jgerrish

I try not to get involved in these kinds of discussions. But you lobbed this out there, so I feel like this community can benefit from a personal story.

I'm not white. I'm human. Or just: I am.

I had an Indian friend growing up. Wonderful man. One of the few in our predominantly white township.

His parents owned a hotel.

And they inspired a desire for education and learning in him.

I ran into him in the university town of one of the top state universities one day after being rejected myself. It was awkward, but it also made me happy.

I recognize there are maybe cultural differences with strict parenting styles. But regardless, that hotel gave his parents a space to raise a damn nice kid who made something of himself.

> Remember though, the US is one of only three countries (Eritrea, Myanmar are the other 2) that taxes its own citizens even if they have not lived in the US for years.

These are the kinds of things that can be changed relatively quickly if the government wanted to. I understand for people financially struggling now that isn't encouraging. But there are other factors like access to resources and people that are important.

It's those and the larger term trends that we see that can inform personal choices on immigration.

I know, anticipating hypothetical tricky legislation switches seems like a waste of time. I'm truly sorry I'm wasting your time on that.

I'm really enjoying Counterfeit Monkey.

There are some other authors doing creative things with the parser. Junior Arithmancer by Mike Spivey is fun, but not as narratively rich as Emily Short's work.

Andrew Plotkin's Lists and Lists also turns Inform into a parser.

I think a future LLM could accomplish these feats. There's definitely a theme or class of Interactive Fiction: call it "simulation" or "meta" at play there. Some classic works like A Mind Forever Voyaging used it. And old Lucas Arts games like Day of the Tentacle even embedded games within the game. So given those kind of prompts something could be generated in a couple generations.

Not to take away from the current work. They build upon the shoulders of classic Interactive Fiction while being more forgiving and enjoyable.

I really do understand the plight of victims of scams.

I know of a couple.

I also see people hurt who were chased from communities, or are drawn into these kinds of things right here instead of just working on what they love.

This isn't a review of a FTC show. It's not really my genre.

It's a review of that classic 90s sub-genre of FCC, Net Neutrality. This is Net Neutrality 2015: Nettier and Neutrier, with Michael O'Rielly.

Esteemed Chair O'Rielly's performance was fantastic as always. After the entirely authentic acting in the fake-out heist classic between President Obama and Tom Wheeler in the 2014 installment, O'Rielly really steals the show here with his honest portrayal of concern for free speech.

Four stars. A slamming success as always.

I really can't wait for the upcoming FTC show of "Automated Robo-caller Deleters from Outer Space". It will be dealt with in a balanced and classy manner as the posters claim. An honest reflection on space PBX robots and what they experienced.

Do you want a sarcastic parody world? Anyways, this gets us closer to authenticated users everywhere, so that's actually a good thing. Many lives will be saved that day.

I posted previously about SBCL and quicklisp. Great ecosystem. I'm still learning but it's usually fun to work in.

I made some recommendations about quicklisp using http by default and how to lock it down.

I don't know if those are good recommendations anymore. I couldn't manage to follow them myself. I couldn't keep up and my patch approach didnt work.

So, I don't know the best approach with that problem, but I was too confident in my post about security suggestions.

I wouldn't want to own a company that did that. Or be forced into a relationship or moved out.

I'm not saying Boeing is a bad company. Lots of workers have put their lives into that company and believe in what they build.

I'm just saying putting ownership into the hands of possible victims seems to put more work and responsibility into their laps, not less.

I've been in abusive situations, and hearing philosophies like that worries me.

I understand it's one small part of what you said and the rest of your comment was helpful.

Being trapped in an ambiguous situation where "improve" can mean many things can lead to unhealthy stress.

If I have a real job and a real house, I have easier access to laws and what my responsibilities are.

If I am in a situation like an "abandoned house", I'm vulnerable to vague jurisdictional issues around "improvement". Maybe San Francisco / Bay Area considers fire safety enough, but Chicago wants sidewalk snow clearing. Those are the simple things. Some jurisdictions will want "self-improvement" classes. Keep practicing that space flute... And then Utah wants other things.

