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dj_mc_merlin

4,016 karma · joined April 13, 2020

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dj_mc_merlin··on Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise
Are you happy? Ignoring everything else that's been said, I truly mean this: are you happy with the person you are?
dj_mc_merlin··on Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise
> You still, however, know that the author is who they say they are

This doesn't mean anything since "who they say they are" is an anonymous username with no real life correlation. Might as well be completely anonymous.

> that other people (the distro maintainers) believe that author to be the correct entity

No? Anyone can make an account and upload to AUR and it has exactly 0% to do with the distro maintainers. Packages can be removed if they're malicious, but websites can also be removed via browser-controlled blacklists (which I don't like btw but it's how it works nowadays).

> And any such compromise would, by definition, affect all users of the repo and presumably be detected by them and not by you in the overwhelmingly common case.

This is true of a popular website that advertises install instructions using curl | bash as well.

I've been using Linux for the past 2 decades and my general experience is that it is in no way more secure than Windows or Mac, just way less popular and with a more tech savvy userbase.

dj_mc_merlin··on Post Mortem: axios NPM supply chain compromise
Arch has pacman and that worked so well that it had to have AUR which is just glorified curl | bash. Linux distros managed it for decades when the vast majority of binaries you would run are made by nerds for nerds. If the original maintainer isn't willing to securely package it then you're often SOL.
dj_mc_merlin··on European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
No, I agree with him. Everyone knows Russia has territory inside Europe. Does that make it European? Post-Ukraine not a lot of people would call it European. It's just a word at the end of the day, the politics are more important to people that geography since both are made up. Why does Europe end at the Ural mountains? Because we said so.
dj_mc_merlin··on Show HN: European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps
All Europeans know what is meant by Europe. We just don't agree on it. But it does mean "not US or someone hostile to us" and that's enough of a definition without splitting hairs about Belarus.
dj_mc_merlin··on DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
This is a really interesting question. Is it? My intuition would say no since you have no inherent duty to protect or help others. I have no clue though.
dj_mc_merlin··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
Is this the first time you have ever thought about the idea of supply chain attacks? This is the first thought 90% of people have and it doesn't work. Too much work to manually verify diffs and LLMs aren't good enough at this yet.
dj_mc_merlin··on I know you didn't write this
If ChatGPT can make a good plan for you from 5 bullet points, why was there a ticket for making a plan in the first place? If it makes a bad plan then the coworker submitted a bad plan and there's already avenues for when coworkers do bad work.
dj_mc_merlin··on I know you didn't write this
If the documents they're putting out are bad, then they're doing bad work and that eventually comes with consequences from your coworkers and superiors. If they're doing good work, then great! Who cares if an LLM wrote most of it and they just edit it? That's not super different than the current relationship between senior and line workers.
dj_mc_merlin··on I know you didn't write this
> The unstated elephant in the room is that you can't possibly know how much thought the originator has given to this.

You can just ask them if they reviewed it in detail.

dj_mc_merlin··on AI and the Future of American Politics
> So I guess the takeaway is: if elections are so close that a tiny amount of voters sway them, the problem of polarization is already pretty extensive enough that AI probably isn’t going to make it much worse than it already is.

To rephrase: things are so bad they can't get worse. But the beauty of life is that they always can!

dj_mc_merlin··on Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"
Very well could be.
dj_mc_merlin··on Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"
BTW, despite disagreeing with you on this topic, I read other parts of your blog and, as somebody else who experiences manic episodes, I actually more or less 100% agree with your "Core Beliefs" section. I've seen this before in other people I've met like me, but it does make me wonder about the nature of manic states and nature/nurture. Do these beliefs trigger individuals to enter manic states, or is predisposition to manic states something that makes individuals adopt this set of beliefs? The subtitle of your blog is "wired differently", but the weird part is many people are wired differently but in vastly similar ways.
dj_mc_merlin··on Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"
> If consumers actually want unique local flavors an non-frozen foods, and are willing to pay a premium for it, sysco would have never gotten a foothold.

This is rooted in the assumption that capitalism provides what people want, rather than the worst that they will still accept. Endlessly cutting costs and then blaming the tastes of the consumer is why people put out anti-corporation pieces like the original video. That is not to say that Sysco is not operating logically.. but if the best move in a system leads to an unfavourable outcome for those that should benefit from it, then the system itself is the problem. Or another way to phrase it: there is a reason why that video resonated with many people that goes beyond trying to blame others for your problems.

dj_mc_merlin··on Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"
My point was that this is just the same tactic that corporations have been using for decades. For example, rather than fix systemic issues that cause them to dump mass amounts of greenhouse gases or toxic waste, they instead reframe the issue so that the consumer is at fault: "you don't recycle enough". This is the same, it's just reframing corporations cutting costs wherever they can as the fault of the consumer rather than just plain entshittification. For the record I agree with your point about eating meat and such, it's just not relevant to the discussion at hand and used just as a cheap appeal to emotion/shame.
dj_mc_merlin··on Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"
I can't say I agree fully with the original video either but this is just blatantly trying to reframe the same facts presented in said video, but placing the blame on consumers rather than businesses, which is a really dirty tactic.

