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jwiley

775 karma · joined September 5, 2014

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jwiley··on Project to build and send cheap FPV drones to Ukraine
Related: https://www.kyivpost.com/videos/21211

"Ukraine’s ever-escalating drone race with Russia is reaching a critical stage and a low-tech $260 hobby drone has become one of the most vital weapons in the war.

In this new Kyiv Post video, hear about how individual FPV drones flown by Ukrainian pilots are being used to destroy Russian vehicles worth millions of dollars.

But it’s not all good news for Kyiv’s armed forces – Russia is also using them and has been far more effective at setting up factories to construct them as well as obtaining the necessary parts from China.

That’s why Oleksii Asanov, a Ukrainian volunteer and co-founder of KazhanFLY, has set up ‘Social Drone UA’, a project he hopes will recruit people from around the world to build FPV drones and send them to Ukraine’s troops on the frontlines. "

jwiley··on The Stubborn Myth of “Learning Styles”
"Reasonable people may disagree about whether teachers should have to pass licensing tests of instructional knowledge before getting a job in a classroom. But it’s hard to dispute the idea that, if there is going to be such a test, then the questions should be based on the best evidence we have about how children learn. Right?

Actually, my research shows that in 29 states, government-distributed test-preparation materials on high-stakes certification exams include the debunked theory of “learning styles,” which holds that matching instruction to students’ preferred mode of learning—seeing, listening, or physically engaging in content-aligned activities, for example—is beneficial. My work builds on earlier research showing the prevalence of the idea in textbooks and teacher trainings across the United States. The presence of such content promotes an incorrect theory."

jwiley··on Black Hole at Heart of Our Galaxy Is on Crash Course, Space-Time Ripples Reveal
"These mysterious cosmic structures at the heart of nearly every galaxy consume light and matter and are impossible to glimpse with traditional telescopes. But now, for the first time, astrophysicists have gathered knowledge directly from these titans, in the form of gravitational waves that ripple through space and time. What they learned suggests that the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging numbers in the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions.

The gravitational waves from these mergers are all contributing to an underlying background hum of the universe that researchers can detect from Earth. The findings, from a collaboration of more than 100 scientists, help confirm what will one day happen to the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center, known as Sagittarius A, as it crashes into the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. "The Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, and in about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are set to merge," said Joseph Simon, a University of Colorado, Boulder, astrophysicist and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or Nanograv, which helped lead the new work with support from the National Science Foundation.

That merger, he said, will eventually result in the black hole at the center of Andromeda and Sagittarius A sinking into the center of the newly combined galaxy and forming what is known as a binary system. The results were announced in a series of papers published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Before now, we didn't even know if supermassive black holes merged, and now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging," said Chiara Mingarelli, a Yale University astrophysicist and a member of Nanograv. The new work could answer questions such as how these black holes grow, and how often their host galaxies merge, the researchers said. "

jwiley··on ChatGPT Risks Divide Biden Administration over EU’s AI Rules
Related: https://www.ft.com/content/5814b408-8111-49a9-8885-8a8434022...
jwiley··on Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
Turing police? https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Turing_Police
jwiley··on Will California Eliminate Anonymous Web Browsing? (Comments on CA AB 2273)
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an owner of a bbq restaurant who said he was struggling to meet new laws required stainless steel tables for food preparation, which was going to cost him $25,000 to install. This legislation, according to him, was heavily pushed by McDonalds corporation with the intention of driving out small business competition.

Whether this is accurate or not, I think it's clear the deluge of privacy legislation will have the opposite of the intended effect in terms of empowering the facebooks, googles, etc who can afford an army of lawyers, privacy engineers, privacy ops people, etc.

jwiley··on MVC frameworks aren't dinosaurs but sharks
While MVC is certainly not perfect, I've had the opposite experience you describe: the days of the spaghetti abstraction really began with the Javascript centric approach. The emphasis changed from opinionated defaults, to completely DIY, everything's configurable, every application is a snowflake.

This doesn't seem any better to me than the Perl+CGI / PHP world that Rails replaced. And we've traded the risk of munging view and model, or breaking conventions, for no guardrails and no patterns and no conventions beyond the most popular library to show up in the last 6 months.

I've personally seen an old, terribly uncool dinosaur MVC decomposition turn into 50+ microservices, with 10+ front-end apps, each with their own toolchains, libraries, peculiarities and hidden dependencies. That doesn't seem to be a win either. It feels like we are all collectively missing a more integrated approach to development, and eventually the pendulum will swing back in the favor of more comprehensive frameworks.

jwiley··on Expanded Protections for Children
Who needs the NSO group?

Repressive regime TODO list:

1: create a child safety organization, or require an existing one to accept your images

2: add images of the children of dissidents (or journalists, or leaders of other political parties), photoshopped to be sexually explicit

3: dissident iphones informs on them. Apple turns the information over to the authorities in the host country

4: if Apple pushes back, threaten iphone sales. Or just improve your doctoring.

5: if Apple plays along or doesn't complain, insist on the ability to detect terrorists, criminals, etc. Again, threaten iphone sales, allow Apple to keep the agreement secret.

This may only work once or twice, but it's worth a shot! If you make it to step 5, you have a really bespoke, beautifully designed, Apple managed intelligence apparatus. made with love in Cupertino.

Maybe this is an overly cynical take, and in addition to the cryptography they have rock-solid, audited governance and internal controls that would prevent it and/or insider abuse.

Maybe localities with real data privacy laws (EU) will be able to offer protections to their citizens with fines big enough Apple will begrudgingly agree, so that a repressive regime can't target their citizens as well as citizens in the host country.