Yes, HOAs are similar, I get that.

Anyways, I've got to keep a fucking yellow legal pad with all these issues. And I know I'm not an expert.

Then I'm not just vulnerable to the whims of the city, I'm vulnerable to exploiters telling me there are these additional requirements.

I dread these next patronizing Last of Us style real world shows. When I should look at them joyfully.

And yeah, people are housed now, I can't argue with that. But we are replacing a public social contract with something darker.

I guess we get a new series of sitcoms about "HOA" style neighborly miscommunication. Hahaha. Oh Mr. Bundy, you can't have a toilet on your front lawn! Oh Mr. ALF, you can't eat cats! Oh Mr. Cohen, you can't say that on television! Hahaha, what a cultural misunderstanding.

This isn't out of the blue. During the legislative process there was back and forth among NHTSA and MA sentators and representatives:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/nhtsa_...

That frankly shows this was not unexpected. And there was responsible transparent discussion between relevant parties.

The NHTSA was doing their job.

Maybe the MA senators and representatives were lobbing them a softball, explicitly calling out cybersecurity instead of leaving review topics up to NHTSA, in hopes of this happening. But that is obviously paranoid and an avenue of discussion that is difficult to talk about. So, I'll just let that go.

I've been doing an informal survey of Rust packages for RISC-V. A lot of the basic RT crates are broken. But the SBI integrated crates are top-notch.

I wonder what would have happened if the other ecosystems had invested in QEMU development and other boot systems during the chip supply shortage.

Or is there just something wrong with them?

Sorry, sick question. I don't need to pursue this avenue.

This is related to your question, but not directly answering it.

I have been privileged to exist in area where a lot of feedback to my projects comes from informal means. Friends taking a look at projects or just giving me time to think about issues. This has led to improvement that may not be as efficient, but was more meaningful.

Importantly, a lot of the feedback was positive. Perhaps overly so. It almost always remained positive, even if my code was shit. This doesn't mean I don't recognize when there are bad smells or practices. It didn't spoil me into thinking all my code was great.

I've made careful and deliberate choices to follow that practice of feedback with others and in other spaces.

So that's cool I guess. Others may have other criteria that are important. Sorry it doesn't explicitly answer the question, I just wanted to offer that.

Yay. Spin up the Mastodon instances for the K-Street exodus.

Because there will be board and campaign meetings on platform risk after this.

Give them their branded snowballs to launch at the other instances.

"Capitalize" on the resulting fallout with naming and identity solutions. Ironic the names we use.

Or maybe something else happens. I'm blind or something. Snowballs may be too jokey.

It was an honor knowing and having Mario and Cloud Strife and all the rest in my life.

Have a good day, I'm closing this tab.

Smart idea. There are a bunch of different basic strategies and policies that could be implemented in a series of weekend projects. Ranged / extent reads/writes, upcoming allocations, locality-sensitive data, Short-range vs. Long-range data structures, access frequency estimates, historical file size estimates, etc.

This pairs well with microkernel architectures too. A separate FS policy manager service that is pluggable. You could write a dozen simple policies in a month and also shore up in terms of open-source defensive patents.

Or, if you're a commercial house and not worrying about day-to-day operations you could fill your patent portfolio.

Smart idea.

It raised a lot of interesting questions in the original thread about automatic updates and other issues that will plague us for decades to come.

And for all the talk of OpenWRT, which is a great addition to the wireless ecosystem, I'm still concerned about the staggering burden maintaining all those ports must be, and how closely the source trees are reviewed.

Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's a panacea.

Yeah, you could work around this with anti-tamper APIs and trip-wires and tech solutions to secure your phone.

But then you're playing an arms-race game against inventive thieves with jammers and portable Faraday cages.

Another solution is legal. Make a dashcam phone a "Protected Insurance Entity" or some shit. Maybe have it always streaming as part of some Citizens on Patrol Star Watcher campaign. Bump the punishment to federal level insurance fraud.

