal (this is most of the stuff in the fumes). Capillary effect is the main thing that makes solder flow where you want it to. When the flux is evaporated soldering gets harder, so you may need to add fresh solder after a while or you use flux from a dispenser that you add manually.³

Then there is a lot about logistics. Heated air travels up, on earth solder tends to be affected by gravity and has a tendency to go down (although capillary effects are really the dominant force here), gravity affects parts, wires bend where their material wanta them to etc. The logistics part means: you have only two hands, an iron, solder wire and typically two or more parts that need to be joined.

Being good at soldering is (1) having a good mental model and intuition about how and why the solder flows the way it does and (2) have skill and experience to get the logistics right. The first you can learn to understand, the latter is a matter of practise.⁴

I have thought soldering sucessfully to well over 400 people during the past decade.

¹ This means your iron and tip need to be able to deliver enough heat to heat the parts. If you try to heat up a 200W copper CPU cooler with a 14W soldering iron you can wait forever for the solder to melt. This also has to do with thermal mass and regulation of the iron. Modern irons with modern tips have the temperature probe inside the tip. This helps a ton with avoiding temperature dips when you start to touch something and makes soldering much easier.

² This means keeping tips clean with a proper cleaner literally before every solder joint is crucial. If your tip is toast and has no shiny bit anymore, clean it. If that doesn't help use Ersa Solder Tip Reactivator or buy a new tip. Of course your parts should also be clean (Isopropanol)

³ There are ways to remove excess solder. The simplest being using the right motion with the tip on a coldish joint, making the excess solder stick to the iron and not to the (colder) joint. Other things are spring loaded suction devices (very useful to get solder out of through holes!) and solder wick (very useful to clean old pads)

⁴ There a tools like third hands and so on, and watching some videos by experienced solderers is a good way (nowadays) to learn it, but a steady hand only comes with practise