Maybe this isn't a slippery slope to more exotic forms of surveillance, like scanning your contact list for pedophiles.

jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Another question related to Budibase, how do you harden the container and handle security issues? A Google search leads me to githubs standard security overview which is empty, Sync suggests there may be some advisories associated with the container?

https://github.com/Budibase/budibase/security https://snyk.io/advisor/npm-package/@budibase/server?utm_med...

jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Good suggestion...I haven't dug in deeply, but do you know what 'tasks' are in this case? Is that user logins, writes to DB, integration requests or?
jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Thanks for mentioning. In terms of pricing I noticed Mendix lined to users. Assuming I want to offer it to lots of consumers who have the ability to login, would that count to the user total? Or is the user limit for admins?
jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
I'll check it out, thanks
jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Thanks Santosh! I'll review and connect with you if it looks like a fit.
jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Budibase looks impressive thanks for sharing. How does scaling / load balancing work if I outgrow a single container?
jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Nice targeted solution for account + login ecesena. For my usecase I was looking for a more all-inclusive solution, but like the flexibility your product offers of retaining some of the control over core development.
jwiley··on Ask HN: No / low-code tools to build an application in 2021?
Thanks for mentioning, I'll check it out when I get closer to implementation.
jwiley··on Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany
This really made my day. I’ve marveled at the skill of demoscene folks for a long time, surely in the class of great artists and worth preserving and encouraging.
jwiley··on Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac
This is great info I've never seen referenced elsewhere. It would be awesome if you would write a blog post explaining this in more detail!
jwiley··on Operation Cat Drop
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cat_Drop
jwiley··on The Dragon Speech, and Chris Crawford's Improbable Dream
I've been a fan of Chris Crawford for a long time. I find his framing of games in terms of "verbs" (the things you can do in the game) and "nouns" (the things you can do them to) to be incredibly eye-opening. It feels like games are constantly getting more nouns (NPCs, cars, buildings, other players), but remain incredibly verb poor.

I think a lot of the bubbling frustration with newer AAA games may actually be an unconscious reaction to enormous, beautiful landscapes where you can't really do much beyond shoot nice looking mannequins, open doors and follow the strict roller-coaster rails down the dialog tree.

Heres to hoping he and other clever people crack the code and give us some better tools and methodologies for building interactivity.

jwiley··on CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)
Quake? Flawless?! I played that on a 486 25 that was rated as the minimum spec and it would barely load and crunched along at 6 FPS but I loved it and was happy to get it. I played Skyrim and fallout 3 on a MacBook and it was truly painful but again that doesn’t detract from the incredible work, artistry and effort that went into the game and that it carried the genre forward.

If you came to different conclusions chalk it up to subjective differences. I completely disagree that it’s a dumpster fire but I suspect we want different things out of cutting edge games or technology in general.

jwiley··on CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)
I assume you’ve actually played the game on a console, and experienced game breaking bugs? Or maybe you subjectively consider the quality to not match your well thought out expectations previous to purchasing it? Can you please expand on your personal experiences with the game that led you to the dumpster fire conclusion?

I’m also curious about your statement that every genre defining game has had a genre defining gold print. Can you point to one or more similar games that launched flawlessly across all platforms, on time, without negative reviews?

jwiley··on CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)
CD Project forced their employees to crunch to get a game out, missed deadlines, and shipped a game that is buggy on some definition of last-gen hardware. Assuming all that is true: how is this news? This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years. As someone who tearfully tried to play Doom on a 286, I have some sympathy but the level of outrage is hard for me to understand.

In my experience playing the game on a PS4 Pro (does that qualify as a last-gen console? Not sure), I have experienced no game breaking bugs or performance issues that warrant the level of criticism here. Instead I have been blown away by the level of detail and beauty of the world they created and I personally am over the moon with the fact the game that I had been eagerly awaiting exceeds my expectations for it.

Congrats CD Projekt, take a vacation, give some bonuses, let people upgrade their 5 year old hardware and chill out.

jwiley··on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams
Yeah thats definitely possible, I may be misremembering the specifics. I think for us the end result was the same: it made us a lot less likely to help them improve their product.
jwiley··on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams
The company I worked for at the time decided to pay since it was affecting users and we had to do an annoying work around. If I remember correctly we got the $100 back a month or so later, with a one liner reply saying something to the effect of "this will be fixed in a service pack at some point, godspeed."
jwiley··on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams
This reminds me of finding and trying to report a bug in Internet Explorer 5.5 20+ years ago (not a difficult task). To report a bug, I had to pay. Yes that's right, I had to put in a credit card, and pay $100.

If it turned out it was deemed to be a real bug, I would be refunded my $100 money. If it wasn't, well that should teach me for wasting their time.

Guess the folks running the bug program got promoted.

jwiley··on Multivariate Temporal Autoencoder for Predictive Reconstruction of Deep Sequence
Yeah absolutely, I want all my research papers to have snappy, attention grabbing headlines instead of clear descriptions of the subject they are addressing. How about:

"Leading temporal autoencoder expert reveals the No. 1 trick to deep sequence reconstruction youre NOT doing."

"The $$$ secret to temporal autoencoders that AI researchers are hiding from you."

"20 something invents impossible autoencoder technology in their garage that could change almost everything."

jwiley··on Low-code, no-model recommendation system with GPT3
Very creative use of the technology. I wonder when GPT3 will evolve to handle more languages, and what if any steps they take to reduce cultural bias? If I was in Japan these recommendations would certainly be less useful. :)
jwiley··on The end of dispersed camping?
Cached version of the article since it seems swamped right now http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pyUsrEA...
jwiley··on Amazon drops Linux support for generating Kindle ebooks
I was thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle) ...roughly the same thing, or maybe the same thing under different branding.
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