> Sysco serves poor quality products. They also serve great quality products. Remember, if restaurants are buying poor quality products, it’s because it’s all you, the consumer, will pay for.

"feel bad about being poor"

> Again, animal welfare is not a Sysco issue. Sysco offers countless sources for humanely-raised meat. And, as always, as a consumer, if you want to be really sure: stop eating meat, and tell everyone you know to do so as well.

"feel bad about eating meat"

> Ironically, the foods analyzed in the video as a sign of “quality” are fried pickles, jalapeño poppers, and funnel cake fries. These are inherently low-quality processed foods that no one in their right sobriety should be eating.

"feel bad about food choices"

> The More Perfect Union narrative stops just short of calling Sysco a monopoly. They’re not. They only control 35% of the market

"only 35%"

I mean, c'mon.. was this written by a real person or Adam Smith come back from the grave?

dj_mc_merlin··on DESI Opens Access to the Largest 3D Map of the Universe Yet
So if the new data is correct, there's no heat death or big rip, no? Everything just crashes back into itself.
dj_mc_merlin··on Gene behind orange fur in cats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
dj_mc_merlin··on Peng – A minimal Rust-based quadrotor simulation pipeline
> Why call it Peng?

> Peng (traditional Chinese: 鵬; simplified Chinese: 鹏; pinyin: péng; Wade–Giles: p'eng) or Dapeng (大鵬) is a giant bird that transforms from a Kun (鯤; 鲲; kūn; k'un) giant fish in Chinese mythology.

Just a funny coincidence, in British slang, a bird is a woman, and being peng means being attractive..

dj_mc_merlin··on There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-3125 contains a fun keypad to reverse engineer. I thought I could simply extract the password from the text but the author lightly obfuscated it (which makes more sense knowing that he has a programming background). I wonder what's the intended way of finding the code -- perhaps it's in one of the later stories.

edit: Oh, I saw it right after posting the comment. It's quite literally in front of your nose. Such a fun series.

dj_mc_merlin··on Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists? (2023)
It comes from wanting the law to behave like physics and be universalizable. It is not at all like that in practice.
dj_mc_merlin··on Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists? (2023)
> it never has before.

Look up the Digital Markets Act.

dj_mc_merlin··on Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists? (2023)
Yes but a human brain needs years of training to to get the basic skills, and further needs to refine on a specific style which can take anywhere from days to months/years depending on prior experience. There are also social connotations that apply to humans that come with copying another artist's style. AI can do it 10x-100x quicker and the copier can remain completely anonymous much easier. This changes the dynamics.
dj_mc_merlin··on The hikikomori in Asia: A life within four walls
You need to live near a population centre to find them, that's true. It's the same reason other minority groups such as homosexuals urbanized so quickly.
dj_mc_merlin··on The hikikomori in Asia: A life within four walls
> Some of us are isolating because y'all refuse to mask up and we can't risk going anywhere.

disclaimer: you may have an autoimmune disease in which case your decision is reasonable.

"y'all" is about 95%-99% of humanity right now. That percentage is not going to go down. Are you planning on staying inside for the rest of your life?

dj_mc_merlin··on The hikikomori in Asia: A life within four walls
> Unless you are able to stay within an extremely narrow range of behaviours (in terms of not being weird, basically speaking expected thinks in expected tone of voice and body language), nobody wants to associate with you.

I'll agree on the lack of on-ramps but this is a pretty limiting view. There's all kinds of people, many who will share some of whatever you think your weirdness is. If you only want to associate with a certain slice of society, it is not so weird that only certain slices of society want to associate with you.

dj_mc_merlin··on The deskilling of web dev is harming us all
I feel like the deskilling of web dev is that the web dev in this article doesn't feel competent enough to learn HTML, CSS _and_ Javascript at the same time.
dj_mc_merlin··on Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?
Just out of interest and if it's not too personal, what's your age/generation? I'm in my mid twenties and I don't have any peers that couldn't more or less always read analog clocks as far as they remember.

edit: I just googled it and apparently New Math was during the 1950s-1970s. This confuses me even further since reading an analog clock seems even more important in those times?

dj_mc_merlin··on ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes
You can make that claim about Reddit or other social networks but.. just read through this thread? It's pretty clear that this is just random people's uninformed opinions, fears and speculations. I don't see a single good argument besides the very easy to make and modest opinion that we're not sure what's going to happen exactly now, but it sure is interesting.
dj_mc_merlin··on Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain
> This assertion is in error. Communication is about transmitting information.

Even if you're correct you've just taken my words at their absolute meaning without trying to understand what I'm saying. If all you care when communicating is transmitting information you will not find much happiness in communication.

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