Jesus, this fucking future.

Obviously, we will save lives, and that is great. It just takes one drunk driver and one teddy bear falling from the sky.

I imagined a future hopping between cyber corps if you have that power.

But this feels different.

> The reason is that an important part of their ownership rights, i.e. the freedom to use the software of their choice, has been withheld from them.

Thank you for your comment and info. But be careful, this is the wrong argument here. They are still letting you use the software you choose.

We can look at this move conceptually, keeping in mind the future. Here's one possible outcome.

You need to phone in first. Imagine the phone is just an IMEI number or a serial number, or one part of a key pair. In a future regime, phoning in marks that phone as no longer "trustworthy". It's now in the digital quarantine or isolation pile. And future network services will isolate the device appropriately.

Phoning in doesn't change what software you can install. It possibly changes who you can interact with.

I don't know if the argument can be won.

We could come up with examples where people were isolated wrongly with other technologies. But there's a subtle psychological trick there about solitary confinement and forcing a family of networks and social interactions. Using that argument reinforces the network that limited us. I don't want to hurt that network. But it also limits us.

And the alternative, hidden network lockouts, is also troubling. So, lose lose I guess?

I don't think I have the power to change the story.

Sorry, just to add: Those new OSes and new languages and the entire growing ecosystem of computer engineering may be beautiful. And this statement can be viewed as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns. And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to different outcomes afterwards.

Microsoft make a ton of products that are still great to use. Microsoft Flight Sim? No jokes, it's just good fun from what I hear. Their Visual Whatever IDEs? They built that by creating great things like the LSP.

And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind of walled garden incentive mechanism.

I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we get there, the journey, matters.

Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that. Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me towards a troll state.

But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into something else.

And I see that happening with other things I love too.

> Console emulators (especially of the HLE variety) seem to have a similar flow.

Good insight.

I was going through this same spiel in my head the other day.

It's a flow that if properly managed can provide a good feedback system. It provides the developer positive feedback and at the same time successful milestones.

Say I'm building an emulator for a simple architecture with a few dozen opcodes...

"Alright. Let's start. Where do I start? How about NOP." So you implement NOP. You write some tests for it. Maybe you build a pretty printer into your opcode and you test it on disassembling a single byte file with a single NOP opcode.

Suddenly you have a working dissassembler! It's obviously an artificial toy, but it works.

Maybe next you add an INC instruction. Add some tests. You'll need registers...

Build a simple one INC opcode binary file. Maybe add an executor in addition to a dissassembler. Suddenly you've got registers working. And if if add another INC opcode byte, you can see your emulator changing behavior based on real external input!

And so on. It's an interesting flow, you're right.

Even if it's the opposite direction, big guy losing and small guy coming out ahead, it's still drama.

Just like Covid introduced epidemiological terms to the general public, this issue can introduce design choices around licensing, copyright and watermarking to more people.

I assume there is a group of researchers building tools to provide fine-grained historical views into AI output. And yes, for billions of parameters trained on billions of documents, linking every letter to a source document is a UX nightmare.

But what a cool problem. That's the interesting part. Yeah, something like TileBars[1] or Seesoft[1] seems like the right tool. But maybe keeping it all text with some graphical marker of authenticity is the better choice.

So many cool problems. But, that authenticity marker is the hard sell. Can reasoned discussions with others be enough to introduce that, or is drama required?

https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/10/node7....

I related this "story" elsewhere, but in another context is good too.

So, when I was younger, I used to frequent DEMF, the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. It's now called Movement or whatever.

It was a great time. And one of the favorite feel good moments was seeing Grandma Techno there: https://mixmag.net/feature/grandma-techno-shares-her-love

Looking back, this view might have been kind of ageist. It shouldn't be that surprising or weird to have older people there. Elders in the tribe. But at the time it was also just a happy recurring image during the event.

We were taught to love this woman through informal network stories and "whispers". Everybody had that friend who pointed her out pridefully, and maybe you became that friend pointing her out to another.

I can imagine another world where seeing Grandma Techno dancing among the younglings is creepy. At least make her wear a VR headset when she's within 1000 feet of the festival. It's nothing personal, it's just nature.

She has a book now. Whether that's because she wanted that sweet "FAANG" publishing deal or liked contributing to the scene. Well... who cares... both benefit us.

Fortunately, we were taught to accept people through informal support networks of friends.

Same goes with npm and cargo.

Yeah, this story seems disjointed and out-of-place. But it's important. And I'm naive, but I'd rather have an orderly migration to social and technical controls for packaging than drama. And I can still respect the people who want some other solution.

Because I'm that fucking old person now.

And of course you could turn that into a community family event at your local hacker-space. For those who didn't like the solo message/messenger.

Sure Mr. Snooty Scientist. Let me get my <checks Internet>: scale, test-tube or conductive container, a way to measure water, a way to hold and burn food, a way to measure temperature.

Well shit, I've got most of that at home. Fine Mr. Snarky Wizard, you win. You didn't have to be so mean about it.

Cool experiment. I grew up on that kind of material.

And as an aside, cold rice leads naturally to fried rice and cooking experiments there. Which is awesome.

I'm sorry, the language style was terse and short, and ignored the diversity of our media landscape.

Imagine Kristen Bell or Terry Crews Pez Dispensers, but for stoners.

That's the joke. The other mumbling was a response to the rightfully concerned diabetic and good sleep crowd. We know caffeine and other substances like sugar will disrupt sleep. We can just look it up on Google Scholar and be careful with our trustees.

Being the character... Well, I don't really want to be that person with that rebel "identity". But I fixed the other issues. I'm sorry you had to call it out.

Free one-hitter with every box! Did you get the Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell or Jason Bateman one?

We are funny and clever marketing people.

Yes, we can all Google Scholar REM sleep studies on various substances.

Christ, I don't want to be this character. And that's important.

Reminds me of the phone bin joke bit in Parks and Rec., during the bird flu practice exercise.

I guess if you're selling it as a tool to get people to spend more time together, it's good?

It feels kinda bad I wasn't able to use my own words to sell the same ideas.

In ten years, I wonder what arranged event is next. Not angry, just...

Anyways, I honestly hope people have fun and can build their own life, sorry for all that.

And I could see some social media companies incentivizing longer prompt sessions for engagement and eyeballs. Not necessarily OpenAI.

Aka, the "Oopsy, I did a poo-poo! Dear User pays more attention to me when I smear it on the wall." mechanic.

Sorry for the metaphor, just registering awareness.

> You cannot skim the AI's code. Every word of it must be examined.

I understand what you're saying. But be careful of this argument, it's susceptible to safety counter arguments.

"Well, this person thinks we shouldn't carefully review all code. Do we want him working on our super-critical FarmVille clone?" (That part is of course ironic. It changes if you're working on medical devices.)

A closely related argument is that the cost of the back-and-forth with a code submitter who submits buggy code is drastically higher. The hand-holding and teaching and encouragement is very expensive.

Maybe that's acceptable to the person who posted this article. But it's a possible avenue of resource exhaustion attack if you're not careful.

I'm sure AI will improve, with loving prompters. But some of the discussions around it seem dishonest, which is troubling (not you of course).

I participated in a paired programming interview once. I didn't get the job, but I walked away with respect for the organization doing it.

It gave them a chance to see how I worked as part of a team. Even if day to day I'm not pair programming, it starts off the relationship saying "If you need help on a problem, you can be comfortable working with your teammates."

The great thing about the setup is that it doesn't have to be a unique or complex problem. "Write a function to reverse a string. We'll write unit tests in parallel with that."

Or one of the thousand other problems. You're not testing algorithms here, you're testing whether the candidate is arrogant. Or talks too much. Or doesn't ask for help. What happens when they get stuck?

You're right, it's a lot of effort. But the resources spent on a bad hire can be even more expensive.